Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (33 page)

Yum.

Sitting just up from Panchakot ghat, facing the risen sun, some kind of holy man or fake holy man was addressing a handful of listeners. At his feet, staring at the Ganges, were two human skulls, yellowish. Just decoration or was some larger point being made? Difficult to tell, but clearly they weren't paying much attention to what was being said. They looked pretty vacant. Whatever he was saying they had, presumably, heard it all before. He summoned me over and I went and sat with him and his mates or followers or whatever they were. One of them was wearing a Chelsea shirt with John Terry's name on the back. It was dispiriting, that shiny shirt, in the same way that it was depressing when Indian boys tried to show off their English by saying things like ‘lovely jubbly.’ The holy man's eyes were incredibly bloodshot, not surprising, given the size of the chillum he was toking on. He exhaled a mighty cloud of smoke – with his dreadlocks it was like an iconic reggae photograph – and passed me one of the skulls so I could take a closer look. I'd never held a human skull in my hands before, so it was quite interesting to do that. It didn't
give me any thoughts about mortality or the soul or the futility of all human endeavour in the face of inevitable death, but I did start to worry that by examining the skull I had expressed a tacit interest in acquiring it. Well, there were worse things to end up buying. I had a momentary urge to boot the skull, goalie-style, into the Ganges. It would have been possible, I think. Instead, I put the skull on the ground again carefully. Feeling that I had to say something – as you do when someone shows you their poems or photographs – I said, ‘Et in Arcadia ego.’

The holy man nodded and I stood up. As I did so, I saw Isobel, on her own, walking by the river. I said goodbye quickly to my new friends and ran down to intercept her. She was wearing dark, three-quarter-length shorts, with lots of pockets and zips, and the same pale yellow T-shirt she'd had on when I'd almost run over her on Shivala Road.

‘Hi. How are you today?’ I said.

‘I'm fine. How are you?’

She had an accent, but I was unable to place it. Her shorts, I saw now, were not plain black, but discreetly camouflage-patterned: camouflaged camouflage! I tried not to stare at her stomach, tanned, flat. She was tall. Her thick dreads fell to below her shoulders. Up close she looked even younger than I had realized. The corollary of this was that I must have looked even older. Nothing is stranger, more delicate, than the relationship between two people who know each other only by sight – and nothing is more awkward than the transition from looking to speaking, when words finally come into play. Unsure what to say, I almost asked again how she was. With slight variations of emphasis – ‘How are
you
today?’ ‘How are you
today?’
– we could have been trapped in this loop of pleasantries for the rest of time. At the last moment I asked, instead, ‘Are you walking this way?’

I gestured in the direction of Manikarnika and, as if the word ‘walking’ obliged me to check that she had a pair, looked down at her feet. She was wearing sandals, an ankle bracelet. Her toenails were painted silver.

‘Yes.’

‘Me too. Shall we stroll?’

We began walking along the busy ghats, exchanging basic information about where we were staying, how long we had been in Varanasi. She was staying in a place I'd not heard of. When I said I was staying at the Ganges View, she said she had heard it was very nice, but expensive.

‘I suppose it is,’ I said, feeling pleased with myself for residing in such high-end accommodation.

‘Where are you from?’

‘England. London. What about you?’

‘Switzerland.’

‘Switzerland?’ I was going to say
I thought you were Israeli
, but feared this might seem anti-Semitic. I almost said
I thought Swiss people were really tidy and smart
, but feared this might seem anti-Swiss or anti-scruff. While I was thinking all of these things and not saying any of them, she explained that her friends were from Israel. She said ‘friends,’ plural, not boyfriend, singular. She had met them in Goa. I was listening, but I was also plotting, plotting what we might do in order to do something – I had no idea what – more than stroll. The sun was glinting off the river to our right, busy with boats. We had come to the steps leading up to the Lotus Lounge. Out of the blue, Isobel said, ‘Have you been to Venice?’

‘Yes, of course. Quite a few times.’

‘Doesn't Varanasi remind you of Venice?’

The opportunity to respond seriously resulted only in the impulse to say something glib: ‘Because they both begin with V?’

She punched me on the arm. ‘Tiny lanes, crumbling old palaces. The water … ’

‘No, you're right.’ We had stopped walking. I turned to look at her. ‘They're incredibly similar. Versions of each other, almost. Twinned.’

The air was quite still, but the moment – whatever it is that makes a moment a moment – had already passed. In spite of this, I said, ‘Would you like to have a coffee here? Or a juice or something?’

‘I have to meet someone,’ she said.

I could have said
OK, let's keep walking
but, in case her rejection of the idea of coffee or juice was meant to be construed as a larger refusal, I said, ‘Oh, well, it's so nice to have met you at last.’ Then, in case it
wasn't
meant to be construed as a rejection of anything other than coffee or juice, I added, ‘Perhaps we could meet again.’

‘That would be nice,’ she said. ‘But tomorrow is my last day in Varanasi.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. I go to Hampi the day after tomorrow.’ I couldn't believe the cruelty of the timing, the way we had been here all this time and were only talking now, when there was no point in doing so.

I was standing there, digesting the implications – the non-implications of all this – when someone called out her name, ‘Isobel!’ We both looked towards the river, where the voice had come from. A boat was passing by. In it, someone was waving.

Ashwin.

She waved back. At first I stood with my hands hanging by my sides, as I had when confronting the monkey who'd snatched my sunglasses. Then, to cover up my embarrassment, I waved too. Ashwin waved at me. Everyone was waving.
We were all drowning in a sea of waves. Ashwin was calling out, asking if she wanted a ride.

‘It's OK,’ she shouted back. ‘I'll see you there. I have to stop off at my room first.’ There was a final flurry of waves and then Ashwin continued downstream towards wherever ‘there’ was.

‘So, you know Ashwin,’ I said. She said yes, smiled in a way that I had not seen before. ‘Nice guy,’ I added.

We stood there a little awkwardly until she said, ‘I should go.’

‘Yes, of course. Well, I'm glad we at least got a chance to speak,’ I said, suppressing the urge to ask if Ashwin was going to Hampi as well. We shook hands and she turned to go. I watched her as she continued walking along the ghats. Then I climbed the steps to the Lotus Lounge. Leaning out over the wall of the terrace, I could just about see her – her thick locks and yellow T-shirt – disappearing into the crowd.

I ordered a cappuccino and a pancake. As I sat there, looking out at the Ganges, I felt obscurely that my last chance – of what, I was not sure – had just gone begging. Gone begging: the phrase flashed through my head, like a sign on a shop door saying
Gone Fishing.

Not such a good idea, having that cappuccino. A few minutes after leaving the Lotus Lounge, I had a violent urge to take a crap. I started running, hoping I could make it to somewhere with a toilet. But it was impossible. Crouching down by a wall, I squirted vile-smelling ooze over a pair of old, sun-dried turds.

Two time schemes co-existed in Varanasi. My days passed without direction or purpose. The city's calendar, meanwhile, was plotted and marked by a rigidly co-ordinated schedule
of festivals. There were so many festivals, I had given up trying to keep track of what was being celebrated or ushered in. An abundance of weddings meant that even the days that weren't festivals were extremely festive. The childish longing, ‘I wish it could be Christmas every day’ (imprinted in my memory by Slade), had been pretty well realized by a combination of Islam, Sikhism and Hinduism. So it was no wonder that I began to drift free of the usual demands of time and dates. Unsure of precisely how long I had been here, I checked the visa in my passport – or would have done, if I could have found it. I rummaged through all the drawers and all the clothing in the drawers where I might have hidden my passport. I tried to remember the last time I'd seen it, the last time I'd taken it out. I'd had it with me during the altercation with the queue-barger in the bank, and I thought I had a memory of putting it away after that, but the more I thought about it the less sure I became if that was a memory or just the hope of a memory, and the more likely it seemed that I
had
taken it out with me on other unremembered occasions since then. Surely I'd had the sense not to take it out on the day we went bananas on
bhang
lassis? The more I thought about that, the less sure I became that I hadn't. I sat on the bed and did not know what to do, and then I decided that not knowing what to do was a form of knowing what to do, which was to do nothing, so that is what I did.

On a day that may or may not have been particularly auspicious, Laline handed me a package wrapped in delicate pink paper, tied with red thread.

‘Present for you,’ she said. I untied the string and unwrapped the paper carefully. Inside was a copy of
The Painted Veil
by Somerset Maugham. On the cover she had carefully painted out the ‘I’ in VEIL and squeezed in a slim ‘A’.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I kissed her, I was grateful. It was a
lovely present, but I didn't read the book because reading books was no longer something I did.

The weather grew hotter. Occasionally a line of thin cloud appeared in the sharp sky.

Walking in the lanes behind the ghats, I came across a man pushing a barrow in which he seemed to be carrying some kind of gourd. Squeezing by him, I realized that what I had taken to be a pumpkin were actually his testicles. Swollen monstrously by disease, they had become unsupportable and it was his destiny to lug them around in a wheelbarrow. Everything in Varanasi was taken to a delirious extreme. In Europe we had the myth of Sisyphus and his stone. In Varanasi there was the fact of this man and his balls.

I took a rickshaw to the museum at the Hindu University. It was a spacious, dusty place with calm statues of the Buddha and trancey bronzes of Shiva in the guise of Nataraja, the cosmic dancer. There was also an impressive array of Indian miniatures, some of which were actually quite big. I had no sense of the relative merits of any of the individual paintings, but one seemed particularly lovely. It was painted by Shivalal – the name meant nothing to me – in 1893, but looked, to my untutored eye, as if it could have been done two or three hundred years earlier. An expensively upholstered procession of horses and riders was crossing a flooded bridge or causeway, in single file, in the monsoon. Rain arrowed into the wet-look river, which had climbed up trees and into houses built, fatalistically, on the flood plain. In the background conical hills – one of them with a castle perched on top – blazed greenly. Clouds sagged. Lightning flashed – a gold snake wriggling through the soggy, indigo sky.

Down at the actual river, the real, unpainted one, the funeral of a
sanyasin
was in progress. He was not cremated. His body
was carried into the Ganges, weighed down by a stone and let go.

So far, I'd not bumped into anyone from what I now regarded as my prior life – my previous incarnation – in London. Then, at Kedar ghat, I ran into Anand Sethi, who had given me the advice about not staying at the Taj Ganges.

‘You've got an explorer beard,’ he said. It was true. I hadn't
grown
a beard, I'd just stopped shaving – and, as a result, I'd become a man with a beard. The young Sikhs with their dark beards and the backpackers with their wispy goatees looked young, handsome; I looked like a slimmed-down version of Dougal Haston or Chris Bonnington. Anand was wearing a striped Paul Smith shirt and Prada slacks. He looked like a banker in a heatwave, which is what he was. That made me conscious of the extent to which I had gone, not native so much as ageing backpacker. I was wearing an old Rip Curl T-shirt and frayed shorts. My hair was long, uncombed, grey, like my beard.

‘How long have you been here?’ I said.

‘Just yesterday. What about you?’

‘I've been here for ages. Since I last saw you, at that opening for Fiona Rae. I never went back. I've sort of taken root here. Are you staying at the Ganges View? I'm surprised I haven't seen you.’

‘No, the Taj,’ he said. ‘The Ganges View was full.’

‘I'm sorry,’ I said, trying not to smirk. ‘That's where I've been all this time. I've probably ended up taking your room.’ I suggested that we meet up for a drink or dinner, but he was leaving for Agra the following night. After that he was going to Bombay, to buy a painting by Atul Dodiya.

As we parted he said, ‘You know, I'm really not sure about the beard. You look like a castaway. Or Terry Waite on hunger strike.’

‘You're right,’ I said. ‘I'm going to do something about it.’

I walked straight to a place I'd long had a fondness for because of its name – the Decent Barber, on Shivala Road – to have my head, beard and eyebrows shaved. I asked the barber to leave a little pigtail at the back of the head, as I had seen on mourners. I wondered if he would object, if aping the ritual of bereavement in this way might be considered offensive, but he went ahead and did it without question or complaint. Several people watched. There must have been a number of tiny nicks; my head stung afterwards. It felt white as an egg, as a skull. I could feel the sun boiling it as I walked back to Assi.

On the way, I ran into Ashwin. I was as surprised to see him as he was surprised by me.

‘I thought you'd be in Hampi,’ I said.

‘No. Not… But, I mean, what's happened?’ he asked.

‘I am in mourning for myself,’ I said, reprising the old Chekhov joke. ‘My old self refuses to die. The new is struggling to be reborn. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’