Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (30 page)

At that moment the tabla kicked in. You could feel the sense of relief spreading through the night. A flight of birds flitted past, quick shadows of themselves. In the unaccompanied
alap
there was an immense yearning, a yearning, on the part of the violin, to achieve the incomparable sob of the sarangi. The fact that this was impossible had added greatly to the sense of longing, but that longing had been answered by the tabla, and the violin grew familiar again. For stretches now, there was a foot-stomping, shit-kicking, hillbilly quality to the music that was not at odds with the mood of meditation and transcendence. It was like discovering some universal template of music, extending from the Appalachians to the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The rasp, the squawk, grew more pronounced, but so too did the glide and swoop of melody, the abandoned melody that had never been left behind. The tabla was tying the beat in knots, more and more tangled, more and more intricate – and untying them just as quickly, faster and faster, but always with time to spare. At the heart of the gallop of the tabla was a gong, ringing out. I could not follow the rhythmic cycles, not consciously at any rate, but however far the violin and tabla strayed from each other, there was always a place they could return to and, at some level, I began to know where this place was, to recognise
it, to know how it sounded, to expect it even if I did so only after it had once again been left behind. The darkness flowed over the river and into it. The river was dark. The sky over the river was as dark as the river, but did not move, unlike the river, which moved constantly. Darkness was hidden by darkness.

Although I had looked at it every day, I had never crossed over to the other side of the Ganges. Then, one afternoon, I did. The boat nudged into the soft mud, directly opposite Jain ghat, and I stepped out. It was deserted, but not completely deserted; a few other tourists had also made the trip and were strolling around. What had looked appealing from a distance turned out to be abysmal up close. There was nothing remotely holy about it. For the most part, it was sandy and dry. In places it was like a boggy moon, with pools of brackish water, patches of moss and slime. At the edge of the water pretty wading birds picked at bubbles of scum-foam. By any normal standards, it was litter-strewn; there were crushed packets of cigarettes, squelchy plastic bags, the odd animal bone, brown fragments of pottery, an old sandal, a couple of broken, muddy Biros. Several dead kites lay in a pool of brown, greenish water. A dog came padding towards me, more hyena than dog. There was a strong sense of standing amid the aftermath of something, but of what? The aftermath of a rubbish dump, a dump where the best bits had been cherry-picked so that what remained was detritus – rubbish – even by the low standards of garbage: stuff that, even according to the Indian habit of maximum utility, could not be recycled and reused. There was nothing to do here, no point in staying.

I wished I hadn't come. It had been possible, beforehand, to believe that this other shore was the place where souls came to rest. If this was the case, then eternity now seemed
a polluted, defiled place. One would have been better off being reborn, having another punt on the roulette wheel of Samsara and hoping for an incarnation-upgrade next time around, for nothing, surely, could have been worse than ending up here.

Especially if you died here and – as I had repeatedly been told – were reborn as a donkey. If that happened, would you know, even if only for the split-second in which the transmigration occurred, that you had been you in a previous life? Would any of you survive in this new incarnation or would you just be a memory-less donkey? If the latter then there was no need to worry about reincarnation. Lacking all consciousness of previous or future lives, you might as well never have been born before. If it had no idea of ever having been anything other than a donkey, then the donkey was oblivious to the fact that it was a donkey. So, through ignorance, the donkey had escaped from Samsara – though it probably didn't feel like it when it was dragging loads or being beaten with sticks and forced to do things against its will, when all it wanted to do was lie down in the soft mud, looking back towards Varanasi, thinking,
Now that rings a bell…

I started to feel sleepy. I thought about the perfect shots I had played at tennis and the games when I had made mistakes on key points and, as a result of those mistakes, had ended up losing the whole match. I thought of games I had played and the tens of thousands of pints of beer I had swilled and the hundreds of lines of cocaine I had snorted, and I realized that my life was flashing before my eyes, as we are told happens at the moment of your death. That's always taken as meaning your whole life unfolds before your eyes, and maybe there was a time when this was the case, but now, in the age of soundbites and highlights, a degree of selectivity is in order. You don't have to re-live every moment of your life, every detail of desire, temptation and surrender, all the hours and
hours watching TV, waiting for buses, picking your nose. That's just padding. No, there are only a limited number of moments that count for anything, that make up and define a life. And one of these moments, I realized, was this one, the one when I realized that my life was … I jolted awake, suddenly afraid that I was on the brink of dying, that this had been my destiny, to die here and be reborn as a donkey, a donkey with a brain, a donkey troubled by a stubborn but inadequate inkling – not a memory, just a nagging doubt, really – of what it meant to be human.

I got to my feet uncertainly, like a newborn foal. The other tourists had gone. I was alone on the far bank of the Ganges.

I checked that the boatman was still here – he was – and walked for a while, looking back at Varanasi. As I did so, the feeling that it had been a mistake to come here gradually reversed itself. I was glad, now, that I had: it was a reminder that since this life – the one back on the other other side, over there in Varanasi, back in the world – was the only one you got, the only real crime or mistake was not to make the most of it. The idea of the afterlife or eternity was just what it was revealed to be here: rubbish. Rubbish that no one wanted, that no one could set any value by. What was here was the aftermath of life itself, what was left when your time was up.

At Harishchandra ghat some kind of happening was in progress. A group of five drummers were thrashing out a hectic rhythm. A bunch of old guys were freaking out, alternating between dancing and fighting. It was a combination of Bum Fight and a festival for brain-damaged veterans of the trance scene. Did the music placate or incite them? Impossible to say. At one moment they were all leaping around, throwing themselves on the floor. Then, without provocation, they hurled themselves into each other and the whole thing turned
into a brawl. There were no obvious alliances or sides – or, if there were alliances, they changed too swiftly for the neutral observer to keep track of them – but, at some point, a few of the other participants tried to break it all up. Wrestling turned to embracing. A man who, a few minutes earlier, had been fighting was now gyrating like a belly dancer, stroking an invisible phallus into a state of massively imagined engorgement. Then the music started again and it all kicked off again. Or the music stopped and it all kicked off again. Those who had tried to calm things down now became the instigators of a further round of hostilities. The longer I watched, the more difficult it became to detect any order, pattern, or loyalties. It was a little bit of mayhem that, while constantly threatening to get completely out of control, never quite did. Everyone involved was having a good time.

I had to walk around the participants to get back to the Ganges View. As I did so, one of them came lurching back into me. On impulse I shoved him back into the mêlée. No one seemed bothered by this retaliation. At close range the banging of the drums was intense, hypnotic. I nodded my head for a bit and then began dancing. After a few minutes another guy bashed into me and I lurched back into someone else. I didn't let go completely, took care not to reel and lurch into the really crazy guys, but once you were in the midst of it, all this lurching and reeling was actually less dangerous than it seemed from the outside, to an onlooker. It was really just an open-air mosh pit, located – inappropriately to western sensibilities – ten yards from where a funeral was in progress.

Shortly after making my trip to the other side, I did something else I'd intended doing for ages: I went into the temple at Kedar ghat. In the time since I had been in Varanasi, the pale blue stripes had faded to the white I'd originally
taken them to be. I remembered how, on my first day here, Varanasi had looked like a decrepit seaside resort. With its pink and white horizontal steps and vertical stripes, Kedar was the epicentre of this impression: it seemed to have taken inspiration from a stick of rock and a deckchair. Such a possibility was not so far-fetched. Nothing if not accommodating, Hinduism could easily incorporate the idea that Shiva once spent a long weekend – about ten thousand years, say – in Brighton, before there were mods and rockers, when even the humblest B&B was the size of the Pavilion.

The roof was rimmed with statues of the gods, bright and cheerful as garden gnomes. The sun was pounding down on the pink and white steps. It was the hottest day of the year so far, by far. Relative to how hot it would be two months from now, when it would be unbearably hot, it was not hot at all, but this did not make it feel any cooler. I walked up the pink and white steps towards the pink and white stripes of the temple, where horizontal became vertical. I took off my sandals and stepped inside. The darkness flickered with candles. Just being inside, out of the sun, was nice. Bells were being rung. My eyes adjusted, grew accustomed to the dark. The walls were painted the same mauvey blue as the steps outside, before they faded. There was a Pollock-splatter of the same blue on the tiled floor, some yellow columns. The green and white tiles on the walls would not have been out of place in an old dairy.

The temple was dedicated to Shiva – there he was, goldhatted, all blue and all-powerful – but this didn't mean the other gods and their consorts were excluded. On the contrary. They were all here; all different, all the same, all one. All for one and one for all. I walked clockwise round the temple. At the back, in what looked like a jail cell, a holy man with a knotted mane of white hair and beard mumbled words and
tended a small flame as if it were a frail bird to be coaxed back to life. He was focused intensely on the flame and the words he was saying. It didn't sound like an incantation, or only like the vestiges of one at any rate, as if the words he'd used to get him to where he was now could only be dimly recalled and lacked the power to bring him back. Not that he had any desire to return. He spoke the words as if asleep, words that suggested that wakefulness was a kind of sleep and only those who slept deeply could awake to the dream of life. Completely oblivious to my presence – and, I suspect, to his own – he would have looked equally at home in a madhouse as a place of worship. He shuffled along in his cell, which was not a cell at all, any more than the universe itself is a cell. Bounded in a nutshell and a king of infinite space! A shame, in a way, that
Hamlet
had not been translated into Sanskrit – though it's quite possible that an audience of sixteenth-century Brahmins would have dismissed the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy as a lot of mumbo-jumbo on the grounds that being and not being were one and the same, that non-being was the highest form of being, that being was itself illusion. A boy was saying hello, asking ‘Where from?’ I smiled, said ‘Mars,’ and walked on. I wanted to be on my own but that idea made no sense either. Why be on my own when I could be giving someone money to tell me things I already knew? A dusty pole of sunlight poked in from the outside, illuminating a piece of Sanskrit written on a wall. The boy pointed at the light, which pointed at the sacred text like the finger of a slow reader moving across the page of a difficult book. I continued moving too and the boy tagged along, keeping fractionally ahead of me, thereby subtly suggesting that he was being employed to guide me. He named the various deities tucked into their little niches, many daubed with fresh vermilion or garlanded with flowers. A white marble Vishnu
and a grey stone Vishnu lived next to each other, in adjacent petal-scattered shrines. I found myself momentarily outside, visiting a three-eyed Ganesh, tangerine-coloured, sunlit.

There were flowers everywhere, including around my neck. Unlike those in the Durga temple, these smelled as they were meant to, were fragrant as flowers. Back inside again, I handed twenty rupees to the old man who had put them there, the old man to whom the young boy had guided me, the old man whose place the young boy would one day take, or had taken, fifty years earlier. Everything in India was so much easier as long as you had plenty of change. The air was heavy with the smell of flowers and the heavier smell of incense. More people had crowded in and more bells were being rung. It was incredibly loud, loud as a nightclub – the original Escape from Samsara. The boy was still at my side. His lips were moving, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. (Was this what it was like to be deaf? To be trapped in a storm of noise?) I gave him five rupees and he walked away. It was impossible to say where the noise of one bell stopped and the sound of another began. If you had to choose a single word to describe the noise of the bells, it could only be ‘din.’ The bells were making the most incredible din. At the heart of this din a drum was pounding, adding to the din, deepening it, lending it focus. Deeper within the temple, in a sanctum, a sinewy priest in a white
dhoti
was tracing patterns of fire with a kind of candelabra. The flames sent shadows lurching and reeling up the walls. The bells were louder than ever, so loud they seemed to be emanating from inside my head. Not that this meant that they were loud enough. The louder the bells became, the more people wanted to ring them. The worshippers formed two rows as if someone or something – a bull? a god? a bull-god? – was about to be released and would come charging out, out of the candle-shadowed darkness
and past us, out into the unimaginable sunlight. But no, nothing was coming out; we were being ushered in, into the sanctum. The bells were deafening. And that pounding, I saw now, came from a mechanical drum pounding, pounding, pounding. Boom! Boom! Boom! The bells were demented, delirious, deranged. In this, the shrine in the deepest recess of the temple, people were reaching out to touch the
lingam
, a lump of brown rock, festooned with orange and yellow flowers. The boy who had insinuated himself into my employment reappeared, indicating that I should make an offering of my garland. No one else was paying me any mind. They were all absorbed in reaching out and touching the
lingam.
I chucked the garland, unceremoniously, onto the heap of flowers. Nothing changed as a result of this gesture, this faithless bit of
puja
, but the sense that I was at the heart of something was irresistible, and in any case I had no desire to resist. The drum kept pounding. Boom! Boom! Boom! The bells were a molten clamour of din. Within the multi-din, the din of all the different bells, another sound was taking shape: round, glowing, expanding, golden.
Aum.