Romantics

Chapter 1 When I first came to Benares in the severe winter of 1989 I stayed in a crumbling riverside house. It is not the kind of place you can easily find anymore. Cut-price "Guest Houses" for Japanese tourists and German pastry shops now line the riverfront; touts at the railway station and airport are likely to lead you to the modern concrete and-glass hotels in the newer parts of the city. The new middle-class prosperity of India has at last come to Benares. This holiest of pilgrimage sites that Hindus for millennia have visited in order to attain liberation from the cycle of rebirths has grown into a noisy little commercial town. This is as it should be; one can't feel too sad about such changes. Benares-destroyed and rebuilt so many times during centuries of Muslim and British rule-is, the Hindus say, the abode of Shiva, the god of perpetual creation and destruction. The world constantly renews itself, and when you look at it that way, regret and nostalgia seem equally futile. The past does live on, in people as well as cities. I have only to look back on that winter in Benares to realize how hard it is to let go of it. It was pure luck that I should ask the pujari at the river side temple about cheap places to rent at the very moment Panditji came in with his offering of crushed withered marigolds. Panditji, a tiny, frail, courteous old musician, overheard our conversation. He saw me as a fellow Brahrnin who had fallen on hard times and he offered to help. With his oversized rubber flip-flops slapping loudly against the cobblestone paving, he led me through narrow winding alleys, past large-eyed cows and innumerable little shrines to Hanuman, to his house. We went up steep stairs, past two identical enclosed courtyards on the ground and first floors, on which opened a series of dark bare rooms, to a tiny room on the roof. Panditji, his white wrinkled hands fumbling with the large padlock and the even larger bolt, unlocked the door. I saw: sunlight streaming in through a small iron-barred window that looked out onto a temple courtyard; whitewashed walls, a cot with bare wooden boards, a writing table and straight-backed wicker chair; fluffs of dust on the rough stone floor. The room, Panditji said, could be mine for just Rs. 150, what he called "Indian" rent, meals not included. Oddly, I hardly ever spoke to Panditji again. He spent his days in a haze of opium under a pile of coarse wool blankets. In the evenings he would awaken sufficiently to give sitar lessons to American and European students-all identical with their long hair, tie-dyed shirts, and stubbly, emaciated, sunken-eyed look. I saw him occasionally, wearing a muslin dhoti and white Gandhi cap, carrying a pail of milk back to the house from the corner sweetshop, the skin on his exposed bony legs shriveled and slack, his sacred thread dangling from under his woolen vest. We nodded at each other, but never exchanged more than a word or two. All my dealings were confined to his arthritic wife, Mrs. Pandey, who lived in one of the dark bare rooms on the first floor with her family retainer, Shyam; she had long cut off all contact with her husband and claimed not to have gone downstairs for over fifteen years. The tenants lived in two small bedsitters on the roof, and I shared the view of the river, the sandy expanses beyond it, and the brooding city toward the north, the looming cupolas and minarets, the decaying palaces and pillared pavilions, with Miss West. Miss West (as she was called by the local shopkeepers-it was weeks later that I discovered her first name was Diana) was English, middle-aged, and, from what I could tell, well-to-do-she presumably paid the "foreign" rent for her room. The perception that Miss West with her clean high forehead, hazel eyes, slender neck, and straight blond hair, now flecked with gray, had been very beautiful at one time came to me only lMishra, Pankaj is the author of 'Romantics' with ISBN 9780375502743 and ISBN 0375502742.