I’m feeling a little weak. We’ve been in the air almost a day and that means a lot of martinis. Also double Lassi.
Suddenly, I’m scared, like I’m the new kid in school and they’re not going to like me.…
Dumdum Airport. I think that’s the whole reason I chose Calcutta to land in. Just to look at that sign.
Took a cab to the hotel where I’ll rest before starting the railway tour in the morning. Indian State Railways. I’ll travel light. A few changes—some shirts, ties, slacks, a pair of shorts—and my credit cards can take care of anything that might come up. At all times, I’ll have my notebook, my $10.95 “Travel to India” fact book, and a book on reincarnation which, by the way, I cover with a brown paper bag.
It’s hot, and I think I just saw a dead man lying on the street.
My hotel overlooks the Maidan. It’s like Central Park.
I cross Chowringhi Road, which takes awhile to do. At the southern end of the park is the Victoria Memorial, very marble, with a statue of Queen Victoria herself. Leaning on the statue right now is a skinny Indian boy about seven, selling something in a little bag to a group of people watching a performance of the
Gita
. I’m surprised I recognized it. I remember something about … “between us, lies the difference …” you know, like, I remember about past lives, and you don’t.…
I buy a bag from the boy and find it is grain. Am I supposed to eat it? I pass student meetings, prayer meetings, and I see dancing bears and a fortune-telling monkey. I give the monkey some grain, and I eat some, too. That monkey could have all my answers.…
The first paper clip in the diary secured a thin sheaf of pages representing days, weeks, months—of what adventures Janice was excluded from knowing—which led her eyes to a page bearing the printed caption “Benares.”
I’m walking and many things are coming at me. First is the smell of jasmine, very sweet. Then the smell of smoke, and that’s not so sweet. And the crowds—the crowds of people—wedding processions, crowds of cows, buffalo, and there are some with long Biblical beards who are nude except for loincloths, and pilgrims on foot, and streams of camels, and children yelling, laughing, squalling, and bells, I hear bells all over, and then I see corpses wrapped in white silk or linen. They’re on bamboo stretchers, and they’re being marched to the Ghats, where they will be deposited and await their turn to be cremated.
I talk to a man who cannot understand me, nor can I understand his language. Later another old man approaches me, and he speaks English with a British accent but is still difficult to understand. He tells me that his ambition has been to visit Benares once in his lifetime, and that now he has realized this ambition and, if possible, he would care to remain here to die. He tells me that the waters here hold the powers of salvation. All the waters do in India, but the main sanctuary is Benares. The old man tells me that people who have never in their lives walked out of their villages will come and make a pilgrimage to Benares. And they’ll take about a week to do so and are absolved of all their sins and stand a good chance for spiritual salvation. He also tells me that if he could have his ultimate goal attained, it would be not to be reborn at all.
Right now, there is smoke twisting up in the sky, and it is from the burning corpses in the Ghats, and I’m half afraid to investigate further. I do not understand my fear, unless it has something to do with the fiery deaths of my wife and child.…
I watch the bodies being removed from the bamboo stretchers, with the families in attendance, as they prepare the bodies for cremation. The Ghats are over three miles in length, three miles of steps that lead down from a very steep bank into the sacred river. And these stone steps wed this great Hindu city to the Ganges.
Water, flowers, smoke, fire—all are forces of divine meaning to these people. In the Ganges are bathing bodies, while in the Ghats are burning bodies. Life and death, the living and the dead, moving onward together in close proximity and in perfect harmony.
Kids. Young children, watching bodies being burned. Flesh being burned. And they’re smiling and handing out flowers. They’re even giving funeral cakes called
pindas
to the dead. Imagine that! Cakes. Pastries. To the dead.…
I think of Sylvia and Audrey Rose, their ashes mingled with those of the ’62 Impala, sealed together in copper cylinders, consigned to the great forgettery in Mount Holyoke Mausoleum. I think of the quick Baptist service … words read from a book … postures, posings, the regulated silence, a tear shed, a brief exchange of grief—all over in less than an hour. No cakes. No
pindas.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests a donation be made to your favorite charity. No ritual offerings of prayer, daily, monthly, yearly, or otherwise.
Janice flipped past a thicker group of clipped pages to the next entry Hoover thought essential for her education.
There is a fact of life here that means everything we do each day is potentially a pious act. I’m grasping, I think, either a truth about the way these people live, or I’m imagining a very wonderful way to live. I must learn more. And that’s not going to happen in forty-five days.
That, perhaps, is the most important thing I discovered in Benares—that time is unimportant.
The way that woman launders her clothes is as pious an act as that man who hasn’t stopped looking at the sun. I don’t know, I might be getting far afield of reality. Perhaps it’s just a poetic way of seeing a life-style that is totally new and different to me. Or maybe there is indeed that poetry here in the sounds and vibrations of work and religion.…
Reincarnation here seems a fact of life.
Destruction, which confused me at first, which caused me to wonder why there was a temple for a goddess who was the consort to the god of destruction, is an equal fact of life.
Destruction and creativity go hand in hand. As I look around me, I see temples and homes that are lopsided, I suppose from the floods during the monsoons, and practically falling into the river, held up by the river. And once again, the idea of destruction—of life persisting, of life continuing, of life fighting on in the midst of all this destruction—seems to pull me toward an understanding of a basic truth, as yet unclear to me. And in trying to define this basic truth, I’m brought back to all the reading I did back in the States. The reading that didn’t make sense there but that now, in view of all that I see around me, must become a whole new education.
I will start by staying here in Benares, the seat of the Hindu religion, using my knapsack as a pillow if I must and continue to watch these cremations to understand why death can be considered a holiday. And what they are celebrating. If it is the final death, if, as that old man said to me, he is not to be reborn again, then what he is celebrating is God. Union with God. But if he has not yet got to that point, then what he is celebrating is another chance toward union with God, a closer step.
It was here that Hoover forsook pen for pencil, which made the going extremely rough.