Let's Go To Benares

Benares Song

(written in English by Bertolt Brecht, 1927)

There is no whisky in this town

There is no bar to sit us down, Oh!

Where is the telephone?

Is here no telephone?

Oh, Sir, God Damn me: No!

Let's go to Benares 

Where the sun is shining

Let's go to Benares!

Johnny, let us go.

The first time I heard the word Benares was in this song by Brecht from Mahagonny Songspiel some 15 years ago. Brecht liked using Asian place names in his works - Surabaya, Mandelay, the Punjab.

So I'd been thinking about where to travel in the three short days after my workshop and before Ulla's 60th birthday party. Some friends recommended a mountain getaway in the foothills of the Himalayas which aren't too far. Others suggested places like Jaipur and Jodhpur but also cautioned that since these were desert towns they were already very hot now. There was Rishikesh where the Beatles attended a transcendental meditation back in 1968. Most of these spots were an 8-hour bus or train trip.

When Ashwin asked me where I really wanted to go, without thinking about it, I said Varanasi, or what Indians have always called Benares. What I read about this strange city on the banks of the holy River Ganges captivated me. People bathed in the river in evening and morning meditations, and burned their dead out in the open on funeral pyres. The city has a rich musical heritage - many musicians have come from Benares. It all sounded compelling. Something was calling me there like India as a whole had called me.

My friend Ian in NY suggested a book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. Venice is already near and dear to my heart as the place where I fell in love with my soulmate at age 19 and that the two cities are linked in this book was interesting enough. Turns out I haven't much like the book, but the author's descriptions of Varanasi are richly construed and spot-on.

It was my ambassador Thomas Matussek with whom I sat at lunch out under the pergola at the residence one afternoon who convinced me to choose Benares and also solved the travel problem. "Fly there," he said. "It'll take an hour and not cost very much. In fact, we'll set it up through our travel agency here." And so we did and on Monday morning at 9:30am I boarded a SpiceJet (India's commuter airline) and flew southeast. I got into a terrible traffic jam with my taxi driver (Varanasi's traffic is even worse than Delhi's with cars, bikes, rickshaws and animals and no lanes in any direction. The hotel Ganges View had come up in conversations and in the book as the place to stay, but it was full and so I got a room a few doors down for two nights at the Palace on the Ganges. It was sweet indeed...small with a big bed and a view to the Assi ghat below.

I've had a deliriously charmed experience in this maiden visit to India and there have been angels accompanying my footfalls. Truly, I have often sensed a presence larger than my own guiding my steps and my awareness. Traveling now alone to a place that is intensely weird, "equal parts fantasy and utter repulsiveness" as one visitor to Zorba told me, I was open yet guarded. Ready to flow in the stream of life as I have come to know it -  trusting that a few benevolent and unseen beings always have my back.

I walked along the ghats after checking out my room. It was mid afternoon and already hot. Cows were everywhere, on the steps, in the water. There were goats and monkeys too. Lots of men were hawking boat rides, lots of children were hawking henna tattoos and souvenirs. "What country, what country?" they would ask. Eventually I started answering "Mars." That didn't deter them. "You like a pretty necklace for Mars? You got some rupees for me?"

I thought I knew what dirt was, what waste was, what shit was. Na. On the surface this was easily the most disgusting place I'd ever seen. But then I'd already been in Delhi for a month and my resistance to the things of this world like filth, poverty, overcrowdedness, noise and shoving had been broken in the first week. Here it all smacked me in the head again and then vanished. The Ganges is so polluted to my Western sensibilities as cannot be believed. But the people who bathe in it and clean their clothes in it don't believe it's dirty, they believe it's holy and so it doesn't make them ill. They flock from all parts of India to take a splash of it in their palms and annoint themselves. They come to Benares to die at its river banks and be cremated here.

I ate the best chicken butter masala of my trip at Fair View rooftop restaurant a few doors down and that's where I met Ricki. Ricki became my guide that night, procuring me a boat for the trip upstream to the evening prayer ceremony and the laying of candles into the river. What a sight when night comes and all these little candle boats are afloat on the river. "This is your luck," Ricki said as I placed my floating candle into the water. Alas a stroke of the oar sent water into my offering drowning the flame. I cried out in dismay. Ricky retrieved my candle and relit it and my luck returned. Isn't that how it is in life? A year ago almost to the day, my luck went out and I fell and broke my femur. Today I was bobbing on the Ganges far away from home and all I knew about myself. And I had walked here on two good legs.

Getting the low-down:

Recovering my luck flame:

The chant of the Brahman:

Ricky procurred me another boat the next morning at dawn, an experience that was so tranquil, dreamy and surreal that I know it will play in my dreams to the end of my days. 

The Ganga at dawn:

Ricki wanted to be my guide for the rest of the day, but I opted instead for some alone time. Something slightly terrifying happened outside my hotel after the morning boat meditation. I returned to my hotel for the complimentary breakfast, showered and put on my sandals which it turns out were wet on the undersoles. As I came out of the hotel, I slipped on the marble staircase and went kerplunking all the way down on my rump. In that instant half a dozen men from as many directions shouted out in horrow and flew to my aid. As soon as I had stood and brushed myself off, back they were to peddling their wares and services. Humans at the core, salesman after that.

Jesus! What is it with all the falling at this stage of my life!?! I walked off the plunge, wondering if the titanium pins in my hipbone had held together and wandered again alone along the ghats. At 

Manikarnika Ghat at 3:00pm, I 

observed the laying down of a corpse on the funeral pyre in silent reverance and with no camera recording it. The head was exposed - stony and still. The body had been lathered in many essential oils and in ghee (to facilitate burning) and was now wrapped in cotton and colorful sashes. The next morning when I came down to the ghat at dawn to meditate in the stillness while people bathed and laid their laundered saris and sheets out on the steps to dry, I saw that this body and all the logs above and beneath it had burned overnight. All that remained was a pyramid-shaped cone of ash. I wondered about myself, my sensibilities. My best musical endeavor to date is all about the coming and going of life, creation and destruction, the sex act and the death act. How is it that I'm made for such things?.... How did I become like this?....

It was Tuesday afternoon and I ventured up into the neighborhoods through Benares' famous alleys and up along the main street called Shivala. I sparred with flying monkeys and got kids to stop selling and smile. I texted Arjun and Nikhil back in Delhi: "Benares is con artistry bobbing on waves of enchantment. Where nothing is as it appears or appears as it is. Where shit and gold shake hands." And later: "There is no place on earth like Benares. I've known border towns in Texas, Arizona, in Europe. This is a border town too. Not to another land, but to another world."

Here I walk along Shivala Road:

A South African woman has opened a coffee shop called Open Hands where Westerners can chill out and collect themselves from the intensity of the Benares experience. I was served the largest piece of carrot cake I've ever had alongside my first coffee in weeks and then I went nuts buying textiles. Two 4x6 cotton rugs for $25 a piece, 2 sets of curtains for the new apartment, pillow cases, tunics and recklessly lovely silk scarves. Back in Delhi, Raja would help me buy another suitcase for the journey home. I arrived with one and left with four.

And after I took this photo my camera phone lost its juice. I had not wanted to schlepp the large charger and converter with me to Benares in my small day back and so that was the end of the filming. Henceforth I would have to carry my impressions on the silver screen of my mind. At Open Hands I asked one of the sales guys where I could hear some tabla and sitar music and he told me to come back at 7:00 that night which I did. I was told that Bablu was waiting for me in the street on his motorcycle and would take me to a place. In my previous life, I would never have gotten on a motorbike with a strange man and no sense of where he was taking me. But now I hiked up my long skirt without question, grabbed him tightly round his belly and held on for dear life as we entered the crazy traffic stream of town. Several times I thought one of my knees would take out a cow utter or some goat testicles...but it never happened. Turns out Bablu brought me to his own music hall and then went off to find more guests. What an ingenious way of producing music - I have something to learn from him. This night, along with a few other visitors from Australia and Japan, I took in a private concert of tabla, sitar and the beautiful sarangi (a kind of violin). Here's a photo of an old one I snapped in my hotel lobby upon arrival. 

After the presentation, they invited the singer from New York to the stage. I merged my Summertime by the Gershwins with Faiyez Ali Khan's sarangi as accompaniment and can say that I sang in Benares. One of the Japanese gals captured the duet on video and has promised to send it to me. I hope she does. The next day Nanu, the tabla player, drove an hour to town and gave me a singing lesson in Indian ragas (9 beats and 16 beats). One of them is happily named Raga Saraswati. He used a harmonium to find our pitches, though what what he called Middle C was more like Ab as I know it. But it was pure bliss and my gratitude for being "led" to this artful space made for a lump in my throat then and does so even now.

At the end of the lesson, Bablu zipped me back to my hotel on his motorbike in time for me to catch my cab to the airport for a 4:00pm flight back to Delhi. God, I'm glad I came here!