Delhi, 7.may.99

The heat of the afternoon pressed me into my sweat-soaked mattress.
Overhead, the whirling fan only seemed to make the air push down more
heavily.  I had been turning and turning for hours like a spitted animal
in a rotisserie oven, baking and evaporating evenly with rotation.  "No,"
I told myself, sitting up for my thousandth swig of almost-hot water, "I
have to do something.  This heat is killing me."  So unwillingly willing
myself out of bed, I rinsed my body, dressed, latched the balcony door to
keep out the monkeys, and sweating afresh, left the room.  Stepping out of
the hotel door and traversing a brief alleyway, I turned left onto the
first main road running parallel to the Ganges.  Liquid oozed from my
entire surface, disappearing into the kiln of Varanasi afternoon.  I
wordlessly negotiated a path through the press of rickshaws and
motorbikes, ignoring the incessant offers of the first and the incessant
honking of the other.  I turned right toward the river, then left into the
first passageway that presented itself, and I was lost.

Varanasi is a good place to get lost: lost in the maze of ancient narrow
walkways and overhanging shutters; lost in the shuffling traffic of myriad
feet, the sputtering traffic of wheels of all kinds, the shouted traffic
of goods and commerce from every doorway and corner, the lumbering traffic
of the cows which feel as free to roam and get lost as I do; lost in the
waves of traffic of my own thoughts, which, liberated from my body by the
wealth of sense-diverting stimulus, ran their own meandering course.  I
felt open.  I let my eyes direct my feet, one step following another
without rush, without direction, weaving fluidly around and among and
within.  Lost.

Varanasi is an old, old, old city, its past present and obscure, lurking
like a spiritworld just out of reach but detectable in every stone, every
breath.  I could feel my thoughts drifting, absorbing, mingling with the
ghosts which floated around and past.  I don't know what I thought about:
the concepts weren't solid, the meanings indefinite.  My mind was a
riverbed, which remembers nothing of the waters which course past,
retaining nothing and receiving only the subtlest imprint of a gentle
erosion, donating some few of its atoms to the flow.  My thoughts were not
my own in possession or control; they belonged to the buildings, the
winding passageways, the air:  they belonged to the ghosts.  I had lost
myself without a fight, with complete abandon and utter surrender.  And on
I wandered.  

I remember half-dressed children in doorways.  I remember the strains of a
sitar and the tickety-thwonks of a tabla breezing aloft from some unseen
source.  I remember indistinguishable people, and indistinguishable piles
of cloth, vegetables, handicrafts, food.  Everything was real, but nothing
was really.  All these seemed mere trappings, surface, a facade of
present-tense embellishing the infinite fortress of time.  All of it
ether, minute details of the deep past of some deep future, which is
constantly swallowed up by what-has-gone-before.  Food for the ghosts,
food for thought, which here is of the ghosts, and through being, always
in the continuous act of having-been.  For time, like ideas -- through
ideas, and ideas through time -- flows forwards, and is always dragged
backwards into the past.  I wandered on.

I remember a cow, glowing lime-white in the reflected light of an
acid-green-washed housefront.  I remember a passageway I did not follow,
beginning with a peaked archway and sloping up to the left out of sight
behind a stone wall.  I remember my shirt, sticking with moisture to my
body.  And I remember turning a corner and finding the ghats, their
shallow, wide steps sweeping the distances on either side, and leading
down to the oldest of the old, the river Ganga, flowing ever gently as a
steady foundation to the ages.

No one needs be told this is a holy river.  Its exudes its force, its
magic, its indelible and impenetrable secrets, slow, the power of the
elephant, of the mountain, of the tree.  It flows heavy, and light, and
always always onward to the sea. The Ganga reaches from the highest
mountains to the deepest depths.  It is a source, a life, an eternal
power.  I continued to wander.

Soon I found the fires.  Across the wide river only trees mark the
opposite bank; but here all the cardinal elements come together in
funereal symphony.  The bodies are carried to the litters on bamboo
litters, wrapped in elaborate and shining cloth.  They are washed in the
sacred water, placed upon neat beds of wood, and lit from a temple fire
which has been kept burning for thousands of years.  I sat on the steps
and watched four such pyres, in different stages of dissolution.  I
watched the families patiently waiting to sweep the ash into the water.  I
watched the boats drifting and the children swimming, and I watched the
smoke, full of sparks, leave the bodies and melt into the sky.  It felt
holy, right, and also, strangely common.  For here, the holy is common.
The children splashed happily, the boats puttered mechanically and with
direction.  Nearby a thin, muscular man chopped wood as he does all day,
every day, food for the fires and for the river.  Food for the ghosts.
With each chop he let out a short yell, yet all these sounds were muffled,
muted, by the power all around, and by the becoming of the past.  I
watched the fires, trying to identify the bodies they consumed.  In our
culture burning flesh is a tragedy, a holocaust, a barbarism.  And here it
is good.  It is a melding, a becoming, a purification and release:  an
ending, neutral, final, benign.  The families do not cry, neither do they
rejoice.  They simply wait, and watch the passage of time, the passage of
a lifetime, to be continued as the past.

After a while I stood, and wandered back slowly along the river.  The sun
was going down, my thoughts were returning to my mind, and under their
weight I needed to go home, to lie under my fan, and to sleep.