“Kāshī (Varanasi) is the whole world, they say. Everything on earth that is powerful and auspicious is here…” – Diana Eck, Banaras: City of Light

Two years ago, leaving home for a few nights required a permit to be on the road. The rest of the world became a huge, distant, inaccessible place, like it must have been before the internal combustion engine. But the plague ran its course and two weeks back I found myself in a room overlooking the mighty Ganges.

Varanasi is a city that Mark Twain described as “older than history” while for Maitreyee Chowdhury it is a place “Where Even the Present is Ancient”. The conference I am to attend is at the stately, cream and red-bricked Banaras Hindu University. Founded in 1916, the main inspiration for the university wanted Sanskrit to meet science, cosmology to meet commerce. The conference ran with a simple efficiency and studied graciousness. All I want to do though is to get to the river and drink the history.

A holy man talks on his phone. Young people bathe. On a swaying boat, a boy launches a kite. And then I close upon the cremation site. A body wrapped in muslin is brought down the stairs and placed on the fire. The chanting reaches a crescendo as the corpse disintegrates. There is no palpable mourning. Death is understood as a journey from this world to another. To die in Varanasi is to achieve moksha, to fuse with Brahman, and escape the fate of being reborn.

I should of course write of the spurned widows, human trafficking, religious conflicts, the coming of McDonald’s and the handloom weavers driven from their ancient finesse by Chinese imports. Any of these stories will take months to research, and like handloom weaving, involve another dying art, fieldwork. Rather than look downwards to the social relations beneath my feet, my chin tilts up to sensations that lift the spirits. I am reaching into the temples of Varanasi.

India has this trick it plays on visitors who fancy themselves immune to the “exotic”. I suspect a crew of actors follows them around to spring out, picturesquely, at the right time. I was not prepared for the rickshaw bicycle stunt drivers, the jagged edges of a thousand apologetic elbows, the tiny holes where sweetmeats form pyramids, the crumbling balconies.

Fortified with bhang lassi I escape into an alleyway, a cow loitered ahead, a motorbike blocked any shimmy to the right. Finally, I spied a sliver of space. It opened into a tearoom where I was offered some chai. “Where are you from?” I must stick out. Before I could muster an answer, my long-haired host proclaimed: “Don’t worry. Was not Lord Shiva, also an outsider?” I look at her visible ear. Where is the earpiece? Who is feeding her these lines?

But I know this text. Diana Eck relates how the demi-god Daksha asked of Shiva, “What is his nature and what is his clan? What place does he belong to… He is not a householder, for he lives in a cremation ground… He is not a celibate because he has a wife… He is not a brahmin, because the Vedas do not know him as one… He is not a man, because half his body is female. And yet he is not a woman because he has a beard… How can he be young when he is so ancient?”

I think about my father who took me from temple to temple along the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal when I was young. Not so much to worship but to imbibe. Whatever slights he might have had to bear on the streets or at work, at least here the two of us were part of a mighty and holy river of belief.

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Years later, as a callow youth on recess from university, I would lecture this befuddled man about the sin of idealism, the power of historical materialism and the foresight of the dictatorship of the proletariat. His cosmology had lasted thousands and thousands of years. Mine would not credibly see out one century.

I think again of the meaning of diaspora, one of the themes of the conference. I certainly don’t feel dispersed or removed from India but, as for the River, yes, I have been separated somehow.

On 18 November 2022, it is dawn, the holiest time for the devoted, pronounced in the Rig Veda. I hear the footsteps, the bells, the chatter. Dawn is seen as a great battle when Surya, the Sun, takes to the field. Surya cuts through the dark, hounding the night from its crevices and tunnels. Devotees extol the light’s ascendancy and the disappearance of night into nothingness.

Yet, at dusk they are back. A new transition is to be celebrated. Song and dance and fire envelop the river turning it into a theatre in which the living and the dead speak to each other, as Surya slowly steps back. But there is no retreat from the devotees who do not shirk the darkening but embrace and challenge it. 

…To be in Banaras unexpectedly

Some evening

And see it in the glow

of lamps, lighted:

you shall see a Magic City,

partly in water, partly in mantras

partly in conches, partly in flower

partly in corpses, partly in sleep

If you see carefully

partly it is and partly it is not… (Kedarnath Singh, Translation Sunita Jain)

I make ready to leave. At breakfast (moong dal and hot, hot chapatti), a learned women tells me that even rascals will be liberated from the eternal return if they are lucky enough to die in this one city, Varanasi. As the taxi sways between a bus and a rickshaw and then shoots through a gap that did not exist there was still an outside chance at moksha for me. But death refused to grasp the hand of this skapie from Durban. Leaving behind a trail of dal I power into the sky and make for Mumbai.

India. I do feel a faded affinity, I feel the undercurrents of that deep river my father spoke about on trips to the temples. But I know if I stayed here for any length of time, I’d long for my own chaos, my own disappointments, my own contestations and grounding.

I would miss the drive from Johannesburg to Durban and the sign on Van Reenen’s Pass that says “Welcome to the Kingdom of the Zulus”. You know you are on your home turf when that which denotatively might exclude you, connotatively does not.

As the 19th century folded into the 20th, a unique species has come into being in South Africa, widely known as the Durban charou. Through all the dislocations and exploding of the extended family, bonds have endured. Even if lived virtually, they are no less real. What are these typical charou ties? It is that bonded beneath one roof on a late Saturday afternoon one will almost always find a destroyer, a preserver and the long-suffering one.

In a sense, Durban and Varanasi are non-identical twins. Varanasi beckons death. The Indians who came to Durban physically survived, yet they died to their castes and languages and ways of dress. In the 1970s and 80s, young Indians, for a moment, thought they could be reborn. Reborn as formally equal citizens, accepted as brothers and sisters by their compatriots.

To some extent that was achieved. However, one senses that, as racial populism and insularity deepens in our land, it can all so easily be undone.

Even outside of calamity, Durban will be the place where, for most of “us”, the road truly and mercifully ends, our ashes washed down the Umgeni. Come to think of it, it is not only in Varanasi where death is a final liberating obliteration. For in death, do we not find our ultimate identity? Do any of us really die as a member of a race, or a gender, or a nation, or class? Or do we, in the instant of death, die as something far more intense: as someone’s beloved?

“At Assi [ghat]/I smell only of you/and die/full of you” – Maitreyee Chowdhury. DM