I filled in the sheaf of duplicate forms brought by the receptionst, who kept calling me sir with exaggerated courtesy. I then waited as he examined them.
Suddenly, at the far end of the lobby, the elevator doors slid open to reveal two young paunchy khadi-clad men — minor politicians, I immediately thought. Their steps echoing across the lobby, they strode with brisk assurance to a white Ambassador, waiting with open doors under the portico. They got into the car but the doors with the tinted windows remained open; they appeared to be expecting someone else. The man in the driver’s seat kept looking straight ahead.
Soon I heard the elevator doors open again. They now revealed two slim, swarthy young women, wearing almost identical salwar-kurtas of some shiny synthetic material, with sequinned chunnis draped around thick gold necklaces. Crimson lipstick almost blotted out their small mouths; gold bangles flashed on their wrists; silver anklets jingled softly as they strutted past me on very high pencil-thin heels.
They joined the politicians in the car; the doors slammed shut in the void of the forecourt; the car slunk off.
As I turned away, I saw the receptionist looking at me with concern.
He attempted to smile. He said, in English, ‘Special guests, sir.’
But it wasn’t what he wished to say; his weak English had let him down, and he knew that almost instantly.
He turned his head to glance at the man in the cubicle, who was still counting the notes, and when he looked back at me his face showed fear.
*
It was an odd return to Benares; it wasn’t what I had been expecting. I had imagined the moment of arrival to be calm. I had imagined it to be infused with gentle memories. But the spell had been broken at the railway station itself, facing the truculent coolies and the rickshaw drivers.
Nothing in that scene was unfamiliar to me, but during the tranquil years in Dharamshala I had lost the old instinctive ways of dealing with it. I could no longer summon the casual self-possession required to bargain out a correct rate with the aggressive rickshaw driver. I lacked the indifference, the unseeing blank gaze of the hardened traveller.
Then the hotel, revealed in the first few minutes as an assignation spot for local politicians, and the nervous receptionist, the man in the cubicle counting the rupee notes — that wasn’t anything I had expected.
I was alert, almost preternaturally so. I felt my senses on edge, but they had registered only strangeness as the rickshaw strained past the ‘fast-food’ parlours with dark glass windows, the white-painted hotels with multicoloured flags listless on their roofs, the banners advertising computer courses swaying across the roads, and now this hotel room, described by the receptionist as a ‘honeymoon suite,’ all done in pink, the walls cluttered with framed posters of tender-faced white children and garish Swiss landscapes with Christian homilies.
This wasn’t the city I knew; what I knew and remembered lay farther down the road, closer to the river and the ghats, the decaying palaces, the half-submerged temples. I began to feel I had made a mistake in allowing the rickshaw driver to take me to this hotel.
The moment of calm came later, when I woke up after a short nap. Light flooded the small room and created a radiant glow against the pink walls and upholstery and bedcovers; snatches of music and talk came in through the open windows.
The morning and anxiety of my arrival seemed far away as I stood at the window that opened out onto the forecourt. The street appeared different from this elevation. Brightly painted rickshaws stood in a queue before the hotel’s gates; a little boy pushed a vegetable stall on the empty road, hawking his wares in a surprisingly deep voice; a man in white flapping pyjamas hurled up the shutters of one of the grocery stores, and the Coca-Cola logo vanished with a brief rattle.
As I watched, a rickshaw suddenly swerved in from around the corner and thudded and jolted across a small pothole. The driver rang his jingling bells as if to protest against the shock, and the sound unfastened an old memory in the mind: the cold foggy mornings I woke up to during my first days in Benares, which I spent in bed, huddled under the Panditji’s thin quilts, trying to read The World as Will and Idea as rickshaws overloaded with children lurched down the potholed alleys and old Hindi melodies wafted out of unseen radios and jets of water from municipal taps cannonaded into plastic buckets, and a woman whom I could never see towel-dried her hair with that peculiar sneezing sound.
*
I showered, put on fresh clothes and went down to the empty restaurant in the lobby for a late and heavy lunch of parathas and pickle. Miss West wasn’t expecting me until later in the afternoon; there was nothing to do until then, and after lunch I went back to my room and played with the television set, switching channels randomly, moving swiftly from MTV to Santa Barbara to CNN and back.
It was the first time in seven years that I had sat before a television screen, and to confront the unfamiliar faces and speech — the anorexic MTV VJs with their bare midriffs and eyebrow rings and rapid-fire banter — was to feel as if I had arrived in an alien city.
I switched off the TV; I went and stood at the window and watched the street. I switched on the TV again, and immediately turned it off as a long wailing sound filled the room. I lay on the bed for a while. I felt a gentle restlessness. I wished to go out; I wished to be away from the hotel.
When I eventually went out into the mellow winter sunshine, things appeared to happen in an effortless daze.
I did not have to think before telling the rickshaw driver the name of the area where Panditji’s house stood; the words slipped out of my mouth as instinctively as they once had. Sitting on the rickshaw, feeling a cool breeze upon my face, passing through streets and alleys so familiar — the tattered kites trapped between power cables, the house with the tiny door that opened towards a large sunny loggia-like space where on crisp winter afternoons women sat on charpoys and oiled their thick black tresses, the men staring out vacantly from dark chai shops — I had the sensation of re-entering a dream.
*
It was damp as always in the alleys leading to Panditji’s house. But a small surprise awaited me at the house itself.
In my memory the main door leading in from the alley had always been open, revealing a small dark courtyard surrounded by the room where Panditji lay under layers of blankets and a bathroom with scars of green slime on the lower end of the walls. The door was now locked from the inside.
I knocked; I heard people talking: a man’s voice and then a woman’s.
Waiting for the door to be opened, I looked up at a strip of blue sky and noticed a woman staring down at me from the roof terrace of the adjoining house. Her face beneath her sari veil was fleshy and expressionless, and I wondered, with a pang of disappointment, if she was the one I had heard drying her hair.
The voices inside grew louder and stranger and then the door was yanked open.
A tall and skinny white man in a lungi and khaki waistcoat stood before me, his head and shoulders hunched under the short door frame. His hair was long and stringy; the skin on his long face was stretched tight over his cheekbones; on his bare pale forearms there were identical tattoos of the goddess Kali, her bright crimson tongue a dab of startling colour in the surrounding blackness.