From My Notebooks In 1977: Back to Bodhgaya via Benares
8th June 2025 |
My impromptu train ride to Delhi from Gaya to listen to Amjad Alikhan play his sarod in concert was frustrated when the concert was cancelled. Trying to make something of all the effort I decided to first take the train to Benares, before returning to Bodghaya. Benares, also called Varanasi, is the holiest of Indian cities on the Ganges.
Monday 14th (The Ides of March)
Peter Wells, the New Zealander met at Delhi on the train is an odd fish; super naïve and sophisticated at the same time. Very young, but with the impassivity of stone – no, less life and more despair than stone. Has been traveling a while– S.E Asia, USA, Mexico, Europe, etc. Worked in North Sea. Likes to take risks and defy authority. Says he enjoys it. Races bikes. Was studying biochemistry. Now determined to find out how cells respond to influence of moon, stars and planets. He strikes me as being in a state of shock. I’ve been thinking again about the disadvantages of too ambitious a first journey. One can be too young to travel? He got caught on a bus in Kabul at twenty degrees below with only his shirt. Has been ill ever since.
We wandered around Varanasi together. I was uneasy because I made every decision. He bought a shirt that didn’t suit him (bright tomato colour) and clung to me a bit.
The Ganges at Varanasi (Benares)
Tuesday 15th
The river boat at Varanasi brought one extremely shattering moment. I see something floating (so much floats; garlands, bits of wood, dead dogs, etc ) Something with a crow sitting on one of its protuberances. Closer, I thought oddly of the knees of a camel sticking up, a ginger colour and hairy. It was a corpse lying on its back, toes, knees and face protruding from water. Crow was sitting on nose and eating the face. Body in attitude of grotesque comfort, lying back in the Ganges. Very moving because it was the materialisation – incarnation – of all the feelings that underly Benares, as though the thought streams met and in the intensity of their interaction caused this body to appear briefly and float past. I thought immediately of Death in Venice – and now I think how often a time or place is infused with secret meanings which yet never manifest themselves. This corpse was the manifestation of Benares. As rare as it is commonplace.
[Peter Wells took a picture of the corpse and, much later, sent me a print which appears in the Penguin edition of Jupiter’s Travels.]
The train to Gaya – perhaps my best Indian train. Crowded, but I was lucky to have the rubber [What on earth was that!] to sit on. Elderly pilgrim couple squatting at my feet. She toothless, stoic, red sari, curled up incredibly small. Knotted into one corner of her sari, a 5 paise coin, which she carefully replaced by a sprinkling of chewing tobacco. He is in euphoric mood, shaven with long whisp of hair on the back of his skull. He has his canes and flags. Once or twice he and his companions let loose great shouts of exultation and incantation. As we rattled over the Ganges bridge, they tossed tiny blossoms from the window and he looked out at the river like one who was seeing his home for the last time, solemn, beyond tears or emotion, trying to fix the moment.
Wednesday 16th
First day of polling in the election. Janata flags everywhere. [Janata was a block of parties opposed to Indira Ghandi’s Congress Party]
Everything is slowing up as the heat grows. Bodhgaya is hotter, calmer. I take the cabin where the quiet tattooed German stayed with the American speaking Oriental girl (the one who had that amazingly trivial conversation with red-haired Deborah over the laundry one day). The second night, when I was less tired, grew into a cavern of sounds and feeling. The beetles were chewing away at the bamboo poles in the roof, sounding louder and more voracious with every hour. The mosquitoes’ whining was intense. I felt oppressed and close to death, felt sure I would die – not in a physical way, but a sort of death of the soul, maybe. Perhaps the ego can only flourish in a temperate climate, where the extremes of nature don’t constantly remind one of one’s fragility.
The East produced the Buddha.
The West replied with the armchair.
Thursday, 16th
Owls swooping into the neon light to snatch a frog from my feet.
Friday March 17th
[I met a Thai monk called Amray who persuaded me to move briefly to another vihar maintained by Nalanda monastery which was joined to the 2000-year-old university of the same name that had been in ruins since 1190. I knew nothing of it at the time. One might say what a wasted opportunity, but ignorance was a price I had to pay to travel through so much of the world.]
Arrived at about 10am. Warm greeting from Amray. The ‘prefect’ is a Laotian ex-monk. He fixes me up with a bed at one end of the prayer hall. Free lunch at the “Thai Kitchen.” Very hot during the day. Many mosquitoes. First evening at 8.30 lying on my bed as monks come in and chant the Sutras for half an hour. Pali is a very melodious language. Very long words, but seemingly succinct. The work of the Institute is carried out in English and Pali. The prefect is very scornful of it. There are three hundred students on the rolls, but only a handful turn up. Lots of them are not even in India. They learn lumps of Pali scripture by heart and get their degree (MA) which is hardly worth anything in reality. Both electricity and water fail frequently.
Reading Miller raises a sympathetic storm in my mind as I stroll round the “cloister,” but the memory fades. Stars are brilliant.
Dogs are an important part of society and in their bestiality and trivial tempers seem to be there expressly to remind us of the perils of bad Karma.
Actually, on another occasion, observing birds, it seems to me that this whole system of grading species according to superiority is a blatant example of the human ego trip.
What would be so terrible about being born a bird or an animal. Actually, the concept is absurd.
What eagle in its right mind would want to be born into the slums of Los Angeles? One hopes that human beings had more dignity in the Buddha’s time.
In afternoon I take Amray to Bihar Sharif [about 50 km away] to get his tax clearance form. It’s a great test of equanimity. Two hours in the office while a Brahmin with a palsied hand and a face engraved with counterfeit cares, fiddles with papers. Two assistants take a tea over the road and buy me one. Talk quite nicely to me. Afterwards I watch him (the assistant) struggling to talk with his lower lip cupped to stop the betel juice from running over onto his paperwork.
[After a few days I left to make my way to Calcutta via Ranchi, where I stopped to have lunch in a relatively expensive restaurant. The food gave me dysentery and I was forced to stop and squat in a field, where I wrote this Ode to Ranchi water.]
The food in Bihar is rather bizarre
You should not stray far after lunch in Bihar
Not even as far as the local bazaar
For none can outrun the food in Bihar