by Laura Newman
And I spied everything. Everything is for sale in Varanasi. It’s like a caravan.
My father was given a small space for his chapel just off the main street by the old market. It was whitewashed and had a ceiling with wood beams and not-bad lighting. The floor was covered with old wool rugs of a thousand colors. There was a large cross on the wall and a desk for a pulpit with a glass jar full of flowers gone to seed. My father pondered his lot. How to build a congregation in a city that thinks Jesus pales next to blue Krishna?
Next door was a family of Momin Ansari, part of the silk weaving community of Muslims who wove the silk in their parlor and sold it by the yard right out the front door. Once, my mother went in and I trailed. The father/merchant offered us tea in small glasses while his son threw down bolt after bolt like magic carpets at our feet. My mother grew embarrassed, thinking of the labor to reroll the bolts, so she bought a single yard that was the same white-yellow of her hair. No doubt the merchant’s worst sale, because brides are the main business of the famous Varanasi silk merchants.
My father paced his chapel. My mother laid the silk out on the pulpit-desk and refreshed the flower jar. How to bring people in? We left him to it and explored. The old city market was a dark warren of small stalls and cookeries. We began to buy our staples from the vendors. Dried apricots and naan, tandoori and coriander. My mother learned to roll her eyes and get a lower price. My father thought of Jesus while my mother thought of new recipes.
There is commerce in Varanasi. In silk, in tourism, and in the business of death. In the university and in the Bodhi tree, which isn’t the original Bodhi tree that Buddha taught the dharma from, but it’s an uncle, or a relic, like the shroud of Turin or a saint’s knuckle. Pilgrimage-worthy. I learned these things during the monsoon season while my mother home-schooled me and the rain was so loud the chickadee didn’t even bother to try and sing. But in the afternoons, when the rain was done for the day and the air was cooler, we would walk down to the eighty-seven ghats, the riverfront steps that start at the base of fantastical buildings and end in the water. The ghats belong to religious sects, and some to private people who should give them back. They all have different characters of colors, symbols, statues, meanings that flew around me like mockingbirds.
On our daily walks we were splattered with garbage and smells and sounds and humanity Rudyard failed to prepare me for. During the first few weeks, even at fourteen, I would not let go of my mother’s hand.
Shit from the wandering cows, spices from the cauldrons of the street cooks. The high-mountain scent of Darjeeling from the passing tea-wallahs, and the dry smell of bone and sandalwood from the pyres of the crematorium ghats. The sounds of thousands of people moving in thousands of directions. The Muslim call to prayer. The rooftop monkeys, the little boys selling marigold wreaths and paper lotus flower candles to set afloat in the Ganges. Tourists climbing into wooden boats to be rowed down the ghats in a voyeuristic journey. Their clicking cameras, so many of them, sounding, if you really listened, like gnats. “Ghat gnats,” my mother said. “Disgusting.”
We walked, never taking the boats. But the boys still tried to sell us flowers and once she let me buy a necklace of wilting orange petals and I tossed it into the Ganges and watched it float away.
I always thought we were poor, as a pastor’s family should be. A thin-soup life. But we were not poor. Near our hotel and in many other places, lines of the poorest women sit on the ground with tin bowls set on thin mats in front of them. Their children are set loose to play close by like tumbling puppies, while the women beg. It is daily work. At first I strove not to look at the women, to make them invisible, to make the uncomfortable way they made me feel invisible. But still I looked. Out of the corner of my eye.
My mother noticed that people came every day with bags of uncooked rice. They walked the line and hand-poured rice into the pans, never stopping, never talking, or really looking, not worrying if it fell into the pans or on the mats. But giving. And the givers looked about twenty-five rupees wealthier than the beggars. My mother took to joining this ritual.
“You’re wasting money,” my father complained. “They never change their lives. They always beg.”
“The poor will always be with you,” my mother said, quoting Jesus without a discernable smirk. I expected a banter, but one of those cartoon light bulbs exploded over my father’s head. He went down to his chapel and named it: The Church of Loaves and Fishes. This was a reference to the miracle of Jesus feeding the multitudes with only five loaves of bread and two fish. A Muslim might know this reference, but it would be lost on a Hindu or a Buddhist. No matter.
My father wrote up a number of handouts that said in essence that if you came and listened to a sermon, you would be fed. He passed these out to the women in the beggar lines. Most of them can’t read. A lot of them don’t speak English.
But some can. And some of the marigold boys can.
My father waited in his chapel. My mother set up a brazier and a pot to cook rice with a handful of spices, if anyone showed up. It was really hot in there and I took off and wandered the ghats because I wasn’t afraid anymore, nor my parents for me.
Often, I couldn’t help myself, I went to the burning ghats of Manikarnika and Harishchandra. There is a brick crematorium where bodies are disposed of on the cheap. But the lucky dead are slathered in ghee and marigolds, men burned face up, women face down on a sandalwood pyre at the burning ghats. Three hours later they are swept into the Ganges, moksha, free and clear from the cycle of reincarnation. Nirvana-bound.
The Doms, the most untouchable of the Untouchable castes do the work. I came to learn that the cost of sandalwood is high and mighty, the price set by the Doms. If you can’t afford enough, grandpa will go into the Ganges partially burned, to be eaten by specially bred snapping turtles. Nobody wants that.
The fires burn day through night. The remains are swept into the Ganges with brooms made of hurly-burly sticks that make a scratchy noise. The Doms keep rings, money, gold teeth, whatever the ashes yield. Fire-hearty items that make the Doms relatively wealthy. But disdained. Like sin-eaters, my mother said.
Sometimes in the winter, when the temperatures are lower, the holy cows stand by the fires to warm themselves and eat some of the fire-starting straw. They poop right there, and I think that’s where the term holy shit derives from.
Some weeks passed before the brazier needed to be lit in the chapel. But then one day Sanjita, a beggar girl, showed up with her one-year-old daughter, Neera. The preaching restaurant was launched! Sanjita was twenty-two and beautiful, of course she was. Her black braid reached her waist, and how is it a woman can wrap nine yards of material around herself and still have a bare midriff? Neera was a bowl of coffee-colored cream and my mother wanted to drink her up.
My father used an old Christian trick to peddle Christ. He told Sanjita that with Jesus there were no castes. She did not need to be a beggar; she could choose her own path. She said yes, she knew it, she was a Buddhist, but that didn’t matter because, wake up and smell the patchouli oil, there are still castes. So he didn’t get her there. But then he said, you can achieve Nirvana, only we call it Heaven, in this lifetime. You can end your suffering and go to eternal peace. She said she could do so by being burned at the Manikarnika Ghat. And he said, “Do you really think you can buy your way to Nirvana with sandalwood?”
Sanjita kept coming back.
My mother fell in love with Neera and my father and I fell in love with Sanjita. She brought seven more women to the congregation and four of their husbands joined, too. Pretty soon Sunday was a potluck. We began to tease my father by calling the church the House of Naan and Saffron. My mother started a weekly women’s Bible study and daycare and I made Bible storyboards for the kids out of felt.
My father began to feel successful. But I could tell my mother was still discontented by the way she took up Charminar cigarett
es, the way she inhaled the smoke.
Livinia Speaks for Herself
I didn’t expect to love it so. Such a cesspool. I missed the clarity of the north. But the women in embroidered silk saris look like movable gardens. My hands smell of saffron, turmeric, and plums. I wash my hair with rosewater. Roof tops are strung with bells and I can hear the chimes in the last of the day’s monsoon rain, or when the hopscotching monkeys shake them.
I don’t remember when it was that I first climbed into Hari’s boat and paid him to row me to and from Dashashwamedh Ghat. He said not a word. I was uncomfortable, both with him and because I had joined the shore-voyeurs, an activity I thought rude. But it was done. Many, many boats carried tourists. He must have thought it odd that I didn’t have a camera. I came back and soon enough Hari realized I lived here and knew to look for me at dawn, because I couldn’t sleep, or didn’t want to. Occasionally I went at dusk. He would find me, if I waited. We spent an hour together two or three times a week. I learned he had been rowing for twenty-five years. It showed in his arms. We didn’t talk much, but he told me that his wife had died in childbirth and his son was one of the boys who sold wreaths and lotus flower candles on the shore. At some point he shook his head and declined my rupees.
I told him about snow.
One morning when it was cooler and the city too wet to kick up dust, Hari left the shore and headed across the river, well over halfway. It was deserted. He anchored the boat, stood and took off his clothes, revealing skin the color of cassia bark. Hari’s intent was clear, but it was an offer, not a demand.
The boat has many seats, so it wasn’t possible to lie down. No matter. There are always options. I took off my own clothes. Bare, I barely breathed. Then, for the first time, I jumped in the Ganges. Surfacing, I turned toward the boat and pulled my shoulders and arms up on the smooth, green-grained side and anchored myself to the boat. I smiled up, met his nut-eyes, perhaps seductively. He smiled too, jumped in and came behind me. He put his arms over my arms, and I felt like I was filled up with ash and bone and marigolds. With the holy Ganges.
I don’t know why I did it. I think it is the river dolphins that make me think I could stay in India. If something of the sea could belong here, why not me? But most likely I am just a monkey. A fool.
Kris
The Ganges is filthy. It’s full of dead people. Really you can’t get around that. My favorite mornings came to be when I awoke to a great commotion with the dawn. Getting up and looking over the veranda, the ghats were swarming with excited people: a holy day. A day to bathe in the Ganges for purification. Can a sinner be made pure by putrid water? If you believe it, you can.
Thousands of people worked their way down the steps of the ghats to plunge fully clothed into a river of crap. Both upstream and downstream from the still-burning pyres. Well, religion ever was more pagan than pragmatic. There is always magic in water.
I would thread my way through the crowd until finally I just sat down. Because it was so beautiful. I was in a kaleidoscope. Inside the northern lights. Saris brushed by, the smell of cardamom-infused flesh. I watched the girls, even the old women, drenched, rise out of the river. Sari-soaked, a second skin of silk and color. Well, I know angels when I see them.
Bikinis are stupid.
Through the Clear Eyes of Sanjita
Sanjita sits on her thin mat receiving rice, looking out to the Ganges, singing to herself, Jesus Christ. Superstar. Do you think you’re what they say you are? Livinia sometimes plays the Broadway score at Sunday dinner, and Sanjita likes the tunes. She had joined the Church of Loaves and Fishes to get extra food for herself and Neera, but now she brings as much food as she takes. She’s not completely sold on Jesus, but she is on Nils, the sincerity of Nils. Some mornings, when Sanjita arrives early and the sun is red, she sees Livinia get into Hari’s boat. She sees Livinia does not pay. She knows Livinia is a fool and will someday pay a full fare.
Sanjita keeps a half-eye on Neera, who plays nearby. God is good.
What Hari Thinks
“I am in love with that crazy gori woman.” But he thinks it in Hindi as he slowly shakes his head and rows his boat.
Kris Tells the Hard Part
I’ve told almost everything now. I’ve put it off as long as possible. Sometimes at night I would lie in my bed listening to the hum of the rusted and useless fan above my head. I tried to recall the north and it came to me as very blue and white. India is every shade intensified. Hard to sort; you just can’t organize it like a sock drawer.
So now I come to December 10, 2010, our second year in India. The Church of Loaves and Fishes had grown to a congregation of around forty people. But I’m not sure one could say they were converted. It is very comfortable for an Indian to simply accommodate an additional religion. Why not cover your bases?
That evening, as we sometimes did, my father and I decided to attend the evening prayers at Dashashwamedh Ghat. My mother, reading on the veranda by the hibiscus tree, stayed home. As we knew there would be, there was a logjam of boats on the river and a thousand locals and tourists at Dashashwamedh as the sun went down and the Hindu priests started the nightly Angi Pooja. A line of priests on a raised platform with neon umbrellas overhead sang prayers and did a fierce fire dance. Some faces in the crowd were in rapture, and some of those were from my father’s congregation. We were used to that and waved hello. If it looked like silliness to me, what would a Hindu think of a Catholic priest in purple velvet holding aloft a thin wafer while ringing a bell and calling it the body of Christ? Seems about the same to me.
My father saw Sanjita sitting on the nearby Sheetla Ghat with Neera on her lap. He headed over to her and I wandered further.
At first I took the sound for fireworks.
Slowly I realized I had been knocked to the ground. I heard tinkling chimes and thought the roof-top monkeys were shaking the lines of brass bells. At last, or quickly, I opened my eyes and there was ash falling from the sky and I assumed I was near a burning ghat and the Loo wind was blowing. I tried to move and I had to concentrate very hard on each part of my body and tell it what to do. Finally, I sat up. There may have been screams, but I could only hear bells. People were running and I saw a railing give way and bodies fall, but still I could not hear the voices, thank God. I looked to where my father had been sitting with Sanjita and then I knew. It was some sort of terrorist pipe bomb. I still couldn’t hear but suddenly I remembered how to run, and I ran, or stumbled, to my father and found him. He was a jumble with blood pouring from his ears and out of a large cut on the side of his head. Before I reached him, I was pushed aside as he was loaded on a stretcher. Sanjita was on a stretcher too, but all I saw of Neera was one small, pink shoe.
I ran for home. My mother wasn’t there. I counted myself nearly an adult, but in that instant I was but a child. I started to cry, and would have surely turned into a cub and howled, but my mother gazelled up the stairs and took me in her arms. Her hair was wet, but her clothes were dry. “Kris, where is Papa?” She shook me a little. Her words came to me in a whisper. “Hospital,” I said, in a hummingbird voice.
We learned that it was the Islamist militant group the mujahideen who were responsible for the blast. The papers told us it was because Babur the Mughal emperor built a mosque in 935 on the site that was known to the Hindus as the birthplace of Rama. So that’s a problem. By 1992, the Hindus had had enough and they demolished Babur’s mosque. This caused Muslims to riot throughout India and over two thousand people died. Now, in 2010, on the anniversary of the 1992 incident, the mujahideen placed an explosive on a Varanasi ghat. In a milk carton. Religion is the dragon biting its own tail.
Many were injured, some critically, including my father and Sanjita. Neera died. Sitting in her mother’s lap, a piece of shrapnel chewed into her like a snapping turtle, but her little body saved her mother’s life.
When we found my father, he was
in a small but private room with white walls and white sheets. There was a single light blub above his head, burning within a wire cage. It may have been the cleanest place I had ever seen in India. His head was wrapped up in a bunting that looked remarkably like a turban. He didn’t know who we were, but he had his Bible in his hand.
This part I surmise, for I was not there: my father asked the nurse repeatedly to turn out the light, and she said, “So sorry, Sahib, light must stay on.” The light began to feel like an interrogation of the Spanish Inquisition. It ghosted onto his retina when he closed his eyes. He began to think it was the Burning Bush. He was willing to sacrifice his firstborn son, even if he couldn’t be sure he had one.
In the middle of the third night my father ripped pages from his Bible, stood tippy-toe on the bed and stuffed the pages within the wire cage to dull the light. The light dimmed to almost candle incandesce. With a deep sigh, he fell deeply asleep.
I often wonder which pages he used. I hope it was the Song of Solomon or some sort of little lamb story. Something soft and not of struggle. The pages, heated up by the bare bulb, began to smoke into a smudge fire. The hospital was not equipped with fire alarms and it was after all, the night shift. His door was closed. They told us he died from smoke inhalation, his body only partially burned, like a body on a pyre where the family could not afford enough sandalwood. No one else was harmed.
And so we finished the job at Manikarnika Ghat, buying a double load of wood, one for Neera. I sat next to a cow and watched my father’s body burn. I watched the Dom scrape his ashes into the Ganges and hoped his moksha was over. I tried not to cry, as is the Hindu way, but was grateful for the light rain which lent me a disguise.
My mother was in a trance. She paced the veranda like the white tiger. For the first time in her life she was completely free to make decisions. We could stay in Varanasi. She could turn the chapel into a real restaurant—she had become an artistic cook with a palette of spices. Norwegian Fusion. Yet I think the freedom scared her. It is easier to play the rebel of your own life than to actually lead it. I might have thought her heartless, pacing the veranda, smoking. But I also saw her sitting by the lemon trees at night, crying like a little girl, or a sad widow.
