Maya (30 page)

The train left on time, crawling out of the station with the whistle blasting, the powerful engine heaving our weight forward. I lay on my back staring up at the curved metal ceiling only a few feet above. For the first time since leaving the bus station I had nothing to occupy my attention, and scenes of the previous night percolated into consciousness. I tried to read, but it was futile. Eventually I lost myself in the clatter of the wheels on the track and collapsed into an agitated sleep. I remember waking once or twice during the night, vaguely aware of the soldiers below me playing cards on my trunk, laughing and smoking bidis. And I recall hearing the cries of vendors when the train stopped at Lucknow. Distorted images of the bus ride passed in and out of my dreams: the man cradling a child's body, women sobbing, a fist pounding relentlessly on the window, the driver's shoulders looming just in front of where I sat huddled over my bag.

Early the next morning I awoke with a start. Someone was shaking my arm. It was a young private, his khaki sack hung over one shoulder, a heavy rifle over the other. “
Pahunch-gaayay
!” He looked at me and grinned, teeth glistening under a pencil thin military moustache.
We have arrived!
As I lowered myself down from the bunk, the whistle blared, brakes sung up and down the train, and the long string of cars rattled and clanked to a stop. From outside I heard the amplified sound of a tabla and the reedy whine of shehnai, a scratchy recording pumped through loudspeakers that dangled over the platform amid a tangle of wires.
Raag Bhairav
. A morning raga. Music of surrender to the power of Lord Shiva. I had entered the sacred precincts of Kashi.

Graveyard of the Cosmos.

Forest of Bliss.

25

I
HAD BEEN ANTICIPATING
this move ever since my visit the previous winter. Here I would take up my new life in earnest, no longer affiliated in any way with Fulbright or the University of Chicago. Here, at last, I could sever my ties with the past—beginning, I now hoped, with my memories of the past forty-eight hours.

For the first few days I crashed with Richard. He was looking for a housemate, and he offered to share his place, but I wanted to live alone. After making some inquiries, I located a room on the second floor of a building not far from the river.

The east wall of my new room was lined with shuttered windows looking out over the street leading down to Assi Ghat, the oldest entry point to the waters of the Ganges. At that time Assi Ghat was still as it had been for centuries—a bare, earthen bank sloping to the sacred water, its slick clay surface packed solid by the passing of innumerable bare feet. The world I viewed through those windows no longer exists. An ancient silence has been lost.

I shared a latrine and water tap on the ground floor with several other tenants, but the room itself was mine. The landlord had a fresh coat of whitewash applied to the walls, and the first thing I did was get down on my hands and knees to scrub the floor. It had a drain in one corner, so I could simply push the water across the ceramic tiles and out. Once the room was clean, I went to the bazaar near Chowk and purchased a few domestic necessities: a plastic bucket and cup for bathing, a kerosene pump stove, a pot and a few other cooking utensils, a desk, and a single electric bulb housed inside a string cage that could be suspended either over the bed or the desk. I unpacked the trunk of books I had carried from Delhi and arranged them on two sets of stone shelves built into the wall opposite the entrance. Between the bookcases, a set of double doors opened directly out onto a shallow veranda above the street. The room came furnished with a wooden armchair, a chest of drawers, and a
threadbare rug. There was also a
chowki
—a raised wooden platform that I used for a bed and meditation area. I placed it lengthwise, with the head against the west wall, so that the room was divided in two; the desk sat at its foot, in front of one of the east-facing windows, where I would have a clear view down to the river while I worked. I covered the planks of the chowki with an old cotton quilt and the shawl I had woven in Manali. The rug found a spot on the floor to one side, nearest the books, and on the other side I unrolled two narrow straw mats that gave the room a vaguely Japanese air that somehow pleased me. After some deliberation, I went out and bought three potted palms for company and placed them near the windows, where they would get plenty of light. While in Manali, I had painted a watercolor of the house where Ramnath and his family lived; it looked a little like one of those paint-by-number kits, but all the same I liked it. I found a cheap wooden frame in the bazaar, installed the picture, and hung it on a narrow strip of wall to the left of the desk. A ceiling fan rotated overhead.

On the day all this was finished I went outside in the hallway and shut the panel doors, then opened them again, stepped in, and looked around, as if I were seeing everything for the first time. And what I saw was a clean, orderly room, an ideal place from which one could venture out into the chaos of Banaras and to which one could, thankfully, return.

My windows, like most windows in Banaras, had no glass—only iron bars to prevent unauthorized entry and shutters that could be closed from the inside to keep out sun and rain. I soon found out, the hard way, just how long and skinny monkey arms are, and how quickly they can be inserted between the bars. In one swift raid I lost several pencils, a new copybook, and a pen I had carried over from the States. All of this was taken while I was actually present in the room, reading. And the windows were not the only place the monkeys posed a threat. They loved to play on the roof where I dried my laundry. A few mornings after moving in, I lost my favorite khadi shirt and very nearly lost a pair of trousers that I had foolishly left hanging unattended on the line. Luckily, my neighbor—a young housewife—happened to be watching from her own roof, and she spotted several culprits wandering around up there, checking out the scene. I was sitting at my desk working when I heard her cry out for my attention: “
Sahab! Sahab
!” I looked up from my book and saw her out there, just across from my window, where she had a clear view of the top of my
building. “
Bandar loag aa gaayay hai, chat par
!! The monkey people are on the roof!!” I sprang for the door, but before I got out of the room I heard her call again, telling me to take some food—anything at all that could be used to attract their attention. I had gone shopping earlier, and there was a bag of rice, one of lentils, and half a dozen potatoes. I grabbed a couple potatoes and bounded up the stairs.

When I rounded the corner onto the rooftop, there they were, two big males, perched on a stone railing at each of the far corners. The one on my left had my shirt stretched out between all four of his little hands, methodically tearing it into strips with his teeth. Meanwhile, his friend combed through the pockets of my pants. The shirt was already a total loss, so I rolled a potato over toward the ape on my right. He had one greedy paw buried in the front right pocket, but when he saw that spud coast to a stop only a few feet away, he froze, eyed it for a second or two, then chucked the pants and went for the bait. This gave me just enough time to pitch across the intervening space before he realized what was going on. When I dove for the pants he assumed I was charging directly for him with intent to kill. His eyes popped out of his wrinkled pink prune face and the hair on his head bristled with fear. He flew off the roof, his companion in hot pursuit. The last I saw of my shirt was a white flag fluttering in the wind as the little bastards leapt over the rooftops and into the haze of the holy city. I shuffled back downstairs, grateful, at any rate, to have salvaged my pants.

This was my first face-to-face encounter with the monkeys of Banaras, and it set the tone for an ambiguous and often strained relationship that persisted throughout my years in Assi. Just outside the bars, they loped back and forth in their oddly listless fashion or lounged on the ledge, picking lice from each other's fur, not more than three feet in front of where I sat immersed in my work. It wasn't long before I could recognize the regulars by their characteristic features or the quirks of their body language. The males had easily identifiable battle scars, but several of the females and even the youngest of the monklets became familiar too. I came to know them not only by their appearance but also by their personal habits and the regular hours when a particular troupe would pass by each morning or evening. I fed them, talked to them, tried to play with them, and dearly wanted—on more than one occasion when they managed to sneak into my room—to kick their furry asses.

After the quiet, solitary summer months in Manali, Banaras offered endless possibilities for socializing. The city was home to many of India's top classical musicians, and once the music season began in November, there was a constant succession of both public concerts and smaller, private musical programs organized in homes all over the city. Through Richard I gradually came into contact with a number of local musicians and scholars—including Pundit Trivedi, my new Sanskrit teacher—and with a loosely knit community of foreign expatriates, people who had traveled to Banaras from all over the world and for every imaginable reason.

I remember one such person in particular, a young French Canadian woman who called herself Parvati. I had only been in town a few days when our paths crossed for the first time. I parked my black Atlas bicycle outside Arora Medical Stores—a pharmacy in the neighborhood of Lanka, near the imposing entrance to Banaras Hindu University. I had stopped to get a soda from their cooler, one of the only functioning refrigerators on the south side of the city. When Parvati walked in, I was leaning against the counter sipping my Limca, relishing the powerful blast from two ceiling fans that whirled above me like jet propellers. She entered the relative darkness of the store's interior like a goddess descending from some ethereal, heavenly sphere.

The first thing I noticed was her height. Parvati was tall, strikingly so in the context of Banaras, a good four or five inches above the heads of the men who crowded against the counter, pushing, waving their arms, and shouting to attract the attention of clerks who hurried back and forth in front of shelves crammed with all manner of bottles, torn packages, and dusty vials. Combined with her fair complexion and a frenzy of blond dreadlocks that exploded from her head, her height would have been sufficient to attract attention. But Parvati also possessed an astonishing figure, the mythological body of her namesake, Lord Shiva's wife: long, shapely legs, wide hips and breasts that bulged like two ripe mangos below the lungi wrapped under her arms like a beach towel. The thin cloth was dyed saffron—the color of renunciation—symbol of Parvati's status as a female anchorite, and it was, at this moment, fluttering under the fans in a most provocative manner. As she strode toward the counter, everything about her seemed to sway. Could she possibly have been oblivious to the effect she had on the men who fell back to let her pass, swept aside in her wake? Did she care?

I was on the verge of prostrating myself at her lotus feet when the clerk, who was himself having some difficulty accommodating the situation, tried to charge me for whatever it was she got. Before I could move to correct him, Parvati took over and patiently explained, in fluent Hindi, that she was
alone
. She handed him a ten-rupee note, received her change, and turned to leave, never so much as glancing in my direction. I watched dumbly as she stepped across the open sewer in front of the shop and disappeared into the throng of bicycles and rickshaws.

In time I discovered that Parvati was something of a legend. A student at McGill University sometime in the late sixties, she was studying abroad in France when she decided to quit school and take the Magic Bus from Amsterdam to Delhi. Apparently she was an accomplished yogini, known and respected well beyond the neighborhood of Assi. I heard there was an ashram in Rishikesh where she resided during the hot season; pilgrims who came there worshiped her as Mata-ji, a manifestation of the Great Mother. She had taken a vow to drink nothing but water from the sacred Ganges and to consume only the gifts of the sacred cow.

Now and again, over the months that followed, I spotted her in one or another of the city's myriad sweet shops, poised over the cloudy glass of a counter, below which were displayed the endless varieties of milk and sugar that provided a good share of her diet. One evening, while out for a walk near the Ganges, I saw her sitting in full-lotus posture, deep in samadhi. She was practicing the traditional “penance of the five fires”: four mounds of dried cow dung burned close to her body, one at each of the cardinal points, the fifth in a clay pot balanced on her head. I saw her there again the next morning surrounded by a small crowd of interested spectators. She had remained as she was, unmoving and silent, through the night.

I never spoke to Parvati. She left in the spring for Rishikesh, and after that I never even saw her again. But plenty of other eccentrics remained behind. Banaras was a three-ring circus of spiritual seekers and lost souls, musicians, crooks and saints, dope heads and scholars, down-and-out drifters and trust-fund hippies—all of us running away from one dream and toward another.

Mickey—my old friend from Agra—arrived in late September. He had written to me in Manali announcing his intention to move to Banaras in order to pursue his training as a classical vocalist. His teacher in Agra had
recommended him to a famous singer from a family here in town, somewhere in the neighborhood of Kabir Chaura. In addition to singing, he immediately fell in with a group of wrestlers who belonged to an akhara near Assi Ghat, devotees of the monkey god Hanuman. Most mornings you could find him working out in a large open-air pit of sand, swinging heavy maces called
jori
to the sound of rhythmic chanting:
Jai Bhajrangbali
! He took to drinking several liters of milk a day and swimming over and back across the Ganges, dodging bloated animal carcasses and the occasional human corpse, all in an effort to maintain his impressive physique.