Monona Wali

The Monkeys Are Laughing

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2022: VOL. 37.

1. Ashes

Lights refract off the sacred Ganges River as if from a dusty jewel. It’s hard to see the goddess in her silent flow or know if she’s calling to me this January evening in Varanasi. Dark is settling in, and the air has a wintery bite. This city in northern India is where my parents fell in love over sixty years ago, and it is where I was born. My daughter Maya and I walk south on the embankment that runs along the river to meet up with Maya’s sister, Kanchan, who has been living here for six months on a Fulbright-Nehru research grant. Maya is twenty-two and Kanchan twenty-five. Kanchan has been our guide and has come to know my birthplace better than me.

Three stooped sadhus holding wooden staffs shuffle by, their foreheads streaked with ash, and a tourist with an impressive lens on his camera snaps their picture. I’m annoyed at all the photo-taking, as if the half-naked river bathers or the cows eating trash at the river’s edge, or the motley collections of pilgrims with their brass bowls and bedrolls are all for the benefit of a tourist’s exotica. There is no question Varanasi has a carnival feel with its riverfront alive with boats and boatmen, its scores of temples devoted to different gods and goddesses, its astrologers perched on low platforms who will read your charts, and goats hopping around in sweaters. Maya thinks I’m just being grouchy and has no intention of putting down her camera. She has fallen in love with the stray dogs, showering special affection on a mother and her two spotted pups who hang out near our guest house. God knows how many pictures she’s taken of these orphans.

Varanasi is one of the holiest cities in India, considered to be a tirtha, a crossing place between this world and the next. To worship in her temples, to have one’s corpse consumed by flames and then have one’s ashes scattered in the river, called Ganga, or just to bathe in it, is to be washed of sins and blessed for eternity. This is moksha—liberation from the earthly cycle of death and rebirth.

But my parents—they wanted nothing to do with all of this. My father is from South India and a Lingayat—an anti-caste caste started in 12th century India as a protest against the Brahmin orthodoxy, akin to the Protestant movement against the Catholic Church. My mother is a Brahmin, the priestly and highest caste. Both had distinguished themselves as exceptional students at an early age. They met at the Benares Hindu University, epically fell in love, and risked getting kicked out the university, being disowned by their families, and writing themselves out of a future. Despite all that, they chose each other, and education, and science, over tradition and ritual. It’s what fueled their immigration to America in the mid-nineteen fifties. I was four when the family left and although this is not my first trip back to India or Varanasi, I have returned this time with a keen desire to embrace all that my parents rejected. It is a desire that has been growing in me over a number of years; a hunger for experience over knowledge. I did, after all, write a novel about a woman who takes the god Shiva as her lover. In writing that plot, wasn’t I in some way trying to imagine a similar plot for myself ? And here I was in Varanasi, considered to be Shiva’s earthly abode where temples and images and sculptures of him, the all-powerful god of creation and destruction, are everywhere. In writing the book, I also dipped my toes in the Vedas, the literature and philosophical treatises of ancient India. What I read intimated that there are different planes of existence: the earthly and the divine, the manifest and the unmanifest, self and selflessness, brahman and atman—words that lure me to deeper understanding.

Maya and I approach Harischandra Ghat, one of the two cremation sites along the river. I draw my shawl over my mouth to avoid breathing the ash—the acrid smoke pours forth from the burning fires. There, by the river’s edge, are two or three burning corpses. The first time I saw this scene, it took me aback—the very public ritual of death, so hidden from western eyes. I wanted to stare and look away at the same time. Members of a special caste, called Doms, attend the fires, and male relatives of the deceased are present. The Doms stack the wood and make sure the fire flames stay strong and consuming. Garlands of flowers are strewn everywhere, sometimes being munched on by stray cows, plumes of smoke color the air black, and the ground has a thick covering of dirt and ash. There are viewing platforms above the site and it is here that tourists stand to grab their Instagram posts.

There’s the usual small crowd of mostly young men gathered around, dressed in ill-fitting jackets with their necks wrapped in woolen scarves. We’re walking along the steps just above the site. I’m probably thinking about where we will go for dinner with Kanchan, always a fraught decision—Varanasi is notorious for making people sick with its unsanitary kitchens and dirty water. Because it’s dark, I don’t see the crumbling brick on the stairs. My foot slips and I take a slow-motion tumble; first my knees buckle and then the slow thud to the ground. My hip hits first. I let out a small cry of surprise and shock. I’m on my side in the dirt. Maya, who is a few steps ahead of me, runs back. A group of the young men who have been standing around the fires hurry over and help me up. I spit dirt out of my mouth. I’m so humiliated. I feel old and unsteady. I hear “foreign lady” and “Madam, sit” just as I become aware of a throbbing in my ankle. As I right myself, these men, like a chorus of geeky kids, are kind and solicitous.

If I’m honest, I have to say, until this moment, that I have no good regard for these men. Everywhere you go in India, there are men standing around with nothing to do it seems but watch and leer. Kanchan has complained often of how these men dominate the public space, how as a young and beautiful woman, she has to travel with utmost caution, especially at night.

“Madam, are you alright?” They beseech me to sit down as they brush off my woolen jacket and shake out my shawl, letting ash fly everywhere.

“I am okay,” I assure them as I lean on Maya and limp away, anxious to get away from the choking smoke, the ash, and their friendly eyes, although I am not ungrateful for their help.

We don’t get far before I have to sit on some steps to catch my breath. We’re now upwind from the smoke. I feel queasy. The ankle, swelling, is already the size of a small grapefruit. One of the stories of Varanasi is of Bhairava, a guardian god to whom you must go and pay homage when you enter the city. Kanchan was sure to take us to the temple, which we circled three times as is the custom and sought approval for our presence. But now as I sit with my swollen ankle, I want to ask Bhairava: Do you want me here? Do you see through me, think I’m a fraud, ignorant of true ritual, void of spiritual bones, that I’m a western seeker who will fly back willingly to the materialistic comfort of America? And why Harischandra Ghat, of all places, to fall with the ash and dirt and gross filth of death in my mouth?

I want to vomit. I do want to return home to Los Angeles, I want to escape this hellhole of a place where I have to watch every step and every bite I put in my mouth. Maya sits quietly by my side. Her presence is soothing. After ten or fifteen minutes, I feel I can walk and I gingerly test my step. The ankle hurts but holds. I want to tell Bhairava: you were right about me.

2. The River

A few days later, on the morning of Makar Sankranti, an annual festival that marks the transition of the sun from Sagittarius to Capricorn, I wake up long before sunrise with a sudden decision: I am going to bathe in the river. It feels important. I couldn’t have fallen into the ashes of thousands of dead people for no reason. What is it? What do I need to learn? The idea of bathing becomes stronger in me, a conviction that I must do it. The word faith comes to my mind. In all my visits to Varanasi, I have never bathed in the river, considering it the height of stupidity. Bathing in the river is a sure invitation to be sick. Sewage pours directly into it, not to mention ashes from the cremation sites, chemical pollution from leather factories up river—the list goes on. Huge sections of the river have been declared dead. Yes, locals and pilgrims bathe in it every day, but they have an immunity I’m pretty sure I don’t have. But faith is a loaded word, a complicated idea. All my life, I had been taught not to take things on faith. Blind faith, in particular, was the bane of secular humanism, the ideology my parents spoon-fed my sisters and I on, and for good reason. They had to fight too much oppression at the hands of old-school thinking; they had to fight for the freedom to love each other.

At six in the morning, Kanchan shows up. She has risen early to photograph the Sankranti rituals being performed in the Ganga at sunrise. I tell her I’ve decided to bathe in the river. She looks at me quizzically. In her six months here, she has not done it. Perhaps I’m hoping she will tell me not to, but her eyes light up.

“Okay, me too,” she says.

Maya stirs awake. We tell her what we are going to do. “Really?” she says. “Okay.” She’s not sure if she will bathe, but she wants to come along and take photos.

We collect towels and walk just a short distance to an area where we see a small group of women bathing. Even at this hour, the banks of the river are alive with people, although the river itself is placid. Silver gray-green water flows with thick and silent purpose between her wide banks. Mist and morning fog rise off the surface. The sun, a muted white disc, sits low off the other bank. There’s a stone landing at the edge of the river. And—of course—there are men standing around. We recognize one of them: a young boatman who took us up the river one day. He remembers us, and now seeing us look around trying to figure out how we are actually going to do this, he gives us instruction, pointing to where to leave our belongings and how to hold on to a rope conveniently tied to a post to help enter the water. Women bathe with their clothes on. I go first. The stones are slippery with moss, and I warn Kanchan about them as she follows me in. The water feels icy, and every muscle contracts in shock, but it’s also silken soft and smells just a little like rotting fruit.

I’m doing it. I’m in the river. I take a breath and note the pink light of the early morning on the gentle gray water. I hold my hands in prayer. I dunk in. I rise up, and dunk again, holding my nose. And then, I turn in three deliberate clockwise circles as the ritual prescribes. I say silent prayers to Ganga and Shiva and ask for blessings on my family. I absorb the radiance of Ganga, this beautiful goddess of the river and water, the sacred element, without which life is not possible. Kanchan takes her three turns, scoops up the water with her palms, and pours it over her head. She tilts her soft round face with its natural rouged cheeks to the heavens. Her long black hair glistens in the morning light and she is aglow.

Maya decides she will come in. We trade places—I go up to the stone embankment and dry off as she makes her way into the water, grimacing and laughing at the same time. She too performs the bathing ritual and glows and giggles as she does. As I dry off, I well up with the deep pleasure of sharing this experience with my daughters.

After returning to the guesthouse and a hot shower, we take our breakfast on the rooftop deck. On decks across the way, boys and girls are scampering around flying charming colorful tissue kites, trying not to let their strings get tangled. The kite flying competitions have begun. Along with the bathing, and temple going, it is one of the ways Makar Sankranti is celebrated. Later, we will buy small sacks of rice and distribute it to waiting children outside the temples. At breakfast, we are watched over by two large silvery brown monkeys perched on the eaves, their eyes and mouths hungry for our toast and bananas. A guest house employee stands nearby with a stick ready to beat them off if they jump on our table.

I wonder if I had the spiritual experience I was seeking? Did I learn the lesson of faith? Or are the monkeys laughing at me, like I imagine my parents will laugh when I tell them that, like fools, we have bathed in the Ganga.

3. The Street of Ordinary Life

Then, two days before we leave, as we walk home from dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the center of town, a strange thing happens. The streets are a jungle of traffic, as they always are. The light from street lamps and vehicles gets refracted in the dust and evening fog that sits in the air. People move in and out of the pockets of glow like ghosts, and I dread walking along the road where there is no sidewalk, no pedestrian lane, just a dirt strip that is a no-man’s land. My senses are on high alert, my maternal eyes guarding Kanchan and Maya, two steps ahead of me. The dangers are manifold—don’t get hit by the oncoming scooter, don’t step in cow dung, don’t breathe the air from the coal fires, watch my purse, watch out for my girls, don’t trip, don’t fall, don’t throw up at the sight of the skin-and-bones dead dog, pray one of the electric wires from the insane tangle that runs amok above doesn’t fall on my head, and don’t care about the skin-and-bones twelve-year-old holding an infant. Don’t see that she’s got her hand cupped begging for a coin.

We turn to another busy street, brightly lit up by a sweet shop on one corner and an electronics shop on the other. The lights sputter and buzz and glow. And then, quite unexpectedly, the whole scene transforms. I’m not sure what happens or how it happens. Did the light shift? Did the air clear? Did Bhairava bless me with new eyes? I see the same things I saw a moment ago, but now it is as if I’m spinning inside the matrix of human civilization, dizzied by millions of individual points that are somehow one. I am no longer repulsed. Instead, I marvel at how all of this works—the chaos of people, animals, cars—this ancient civilization cranked up to modern speed—and, even more, I marvel at my own ignorance of its workings. I see the flow of people, I see the cars as if they are in slow motion, I see the shops and shopkeepers, and the white cows munching on strewn trash, but now they meld into a beautiful stream, a gestalt of life. I’m aware in an instant that a lens has shifted, that this new lens offers a freer, lighter vision, drained of fear and expectation, and whoever I was a moment ago; a daughter of the West, I no longer am. I have always wondered at the images of Hindu gods with five heads, and multiple arms, and now finally, finally I think I might understand. There are so many ways of being conscious, so many planes of consciousness: sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, intellect, heart, dream, spirit—if only to access them all and all the time. I walk forward and expect the feeling to leave me, but it doesn’t, at least not right away. I’m aware that something profound has shifted in me. Quite possibly, I have come to a tirtha, a crossing place, completely unbidden, on the street of ordinary life. The ashes, the river, the street all reveal to me that mystery is everywhere. No attempt should be made to explain it. I, least of all, can explain it. Nor do I want to. I want it to live in me every second, every day. Even if the experience of the tirtha becomes a memory, and like every mystery, slips like water through my fingers, it leaves my palms wet, thirsty for more.