Please, Varanasi by Arjun Shah

Looking out over the bridge, you can see widows in their sarees and gold bangles and solemn, painted faces. Above them, the sun emits a last, romantic orange which blends with the blue of the previous sky, creating stripes of pink which bring the two colors together. The air smells of death.

On the river, funeral pyres float, their fires growing from blue to red as they climb higher. The surf laps against the pyres, swaying them as they head downstream. Back on the shore, there are some men dressed in white wearing brown shoes who are singing. The music stretches out into the air, into the dead, then ceases when the pyres grow out of sight. The women look out into the river and hold each other. They too are dressed in white and their hands are painted with brown-red colors. Gold bangles hang on crooked wrists. When the men stop singing, they gather the women in their arms and head away from the river towards the temple. One man puts a cigarette in his mouth before he takes a woman’s palm, which reveals spaces of white amid the brown pattern. A tear falls down the side of her cheek. The singing begins again.

I withdraw my elbows from the bridge and head down the street which runs adjacent to the river. The air is cool now. Men with skin like dark coals pedal by me, in their wake bringing a carriage that holds a face concealed by a yellow sun blind. School children chatter incessantly. A girl with a thick coil of freshly-oiled hair applies mascara in the back of a rickshaw. I look at her face and she sees me and laughs, revealing straight, uniform teeth. I look away and out back to the river which curves throughout Varanasi, and then upwards at a temple the color of clay that extends into a dome, reaching toward the sky. At the entrance to the temple, a Sadhu dressed in orange robes with a white mark on his forehead stands, while a string of beads hangs on his neck and sways in the river breeze. He was yelling something out causing his beard to vibrate, the silver hairs dancing, but nobody was listening to him. I walk over to a cafe next to the temple and order a cold coffee. I see Vishnu there, another monk at the monastery. Vishnu, like me, dropped out of college and moved to India to become a monk. He had a very squat nose and was very round. He reminded me of a great bullfrog. He also had curly hair and the blackest skin I had ever seen, and his teeth were very white little mints that glowed rather shockingly to the eye. I wondered, often, what exactly produced him, and what kind of circumstances had brought him East. I suppose he was innocent in a very unbecoming way, but I rather liked him.           

 “You have some way of going,” he said. “With your arms all swinging about.”

“Don’t be like that.”

He ran his finger through his curly hair and smiled. “OK.”

“Let’s go to the place,”

“You’re some monk, you know that,”

“It’s my day off”

We pay for the coffee and then walk along the street. We reach the place and look up at the pastel colored exterior. When we knock on the door there is no answer.

“I think it’s closed,” Vishnu says.

“So observant,”

We walk back onto the street and continue down the road, directionless.

 “We have to stop doing this,” Vishnu began, his voice filled with resignation. “Somebody from the monastery could see us, and anyways, it’s not going to get you any closer to solving your problems.”

“Problems?”

“You have problems with people”

“I don’t know anyone except you and my mother” I look past him, to the vendors hawking samosas in their carts.

“Yes, but you used to. You used to know people and then you had problems with them and now you don’t know them anymore.”

“It’s not my fault they don’t want to see me.”

“Is that what they said?” 

“Yes.”

“That’s very sad. You are a sad young man.”

“Don’t get all sentimental. By the way, it wasn’t even my personality, you know. It was the face.”

“Your face?”

“Yes… It was my face. They didn’t want to see my face anymore. I suppose they didn’t like it very much.” I say these words slowly, trying to recall what exactly had happened those years ago.

Vishnu laughs. “I think these days men look too much in mirrors. The other day I saw a man buying creams for his face. What a tragedy. Men have become shallow. “

“That’s a laugh. So what? Do you get along with people? Do you have no problems with them?”

“We’re monks. You know, enlightenment and all that. Have you already forgotten our dear friend Siddartha?”

“Yes, I remember, the prince who preferred to sit in the forests than palaces. What an idiot.”

Vishnu looks at me breathlessly. The last hues of the sun got caught in his eyes so that they glowed like honey. “Once you have something, it no longer becomes the object of desire. For instance, you have legs yet you don’t appreciate them. If, say, for instance, one day, they were to be chopped off, then not having legs would be all you would be able to think about. But currently, while you are fully-legged, they are of no concern to you. You do not thank them. In this same way, whatever you want now will be meaningless to you once you attain it. Thus, you are stuck in an endless cycle of depravity. To eliminate desire is to eliminate suffering. To eliminate desire is to transcend the self: service, meditation, austerity—these are the principles we live by, these are the basis of our functions.”

I laugh and bend over, holding my knees. Vishnu looks up at the sky with a great concentration. I leave him there as I often do when he gets stuck in the rapture of contemplation and head back to the cafe where I order another coffee. There is a girl standing by the counter and I can tell by her dress that she is a fellow American. She is a young-twenty-something, maybe. Trickles of sweat walk down the side of her head as self-assured as bugs crawling toward a great feast.

The girl looks at me and I observe the curl of her eyelashes, the symmetry of her face.

“Hello,” she says. “Who are you?”

“A monk”

She laughs, her mouth forming a half-a-moon.

“I know that,” she says, still laughing. “What’s your name?”

“I gave up all that”

 “What do you mean?”

“You shouldn’t be here alone, it isn’t safe.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course not. That’s what they say though, isn’t it?—this country, it’s not safe for people like you… Well, don’t worry.”

“You’re cynical. Why did you give up your name?”

“It’s a part of becoming a monk.”

“I don’t think that it is.” She pauses, unsure then confident. “I already know. Someone broke your heart.”

“I’m not so sentimental.” I am still, looking at her. Finally, I say: “You, you should not be here. It’s not for you. This is a place where people come to die.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“You don’t know anything about me,” my voice beginning to have a real venom to it. “Only fools cry when people leave. You cannot lose someone, because you never have anyone in the first place.”

We are quiet for some time, us two strangers. A horn bellows as we wait, the mark of a funeral procession. The street is quieter now, quieter so we can hear the palpation of words before they are produced, the beginning of thought, the prepositions to vocalization.

“So which one is it then?” I ask.

“Yale.”

“Of course.”

***

The next day she shows up at the monastery. I am out sweeping when she comes. I don’t smile when I see her.

“Are you stalking me?” I ask, placing the broom down. Her grin dissipates into her natural smile. Her curly, black hair is wet.

“Of course not. How would I have known that you would be here?”

I ignore the question and return to sweeping, watching the dust fly in the air with each brushstroke, satisfied with the work.

“So are you going to stay here forever?” she asks. The white of her shoes are caked with dust. The sun is shining on the side of her face, though she doesn’t appear to mind.

“It appears so.”

“OK. You don’t seem very happy, though.”

“It’s all so tiresome.”

“What is?”

“Desiring. That’s why I came here, if you really want to know.” I pause looking at her face for the first time, looking at her as she looks at me. “It’s never enough.”

“OK, If you say so” she says. The last words she speaks are filled with doubt, I sense, and it annoys me.

“Don’t think you are so much better than me” I say, for the first time since I have met her fostering a genuine dislike toward her, the condescension she carries in each syllable. “That all means nothing to people here. All they know is death.”

For a moment, I fear that she is going to walk away, close another door, resign from speaking and let me watch as she slips into the innocuous nature of a stranger, but she stays there—she—and looks at me with foreboding eyes.

“My name is Anjali, by the way. In case you want to put a name to the person you insult with so much vigor.”

“So go on Anjali, run off back to school and leave me here.” I say these words, not really believing them but curious, curious to see what she does next.

“Well I won’t stay here forever like you. But rest assured I won’t listen to you. What makes you think you can tell me what to do, anyway?”

I pause for some time, letting the intermittence well up between us, find itself in the air and predispose itself to our talking. The dust is less clear now, now that the sun has climbed down across the sky so the hues of dusk shine between our faces, making brown into orange, darkness into lightness.

“I am not the type for this.”

“So you have suffered?”

“You could say that.”

“And you’re just going to feel sorry for yourself the rest of your life? Sweeping dust and praying?” She looks at me, her face serious.

“Prayer is productive.”

“Will you pray for me?”

“I pray for everyone.”

She sits on a stool that we keep on the porch, which the monks sometimes sit on early in the morning after ceremony.”

“I think you’ll come back one day,” she says, her voice cheerful. “You’re too young to have given up already.”

“You want me to come back with you to Yale and shack up in some little place near Old Campus?” I say, my voice comical now.

She grins. “I only see you as a friend.”

“You are not my friend. Leave me alone now.”

When she did finally walk away, after some time, the trees were green around her. The dust flew to her ankles as she stepped, and she didn’t appear to turn back once. As she left, as her back rocked gently up and down in the rhythm of her step, I wondered if I would ever see her again.

***

One day, I wake to the sound of rain. When I step out of my cot, my ankles are submerged in brown water. Rubbing my face, I watch as more water pours in until I get to my senses and stand up.

“Vishnu,” I yell, looking for him. I expect him to be beside me, on the cot next to me, but he isn’t there. I get up and head through the doorway, all the while the sound of rain, the sound of water rushing, is growing stronger. “Vishnu” I yell. “Vishnu, where are you?” Nobody else is in the monastery, it seems. I say a silent prayer, perhaps the first one I’ve ever said in earnest, as my feet slosh and take me out of the monastery into the street where the water has begun taking cars downstream. Trash, multicolored specks of orange and yellow, pepper the water. The white of the water, the white in the brown, nips at my ankles as I move through the trash, feeling the faint brush of plastic on my knees. “Vishnu” I scream again, my voice threatening to break under its own power. “Where are you?”

People are out on the street, holding onto each other. I watch as a woman carries her baby in her hands, the baby screaming, and then, with quiet resolution, places the baby into the river. In the Hindi I know, I yell at her, but it doesn’t matter because she can’t hear me and even if she could she wouldn’t listen—it was too late. I am there for a while, watching the baby float in the water, watching the gentle bobbing of it in the waves, and I want to run after it but something in my body, something inside that I can’t control, keeps me there. The baby goes out of my vision and I taste cold blood in my mouth. By the time I turn around the woman is by my side, holding on to my arm, her cries deafening as her nails stab into my skin. Orange lines her scalp, vermeulen powder meant to signify the feminine gods. Her teeth are crooked and yellow as her breath meets my skin. “Why did you do it,” I yell at her, but now she has sunk to her knees, her knuckles submerged in the trash and water. I don’t try to pick her up. She looks at me with green, watered eyes as the crystalline shape of a tear clouds her vision. I am frozen in place when she gets caught in the tide and I watch as her fingers unravel from my arm, as she closes her eyes in acceptance, and tumbles, slowly, through the water.

At this point I begin to feel something, something in my voice, something with a sense of music to it. I look at the sky. Men are yelling now, and I feel a hand grasp my arm and take me, take me away to where there is less water, where the women and children are. “Vishnu” I yell again, and now I am in their arms, now my body has gone numb as the cold water rushes through my pores, as I hear a woman cry. The blue is the only thing in my vision, the only thing I cling onto.

When I am on the shore, when my feet drag against the mud, they lie me down face up. I mean to get up, to look around, but when I try to my legs buckle and a man with a mustache and dark, serious eyes has to hold me up as they help me to a chair. “Vishnu, is Vishnu here?” I ask. 

The man looks at me and shakes his head.

“No. He is gone.”

I look at the man, at the women and the children, at the meaninglessness of it all. “What do you mean? How can he be gone?” The man says nothing, just looks at me and then turns away to the water, watching it rush down. We sit there for some time, us two, as more people come ashore, as they all come, the unvanquished, and we are silent when they arrive. I don’t say anything until hours later, when we all begin to walk toward higher land. “Vishnu” I say. “Can you hear me?”

***

She is there when I get to the place, the place where they take us, the place where it is supposed to be safer. When she sees me I can sense she is relieved as I march forward toward the camp they have set up, where children chase each other and mothers cry.

“Are you okay?” she asks. I am silent. Her face is worn with worry.

“Vishnu is gone,” I say.

“Your friend? The Monk?”

“Yes. They say he’s dead.” Her eyes meet mine, the blue eyes of the Kashmiris, because she never told me, never told me where her family came from, that northern, mystical land.

“I am so sorry,” she says.

“I know. That’s all you ever are.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean why are you still here?”

“I was thinking I’ll help with the clean up.”

“You posture, you don’t really care. Go and run back to America.”

She picks up a piece of trash and puts it in her bag, her gloved hands working carefully.

“I know you’re sad about your friend—”

“He was far more than that,” I say, my voice angry. “You could never understand.”

After a long pause, she speaks, disappointed: “I think that I do.”

And to that I have nothing to say. When she leaves on the bus for Delhi, I give a half-hearted wave before looking back, back into the water.

***

A few days later, I am picking up trash. The air is cooler, the breeze lifting up pieces of trash making the task more difficult when it all inevitably escapes my grasp, marking my journey longer, less fruitful. It is then when I discover a three-inch piece of paper perched in the brush, a ticket stub. It reads: VARANASI AIRPORT: 5 AM. The rest of the ticket is cut out so I cannot read who it belongs to, though I quickly distinguish that the essential part of the ticket, the part needed to actually board the flight, is missing.

Arjun Shah      

Image : © Vyacheslav Argenberg / http://www.vascoplanet.com/, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Varanasi riverbank with houses and temples climbing up behind and a crowd attending a funeral/cremation on the banks.