In the Dying Light

I do not see the dead bodies in Varanasi. Even as the images flash before me, they get superimposed by the sight of a smiling paan-stained mouth, the pichkari from it landing on a cream-coloured wall. It is as red as the blood they are showing us now.

I do not see dead bodies. Instead, I see what looked like a huge boulder in the middle of the Ganges as the two young boatmen rowed near it. I had wondered what it was doing there. How did it end up in the river, was it a natural formation?

“Nahin, nahin,” they had laughed. “Murdaa hai…” It was the bloated carcass of an animal.

They had become seasoned and we passed many such cadavers and they began pointing out those assuming I had just discovered the meaning of mortality.

In some ways, I had. The smoke from a distant pyre swayed ominously in the breeze like the dance of death it was in fact performing. Corpses lay waiting to be cremated – the higher the pile of wood and the more fragrant it was, you understood that it belonged to someone whose value in death, as in life, was a little more.

One of the boatmen told me that sometimes relatives of those who could not afford it or just could not wait threw the bodies in the river. They saw the corpses turn blue and unrecognisable.

Were they not afraid? I asked.

“Yeh to roz ki baat hai,” he said.

* * *

The bomb blasts are not an everyday thing. I am sure he would react differently. He would see those bodies differently.

I do not see those dead bodies. It is like wanting to remember something that one has cherished as it was. I am not denying what happened, I know it is something that needs to be probed into, but I cannot get myself to even think. In a strange way – and I still do not know why -- this was my first reaction to the demolition of the Babri Masjid too. I had gone numb. I did not know the latter; I know Varanasi.

It isn’t only about that saree in my closet – the one with the most subtle play of colours, the light sea green and dawn pink meshing on a white background that takes on their reflection and does not seem so white anymore. That is how one feels the moment one enters the city.

I wasn’t just a tourist. It was a place I always wanted to go to. I felt like a seeker who would find something. I was not looking for god. I was looking for nothing. And it is tough finding Nothing.

The sudden showers had clogged the narrow streets. The cycle rickshaw swerved dangerously through the water, splashing school kids who were making their way home. How many such kids knew that the person clicking them with a camera was imagining she would find her Nothingness there? They laughed and waved and I laughed and waved back cursing myself for interrupting my goal towards mystical enlightenment.

My mind does not allow me to think of kids dying.

The rickshawalla could not go right near the ghats. Walking the stretch from the road to the steps through muddy water carrying withered flowers became a matter of survival of the feet. Did mystics think of antiseptic soaps?

After being accosted by touts, as one is in any religious place, I just stood at the edge of the steps leading to the river. I knew Project Ganga had been started to clean up the water. From where I was, I could see ochre and white robes, people carrying wood and incense, and lots of marigold garlands. Was this about death or life?

A foreigner sat cross-legged on the stairs, shutting his vision to everything. I tried doing that and realised that my eyes were hungry. I got into the boat and from there even the man meditating seemed like a small speck.

I had always wanted to touch the Ganga water, but chickened out. The boatmen did, leaving a trail with their fingertips. The skies realised my dilemma and a light drizzle came down on us. The water touched me and met the river. Contact had been made.

We had gone quite far out and on the return we got a closer look. Each ghat had a story, a reason, a purpose.

* * *

There was a small eating place right up the steps. It was a little hole in the wall, but was stocked with an amazing range of biscuits and chocolates and…toilet paper rolls. They looked rather anachronistic here. I conveyed my confusion to the boy who was serving customers. “Foreigner log,” he said. This was the clientele. They ate pastas and sandwiches. They came in with their straw hats and paisley print dresses and returned for something straight from the packet.

From a small window you could see the river; it looked like a rough-hewn painting. This was one way to see it. Or you could stick your neck out and feel the air as it camouflaged death.

I made quick visits to the umpteen temples and passed the many pandas who have found a home here. Going through lanes selling rudraksh beads and kiosks hawking real estate, one reached row-lined houses where the sadhus stay. Peeping into one of the homes, the sparsely done up place was visible: a small cot, about four utensils and a pair of wooden sandals. A tap was located just outside from which a sadhu was filling a bucket. A single tiny grilled window let in the light and the air.

As one left to make way for some more, there was a modern intruder. A guy with a box on a stand tried to market the idea of a quickie horoscope. All you did was plug in the earphones and listened to a tape-recorded message in shudh Hindi about your character, your present problems and rosy future. You heard the catch-phrases about peit ka dard, sar dard, kathin rishte, and smiled at last over the prediction that you would get what you were seeking very soon.

There, in a corner, was Chotiwalla Baba’s restaurant smelling of heaven fried a golden brown.

* * *

In these days of Them and Us when sick jokes and weak repartee have become the order of the day it wasn’t at all surprising that a friend should comment in ostensibly good humour about my then imminent trip. “Oh, a Muslim going there. You are sure to defile the place!”

The reply, as expected, was defensive. “Quite the contrary, I shall make the place holier.”

But all the machinations of men playing god fail when one realises that belief essentially means never having to be sorry.

You must not be sorry about the sticky stains left behind by extra sweet chai as memories on tea cups. You must not be sorry about suspicious-looking chhole-bhature and pakoras. You must not be sorry about the slippery floor that is wet with water and urine that mingle with dust and muck to produce a greyish glaze. You must not be sorry that what you have come to find you may never get.

At one of the temples a group of women were singing songs, carrying crimson strings that they would tie for their wishes to be granted. Was it the Sankat Mochan Temple that exploded with bombs, the temple that means all troubles would be wiped away? I do not know.

“Why don’t you tie a thread?” one of them asked.

I want Nothing, I had said.

It is all a matter of faith, I am told. It is only when darkness descends and one can smell the night and wipe out the stink, that one’s eyes become moist. Could it be merely a romantic moment of search? It matters not. Suffice to say that the sound of the aarti and the sight of small leaf boats with a flame on them were enough to engulf one with a warm feeling of being at home in an alien place.

I could hear the water hum and imagine Ustad Bismillah Khan’s shehnai playing a tune that was more celebratory than a dirge, or just lie down and watch the sky and marvel at the fact that nature is god in so many incarnations.