This chapter is about three places and one river. Our last few days in India were spent in Rishikesh where the Ganges flows out of the mountains and onto the plains. On the way there we stayed by its tributary, the Yamuna, outside Delhi, and also spent a few memorable days on the Ganges at Varanasi, the holy city.
It occurred to me that the river is the link that ties these places together in my story. But I look at a map and see that the drainage basin (why isn’t there a more poetic word for this?) of the Ganges is massive. The outflow of the lake at Pokhara, the Marsyangdi and the Kali Kandaki rivers around Annapurna, the snow-melt and ice-melt of the Everest region, the Yamuna river that flows past Delhi and through Agra, all flow into the Ganges. Half the places we went to in India and all the places we went to in Nepal are in the Ganges catchment. It’s big.
On February 3rd, 2010 I wrote this blog post:
Train from Jodhpur to Delhi, 10pm > 11am overnight sleeper. A man snoring like some blobby monster or a pig drowning or maybe a walrus. Loud, varied, continuous blubbery wet snoring. There are 64 people in this 3 tier sleeper carriage; one awful loud snorer, 63 plotting murder. Fortunately he gets out at Jaipur at 5am.
We arrive in Delhi and stay at the Tibetan colony, north of the city. Monks with maroon robes and shaved heads. A rooftop view of allotments running down to the river, scrub and reedbeds and woods on the far bank. We go for a walk across the Yamuna River on a pontoon bridge. The water is black, the colour and very nearly the consistency of used engine oil. Completely opaque. It smells bad. In the woods on the other side we see deer.
From the rooftop in the morning I see a three-quarter moon reflected in the putrid river. A sickly beauty. No, just sickly, I think.
When we looked down on the Yamuna we saw roughly built shelters of poor people close to its banks. In the very hot weather of summer the smell must be... but I don’t think there can be a word for it. The foul Yamuna flows into the Ganges. And further downstream at Varanasi 200 million litres of untreated human sewage enter the river every day. But the Ganges is, to Indians, both pure and purifying. Not symbolically but literally pure. That’s just how it is.
We flew from Delhi to Varanasi. Looking out of the window to the north we saw strange clouds with unlikely shapes to them. They were not clouds but mountains as high as clouds, their peaks at an aircraft’s cruising height. The Himalayas.
Outside Varanasi airport we were told that there was no bus to the town; we needed to take a taxi. A few minutes later we were in a taxi in heavy traffic, surrounded by buses going our way. Never mind. The taxi took us to Assi Ghat and we found a very cheap hotel overlooking the river. We climbed up onto the roof and took in the view. I think we knew that Varanasi was a foul holy city on a foul holy river. Nobody told us that it was beautiful but it is; viewed from a rooftop in the morning or evening light it’s a magical place. From Flic’s journal:
It took a while driving through crowded streets to get to Assi Ghat. There we got to the river, a great expanse of water, grey not black, sandy opposite shore, even a beach. Beautiful old buildings line the shore, it’s peaceful and quiet, we walk along with our rucksacks until we find a hotel with the right specifications – a rooftop restaurant and view over the river. The room is a bit grotty but it’s got a loo and shower room. As we got up so early this morning we both fall asleep.
Next morning I woke feeling excited and we got up early and went out along the ghats and walked as the sun rose over the boats, people praying in lots of ways, pouring water over their heads, burning incense, doing yoga, lots of beggars. We went along a street, people sitting on sacks being given ladlefuls of green mushy food on newspaper plates, they eat with their fingers, right hand only. Others sat behind baskets of vegetables, cabbages, radishes, potatoes, holding out their dark dirty hands. People are desperate to sell something – hand massage – they grab your hand as you pass, haircut? Some are having their heads shaved, long hair falling to the ground. People will do anything. Some guy covered in white paint, looks like a Westerner, swinging a candle-holder all lit, dancing, standing on one leg in the dawn.
On the same morning walk I made a note of seeing marigold vendors, beggars, outdoor barbers, copulating monkeys, washermen and washerwomen, holymen, fishermen, conmen, goats, cows and water buffalos, corpses on funeral fires, people bathing, and boys playing cricket.
There are more than eighty ghats stretching perhaps for a mile along the river bank. They are stone embankments with steps leading down to the river and are designated either for bathing or cremation. At the bathing ghats pilgrims perform ritual ablutions, ducking their heads and scooping up palmfulls of water, holding them up to the sky and muttering prayers. At the burning ghats corpses are brought down on decorated biers and carried several times around a great pile of wood before cremation. There is a constant traffic of corpses and mourners and timber being carried onto the ghats. Behind the ghats are temples and shrines, hotels and cheap accommodation for pilgrims.
We spent our few days walking up and down the river bank, being asked a thousand times if we wanted a boat ride and hassled by beggars and vendors of postcards. Other people, often children, sold little leaf boats bearing candles and offerings to be set on the water. We took a ride in one of the rowing boats two or three times, crossing the river to look at the muddy, sandy beach on the far shore, looking at the city from the water, or simply when we were tired to be ferried back to our hotel.
Varanasi is India at its best and worst, at its most extraordinary and colourful and at its dirtiest. There is no end of hustle and bustle and hassle. After a few days we had had enough. We went to the station and got a train towards the border with Nepal. We loved and, it must be said, hated India but we would never regret having spent time there. We decided that we would not be coming back again.
Some weeks later we were staying by the lake in Pokhara and still had a little time left before catching our flight home via Delhi. I suppose we began to get bored. We went back to India and stayed by the Ganges again, but this time alongside a very different stretch of the river.
My blog post for March 6th, 2010:
Rishikesh. We got here last night after a 15 hour journey from Kathmandu which included the dodgiest taxi ride in the dark that you can imagine. We were forced off the road twice by oncoming cars. Loads of vehicles had no lights at all. There were lots of water-buffalo towing cart-loads of sugar cane to the distilleries, camels looming, unlit, out of the dark, huge lorries and overloaded buses and more. But now we’re here and it’s fun as Hindu holy places tend to be. There are Sadhus and lots of devout but jolly Indian pilgrims, some tourists and some Western holy-hippies. The Indian tourists stare at us and we try not to stare back. The Ganges comes out of the mountains and onto the plains right here in front of our eyes. People bathe and shiver in the glacier-melt-blue cold water and scatter petals and feed monkeys and so on...
On the edge of Rishikesh a suspension footbridge called Lakshman Jhula takes you across the river to a small area of houses and temples and cheap hotels squashed between the river and a steep slope clad in jungle. We stayed here, in a simple guesthouse right on the river bank. Upstream there were a few buildings and then only the hills, the trees and the river rushing among rocks and sandbanks. Downstream we could see a large multi-storey temple that looked like it was built in the sixties or seventies, other smaller temples, and the bridge, busy with pilgrims, a few tourists, one or two motorbikes, some monkeys and the occasional cow. Opposite us the bank was steep and sandy. A hermit or holy man lived there in a rough shelter built against a boulder. A tattered flag by his hovel was blown downstream in the early mornings as the wind came off the hills; then the wind changed direction and the flag flew the other way for the rest of the day.
We found that we could explore up the river and find places to swim. The river was powerful but there were little beaches and small areas of still water among the rocks. Locals had painted signs in English explaining that the half-naked foreigners sunbathing and swimming in their holy river were a source of deep offence. On the other hand young men would come out from town on motorbikes to stare at the Western women. We tried to go a little further upstream away from other people.
The first time we went to swim there I found that my illness made it too difficult to get changed; I didn’t have enough control of my arms and legs. It was a hot afternoon and I wanted to swim like everyone else. It was the first time this had happened to me and I felt bitter. But the next time we were there I found that I could get my clothes off. That’s how it is with Parkinson’s; you can do things but not necessarily right now. You have to be patient.
We explored further upstream one day searching for a waterfall on a tributary of the river. We talked to a charming woman who came originally from south India but lived in Canada. She had trained as a dentist but had moved into alternative therapies. She sounded so convincing for a while but I never did follow her advice for the treatment of my illness. It involved drinking my own urine. It is a gift from God, she said. Credulity is not one of my strong points.
There are a great number of beggars in Rishikesh. Our idea about people poor enough and desperate enough to spend their days at the side of the road with their hands out is very simple. We give them money. Still it was difficult to carry enough small change to get us through the day and we couldn’t give to everyone. But one morning we were walking along a shady path under the trees in a quiet area downstream of our accommodation and we met a personable young man with only one leg. We sat down with him and listened to his story. He had been involved in an accident and was now unable to find work. He explained that he was saving up for an artificial limb and told us how much it would cost. We, of course, handed him some money, the equivalent of five pounds or so. Five pounds! That’s very big money in India. We realised afterwards that he only needed to meet people like us two or three times a week to live quite comfortably. He was on to a good thing and I think he was quite unlikely to ever buy that new leg. It would be the loss of his livelihood.
We took a trip from Rishikesh to Mussoorie and stayed a couple of nights. Mussoorie is an old hill station and as such is pretty weird. It’s a town developed by the British colonial rulers as somewhere to escape from the heat of the plains. The main promenade is known, to this day, as the Mall. It is said that there were signs along the Mall bearing the words Indians and Dogs not Allowed during British rule. Now it’s not a place that is attractive to foreigners like us but is very popular with Indian tourists and so, and this is the weird twist, all the shop signs are in English. More than that, and weirder, is the fact that cafés sell the most appalling English food. We had the worst sausage, egg and chips imaginable.
We walked around looking at the hazy views of the distant Himalayas and at the amusement arcades and souvenir shops. We stopped to watch a march of young Tibetan women. There is a small expatriate Tibetan community here and in other towns nearby and it turned out to be Fifty-first National Tibetan Women Uprising Day. I got my camera out but it seemed wrong to take a picture. This was serious. The women were mostly sturdy teenage school-girls, impassioned, chanting slogans in English and Hindi, China, out of Tibet, China, out of Tibet. Both Flic and I were moved in a way I can’t explain. Later on we wandered into an aquarium and then through the exit into the foyer of a large restaurant in the same building. The marchers came up and stopped outside, facing us as we looked out of the window. They were chanting again, looking stern, almost angry. It took us a moment to understand. The shouts grew louder and I realised that we were standing in the entrance of a Chinese restaurant. We left, quite quickly, and by another door.
We stayed in Mussoorie in a cheap hotel; a timber building with a corrugated tin roof, like many of the buildings there. After we had moved from our lilac and chocolate coloured room to another with similar paintwork but no mouse nest in the wardrobe we had an encounter with a monkey. Flic had returned from the local bookshop with a book entitled Being Indian. She told me that she had slipped quietly past a couple of monkeys on the balcony and I was concerned that I had left my shoes out there. We opened the door and there were my two shoes, one where I had left it, the other in the hand of a small brown monkey standing at the end of the balcony. I acted swiftly, grabbing Flic’s new book out of her hand and throwing it at the monkey. He dropped the shoe and made off up onto the roof with the book. It took some time to get it back. The guys running the hotel chased around on the roof for a while and eventually found the book abandoned on the terrace at the other side of the hotel. I guess the monkey had read that one before.
We took a bus out to Kempty Falls. Flic wrote: I wanted to go on a tour bus to some waterfalls. Richard warned me that it would be awful but I still wanted to go. Richard felt very ill but he came on the bus with me. The waterfalls were ruined in an Indian way. There was concrete everywhere, lots of shops and disco music. I remember the bathing and boating pools, the later complete with plastic swan-shaped pedalo boats, and also the concrete dinosaurs and the disco music, played loud enough to be heard over the sound of gushing water. We walked down and down away from the crowds in an effort to find somewhere quiet to swim on our own. We got away from the people but not from the rubbish. It was, as I predicted, awful. But the natural beauty was so comprehensively wrecked that it was interesting and almost fun. The Indians leaping about like ten year olds in the water were certainly joyful and daft in a way that adults in other parts of the world can’t match. And there were other waterfalls around Rishikesh that weren’t spoiled. We went to one of them another day.
On our way to Rishikesh in the dark Flic and I had been on the last leg of a very long journey. We were very tired and dropped off to sleep from time to time. Late at night we dreamed that we were passing along the edge of a town so festooned with coloured lights as to be beyond belief or imagination. If there was a city of one hundred funfairs this was it, here, in India, on the road to Rishikesh, in our dream. How unusual, I hear you say, that two people should dream the same dream. Simultaneously! I admit that it seems unlikely but there can be no other explanation. Imagine the Blackpool lights ten times over, no a dozen times, twenty times over. Could there really be such a place on the plains of north India?
Well, okay, there is Haridwar, the seventh most holy place in Hinduism, and the gaudiest, glitziest holy place in the world’s gaudiest, glitziest religion. The place where on January 14th, over a million pilgrims bathed in the Ganges at the start of the three month long bathing festival, the Kumbh Mela. Perhaps that was it. When we got back from Mussoorie the pilgrims from Haridwar were visiting nearby Rishikesh in increasing numbers as we got close to another of the big-time auspicious bathing days when the river would turn to nectar.
We decided to go to Haridwar, but not on the busiest day. It was March by now and India was getting hotter and hotter. The thought of those crowds in that heat was too much. Meanwhile Rishikesh was getting more pilgrims. They came from all over India and we could recognise some of them by their dress. There were certainly some from places in Rajasthan that we had visited. And there were others dark enough to be from south India and of a caste that traditionally wore red baseball caps. Some of the pilgrims went barefoot. Some of them carried their belongings on their heads. They were happy people, seriously devout but having a good time too. They didn’t mind when Flic asked if she could take their pictures.
On the day before the big-time bathing day we visited Haridwar. The river there is much wider and faster flowing and somewhat canalised. It doesn’t have the natural feel of Rishikesh or Varanasi. Along the concrete banks and across the bridges chains hang into the water for people to catch onto if they get carried away by the current. On the way into town we passed huge billboards advertising a host of different gurus. We went to see the enormous marquees where they speak to the faithful and the fields of tents put up to accommodate everybody. We saw lots of police and stewards in hi-vis jackets, lots of devout pilgrims, of course, and quite a few Sadhus in orange and saffron robes. Imagine a dozen big evangelical revivalist meetings taking place in a tacky holiday resort but with more people and more colour and more heat. That’s Haridwar. We didn’t stay very long.
On one of our last mornings in Rishikesh we set off to visit the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi where the Beatles stayed in 1968. We walked past the multi-tiered concrete temple with its pilgrims pacing around the balconies ringing bells, lighting candles and saying prayers. We walked past the sculptures of six-armed figures standing on crocodiles and black faced, tongue-rotting, cross-eyed squat monsters, as Flic described them, adding the words, how can people worship these? We walked on past cripples and beggars and pilgrims and a Western woman trying to befriend a rather large monkey. We carried on past the tourist shops and the bathing ghats and the little corrugated tin shacks on the edge of town.
Eventually we came to the place where the Ganges broadens out and flows shallow among rocks and over pebbles. On one bank the land rose gently to the main new part of town. On the other bank was a steep hillside covered in sub-tropical forest, almost jungle. At the very edge of this wilderness we found the derelict ashram, fenced off with netting and barbed wire. We discovered a place where we could scramble over the fence and went in to explore.
The main buildings were flat-roofed constructions of concrete and brick with zigzag balustrades along the balconies and yellow paint peeling off crumbling plaster. It looked like a 1960s holiday camp, abandoned long ago and overgrown with trees and flowering shrubs and creepers (in fact Ringo Star had described it at the time as a spiritual Butlins). Dotted around and about were little two-storey circular concrete buildings faced with pebbles. They looked like tacky copies of the stone beehive huts of monastic settlements on the west coast of Ireland. There were monkeys in the trees, exotic insects in the air, and through gaps in the vegetation we could see the blue-grey water of the Ganges flowing past below us. The place was seedy, defunct, atmospheric and almost beautiful. We clambered about and explored for quite a while. I liked it there.
I tried to imagine it as it had been, with the charismatic guru casting his spell over rich, spaced out rock stars and celebrities. Lennon, McCartney and George Harrison with their acoustic guitars, being taught to fingerpick by Donovan, and coming up with songs that would eventually appear on the White Album and Abbey Road. Songs with titles like, Why Don’t We Do it in the Road, Sexy Sadie and Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and my Monkey.