The Indian Equator Read online

  At least the Brahmin and the scooter will be able to take me right into the middle of the religious festival that is the mighty Mela. To be with a Brahmin is to have an Access All Areas pass; to ride on a scooter is to be able to access all those areas. This year we have a Magh Mela, one of the most significant Hindu festivals, and one held every year at the very spot where Brahma created the world all those billions of years ago. Then every twelve years, in accordance with Vedic astrological significance,[31] they hold the Kumbh Mela. Twain was lucky enough to have stumbled into the big Mela, the Kumbh Mela. The difference? This year’s Magh Mela will attract two million pilgrims; the last Kumbh Mela, held ten years ago, had seventy million pilgrims and in 2013 they are expecting eighty million pilgrims. It was and will be the largest human gathering anywhere on earth, clearly visible from space orbiters. The Kumbh Mela that Mark Twain saw one hundred and fifteen years ago had two million pilgrims, the same as today’s Magh Mela.

  For a few moments I am enthusing about the mathematics as much as about the festival. As we have been wandering around the great mass of souls in northern India these past three weeks I have often found myself wondering what it must have been like for Twain, density of population-wise. Now I have at least one answer: eighty million to two million; forty to one. I started the mental calculations: take away thirty-nine houses from that bundle of buildings over there; lose thirty-nine of that line of forty cars; how would those forty loafers look if there were thirty-nine fewer of them? India becomes a sort of instant imaginary paradise, full of all the good parts, the color, the vitality, the energy, the chaos, the charm, the good humor - but now on a human rather than an overwhelming scale.

  Uniquely, the number of Indians he saw Mela-ing then I saw Mela-ing now, Kumbhs and Maghs notwithstanding; we had reached some kind of numerical equivalency. We both saw two million orange-clad Hindus, mostly Brahmins and Sadhus, moving to and from the shore, laughing, dipping in and out the holy Ganges, re-wrapping themselves, having themselves one massive great dipping party; having fun; and, as was becoming clearer day by day, the doing of Hinduism is fun.

  ***

  Rajesh stops the scooter on the higher ground just below the fort and asks me how it looks. Music festivals and recipes come to mind:

  Take one Glastonbury or Summerfest and magnify it a few times; about five square miles should hold most of it.

  Extend the duration from a long weekend to six weeks.

  Change the multicolored tents to a uniform UN refugee dust-green, provided by the “organizers”.

  Change the mud to dirt-dust.

  Fly red spectrum pennants from every tent, each shade showing a different home location or Brahmin variation.

  Change the music from electric to flutes and drums, harmonia, bells and chanting.

  Move the music from the stages into the tent-villages.

  Keep the wood smoke but intensify by constant cooking and still air - and heat.

  Substitute early morning mist for sun-smoke.

  Re-jig Desolation Row to Beggars Alley. At either end have change-wallahs with one-rupee coins (two cents).

  Re-jig Field of Avalon to Sadhu City. Dozens of Sadhus sit and pose for photos with Indian tourists (no Westerners seen except your correspondent). The more orange-clad, haystack-haired, bearded and beaded, barefooted, coconut shell-begging bowled they look the more the Indian tourists pay to squat beside them. (Beware, the more ragged ones are fake fakirs in fancy frocks. Winner of the Fullest Bowl Competition: one Mana Saah from Lucknow, five feet tall (approx), six-foot beard (red), seven-foot hair (henna), one pair thick old spectacles (angled, upside down), one over-turban (Tibetan lookalike lingo), one shawl (gold), one handkerchief (orange, about his person), one pair feet (leather-bare), fingernails (ten, long, curled, for the use of). Even I gave him ten (rupees).

  Cancel all Portaloos and similar. Men and children just pee where they stand as always. Women go behind screens. No queues at all.

  Keep the rows of palmists, astrologers, healers, soothsayers, peace paint artists and yogis, but add volume tenfold and color accordingly.

  Keep the rows of food stalls, but ignore the health and safety regulations and fry, fry, fry.

  Cancel all garbage collection contracts and sub out to gaudily decorated cows.

  Keep the rows of souvenir stalls but reduce usefulness of objects to old clock parts, old string and old kettle elements.

  Change drug of choice to bhang. Bhang - a preparation made from the cannabis plant - is bought from one of the government-approved bhang stalls. Take one measure in a scrap of old newspaper to a lassi shop. Lassi - a preparation made from yoghurt - when given enough sugar hides the earthy taste of the bhang. Your correspondent declined due to possible pillion balancing problems but from previous experience can report similarities to horse tranquilizer: a chirpy enough giddy-up followed by a rather rapid whoa and a good week’s sleep.

  And here the Glastonbury/Summerfest similarities must end for the pilgrimage is about meeting your favorite gods, not seeing your favorite acts, about wiping your karmic slate clean by immersing yourself - and by extension your Self - in water (you can see where John the Baptist got the idea a few thousand years later), not getting shit-faced and the lights going out - and it all revolves around dipping in three holy rivers, one of which is mythological and anyway subterranean - and there ain’t any of those in Wisconsin or Somerset, England.

  As we leave the site we pass countless other pilgrims hustling this or that, generally hobbling along. The last one is a well-dressed luminous yo-yo salesman standing in the middle of a roundabout with hundreds of decibels of horns blaring incessantly all around him. Now a roundabout here isn’t a system of unidirectional traffic flow but a multidirectional series of corners. In the ten minutes it takes us to cover the ten yards to pass him he didn’t sell any. The ten minutes also gave ample to time to ask “why?” on any number of levels about the yo-yo wallah and the great dip-in down on the river below.

  ***

  Back at the horrible Ada Hotel (the Harsh has yet to open and secular tourism has yet to arrive in Allahabad) we compare notes. Gillian and Sita have made a remarkable discovery, a new Hindu god, Richard Sahib.[32]

  They had been wandering around the park and near Company Bagh, the old East India Company headquarters, had seen a well-kept grave protected by equally well-kept railings. Anything well-kept immediately arouses interest and they walked over to investigate. Around the headstone were placed offerings of tobacco and alcohol, bidis and toddy. The original epitaph on the headstone had faded with time but someone had over-inscribed it, with great care, with all the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet. I had seen this before - in Roman letters - on an unknown soldier’s World War 1 grave in Flanders; from the letters can be made any name that has ever existed.

  Sita asked a gardener about the significance of this grave-site. The person buried there is known as Richard Sahib. He was a high-ranking British artillery officer who during the Sepoy Uprising sided with the Indians. One night he slipped out of the cantonment and found the local leader and told him to move his troops down towards the river. The leader noted how Richard Sahib drank and smoked a lot. That night there was a terrific electrical storm and the mutineers’ previous headquarters - now empty - was struck by lightning.

  Richard Sahib was hung for treason by the British and buried next to Company Bagh. One night, at the height of another electrical storm, he was seen risen from the grave dressed in an immaculate red and white uniform. The gardener who saw him was told to avoid rabid dogs and the next day another gardener, who didn’t see the risen Richard, was bitten by one and died. Now whenever there is a downpour the gardeners gather under Company Bagh’s shelter and wait for his good council. Sometimes he appears as himself and sometimes disguised as his avatar, a duck.

  Gillian asks Rajesh what a good Brahmin makes
of this story. He advises against looking for facts in the case of the god Richard Sahib. Five years ago a Canadian student included the Richard Sahib story in his thesis on Hindu mythology. He determined that Richard wasn’t his name, he wasn’t British let alone an army officer and traitor, and that he died before the Sepoy Uprising. According to the Canadian, the grave belonged to a Belgian missionary who died of an unknown disease. Never mind, Rajesh advised further; to the gardeners Richard Sahib is a local god who gives good advice and surely these are facts enough in themselves.

  “Yes, I see,” says Gillian, “but what about the duck?”

  “Every god must have an avatar, that’s how gods work,” Rajesh replies patiently.

  We may have looked a bit nonplussed but that was because we had yet to visit Benares, where the mysteries of Hindu mythology are born, sustained and destroyed - as indeed are we all.

  Benares

  From Allahabad to Benares is only sixty miles, a quick, by Indian standards, train journey of two hours. In 1896 one joined the main Delhi to Calcutta line until Moghul Serai and then took a branch line to Benares. The combination of soot from the steam engine and dust through the open windows made the journey, wrote Mark Twain, “admirably dusty. The dust settled upon you in a thick ashy layer and turned you into a fakeer, with nothing lacking to the role but the cow manure and the sense of holiness.”

  Train journeys across India are the quintessential tourist experience and ones not quickly forgotten. For many, Twain and the writer included, the real joy is to be found not on the trains but on the platforms. Verily, there is no spot on earth more captivating than a random Indian Railways platform. And random is exactly what is unfolding in front of you; anything can happen.

  We both had an enforced delay in our journeys to Benares. “There was a change of cars about mid-afternoon at Moghul-Serai - and a wait of two hours there for the Benares train.” Our train was two hours late arriving at Allahabad.[33] Both circumstances encouraged sitting back and watching Planet Platform whirl its orbit around us.

  In other countries a long wait at a station is a dull thing and tedious, but one has no right to have that feeling in India. You have the monster crowd of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting splendors of the costumes - dear me, the delight of it, the charm of it are beyond speech.

  The two-hour wait was over too soon. Among other satisfying things to look at was a minor native prince from the backwoods somewhere, with his guard of honor, a ragged but wonderfully gaudy gang of fifty dark barbarians armed with rusty flint-lock muskets. The general show came so near to exhausting variety that one would have said that no addition to it could be conspicuous, but when this Falstaff and his motleys marched through it one saw that that seeming impossibility had happened.

  I too would not have missed a moment. I make an armchair from my large and small wheely-bags, pitch camp in a corner discreet and watch and wonder. Where are they all going? How long has that extended family of twenty been lying there? Why do they always sleep wrapped with their heads covered and their bare feet sticking out? Who do those goats belong to? Is that geyser water safe to drink? Why is he hawking a puppet that just makes a horrid noise? Don’t the throw-away clay cups cost more than the tea? Why is that Sadhu covered in costume jewelry? Why are the coolies[34] playing cards just when a train is arriving? Why are they jumping off the train when it’s still at trotting speed? Why does no one lying around move out of the way of the new hordes? How do they make the sarees so bright? Good God, there’s a peacock on that roof. How many of those useless trinkets can that wallah sell? How can he make a living? Who on earth would want to buy one? How come each train sits at the platform for twenty minutes? How young is that boy sweeping the carriages? Why is the Vegetarian Tea Stall only selling tea? Why is that cow walking between the tracks? Why is that man walking around with a bicycle horn in his hand, and why is he blowing it? Oh look, that must be the goatherd. But why are he and his goats here? Why is he holding a blue flag and she a green one? Why is she begging, I’ve seen a lot ropier than that? Why is she selling fruit directly from the platform when there’s an empty basket nearby? What is he putting in that primus stove? What can that crow possibly want with that pencil-end? How can that coolie balance those sacks on his head? Why is she wearing odd shoes? Are those chickens with that family? Why are those two men holding hands? Why is he selling wind-up helicopters that don’t fly? Is that a Sadhu or a fakir? Why is the Upper Class Waiting Room locked? How many watches is he selling from each arm? Is there a word for “slow bustle”? I wonder what that monkey eats? How come the announcer sounds like the queen: “Any inconvenience caused is deeply regretted”? No thanks, I don’t want a taxi; no, nor an auto-rickshaw. I should be paying a license fee - or having to view ads - to be watching such a fandango.

  ***

  If you find the Lonely Planet guide to Syria and then look under Damascus you will see that chapter opens with a Mark Twain quote from The Innocents Abroad; a quote derived from his visit there in early 1869. In my book about his Grand Tour of the Holy Land, Innocence and War, I suggested that having read many other guide books and memoirs about Damascus, Twain’s description still deserves to open the batting for Lonely Planet.

  I would suggest the same is true of the holy ground that in 1896 was called Benares and is now - mostly - called Varanasi. I have forwarded the following extract from Following the Equator - without Twain’s permission but I know he’d be delighted - to the Lonely Planet editors for their consideration:

  Benares was not a disappointment; it justified its reputation as a curiosity. It is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.

  It is on high ground, and overhangs a grand curve of the Ganges. It is a vast mass of building, compactly crusting a hill, and is cloven in all directions by an intricate confusion of cracks which stand for streets. Tall, slim minarets and beflagged temple-spires rise out of it and give it picturesqueness. The city is as busy as an ant-hill, and the hurly-burly of human life swarms along the web of narrow streets. The sacred cow swarms along, too, and goes whither she pleases, and takes toll of the grain-shops, and is very much in the way, and is a good deal of a nuisance, since she must not be molested.

  Benares is a religious Vesuvius. In its bowels the theological forces have been heaving and tossing, rumbling, thundering and quaking, boiling, and weltering and flaming and smoking for ages. There are Hindu temples without number - these quaintly shaped and elaborately sculptured little stone jugs crowd all the lanes. The Ganges itself and every individual drop of water in it are temples.

  The Ganges front is its supreme show-place. Its tall bluffs are solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles, with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair-flights, rich and stately palaces - nowhere a break, nowhere a glimpse of the bluff itself; all the long face of it is compactly walled from sight by this crammed perspective of platforms, soaring stairways, sculptured temples, majestic palaces, softening away into the distances; and there is movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed - streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed in metaphorical flower-gardens on the miles of great platforms at the river’s edge.

  Benares is the core of Hinduism, the powerhouse of its myths and practices and I suppose in the grand scheme of things I’m a bit of an old Benares hand. Mark Twain and I are about the same age, early sixties, on our visits to Benares. He left here a hundred and fifteen years ago; I left here for the first time forty years ago. Photographs and memoirs show that the Benares of the early 1970s was a lot closer to the Benares of the late 1890s than to the Varanasi of the early 2010s in everything except years; and in this city of living mythology time is anyway something that only the clocks keep. I’ve been
back here four times since that first visit, the last time with my son five years ago. He still says they were the four weirdest days of his life. It was for me too until this visit these five years later. Mark Twain felt the same. If the India section of Following the Equator took up a disproportionately large section of the book, then the Benares section took up a disproportionately large section of the India section of the book. In fact one could say that it is the only time writing about his world tour that he reverted to his reportage roots. In two-dozen dazzling pages - the standout pages from what is in truth at times rather a tired book - he shows that the journalist in him was merely stowing away; it just took two days in Benares to bring him out on deck.

  The biggest difference between the Benares of the 1890s (and the 1970s) and the Varanasi of the 2010s is the sheer volume and density of the population and its newly manic activity. When Twain came here the population was well under half a million; by the time of my first visit it had rounded up to half a million; now, although no one is sure let alone counting, it is nearly a million and a half. It’s not just that the numbers have trebled but that their activity has trebled again, making them Mark Twain-era dense by a factor of nine. Twain may have thought it “as busy as an ant-hill” but the ants now have aroused ambition and internal combustion engines and have lost any semblance they might have had of ant-patience or ant-discipline. What was a sleepy town on a holy river, where the spirit and presence could walk in peace and reflect where they stood, has become a bustling, jangling city where any attempt to walk in peace will be met by a blare of furious horns from buses, cars, motor bikes or auto-rickshaws and any attempt to reflect where you stand will attract swarms of touts and hustlers selling you just about anything that you didn’t know you didn’t want. Varanasi now is just like the rest of India - only more so; an India without the high levels of organized predictability.