Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (25 page)

‘Don't worry,’ said Kamal. ‘He is guest too.’

In the main room of the hotel was a portrait of Shashank's father, in his thirties, looking suave in a suit. It was like one of those paintings in films where real eyes peep through the painted eyes, spying and monitoring. Dinner was served here, in a semi-communal way that encouraged interaction among the guests. As different people came and went, bonded and dispersed, so the vibe of the hotel changed. At any time, different combinations and nationalities held sway. For a few days the French were dominant; there would be a group of six of them at the big table for dinner, chattering away in French, somehow making the rest of us feel that we were in France, wishing we weren't. Then, after they left, Americans would be in the majority and the hotel would be animated by their friendliness and perfect manners. Occasionally, there would be a lone Japanese, or Indians, some Germans, interested Scandinavians, lively Italians. Then there'd be a phase marked by its lack of defining character or cogency, when it was just a mixture of people from all over the place: mainly singles, the odd couple. Always, whatever the nationality, at least one person was sick and spent the day languishing in their room, unseen and unhappy. Everyone had come from somewhere and was going somewhere else. Everyone had had experience of trains and fog, delayments. Everyone had favourite places and places where they had fallen ill. We all had anecdotes and knew something that everyone else also knew.

I ate dinner in the hotel every night. It was nice meeting
people, and sometimes we sat around talking after dessert, but these dinners never turned into more than dinners. If you wanted an early-evening beer on the terrace, one of the boys would go out to the market to buy a bottle of Kingfisher, but no alcohol was allowed in the house itself. For people used to running their social lives on booze, the lack of wine at dinner meant that once the food was eaten the experience was pretty well finished. It was still too cold at night to sit on the terrace drinking beer. So we said goodnight, went to bed early and read under blankets in our rooms, eager for another dawn.

It was not a lonely time, though. Because the Ganges View was more expensive than most of the other places on the river, the guests tended to be a little older, or at least the ages were more mixed. It was easy for me to pass myself on from one group to the next, like a baton.

Even so, I was overjoyed when Darrell came back to Varanasi. I'd only spent a couple of hours with him, but when he appeared on the terrace one afternoon – ‘Hey, buddy!’ – it felt like the return of a long-lost friend. His hair was cropped short as before, as if it had not grown at all in the intervening weeks. He was now staying here at the Ganges View, albeit in an entry-level room. Until a better option became available, he had to settle for a windowless cell at the back of the hotel (‘in backside,’ as they say in India). We ordered black tea and talked about where he'd been and what had been happening in his absence. It was as if we were in a diner in his dusty hometown in the Midwest and he had ventured out into the wide world while I had stayed put, pumping gas or working in a hardware store.

On the way back to Varanasi he'd stopped off at Bodhgaya, where the Buddha had gained enlightenment. Darrell had gone for a five-day retreat, but only lasted one night. Vibrationally, it was one of the most intense places he had ever been to –
and he couldn't wait to leave. Everyone in Bodhgaya was a monk or beggar or tourist, and there were loads of each. There were counters in the town, he said, where you were given ninety rupee coins for a hundred rupee note so that you would have something to give to ninety beggars – and that wasn't nearly enough to go around.

‘What I liked about it,’ he said, ‘was that the mark-up was so easy to calculate. Ten per cent.’

‘I wish I'd known you were coming,’ I said. ‘I'd have asked you to bring some coins back for me. You can never have too much change in India. You could have taken a cut to make it worth your while. Another ten per cent.’

‘Trouble is, ten per cent of ninety is nine. So right away the math is becoming more complex. We are down now to eighty-one.’

‘And suddenly, from my point of view, it starts looking like not such an attractive deal. Maybe you'd have to settle for just five per cent.’

‘Five per cent of ninety? I'd struggle with that.’

‘It's true. We're getting into fractions.’

It was nothing, just a bit of chat. But it was the first conversation of its kind that I'd had in ages, the first time I'd been able to talk with someone who had an instinctive understanding of another kind of maths that people often find difficult to grasp: that it's possible to be a hundred per cent sincere and a hundred per cent ironic at the same time. This was the kind of conversation I could feel at home with. It made me think that, despite what I said about not being lonely here, it had been a lonesome time.

From the day that Darrell returned, my time in Varanasi was subtly changed. In turn,
our
time was completely transformed by the arrival, shortly afterwards, of Laline. She was travelling alone, beautiful, friendly, Indian (we assumed – she
looked
Indian and we heard her speaking Hindi with Shashank), and Darrell and I ate dinner with her on her second evening here. Her hair was dark, long. She was wearing tortoiseshell glasses, white T-shirt and trousers, and a cosy blue cardigan. There was a superficial nervousness about her manner – her eyes flickered around the room, she scratched, absently, at her forearm – and yet she seemed completely unnervous. She was from Bangalore originally, had moved to London with her parents when she was five, grew up in Hounslow. In the course of this trip, she'd been to Bangalore and to Hampi (Darrell had been there as well) and, most recently, Lucknow, where there was an interesting museum.

‘As far as I know,’ Laline said, ‘it's the only museum in the world where, in order to enter, you have to buy a ticket for the zoo.’

Our friendship with Laline was accelerated by an incident involving another new arrival. Her name was Francesca, she was Italian, and our dinner with her was dominated by a long debate about Islam and women who choose to wear the veil. Francesca was very anti-veil. So was Laline, so were Darrell and I, so it was not as if we approached this divisive issue from fiercely polarized points of view or radically different cultures. No, the reason the debate went on so long was solely down to the way Francesca pronounced ‘veil.’ For her, it was terrible to be forced to wear the veal. The veal was a symbol of the absolute subordination of women. Rather than correcting her, Darrell, Laline and I also began talking about the veal, contriving ways of keeping the veal debate going.

‘So, you don't think the veal is just a matter of personal taste?’ asked Darrell.

‘The veal is obviously an ethical issue,’ I said.

The longer this went on, the more difficult it became not to laugh. Eventually Laline said, ‘It's so obviously a dreadful
thing … ’ On the brink of being consumed by laughter, she was finding it difficult to complete the sentence and had to begin again. ‘It's so obviously a cruel thing … I don't know why, as an issue, veal is even on the menu.’

There was a brief moment of calm before a storm of laughter broke simultaneously over the three of us. Once we had given in to this long-postponed laughter, we found it impossible to stop. Francesca sat there, bemused and confused, waiting for an explanation we were incapable of attempting without redoubling the hilarity of the situation. When the explanation was eventually forthcoming – from Laline – Francesca took it in good part, sort of, but the damage had been done: we had conspired against the new arrival, excluded her, and the laugh we'd had – a monstrous, all-consuming laugh that quickly grew beyond our control – was entirely at her expense. She had not planned on remaining long in Varanasi and the veal-veil gag did not encourage her to extend her stay.

Laline, like Darrell and I, had no plans to go anywhere else. This was great news for me. If you have been spending a lot of time on your own, meeting people you like can be as exciting as falling in love. I had liked Darrell from the moment I met him, but now things were even better for the simple reason that there were three of us. I've never enjoyed the serve-and-volley of seeing friends on a one-to-one basis. If there are just two of you, something is always goading the conversation towards a heart-to-heart – not in order to lift the veal on some hidden but essential truth, just to keep the ball rolling. In a trio, the three of you are the ball and it never stops rolling. And because we were all staying in the same hotel, we never arranged to meet; we ran into each other on the ghats, at the Lotus Lounge or, failing everything else, back on the terrace of the Ganges View. So our relationship had the quality of a happy accident, constantly renewed and extended.

It is a convention among travellers that you tend not to ask each other what you do for a living. As a result you become extremely curious, trying to extrapolate back from how they are now to what they do or did back home. (I don't remember how I learned that Darrell was an industrial designer – and since I didn't know what this involved, I was none the wiser anyway.) Laline was the exception to this rule, revealing on only her third day that she worked in television, for a production company, and had taken time off to travel in India. After spending a morning on the ghats and in the lanes, she had come up with an idea for a six-part series.

‘It's a reality TV show,’ she said. ‘Someone from Health and Safety is sent to Varanasi to enforce UK standards. In the first episode we watch him going about his business, making inspections and so on. Then, over the next five, we watch him crack up.’

We were on the terrace, the three of us, drinking beer before dinner. We clinked glasses. I told them about my idea for
Varanasi Death Trip
and we clinked glasses again. From similar small beginnings, this was probably how the British East India Company had come into existence. The move from drinking a couple of bottles of Kingfisher to the establishment of the British Empire – a vast swathe of exploitation and accumulation – seemed a historic inevitability.

In a related piece of entrepreneurial ingenuity, we had discovered a place just off the Shivala Road where you could buy beer at seventy rupees a bottle. The hotel charged two hundred rupees, a mark-up that was entirely reasonable. Because of the numerous temples in the area, nowhere near Assi was permitted to sell alcohol, so every request for beer involved a special errand. Even so, three for the price of two was impossible to resist and so, when Darrell and I found this place, it made sense to buy in bulk. We stumbled on it
by accident, drawn by a scrum of bodies who looked like they were buying crack. Actually, they were scoring bottles of hard liquor through a tiny gap in a carefully guarded security grille. Next door was the less fortified, more sedate sister outlet where beer was sold. The following evening we bought ten large bottles apiece, came clanking home on a rickshaw and stashed them in our respective fridges. At this rate, we could flog beer to fellow-guests for twice what we paid and still undercut the boys in the hotel by sixty rupees. Once we'd got that hustle up and running, we could start moving in on other rackets.

‘Gambling.’

‘Boats.’

‘Dope.’

‘Whores.’

‘Marigolds?’ Laline asked sweetly.

‘Fuck marigolds, man. Cremations – that's where the big bucks are in this town.’

Another bond between the three of us was our loathing of the crusties who gathered on the steps just down from Assi ghat. I sometimes saw them walking to or from wherever it was they were staying, but these steps were where they spent most of their time. They walked slowly, gently, as if the idea of hurrying or urgency were a sign of being trapped in some inferior version of your current incarnation. From the sadhus they had developed the trick whereby vacancy could be taken as a mode of superior awareness, gormlessness of wisdom, near-catatonia as enlightenment. Being stoned helped, of course, and although I never saw them smoking, it was safe to assume that they were all mashed all day.

One of the women was actually extremely attractive, or would have been were it not for the dirty blanket and air of
cultivated squalor that clung to her. She had luminous eyes, olive skin, dreadlocks (naturally) and delicate ankles. If she'd washed her hair and dressed up a bit – not in designer clobber, just the clean, casual gear of the international traveller – she would have been immensely desirable. Like that she would have retained some of the feral quality that had, at present, overwhelmed all others. It took only the smallest hop of the imagination to picture her as an NYU undergraduate, a well-heeled JAP who did yoga, ate only vegetables and consented quickly to anal sex. Once this leap had been made, I realized I had been wrong about her feral quality, for there was nothing wild or savage about her. She looked dirty, yes, but her main quality was of obedience, submission. She had about her the slightly bovine quality of the convert to a cult: happy, fulfilled, completely accepting of the identity in which she had enrolled.

It says something about our relationship that I told all this to Laline – it was actually she who supplied the anal-sex gag. We were friends; the idea was to keep each other entertained. She was extremely attractive, but we were just friends, in the same way that Darrell and I were friends – though not, it turned out, in the way that she and Darrell were friends.

There are certain men who, without ever making any attempt to attract them, always seem to have beautiful girlfriends. It simply happens. I don't mean successful, ambitious men for whom getting what they want is second nature, who acquire women as part of a general rapaciousness. No, the kind of man I have in mind often lacks drive and ambition. That lack of effort, the absence of any kind of pushiness in either the worldly or romantic realm, is probably part of their attraction.

Except on one occasion – so exceptional it had made me feel like a different person – I'd never had that ‘if it happens, it happens’ attitude that seems almost to guarantee that something
will happen. Without the desire – or maybe ambition is a better word – to render myself attractive, without cultivating all the things that made me attractive to women, I was not attractive to women. And this holds true for most other men too. That leaves a tiny minority, laid-back, often good at yoga, not even particularly funny, usually completely lacking in vanity, whom beautiful women gravitate towards. Darrell was like that, with the considerable bonus of a GSOH thrown in. The one thing he lacked – a lack so crucial that it appeared to undermine this little idea of mine – was … a girlfriend.