Slouching towards Varanasi to be reborn — on a journey to India, I find my roots in Durban

“Kāshī (Varanasi) is the whole world, they say. Everything on earth that is powerful and auspicious is here…” - Diana Eck, Banaras: City of Light

Two years ago, leaving home for a few nights required a permit to be on the road. The rest of the world became a huge, distant, inaccessible place, like it must have been before the internal combustion engine. But the plague ran its course and two weeks back I found myself in a room overlooking the mighty Ganges.

Varanasi is a city that Mark Twain described as “older than history” while for Maitreyee Chowdhury it is a place “Where Even the Present is Ancient”. The conference I am to attend is at the stately, cream and red-bricked Banaras Hindu University. Founded in 1916, the main inspiration for the university wanted Sanskrit to meet science, cosmology to meet commerce. The conference ran with a simple efficiency and studied graciousness. All I want to do though is to get to the river and drink the history.

A holy man talks on his phone. Young people bathe. On a swaying boat, a boy launches a kite. And then I close upon the cremation site. A body wrapped in muslin is brought down the stairs and placed on the fire. The chanting reaches a crescendo as the corpse disintegrates. There is no palpable mourning. Death is understood as a journey from this world to another. To die in Varanasi is to achieve moksha, to fuse with Brahman, and escape the fate of being reborn.

I should of course write of the spurned widows, human trafficking, religious conflicts, the coming of McDonald’s and the handloom weavers driven from their ancient finesse by Chinese imports. Any of these stories will take months to research, and like handloom weaving, involve another dying art, fieldwork. Rather than look downwards to the social relations beneath my feet, my chin tilts up to sensations that lift the spirits. I am reaching into the temples of Varanasi.

India has this trick it plays on visitors who fancy themselves immune to the “exotic”. I suspect a crew of actors follows them around to spring out, picturesquely, at the right time. I was not prepared for the rickshaw bicycle stunt drivers, the jagged edges of a thousand apologetic elbows, the tiny holes where sweetmeats form pyramids, the crumbling balconies.

Fortified with bhang lassi I escape into an alleyway, a cow loitered ahead, a motorbike blocked any shimmy to the right. Finally, I spied a sliver of space. It opened into a tearoom where I was offered some chai. “Where are you from?” I must stick out. Before I could muster an answer, my long-haired host proclaimed: “Don’t worry. Was not Lord Shiva, also an outsider?” I look at her visible ear. Where is the earpiece? Who is feeding her these lines?

But I know this text. Diana Eck relates how the demi-god Daksha asked of Shiva, “What is his nature and what is his clan? What place does he belong to… He is not a householder, for he lives in a cremation ground… He is not a celibate because he has a wife… He is not a brahmin, because the Vedas do not know him as one… He is not a man, because half his body is female. And yet he is not a woman because he has a beard… How can he be young when he is so ancient?”

I think about my father who took me from temple to temple along the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal when I was young. Not so much to worship but to imbibe. Whatever slights he might have had to bear on the streets or at work, at least here the two of us were part of a mighty and holy river of belief.