Kaleidoscope City: A Year in Varanasi

For Lucy, this one’s for you

Contents

Introduction

Instant Moksha

Searching for Rama in Ramnagar

Sex for Sale

The Mice in the Mithai Shop

The Ganga

The Warp and the Weft

The City of Ten Thousand Widows

Harmony, Rhythm and Order

Afterword

Select Glossary

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

Introduction

Kashi is the whole world they say. Everything on earth that is powerful and auspicious is here, in this microcosm. All of the sacred places of India and all of her sacred waters are here. All of the Gods reside here, attracted by the brilliance of the City of Light. All of the eight directions of the compass originated here, receiving jurisdiction over the sectors of the universe. And all of time is here, for the lords of the heavenly bodies which govern time are grounded in Kashi.

– Diana Eck, Banaras: City of Light

Perhaps for all of us there is a country, and within that a single place, in which some essential element of the world is illuminated for the first time. Sitting down on a park bench in a beam of sunlight, or lost in the cacophony of a spice market, it comes to us that we have never been this vibrantly, persuasively alive. Our heart centre – as the Indian yogis like to call it – is aflame with the wonder of all things.

I first came to Varanasi when I was twenty-five, en route for Nepal through northern India, and with very little idea about the city other than it was supposed to be interesting, and that it made a convenient resting place for a few days before I continued my journey. India had already begun to work her magic on me, but it was in Varanasi (known as Kashi in the scriptures, or more recently Banaras) that the full possibility of what India might be seemed to announce itself. Here was a vast experiment in human cohabitation that had been going on for five thousand years: a river city containing every facet of humanity, every creed, colour, caste, both astonishing beauty and the most harrowing ugliness and desolation. Here was the madness of India, as well as its wisdom, the sublime poetry of its spiritual traditions and the dirty imbalance of corruption. Here were Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jains and Sikhs, as well as infinite sects pre-dating any of these major traditions, but which persisted happily within the larger whole. All of it combined as the city itself: one entity, a composite of spirit and form.

Until then I had supposed India was essentially unfathomable: it was too fast, too swiftly changing to yield to any categorisation. In Varanasi, however, I found a city whose spirit seemed to denote the whole. On that first trip, even from my fairly cursory explorations, it seemed abundantly clear that there was something unique about the place, an energetic quality, a feeling that spoke in the body long before it appeared as thought. There was an intensity to the alleys and the dust, which was part of the makeup of the citizens themselves, the most passionate, lively people I’d ever encountered. Even after leaving it behind, the resonance of Banaras kept returning to me like some haunting snatch of music. I wanted to hear that music again, let it play upon my ears for a while, until it revealed its secrets.

The following winter I returned for a month, and the winter after that for three months. At first, my reasons for being there remained unclear to me – I studied yoga and meditation, walked for hours, spent long days reading at the library Krishnamurti had set up at Raj Ghat, sometimes taking a boat ride home, a blissful hour in which the whole sweep of the river front would pass before me. I was in my mid-thirties, still restless. Why I should find answers here was anyone’s guess, and yet a certain intuition kept my ear to the ground. As with the thousands of pilgrims who arrived here on any given day, I was hoping the city herself would respond.

Finally, the opportunity came to return for a longer period, perhaps a year. Here now, at last, I felt I might cease to be an outsider and penetrate to the city’s heart. I returned during the last burning days of summer, the Ganga lower than I had ever seen it owing to a poor monsoon, the heat shimmering off the flat plains of Uttar Pradesh at over 40 degrees. With one small bag of clothes, no camera, and the germ of an idea to write about my experiences, I went to Assi Ghat, which has long been the haunt of foreign residents. The word ‘ghat’ refers to the flights of stone steps descending the banks of the Ganga into water: there are nearly a hundred in Varanasi, with Assi the southernmost. Because of this, it has retained an open village-like feel, bucolic at its edges, until very recently.

Looking back over my notes from those first days, I notice the shock and exhaustion of my re-entry: dust-red eyes from whizzing rickshaw rides, ears resounding with the blasts of incessant car horns, mind spinning with the velocity of it all, which somehow, I don’t know how, I’d forgotten. As any quantum physicist will tell you, all we are is energy, but in Varanasi that energy seems more highly charged: spinning faster, amplified somehow so that basic human tasks such as simply going to buy rice become shattering experiences of navigating two-hour traffic jams, throwing oneself against the side of an alley to avoid being crushed by a roaring Tata motorbike, or weaving between unruly cattle in the course of crossing the street. The crush of human numbers, the crumbling medieval architecture built upon and compressed by concrete structures, the hissing charge of frayed electric wires used as ropes by monkey troupes, the appalling pollution and a thousand other environmental factors combine to make the city an alchemist’s crucible, transmuting all who live there. Should you, after returning home across the city, wipe your face with a white cloth it will be stained black from the traffic fumes. Your lungs burn, your eyes stream, your stomach purges, and yet despite all this your spirit soars.

Within a week or so I’d found a place to live: two rooms at the top of a supremely ugly custard-yellow concrete building right on the edge of the river. My landlord, Khado Yadav, lived with his wife, son and grandchildren on the ground floor, along with a legion of mice who would scuttle about, searching for fallen crumbs, while the family watched soap operas on television. During one of our first conversations, while Mr Yadav examined my potential as a likely tenant from his armchair, I gained a useful lesson by observing how the family simply let the mice be, utterly unconcerned by their presence. This was the key, perhaps, to surviving the city: an equanimous acceptance – for a foreigner, easier said than done.

After the necessary haggling over the rent, Mr Yadav, a little creaky in his early seventies, and wearing a dal-stained white vest and lungi, showed me my quarters – two rooms with bare concrete floors, and with only mesh windows, painted several generations before with a cobalt-blue now flaking paint. An iron key that might have unlocked a castle door clicked open the padlock. The only piece of furniture of note was a bed, built in the Indian style of wooden planks. In short, the place was perfect: cheap to inhabit, authentically Spartan, and with a view from one side over the Ganga herself. I could use the family’s own bucket shower for washing, and if things needed to be dried, there was the rooftop – he pointed a digit vertically – which I was welcome to make use of.

I moved in soon after, purchasing the essentials of a gas ring, a few pans, a cast-iron tava – a convex disc-shaped griddle – for cooking chapattis, and a mosquito net. I arranged my single shelf with a few scholarly tomes on the city, a metal beaker for drinking water, notebook and pens, a postcard image of the great saint Sri Ramana Maharshi, as well as certain concessions to modernity, such as my laptop. As I lay down on my bed that first night, the warm wind streaming in through the rusted window mesh, I could hear rhesus macaques and tussling crows on the neighbouring roof. The months stretched ahead like an open promise, the river flowed past my window carrying the first night-time oil lamps, floating prayers cast out into the twilight.

My landlord, I discovered, was a former army officer, who had spent forty-five years manning checkpoints in a variety of inhospitable locations across India. Now in his retirement, he was devoting his life to spiritual matters and could be heard vociferously reciting the scriptures at first light. In him I gained an early consultant on all things Banarasi, and would often leave in the morning with a hand-drawn map – slivers of paper torn along a Helix ruler.

Bearing these military diagrams, I began my exploration of the city. Close to the Ganga, the galis, lanes, seemed little changed from the time of the Buddha, thronged with white- and orange-clad pilgrims stepping gingerly over the cowpats on their way for a morning dip. These tapered streets had a poetry about them that filled me with wonder. Every crevice held the potential for unexpected bursts of life: a blood-red Hanuman statue no bigger than a human hand, a dog suckling eight blind puppies, verses from the mystic poet Kabir scrawled in chalk, already dissolving.

Though almost everything ever written about the contemporary city seems to use the word ‘chaos’, I found an unexpected serenity in these narrow galis – some of them too slender even to allow two people to walk abreast. In the early morning especially, before the first blare and rumble of motorcycle engines, one can close one’s eyes and imagine a lost world, some biblical city opened through the fabric of time. The powers of ritual and myth still endure there, and it is just this presence that animates the ancient stonework, rendering it more than an inhabited museum but rather a living organism: humans going about their business of trying to survive, their thoughts half on this world, half on the next.

Varanasi is divided into eight wards. Within these there are the mohallas – a word translating as something like parish – whose makeups differ widely in language and population, so that there are Bengali mohallas, South Indian, Nepali and so forth, as well as mohallas grouped by caste or occupation. Each with its shrine, mosque or temple, the mohallas are microcosms of the larger city: miniature villages whose residents form extended families and have their own headmen given to the adjudication of minor disputes. In the open space of the mohallas, women will dye fabric or thresh grain, and during weddings or festivals the whole community will join together in stringing up lanterns and coloured lights, banners and decorations. At the important times of the year – Ramlila (a devotional play) or Muharram (the first month of the Islamic calendar) – the residents of neighbouring mohallas compete with each other for the quality of their performances and decorations, a friendly rivalry that links the communities together. Walking these mohallas, getting lost, and almost always finding a profound hospitality and kindness, was a key way I got to know the city.

This was Varanasi, the fabled City of Light: its scriptural name ‘Kashi’ means, literally, ‘luminous’ in Sanskrit. Certainly it was dazzling, but to my eyes it was more like a kaleidoscope: full of symmetry and colour, but also operating on the principle of multiple reflection. Everything I saw cast perspective on something else, almost every viewpoint I heard could be countered or, at the least, seen as incomprehensible by someone a few streets away. As I explored, certain themes of the city – the interplay between life and death, the industries of silk-weaving and sweet-making, the drama and music that make Varanasi both a stage and a soundtrack, a human city as well as divine – began to emerge. Corruption, endemic poverty and the lingering prejudices of the caste system were part of that, as was a substantial heroin trade and the human trafficking of sex workers by ruthless cartels.

And yet, despite this, the simplicity of life in the old medieval alleys, the poetry of the city’s rituals and beliefs, seemed to me to represent the best of India, the best, perhaps, of the human condition. There was a straightforward friendliness to the people there, a jocular sense of humour. Above the basic hunger for survival was a sense of our place in a much larger order alluded to in a thousand subtle phrases and offerings. All of this was the language of Banaras, its own private patois. It seemed like a language I’d been waiting to learn my whole life.

See notes on Introduction

Instant Moksha

Virtue does not grow easily in Banaras. And vice has no better place. For all come here to burn.

– Raja Rao, On the Ganga Ghat

Death is ever-present in the Holy City. To visit here without encountering it is impossible. Sipping chai in the narrow galis of the old quarter, one hears the distant sounds of chanting: ‘Ram Nam Satya Hai, Ram Nam Satya Hai’, literally ‘The name of God is Truth’. A minute later, six men bearing a corpse on a bamboo ladder come into view, walking purposefully towards the river. Bound in white muslin, the corpse may be decorated with silver tinsel, or a garland of orange marigolds. It moves, in funereal stillness, towards the cremation ground, and the world beyond.

One or two of the chai drinkers may look up. Most will barely raise a glance from their newspapers, or falter in their recounting of the latest test-match scores. Bodies pass through these alleyways with as great a frequency as cattle or goats, and there is no cause for alarm.

Drawing closer to the cremation ghat itself, one confronts an even starker view. Here, in plain sight, corpses smoulder among carefully stacked piles of wood, and the air is filled with the smell of burning. Among the mourners, tears are very rare. Rather, there is a calm acceptance of what is, and the surety that a relative has ended their journey at the most auspicious place in the Hindu world. ‘If only a bone of a person shall touch the water of the Ganga,’ says the Mahabharata, ‘that person shall dwell, honoured, in heaven.’

Woven tightly into the fabric of Varanasi is its association with death. For the visitor to the city, especially from the West, the ubiquity of death here can seem shocking, and one of India’s greatest contrasts with our own deeply private traditions. Like so many travellers, I went to see the cremation ghats on my first visit, eager for this rite of passage into the city. I rose at five o’clock one morning and strolled down to the waterfront, where I engaged the services of a boatman. Mist pooled over the river, and the air rang with the plaintive cawing of crows. The boatman was an aged fellow who drew the oars through the water with a look of excruciating effort. Veins stood out on his forearms like cords of wire.

As we drew close to Manikarnika, most esteemed among the city’s burning ghats, I could make out the orange glow of a funeral pyre on the shoreline and, blinking a little, noticed the corpse on fire, smelled the smoke in the air. A skyline of soot-darkened temples formed the backdrop, and I was to wonder how much of that carbon deposit was formed of the dust of human bodies, risen on the wind and pushed back into the very structure of the city. Amalgamations of history, cities are constructed of the dead as much as the living, Varanasi perhaps most of all.

In that early morning silence, I felt the tremulous thrill of one who is standing at a threshold, beyond which there is unease, the end of what is known. Everything about this place was alien to me – its rituals, belief systems, the unending flow of people