We are all tourists in this world,” Mr Bharadwaj said, wielding his morning
paper like a baton as he waved me down the steps towards a rowing boat.
“When it is time to end our journey,” – he struggled for a moment for
balance before gaining a seat in the bow – “this is the place to die.”
The boatmen took the oars and we glided towards midstream. In the predawn, the
Ganges was the colour of pomegranates. Birds skimmed the mirrored surface.
In the religious geography of Hinduism, we were at the centre of the
universe. To Hindus, Mother Ganges is amrita, the elixir of life, bringing
purity to the living and salvation to the dead. Varanasi is one of the
holiest of the “crossing places”, a sort of border point between our own
physical reality and the eternal. Here the gods come to earth, and here,
too, the devotee can gain access to the divine. It is an enlightened place
to live, a blessed place to die, and probably not a bad place to be stuck in
a small boat with Mr Bharadwaj.
“We suffer from five diseases,” he announced solemnly. “Sex, anger,
attachment, temptation, egoism. In Sanskrit, of course, the diseases have a
more poetic ring.”
In his present incarnation, Mr Bharadwaj had betel-stained teeth and dark
exuberant hair growing from his ears. With his flat cap and worn tweed
jacket, he might have been a slightly down-at-heel country doctor, affable,
secular, smelling of pipe tobacco. But here, in the arms of the Ganges, Mr
Bharadwaj’s spiritual heart had quickened. The river was working its magic.
“God is latent in ourselves,” Mr Bharadwaj was saying, gazing at me through
his thick horn-rimmed spectacles. “We search for him everywhere, and all the
while he resides in our own hearts. We live in profound spiritual ignorance.”
The problem with Mr Bharadwaj, who had been sent along to act as my guide in
Varanasi, was that the great spiritual issues had blinded him to more
prosaic considerations. In this holiest of Hindu cities, surrounded by a
host of arcane rituals, my questions tended to the “who, what, where, why”
school of practical curiosity. But Mr Bharadwaj had already slipped the
bounds of our world. He had entered the metaphysical regions. He had begun
to speak in parables.
“We are like the monkey,” Mr Bharadwaj said, “with our hands stuck in the
grain jar. If only we realised we need just to open our hand and drop the
grain, we would be free.”
As if on cue, a monkey appeared at the window of a crumbling palace on the
bank. I asked who had built it and why it was abandoned.
“Nothing is permanent,” he shrugged wearily. “We are like the spring flowers,
brief sparks of life, endlessly dying, endlessly returning. All things must
pass.” Mr Bharadwaj had a way of making my inquiries seem a trifle petty.
Spectral wreaths of mist uncurled across the surface of the water. On the
ghats, or stone steps, that lined the river bank, pilgrims were gathering
for the miracle of the new day. There was a sense of expectancy.
I turned to look downriver towards the columns of smoke at Manikarnika Ghat,
where the dead were cremated. When I turned back the sun had appeared, a red
sliver above a sand bar on the empty east bank. As it rose through the
splintered heads of the palm trees, pilgrims on the west side stepped from
the ghats into the water.
“We believe that to bathe in the holy river will wash away our sins,” Mr
Bharadwaj said. All along the bank, waist deep in the Ganges, the faithful
were scrubbing themselves and their clothes with merry religious vigour.
Given the polluted state of Mother Ganges, it was a ritual that required
strong reserves of faith, and probably an iron constitution.
“It is a question of the mind, and the attitude,” Mr Bharadwaj said. “For
them, it is not civil water. It is sacred water.”
Varanasi is one of the oldest cities in the world. It was old when Nineveh was
new. It was very old when the wise men set off for Bethlehem. In its warren
of antique alleys, so narrow that a bicycle could prove an obstacle,
Varanasi feels as old as time.
Life flows through these lanes in tumultuous confusion. School children with
neat blue uniforms and leather satchels troop past, chattering like bees. A
thin man in a dhoti, carrying a brass pot of water, calls out warnings to
make way. Three women in bright silk saris float elegantly around a corner.
A cow stands stock still in the middle of a lane, as if trying to remember
why it had come this way, while the human stream eddies carefully around her
muddy flanks.
In the walls of the lanes are small shops and stalls where people have built a
livelihood on specialities – sunflower seeds or sandalwood or pop cassettes.
I passed a flour mill the size of a small bedroom, where a white dust ghost
peered out at me from behind swollen sacks. Doorways lead to passages
opening into tiny interior courtyards or to turquoise and pink temples from
which drifts the sound of chanting. The gods are everywhere – in niches in
the walls, by doorsteps, in the shops – smeared with oil and orange dye and
tika powder and draped with strings of marigolds.
In this labyrinthine world, the only people as lost as myself were the
mourners. They had come to Varanasi bearing their dead. Disorientated in the
alleyways, they stopped to ask the way to the river, to the holy Ganges
which was their destination.
Death is an industry in Varanasi. The frail, the sick, the elderly come to the
city to stay in hostels and ashrams to wait for death. To die here is a
short cut to heaven. At the moment of passing, Shiva arrives to whisper the
tarak mantra, the secret of the attainment of nirvana, in the ear of the
dead. All those who expire in the precincts of the holy city are destined to
escape the endless cycles of rebirth and suffering.
If you miss out on dying in Varanasi, the next best thing is to be cremated
here, where your ashes can be cleansed by the Ganges. The number of dead
arriving in the Old City easily rivals the living. I wanted to ask Mr
Bharadwaj about the details – how did the dead travel in a hot country? Did
they fly? Did they come by road? Did they sit upright in the front seat of
the family car – but he did not deal in such practical matters. I would get
a lot of stuff about the transience of human existence and the illusion of
the physical world, and nothing about undertaker arrangements.
I came to the cremation ghat through the silk bazaar. It was the season of
weddings and everyone was in the market for a new sari. In their stalls,
merchants sat crosslegged on white mattresses as they unfurled banners of
colour, bright advertisements for the persistence of human desire, with a
flick of their wrists.
I passed from this luxuriant world to the world of the dead in a stride,
emerging from the alleyways onto the river bank and the cremation pyres of
Manikarnika Ghat. In late afternoon it is a busy place. A dozen fires were
burning on three terraces. Another body arrived, carried by four men on a
litter slung between bamboo poles. Picking their way down the slippery bank
through the crowds of other mourners and pallbearers, they were taken under
the wing of the Doms, the caste who tend the funeral pyres. Wood must be
purchased, prayers arranged. Laying the litter on the bank, they waited
their turn for a fire.
For us, formality keeps death and the attendant funeral rites separate from
the rest of our world. But in Varanasi, death is surrounded by chaotic
vibrant life. While the flames consumed the corpses, boatmen jostled for
moorings at the river’s edge, boys played cricket on the neighbouring ghat,
construction workers hammered at a building, women hung laundry from
windows, woodcutters chopped wood, dogs fought, children shouted, music
wailed, and a man cooked rice on a brazier.
Meanwhile, the new arrival had been assigned a fire. Wrapped in a simple
cloth, the body was laid on the logs, its feet towards the river. The eldest
son squatted at the head as the logs were lit. Unseen to us all, Shiva
perhaps was leaning forward towards the ear of the deceased with the tarak
mantra. Above the cacophony of surrounding life, he would need to shout.
I found a boatman to take me back upriver to Dashaswamedh Ghat. After the
hectic lanes of the city, and the chaotic scenes of the cremation fires,
there was a sweet stillness on the Ganges with the boatman dipping his oars,
and the ghats gliding slowly past. Above the city, the evening sky was full
of kites, one of the curious passions of Varanasi, dancing in the wind like
released souls.
I had bought some of the small lamps whose production and sale is a cottage
industry here. Inside a small leaf bowl is a wick and candle fat surrounded
by a posy of flowers. They serve much the same purpose as church candles;
one lights them for the dead. As dusk gathered, I lit mine for loved ones
who had died, and launched them on the river. They drifted away from me,
downstream. I watched them for a long time, my own dead on the wide, dark
bosom of the river, until they were almost indistinguishable from the lights
on shore, the lights of Varanasi, beating with insistent life.
Stanley Stewart travelled as a guest of Greaves Travel
Travel details: Greaves Travel (020 7487 9111; www.greavesindia.com
) specialises in tailor-made trips. A 10-day tour that includes three nights
in Varanasi, plus visits to Delhi, Khajuraho and the Taj Mahal, costs from
£1,475, staying at five-star hotels and flying with British Airways from
Heathrow to Delhi. Or try Pettitts (01892 515966, www.pettitts.co.uk
), Coromandel (01572 821330, www.coromandelabt.com
), or Trans Indus (020 8566 2729, www.transindus.co.uk
).
