by Sue Perkins
We talked for a while. I told him about my dad. He told me that his father was also dying, from kidney cancer – from the very disease his son was spending his life trying to cure. That twisting irony again. As I was leaving, I turned back to him on a whim.
ME: I’ll say a prayer for him, at the ghat. I will say a prayer there, I promise. Goodbye.
Then I carried on walking, without turning round, for fear I had said the wrong thing. I so didn’t want to say the wrong thing. And I cried all the way home.
43. The Magnet Boys
It was seven thirty in the morning, and the sun was already making a nuisance of itself. We parked up by the vast Raj Ghat Malviya Bridge, and the boys got out to set up. There was the sudden and violent cacophony of car horns, dog barks and telephone ringtones, then the doors slammed shut and I was returned to peace again.
I love this moment of the day, first light, mouth still thick with sleep and brain just coming to, feeling mildly fretful about what is to come. We park up in a strange new place, with strange new people, and for ten minutes I’m left alone in the car to gather my thoughts away from the noise and the smog.
It’s the same routine wherever I am – forest or jungle, city or village. I flip down the passenger side visor and slide the plastic tab across to reveal a tiny mirror, smeared with grease. It measures no more than 7 x 15 centimetres. I say this, in part, as justification for the lack of personal grooming displayed on camera. No resources, you see?
Wherever I am, however, I will gamely try to put on a little slap. Standards.
I get out my make-up bag. I say bag – bag is a rather grandiose title for the worn little pochette I carry around with me. Even the sight of it is enough to send Anna into a tailspin back home. Why don’t you wash it? Why wouldn’t you wash it? Oh, God! What the hell is on that brush? Is it skin? Is that face skin, Sue?
My routine is always the same. First, a good slathering of Factor 50 sunscreen. Everywhere. It’s white and oily, and sits on my skin like goose fat. Once that’s blocking my pores, good and proper, it’s time for more Factor 50, this time mixed with a little tinted moisturizer. Now, not only am I greasy but faintly orange. I swirl my trusty, crusty brush into a pot of black eyeliner and paint around my peepers. I’ve never been taught how to do it, but I figure it’s OK to just go all the way round in a circle. There’s a hint of Shakespears Sister, but not too much. Finally, I blot it all down with powder from the dusty compact. I am not sure how much of it is really mineral powder any more, and how much of it is just accumulated dust. Anyway, whatever those particles are, they do the job and soak up some of the sunscreen ooze.
There’s a gentle tap on the window. It’s Olly, dangling a microphone cable provocatively.
I’m box fresh. I’m good to go. I am ready for my close up, Mr de Mille.
A large group of boys had congregated round the car. I noticed they had slicked their hair back with coconut oil. Sharp. They looked more photogenic than I ever could.
I rolled off the front seat, and was immediately hit by the forty-five-degree heat. I could feel the moisturizer slipping down my face, leaving the sunscreen underneath to harden and turn yellow in the heat. By late morning, it looked like I’d been potted, like a Victorian shrimp.
The kids tumbled down the riverbank, slapping and kicking one another. Oh, to have surplus energy again. I say ‘again’ – I don’t think I’ve ever had it. I’ve only ever had the exact amount of energy necessary to do the things I love: reading, talking, playing music and laughing. My cardiovascular needs are therefore somewhat modest.
They flew, laughing, onto their boat, a thin rickety thing that looked like it had been fashioned from outsized lolly sticks. The craft barely registered their weight as they tumbled on board. We headed off to the centre of the river, between the two banks and a hundred metres downstream of the mighty bridge.
These boys are the sons of fishermen, and would no doubt have followed in their fathers’ footsteps, were it not for the fact that this stretch of the river is clinically dead. Nothing lives in these waters any more. Yet still the kids come here, day after endless day, and drop their nets into the water, not in the vain hope of catching carp or mullet but of harvesting something far more dazzling.
Cash.
The Raj Ghat Malviya is a monstrous feat of engineering. It’s essentially a double-decker bridge, the upper level for cars, the lower for trains. It’s the trains we’re waiting for, crammed full of pilgrims en route to the city, desperate for a sign of Ma Ganga. It’s tradition that when they see her, snaking beneath them, they’ll throw whatever change they have into the river by way of an offering.
We drop anchor in the middle of the river, fifty metres or so downstream of the bridge, and wait. After a few minutes I can hear the rumble of an approaching train and look to the boys – only to find they have turned their backs to the bridge, and bowed their heads, like they’re extras in a waterborne Blair Witch. As the rolling stock rumbles into view, one of them makes a dash towards me, grabs an umbrella and opens it above my head.
ME: What are you doing?
BOY: Don’t talk!
ALL: Don’t talk! Mouth shut!
I can hear the train rumbling above.
ME: What the hell is this umbrella for?
I wondered if they had spotted a raincloud ahead. Then came a forceful splat, which hit the spokes and showered outwards. It certainly felt like rain.
The boys laughed.
ME: (laughing) What? What is it?
One of them points to his groin, another to his bum.
I look down and realize with horror that the spots of moisture on my skin and clothes aren’t rain, but human piss – a tinkle-sprinkle raining down from the locomotive toilets above. It transpires I’d got lucky – it wasn’t a solids day.
Once the train was out of view, the boys began their day’s work. First, they unfurled their nets into the water, the edges weighted and fringed with black magnets they’d taken from old refrigerator doors and the like. (Nothing is wasted in India – everything is repurposed and recycled.)
Once the nets were fully submerged, we waited for the current to do its work, drawing the shiny coins towards us. As the kids waited they held diving competitions, hurling their skinny bodies this way and that off the end of the prow. Then, when the time was right – and they seemed to just know when the time was right – they pulled the soaked rigging from the depths, and with it the shiny offertory. Praise be.
I held that net. I held it for five seconds and then I couldn’t hold it any more. These boys single-handedly reeled it in time and time again. I looked at their little arms, like pistons. There was no muscle. But then it wasn’t muscle-power fuelling them, it was something far stronger – necessity.
The eldest boy back-flipped into the murk and returned a minute later with a coin.
‘What’s it like in there?’ I asked. Later, a scientist would tell me the water contains dizzyingly high levels of faecal coliform bacteria. It’s no exaggeration to say that swimming in this part of the Ganges is akin to swimming in raw sewage.
BOY: It is good. But I am used to it.
ME: What was it like to start with? Do you remember the first time you dived?
BOY: It was scary. I was frightened.
ME: How come?
BOY: The bodies. You see the bodies. I am used to it now. I am strong. I dive in so the younger ones don’t have to see the dead people.
ME: Are they bodies from the ghats?
He nodded. I imagined swimming through the filthy water, its dimness punctuated by pale bloated faces, half-burnt mouths open, as if screaming through the deep.
He gestured upwards, towards the bridge.
ME: They come from there too? Suicides?
He nodded again, his eyes lowering, as if trying to remove the images from his head.
The others were unconcerned, busying themselves with counting out the cash. I wondered if they felt bad about taking the pilgrims’ money
. It would be like me standing in the middle of Rome’s Trevi Fountain and catching the coins as people threw them over their shoulders.
ME: Do you feel bad? Those coins are meant as offerings …
He held a tower of coins between his thumb and forefinger, smiling. ‘Ganga provides,’ he replied.
An hour later and it was time to head back to the bank. There was more human piss on my shoulders, and something resembling phlegm on my waistband. I tried not to think about it. I got off the boat and waded through the mud and shit and plastic bags to get to the ghat and the street above. I hadn’t been back long when a shout went up.
In the distance, I could see our crew boat coming in, with people waving to us from onboard.
A crowd started to gather. All men. There was a lot of jostling and chatter. Several got out their phones. The crowd grew. I could feel hands in the small of my back and hot breath on my neck. There is no such thing as personal space in India.
Another shout went up, this time nearer – and the crowd parted. In rushed one of our Indian crew carrying a young woman, soaking wet and screaming. He laid her down on one of the market stagings, a raised concrete plinth in the centre of the street. The crowd moved to surround her. I could see she was writhing and clutching her stomach. Her eyes were full of blood. Her hand moved to her head to replace the veil that had fallen to one side. Even in agony, she felt the need to conform.
Immediately Lucy, the producer, and Vicky were on hand, moving her gently into the recovery position, talking to her, reassuring her. I started asking around for a paramedic. We three women bustled around, desperately trying to help, in the middle of a crowd of a hundred or more men who did nothing other than stare.
Behind me I could hear someone explaining in English how two people had just thrown themselves from the bridge, and how they had managed to retrieve only one. The other was seemingly lost to the water. I imagined that boy diving for coins and finding the body, skimming past the puffed face and twisted limbs.
The crowd around me chattered and started taking photos. They behaved as if this was a routine occurrence, and nothing special.
‘Is somebody going to do something?’ I asked, pushing back at the throng around me. ‘Is anybody going to do something?’
Then came the familiar rumble of Abhra’s 4x4 – an ancient black gas-guzzler with gaudy gold trim. His baby. His pride and joy. His team fought through the throng, lifted the screaming woman into the back seat and drove away.
The next day, Abhra showed us the morning papers. The story had made the news. The girl had survived, thank God. She was sixteen, and came from a Muslim family in rural Uttar Pradesh. She had wanted to marry a Hindu boy and her parents had refused to sanction the match. She was just a little kid who had fallen in love, and then, in heartbreak, fallen through the sky to a certain fate. But she had not counted on the power of the river.
Ganga will provide.
44. The City of Light/The Heart of Darkness
Varanasi is one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities – as old as or older than Jerusalem, Athens and Beijing. It’s been a centre of culture and learning for over three thousand years, and is regarded as the spiritual capital of India.
It’s an unusual city: although it’s built around a waterway, only one of its banks is inhabited, framed by the eighty or so ‘ghats’, or stone-stepped embankments, which line its edges. The opposite side is little more than a mud flat, which gets completely flooded during monsoon season.
We take a wooden boat out at dusk and putter along the river towards the main ghat. We are accompanied by a dead cow, belly up and bloated like a bovine space hopper, which drifts on the current alongside us. Around it, children swim and play. Sadhus, covered head to toe with human ash, chant on the banks, stoned out of their brains.
We pass an ancient temple, partially submerged and so stooped it makes the Leaning Tower of Pisa look positively upright. It is a fool’s errand to look for right angles, for order of any kind, in this place. The whole city, despite its UNESCO heritage status, feels like it is inexorably surrendering to the deep. Everything is crumbling here, slumped and wonky. It looks like a scene from a generic disaster movie, where an extinction event has decimated a once beautiful and pristine city. Think Independence Day and you’ll get the general gist.
But Varanasi isn’t about the visuals, as I was to learn. For the millions of pilgrims who come here each year, it’s about something far more profound.
Most ghats are for bathing, or for puja, a religious ritual performed by Hindus where offerings are made to the gods. One of the riverside platforms, however, appeared to be staging some kind of women-only dance spectacular. As we floated past we were blasted by music from the tannoy, and could make out the odd limb whirling, the occasional glint of jewelled sari in the moonlight. Occasionally the women would whip themselves up into a frenzy, screaming and clawing at their necks, before throwing themselves into the river, then clambering out to start the whole process over again.
ME: What’s that? What’s going on?
GUIDE: They are prostitutes – sex workers. This is their offering to the gods. They are asking that they die now and get reborn into another life where they are not prostitutes.
ME: Where have they come from?
GUIDE: All over. They come from all over India.
I can appreciate the dancing, the music, the sense of a beat driving you into madness – these are the familiar markers of a celebration. It’s harder, however, to understand a party where the end goal is death, where you convene in order to beg for your life to end, where you pray that your next turn around the block won’t involve selling your body for cash.
It is a hard mental gap to bridge, and next to impossible for a visiting Westerner.
ME: This party looks so expensive.
GUIDE: Yes, very expensive.
ME: Would they have paid for it?
GUIDE: Oh, yes.
ME: But wouldn’t it be better if they saved that money and used it to escape sex work?
My guide fell silent. I didn’t know if he was stunned by my ignorance, or offended by the question. Either way, I didn’t persist.
I can appreciate the value of faith. Of course. I understand it provides solace, lifting you in times of need. I find it harder to appreciate a system rooted in the belief that your circumstances will change in the next life, keeping the most disadvantaged locked into an acceptance of the status quo. If you believe an easier life is waiting, then it gives you, perhaps, less or little incentive to engineer a better outcome in this one.
I think of that boy with HIV under the bridge in Kolkata and my heart breaks because that is not a snapshot of his life – that is his life, in perpetuity. Without change, without mitigation, without hope.
That night, the moon hung in the thinnest, sharpest crescent I’d ever seen. Like you could pick it from the sky and carve up the dark with it.
I’d finished the last shot of the day, and wandered down one of the ghats in an attempt to grab a few snapshots of it. As I descended, one of the steps crumbled beneath me. I lost my footing, and stumbled downwards head first, my arms outstretched. As my hands reached out to break my fall, they plunged into something soft at the bottom of the steps, which cushioned my landing.
As I landed, I instinctively knew what that soft substance was. My nostrils quickly provided the proof, should proof have been needed.
Shit. Human shit. I had fallen in human shit.
I knew it was bad. My elbow felt broken, and I could feel blood trickling down my arm and fingers. My jeans were ripped at both knees, which were bleeding too.
I was in the middle of one of the most unsanitary places on earth with human shit running into the open cuts on my hand. I shuffled onto my side, removed my belt and tourniqueted my arm. Then I reached into my pocket, pulled out a bottle of my old friend, hand sanitizer, and poured the entire contents over the wound.
I heard a noise, incredibly close, yet unf
amiliar. It was a deep bellow, like a cow in labour. It took me a while to realize the sound was coming out of my own mouth. The alcohol had hit the exposed skin and mingled with my blood. The pain was so sharp, it felt like I’d been electrocuted.
I got up, and claret started filling my shoe.
I staggered back up the steps. Some five minutes later I got to the top, hunched and limping. The crew were there to greet me.
VICKY: Sue? You OK? What’s happened?
ME: Fallen. Shit. Shit. Fallen in shit.
I was babbling.
Matt raised the lens.
VICKY: You OK?
Vicky is an incredibly kind, decent and empathetic person. However, she is also the director on this shoot, which means all of those values are surplus to her job description.
VICKY: How are you feeling?
Now, when a director says ‘How are you feeling?’, what they really mean, is ‘Do you want to tell us on camera how you’re feeling?’
In fact, now might be the perfect time to give you a quick Director’s Phrase Translator:
DIRECTOR: How was that for you?
Translation: I need you to do it again.
DIRECTOR: Yeah. That was great!
Translation: I need you to do it again.
DIRECTOR: Can we try it another way?
Translation: Can we try it MY way?
DIRECTOR: How would you feel about …?
Translation: Your answer is irrelevant. This is what we’re going to do, regardless of how you feel.
DIRECTOR: We’re nearly done.
Translation: Give me another hour.
DIRECTOR: We’ll only be another hour.
Translation: We’ll be another two.
DIRECTOR: The edit’s coming along nicely.
Translation: I don’t think we have a film. Why did I ever work with you?
DIRECTOR: You’ve got a lie-in tomorrow.
Translation: See you at 7.30 a.m. sharp.
