February 2009

That first trip to Benaras. On the Shiv-Ganga Express with Allen Ginsberg's "Indian Journals" for inspiration. In my compartment there was a Sanskrit professor and a Muslim Silk saree seller. They spoke of their love for Benaras, what makes Benaras a universe and not just a city and how silly it was of me to expect to cover Benaras in four days. I had four days.

Straight from the railway station to Leela Guesthouse. Room with a slanted view of the Ganga for 350 rupees. I never knew this place would change the way I looked at life. From now on everything would be different. I started documenting everything on my still camera. The gulleys, the dogs, the cows, the chai shops, the monkeys. Mansarover ghat. The typology of the town was so simple. Everything opens out into the Ganga. In the vastness that is Benaras, you still can never get really lost. Maybe lost in your head, maybe metaphysically, but never physically. Metaphysically I was dropping the dots on that slope on Mansarover Ghat smoking chillums with some random baba's. One of them, a baba from Andhra gave me his take on Benaras, about this side being illusion and the otherside (the barren coastal otherside) being non-illusion. Ultimately, that is what is Benaras. On this side of the river there is everything, castles, temples, holy bathing points, pundits, graffiti, monkeys, dogs, tourists and on the other side there was nothing.

Meeting Somnath Baba, his hair tangled into circles, Sahasrara in full bloom. Angry baba, angry at politics, at samsara, at the worldly cycle of things, occassionally having a chai in his Akhara (ashram). Then the big meeting of the season. On the slope, I met Viswanath, a boatman from Bengal born and brought up in Benaras. He guessed my age. He thought I was sixty. "Sir, aap to saat saal hoga". Does this place drive everyone crazy. It certainly seems to attract a lot of weird people. On my first day I made a visit to the ever-popular Mona Lisa Cafe. There I met a violinist from America called Lorena. She would resurface again many months later in Himachal when I was lost in the forest looking for my house. Strange how time spins its hands into your gut and breathes out all sorts of connecting energies. I hung out with her for a while, shot a video of her on the boat while she tried to play some Carnatic-sounding compositions. She looked strange, I wonder how she found Benaras. The boatman, Pappu, had his name tattooed on his arm. He seemed very drunk. Later, he took me for dinner in Harishchandra Ghat and got even more drunk, I had to escape from him and back to my room. I found the first day in Benaras very unwelcoming. I constantly wondered what brought me to this town of bizarrities. But that is Benaras, it tests your endurance levels first, then it decides where to swallow you into its maze or spit you out permanently. Next morning, sunrise, and many more questions...

I woke up at 6. The weather was lovely. I was doing the regular touristy thing. Getting onto a boat with a camera and looking at life through the lens hoping to upload all this to my facebook page and wait for "likes" and comments. I was asking the boatman the regular set of questions, the answers that he belts out almost everyday. I had questions about the burning ghats, about the conmen, about the state of the river, the same questions. I didn't think different. It was my first major trip in 33 years. Cosmic reboot. I was slowly beginning to accept the coordinates of this town, accept that wonderful stretch of land between the Varna and the Assi rivers, that holy land of Varanasi. Or Benaras, or Kashi. I also bought a Rudraksha on the boat for two-hundred rupees not knowing whether it was genuine or fake. Rudraksha (also Rudraksh; Sanskrit: rudrākṣa ("Rudra tears")) is a large evergreen broad-leaved tree whose seed is traditionally used for prayer beads in Hinduism. The seed is borne by several species of Elaeocarpus, with E. ganitrus being the principal species used in the making of a bead chain or mala. Rudraksha is a Sanskrit compound consisting of the name Rudra and akṣa ("eye").

I started hanging out at Raju's chai shop near my guesthouse. A perfect setting for a chai shop. See, Benaras is expected to be three-thousand years old. So the first patch of about 2 km by 7 km from the Ganga onto the road is all pedestrian. It consists of narrow gulleys forming a sort of labyrinthian structure. These little streets or gulleys as they call it have numerous chai shops, temples, guesthouses, restaurants...sitting in one of these chai shops is like watching live television because you get to see monkeys, dogs, cows, ascetics, tourists, people from all over the country walking past you. You can never predict what you will see next. I used to enjoy sitting here at Raju's chai shop having my clove cigarette and listening to the stories of people and watching life's metaphysical hands making gestures at me.