The Indian Equator Read online

  There is no opportunity for all these busy bustling horn-tooting newcomers and their attendant army of supplicants to spread out, even into shanties, as they have in every other city. Varanasi lies on only the west bank of the Ganges for the very sound reason that to have the misfortune to die on the east bank will hasten your return as a donkey. Twain thought this rather unfair on donkeys: “The Hindoo has a childish and unreasoning aversion to being turned into an ass. He would gain much - release from his slavery to two million gods and twenty million priests, fakirs, holy mendicants, and other sacred bacilli; he would escape the Hindoo hell; he would also escape the Hindoo heaven. These are advantages which the Hindoo ought to consider; then he would go over and die on the other side.”

  So far no Indians have taken Twain’s advice and the million and a half inhabitants are squeezed into the west bank and further squeezed because the agricultural land around the city is highly fertile and vote-buying farming subsidies mean it is worth more as farm land than shanty land, which would otherwise be its fate. The result is that the one million and a half plus souls crammed into the mythological wonderland of the Benares of old India spend all day, every day, as busy as those ants in an ant-hill in the economic chaosocracy of the Varanasi of new India.

  ***

  Now we are in Benares we should take the Mark Twain tour, to see what made such an impression on him then - and see if we can improve the tour, make it a bit easier on the nerves as we move around the myths.

  Twain was shown around the sights of Benares by an American missionary, the Rev. Parker, who had also written his “Guide to Benares”. One assumes the Rev. Parker had at best a tentative grip on Hindu mythology; one suspects all those idols and lingams quite gave him the vapors. As Twain said, “If Vishnu had foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called it Idolville or Lingamburg.”

  They visited eleven holy sites together. Twain later added a twelfth attraction and re-ordered them into a kind of tongue-in-cheek pilgrimage narrative for logical Westerners. He wrote:

  I do not claim that the pilgrims do their acts of worship in the order and sequence charted out in this itinerary of mine, but I think logic suggests that they ought to do so. Instead of a helter-skelter worship, we then have a definite starting-place, and a march which carries the pilgrim steadily forward by reasoned and logical progression to a definite goal.

  I should recall that a ghat is series of steps leading from a temple to a river, in this case the holy Ganges. I paraphrase the Twain-a-tour thus:

  A dip in the Ganges in the early morning to purify the soul and give the body an appetite.

  At the Cow Temple kiss the cow-tails and remove that hunger.

  Visit the Dalbhyeswar Temple for some words with the god Shiva - albeit under another alias - to bring prosperity, and as an unavoidable by-product, rain - for he is in charge of both. Unfortunately the rain brings on a fever, so repair pronto to the...

  Kedar Ghat, and “find a long flight of stone steps leading down to the river. Half way down is a tank filled with sewage. Drink as much of it as you want. It is for fever.”

  The fever is cured but brings on smallpox; time to visit temple of Sitala, goddess of smallpox.

  Wishing to know how that is going to turn out, visit the Dandpan Temple and look down the Well of Fate.

  The indicators being positive, head for to the Briddhkal Temple and “secure Youth and Long Life by bathing in a puddle of leper-pus”.

  Having been granted a stay of execution, it’s time for some fun, so it’s off to see Shiva, in his Lord of Desires alias, at the Kameshwar Temple.

  Although ready to live it up, better hedge your bets at the Well of the Earring, the Holy of Holies.

  To be doubly certain, better do some redemption and take a 44-mile walk around the city limits stopping at auspicious spots along the way.

  Register your trek, “get your redemption recorded” at the Sakhi Binayak Temple.

  Just to round it off go to the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation and bask for a while in the certainty that having done the rounds Salvation, and the Knowledge thereof, is at hand.

  Now, just in case an alien arrives from outer space, dives into a bookstore and buys Following the Equator thinking it’s a new travel guide... for the benefit of this great mass of alienated readers I have followed Mark Twain’s advice and visited them in the order he rather mischievously later contrived. For the further benefit of the aforementioned aliens I have re-ordered them into a more practical route which minimizes dealing with the murderous traffic - as well as adding a more Hindu-centric sequence to the tour. It also happens to be a good one-day city tour which takes in all the major sites. This tour I can recommend to aliens and earthlings alike.

  Firstly any visitor to Benares should take a guide for two reasons: the tour’s first three sights are in the Chowk area, and if you thought Marrakesh’s or Damascus’ souks were a little complicated to find your way around you have yet to delve into the labyrinthine, squashed-up, cow-run back lanes of Benares. Then we are going to be ducking in and out of temples and a Hindu guide, while not essential, certainly eases one’s way around the equally labyrinthine temple etiquette, where on the one hand anything goes yet on the other anything has to go in a prescribed manner. This, of course, implies that the guide will be a Hindu but I would recommend going one better and making sure he’s a Brahmin - or even better a Pandit, from which word we derive pundit, a Brahminical scholar. Guides can be sourced from tourist offices and hotels; in India expect the pay to be about US$15 a day - a day being about six hours.

  At a reception a month ago at the American Center in Mumbai, sorry Bombay, Sita and I had met a Sanskrit scholar, archaeologist and Benares resident, Mr. Shailesh Tripathy. He was interested in the project and offered to show us around once we had reached Benares.

  “But you must know that I am not a qualified guide,” he said, sipping the local, sickly Omar Kayyham (sic) sparkling wine.

  “Good. Unless I insist otherwise before setting off, I find guides in India mainly want to guide me to their cousin’s souvenir shop,” I replied, sipping the slightly less disgusting Sula Sauvignon Blanc option.

  “No danger of that, all my cousins are professional people,” he replied rather haughtily.

  “I’m sure you will be much better that the American missionary, the Reverend Parker.”

  “Who is he?”

  I explain and Sita later emails him a fuller version of Twain’s itinerary as above. We all agree it would be suicidal (literally) to take a 44-mile walk around the city’s roads and so scrub no. 10.

  I have an additional request. “For Mark Twain’s no. 1, the Ganges dip, Gillian and I don’t want to be downstream of any of the cremation ghats.”

  “And you?” he asks Sita.

  “I’m not going anywhere near it, thank you very much,” she replies flatly.

  Shailesh harrumphs and gives me what I take to be an old-fashioned Indian look. “We should properly take the waters at the main ghat, Dasaswamedh. It won’t be authentic otherwise. The body ashes from Harishchandra Ghat should be washed away to midstream by then.”

  “Well, maybe,” I reply. “That’s the first problem. I tell you swimming with the ashes is going to give me the willies. Second problem is the main ghat is crowded. I’ve only got my gay blue swimming trunks and I’m going to feel like an idiot prancing around in them in public. And Gillian’s not too keen on swimming publicly in a saree.”

  “That a far better reason,” Shailesh says. “We’ll start outside your friend’s house[35] on Tulsi Ghat.” And, a month later, we do.

  Except we don’t; well, he does and we don’t. You would think Twain’s instruction - “At sunrise you must go down to the Ganges and bathe, pray, and drink some of the water. This is for your general purification” - would be the easy par
t: a simple early morning dip, all the way, full immersion, no slackers, in the holy river. Not that he himself would have done it.

  Faith can certainly do wonders, and this is an instance of it. Those people were not drinking that fearful stuff to assuage thirst, but in order to purify their souls and the interior of their bodies. According to their creed, the Ganges water makes everything pure that it touches - instantly and utterly pure. The sewer water was not an offence to them, the corpse did not revolt them; the sacred water had touched both, and both were now snow-pure, and could defile no one. The memory of that sight will always stay by me; but not by request.

  I try my luck. Bottom half sporting the gay blue trunks, top half wrapped in a shawl from the market in Baroda, Gillian and Sita cheering derisively from the shoreline, I waddle down the Tulsi Ghat to the river edge. Soon there are two problems, and the second relieves the first. First, in the back of the mind is the thought that this is a pretty filthy piece of water. And I saw a snake slithering along in it last night. If you’ve been brought up to feel it is holy and that nothing can pollute it - no corpses of man or beast, no sewage, no chemicals from Kanpur or detritus from Allahabad upriver or fertilizers flowing in from the Indo-Gangetic prairies, you have the advantage. If you’ve been brought up to suspect it just might be an ill-flowing cesspit of amphibious and vengeful e-coli sleepers just waiting to pounce, you have the disadvantage. Still, the in-built contrarian argues, one looks around and sees plenty of bodies bobbing up and down and they all seem pretty much alive. Shawl-free one wanders to the edge and dips a toe in the water: second problem. It’s f-f-f-freezing. Feeling rather sheepish, surrounded by skinny-dipping skinny Indians, many of a venerable age, one retreats without too much decorum.

  Shailesh, who is even older than me, is splashing around like a good ’un, dipping up and down and I can only look on enviously as his iffy karma is washed away - but not enviously enough to catch pneumonia and heaven knows what else besides.

  “Come on in, why don’t you?” he suggests, “it’s invigorating.”

  “Well you invigor all you like. I’ll try washing my karmic slate clean in a hot shower later.”

  “It won’t work,” he gloats splashing back up to the ghat steps.

  I have a feeling he may be right karma-wise as in spite of a deluge of hot showers there has been no discernible karmic improvement.

  The winter waters here were recently Himalayan snow and the chilliness is only to be expected; not so the state of the Ganges. The pollution is now causing concern to even the most convinced Hindu. The problems are many: the government has dammed the river several times before it reaches Benares and interrupted its flow - and it was the sheer flow which washed away the filth, down towards Calcutta, where it would be lost in the morass, before; the massive population growth all along the river has caused a corresponding sewage outbreak, as has the industrial growth caused a chemical and wastage problem; corruption means that any controls are simply bought off as it’s far cheaper to pay a bribe than treat the problem; the farmlands leading into Benares are more productive than ever thanks to agricultural chemicals, which of course also wash off into the Ganges; and lastly Benares itself has grown to be a pounding city of a million and a half souls all going about their business, business of one kind or another which deposits its remains straight into the now barely moving holy river that defines the holy city.

  Everyone agrees that the state of the river is just getting worse and worse. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it spontaneously combust into holy blue flames. In a bad dream I see them sending out a fire-boat - as if! - which high-pressure hoses the flames with more toxic water and the gods decree that the whole city explodes in a massive cosmic act of retaliation against the filthy earthlings. Hmmm, I feel a Hindu myth coming on.

  ***

  Off we go on our Re-Tour. There’s no chance to talk with Shailesh as there isn’t room for two abreast in the alleys, so we follow him crocodile file, left, right, half right, quick left, bit of a straight, left again, right at the junction and he stops. All around are brightly lit stalls selling brightly lit bangles, bracelets and anklets; we are in the bangles, bracelets and anklets area, having just followed him through the henna and dyestuffs area and before that the slippers and sandals stalls, opposite the pirated perfume stalls.

  “None of this would have been here in 1896,” explains Shailesh.

  “The shops?”

  “That’s right,” he says. “You can see they have all been carved out of ground floors. In 1900 there would have been more than enough stalls in the streets. Now India has so many new people and so many new shops. There’s not really room for everybody.” Right on cue a cow waddles past the other way, followed by a motorbike, horn blowing as usual. The cow, I’m pleased to report, pays no attention at all.

  “Why are we starting here?” I ask.

  “Because this temple, Sakhi Binayak, is dedicated to the god Ganesha, the god of prosperity and good luck, so every new venture starts with a visit to Ganesha. We are touring the temples, that’s a new venture, so we should start here. Everyone can worship Ganesha and everyone does.”

  I look at my notes and say, “Mark Twain came here to have his redemption recorded after the 44-mile pilgrimage he didn’t - and we won’t - be making. Could that be right?”

  “No, I think he was joking,” Shailesh replies.

  “Then Twain says; ‘you will see a Brahmin who will attend to the matter and take the money. If he should forget to collect the money, you can remind him.’”

  Shailesh smiles and agrees some things never change. We turn left and walk through a row of tacky, shiny shops selling glitzy gluck. Ganesha has now found himself in the back of a shop. He has clearly answered all those pleas for prosperity but in doing so has lost his pride of place - and his fee-collecting Brahmin.

  Shailesh rings the bell above our heads as we enter and touches the base of the god’s pedestal. “Ganesha is simple to pray with,” he says, “he doesn’t need a lot of offerings. So I say, ‘Oh Ganesha, bless this tour of the temples. Show me how to show them. Make our day happy and fruitful.’”

  “Am I right in thinking that you are in effect giving yourself a pep talk, wishing yourself well - as our guide?” I ask.

  “In a sense, yes. Ganesha himself doesn’t have the power to make our tour happy, only we can do that - but he can show me the example of how to make our tour enjoyable. He is, you see, a god, the god within me that needs bringing out. I do it by what we call darshana or looking, seeing. Inspiration is coming to be the best in myself, if you will.”

  Shailesh inspired - and Gillian, Sita and I enthused - on we press. As we shuffle along the back alleys and side alleys beyond the Sakhi Binayak Temple we see more and more dull-brown uniformed, heavily armed policemen. Young and eager they look too. Now after leaving Sakhi Binayak they are more and more in evidence lining the tiny alleys so we have to pass the larger soldiers crab-style. We must be nearing our second stop, in theory Benares’ most famous site, the Golden Temple.

  In practice it is little visited by foreigners these days since the bombings and the subsequent security siege. The whole section of the Chowk around the Golden Temple and the Aurangzeb Mosque was sealed off after a number of bomb blasts across Varanasi in 2006 and 2010, supposedly - and it is unproven - sent with the blessings of the Muslims from the neighboring mosque, the self-styled Indian Mujahadeen. The “problem” is that the whole site was originally a Hindu temple until it was sacked, along with the rest of the city, by the Muslim Emperor Aurangzeb six hundred years ago. As the Afghan Moghuls were replaced by Indian Moghuls and then the East India Company, the Hindus felt confident enough to rebuild their temple on its original site next to the Aurangzeb Mosque. “Next to” was a bit too close for the Muslims, who have tried to bomb their point of view across. There is no security at all entering the Aurangzeb Mosque; the mosque
is exquisite, its followers somewhat less so: the terror traffic is strictly one-way.

  And very effectively sealed off it is too. There is double frisking to enter into the Golden Temple complex - it’s a sort of self-contained shrine-village - and then double frisking again to enter the temple itself. Those who have been frisked before delving around the holy sites of Jerusalem will feel equally safe around the Golden Temple. In theory non-Hindus are not allowed but in practice that means non-Muslims; Shailesh and Sita have to show their ID and their name will reveal their religions, Hindu and Christian respectively; foreigners will have to show their passports and a small gesture - twenty rupees is recommended - in the security donation box is much appreciated. Again, with a Hindu guide life becomes a lot less complicated.

  Once inside, we are looking for the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation. It hasn’t changed for many a year, and certainly not since Twain’s visit:

  There you will see, sculptured out of a single piece of black marble, a bull which is much larger than any living bull you have ever seen, and yet is not a good likeness after all. And there also you will see a very uncommon thing - an image of Shiva. You have seen his lingam fifty thousand times already, but this is Shiva himself, and said to be a good likeness.

  The well is covered by a fine canopy of stone supported by forty pillars and around it you will find what you have already seen at almost every shrine you have visited in Benares, a mob of devout and eager pilgrims. The sacred water is being ladled out to them; with it comes to them the knowledge, clear, thrilling, absolute, that they are saved; and you can see by their faces that there is one happiness in this world which is supreme, and to which no other joy is comparable. You receive your water, you make your deposit, and now what more would you have? Gold, diamonds, power, fame? All in a single moment these things have withered to dirt, dust, ashes. The world has nothing to give you now. For you it is bankrupt.