Part Two

The Hindu Heartland

Allahabad

The Twain party left for Allahabad by a night train for “it is the custom of the country to avoid day travel when it can conveniently be done. It was a long journey - two nights, one day, and part of another day; but it was always interesting, and not fatiguing.” Livy and Clara were in a ladies’ four-berth compartment, and Mark Twain and Smythe in a male-only one down the corridor. Nowadays one can reserve the more desirable lower berths but in 1896 the etiquette was that whoever laid out their baggage on the lower berth first “bagged” it. The trick was to have “your Satan arrive before somebody else’s servants, and spread the bedding on the two sofas and then stand guard till you come and all will be well; but if they step aside on an errand, they may find the beds promoted to the two shelves, and somebody else’s demons standing guard over their master’s beds, which in the meantime have been spread upon your sofas.”

This is exactly what happened. Satan had laid out Livy and Clara’s bedding on the lower berths in the female compartment and then gone to the male compartment to do the same for Twain and Smythe. “Clara’s satchels were holding possession of her berth - a lower one. At the last moment, whilst Satan was attending to Smythe and me, a middle-aged American lady swarmed into the compartment, followed by native porters laden with her baggage. She was growling and snarling and scolding, and trying to make herself phenomenally disagreeable; and succeeding. Without a word, she hoisted the satchels into the hanging shelf, and took possession of that lower berth.”

Slowly the old steam engine chugged them across the endless plains of northern India:

Out in the country in India, the day begins early. One sees a plain, perfectly flat, dust-colored and brick-yardy, stretching limitlessly away on every side in the dim gray light, striped everywhere with hard-beaten narrow paths, the vast flatness broken at wide intervals by bunches of spectral trees that mark where villages are. All day long one has this monotony of dust-colored dead levels and scattering bunches of trees and mud villages. You soon realize that India is not beautiful; still there is an enchantment about it that is beguiling, and which does not pall. You cannot tell just what it is that makes the spell, perhaps, but you feel it and confess it, nevertheless.

Perhaps the spell was helped when “Satan got left behind somewhere that morning, and did not overtake us until after nightfall. It seemed very peaceful without him. The world seemed asleep and dreaming.”

***

When Mark Twain arrived on the morning of 3 February he promptly christened Allahabad by its direct translation, Godville. Actually, god-wise, he had rather missed Godville’s glory days but he was in the right place and the right time - a once every twelve years right time - to see the most extraordinary outpouring of goddom, the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela.

For Hindus it is the place where Brahma created the universe untold millions of years gone by; after the Moghuls arrived five hundred years ago they built mosques and forts all over northern India, and one of the best surviving ones is here, the wonderful Akbar fort on the banks of the Ganges; when the British took over two hundred years after that numerous churches and missionary schools were built, the most outstanding church being All Saints Cathedral,[21] modeled on Paris’ Notre Dame and completed only ten years before Twain’s arrival.

The city had played a part, albeit a minor a part, in the Sepoy Uprising of 1857, a series of mutinies and revolts whose memories were increasingly to preoccupy Twain as his Grand Tour proceeded.

***

I think now would be a good time to say something about the Sepoy Uprising. As Twain traveled east towards Calcutta from here then headed back west to Delhi he journeyed through the Uprising country and was hosted by the same British Army whose attitudes to India had been changed so much by the mutinous events thirty-nine years before.

The events and heroics of the revolt inspired him, even if he only came across the British view of them: “The military history of England is old and great, but I think it must be granted that the crushing of the Indian Mutiny[22] is the greatest chapter in it. The British were caught asleep and unprepared. They were a few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean of hostile populations. It would take months to inform England and get help, but they did not falter or stop to count the odds, but with English resolution and English devotion they took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it, through good fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising fight that one may read of in fiction or out of it, and won it thoroughly.”

Like many great events in history the casus belli of the Sepoy Uprising was not one single catastrophic eruption but a series of minor tremors, each survivable on its own but which when thrown together became combustible. The most major of the minor incidents was the decision - motivated purely by greed - in the spring of 1857 by the ruling East India Company to annex the Kingdom of Oudh. As Twain noted: “It seems to be settled, now, that among the many causes from which the Great Mutiny sprang, the main one was the annexation of the kingdom of Oudh by the East India Company - characterized by Sir Henry Lawrence as “the most unrighteous act that was ever committed”.”“

This being India, caste - and the protection of caste rights - also played its part. Luckily for the British the revolt was confined to only one of the three armies, the one from Bengal,[23] and this was the only one recruited from the higher-caste Rajputs and Brahmins. Ironically, this recruitment was done in the early days of Company expansion as it was thought the caste system, with its inbuilt respect of hierarchy, would provide greater loyalty. In fact of the 140,000 sepoys - indigenous infantry privates - in the Bengal Army only 8,000 remained loyal.

As the Company’s empire spread west and the newly acquired lands came under British control the ruling castes lost some of their perks and privileges, causing disquiet; this disquiet, allied to the better education which their higher caste had given them, fermented into revolt - and well-led revolt at that. According to Twain: “The leaders moved from camp to camp undisturbed, and painted to the native soldier the wrongs his people were suffering at the hands of the English, and made his heart burn for revenge. They were able to point to two facts of formidable value as backers of their persuasions: In Clive’s day, native armies were incoherent mobs, and without effective arms; therefore, they were weak against Clive’s organized handful of well-armed men, but the thing was the other way, now. The British forces were native; they had been trained by the British, organized by the British, armed by the British, all the power was in their hands - they were a club made by British hands to beat out British brains with. There was nothing to oppose their mass, nothing but a few weak battalions of British soldiers scattered about India, a force not worth speaking of.”

There was a related issue to caste: religion. In the early days of British expansion the East India Company had concentrated on its main aim, commerce. As the unofficial empire expanded more force was needed and the army presence grew. With the army came chaplains and religiously minded officers, some in very high rank, whose own interpretation of their mission was as much to save the heathen Hindu from his sins as to establish trade routes for the Company. Inevitably this postulating from the Christians leaders, who made the mistake of seeing Hinduism as a religion - and an inferior one - led to resentment among the sepoys who made the mistake of seeing Christianity as another philosophy - and an inferior one - to which they were not about to descend. As the Christians were in power and Hindus subjugated, the latter felt the need to make a stand to protect their way of life - and for them was Hinduism is just that.

The most infamous cause of the uprising - and certainly the most ineptly handled by the British - was the issuing of ammunition greased in animal fat. The army had recently been re-equipped with the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle. This new technology needed better shot which had to be tightly wrapped in greased paper. The drill was for the sepoys to bite off the end of the cartridge to release the powder. The shot now came pre-greased with tallow made from animal fat, either from a cow or a pig; the vegetarian Hindu sepoys could tolerate biting neither tallow and the Muslim sepoys could not tell from which beast it derived and so chose the abhor them both as haram.

Amazingly the British ignored all warnings about the unacceptability of the sepoys biting into tallow and insisted, to the point of court martial, that the new shot was used as designed. When unrest became restless the British tried denying there was animal fat in the tallow but as the high-caste sepoys could see the low-caste tallow-wallahs at work the denial only aroused suspicions. When the British then re-issued the shot with hand-torn cartridges the original suspicions were only confirmed.

Finally, there was a less tangible, more Indian factor at work, best explained by Twain as follows: “...the bravest and best Indian troops had a wholesome dread of the white soldier, whether he was weak or strong. But, against that, there was a prophecy - a prophecy a hundred years old. The Indian is open to prophecy at all times; argument may fail to convince him, but not prophecy. There was a prophecy that a hundred years from the year of that battle of Clive’s which founded the British Indian Empire, the British power would be overthrown and swept away by the natives.”

It is hard in retrospect to see how the British did not see the trouble brewing. The reason was in large part benign neglect; the older and more senior East India Company British officers had developed a strong attraction to India and felt they had a special relationship with the sepoys, and the sepoys with them, and as a result the sepoys would never revolt against them. They had after all learnt the native language - no sepoy was allowed to speak English to an officer and no officer allowed to speak English to a sepoy. Younger officers who sounded the alarm were ignored as inexperienced types who didn’t understand the native mind and spirit. In Twain’s words: “...a mutinous spirit was observable in many of the native garrisons, and it grew day-by-day and spread wider and wider. The younger military men saw something very serious in it, and would have liked to take hold of it vigorously and stamp it out promptly; but they were not in authority. Old-men were in the high places of the army - men who should have been retired long before, because of their great age - and they regarded the matter as a thing of no consequence. They loved their native soldiers, and would not believe that anything could move them to revolt.”

We shall see how the Sepoy Uprising affected Twain’s visits to the northern cities as he passed through these places For now suffice to say that the revolt failed and the British retribution was unjust and terrible, “disproportionate” as we would say now. A further tragedy was the breakdown in trust between the British and the Indians. Before 1857 the British in India called themselves “Indians” and the Indians “natives”, with no hint of disparagement. After the slaughter of British women and children, in particular, the feelings of bonding turned to disgust - and fear, the feeling of “the degradation of fearing those we had taught to fear us” in the words of Sir John Kaye. H. G. Keene in his Anglo-Indian Sketches wrote that “a terrible abyss has opened between the rulers and the ruled; and every huckster, every pettifogger who wears a hat and beaches, looks down upon the noblest of the natives.” Even Sir Bartle Frere, an ex-Governor of Bombay and in many ways the father of the modern city, said, “You have no idea how much India has altered. The sympathy which Englishman felt for the natives has changed to a general feeling of repugnance.”

As Twain pointed out, the British won a heroic victory against seemingly impossible odds but they were helped enormously by the chaos on the Indian side. The Muslims in particular divided against themselves, Sunni and Shia, or against the Hindus by supporting the British when Hindu success seemed likely. Other Indian groups, like the Sikhs, the Pathans, the Ghurkhas and other Nepalis and the Aga Khan’s Muslims, openly supported the British from the start. Meanwhile the sepoys, at heart an unpaid, officerless peasant army, had no central command or even a cohesive goal, and split more geographically than ideologically were easily picked off by the disciplined - and at the time, desperate - British.

When the British regained control, that control passed from the East India Company to the British Crown whose first priority was to make sure no future uprisings could give them such a run for their money. Entire native towns were cleared across the northern plains, of which Allahabad was one. In the Sepoy Uprising the British areas had been badly damaged and in their place the British built wide, tree-lined boulevards with large, tree-lined bungalows behind even larger tree-lined walls; a vision of European civilization in the tropics. From these bungalows they ran the districts and in many cities, including Allahabad, they called these areas Civil Lines.

***

Civil Lines in Allahabad Mark Twain described thus: “I saw the English part of the city. It is a town of wide avenues and noble distances, and is comely and alluring, and full of suggestions of comfort and leisure, and of the serenity which a good conscience buttressed by a sufficient bank account gives. The bungalows (dwellings) stand well back in the seclusion and privacy of large enclosed compounds (private grounds, as we should say) and in the shade and shelter of trees.”

Twain’s hotel was at the western edge of Civil Lines, next to All Saints Cathedral. It still stands and will soon be a functioning hotel again, albeit with the rather unfortunate name of Hotel Harsh. Built in 1875 on two floors with a castellated roof, it is long and low and white and had what Mark Twain described as “a long yellow veranda”, a feature which still zigzags around the front of the hotel now.

In 1896 it was known as Barnet’s Hotel; its proprietor was Sir G. H. Barnet about whom even Sita cannot find anything noteworthy.

I meet the current owner, Mr. Adinath Harsh.

“We are rebuilding it. It has not been a hotel for more than twenty years. But now Allahabad is busy again. Aspects are propitious.”

He shows me around. There are no records surviving, no guest book of 3 February 1896 for us to pore over.

“This room is typical room of where they would have stayed. We have yet to divide it.”

“Divide?”

“Yes, the rooms are too big for today. Typically they are four hundred square feet with twenty-five foot ceilings. Imagine the cost of cooling that. So we are lowering the ceilings and dividing the rooms. Indians like smaller confines and we get twice as many rooms.”

“I hope you don’t mind me saying, and you speak such good Engl...”

“The name,” Adinath says. “Yes, I know. In Hindi harsh means comfortable - and fortunate. But really the problem is that it is part of our family name and my father is insistent.”

“It’s his hotel?”

“It’s his money. And as you say, ‘he who pays the piper plays the tune’.”

That evening’s Talk was at the Railway Club, a short tonga[24] trot away. Mark Twain noticed how everyone had their own carriage and took it for even the shortest distances: “all the white citizens have private carriages; and each carriage has a flock of white-turbaned black footmen and drivers all over it. The vicinity of a lecture-hall looks like a snowstorm - and makes the lecturer feel like an opera.”

Railway Clubs were the most racially integrated meeting places in India. While, to quote Rudyard Kipling, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,[25] there was one group where they did meet, the largely unfortunate Anglo-Indians. In the early East India Company days many European men were entranced by the Moghul and Hindu civilizations and, being single, took Indian wives, frequently beautiful widows who otherwise would have been left to wither on the vine. Their offspring, inevitably wealthy and often beautiful, were brought up without stigma; rather the opposite. By the time of Twain’s visit the more interesting, freethinking Europeans had been replaced by stuffier, less imaginative men - and their wives - and affairs between well-born Europeans and Indians were taboo. An Anglo-Indian at the Railway Club that night was more likely to have been the result of a liaison between a British squaddy[26] and an Indian prostitute - and as a result not readily acceptable to either side. Nevertheless they were fiercely racist against the “wog”[27] natives themselves and equally obsequious to the whites. They would only speak English, made the Indian railways their cause and were invaluable as drivers, engineers and junior managers; every major terminus and junction had its “railway colony” of Anglo-Indians. What few privileges their tint gave the twilight Eurasians were lost at Independence and most have now emigrated throughout the Commonwealth - anecdotally at least, largely to Canada.

Allahabad had become an important junction, but after Independence Indian Railways stopped supporting the club and it declined like so many other Raj institutions. In 1984 it was rescued by a local businessman who saw the need for a school and a community center. The Railway Club’s wing is now the thriving Coral Club Medium School (not I presume, a school for mystics) and the main building a large empty shell used mostly for Hindu weddings. As a Hindu wedding is not a short-lived affair the main hall is in more or less permanent use.

The stage is still set at one end of the main hall, and as it is made of brick I can only assume it is as it was when Twain delivered his “At Home” there. The Allahabad Pioneer,[28] the paper on which his new friend Rudyard Kipling used to work, reported that “Mark Twain’s humor is often of the ladies’ postscript sort - in a casual incidental way he introduces a circumstance that puts quite a new color on a detailed story...The charm of his delivery is so delightful that no one who hears him could wish to have been content with a report.”

***

Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling were arguably the two most celebrated writers in the English language in the late nineteenth century. They formed a mutual admiration society.

Twain told the Calcutta Hindoo Patriot in an interview the following week that he had met Rudyard Kipling several times and “I like him very much. I admire his work prodigiously. There is no question as to his genius and that must be confessed by everyone. He has genius and plenty of it. I have an amazing fondness for his Plain Tales from the Hills and I think that some of his ballad work is inimitable. I don’t see how anyone could possibly surpass it.”

They first met in the summer of 1890 in Elmira, NY and gave back-to-back accounts of their encounter; Kipling’s on meeting Twain in the New York Herald of 17 August 1890 and Twain’s on meeting Kipling in the New York World a week later. Mark Twain was 55; Rudyard Kipling was 25.

Kipling’s piece starts with an imaginary address to an audience in India:

You are a contemptible lot out there! Some of you are Commissioners and some Lieutenant-Governors and a few of you are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar - no two cigars - with him and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand I do not despise you - indeed I don’t. I am only very sorry for you all from the Viceroy downwards. To soothe your envy and to prove I still regard you as my equals I will tell you about it.

I was impressed that Mark Twain had time to entertain an escaped lunatic from India, be he ever so full of admiration. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk - this man I had learned to love and admire 14,000 miles away.

The New York World piece started:

The young story-writer of old England paid his respects in earnest person as well as in luminous prose to the veteran humorist of New England. The latter opined: “It would be a good thing to read Mr. Kipling’s writings for their style alone if there were no back story to it. But, as you say, there always is a story there and a powerfully interesting one generally. How people have gotten to read and talk about his stories! Why, when a young man not yet 24 years of age, succeeds in the way Kipling has succeeded, it simply shows, doesn’t it, that the general public has a strong appreciation of a good thing when it gets hold of one?

“His great charm to me is the way he ‘swings nervous’ English! It is wonderful. That it seems to me is one great secret of the hold he takes on his readers. They can understand what he is at. He is simple and direct.”

***

The next morning, wrote Twain:

In the early brightness we made a long drive out to the Fort. Part of the way was beautiful. It led under stately trees and through groups of native houses and by the usual village well, where the picturesque gangs are always flocking to and fro and laughing and chattering; and this time brawny men were deluging their bronze bodies with the limpid water, and making a refreshing and enticing show of it; enticing, for the sun was already transacting business, firing India up for the day. There was plenty of this early bathing going on, for it was getting toward breakfast time, and with an unpurified body the Hindoo must not eat.

Then we struck into the hot plain, and found the roads crowded with pilgrims of both sexes, for one of the great religious fairs of India, the Kumbh Mela, was being held, just beyond the Fort. It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.

Early this morning, as Gillian and Sita head off for the museum and library, I team up with my guide, a personable young Brahmin, Rajesh Giri. The reason I need a Brahmin will become clear soon. I jump on the back of his scooter and we head off for the fort. The reason we need a scooter will also become clear soon. As we duck and weave in and out of the blaring traffic it seems hard to imagine that “Part of the way was beautiful. It led under stately trees...” None of the way is beautiful now, in fact for rank ugliness, what Twain called “uncomeliness”, dirt and depravity, it is as bad as anything seen in India so far - a bar not set too low.

For Allahabad has spread way beyond Civil Lines and is one of the many places in northern India to claim the title “fastest growing city”. It is a town divided by the railway tracks and, as always, there is the right side of the tracks and the wrong side of the tracks. Civil Lines and its wide streets and low-rise houses are on the fancy side; Chowk, an Indian version of souk, isn’t fancy-side at all. Even on a scooter it takes twenty minutes, pedestrian speed, to clear the main street, leaving plenty of time to look around at all the garbage piled high: the fruit and vegetable trash being chewed by cows, the bag trash being inspected by dogs, the paper trash being slept on by goats, the metal trash being sifted by scavenger children, the glass trash being bagged by their parents, the bright trash being carried off by crows, the traffic trash just sitting there reproducing - and the smell of trash just hanging aimlessly in the air. The aural backdrop is the blaring horns. Right behind us is a particularly noisy and noisome old Ambassador.[29] The driver just holds down his horn a few feet behind me. None of the cars, motorbikes, pedal- or auto-rickshaws, cows or ox carts can go anywhere where they are not already going; can’t go any faster either. I turn around and give him - always a him - a shrug sign. He just blows another blast. I get off the pillion and walk back a few feet.

“I tell you what. I’ll sit in your car and blow the horn and you sit on the back of the scooter and try and get out of the way.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Why what?”

“Why problem?”

“Why problem because I’m sitting a few feet from your horn. Your horn isn’t making any difference. None of us can go anywhere we are not already trying to go.”

He ceases. In the meantime the traffic has moved forward four feet. That is enough to get up a barrage of klaxoned abuse from those behind him. I walk forward and jump back on the pillion. He resumes his position an inch from our tail. And then he resumes his position on the horn.

“What’s the problem?” asks Rajesh, blowing his tinny horn at the cycle rickshaw in front of him and the cow in front of that and everything and everyone on the road in front of them.

“Nothing,” I reply and chalk another one up to irreconcilable cultural differences, patience and courtesy on the road not being part of the Indian DNA - like asking an Italian to wear a seatbelt or an Englishman to jump a line (there being no Hindi word or Indian concept for line[30]).

Eventually, nerves tattered and eardrums shattered, we reach Akbar’s splendid old fort. We need a break from the madness and find a chai stall. I ask Rajesh about his life as tourist guide.

“I’m only doing it as I was hopeless at mathematics so couldn’t do computer sciences like all my friends at school.”

“Is that what they are all doing now?” I ask, “Hardware, software, that sort of thing?”

“You’ve seen the billboards for computer training courses?” I have, they are everywhere. “The whole country is going IT mad. I worked in a call centre after college.”

“How was that?”

“I didn’t like it for lots of reasons. We Brahmins speak the best English but even we had to take the MTI course.”

“What’s that?”

“MTI? Mother Tongue Influence. They try to make us sound less sing-song. I had to learn Australian slang too.”

“So you speak ’Strain?”

“Yeah, Ozzie too, I guess. No probs, mate. I was on railway inquiries.”

“You had to keep Ozzie hours too?”

“That’s right, up all night our time. And four-hour shifts. And some rude and racist people on the other end too. It was sweat shop.”

“But a well paid sweat shop.”

“It is well paid, two US bucks an hour, about twenty thousand roops a month. Much more if you are selling something. On commission. My God, you can treble that. But I like this guiding. Not so much money but outdoors. And meeting interesting people, not just talking on the phone.”

We look up as the old fort. It must have been completely splendid when it was built four hundred years ago and it still is relatively splendid even now. Twain described it: “The Fort is a huge old structure, and has had a large experience in religions. In its great court stands a monolith which was placed there more than 2,000 years ago to preach (Buddhism) by its pious inscription; the Fort was built three centuries ago by a Mohammedan Emperor - a resanctification of the place in the interest of that religion. There is a Hindoo temple, too, with subterranean ramifications stocked with shrines and idols; and now the Fort belongs to the English, it contains a Christian Church. Insured in all the companies.” Very droll.

No insurance is needed now as three-quarters of the old fort has been taken over by the Indian Army. It looks in fine shape: painted buildings, mown lawns, a polo pitch. Left-right, left-right on the parade ground. I’m not quite sure why the third biggest army in the world needs to be here, as far as they can be from any border, mucking up our sightseeing but I am

sure it’s all for the best. The quarter not taken over by the Indian Army is going to the mange-dogs, physically and proverbially. There are four impromptu Hindu temples, surrounded by overgrowing general shrubbery; the civilian part of the fort will soon be of interest to archaeologists only.

From the turrets, now out of bounds, Twain could see the view I cannot see now. To reach the object of the view I need Rajesh, the Brahmin on the scooter.

Two rivers join at that point - the pale blue Jumna, apparently clean and clear, and the muddy Ganges, dull yellow and not clean. On a long curved spit between the rivers, towns of tents were visible, with a multitude of fluttering pennons, and a mighty swarm of pilgrims. It is a fair as well as a religious festival. Crowds were bathing, praying, and drinking the purifying waters, and many sick pilgrims had come long journeys in palanquins to be healed of their maladies by a bath; or if that might not be, then to die on the blessed banks and so make sure of heaven.

There were fakirs in plenty, with their bodies dusted over with ashes and their long hair caked together with cow-dung; for the cow is holy and so is the rest of it; so holy that the good Hindoo peasant frescoes the walls of his hut with this refuse, and also constructs ornamental figures out of it for the gracing of his dirt floor. There were seated families, fearfully and wonderfully painted, who by attitude and grouping represented the families of certain great gods. There was a holy man who sat naked by the day and by the week on a cluster of iron spikes, and did not seem to mind it; and another holy man, who stood all day holding his withered arms motionless aloft, and was said to have been doing it for years. All of these performers have a cloth on the ground beside them for the reception of contributions, and even the poorest of the people give a trifle and hope that the sacrifice will be blessed to him. At last came a procession of naked holy people marching by and chanting, and I wrenched myself away.

At least the Brahmin and the scooter will be able to take me right into the middle of the religious festival that is the mighty Mela. To be with a Brahmin is to have an Access All Areas pass; to ride on a scooter is to be able to access all those areas. This year we have a Magh Mela, one of the most significant Hindu festivals, and one held every year at the very spot where Brahma created the world all those billions of years ago. Then every twelve years, in accordance with Vedic astrological significance,[31] they hold the Kumbh Mela. Twain was lucky enough to have stumbled into the big Mela, the Kumbh Mela. The difference? This year’s Magh Mela will attract two million pilgrims; the last Kumbh Mela, held ten years ago, had seventy million pilgrims and in 2013 they are expecting eighty million pilgrims. It was and will be the largest human gathering anywhere on earth, clearly visible from space orbiters. The Kumbh Mela that Mark Twain saw one hundred and fifteen years ago had two million pilgrims, the same as today’s Magh Mela.

For a few moments I am enthusing about the mathematics as much as about the festival. As we have been wandering around the great mass of souls in northern India these past three weeks I have often found myself wondering what it must have been like for Twain, density of population-wise. Now I have at least one answer: eighty million to two million; forty to one. I started the mental calculations: take away thirty-nine houses from that bundle of buildings over there; lose thirty-nine of that line of forty cars; how would those forty loafers look if there were thirty-nine fewer of them? India becomes a sort of instant imaginary paradise, full of all the good parts, the color, the vitality, the energy, the chaos, the charm, the good humor - but now on a human rather than an overwhelming scale.

Uniquely, the number of Indians he saw Mela-ing then I saw Mela-ing now, Kumbhs and Maghs notwithstanding; we had reached some kind of numerical equivalency. We both saw two million orange-clad Hindus, mostly Brahmins and Sadhus, moving to and from the shore, laughing, dipping in and out the holy Ganges, re-wrapping themselves, having themselves one massive great dipping party; having fun; and, as was becoming clearer day by day, the doing of Hinduism is fun.

***

Rajesh stops the scooter on the higher ground just below the fort and asks me how it looks. Music festivals and recipes come to mind:

Take one Glastonbury or Summerfest and magnify it a few times; about five square miles should hold most of it.

Extend the duration from a long weekend to six weeks.

Change the multicolored tents to a uniform UN refugee dust-green, provided by the “organizers”.

Change the mud to dirt-dust.

Fly red spectrum pennants from every tent, each shade showing a different home location or Brahmin variation.

Change the music from electric to flutes and drums, harmonia, bells and chanting.

Move the music from the stages into the tent-villages.

Keep the wood smoke but intensify by constant cooking and still air - and heat.

Substitute early morning mist for sun-smoke.

Re-jig Desolation Row to Beggars Alley. At either end have change-wallahs with one-rupee coins (two cents).

Re-jig Field of Avalon to Sadhu City. Dozens of Sadhus sit and pose for photos with Indian tourists (no Westerners seen except your correspondent). The more orange-clad, haystack-haired, bearded and beaded, barefooted, coconut shell-begging bowled they look the more the Indian tourists pay to squat beside them. (Beware, the more ragged ones are fake fakirs in fancy frocks. Winner of the Fullest Bowl Competition: one Mana Saah from Lucknow, five feet tall (approx), six-foot beard (red), seven-foot hair (henna), one pair thick old spectacles (angled, upside down), one over-turban (Tibetan lookalike lingo), one shawl (gold), one handkerchief (orange, about his person), one pair feet (leather-bare), fingernails (ten, long, curled, for the use of). Even I gave him ten (rupees).

Cancel all Portaloos and similar. Men and children just pee where they stand as always. Women go behind screens. No queues at all.

Keep the rows of palmists, astrologers, healers, soothsayers, peace paint artists and yogis, but add volume tenfold and color accordingly.

Keep the rows of food stalls, but ignore the health and safety regulations and fry, fry, fry.

Cancel all garbage collection contracts and sub out to gaudily decorated cows.

Keep the rows of souvenir stalls but reduce usefulness of objects to old clock parts, old string and old kettle elements.

Change drug of choice to bhang. Bhang - a preparation made from the cannabis plant - is bought from one of the government-approved bhang stalls. Take one measure in a scrap of old newspaper to a lassi shop. Lassi - a preparation made from yoghurt - when given enough sugar hides the earthy taste of the bhang. Your correspondent declined due to possible pillion balancing problems but from previous experience can report similarities to horse tranquilizer: a chirpy enough giddy-up followed by a rather rapid whoa and a good week’s sleep.

And here the Glastonbury/Summerfest similarities must end for the pilgrimage is about meeting your favorite gods, not seeing your favorite acts, about wiping your karmic slate clean by immersing yourself - and by extension your Self - in water (you can see where John the Baptist got the idea a few thousand years later), not getting shit-faced and the lights going out - and it all revolves around dipping in three holy rivers, one of which is mythological and anyway subterranean - and there ain’t any of those in Wisconsin or Somerset, England.

As we leave the site we pass countless other pilgrims hustling this or that, generally hobbling along. The last one is a well-dressed luminous yo-yo salesman standing in the middle of a roundabout with hundreds of decibels of horns blaring incessantly all around him. Now a roundabout here isn’t a system of unidirectional traffic flow but a multidirectional series of corners. In the ten minutes it takes us to cover the ten yards to pass him he didn’t sell any. The ten minutes also gave ample to time to ask “why?” on any number of levels about the yo-yo wallah and the great dip-in down on the river below.

***

Back at the horrible Ada Hotel (the Harsh has yet to open and secular tourism has yet to arrive in Allahabad) we compare notes. Gillian and Sita have made a remarkable discovery, a new Hindu god, Richard Sahib.[32]

They had been wandering around the park and near Company Bagh, the old East India Company headquarters, had seen a well-kept grave protected by equally well-kept railings. Anything well-kept immediately arouses interest and they walked over to investigate. Around the headstone were placed offerings of tobacco and alcohol, bidis and toddy. The original epitaph on the headstone had faded with time but someone had over-inscribed it, with great care, with all the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet. I had seen this before - in Roman letters - on an unknown soldier’s World War 1 grave in Flanders; from the letters can be made any name that has ever existed.

Sita asked a gardener about the significance of this grave-site. The person buried there is known as Richard Sahib. He was a high-ranking British artillery officer who during the Sepoy Uprising sided with the Indians. One night he slipped out of the cantonment and found the local leader and told him to move his troops down towards the river. The leader noted how Richard Sahib drank and smoked a lot. That night there was a terrific electrical storm and the mutineers’ previous headquarters - now empty - was struck by lightning.

Richard Sahib was hung for treason by the British and buried next to Company Bagh. One night, at the height of another electrical storm, he was seen risen from the grave dressed in an immaculate red and white uniform. The gardener who saw him was told to avoid rabid dogs and the next day another gardener, who didn’t see the risen Richard, was bitten by one and died. Now whenever there is a downpour the gardeners gather under Company Bagh’s shelter and wait for his good council. Sometimes he appears as himself and sometimes disguised as his avatar, a duck.

Gillian asks Rajesh what a good Brahmin makes of this story. He advises against looking for facts in the case of the god Richard Sahib. Five years ago a Canadian student included the Richard Sahib story in his thesis on Hindu mythology. He determined that Richard wasn’t his name, he wasn’t British let alone an army officer and traitor, and that he died before the Sepoy Uprising. According to the Canadian, the grave belonged to a Belgian missionary who died of an unknown disease. Never mind, Rajesh advised further; to the gardeners Richard Sahib is a local god who gives good advice and surely these are facts enough in themselves.

“Yes, I see,” says Gillian, “but what about the duck?”

“Every god must have an avatar, that’s how gods work,” Rajesh replies patiently.

We may have looked a bit nonplussed but that was because we had yet to visit Benares, where the mysteries of Hindu mythology are born, sustained and destroyed - as indeed are we all.

Benares

From Allahabad to Benares is only sixty miles, a quick, by Indian standards, train journey of two hours. In 1896 one joined the main Delhi to Calcutta line until Moghul Serai and then took a branch line to Benares. The combination of soot from the steam engine and dust through the open windows made the journey, wrote Mark Twain, “admirably dusty. The dust settled upon you in a thick ashy layer and turned you into a fakeer, with nothing lacking to the role but the cow manure and the sense of holiness.”

Train journeys across India are the quintessential tourist experience and ones not quickly forgotten. For many, Twain and the writer included, the real joy is to be found not on the trains but on the platforms. Verily, there is no spot on earth more captivating than a random Indian Railways platform. And random is exactly what is unfolding in front of you; anything can happen.

We both had an enforced delay in our journeys to Benares. “There was a change of cars about mid-afternoon at Moghul-Serai - and a wait of two hours there for the Benares train.” Our train was two hours late arriving at Allahabad.[33] Both circumstances encouraged sitting back and watching Planet Platform whirl its orbit around us.

In other countries a long wait at a station is a dull thing and tedious, but one has no right to have that feeling in India. You have the monster crowd of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting splendors of the costumes - dear me, the delight of it, the charm of it are beyond speech.

The two-hour wait was over too soon. Among other satisfying things to look at was a minor native prince from the backwoods somewhere, with his guard of honor, a ragged but wonderfully gaudy gang of fifty dark barbarians armed with rusty flint-lock muskets. The general show came so near to exhausting variety that one would have said that no addition to it could be conspicuous, but when this Falstaff and his motleys marched through it one saw that that seeming impossibility had happened.

I too would not have missed a moment. I make an armchair from my large and small wheely-bags, pitch camp in a corner discreet and watch and wonder. Where are they all going? How long has that extended family of twenty been lying there? Why do they always sleep wrapped with their heads covered and their bare feet sticking out? Who do those goats belong to? Is that geyser water safe to drink? Why is he hawking a puppet that just makes a horrid noise? Don’t the throw-away clay cups cost more than the tea? Why is that Sadhu covered in costume jewelry? Why are the coolies[34] playing cards just when a train is arriving? Why are they jumping off the train when it’s still at trotting speed? Why does no one lying around move out of the way of the new hordes? How do they make the sarees so bright? Good God, there’s a peacock on that roof. How many of those useless trinkets can that wallah sell? How can he make a living? Who on earth would want to buy one? How come each train sits at the platform for twenty minutes? How young is that boy sweeping the carriages? Why is the Vegetarian Tea Stall only selling tea? Why is that cow walking between the tracks? Why is that man walking around with a bicycle horn in his hand, and why is he blowing it? Oh look, that must be the goatherd. But why are he and his goats here? Why is he holding a blue flag and she a green one? Why is she begging, I’ve seen a lot ropier than that? Why is she selling fruit directly from the platform when there’s an empty basket nearby? What is he putting in that primus stove? What can that crow possibly want with that pencil-end? How can that coolie balance those sacks on his head? Why is she wearing odd shoes? Are those chickens with that family? Why are those two men holding hands? Why is he selling wind-up helicopters that don’t fly? Is that a Sadhu or a fakir? Why is the Upper Class Waiting Room locked? How many watches is he selling from each arm? Is there a word for “slow bustle”? I wonder what that monkey eats? How come the announcer sounds like the queen: “Any inconvenience caused is deeply regretted”? No thanks, I don’t want a taxi; no, nor an auto-rickshaw. I should be paying a license fee - or having to view ads - to be watching such a fandango.

***

If you find the Lonely Planet guide to Syria and then look under Damascus you will see that chapter opens with a Mark Twain quote from The Innocents Abroad; a quote derived from his visit there in early 1869. In my book about his Grand Tour of the Holy Land, Innocence and War, I suggested that having read many other guide books and memoirs about Damascus, Twain’s description still deserves to open the batting for Lonely Planet.

I would suggest the same is true of the holy ground that in 1896 was called Benares and is now - mostly - called Varanasi. I have forwarded the following extract from Following the Equator - without Twain’s permission but I know he’d be delighted - to the Lonely Planet editors for their consideration:

Benares was not a disappointment; it justified its reputation as a curiosity. It is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.

It is on high ground, and overhangs a grand curve of the Ganges. It is a vast mass of building, compactly crusting a hill, and is cloven in all directions by an intricate confusion of cracks which stand for streets. Tall, slim minarets and beflagged temple-spires rise out of it and give it picturesqueness. The city is as busy as an ant-hill, and the hurly-burly of human life swarms along the web of narrow streets. The sacred cow swarms along, too, and goes whither she pleases, and takes toll of the grain-shops, and is very much in the way, and is a good deal of a nuisance, since she must not be molested.

Benares is a religious Vesuvius. In its bowels the theological forces have been heaving and tossing, rumbling, thundering and quaking, boiling, and weltering and flaming and smoking for ages. There are Hindu temples without number - these quaintly shaped and elaborately sculptured little stone jugs crowd all the lanes. The Ganges itself and every individual drop of water in it are temples.

The Ganges front is its supreme show-place. Its tall bluffs are solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles, with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair-flights, rich and stately palaces - nowhere a break, nowhere a glimpse of the bluff itself; all the long face of it is compactly walled from sight by this crammed perspective of platforms, soaring stairways, sculptured temples, majestic palaces, softening away into the distances; and there is movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed - streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed in metaphorical flower-gardens on the miles of great platforms at the river’s edge.

Benares is the core of Hinduism, the powerhouse of its myths and practices and I suppose in the grand scheme of things I’m a bit of an old Benares hand. Mark Twain and I are about the same age, early sixties, on our visits to Benares. He left here a hundred and fifteen years ago; I left here for the first time forty years ago. Photographs and memoirs show that the Benares of the early 1970s was a lot closer to the Benares of the late 1890s than to the Varanasi of the early 2010s in everything except years; and in this city of living mythology time is anyway something that only the clocks keep. I’ve been back here four times since that first visit, the last time with my son five years ago. He still says they were the four weirdest days of his life. It was for me too until this visit these five years later. Mark Twain felt the same. If the India section of Following the Equator took up a disproportionately large section of the book, then the Benares section took up a disproportionately large section of the India section of the book. In fact one could say that it is the only time writing about his world tour that he reverted to his reportage roots. In two-dozen dazzling pages - the standout pages from what is in truth at times rather a tired book - he shows that the journalist in him was merely stowing away; it just took two days in Benares to bring him out on deck.

The biggest difference between the Benares of the 1890s (and the 1970s) and the Varanasi of the 2010s is the sheer volume and density of the population and its newly manic activity. When Twain came here the population was well under half a million; by the time of my first visit it had rounded up to half a million; now, although no one is sure let alone counting, it is nearly a million and a half. It’s not just that the numbers have trebled but that their activity has trebled again, making them Mark Twain-era dense by a factor of nine. Twain may have thought it “as busy as an ant-hill” but the ants now have aroused ambition and internal combustion engines and have lost any semblance they might have had of ant-patience or ant-discipline. What was a sleepy town on a holy river, where the spirit and presence could walk in peace and reflect where they stood, has become a bustling, jangling city where any attempt to walk in peace will be met by a blare of furious horns from buses, cars, motor bikes or auto-rickshaws and any attempt to reflect where you stand will attract swarms of touts and hustlers selling you just about anything that you didn’t know you didn’t want. Varanasi now is just like the rest of India - only more so; an India without the high levels of organized predictability.

There is no opportunity for all these busy bustling horn-tooting newcomers and their attendant army of supplicants to spread out, even into shanties, as they have in every other city. Varanasi lies on only the west bank of the Ganges for the very sound reason that to have the misfortune to die on the east bank will hasten your return as a donkey. Twain thought this rather unfair on donkeys: “The Hindoo has a childish and unreasoning aversion to being turned into an ass. He would gain much - release from his slavery to two million gods and twenty million priests, fakirs, holy mendicants, and other sacred bacilli; he would escape the Hindoo hell; he would also escape the Hindoo heaven. These are advantages which the Hindoo ought to consider; then he would go over and die on the other side.”

So far no Indians have taken Twain’s advice and the million and a half inhabitants are squeezed into the west bank and further squeezed because the agricultural land around the city is highly fertile and vote-buying farming subsidies mean it is worth more as farm land than shanty land, which would otherwise be its fate. The result is that the one million and a half plus souls crammed into the mythological wonderland of the Benares of old India spend all day, every day, as busy as those ants in an ant-hill in the economic chaosocracy of the Varanasi of new India.

***

Now we are in Benares we should take the Mark Twain tour, to see what made such an impression on him then - and see if we can improve the tour, make it a bit easier on the nerves as we move around the myths.

Twain was shown around the sights of Benares by an American missionary, the Rev. Parker, who had also written his “Guide to Benares”. One assumes the Rev. Parker had at best a tentative grip on Hindu mythology; one suspects all those idols and lingams quite gave him the vapors. As Twain said, “If Vishnu had foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called it Idolville or Lingamburg.”

They visited eleven holy sites together. Twain later added a twelfth attraction and re-ordered them into a kind of tongue-in-cheek pilgrimage narrative for logical Westerners. He wrote:

I do not claim that the pilgrims do their acts of worship in the order and sequence charted out in this itinerary of mine, but I think logic suggests that they ought to do so. Instead of a helter-skelter worship, we then have a definite starting-place, and a march which carries the pilgrim steadily forward by reasoned and logical progression to a definite goal.

I should recall that a ghat is series of steps leading from a temple to a river, in this case the holy Ganges. I paraphrase the Twain-a-tour thus:

1. A dip in the Ganges in the early morning to purify the soul and give the body an appetite.
2. At the Cow Temple kiss the cow-tails and remove that hunger.
3. Visit the Dalbhyeswar Temple for some words with the god Shiva - albeit under another alias - to bring prosperity, and as an unavoidable by-product, rain - for he is in charge of both. Unfortunately the rain brings on a fever, so repair pronto to the...
4. Kedar Ghat, and “find a long flight of stone steps leading down to the river. Half way down is a tank filled with sewage. Drink as much of it as you want. It is for fever.”
5. The fever is cured but brings on smallpox; time to visit temple of Sitala, goddess of smallpox.
6. Wishing to know how that is going to turn out, visit the Dandpan Temple and look down the Well of Fate.
7. The indicators being positive, head for to the Briddhkal Temple and “secure Youth and Long Life by bathing in a puddle of leper-pus”.
8. Having been granted a stay of execution, it’s time for some fun, so it’s off to see Shiva, in his Lord of Desires alias, at the Kameshwar Temple.
9. Although ready to live it up, better hedge your bets at the Well of the Earring, the Holy of Holies.
10. To be doubly certain, better do some redemption and take a 44-mile walk around the city limits stopping at auspicious spots along the way.
11. Register your trek, “get your redemption recorded” at the Sakhi Binayak Temple.
12. Just to round it off go to the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation and bask for a while in the certainty that having done the rounds Salvation, and the Knowledge thereof, is at hand.

Now, just in case an alien arrives from outer space, dives into a bookstore and buys Following the Equator thinking it’s a new travel guide... for the benefit of this great mass of alienated readers I have followed Mark Twain’s advice and visited them in the order he rather mischievously later contrived. For the further benefit of the aforementioned aliens I have re-ordered them into a more practical route which minimizes dealing with the murderous traffic - as well as adding a more Hindu-centric sequence to the tour. It also happens to be a good one-day city tour which takes in all the major sites. This tour I can recommend to aliens and earthlings alike.

Firstly any visitor to Benares should take a guide for two reasons: the tour’s first three sights are in the Chowk area, and if you thought Marrakesh’s or Damascus’ souks were a little complicated to find your way around you have yet to delve into the labyrinthine, squashed-up, cow-run back lanes of Benares. Then we are going to be ducking in and out of temples and a Hindu guide, while not essential, certainly eases one’s way around the equally labyrinthine temple etiquette, where on the one hand anything goes yet on the other anything has to go in a prescribed manner. This, of course, implies that the guide will be a Hindu but I would recommend going one better and making sure he’s a Brahmin - or even better a Pandit, from which word we derive pundit, a Brahminical scholar. Guides can be sourced from tourist offices and hotels; in India expect the pay to be about US$15 a day - a day being about six hours.

At a reception a month ago at the American Center in Mumbai, sorry Bombay, Sita and I had met a Sanskrit scholar, archaeologist and Benares resident, Mr. Shailesh Tripathy. He was interested in the project and offered to show us around once we had reached Benares.

“But you must know that I am not a qualified guide,” he said, sipping the local, sickly Omar Kayyham (sic) sparkling wine.

“Good. Unless I insist otherwise before setting off, I find guides in India mainly want to guide me to their cousin’s souvenir shop,” I replied, sipping the slightly less disgusting Sula Sauvignon Blanc option.

“No danger of that, all my cousins are professional people,” he replied rather haughtily.

“I’m sure you will be much better that the American missionary, the Reverend Parker.”

“Who is he?”

I explain and Sita later emails him a fuller version of Twain’s itinerary as above. We all agree it would be suicidal (literally) to take a 44-mile walk around the city’s roads and so scrub no. 10.

I have an additional request. “For Mark Twain’s no. 1, the Ganges dip, Gillian and I don’t want to be downstream of any of the cremation ghats.”

“And you?” he asks Sita.

“I’m not going anywhere near it, thank you very much,” she replies flatly.

Shailesh harrumphs and gives me what I take to be an old-fashioned Indian look. “We should properly take the waters at the main ghat, Dasaswamedh. It won’t be authentic otherwise. The body ashes from Harishchandra Ghat should be washed away to midstream by then.”

“Well, maybe,” I reply. “That’s the first problem. I tell you swimming with the ashes is going to give me the willies. Second problem is the main ghat is crowded. I’ve only got my gay blue swimming trunks and I’m going to feel like an idiot prancing around in them in public. And Gillian’s not too keen on swimming publicly in a saree.”

“That a far better reason,” Shailesh says. “We’ll start outside your friend’s house[35] on Tulsi Ghat.” And, a month later, we do.

Except we don’t; well, he does and we don’t. You would think Twain’s instruction - “At sunrise you must go down to the Ganges and bathe, pray, and drink some of the water. This is for your general purification” - would be the easy part: a simple early morning dip, all the way, full immersion, no slackers, in the holy river. Not that he himself would have done it.

Faith can certainly do wonders, and this is an instance of it. Those people were not drinking that fearful stuff to assuage thirst, but in order to purify their souls and the interior of their bodies. According to their creed, the Ganges water makes everything pure that it touches - instantly and utterly pure. The sewer water was not an offence to them, the corpse did not revolt them; the sacred water had touched both, and both were now snow-pure, and could defile no one. The memory of that sight will always stay by me; but not by request.

I try my luck. Bottom half sporting the gay blue trunks, top half wrapped in a shawl from the market in Baroda, Gillian and Sita cheering derisively from the shoreline, I waddle down the Tulsi Ghat to the river edge. Soon there are two problems, and the second relieves the first. First, in the back of the mind is the thought that this is a pretty filthy piece of water. And I saw a snake slithering along in it last night. If you’ve been brought up to feel it is holy and that nothing can pollute it - no corpses of man or beast, no sewage, no chemicals from Kanpur or detritus from Allahabad upriver or fertilizers flowing in from the Indo-Gangetic prairies, you have the advantage. If you’ve been brought up to suspect it just might be an ill-flowing cesspit of amphibious and vengeful e-coli sleepers just waiting to pounce, you have the disadvantage. Still, the in-built contrarian argues, one looks around and sees plenty of bodies bobbing up and down and they all seem pretty much alive. Shawl-free one wanders to the edge and dips a toe in the water: second problem. It’s f-f-f-freezing. Feeling rather sheepish, surrounded by skinny-dipping skinny Indians, many of a venerable age, one retreats without too much decorum.

Shailesh, who is even older than me, is splashing around like a good ’un, dipping up and down and I can only look on enviously as his iffy karma is washed away - but not enviously enough to catch pneumonia and heaven knows what else besides.

“Come on in, why don’t you?” he suggests, “it’s invigorating.”

“Well you invigor all you like. I’ll try washing my karmic slate clean in a hot shower later.”

“It won’t work,” he gloats splashing back up to the ghat steps.

I have a feeling he may be right karma-wise as in spite of a deluge of hot showers there has been no discernible karmic improvement.

The winter waters here were recently Himalayan snow and the chilliness is only to be expected; not so the state of the Ganges. The pollution is now causing concern to even the most convinced Hindu. The problems are many: the government has dammed the river several times before it reaches Benares and interrupted its flow - and it was the sheer flow which washed away the filth, down towards Calcutta, where it would be lost in the morass, before; the massive population growth all along the river has caused a corresponding sewage outbreak, as has the industrial growth caused a chemical and wastage problem; corruption means that any controls are simply bought off as it’s far cheaper to pay a bribe than treat the problem; the farmlands leading into Benares are more productive than ever thanks to agricultural chemicals, which of course also wash off into the Ganges; and lastly Benares itself has grown to be a pounding city of a million and a half souls all going about their business, business of one kind or another which deposits its remains straight into the now barely moving holy river that defines the holy city.

Everyone agrees that the state of the river is just getting worse and worse. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it spontaneously combust into holy blue flames. In a bad dream I see them sending out a fire-boat - as if! - which high-pressure hoses the flames with more toxic water and the gods decree that the whole city explodes in a massive cosmic act of retaliation against the filthy earthlings. Hmmm, I feel a Hindu myth coming on.

***

Off we go on our Re-Tour. There’s no chance to talk with Shailesh as there isn’t room for two abreast in the alleys, so we follow him crocodile file, left, right, half right, quick left, bit of a straight, left again, right at the junction and he stops. All around are brightly lit stalls selling brightly lit bangles, bracelets and anklets; we are in the bangles, bracelets and anklets area, having just followed him through the henna and dyestuffs area and before that the slippers and sandals stalls, opposite the pirated perfume stalls.

“None of this would have been here in 1896,” explains Shailesh.

“The shops?”

“That’s right,” he says. “You can see they have all been carved out of ground floors. In 1900 there would have been more than enough stalls in the streets. Now India has so many new people and so many new shops. There’s not really room for everybody.” Right on cue a cow waddles past the other way, followed by a motorbike, horn blowing as usual. The cow, I’m pleased to report, pays no attention at all.

“Why are we starting here?” I ask.

“Because this temple, Sakhi Binayak, is dedicated to the god Ganesha, the god of prosperity and good luck, so every new venture starts with a visit to Ganesha. We are touring the temples, that’s a new venture, so we should start here. Everyone can worship Ganesha and everyone does.”

I look at my notes and say, “Mark Twain came here to have his redemption recorded after the 44-mile pilgrimage he didn’t - and we won’t - be making. Could that be right?”

“No, I think he was joking,” Shailesh replies.

“Then Twain says; ‘you will see a Brahmin who will attend to the matter and take the money. If he should forget to collect the money, you can remind him.’”

Shailesh smiles and agrees some things never change. We turn left and walk through a row of tacky, shiny shops selling glitzy gluck. Ganesha has now found himself in the back of a shop. He has clearly answered all those pleas for prosperity but in doing so has lost his pride of place - and his fee-collecting Brahmin.

Shailesh rings the bell above our heads as we enter and touches the base of the god’s pedestal. “Ganesha is simple to pray with,” he says, “he doesn’t need a lot of offerings. So I say, ‘Oh Ganesha, bless this tour of the temples. Show me how to show them. Make our day happy and fruitful.’”

“Am I right in thinking that you are in effect giving yourself a pep talk, wishing yourself well - as our guide?” I ask.

“In a sense, yes. Ganesha himself doesn’t have the power to make our tour happy, only we can do that - but he can show me the example of how to make our tour enjoyable. He is, you see, a god, the god within me that needs bringing out. I do it by what we call darshana or looking, seeing. Inspiration is coming to be the best in myself, if you will.”

Shailesh inspired - and Gillian, Sita and I enthused - on we press. As we shuffle along the back alleys and side alleys beyond the Sakhi Binayak Temple we see more and more dull-brown uniformed, heavily armed policemen. Young and eager they look too. Now after leaving Sakhi Binayak they are more and more in evidence lining the tiny alleys so we have to pass the larger soldiers crab-style. We must be nearing our second stop, in theory Benares’ most famous site, the Golden Temple.

In practice it is little visited by foreigners these days since the bombings and the subsequent security siege. The whole section of the Chowk around the Golden Temple and the Aurangzeb Mosque was sealed off after a number of bomb blasts across Varanasi in 2006 and 2010, supposedly - and it is unproven - sent with the blessings of the Muslims from the neighboring mosque, the self-styled Indian Mujahadeen. The “problem” is that the whole site was originally a Hindu temple until it was sacked, along with the rest of the city, by the Muslim Emperor Aurangzeb six hundred years ago. As the Afghan Moghuls were replaced by Indian Moghuls and then the East India Company, the Hindus felt confident enough to rebuild their temple on its original site next to the Aurangzeb Mosque. “Next to” was a bit too close for the Muslims, who have tried to bomb their point of view across. There is no security at all entering the Aurangzeb Mosque; the mosque is exquisite, its followers somewhat less so: the terror traffic is strictly one-way.

And very effectively sealed off it is too. There is double frisking to enter into the Golden Temple complex - it’s a sort of self-contained shrine-village - and then double frisking again to enter the temple itself. Those who have been frisked before delving around the holy sites of Jerusalem will feel equally safe around the Golden Temple. In theory non-Hindus are not allowed but in practice that means non-Muslims; Shailesh and Sita have to show their ID and their name will reveal their religions, Hindu and Christian respectively; foreigners will have to show their passports and a small gesture - twenty rupees is recommended - in the security donation box is much appreciated. Again, with a Hindu guide life becomes a lot less complicated.

Once inside, we are looking for the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation. It hasn’t changed for many a year, and certainly not since Twain’s visit:

There you will see, sculptured out of a single piece of black marble, a bull which is much larger than any living bull you have ever seen, and yet is not a good likeness after all. And there also you will see a very uncommon thing - an image of Shiva. You have seen his lingam fifty thousand times already, but this is Shiva himself, and said to be a good likeness.

The well is covered by a fine canopy of stone supported by forty pillars and around it you will find what you have already seen at almost every shrine you have visited in Benares, a mob of devout and eager pilgrims. The sacred water is being ladled out to them; with it comes to them the knowledge, clear, thrilling, absolute, that they are saved; and you can see by their faces that there is one happiness in this world which is supreme, and to which no other joy is comparable. You receive your water, you make your deposit, and now what more would you have? Gold, diamonds, power, fame? All in a single moment these things have withered to dirt, dust, ashes. The world has nothing to give you now. For you it is bankrupt.

An uncannily accurate description of what one finds there now with one, overwhelming exception: monkeys - and yet more monkeys, hundreds of them, squabbling, stealing, frightening and out of control numerically and behaviorally. If one finds the Venetian pigeons are ruining St. Mark’s Square the same can be said of the Indian monkeys in the Golden Temple.

Elsewhere in Benares too Twain found that “There are plenty of monkeys about the place. Being sacred, they make themselves very free, and scramble around wherever they please.” Again true, but now much more so. Most animals we humans meet day to day are afraid of us. Not the Indian monkey; as they have become more and more numerous and confident they can see we are more afraid of them than they of us. They must think we are just another breed of monkey - and let’s face it we must look as much like monkeys to them as they do to us - some of us more so than others.

The breeding rate of these urban monkeys is now far outstripping the human rate and the Hindus will do nothing about it, for not only are the monkeys alive and therefore sacred but each time a Hindu sees one he is reminded of Hanuman, the monkey god, the most accessible god of all and to kill - or even interfere with - a likeness to a god is simply unthinkable.

Here in the Golden Temple I ask Shailesh what can be done about them.

“Nothing, it has really become their temple. We call it the Monkey Temple in Hindi. Every time a worshiper brings an offering he is, at second hand, just feeding the monkeys. They are in paradise but you wouldn’t think so by the racket they make squabbling with each other. I’m told that about fifty years ago they contracted a plague of sorts and most of them died.”

“Not that I wish them any harm, but...”

“Bring back the plague,” Sita suggests.

“Well, the Indian way is not to persecute them but then not to help them, just to leave them alone,” says Shailesh.

“So no vets come the plague?” asks Gillian.

“No vets come the plague,” he confirms

As one monkey flies across my face and three tiny monkettes scamper around my feet we head for the exit, and then through more frisking coming out. Looking back into the temple - and in spite of the reality of ape terror and the threat of Islamic terror - one has to be impressed by all the outpourings of gold that give the temple its name. Like a local population census, no-one is at all sure of the exact weight but something like eighteen hundredweight of pure gold went onto the temple roofs. It was donated by the Maharaja of Lahore, now in Pakistan, an ironic twist to the terror tactics against the object of his largesse.

It’s a relief to be back in the unpoliced alleys, twisting and turning this way and that, dodging the cows and stepping around their pats as we make our way to Twain’s next stop, the Kameshwar Temple. It’s only about a minute away but that minute in the eccentricities of the Benares Chowk provides the usual hour’s worth of entertainment.

This temple is the very opposite of the Golden Temple, being no more than extension of someone’s ramshackle house. It’s the shabbiest temple we have seen in all our time here, but then the immediate area all around it is equally shabby, including the old Honda motorbike parked right up close to Shiva’s gate.

A lovely old man, wrinkled and stooped and dusty-orange-robed, emerges from the adjoining house and shows us around while Sita translates Mark Twain’s notes to him: this temple was to Shiva in his guise of the Lord of Desires and one should, “Arrange for yours there. And if you like to look at idols among the pack and jam of temples, there you will find desires enough to stock a museum.”

The temple and garden are indeed packed with the pantheon in miniature I am almost expecting a garden gnome to be in there somewhere. We take chai with the temple keeper, make a small donation to keep Shiva in desire fulfillment generosity and move on.

We now leave the press of the Chowk alleys and suddenly walk into bright light - and a thick haze of flesh-tinged wood smoke. We are above and looking down on Manikarnika Ghat, the main cremation ghat and the most auspicious place for rich or high-caste Hindus to be sent on their way to the next incarnation. We shall return to this fascinating, gruesome, unstoppable-watchable site later on, as Twain did, with an even better view from the river, so we turn inland and there find the Well of the Earring, where as he noted, one can find “Temporary Cleansing from Sin”.

As we have seen and will see again, holy sites fall in and out of fashion and fashion has rather shunned the Well of the Earring of late. Shailesh confirmed Twain’s view that at the time it was “unutterably sacred. It is, indeed, the most sacred place in Benares, the very Holy of Holies, in the estimation of the people.” It is still “a railed tank, with stone stairways leading down to the water. The water is not clean”. But whereas he saw “people always bathing in it. As long as you choose to stand and look, you will see the files of sinners descending and ascending - descending soiled with sin, ascending purged from it”, now it looks like an empty and unloved municipal swimming pool out of season. One really needs a Japanese-style face-mask to descend the steps and peer into the stagnant bathing pool which is so filthy and trash-strewn that even the most unquestioning devotee must think twice before dipping into this particular sin-cleansing bath.

Shailesh sees I am verging on the horrified and says, “It’s not always this bad. In the rainy season the tank fills from below and some people swim in it.”

“Some people?”

“A few.”

“But surely it must just back up with sewage?”

“It’s a question of faith,” he says and shrugs.

It’s now time to leave the Chowk and into the heart of the new Varanasi town. The smart move is to stay on the river and walk north along by the ghats. Most tourists - and Indians - go no further north than Manikarnika Ghat and the cremation show there. As one walks north the population thins and the ghats are no less interesting than the ones to the south - if you like that sort of thing. After an amble of twenty minutes one comes to Gaya Ghat and a quick turn inland brings one to the main road for a short assault on the eardrums in a rickshaw to the main post office. A hundred yards to its north and south respectively are our next two stops, the Dandpan Temple and the Briddhkal Temple; the former houses the Well of Fate and the latter the Well of Long Life.

In many ways I find this diversion into new Varanasi the most interesting part of the tour, away from the obvious tourism and into scenes of day-to-day life for Varanasi’s day-to-day citizens: human, primate, bovine, canine and avian. The buildings are newer, certainly newer than Twain would have seen, but are already decaying; the open sewers either side of the road are as he would have seen them, albeit less foul.

The back road to the Dandpan Temple is also the main thoroughfare for motorcycles and water buffalo and it makes for an amusing spectacle to see the competing road users go about their business: the water buffalo sway serenely along impervious to all the chaos around them; the dogs just sleep where they feel like it, knowing that somehow the water buffalo and the motorcyclists will not step on or run over them; the motorcyclists weave in and out of the bovine and canine chicanes, the horns on the bikes as permanent as the horns on the buffalos; the humans survive as best they can, pressed up against a wall or sidestepping buff-pats or sometimes both at the same time, all done with endless patience and good humor.

Opposite the Dandpan Temple are stalls selling temple offerings: garlands, leaves, petals and small clay urns of Ganges water. Shailesh takes us through the dense crowd shuffling and pushing for position near the sacred tank which has replaced the sacred well. We see an evolution of Twain’s ceremony. He “bent over the Well and looked. If the fates are propitious, you will see your face pictured in the water far down in the well. If matters have been otherwise ordered, a sudden cloud will mask the sun and you will see nothing, not a good sign.” Now we see a Brahmin conduct a highly complicated routine of Ganges water management, whereby he pours Shailesh’s watery offerings into a tank full of soaking garlands, leaves and petals and ladles some of it back into Shailesh’s cupped hands. Shailesh in turn pours it back into the tank and then touches his wet palms onto his forehead; this is repeated three times to ensure that the fates are positive. I ask Shailesh how he feels, fate-wise; he shrugs fatalistically and says “only time will tell”.

We now head back past the post office to our next temple, what Twain called “the mouldering and venerable Briddhkal Temple, which is one of the oldest in Benares, the home of the Well of Long Life”. The good news - practical news rather than divine - is that I’ve learnt how to cope with the traffic in the interconnecting thoroughfare; one walks between a pair of water buffalo. Wits are needed: too close to the one behind might mean a shove in the bum, too close to one in front might mean... well, yes. The motorcyclists aren’t too happy as one has spoilt their slalom course but overall it works and at a pleasant, stately pace to which one can soon adjust one’s gait.

Thus promenading we arrive at the main road next to post office. The water buffalo, to a beast and for reasons known only to themselves, all turn left and join in that particular melee. We need to dodge death across the road and soon find ourselves in another sewageway and then promptly upon the Briddhkal Temple and its Well of Long Life.

Shailesh leans low to squeeze under the lintel and rings the bell above his head. Gillian, Sita and I kick off our shoes and follow close behind. Unlike the Dandpan of twenty minutes ago the Briddhkal is empty. The Brahmin in here is decidedly grumpy, whether the cause or the effect of the emptiness is unclear. Shailesh is a little sheepish admitting that he has never been here (“but you see there are over 11,000 temples here”) and receives his instructions from Mr. Grumpy Brahmin.

Inside the entrance is the well. Everything is painted orange: the well itself, the grating over it, the pail that goes down it and the wheel around which the rope revolves. Shailesh lifts up the grating, lowers the empty pail, raises the full pail and hands it to the Brahmin. The latter takes a small swig and hands it to Shailesh who takes a longer draught. Only then are we allowed to look down the well at the water far below. God knows what’s in it.

Outside I say to Shailesh, “Well you got off lightly.”

“What do you mean?”

“You only had to drink it, not bathe in it too.”

“Mark Twain, I suppose? Go on, what happened?”

I read from Following the Equator: “In here you will find a shallow pool of stagnant sewage. It smells like the best limburger cheese, and is filthy with the washings of rotting lepers, but that is nothing, bathe in it; bathe in it gratefully and worshipfully, for this is the Fountain of Youth; these are the Waters of Long Life.”

He says he’ll let me know and, brave face and saving face, doesn’t say much else for a while.

Again we take the least traffic option and head back south along the ghats until we reach the midway Dasaswamedh or Main Ghat. This is split into two adjoining ghats and we want the second or southerly one - the site of the latest Islamic bomb in only December 2010.

It is also Sadhu Central. Sita insists they are all phony. “Not that there aren’t real Sadhus. Of course there are but they are out wandering around teaching and learning as they should be - not sitting here posing and smoking hashish all day long,” she shudders.

It’s clear from the number of gullible young Westerners who think they are the real thing that a Sadhu franchise along the river front is not such a bad thing to have. Nothing much has changed there: “A good stand is worth a world of money. The holy proprietor of it sits under his grand spectacular umbrella and blesses people all his life, and collects his commission, and grows fat and rich; and the stand passes from father to son, down and down and down through the ages, and remains a permanent and lucrative estate in the family.”

Here, at our next stop, we are in for a nice surprise.

The temple Twain described is, or rather was, “Dalbhyeswar, on the bluff overlooking the Ganges, so you must go back to the river.” It has since been washed away in one of the floods and has now become a kind of unofficial wedding ghat and if you are lucky - and the bride and groom need an astrologically auspicious day to marry - you will see a constant colorful procession of splendidly dressed young Indians go to and from the water’s edge. In a ceremony with the Brahmin standing in the Ganges and the couple just in front of him on the shore, surrounded by the newly extended family, they bow and scoop up the Ganges water, pouring it over the hands and face and yes, drinking some of it too.

It is quite a sight. Indian women always dress as well as funds allow and in their wedding sarees they glitter and shimmer in a dazzling display of extravagance and finery. They accessorize with a vengeance too as a matter of course and for high days and weddings replace the trinkets with costume or real jewelry that leaves barely an inch of skin unadorned. The grooms look equally splendid with dress turbans and sequined long coats and trousers, bottomed off with inlaid khussa shoes.

Feeling full of good cheer we now climb the steep steps up to the nearest temple just a touch further south, the Sitala Temple. The bells will guide you there; there are dozens of them and most of them seem to ring most of the time. Shoes off and in we go. Ding dong ding dong. It’s quite a racket, as loud as the horns heard in the back of a rickshaw, and I head back out more or less immediately counter-clockwise against the flow. Twain reckoned it wise to pray “in the temple sacred to Sitala, goddess of smallpox. Her under-study is there - a rude human figure behind a brass screen.” Looking back in through the bars I can see a figure there but he’s not very rude - in fact he’s downright handsome and certainly has seen no smallpox. A few minutes later the others reappear, having done the circuit. They all look a bit bell-shocked but don’t seem to have caught the pox, small or other wise.

Our last stops are two in one, both at the next ghat to the south, Kedar. First we climb up the red and white striped steps to the red and white striped South Indian Kedar Temple that Twain called the “Cow Temple”. Shailesh feels sure that by “cow” he means Nandi, Shiva’s bull vehicle and to which then and now the Hindus pray for relief from hunger.

It is not quite so atmospheric now as it was then. “The temple is a grim and stenchy place, for it is populous with sacred cows and with beggars. You will give something to the beggars, and reverently kiss the tails of such cows as pass along, for these cows are peculiarly holy, and this act of worship will secure you from hunger for the day.”

Inside today there are no beggars; they are outside, more than a dozen of them in various stages of desperation. You give accordingly and enter what resembles a rather shabby Turkish bath with cracked tiles for decoration but without the steam for relaxation and cleansing - and by now, several hours of the dusty, farmyard tour later, a bit of cleansing would do no harm. The priests inside are less supine than the beggars outside, crying “give rupees, give rupees” as you wander around from manger to manger. There are no cows or bulls now but there clearly have been; Shailesh reckons they overnight here. Stenchy it is too so maybe the lack of steam isn’t such a bad idea. Eventually one see the great Nandi himself, Bull One, covered in garlands. The devout do kiss his tail and none of them looks too hungry as a result. It’s time to leave; this has been the least agreeable temple, even if one of the more eccentric.

A quick trot down the ghat steps brings us close to the river where “half way down is a tank filled with sewage. Drink as much of it as you want. It is for fever.”

The tank, and it is a tank, is empty now but when the river floods it fills back up and when the water reaches the rim people do indeed bathe in it. Sita holds her nose and pulls a funny face. I know what she means: bathing in sewage to ward off fever does seem a hostage to fortune - but then at least three out of the four of us don’t have the benefit of faith and I feel our Pandit is just playing along for our benefit.

***

The day is moving into the afternoon and as we only have Shailesh for the day I am going to suggest a variation on the usual tourist itinerary. It is standard practice - and quite rightly so - to take the dawn boat trip down the Ganges. In fact one doesn’t need a guide at all for this transcendent, wordless scene as the pink, then golden, dawn rays from the empty plains across the river fall horizontally onto the venerable old waterfront. The ghats and the temples glow and reflect timelessly back upon the river and the early morning dippers’ ripples deflect the reflections. “We made the usual trip up and down the river, seated in chairs under an awning on the deck of the usual commodious hand-propelled ark; for, of course, the palaces and temples would grow more and more beautiful every time one saw them, for that happens with all such things; also, I think one would not get tired of the bathers, nor their costumes, nor of their ingenuities in getting out of them and into them again without exposing too much bronze, nor of their devotional gesticulations and absorbed bead-tellings.”

Most of the “commodious arks” are still “hand-propelled” but I suppose it was just a matter of time until someone discovered the joys of the internal combustion engine. Of course they don’t fit some nice quiet, well-insulated, catalytic converted Japanese or Swedish diesel engine but an old outdoor thump-thump ex-generator you hear everywhere when there’s a power cut. The first time I heard one - and I was in the safety of our palace - I thought there was about to be a crash landing from the Indian Air Force. Steadily, inexorably the hand-propelled arcs are becoming the propeller-propelled - and pretty soon I suppose they’ll all have horns.

All that will wait for tomorrow’s dawn. Today though we will walk ten minutes further south, to beyond the second cremation ground at Harishchandra Ghat and then take an afternoon boat back down to Manikarnika Ghat to see the main cremation site from the river and then turn around back down south again in the twilight to see the nightly evening son-et-lumière at the midway Dasaswamedh Ghat.

Benares is the most auspicious place for Hindus to die and the holy Ganges the most auspicious river on which their ashes can be laid. After squeezing past the overcrowding in the alleys and flinching at the decibels on the roads the newcomer to Benares next notices the markedly aged population. One could say that death keeps the city alive: not only do the nearly-dead come here in anticipation of their demise but the recently widowed or widowered stay behind and await their turn. A large part of the mounds of litter in the streets and on the river is the detritus of death. With its “God’s waiting room” clientele it could easily be twinned with Venice, Florida or Eastbourne, Sussex but here the attitude to death is so completely different that comparisons soon wither in the smoke haze. Death here is not the end of the life but an end of a life - and ending this life here is a sensible precaution towards a better next life.

For better or worse, the cremation ghats hold an irresistible attraction for tourists. We foreigners can go for as long as our lives have been so far and never see a dead body and yet here within the space of an hour see a dozen - and in various stages of vaporization. They die here according to their means. I don’t mean to be flippant about death and dying, but here in Benares one can break down the Ganges-bound into four classes - almost into four castes - which Shailesh explains as we take the gruesome, unstoppable-watchable tour down-ghat.

The A-listers are cremated at Manikarnika Ghat. Piles of size-sorted logs sit on the ghat steps waiting their turn on the pyre. Reinforcements are piled high in barges tied up under the ghats. The pyres are laid out, half a dozen at a time, on two layers of stone ledges leading down to the water. Smoke drifts and billows in the sunlight, swirling around the temple spires. Hot cinders fly forth like confused fireflies. Teams of the low-caste doms bring a steady roster of bodies down to the shore on bamboos litters. The bodies are wrapped in brightly colored paper and ribbons, not unlike Christmas presents. Next the body, still on its litter, is shown the water’s edge, not for total immersion but for the relatives to splash the Ganges water onto the corpse. The body is then taken onto the pyre, the latter arranged in cross-stitch pattern about a dozen logs deep. The eldest son then undoes the many layers of shrouding to reach the bare face and then pours some urnfuls of Ganges water onto it. The male members of the family then walk seven times[36] around the pyre, sprinkle various seeds and ointments on it and then the eldest son lights the metaphorical blue touch paper and they all retire.

Photographing all this is a sensitive subject. On the one hand the family mourners all whisk out their mobile phones to photograph the open, watered face one last time immediately prior to - and then during - the lighting ceremony; on the other hand any tourist seen photographing the scene is swiftly told not to do so. It happens to me thus:

“No photo, no photo.”

“Oh, OK. But, why not? They photo...”

“Photo negative dead man’s soul no good.”

“Ah, but there is no negative, it’s digital.”

“No photo, no photo.”

I can see the point - it is a bit like gawping - but it’s hard not to photograph what, for us, is such an extraordinary yet matter-of-fact scene. Apart from the burning bodies and the attendant relatives and the busy, rag-wearing, dark doms there is the usual Indian farmyard pageant standing by: cows wander around the pyres grazing on discarded garlands, goats chomp on the trash, dogs sleep just feet away from the burning bodies, monkeys scratch and fidget, water buffalo wallow just upstream, crows fly and croak in and out, kite-hawks hover in and out of the spiraling smoke, dom children wander around barefoot in the smoldering ash and cowpats, puppies play with each other - all this as though death was the most natural thing in the world - which of course it is.

The same squeamishness about photography applies to looking and staring. I mean, how close is it polite to stand near a body-draped pyre, near somebody’s late mother, somebody’s late son? The Japanese tourists, who always wear face-masks in India anyway, have no compunction about walking right up to a pyre, practically to within prodding distance. The photography issue goes away when one is photographing from a boat, by the way, as it seems quite in order to stand up on board and snap away from the river. Shailesh says that is because the river is holy and so everything that happens on it is instantly forgiven. And, the heathen reflects, you get much better shots.

There is no mourning at the cremation as that has already taken place immediately after death and it is considered bad luck, reincarnation-wise, to mourn overtly at the time of cremation. After the fire is lit the family disperses and only the doms with their long and blackened bamboo poles remain to hasten the burning of the remains, prodding various limbs back into the fire and poking the fire to keep it going. Still, it takes a surprisingly long time - about two hours - until the ashes of flesh and wood are ready to be scooped up and emptied (nothing as ceremonial as scattered) into the river or, as Shailesh explains, back to the source, back to from whence we all came.

This A-list ghat is a big budget operation; it costs ten thousand rupees, about US$200, to be cremated here. It is run with seamless efficiency; in fact the unkind might suggest it is one of the very few efficient Indian undertakings. And like the undertakers back home the doms know how to charge. They say it needs nearly eight hundredweight of wood to be burned, whereas, as we shall see in the B-list ghat, it needs nothing like that. Then they have invented a story that sandalwood is the most auspicious wood and so of course that is extra. And then there’s the fire, as Twain noted: “The fire used is sacred, of course - for there is money in it. Ordinary fire is forbidden; there is no money in it. I was told that this sacred fire is all furnished by one person, and that he has a monopoly of it and charges a good price for it. Sometimes a rich mourner pays a thousand rupees for it. To get to paradise from India is an expensive thing. Every detail connected with the matter costs something, and helps to fatten a priest. I suppose it is quite safe to conclude that that fire-bug is in holy orders.”

The whole scene we see now is exactly as he would have seen it then. Actually I am surprised that he found the whole affair as distasteful as he did since, as we have seen, at the time he was a great champion of cremation.

It is a dismal business. The stokers did not sit down in idleness, but moved briskly about, punching up the fires with long poles, and now and then adding fuel. Sometimes they hoisted the half of a skeleton into the air, then slammed it down and beat it with the pole, breaking it up so that it would burn better. They hoisted skulls up in the same way and banged and battered them.

The sight was hard to bear; it would have been harder if the mourners had stayed to witness it. I had but a moderate desire to see a cremation, so it was soon satisfied. For sanitary reasons it would be well if cremation were universal; but this form is revolting, and not to be recommended. In all I saw nine corpses burned. I should not wish to see any more of it, unless I might select the parties.

Sita is as blasé as only the young can be but neither Gillian nor I find it nearly so gruesome as did our earlier visitor, and given an understanding of Hinduism and Shailesh’s running commentary it seems like a good inter-life career move for a rich and righteous Indian to take, given all the other options. I must admit my main concern is ecological as the tons of trees - and the wonton waste of wood built into the charging system - that must have to be chopped down to keep the pyres burning and the subsequent smoke arising is plainly too wasteful for a withered world. It sets one to thinking that there must be some kind of microwave version of cremation that could do the job just as well - and there is, just down river to where we heading.

So that’s the A-listers; the B-listers are cremated at Harishchandra Ghat near to where we started this rather ghoulish boat ride. As one is hand-propelled up river and up-ghat one is conscious for the first time that the smoke that one has been coming across for the last few days contains remnants of old flesh and bones too.

Drifting off Harishchandra Ghat it is immediately apparent that this is a far more low-key affair. There are no stone ledges, just banks of mud. Like Manikarnika, they cremate half a dozen at a time but the doms are also B-list, shuffling around aimlessly. The ceremonies at the water’s edge and on the pyres are haphazard - as are the corpses, some once loved in poverty and others as unloved in life as they now are in death. The farmyard contingent is lackluster too; there just aren’t the lavish pickings to be found here and so only the B-list cows and B-list goats clear the detritus and without much enthusiasm; the others don’t even bother to show. Shailesh reckons this is a thousand-rupee cremation and agrees with my assessment that there is room in the market, or along the ghats, for a middle way, for an A- or B+ cremation.

But if the gap between death’s smart ghat and death’s scruffy ghat seems too large we now see the same between the B- and the C-listers’ options. It’s all close by. Right behind the smoldering Harishchandra Ghat is a large, modern, shoddy circular construction on concrete stilts. It’s not designed to fit into the ancient surroundings and seems uncaring and bare-bricked in its duty as a municipal human incinerator, for that is what it is. A large sign on the back announces that this is the 200-rupee option. Shailesh says it is known locally as the Electric Ghat. It only runs once a day at dusk. There is a long ramp up to an open door. Corpses are taken up on bamboo litters and dumped in a bowl. You can tell it’s low-budget because here the bamboo is reused and doesn’t form part of the pyre. Come the time a switch is thrown, immense heat is generated, the extractor fans whirl and while the bodies vaporize dark grey smoke puffs out of the long galvanized chimney. The following morning at dusk when the remnants have cooled down in the night, doms empty the bowl from below and deposit the collective ashes in the holy river. Again, one can’t help feeling the gap in indignity is too large and that there should be B- and C+ options to more accurately reflect the cremation grading of the dead with the caste grading of the living.

Lastly come the D-listers who aren’t cremated at all but soaked and drowned into the next life. It all happens at Harishchandra Ghat, and Twain saw then what we see now: “They do not burn fakirs - those revered mendicants. They are so holy that they can get to their place without that sacrament, provided they be consigned to the consecrating river. We saw one carried to mid-stream and thrown overboard. He was sandwiched between two great slabs of stone.” Exactly that, except it’s not just fakirs these days but any destitute person, the unknown and the homeless. Here the doms wrap the corpse in left-over shrouds and tie a loop-knot around the neck. One then rows a boat out to mid-stream while another sits on the stern with his hand through the loop-knot, towing the still-floating corpse through the water like a reluctant water-skier. A slab of stone, tied onto the loop knot, sits on the stern and when the time is nigh the stern rider chucks the slab overboard and the corpse sinks, leaving behind only the a few lonely bubbles in exchange for a lonely life.

***

All this death is giving us a thirst and after we take our place among the flotilla watching the son-et-lumière, Golap, our highly skilled hand-propellist, leaps off the bow of our commodious ark and brings back some beer. Shailesh, being a good Pandit, declines - and he has seen it all before. Sita prefers Bollywood and heads off to find a cinema.

We say good-bye; it has been quite a day. We both doze off before the show ends but from what little I see I’m sure it is well done. The last memory is of Twain’s quote in The Calcutta Patriot two weeks later: “I think Benares is one of the most wonderful places I have ever seen. It struck me that a Westerner feels in Benares very much as an Oriental must feel when he is planted down in the middle of London. Everything is so strange, so utterly unlike the whole of one’s previous experience.”

Hinduism

It is a truism that foreigners either love India or loathe it. This is not a country from which one returns and tells friends: “Oh, I suppose it was alright.” Whether you love it or loathe it depends on how you react to chaos - and farmyards. Mark Twain and I clearly love it, and yet I can quite see why an equal number of people head screaming for the nearest airport, or in his case seaport; what to one person is happy, crazy, freewheeling, maximized, anarchic chaos is to another a gigantic urban-farmyard-cum-uncleaned-lavatory-cum-garbage dump where the animals have taken over and the chain doesn’t pull. India is not for the faint of heart nor mild of spirit nor weak of mind nor dull of sense nor correct of politic; it is a concurrent explosion of energy, contradictions, spontaneity, degradation, opportunity, hopelessness and vitality, a country without padding where a few hundred million have grabbed the twenty-first century by the whiskers and many more hundred million still tuck the nineteenth century into bed at night.

On one point though the love-it and loathe-it brigades agree - or at least they ask the same question. How can India, as a society, put up with itself? Anywhere else 1.2 plus billion people living cheek-by-jowl would be thinking of new ways to lay waste to each other and yet they all seem to rub along quite happily together. Why, when four of the ten richest people in the world are Indian, when the intermediary nouveaux riches are uniformly vulgarian and flauntatious and think the Indian tradition of philanthropy is a fancy word for extra-curricular leg-over, when the mass of the hoi polloi are destined to live in acute poverty, and many in down-dirty squalor, why with all this blatant injustice isn’t there a revolution? How come any of us can walk home at night, stepping over bodies sleeping on the sidewalks, knowing that even that thing around our wrist is worth enough to keep any of them going for six months, and do so without any fear of a dispossessed vagrant taking a pop at us? Why, given the sophistication and urbanity of the elite, are all the politicians in the world’s biggest democracy tribal embezzlers at best and outright gangsters at worst. How on earth do they put up with it all - and with each other?

The answer is that mainstay of Indian life, Hinduism. I carefully avoided putting the word “religion” in front of Hinduism as I sensed several thousand pedants reaching for their quills - and strictly speaking the pedants are right: Hinduism is not a religion in the sense that it has an all-powerful, all-knowing superhuman figure its followers must worship and obey. The problem is that there is no single word in English to describe what the Oxford dictionary has as a “diverse family of devotional and ascetic cults and philosophical schools, all sharing a belief in reincarnation and involving the worship of one or more of a large pantheon of gods and goddesses”. Fair enough, although “large” is a bit of an understatement but we’ll come to that later. In fact we are swimming in gloomy waters trying to define Hinduism in words at all as the whole point of the practice of treating with the pantheon is to take us beyond the limitation of words, beyond the subsequent differentiating formulation of subject/verb/object which affects our whole way of thinking, beyond our mental concepts restricted by time and space and into a transcendent sphere where we realize the godhead within us - and equally within all of us - and within everything we perceive.

And this surely is the answer to the foreigners’ question. These 1.2 billion souls living on top of each other are not 1.2 billion egos but 1.2 billion aspects of the same Consciousness. To harm one aspect-holder is to harm all aspect-holders, including oneself as a fellow aspect-holder.

For us foreigners the best-known part of Hinduism is karma which we have allied, philosophically, to the Golden Rule. In Hinduism karma goes further than that as it is an integral part of re-incarnation and to live by the laws of karma becomes simple common sense; man is not punished for his sins but by his sins. To sin is simply counterproductive, the spiritual equivalent of banging your head against a brick wall.

***

Like most visitors to India Mark Twain thought he should learn about Hinduism and like most visitors he made the mistake of trying to learn it as a series of facts - as we would learn the names and dates of the presidents or state capitals. I made the same mistake: I found something like “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hinduism” and got as far as page 5 before reaching for the drinks cabinet. We came to the same conclusion:

I should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of Hindoo theology, but the difficulties were too great, the matter was too intricate. Even the mere A, B, C of it is baffling.

There is a trinity - Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu - independent powers, apparently, though one cannot feel quite sure of that, because in one of the temples there is an image where an attempt has been made to concentrate the three in one person. The three have other names and plenty of them, and this makes confusion in one’s mind. The three have wives and the wives have several names, and this increases the confusion. There are children, the children have many names, and thus the confusion goes on and on. It is not worth while to try to get any grip upon the cloud of minor gods, there are too many of them.”

That is absolutely right; the Western, conditioned adult mind is soon way out of its depth. Apart from the 330 million gods and goddesses there are different god-teams and then different god-days, -weeks and -months. The next day Twain noted with some frustration that “The great god Vishnu has 108 names - 108 special ones - 108 peculiarly holy names and just for Sunday use only.” Someone forgot to tell him that Vishnu has at least 892 other names as do all the other major gods and goddesses, and their respective consorts and incarnations-as-children have thousands of names as well. Multilimbing as well as multinaming is the norm.

Then there are the chariots. The gods and goddesses each need a vehicle to transport them around the imagination. This is seldom what one would expect, so that Ganesha, part-man part-elephant, has for his transport not as one would expect a mammoth or juggernaut (another offshoot of Indian mythology) but a... mouse. One’s instinct is to look for parallels in our own classical mythology where gods are also omnipotent and immortal, but Hindu mythology is so convoluted by the fantastical that it makes the goings on of the Greek gods and demigods seem as simplistic as Robin Hood. It is truly - and truly meant to be - beyond the limitations of the day-to-day mind.

Unfortunately today the word “myth” has come to mean something that is untrue. The “Mythbusters”, claiming to unearth misconceptions, is a popular TV series; the phrase “urban myth” has come to mean a story that is widely held to be true but is actually untrue; myths are ripe for “debunking”. Exposed politicians and crooked bankers cry “It’s a myth!” when caught red-handed. A myth, as it was understood from the beginnings of knowledge until the Age of Reason, meant a story that helped explain the inexplicable. A myth by its very nature could not be, did not claim to be, “true”, as a fact is true; a myth only started where facts and emotions could not be explained. As Karl Gustav Jung discovered in his search for the soul, myths have always used deliberately fictitious motifs and like all good fiction have asked those “what-if?” questions that take us beyond what we like to think of as “ourselves” and gives us a glimpse of the Self in all.

Thanks to the work of Jung and Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong and others, the Western world is now re-evaluating the significance of mythology and Varanasi is a fine place to see mythology in action; and as they all point out, it needs to be in action to have any meaning. As Mark Twain and I discovered, mythology is not a psychology that the can be studied in the hope of reaching an intellectual conclusion. It needs doing -and from an early age so that it is just another part of life, a part of life that doesn’t see itself as myth at all. Doing it has advantages for the myth - it keeps it alive and evolving - and for the partakers of myth - it keeps them actively involved in the unexplained world, the very opposite to the fatalism of which the Indians are sometimes so wrongly accused.

I had the advantage of homestaying with an Indian family in Benares and could see all this where it was meant to be seen, in action. In the palace grounds were two temples, a large one to Shiva and a smaller one in the courtyard to Kali.

“Kali wards off the evil spirits,” explains my host Kashi, a 33-year-old Western-educated Bengali.

“A spirit guard dog,” I suggest.

“Yes, and a burglar guard dog too. If a thief enters the house and sees Kali looking at him he will run away. She is not to be upset,” he grins knowingly.

One can see how Kali - and Shiva in the larger temple - fit into family life. Kashi, his wife Bullbullee and two daughters, Kashica, five, and Misti, three, talk to them and about them as family members throughout the day.

“Don’t shout, Kali is resting.”

“Kashica, give some of that to Kali.”

“I’m leaving at three, Kali.”

“Sweep out around Shiva too.”

“We all hate the monsoon, Kali especially. So sweaty.”

“Kashica, light these for Shiva.”

They don’t have to stray far to feel the godly incarnations. The house behind has become a Buddhist[37] meditation and study centre. At the end of the alley is a house where Ganesha, using a broken tusk as a pen, took down dictation from Shiva and gave us the Ramayana. There is a temple to Ganesha outside the house and we see him fully decorated with red paint and yellow garlands, his ten arms arrayed in an arc behind his Buddha-style pot belly. The house where it all happened is right there/probably right there/possibly somewhere near/well, quite close, close enough that every year they have a 48-hour chantalong. There is a relay of two singers and a harmonium and tabla players; shifts change every... well whenever anyone new shows up. The whole neighborhood becomes involved in ferrying supplies back and forth and general encouragement. The lyricist had an easy time of it: the couplet “Sita Rama; Sita Rama” is just repeated over and over again for the two days alternating between the two singers. They have thoughtfully mounted a loudspeaker outside the front door so all around can join in the celebrations. Anywhere else in the world one would call time on the neighbors from hell, file for a restraining order, but here one somehow goes native - and it doesn’t seem to matter much any more.

At night various cows and goats stop by and chomp on discarded garlands. Thank heavens on the second day there is a power cut and I’m sure that, like me, all the neighbors rush to bed to catch up on their sleep with “Sita Rama; Sita Rama” still much on their minds.

Then every morning somewhere around 5.30 the house wakes up to the full hoopla from the communal Shiva temple just behind it. What a fantastic racket: bells of various hues, drums of various beats and chants of various prayers all ring together for ten minutes of early morning chaos; happy chaos - a state in which the worshippers, along with most of India, will spend the rest of the day. The temple has a regular turnover of worshippers throughout the day; most drop in for a few minutes, ring the bell, have a few words with Shiva and continue the day fortified by god-to-god contact.

For the last three hours there has been another party with what sounds like a mariachi band. Lots of bells and chanting; weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth this ain’t. I pop round to have a look-see. Twin four-year-old Brahmin boys are having their heads shaved, one of their rites of passage. They are all from Bombay but the uncle works in Delhi for Coca-Cola; “headquarters in Atlanta,” he says with pride. “My brother, their father, works for Electrolux in Mysore.” And they’ve come here to this Shiva temple hundreds of miles away for the birthday? “Yes, this is a special Shiva temple for Brahmins. And it’s not actually the boys’ birthday but the day nearest it which is astrologically auspicious, you see.”

All around the temple all day long is a market selling bits of bright cotton and string and scarves, bells, straw mats, coconut shells, incense and rice for the temple guests to buy as offerings. Worshipping - still not really the right word but pointing in the right direction - is lighthearted and joyful. By making the gods happy they are making themselves happy, for after all, are they not the same? Fun is the right word; and after a week of total immersion in Hinduism I would say above all the practice of it is fun, fun for family, fun for the nation, which brings us back to why they are not all at each others’ throats.

***

Time, methinks, to join in the fun. Accepting that the adult Western mind will never understand the theory of Hinduism it seems the best way forward is to join in the practice, to do the myth. My host Kashi leads me by the nose.

“You are a writer, isn’t it?” he asks.

“It’s kind of you to say so.”

“No, I mean that’s what you do. If I was a writer I would become friends with the goddess Saraswati.”

“Saraswati?”

“Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom and knowledge. And writers. And learning. At primary school in Bengal we used to start each day with incantations to Saraswati. In Bengal we also see her as Ganesha’s half brother. In Buddhism she is a guardian angel.”

“But I thought you said earlier that Ganesha was the god of writers.”

“No, he’s the god of writing not writers. Ganesha is a scribe.”

“Like a secretary?

“Yes, Saraswati is the creative force. She invented words.”

“And how will I know her?”

“That’s easy. She is white skinned and wears white clothes. She sits on a white water lily and besides her is always her vehicle, a white swan.”

“A vision in whiteness?”

“Yes. That’s also one of the reasons Hindu widows wear white, not black as yours do. They want wisdom in their older years. Normally she has four arms, one hand for a book of palm leaves for learning, another hand for a string of pearls or a vase for the love of giving wisdom. The other two hands are for a sitar. Sometimes each hand is for a Veda. That’s when she has eight arms. She is the goddess of all the arts.”

“And her consort?”

“Her consort is Brahma, the creator.”

“So she was consorted well?”

“Very well!”

A few moments later we are at a nearby temple to Saraswati. On the way over Kashi explained the rules of puja, the Hindu ritual in the temple. It wasn’t a long lecture; there are no rules. In fact you don’t even have to be in a temple. Sometimes you can talk to the Absolute through Saraswati directly, sometimes you may prefer to use a temple Brahmin. You can stay in the temple for one minute or sixty or all day. You can offer her gifts or keep your hands in your metaphorical pockets. You can talk to her, with her would be more accurate, silently or in a mumble or right out loud.

What is common practice though is to ring a bell suspended near the door as you enter the temple. This is to take the mind off the external sounds and help it turn inwards; like a sort of instant mantra. Kashi now lights some incense and waves it in front of the gilt-framed image of the goddess. The frame has copious amounts of garlands of marigolds draped over it. Around it lie random petals, rice grains, coconut shell shards, old incense sticks, camphor butts, orange slices, an unopened apple, boiled sweets (unwrapped) and a dozen lit candles.

Kashi says - and I repeat: “O goddess, O Saraswati, consort of creation, knower of the Vedas and fountain of knowledge, show us the powers we share, show us wisdom and true knowledge of the Absolute, find it in me and I will find it in you, we are as one with the One, unlimited, beyond conception. I will write as you will write, with creation and truth and love. Bless us together as one, O goddess, O Saraswati.”

***

I will leave it to readers to decide if Saraswati and I are working well together as future chapters unfold. We three musketeers are off to Calcutta in a couple of days and I will seek out a Saraswati temple and repeat the incantation; and also in Darjeeling after that. I just liked being brought out of “my” self, to make place for the “other”.

The last word - for now - on the “other” should rest with Albert Einstein: “To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of the devoutly religious.”

***

Before leaving Benares Mark Twain had an important engagement, arranged with some difficulty by the Rev. Parker: they were to meet one of India’s most renowned gurus of the time, Swami Sri Bhaskarananda Saraswati, as Twain said “a living god”. He held court in a small park now known as Anand Bagh, near Assi Ghat. The old ashram where they met still stands, now as a large, open-fronted, wooden and fluted columned shelter along the north side of the park. People use it to rest and enjoy the shade.

Twain was impressed:

Then Sri Saraswati came, and I saw him - that object of the worship of millions. We got along very well together, and I found him a most pleasant and friendly deity. Meeting him was a strange sensation, and thrilling. I wish I could feel it stream through my veins again.

He was tall and slender, indeed emaciated. He had a clean-cut and conspicuously intellectual face, and a deep and kindly eye. He looked many years older than he really was, but much study and meditation and fasting and prayer, with the arid life he had led as hermit and beggar, could account for that. He is wholly nude when he receives natives, of whatever rank they may be, but he had white cloth around his loins now, a concession to Mr. Parker’s European prejudices, no doubt.

He has attained what among the Hindoos is called the “state of perfection”. It is a state which other Hindoos reach by being born again and again, and over and over again into this world, through one re-incarnation after another - a tiresome long job covering centuries and decades of centuries. But in reaching perfection, he has escaped all that. He is no longer a part or a feature of this world; his substance has changed, all earthiness has departed out of it; he is utterly holy, utterly pure; nothing can desecrate this holiness or stain this purity; he is no longer of the earth, its concerns are matters foreign to him, its pains and griefs and troubles cannot reach him. When he dies, Nirvana is his; he will be absorbed into the substance of the Supreme Deity and be at peace forever. Throughout the long course he was perfecting himself in holy learning, and writing commentaries upon the sacred books. He was also meditating upon Brahma, and he does that now.

This god is comfortably housed, and yet modestly, all things considered, for if he wanted to live in a palace he would only need to speak and his worshipers would gladly build it. Rank is nothing to him, he being a god. To him all men are alike. He sees whom he pleases and denies himself to whom he pleases. Sometimes he sees a prince and denies himself to a pauper; at other times he receives the pauper and turns the prince away. However, he does not receive many of either class. He has to husband his time for his meditations.

They exchanged signed copies of their books. “I gave him a copy of Huckleberry Finn. I thought it might rest him up a little to mix it in along with his meditations on Brahma, for he looked tired, and I knew that if it didn’t do him any good it wouldn’t do him any harm.”[38]

***

Actually Mark Twain would have been somewhat familiar with Vedanta philosophy due to his knowledge of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays on the Bhagavad-Gita and the Transcendentalist movement. Emerson wrote that:

What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell.

The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact. This manner of looking at things, transfers every object in nature from an independent and anomalous position without there, into the consciousness that is everywhere.

***

On the train to Calcutta I ask Sita about another aspect of Hinduism that doesn’t immediately make sense, Hindu extremism.

She looks rather blank and Gillian mentions the word “oxymoron”.

“I know,” I say, “like Calvinistic licentiousness or Catholic austerity.”

“Or Islamic broadmindedness or Judaic self-doubt,” she suggests.

I remind Sita that, as far as I know, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist.[39]

“We learned at school he was an extremist who happened to be a Hindu - of sorts - rather than a Hindu extremist. You can’t be a Hindu extremist. Have you heard of Hindutva?”

“No.”

“It’s a kind of Indian fascism but instead of being political it is religious. It’s a Brahmin thing. They think they are a race apart and want to legalize the caste system and make everyone speak Sanskrit.”

“And are there many of them?” asks Gillian.

“No, I’ve never seen any,” says Sita. “They are in the papers but who isn’t? Like the Saffron Terror.”

The idea of Saffron Terror has been much in the news in India recently as it is mentioned in WikiLeaks. In July 2009 Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was hosting a lunch for Hilary Clinton and the US Ambassador Timothy Roemer. Clinton was told that “there may be a counter threat (to Pakistani-backed terrorism) from radicalized Hindu groups”. Somehow the term Saffron Terror crept into the conversation but as far as anyone knows it has crept no further.

“I never think about it,” says Sita, “but there are a billion plus people out there. Bound to be some scallies.”

21 Designed by Sir William Emerson of Victoria Memorial fame - more in Calcutta.

22 He would only have heard the uprising called the Indian Mutiny or Great Mutiny.

23 The Bombay Presidency’s Army saw only minor disturbances and the one from Madras (now Chennai) none at all.

24 A light two-person, one-horse carriage, often self-driven, from the Hindi taga - not to be confused with the nippier Victoria which was for one person and one horse - what we would call a sulky.

25 From “The Ballad of East and West”, written one year before Mark Twain’s visit.

26 A British foot soldier, so called from having to march in a squad around the parade ground.

27 Nothing to do with the children’s book character, Gollywog, but an acronym for Westernized Oriental Gentleman - and used disparagingly. It was originally coined by the British to describe the Eurasian Anglo-Indians, who in turn took it to refer to native Indians, forgetting the meaning behind the acronym.

28 Now a daily paper, The Pioneer, published from Lucknow.

29 The standard issue government car, the venerable Hindustan Motors Ambassador is based on the 1946 Morris Oxford III.

30 Sometimes one sees the English word “queue”, as in a sign saying Queue Here, lost in translation to mean “Push and shove, please use elbows”.

31 The Kumbh Mela takes place only when Jupiter enters Aquarius and the Sun enters Aries.

32 Sahib means “sir” or “master” (mem’sahib means “madam” or “mistress”).

33 Indian Railways timekeeping is as random as the life on its platform. All one can say is that they tend to leave the starting terminus on time - but further down the line... Later at Muzaffarpur we came across one that was 34 hours late. There is even a website devoted to averaging delays, www.indiarailinfo.com

34 “Coolie” sounds like a rather condescending way of describing a porter but it is what they call themselves, as in “coolie, sahib, coolie, very cheap”.

35 We are staying at my agent’s half-brother’s Ganges palace on the edge of town.

36 To awaken the seven safe havens for the soul to visit.

37 The Buddha is the ninth incarnation of Vishnu.

38 In the weekly English Courier Twain said: “We traded autographs. I said I had heard of him, and he said he had heard of me. Gods lie sometimes, I suspect.”

39 Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 as he was about to address a prayer meeting. The assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a Hindu nationalist who held Gandhi responsible for weakening India by “supporting” the existence of Pakistan.