Cold Karma

My first visit to India was in January of 2002.  I flew into Delhi, then went to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, and later took the train to Varanasi.  My intention was to then head to Darjeeling but I missed the train and backpedaled to Delhi and headed north to Daramsala. The story here takes place in Varanasi, where I became terribly sick and was bedridden for a week.  There's nothing like an illness to get us on the road to introspection.

“Excuse me, what country are you from sir?” America. “Oh, good, I thought you were from Pakistan because then I would have wanted to kill you.”And you are from where? Here? In Varanasi, of course, oh, I thought you were from Sri Lanka. I would have wanted to tell you your cricket team sucks.

On an early morning walk south to Assi Ghat I rested on steps near two goats humping and stumbling as if they hadn’t eaten anything for weeks until the male dismounted and clopped away. That was discouraging. A few moments earlier a Sadhu stopped me on my walk: “I am a holy man. I need a ballpoint pen.” I told him I had only one ballpoint pen, which wasn’t true but I was a little suspicious of a holy man who needed a ballpoint pen. A real holy man doesn’t need anything, right? He asked me my age. I don’t know I was just a baby when I was born. I think I was born twice. “Oh, March and August, you will have abundant blessings.” I wasn’t born in each and walked on. Ten minutes later I rested again. Within seconds two girls came to me and wanted a sip of my coke. One Sadhu pointed at the beverage and declared, “It’s all chemicals, all chemicals”. Sometimes chemicals are good, o holy ones. Twelve kids surrounded me on a ghat’s steps. I taught them to count to ten in Spanish and whoop like a Razorback after the last number. Two out of ten passed the test. I asked why they weren’t in school. It was 10:00 in the morning.

Under the shade of a tree at Assi, a woman with her bowl and son came up to me. The four year old played with a string and a plastic neon green golf ball at the end. The woman looked over my shoulder a few times at a man who was eight or nine steps behind me. I waved weakly to him. I didn’t wish to look into her eyes, but she stood right in front of me,

whispering pleas for charity. I dug into my pockets, wishing to give her a 100 rupee note but I didn’t want to make a scene by pulling out a stack of new bills which amounted to $20, so I worked on the front left which proved difficult because I sat down and didn’t want to stand up and attract attention. I finally pulled out a 10-rupee note. That’s not what I was looking for. The woman looked at me, looked at the note, looked again at me with a face of defeat and fatigue that started when she was born and accepted the note, sat down on the steps with her back to me, thirty yards away. The little boy continued to play with the neon green ball.

Discerning who the real soul-searching sadhu is from the fraud, discerning who is legitimately downtrodden from the bum, isn’t easy. Five days in the very heart of Varanasi’s old city, my conscience hadn't been a trustworthy comrade in discriminating between any of them. It looked like everyone had a hand out for something. To be able to walk by so many who have nothing other than their existence and faith and not slow down required a philosophically rational and inevitable revision on personal definitions of poverty and suffering. I have never had grand notions of feeding all the hungry, though Jesus could have if he wanted to. He also said the poor would always be with us. This was and usually is a most somber of thoughts amidst the poorest country in the world with a head count that mocks Jesus’ observation. Would the Messiah’s message and influence been any different if he had stood above the refuse and ash in India instead of the mountains and hills of Galilee? Would his parabolic feeding of 5,000 with fish and loaves been a story of feeding 150,000 with chicken tikka and chapattis?

 

 

I stood high above the holy water and breathed in a ubiquitous haze. After an evening and morning of no food, two Imodium, and a half roll of paper I ventured out of my dark tiny room into a late afternoon with a headache and nothing to sustain me for anything. I wandered north to the burning ghat, a smoldering of three marinated souls crackled and popped. I turned around and went up to the Alki Hotel’s rooftop restaurant for a Sprite and a magnificent view. The Japanese man whose photo I had taken with his camera yesterday was also present. He extended an offering of local moonshine wrapped in newspaper. He was quietly inebriated and enjoyed the panorama when suddenly he jumped up and yelled ‘look, many monkeys, many monkeys, many monkeys, ha ha.’

Varanasi is a city of strings and tables; melody and harmony come from every direction like a therapeutic balm: pain succumbs and the troubles of life are for a moment, forgotten. Here the sounds of eternity above the river envelop an ancient spin; rhythmic calls of worship pulsate, echoes of laughing children from afar, monkeys screech and bark. Here I hear the presence of religion and culture unify through the hypnotic intonations of music. It is all very Indian and all very universal.

Then a boy’s kite string whacked my forehead while I wrote this and the drunken Japanese man laughed in mock horror, pointed to the boy in a building above us to our right and then at the string that lead down to the water: “ag! Ghat wata on string” The river of life on a kite string. I looked back and a boy waived like the Pope.

The five elements of life in Hinduism are earth, wind, fire, the spirit and water. As I watched men scrub themselves in the holy Ganga, women next to the men dipped themselves forward repeatedly, fully clothed, as if an overzealous Pentecostal preacher forgot it only had to be done once. A man brushed his teeth, rinsed with the knee deep river, and as if he knew he was being watched, gargled with his head way back looking up, and fountained a stream of brown holiness back into its origin. The pyre workers shoveled ashes back into the water, garlands of roses and marigolds floated with the trash, ducks that looked surprisingly healthy ate the flowers. This is a kind of holiness that is beyond my ability to grasp: holiness that could kill you. Of course to walk in the Holy of Holies a temple priest wore bells and was tethered so his fearful colleagues could drag his remains out if he offended the Shekina Glory. Even an apocalyptic moment with Indiana Jones is more entertaining to watch than understand; to accept the bells of the dead, the unquenchable fires of the Manikarnika Ghat, or a boxed Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse somewhere in Virginia, is to accept my own ignorance of such things in place of faith, which of course, is what a Hindi and all religious people expect and require of themselves when they walk with higher powers in mind.

I wasn’t afraid of dying in India, I was afraid of any debilitating sickness that would keep me holed up in my tiny dark room at the guesthouse. I needed to keep moving and suck any fresh air somewhere. During an early morning walk I met boatmen, massage men, postcard boys and even barbers who offered to shave my neck, not my seven-week-old beard. I told the boatmen 50 rupees was very cheap, but it’s very cold and I can stay warmer on land than in any dinghy. The massage men extended their hands in feint greeting--namaste, how are you--and I avoided them and their inclination to hold and drag me to their flat straw mat on the ground for an hour of a hatchet back rub. The postcard boys had images of the burning ghat, so I bought a few since taking photos is strongly discouraged. I kept the boys at bay while I sat looking at a five rupee cup of hot chai, wondering if it came from the river twenty feet away. The colors were the same and their flows and ebbs resembled a bile lite cappuccino with no froth. Next to me I watched a little boy, no older than four, have his head shaved; thick black hair fell away like roadside grass from the straight edge blade. Within minutes he looked like a cancer patient. I had to lie down.

Thirty minutes of wandering in and out of the old city and it took 90 minutes to return to the Ganga Fuji Guest Home. I asked at least five people for directions to the river. One said go left, another go right, two more rights, another left. I wasn’t going in circles though it felt like I was going in circles. One man said he didn’t know where the river was located, and two told me I didn’t want to go the river. A holy man who sat in a little grotto carved out from the corner of a building said loud enough for me to turn around to the sound of his voice: you’re lost. I walked up to the old man with thick glasses and a kind smile. ‘Where is Meer Ghat?’ It’s that way, go left and turn right. I think I just came from that direction. Are you sure? I laughed and asked Mr. Sadhu, do you know what I’m looking for? He put his hand out at an angle, fingers stretched out, and it shook mildly, as if he knew what I wanted. All I need is a toilet.

I read before coming to this country there would be shit everywhere, but in the city of the holies there was shit heaped upon shit at every turn. The bull’s shit was the largest, larger by far than the cows I sometimes mistook for bulls, and dwarfed the dog shits and human shits. At one of the Ghats today I stood on the steps looking down at the commercial activity when a man from behind asked me if I was looking for any shit today. Why do I want to look at your shit when I can look at all the shit around me for free? Because I got good shit, the best shit in the area. Come, look for a minute, free admission, no pressure to buy, come sit down, look at these Pashminas, this is only the best shit. I got up and took a look. Isn’t it rewarding when shit like this happens to you?

At the burning Ghat it was a slow evening, only three bodies roasted on the open fires. The first time I visited four days earlier huge families filled the area. From above I followed a mournfully triumphant marching band lead a dearly departed soul and its extended family through the winding and narrow streets until it reached the water’s edge. This time a thin man came up to me in silhouette form and told me “please, no photos”. I have never been one to anger a Hindu, day or night, when it came to his religious practice. He came out of his darkness and launched into a familiar soliloquy about the process and rituals of burning, and in his tantric ritual muttered something about the people who are cremated end their cycle and immediately go to Nirvana. I asked if he believed reincarnation ended on the fire. He was a windy one and went back 10,000 years so I interrupted him and said he wasn’t answering my question. He laughed and launched into another lengthy discourse that required, at least to him, the necessity to understand the essentials in order to answer the present. I wanted the cliff notes version and then showed him a brochure for a free concert of classical Indian music and I needed directions. After a sales pitch to come visit an emporium which I politely declined, I followed him away from the charred remains. He looked back at me ‘this the first time in our country?’ No, it is my third time, but the first two times were in previous lives. The silhouetted one laughed as he led me up the black hill.

He led me to a dark room with a few candles. I stumbled in, sat on the shoe mat first, and was waved away by the men who could see the tourist quite easily. I took my shoes off then headed into the back corner of the room after I mistakenly sat too quickly next to one of the musicians and thought if he’s going to play here I don’t want to be that close. I was offered Ganga chai: please, no thank you. ‘But sir, it’s respectful to offer tea and accept our hospitality.’ I don’t want any tea that will keep me on the loo for the next 24 hours. Ok, I took it after more insisting and the small chai sat next to me, behind a few tabla drums in the corner. The concert started.

Is the warm-up part of a classical Indian concert? The sitar player took at least 15 minutes to tune his instrument. Why didn’t he do this beforehand? Was he waiting to see if anyone was going to show up? At least one of the nine in the audience found it impossible to think of anything other than how to exit. The sitar player was, for what it was worth, an intrigue to ponder: He wore a bright sanitation highway orange long sleeve shirt and a tomato red wool cap that tied under his chin with white fuzzy balls at the end of the draw strings which swayed while wisps of gray hair flew in long shoots from under and out of the cap. For the next twenty minutes he played a tune I swear I had heard somewhere else. The tabla player stared at something inside a showcase cabinet to his right or he stared right above me or at me, especially when I looked for a place to hide the Ganga chai. Thirty minutes passed and the orange sitar player wrapped up his performance, a hearty if not uncomfortably sitting applause greeted him, the tabla man stood up and left the building. I was right behind him.

A man outside the concert room who smoked asked me where I was going as I laced up my shoes, the second half would start soon. I have a date. A Japanese man standing amongst the men who smoke laughed at the lame excuse. I couldn’t stay in a pretzeled position for another 25-minute tune I recognized as one I didn’t like in its original rendition. The moon was 3/4 full and a bluish light created shadows no different from the homeless and holy men who slept everywhere in the alleys and near the water of the old town.