14 Chapter 14. From Agra to Benares

Much has been written about Indian train stations, most famously by Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). My experience of New Delhi’s train station echoes other vivid descriptions of a community of desperate outcasts living in near-permanent isolation from the greater city. People—men, women, and children—slept amid soiled blankets and sheets on the side of train tracks. When not sleeping, the huddled masses milled about, waiting for trains to arrive. When they did, a hundred hands would be suddenly thrust upwards toward the train windows, sometimes bearing food and trinkets, but more often simply begging. The noise emanating from the makeshift community was loud and incessant; the smells of curried food being cooked on open flames equally so. Life along the tracks was also dangerous. Our train to New Delhi arrived an hour late because, as we learned, someone had been killed on the track.

Seventy kilometres from New Delhi lies Vrindavan, the town of Krishna’s birth and thus the locus of his worship and a long-standing site of pilgrimage that, in 1967, became the centre of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. In 1975, the year before my journey, the Hare Krishnas established a temple in Vrindavan and the city soon became an assemblage of other “temples, ashrams, and dharmshalas,” attracting a large swath of Western devotees.¹ Bruce Shore, who went to Vrindavan in 1976, said his impression was that Indians viewed the Hare Krishna disciples as “only dressing the part, as triflers.” But the faux acolytes kept coming.²

I was not interested in exploring ersatz religious experiences, so I did not disembark in Vrindavan with the pilgrims who had journeyed with me. Like many others who made the journey to India, I enjoyed simply the sensory thrill of being free to walk through teeming cities, visiting ancient and revered temples, seeing different peoples, and sometimes smoking pot or hash.

Agra is only a two-hour train ride from New Delhi. My notes suggest I was ill and ill-disposed at the time, still taking my course of antibiotics, still fatigued. The endless arguments with rickshaw drivers and quibbling with street sellers and storekeepers over everything also wore on me. My hotel room became my only safe haven, but not even that proved to be an entirely safe space, for then I was alone with my thoughts, which posed a different kind of threat. I was reading too much Plato and Hesse and books about Hinduism and longing too much for my Swiss girlfriend, who as far as I knew was now in Zambia working with the aid mission. When awake, I felt depressed; when sleeping, I was beset by dreams of unresolved conflicts. I was, in a word, a mess, which no doubt coloured my lack of appreciation for the Taj Mahal upon arrival. It was, I intoned, beautiful and exquisite, “as perfect as anything mankind could build, a testament to the skilled craftsmen,” yet it left me “strangely unmoved”: it was too perfect. Despite my disappointment, I stayed in Agra and over the next three days I was there, my mood steadily improved so that by the time I left for Benares, I was genuinely excited about getting there.

I had first heard of the ancient city as a youth from some of the many books about history and world cultures that graced our home, supplemented by National Geographic magazines. Like many Westerners on the road, I had also read Hesse’s Siddhartha, his account of the life of the Buddha, who is reputed to have given his first sermon at Sarnath, not far north of the city.

After arriving in Benares, I found a second-floor room at the New Quality Hotel. “I have a hardwood bed,” I wrote,

with a canopy for a fly net and mirrors at both ends, but with so many age spots as to be unusable. There is a table, three chairs, and another bed. A large, panelled door, with side windows, opens out on to a balcony, but it is locked and bolted. My windows look in at an office of what I surmise to be barristers.

Another panel of doors opens up beside my bed but going where I know not. They are also locked and bolted. There is a large window, garish green in colour, again locked and bolted, and another small window that is boarded.

Down the hallway, around a balcony that cordoned a courtyard, there was a toilet that emitted a frightful stench. The water from the taps was grey. As always, there were mice. A temple, built into the hotel, or I should say, around which the hotel was built, stretched from the second to the third floors.

It was still early, so I took to exploring the neighbourhood a bit more. Not far from the hotel I found a small café, which I later realized was the place the balding servant at the hotel would go when I, or another guest, asked for a Coke. Back in my room, I could hear the tinkle of a rickshaw and the incessant noise of fighting dogs. Then a whistle, followed by silence.

In the morning, I took a short walk to the Ganges River. Religion formed part and parcel of everyday life in Benares, and that sense of easy unity among the disparate elements of life seemed to flow through everything. Music joined with laughter and sorrow, by day and by night. I passed by one of the two ghats—wide flights of steps leading down to the river’s edge—at which bodies are cremated, fires blazing constantly, day and night. I lingered, and when I finally took my leave of that place, it was with an already familiar sense of oneness, even in death, as though the dead were merely entering a new day in a new place. At the same time, even in death there is a class element. Wealthy families can afford to include significant quantities of richly fragrant sandalwood in funeral pyres, whereas the less fortunate must content themselves with corkwood or mango wood.

Later in the day, I took a ride in a rowboat, accompanied by a boy of sixteen and the oarsman. The boy spoke fair English and was hoping that I would go to see his father’s brocades. As we oared out into the river, I gazed back at the intricately carved towers of temples along the banks, silently absorbing the panoramic view:

There were small boats tied to the shore. Further out, two fishermen sat at ease in the water, their net draped over the side. We rowed on to the burning place where the fires were high and four bodies, draped in orange and red silk, waited their turn to be bathed. The young boy and I disembarked while our oarsman stayed. I followed the boy up a winding street to his father’s shop, yet I saw no brocades or other wares on sale. Unsure what its business was, I decided not to enter and returned instead to the boat. We rowed further down the shore, past a temple sinking slowly into the Ganges. During monsoon season the waters are very high, often reaching well up into the temples, and the burning place must be moved. But as I saw it now, I thought it might be the most elegant and picturesque shoreline I had ever seen.

On the way back, my eyes rested on the serene picture of the burnings before me. There seemed to be something medieval, holy, and commonplace all at once about the proceedings. In the water beside the boat, black chards of ash and garlands of orange and red flowers floated by. We pulled up once for the young chap to relieve himself, then moved on again to the mooring where I’d first boarded. An Australian couple had rented a houseboat there and wondered if I was interested in staying with them. I declined, as I was leaving in two days.

After some brief haggling, I paid the oarsman two rupees, said my goodbyes, and walked away, up a flight of steps that were obscured by sand. Having reached the plateau at the end of the stairs, I looked back. A ring of tour boats, houseboats, and rowboats clung to the riverbank like a garland in the waning spans of the evening.

A couple of children called out “Hello, mister!” as I crossed a busy market street, and a man tried to entice me to come to his house to view his wares. But I’d had enough for the day, so I declined the invitation and made my way back to the hotel, stopping only at a shop where a family was polishing agate bowls and pipes. Then I returned to sidestepping rickshaws and pedestrians. At the hotel, I dragged my body up the stairs, unlocked the door to my room, and collapsed on the bed.

My collapse was likely due to the ongoing effects of amoebic dysentery. It is a simple fact that anyone travelling to India then, and even in some parts now, will become ill. As poet Mike Ramsden wrote, “bowels tend to dominate the day.”³ Many travellers adopted elaborate measures, some fantastical, to escape illness. Henry Hamilton and Alastair Harper cooked meals in a pressure cooker, avoided local eateries and restaurants, and used chlorine tablets to sterilize water.⁴ Bruce Shore and Brenda Grant adopted a strictly vegetarian diet, while Ernest ate only “hard boiled eggs with shells that weren’t cracked, and melons that we sliced with knives sterilized with candles.”

Despite such precautions, illness was common, for which travellers readily exchanged folk remedies. One oft-repeated remedy for diarrhea was the “Coca-Cola cure,” the theory being that if soda could corrode metal, it could also kill any stomach invaders. When he got sick in Quetta, Don Skelton “just drank tons and tons of ginger ale for a couple days.”

The intensity of any illness ranged from mild or moderate, but manageable, to serious enough to require antibiotics and possibly hospital care. Fortunately, my illness was now on the mild to moderate end of the scale, and so, on November 25, two weeks after arriving in Benares, I took the bus to Bombay, still ill but on the mend.

1. Charles R. Brooks, The Hare Krishnas in India, 8. A page later, Brooks writes that the priests at the Krishna-Balaram temple “are unmistakably non-Indian,” the head priest being French, the temple manager American, and the Brahman cook English.

2. David Lane, who travelled overland to India in 1972, scathingly described the acolytes as wealthy people trying to copy the Beatles visiting the Maharishi “or who went to ashrams to hang out and pick up chicks.”

3. Mike Ramsden, Road to Kabul, 24.

4. On a somewhat comical note, on an earlier trip in 1973 I met a young man in southern Italy who said he took a chlorine tablet every day so as to be protected against contaminated water. One can only wonder about the condition of his stomach lining.