Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  He fell at last into fitful sleep. The train reached Mughal Serai at four in the morning and he disembarked into a still, clammy cold. The station lights were orange orbs hung up in the fog. An auto-rickshaw found him and carried him through the night, its torn curtains open to the road, towards the Buddhist sanctuaries of Sarnath. For an hour it puttered over the unlit tracks of scattered villages where men crouched over roadside fires, and left him at last in the fog-bound silence of the holy town. He found a Tibetan monastery whose courtyard doors were open, and went in and sat in its concealing mist until dawn. He felt the excitement of his own solitude returning, then rifled through his backpack to find Ricky’s biscuits.

  Light came imperceptibly, less like dawn than a transparency in the night air. One by one the monks and pilgrims emerged to twirl the prayer wheels round the temple court, murmuring their mantras, and the throb of drums and chanting filled the temple. He sat there for a long time, feeling a subdued elation, listening to the incomprehensible prayers, until an old guest master arrived and assigned him a cell in the cloisters.

  In the streets outside, Steven ignored the stalls of gilded souvenirs and the touts for fake antiques, and went into a park where the fog gentled the remains of a monastery city founded more than two millennia ago. Here the Buddha had preached his first sermon, surrounded by early disciples and some attentive deer. A few monks were circling the only memorial stupa to survive – a towering cylinder of stone-faced brick – and pilgrims were lighting candles wherever they believed the Buddha had preached. Around them a vast complex of monasteries and temples, fallen into ruin a thousand years ago, spread its brick foundations into the mist: grass-fringed cells, terraces, avenues, and the empty circles of once-stupendous shrines.

  Living monasteries – Japanese, Thai, Chinese, Burmese – filled the town outside. His own Tibetan sanctuary was quietly venerated. In its temple, beyond the low seats and banked altar, the gilded torso of an enormous Buddha loomed, his head invisible in the shrine’s tower, while his golden hands descended to inscribe the gesture of his enlightenment, received in the park where Steven had just walked. The walls were covered with rank on rank of frescoed Buddhas, tiny and identical, like echoes of the prayers and mantras chanted here, in the peace of repetition.

  His cell was furnished with an iron bed and a defunct fan. Two nights he woke to the low, pulsing prayer in the temple, like a beehive stirring, and in the morning found the monks eating at their makeshift canteen, or walking along the cold cloisters in their magenta robes and woollen hats. Several spoke English, and talked to him in soft, surprised voices. Few of them had ever known their Tibetan homeland. Born in exile, they had found a homeland in their faith. What was Tibet in their minds? he wondered. Was it a lost paradise, or the despoiled country of the Chinese? An old monk, burning with some inner merriment, said that Tibet was present here in India, in the lineage of its teachers. Here was the true country.

  To Steven the monks seemed mysteriously cheerful. He found himself asking them naive questions. Talking about karma and samsara, they answered him gently, so that he warmed especially to the old man, and to a frail-looking acolyte. The younger fell silent in the presence of the older, so Steven tried to encounter them separately; yet often they echoed one another, as if from the same insight or authority, speaking of the human being always as an entity that ceases and is constantly reborn. Norbu, the old man, described the journeying soul as a wayfarer who takes up his abode each night, then sleeps and forgets, and rises each morning to a new birth. Tenzin, the acolyte, likened such rebirths to a planted tulip that flowers again each year after sleeping in the earth.

  Yet no soul existed. There was no lasting human essence, they said. Only the journey itself, the karma of cause and effect. While Norbu boomed his truths in grinning serenity, Tenzin sensed some distress in Steven. His thin fingers twisted at his prayer beads as he spoke, as if they might sweeten his answers, and his eyes flickered. ‘Things are different with us’ – he assumed Steven a Christian. ‘We don’t believe in the existence of God. There is no Creator. There are gods who are aids to understanding, but they die. They are illusions.’

  Steven was silent, then asked: ‘If there is no God, what survives death?’ He could hear the breathiness in his own question, as if Tenzin – whose speech was so exact, so certain, yet nervous – might have secret knowledge.

  ‘Something inherited,’ the monk answered. ‘Something waiting to be perfected.’ His hands unfurled from his chest. ‘But the previous life cannot be found again.’

  ‘It has no memory . . .’

  ‘If it has memory, it does not know it. Sometimes a person is reminded after many years, maybe prompted by chance. There are stories . . .’

  Steven detected a searching for his consolation in the monk’s eyes. Yes, there were stories of people remembering their previous lives, but strange stories, unsure. In the end, nobody could find again the loved dead. They were changed, they did not even know themselves. Tenzin said: ‘They have already gone. They’ll never come again.’

  ‘No.’ But Steven could see his tension reflected in Tenzin’s face. His gaze dropped from the monk’s into silence. ‘There’s too much past.’ He heard the voice of his colleague’s wife, Sylvia, who had died in love with him; he still touched his mother’s hand; and the hanged and innocent head went on turning in his memory.

  The old monk Norbu, seated in a cell almost as bare as Steven’s, cheerfully told Steven he did not exist. In fact neither of them existed. Nor did Tenzin. The world began to thin and vanish with the illumination that led at last to nirvana. It was the self that created its surroundings. And these were illusions. And the self too was an illusion: the greatest of all. It was meditation – Norbu had meditated over fifty years – that brought about this purified vision. Once started on the path of meditation – and he patted Steven’s arm in encouragement – you could never return. ‘You’d lose too much! Ha, ha! You’d die back into suffering. We say that life is a burning house.’

  Steven noticed by Norbu’s bed a parchment mandala: the painting of a maze-like palace, at whose centre sat a Buddha. This wasn’t magic, Norbu laughed, and no, it was not a maze either. It was an aid to meditation, in which you focused on the sacred figure at its heart. This was an act of great discipline and stillness, in which the independent self slowly evaporated, and united at last with the Buddha.

  Steven remembered from his teaching days, as from another life, some recent experiments on the brain, proving that prolonged focus on an object, through a complex imbalance of neural flow, produced the sensation of the self and its object merging. For a moment he wanted to tell the old man this, to temper his certainty. But of course the experiment proved nothing. Only that the brain was either the receiver or the creator of divinity. Rapture or grief – or maybe God – were waiting in the mind’s dark, to be ignited by the martyr’s shrine at Meshed perhaps, or by the confessions of a postulant in the candlelight: either self-induced or divinely precipitated, no one could know.

  Steven tried to imagine travelling down this path of meditation, deep into its certainty, its neural transformation, while the old man beamed at him. He might journey on, of course, until return became impossible: until doubt vanished together with the sharpness of grief, and the dead were released into their reincarnations.

  In the monk’s faith, he realised, only good and evil importantly survived, continuing in a chain of karma that was beyond self, and moving to the salvation of all sentient things.

  ‘When people dream’ – it was Tenzin speaking, with his odd, tremulous certainty – ‘they imagine that all sorts of desires and terrors are real. But then they wake up. The “I” is like that too. It is dreaming illusion.’

  Steven could not recall ever hearing Norbu or Tenzin speak in the first person. Perhaps they instinctively recoiled from it. ‘I’ was not an intrinsic entity for them. It was only a series of transitory responses, which in memory constructed a recipient for themselves and c
alled it ‘I’. ‘I’ was the story the perceptions told themselves. As in recent theories of the brain, the coherent self disappeared.

  Yet he muttered almost inaudibly: ‘But somebody wakes up from the dream. There is somebody dreaming.’

  ‘There is nobody dreaming,’ Tenzin said.

  After a while, a kind of weary impatience grew in Steven. He was starting to equate doubt with liberation, and he wanted to leave. But there was a fragility in his head, he knew. Something had been taken away. It would never return, whatever concentration he exerted. Perhaps it was for this that he determined to insist on ‘I’, his own singularity. I am walking along this street, he told himself, after he left the monastery. I am looking for a bus. In an hour’s time I think I will be in Varanasi. These are my legs, my arms. I . . .

  * * *

  The streets grow dense with pilgrims and traders, all muffled against the fog, long before they reach the Ganges. Rickshaws and motor scooters thrust and weave between them. The noise is tremendous. The people have grown dark and small since Simla, pilgrims from country towns and villages, led by their pandas, their foreheads bright with tilaks. They barely look at me. From time to time a wooden bier is rushed through the streets. The shrouded corpse lies rigid, its garlanded head poking out from gold and crimson sheets, and a handful of mourners follow chanting Rama nama satya hai!Sometimes they look joyous. God’s name is truth! The air above is jungled with advertisements and electric cables. Garbage is everywhere, open sewers and pavement fires. Dogs sleep in the warm ash, and white cows graze.

  I go down alleys to the river. Four, five storeys high, their walls barely let in light. They are rotted plaster: a labyrinth overhung by decayed balconies and shutters. The way is constricted by stone steps and ledges, where people sleep. The doors give on to darkness. And the gods’ sanctuaries are everywhere: in alcoves and subterranean chambers, where the stone phallus of Shiva, lord of destruction and change, is wreathed with marigolds and shiny from anointing. The whole of Varanasi is his. Mystically balanced on his trident, the city escapes the Hindu cycles of cosmic time. It is indestructible. Those who die and are cremated here will instantly enter moksha, the Hindu nirvana. So the place is crowded with the sick and the old, waiting. I am walking into the heart of an ancient understanding. Seen with clear eyes, people say, the city is beautiful. The ferocious neglect – the drifting rubbish, the open sewers, the chronic poverty – is the thin cloak of its sanctity. Yama, the lord of death, is forbidden to enter. Only I do not see this. My vision is unpurified. I am just a tourist, and the beggars throng round me, shaking their empty bowls.

  I find a hotel near the Ganges. It is dusk now. The river flows oily grey beyond my window. A run-down restaurant serves the masala chicken that Ricky hated – nothing here costs more than a few pence – and I wash this down with Kingfisher beer, and go early to bed. After last night’s monastic cell my room looks cavernous; its warm shower brings on a nostalgia for comfort. I sleep fitfully and wake in the night to hear chanting and bells, then fall asleep again. You may take a boat at dawn along the holy Ganges, the hotelier said, while the pilgrims come down to bathe. So I go out into the cold before sunrise, and the boatmen crowd around me calling, ‘Uncle! Boat, Uncle!’, until I select an old oarsman – he is shivering under a tattered pullover – and we push out on to the river.

  The night becomes white around us. Our oars creak forward into a vaporous wall of sky and water. Then the city starts to materialise: an auburn silhouette in the greyness, where a few lights shine. For four miles along the river enormous terraces of steps flow down beneath ancient-looking temples and palaces. The sun rises and hangs like a white coin in the emptiness, void of any circumambient light. And already the people are descending. Men strip to their loincloths and walk waist-deep into the flood. They splash its sanctity over their bodies, their faces. Some submerge themselves wholesale. A holiday joyousness is in the air. Women bathe laughing in their saris. Stout Brahmin torsos, dangling their ceremonial cord, mingle with the spindly, the aged. They make isolated tableaux as we pass. A young man, deep in the cold current, stands raptly facing the east, his palms joined in prayer. An old woman, frail and shaking, is gentled into the water by her daughters, perhaps for the last time.

  My boatman rests on his oars. ‘You make offer to Mother Ganges?’ He sells me a garland to float on the river. ‘You want buy silks?’

  No silks, no. The polluted current squelches against our prow. The river’s edges are seamed deep in refuse. Effluent from factories upriver – chemical plants, tanneries, slaughterhouses – joins the sewage and litter and fragments of cremated bodies, to float past us in a slow, toxic holiness. The palaces and temples that tower over the steps, rising from blank walls into skyline galleries and turrets, look gutted and derelict, their windows unlit. Their walls are broken by faded advertisements for hostels and restaurants, by painted gods, by notices for ‘Yogic Voice Consciousness’, the Elvis Guest House, and a helpline for abandoned children.

  As the day wears on, groups of pilgrims float on to the river in big, slow motorboats. Their engines barely sound under the temples. Far out in the calm, where the eastern shore of the Ganges is a treeless wilderness, they drift suspended in the fog, and women float tiny cups of candle flame on to the water. Along the more popular ghats, priests are settled under saffron umbrellas, and sadhu holy men, smeared with ash or sandalwood, sit before home-made shrines to Shiva and gaze motionless at the river.

  I gaze back at them, and wonder what they are seeing. I feel an old urge to capture this whole spectacle on camera, and cross the steps all afternoon in a watery sunlight. Along the quietest stretches, boys are playing cricket with sticks and tennis balls, or flying kites which twitch high in an air that looks unearthly still. Other terraces are gaudy with pink towers and clustered parasols, like some sacred funfair, while downriver shine the everlasting fires of the cremation grounds. Everything seems to arrange itself for the camera in a shock of colour or vivid composition. A temple tilts into the sludge in sheaves of sculpted stone. Flocks of mynah birds shower from a palace roof. A young woman, slim and poor, collects the Ganges water into a little phial and cradles it at her breast. And all along the terraces a telephoto lens can foreshorten the crowds into a brilliant multitude, and angle along the river’s edge to capture a collage of glistening, hirsute bodies.

  But at dusk, in an alley’s shelter, I run these photos back through my viewfinder, and wonder. Some essence has eluded me. It is as if everything visible in this strange city were unimportant, its meaning accessible only to the privacy of belief, even the belief that the sewer of the Ganges is pure. I have merely coerced these scenes to clichés of form and light, and hoped that they would speak.

  ‘You want hashish, Uncle?’

  I’ve heard this all through Africa and Asia. I used to smoke it. Now I see a small brown cake in the man’s hand. I buy it, I suppose, because hashish is sacred to Shiva, and I have a leftover desire to experience things in their place. Munched in the deserted lane, it tastes more bitter than it should.

  In the labyrinth of alleys, temples and shrines multiply behind dilapidated walls and doors. Under an unlit gateway somebody sells me a garland for the god, offers a bowl of water to wash my hands, and dabs my forehead with a tilak. I shed my shoes into his care. The entrance is hung with notices in Hindi, which I can’t read. I find myself in a warren of passages flanked by iron-barred chapels, and the marble paving is ice-cold under my feet. Worshippers are lighting candles on the steps before the gods while a woman whispers the divine names. But the gods sit indecipherable in the dark of their cages. Some are violently painted, others daubed vermilion, still others – these the least worshipped – seem withdrawn into their naked stone. Often I can make out no more than a disembodied headdress or the slope of a jewelled hand. Others are so draped in garlands that only their eyes gleam in the smothered face. The elephant-headed Ganesh squats in a cave of flames; the monkey god Hanuman is a blob of clay, prick
ed with black pupils.

  To a learned elite, these deities do not exist. As with the Buddhist monks, the world and even divinity are illusion. I walk their aisles in bewilderment. No god is himself alone. Each one, in a teeming pantheon, is an aspect or a spouse or the divine antithesis of another. I cannot keep track of them. An old, tingling euphoria is starting up inside my head. Vishnu, the preserver, is the benign manifestation of Shiva the destroyer, who himself creates even as he ravages. They are each, in a sense, one another. Shiva’s consort is the gentle Parvati, who may revert at any moment to her alter ego Kali, the bloodstained goddess of dissolution.

  The shrines follow one another in zones of flickering light. I go from fire to fire. There is a juddering behind my eyes. Everything is alternately close and far away. I hear laughter and chanting. I wonder if I am really allowed here, in this private netherworld of gods. If the statue’s eyes are present, I’ve read, the god is alive. The eyes, like an icon’s, emit light from another realm. My feet drift soundless over the marble. I have a sensation of floating. I realise this is only the effect of hash – I’ve known it before – but there are doors and passageways here that might lead to near-infinity. I imagine unlocking private chambers where curtained walls part to reveal something else, and something beyond that. When I gaze into the shrines, my hands on the cage bars look far away. The gods loom in and out of focus. They are all one, of course, or nothing. But their stares criss-cross the dark. And they are all accompanied by their mounts, their incarnate energies, which lie at their feet: Shiva rides a bull, Parvati a lion, Ganesh travels by mouse, Vishnu by eagle. I go silently on my own feet, which I cannot feel. But my head throbs.