Continuation of India 1979 TR of previous.

The guard and his lathi stick must have intimidated everyone under the platform as no one else emerged after I returned to my pack. The train pulled in and I found a conductor to decipher the scribbles on my ticket so I could find my assigned car. I jostled my way past the people jammed in the aisle to the right compartment, just an open stall with three bunks on each wall, and crammed my pack on the top one. We pulled away from the station in the thin morning sun, moving slowly past cardboard and scrap lumber shacks alive with skinny naked children and emaciated adults warming themselves around countless little fires. I was one of the lucky ones. I had a place to sit. Most people were forced to stand or crouch in the aisle, talking loudly over the din of the wheels, some looking vacantly out the windows, smoking bidis, chewing betel, perhaps enjoying the moist warmth of so many closely packed bodies after the morning chill of the platform.

In a short time, the unpadded wooden bench was grinding into my bottom every time the car bumped across a joint in the track. I wondered if anyone else on the bench was as uncomfortable as me. I retrieved my ensolite pad from my pack, under the close and curious scrutiny of everyone, and motioned to the people on the bench to help me unroll it so we could all sit. They loved it, pinching and caressing the pad, talking between themselves in Hindi, smiling, shaking my hand. It was an unheard of luxury for them. My butt was dead after a couple of hours, but everyone else on the bench was content, happy as clams, the best trip they’d had in years. They were a lot tougher than me. Although my rear end was damaged for life, I was banking up good karma like a regular Vanderbilt.

We rolled along all day, past vast cultivated fields, through dusty cities and towns. Sometimes we’d stop in a city. The shrill voices of vendors assailed the cars from the outside. There was no way they could fit themselves into the jammed aisles. They were mostly small boys, yelling “chiiya…chiiya…chiiya…” poured out of big pots into unglazed red clay cups exchanged for paisa, passed from person to person from the middle of the car to the window, a filled cup for each pittance passed back into the shadowed interior till everyone had their tea. When done, the cups were passed back to those at the windows, who tossed the cups onto the roadbed between the cars and the platform, shattering like hundreds of balloons popping up and down the length of the train. Other vendors hawked bananas and packages of little white balls I thought to be bread rolls. They were lumps of sugar, sickeningly sweet. I gave them away to my neighbors. I make them comfortable, I feed them: I’ll be nominated for sainthood next. A boy was selling chapattis. Something besides bananas would be good. I didn’t dare eat the omelets. They had an evil orange color and were swimming in grease. It would take ten minutes at least to get to the toilet at the end of the car, if I could get into it when I got there. Best to not risk it and just go hungry, so I settled for a couple of chapattis and some bananas, munching away on my frugal repast as we pulled out of who knows where. The only city name I recognized was Lucknow. It was a second class carriage and no one seemed to know any English, so even though I had a map, I could never figure out quite where I was. I just had to trust I would get to Varanasi at some point and as the hours went on, even that possibility became vague, leaving me to wonder just where I was or where I was going, in a most strange and diffuse sense, like I was not a part of the world any more, but in some strange vehicle slowly moving through space.

Sometime after dark, I cleared some space on the top bunk and clambered onto it, crammed up against the ceiling and lacking a foot or so of length. Even though I was folded and jammed, I had it to myself. Sleep was a vain hope, with the chatter and train noise and the physical law that heat rises in effect. The best that could be made of it was to doze a bit and keep an eye on my pack safely under my head. As the night went on, the car became quiet, people squeezed together, some under blankets, others hunched or standing together swaying with motion of the train. The dim light of a few bare bulbs cast us all in shadows and the only sounds were muffled metal rumblings and squeakings, the whistle of the wind outside.

Half way through the night we stopped in a dimly lit station. I hung my head over the side of the berth and peered outside. There were hundreds of people standing on the platform. As soon as the train stopped, they jammed the doors of the car, shouting and shaking their fists, jostling for entry into the all ready packed car. One young man in a white suit jumped on the shoulders of the crowd. He crawled on all fours over everyone’s heads, rocketing into the aisle. Bridging between the outside wall and the end walls of the compartments, he moved like a spider over everyone until he dropped into a hole in the crowd and sat. He had a wild, frightened look in his eyes. The crowd at the door was screaming, angry at him, at each other. The only way to get in would be to trample those all ready in the aisle. The people in the aisle looked worried, like it just could happen. A stampede was averted when the police arrived, brandishing their lathi sticks as they pulled people away from the doors, threatening to strike them if they acted like they wanted to join the fracas at the doors again. A couple of men didn’t get the picture and I could hear the smack of bamboo against meat, the cries of pain. That did the trick and the crowd dispersed. People sulked on the platform, kicking little bits of gravel with their sandals, looking dejected. A couple of men were arguing with the conductor and the police, motioning down the track. Apparently they had to get somewhere urgently. The conductor and the police looked bored, hearing the men out, saying nothing. The car lurched with a bang of couplings as we pulled out of the station. Faces stared in from outside, looking defeated, falling backwards as the train rumbled into the night.

All the next day we rolled on, passing many towns and villages too small to be stops for an express. Skinny men and women stood along the tracks against the dry and dusty land, watching without expression, the dust of our passing blowing in their eyes. Maybe they stand there forever, watching the train go by. I did not know.

We pulled into Varanasi Cantonment after dark. The platforms were laced in deep shadows around circles of light cast by the bare bulbs. The train crept slowly along the length of the platform, coming to a halt with precision smoothness, as if we were arriving in a dream. The hawkers were subdued. They quietly filtered into the car as it emptied, offering their wares in hushed voices. The train was continuing to Calcutta, but had a long layover in Varanasi. When the car was nearly empty, I shouldered my pack and went outside. It was the first time I’d been out of the car in 36 hours.

I wandered into the main terminal. The floor was nearly solid with sleeping people. There were gaps between them wide enough to step into if I was careful. Softly, carefully, I made my way across that vast darkened hall. I stopped once to figure out where to go. There were other people doing the same thing I was. They looked like flamingos with their long stiffness, making their way across a dim and ruffled lake.

As I walked out into the square in front of the station, a man asked me if I would like to go to a hotel: one rupee, very close, just down the street. I followed him around the paved loop in front of the station, past rickshaws put up for the night, their front forks grasping the starry sky. Behind them, groups of men huddled around small fires, talking among themselves, heedless of our passing.

We crossed a wide avenue and as we reached the other side, a loud cacophony of horns and trumpets and cymbals attracted my attention. Out of a side street emerged a procession of men, dancing and singing in front of a small but mad little band, behind them a young woman riding on a white horse escorted by a troop of serious, but not sad looking men and women. The girl was wearing a crown of long neon light tubes, keeping her head determiningly erect, though her crown must have weighed a great deal. The neon tubes buzzed and crackled, illuminating the entire group in a bluish glow. Behind the horse, a man wheeled a small but noisy generator that was connected to two men following behind carrying two clusters glowing neon similar to the girls. All around the procession, men danced and laughed, while the young girl looked perfectly straight ahead, her posture the envy of form, with an unfathomable look in her eyes, her mouth set in a line, unknowable to a chance wanderer in the night.

It is a wedding procession, my guide informed me, and without further comment, motioned for me to follow him. We entered a darkened street with broken pavement, potholes that became visible only just before I was ready to topple into them. We went a couple of blocks before stopping in front of a bared gate. My guide rattled the heavy steel lattice, softly calling to someone inside. I was still standing in the middle of the street, transfixed by the strange building next to the hotel. A couple of searchlights were trained on its bright green walls, lending an eerie green phosphorescence to everything in the street. A piercing, undulating electronic whine issued from somewhere inside, sounding like chanting but so distorted electronically, that it could have been anything: the wind, some creature being tortured, a mad chainsaw killer. There was no sign of people, not even zombies crazily grinning out its lunatic green gate.

Best to ignore that sh#t, I thought, just get some sleep, which was apparently being arranged for my benefit between my guide and a young man who had opened the hotel gate. The boy wanted 3 rupees to let me in at that late hour. I gave it to him without arguing. Just get a wall between me and all this, please. The boy led us down a dark hall onto a long porch lined with doors and small barred windows overlooking a dark sunken court. He opened a door and lit a candle on a small table, revealing a cell of peeling stucco, a charpoi covered with a hemp mattress, a stool, the barred window, and a toilet. I was entertaining the uncharitable thought that the terminal floor might have been better, when my guide took my arm and, with brotherly solicitude, warned me to lock the door at all times when I was gone and bolt it when inside. Only he could be trusted. He said he’d be by in the morning. I was to wait only for him. Accept no substitutes. He would take me to the ghats, the silk factories for which Benares is renowned. I’d like that, yes? My uncle will give you a boat on the Ganges past all of the ghats for only 200 rupee. Good price. I will be your all day rickshaw driver. I pay him what I think is good. I know you will be generous, sir.

OK, OK, whatever. Please, no more. It is very late. I am tired. Thank you. Don’t rush over in the morning. I will sleep late. Oh, but please sir, promise me. Yes, thank you, good night, here is something for your trouble. I mashed a few rupees in his hand as I herded them out of the room. He started his all day for all my wallet pitch on the porch, but at that point, the night watch wanted to get back to sleep too and towed my luckless guide to the front gate, rattling the chain behind him as he protested his eviction.

I turned into my little room and surveyed it by candlelight. The toilet was amazing. Life forms yet undescribed by modern science were proliferating there like cabbages. I turned up the edge of the mattress. Several dubious black bugs scurried into the fibers. There were little bumps all over the walls. Closer inspection revealed them to be mosquitoes, dozens within the circle of candlelight, their sacs distended with blood. All the while, the same eerie wailing I’d heard issuing from the green building was emanating from the walls. Perhaps the management had piped it in for entertainment, failing the acquisition of vibrator beds. I decided to spend the night on the porch.

I sat on the wide stone railing, back against a post. The green building was only a couple of rooms away at the end of the hotel, casting its poisonous green halo against the night sky. The wailing was not as penetrating on the porch. I finally figured out that it was some sort of temple. The wailing would regularly subside to a monotonous chanting at a lower tone, when a man would read prayers in a sonorous voice. The chanters repeated his exhortations and to make sure the deity wouldn’t miss a word of their labors, the reader was apparently using a megaphone to get the point across. At regular intervals, the chanting would build to such a crescendo that the megaphone couldn’t handle all those cosmic vibs and would convert their prayers to a piercing electronic shriek that cut into my ears, even on the porch. I figured this shriek must have been the orgiastic union with their deity, for whom I began to feel pity as the night progressed, since he/she or it was probably deaf as a post after all this.

It was nice on the porch. Between shrieking unions, the chanting would return to a murmur in the night. I began to make out some small trees in the darkness of the courtyard, where some crickets were clicking. The night passed softly, the stars cool and distant above the trees. They faded and disappeared as the eastern sky began to lighten.

In the early morning light, when colors arise and remerge into black and white at the beat of a heart, a sari clad woman emerged from a room at the far end of the porch. She didn’t notice me in the shadows as she moved to the stone rail to look into the garden. As the sun peeked over the rooftops, her sari played the light as luminous green and yellow and scarlet that flowed one into another with her slightest movements. The metallic foil designs sewn into the fabric flashed as she swayed, throwing golden sparks into the shadowed corners of the passage.

I heard the chain running through the bars of the gate and the creaking of rusty hinges. As I got up the get my pack, the woman saw me and looking surprised, scurried back into her room. I thanked the young man and gave him a couple of rupees as I left. He acted like he needed a couple of more nights of solid sleep.

Hoping to avoid my guide from the previous night, I started down the broken street, past the entrance to the green temple. The endless wailing appeared to be set to go all day and still, no one in sight, even on the patio just inside the gate. Definitely some weird stuff happening there, based on the general feel in the air. I had developed an interesting ability in the last five months of travelling to tell if something or someone was good or bad by the color they emanated. That green color was bad juju: go in there and never return. The street was torn up badly, paving stones stacked helter-skelter on either side. Cows and kids picked in the ruins and dirt as adults squatted in the acrid smoke of cow dung fires. I kept walking until I came to a fairly nice looking hotel. Inside, it had a clean and healthy air. How much for a room, one person? Fifteen rupee. Can I see it? The desk clerk called to a young boy and handed him a key. He showed me upstairs to an airy, well it room with a double bed, private bathroom, even a sink. Yes, I’ll take it. Please pay in advance, downstairs, please. The desk clerk surveyed my passport with the usual jaundiced look they give to anyone with a backpack and long hair. He wrote all my numbers down in a giant log book probably obtained from some stationary store that was still trying to clear out its stock of Victorian Era log books. I signed on the line. He compared the signature with that on my passport before returning it with the room key. No fugitives from justice wanted here. Please leave key at desk before leaving the hotel. I went up to my room and sat there for a little while. It would be nice not to share my sleep with lower life forms: the small considerations of living.

There was a little restaurant next to the front office. A couple was all ready there, speaking German. The boy who had shown me the room was waiting tables. The management was getting the work out of him. He brought toast and tea to the Germans. The man scowled at the toast and angrily complained that it was not properly done. He sent it back to a subconscious oven in Poland for further treatment. I forced myself not to giggle at that thought. I’d been up for a long time. It seemed like my entire life had been this way, but really, what could be wrong with a piece of toast? I suspect the woman thought the same. She looked embarrassed and smiled wanly at me. They both looked strung out: pale and underfed. Of course, anyone who’s been in India for more than two weeks starts to look that way but they were a cut above the usual. Maybe a just touch of dysentery, instead of anything as extravagant as heroin.

The boy returned, casting the secret killer glance of Kali at the Germans on his way to me. Blood streaming from a long, sexually erect tongue; garlands of severed blue heads: I’ll stomp your ass good, buddy, just wait. He likes me though, I thanked him for showing me the room and gave him a tip for taking my pack up to the room. Being polite never hurts, wherever you go. Chiiya, maybe toast? Eggs? Sure, yes, that would be fine, thank you. Exercises in malnutrition. I should attempt to eat something more today. Three days of bananas and chapattis and tea. I’ll have to cut another hole in my belt at this rate.

The kid returned with breakfast. The Germans were going to wait. I was probably getting what Fritz had rejected. That was okay; he didn’t touch it. Good to have a nice place to stay for a few days: tired of bug infested holes, communal toilet shared with junkies. A higher standard of living might help the outlook.

I was a little giddy, too wired to go the sleep. I inspected the map of Benares I’d obtained in Dehli. The desk clerk marked where the hotel was on the map and told me how to get to the old city. I induced a mild state of unhappiness in the half dozen rickshaw wallahs stationed out front when I announced upon leaving that I would be walking. After 36 hours cooped up in that train, the last thing I wanted to do was ride somewhere. Here we go, down the street to the big avenue, perambulate in front of the great wheel of India mounted above the entrance to Varanasi Cantonment Station, surreally huge and turning like above the yellow morning mist of cow dung fires and exhaust and locomotive smoke and you can hear, behind the great façade, the morning sound of India, the lonely echo whistle of the morning train to some place you’ve never been, some fable you heard of long ago that stalks you now on the edge of your thought in the morning coolness rapidly evaporating into dust and smoke like some yellowed old photograph dense with vendors and their canopied carts selling chiiya and hot chapattis and life is a little easier here, people more relaxed in this holy city on the Ganges, people eating at the stalls, maybe going to work, or maybe getting ready to catch a train but all quietly talking so unlike the noise and commotion of so many other Indian cities and the rickshaw wallahs shrug it off when you don’t want a ride and there are no beggars pestering for rupees. I was missing an appendage without my train of kids and cripples tailing me through the streets into the old city like a pilgrimage to Lourdes behind a poor and giddy prophet.