Writers of the Valley| Benaras.2

Imagine all the colors that you have ever seen in your life or imagined to exist. Orange, peacock blue, the brightest ochre.

Now imagine all of those colors coming together in a crescendo that God himself wouldn’t have expected to turn out as maddening as it has.

That, and more, is Benaras.

But for me, you were an escape. A phantom.

What started as a fantasy had become a quiet obsession. Dreams, like wounds and anger, when embellished with longing, inaction and time can bloom into a completely spectacular proportion, a scale at which reasoning and logic don’t hold any chance in front of it.

It was a chance, the way I had come across you. A warm-hued watercolor of the ghats. A cliché scene now that I think of it, and a cliché is what everybody has limited you to. Those powerful pictures of the burning ghats or the glorious grand lamps of the evening aarti. But this one was different. The haziness and uncertainties of the watercolor, painted with the artist’s own nightmares held back your secrets and allowed me to form stories of my own. Which is what you have done for thousands of years and millions of people. So many stories people have crafted with you that I wonder if you are made of people, or of the tiny tiny stories that each of us come and write with you.

Here, I offer you one of mine.

Disturbed, depressed and slightly delirious, I wonder if maybe this holy land would give me what it promised all the other, dead or alive, nirvana, a sense of peace. Hope.

But mostly, what I am looking for was an escape.

So I sneak out of my hostel, wrapped up in my cozy jacket meandering the alleys, the ‘galis’ of Benaras, the width of which I measured by outstretching my arms. I totter down to the mighty Ganges, which has pulled people towards her over the millennia. In the place older than time itself, I find myself a spot and sit down on the steps waiting for the sun to unfold the magic, the brilliance that never gets old.

As I sit there, holding my guard against the boatmen pestering me every ten minutes to take that sunrise boat-ride, I roll a cigarette, open my diary and think maybe, just maybe inspiration will strike as I inhale the misty morning.

A boatman, who has been watching me for a while, starts walking towards me.

I really don’t want to say for the hundredth time that I don’t want to do the darn boat ride. I determinedly ignore him as he stands there.

However, his opening statement completely takes me off guard,

“Ma’am, what are you writing?”

I am clueless. Both as to how to answer him and what was it that I am attempting to write.

Overcome with the embarrassment of my writer’s block, I muster a vague, disappointing answer, “aise hi, whatever comes to my mind.”

He asks, “would you like to do a boat ride?”

Honestly, I am annoyed. I really didn’t want to get into this!

“No, you sit in the boat, amid Ganges and I am sure you would love writing there.”

I know it means something to him, my diary. I saw the way he eyed it, almost with the same fascination that I eye his city. The city where each street, each crossing, and each balcony has a fable attached to it, I follow him to the boat.

With the sun shining bright now on the dilapidated forgotten palaces lining the river, this man who must have shared this boat with hundreds before me, confesses, ‘You know.. I also want to write.’

I am struck.

He continues, “but, I don’t know how to. How does one write?”

I almost laugh, reveling at the camaraderie that we share. The same challenges, the same hunger to express. What is it about storytelling and sharing our experiences that transcend everything?

I tell him the same things that have been told to me, to various people over the years,

‘‘Just start. Start with the first word and the rest will follow...’’

We share a cigarette as he laughs and tells me about the city, as people do their morning ablutions, amidst the glittering earthen lamps in the misty river. Isn’t it brilliant that I am sitting with a man, in the same boat, literally and figuratively, able to communicate our fears, hopes, wants and needs, ‘concepts’ that do not have any tangible form, communicating with the help of some sounds, alphabets strung together?

Isn’t that the true magic and the song of Benaras? The symphony of humanity and the songs of the lore.

As I walk back to the ghats, I have an answer now.

I write about him.