Tomorrow Never Dies
Varanasi was the first big city any of us had seen in weeks (Kathmandu is more of an outpost than a real city) and, of course, we were all gagging for the Ganges and the sight of corpses being carried through the streets and burned at the edge of the river. Ghoulish? You bet! So we arrived in the early evening of the 31st and made our way up to our rooms, which were relatively palatial although, like most star-rated rooms we'd found, scented with the unmistakable reek of camphor. Mothballs seem to be applied liberally for the purposes of insect control and refreshing the air - nobody in these parts seems to have caught on that the smell of musty hotel room is more easily remedied (incense, what else?) than that of ammonia or camphor. Anyhow. After making ourselves comfortable and freshening up from our eight-hour drive, we settled down to a feast of Everything Masala followed by gimlets - our first taste of hard liquor for weeks - and then retired to my camphoric hotel room, made hot by a tiny and overloaded convector heater, to enjoy Tomorrow Never Dies. In India, as in Britain, James Bond movies are shown across the festive season, so we were just in time. All thoughts of spirituality vanished as we languised in front of James in Kazakstan, James in Istanbul, James with Sophie Marceau, James in bed with everyone...
Tomorrow didn't die, then, but we very nearly did. After breakfast and a trip to Sarnath, we headed off to the old city and the ghats, where the Hindu faithful bathe at sunrise and sunset, year-round, whatever the weather. My trusty Lonely Planet guide tells that the safe level for faecal bacteria in water is something like one million times LESS than is present in the Ganges at Varanasi. However, the faithful believe, with unassailable logic, that the water is itself both holy and pure and that it's simply the filth that's filthy. And they survive and flourish on their daily baths. In fact, Guruji, my Baba, who calculated my astrological chart, told me my character, past, future and time of death (which is, nonetheless, uncertain), was shocked to hear that I'd not bathed the day I visited him (you have to be here to understand that) and advised me that no matter what the weather (it was Himalayan that day), I should bathe each morning without fail.
So, on New Year's Day, we made our way into Varanasi, the Eternal City. Indeed, although no building is older than perhaps 300 years (a result of repeated looting by various opportunists), its atmosphere is that of somewhere quite beyond and outside of history. Possibly, this is because life and death confront you each moment - the narrow and labyrinthine alleys of the old city are populated by every kind of creature: dogs, donkeys, cats, cows (shit everywhere), monkeys, macaques, parrots, pelicans and, of course, countless humans. Every female animal, without exception, is either pregnant, lactating, or dying. Puppies litter the alleys, huddling amongs the embers of dying fires to survive the shockingly bitter cold, magnified by the morning mists that seem to last until the afternoon. Like Venice, the old city spreads back from the banks of the river, and floods each year during the monsoon. Opposite the city, the land is completely uninhabited and barren; the flood plain stretches inland maybe half a mile, like a huge deserted beach carpeted with a vast array of detritis, both organic and manufactured.
Dying in Varanasi guarantees immediate nirvana, meaning that the faithful flock here from across India so that their bodies can be cremated at the ghats.
We spent the evening on the river. I persuaded the group I was with that the best way of seeing the city in an hour or so was from the river itself, so we hired a rowboat for an hour (around a dollar) and took a short tour. The noise of the city seemed to vanish as soon as we'd got on the boat, and it was a relief to escape the beggars, masseurs, barbers and chaos of the ghats. We rowed up to Manikarnika, the 24-hour burning ghat. Our boatman, a somewhat camp Indian in baggy jeans and a white denim jacket, gave us a complete narrative of the city?s death rites as he rowed. Here, bodies adorned in brocade and ritual offerings are carried through the alleys on litters before being doused in the sacred river and then burned on pyres of expensive and aromatic banyan wood, specifically weighed for each funeral; the cost of the ceremony depends entirely upon the amount used. Because of the prohibitive prices (around $100), only the fortunate are cremated here.
The bodies of young children and pregnant women (immolation purifies transgression; children, being free from sin, purify the mother), and of snakebite victims (some have the power to purify the poison and return from death), are simply cast into the Ganges on their bier.
So, as you can imagine, we were completely fascinated by all of this and in no way ready to return to the pilgrimage. We stayed on the river until the sun had set, and then went to the puja at the Main Ghat where, each evening, five brahmin priests make tantric ritual offerings at the side of the river ? an hour-long festival of light, sound and clouds of incense. We were hooked.
Die Another Day
The evening ended with dinner in a rooftop restaurant, with live Indian classical music, delicious food, and beer that had to be smuggled up for us (alcohol isn?t part of the Hindu diet). But the highlight of the whole day was our autorickshaw ride home, which you?ll have to visualize by rolling every James Bond car chase into one. We managed to cram all four of us, plus the driver and his mate, into this tiny contraption. The driver was stoned, and his friend was holding the handlebars steady. An autorickshaw, in case you?ve never encountered one, is a kind of scooter that?s had a chassis and a tiny sofa stuck over it. Usually driven by a lunatic. So, as the night and the mist drew close, we all set off to our hotel. The driver was quite disoriented, and lost both the hotel, the correct side of the road, and any sense of danger. At one point, Varanasi?s busiest intersection, we found ourselves zig-zagging along the middle of the road next to a huge truck that was closing in on us. On the other side, another huge truck was closing in on us. Autorickshaw Sandwich, with Caucasian sauce! Mmmmm! So we stopped a couple of times to catch our breath and get directions, veered our way back to the hotel, and woke up the next morning feeling that much luckier to have done so!
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