Ananya Vajpeyi. Original photograph Gautam Menon

---

From Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities

Ananya Vajpeyi is a Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. An intellectual historian, political theorist and writer, she was educated in Delhi, Oxford, and Chicago. Her book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, the Crossword Award for Non-Fiction, the Tata First Book Prize for Non-Fiction. Apart from her scholarly work, she has published opinion, reportage, non-fiction, and short fiction in leading newspapers, magazines, and edited volumes in India and abroad. She is currently completing a book about the modern life of Sanskrit. Excerpted with permission, published by Women Unlimited Ink

Sudeep Sen

Kashi Karvat

I was in Banaras again.

This time, I had with me an urn with my mother’s ashes, and two cousins, both women, slightly younger than me. It was two days after my 46th birthday. We stayed in a small hotel, otherwise quite pleasant, except it had a direct view of the burning ghat, Manikarnika. We booked two rooms but in the end slept in one of them leaving the urn by itself in the other. I didn’t sleep much. The next morning, still somewhat cold in mid-February, we took a boat and went out on the Ganga. Take us towards Tulsi Ghat, I said to the boatman, but not close to the bank.

My father was a poet. My mother used to say to him, let’s go and live in Banaras, you can write your poetry by the banks of the Ganga, like Tulsidas. Your poems will be immortal. My father regarded such proposals with deep scepticism. What will you do? he asked her. I will keep a cow, she said, and watch the river go by and listen to you recite your poems, and put bananas in the courtyard of the Hanuman temple for the monkeys to partake of. We will grow old together and die in Kashi, and attain moksha.  My father was not enthusiastic. We can do that here, he said, at home.

In the event they did both die at home, scarcely three years apart. There wasn’t a cow, but my mother had two dogs she loved, and there were monkeys who came to raid her mango tree in the tiny garden in front of the house. I thought the least I could do for my mother was to scatter her ashes in the Ganga, at Tulsi Ghat, where she had wanted to live in an idyll of poetry with her beloved, my father. Rose petals, small floating diyas, ashes, into the flowing waters they went. Years later, I decided I would write a book about Tulsidas, the poet of the epic Ramcharitmanas, who lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and died in Banaras.

Our first trip to Banaras was when I was a young teenager, and my father was making a film for television about the newly announced Ganga Action Plan inaugurated by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The dirty river was to be cleaned up, at long last, with substantial funding from the central government. My father was going for a reconnaissance trip but my mother wanted him to take us along to see the holy city. It turned into a family holiday.

On this trip, I travelled with an urn. After letting go of my mother’s mortal remains, I sat in the gently bobbing boat on the quiet, lightly mist-covered waters of early morning, my two cousins wrapped up in shawls, saying nothing.

I recalled being on a boat with my parents and my father, at some point, tearing off his clothes and jumping into the river. He had grown up swimming in the Betwa, the river of Kannauj, his homeland. He swam with powerful strokes and I watched, transfixed. My mother, though, was impatient. She too stripped down and leapt in after him. Take me with you, she shouted, don’t leave me alone here! They were both in the river which has a powerful current, and is very deep. I took a photograph which I still have. She’s holding on to his arm, her cheek pressed to his shoulder, they’re both laughing and waving at me, while trying to stay afloat.

Thirty years later we took my father’s ashes to Prayag, and again my mother got out of the boat in the sandy flats of the Sangam and walked into the water, her sari and her long hair streaming behind her, her whole body taut and twisted with anguish. She looked like a mermaid, with seaweed hair. Take me with you, she shouted, don’t leave me alone here! Again I watched from the boat, not afraid. I knew their love would hold them aloft, keep their heads above water and carry them through to safety. This time I did not take a photo. Into the same river they went, he first, upstream, she later, downstream, with me as their witness. I sat in the boat in a reverie, transported from present death to past life, reversing the arrow of time.

In Banaras, the Ganga flows westward, as though trying to return to its distant source in the high Himalaya. Only later, past the city, does it resume its course east and south to the Bay of Bengal. This is called Kashi Karvat—The Turning at Kashi—the turning over that happens when we’re asleep and change sides without waking up, for a brief time. When death comes one turns from the future towards the past, like a sleeping person in the middle of the night, changing our perspective even though our eyes are closed. Perhaps we turn away from our nightmares and look to pleasant dreams. Or perhaps we just need to rest.

When we disembarked, my cousins and I, we went to Assi Ghat, which I knew well, and to the Ganges View hotel which had the colourful flowers of springtime blooming in potted plants on the terrace, and great views of the water and the city. I wasn’t myself after the morning’s painful rituals, so I forget if we had tea, maybe even breakfast. My mother gave birth to me and I sent her ashes on their last journey down the Ganga. I had been through the distressing immersion of my father’s ashes, and yet once again in letting my mother go, I was distraught at this asymmetry at the heart of our relationship as parent and child.

We went down to Assi and started to walk along the banks, watching pilgrims bathing, boats bobbing, birds gliding and skimming near the surface of the water, chants and temple bells and prayers wafting over the ghats. Dogs and cows and gulls. Dog shit, cowdung, bird droppings. Puja items—used diyas, oil-soaked cottonwool wicks burnt at one end, red and yellow mauli thread, incense sticks, marigolds plucked off their stems, small pots of clay or brass, sadhus of all descriptions, widows in white, urchins, hawkers, beggars, boatmen, pandits, pujaris, astrologers, shy women with their saris damp and their faces covered—slowly we traversed this mosaic of humanity, while my mother was carried away to the distant sea.

We arrived somewhere, I forget at which ghat. The sun was up. The morning mist had evaporated. Tulsi Ghat was left behind. A name floated to the top of my mind from the deep pools of childhood, like a buoy. Gai Ghat. That’s where I had stayed with my parents, long ago in another world. I want to go there, I told my cousins, to find the house where we stayed. It belonged to the Bhargav family, I recalled; they had a well-known printing press and bookshop and published a famous dictionary in Hindi and English, considered the standard at that time. I wondered if they were still there. Would they remember my father? Would the Bhargav patriarch still be alive?

My cousins wanted to go and explore the small lanes and shops of Banaras, away from the ghats. I took a boat alone to Gai Ghat. I climbed up the steps and entered a dark winding street, as though swimming up my mother’s birth canal, back to the source. There was nobody around as I wandered up slowly, or at least I don’t remember seeing anyone in my state of somnambulance. But I must have asked someone for the way to the Bhargav Haveli, which I found eventually.

No one lived there any more except a caretaker. It’s a huge palazzo with a pillared verandah running around a large central courtyard, rooms set back, that I remember filled with family members of at least three if not fourgenerations, women and children, elders, servants, cooks, a thriving household. In its current state of desuetude the place seemed derelict, haunted. The furniture and drapery and carpets were old and faded, filled with dust, reeking of mould.

That smell brought back, in a flash, a sunken private swimming pool that was either in the house or nearby inan adjacent building (a clubhouse?), where the women and girls of the family could swim in seclusion. I remember its water as freezing cold, and the ambient air as dank. Theproximity to the river was terrifying to my 14-year-old mind, as I imagined underground tunnels and floods, maybe creatures of the deep, fish and crocodiles and goodness knows what else pouring into the foundations of the house and washing it away. The kids of the family laughed at me for being such a city girl and a scaredy-cat.

[… … …]

I exchanged a few words with the caretaker, explaining the reason for my sudden visit and asking after the family—where had they gone, why was the house left unoccupied,did he remember my father, what about the printing press, but I don’t recall now what his answers were. That same morning I had sent my mother’s ashes on their final journey. I felt numb and suspended, as though the entire palazzo was underwater, with me and the caretaker in it, and there was no speaking possible, no sound that passed between us, except the profound, hushed roar of the river’s fathomless interior, its inexorable surge towards the distant delta in Bengal.

[… … …]