In mark twain146;s footsteps

The whereabouts of the hall are lost in time. Located near the railway station, it now goes by the name of Coral Club. The logo of the East Indian Railway adorns the slightly decrepit portico where, a century ago, Englishmen disembarked from their private carriages driven by white-turbaned locals. 8220;The vicinity of a lecture-hall looks like a snowstorm8212;and makes the lecturer feel like an opera,8221; Twain wrote in Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Nothing could have prepared me for the 8216;renovation work8217;8212;the doors are painted a greasy blue and the pillars sport white ceramic tiles. Railway employees lounge on plastic chairs, playing cards. They admit, 8220;The wood flooring was auctioned off three-four years back.8221; Without much ado, I am shown around: a primary school occupies one wing of the building; rainwater has seeped into the indoor swimming pool. Coral Club General Secretary J.P. Yadav says, 8220;In British times, the hall was off-bounds to Indians. Now we let it out for marriages at a daily rent of Rs 5,000.8221;

On my way back to the hotel in Civil Lines8212;the part of the city established by the English after the sepoy mutiny of 18578212;workers are pulling down the last vestiges of what must have been a grand old colonial dwelling. Clay tiles that kept the sahibs cool in the summer months lie in a heap; a lone litchi tree clings to life amid the rubble; the boundaries that dissect the grounds into rude little plots mark the end of an era of 8220;noble distances8221;. Only a handful of the bungalows with large private enclosures8212;which Twain found to be 8220;full of suggestions of comfort and leisure8221;8212;have survived.

The morning after the lecture, Twain drove to the fort, built by Akbar in the late 16th century, which now houses an ordnance depot of the Indian Army. The Patalpuri temple 8220;stocked with shrines and idols8221; and the polished stone pillar with Buddhist edicts erected by Asoka in 250 BC still stand, but there is not a trace of the church referred to in Twain8217;s book. 8220;Insured in all the companies,8221; he wrote in a flash of laconic wit, alluding to the multi-religiosity of the fort, which, indeed, never fell to enemy forces.

Professor Devi Prasad Dubey, of the Department of Archaeology, University of Allahabad, points out that the British filled up a stepwell8212;known as Kamyakoop8212;and effected other improvisations in the precincts; the two-storeyed barracks built by them look brand new even today. I am denied access to Jehangir8217;s Hall of Forty Pillars, which the East India Company turned into an arsenal in the 1840s, and to the sacred Akshayvat, the undying banyan tree at the southern end of the fort from which the pious jumped into the Yamuna in pre-Aurangzeb times in a bid for salvation.

From the ramparts, Twain had a clear view of the Magh Mela8212;the yearly fair drew a two-million-strong crowd then. Curiously, he was of the impression that there was to be only one more 12-yearly extravaganza known as the Kumbh Mela. Quite antithetically, the fair is now the largest holy gathering in the world, with the attendance swelling exponentially in recent times; last year8217;s Ardh Kumbh attracted over 80 million pilgrims.

Much has changed in the City of God over the decades. Even the hallowed confluence of the muddy Ganga and the relatively clear8212;not pale blue as Twain saw it8212;Yamuna has shifted constantly; it is drifting westward now. It is a hot day when we arrive at the riverbed, with not a pilgrim in sight. Pandas and their pennons dot the barren sands. The unwavering faith that the traveller found to be 8220;marvellous to our kind of people, the cold whites8221;, has not ebbed, but the India of the 21st century is more than the 8220;Land where All Life is Holy8221;. Puranic Prayag, Mughal Allahabad and British provincial capital, the city has added another layer of civilisation: one mottled with a patina of colourful cycle rickshaws and towering universities, barristers-at-law and blighted old structures.

VARANASI.

In a muggy corner, not far from Harishchandra Ghat, three padlocked doors are immured in a low brick wall, side by side. They are the doors of time, and of our perception of time. Throw them open, and everything, to paraphrase William Blake, would appear infinite8212;for, the story of Banaras, now Varanasi, cannot be told in Euclidean space-time. Mark Twain pondered, 8220;They have doors in India, but I don8217;t know why. They don8217;t fasten, and they stand open, as a rule.8221; Today, Banaras may not be a city of open doors, but it is still the yoke of faith justifying, for the traveller, 8220;its reputation as a curiosity8221;.

Reading Twain8217;s itinerary for the pilgrim is a vicarious experience that is further enriched when one traverses the gossamer streets of Banaras, which teem with saffron-attired kavadiyas, bemused Westerners and hungry stragglers. Following Twain8217;s advice, delivered in mock-utilitarian fashion, I knock on the doors of Sitala Devi, the goddess of smallpox: not only has the dreaded disease been consigned to history, but the neem tree in whose shade the puranas say the shrine is located, is no more. Next, I endeavour to peep into the Mahakaal Koop, the Well of Fate, at the Dandapani temple. 8220;If the fates are propitious, you will see your face pictured in the water far down in the well,8221; Twain wrote. As luck would have it, my visit coincides with a power failure and all is dark8212;by no whim of fate, I hope.

Professor Rana P.B. Singh, cultural geographer, Banaras Hindu University, says the holy city has moved south over the centuries, with Gai Ghat, one of the 84 ghats along the four-mile-long riverfront, marking the northern threshold of the shift. Here, the head of a bovine statue is visible above the swollen river, where milkmen noisily rinse their cans and locals, stripped down to their briefs, scrub away at their dhotis. A vermilion-painted stone bearing a carving of a couple holding hands commemorates Sati. Over 40 Sati stones see pic bespeckle the ghats, each marking, Twain noted in his travelogue, 8220;the spot where a widow went to her death by fire8221;.

A few feet from the Sati shrine, the roots of a banyan tree curl around several abandoned and fractured gods. 8220;If Vishnu had foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called it Idolville or Lingamburg,8221; Twain jested. My eyes take in hundreds of lingams at the Gauri Kedareshwar temple, on Kedar Ghat, a scaled-down facsimile of the Himalayan shrine at Kedarnath. The holiest temples in India are replicated in the City of Light: the temple of Mahamrityunjaya, the One Who Has Conquered Death, is a manifestation of Ujjain8217;s Mahakal.

Death does loom large in the city of mourning. Through alleys heaped with firewood, I follow a funeral bier to Manikarnika Ghat, where all is stained black with centuries of loss. The Doms, who run the business of death in Varanasi, pile logs of wood on the body, swathed in the purest white muslin. Inured to the rites of passage, children play amid the singeing vapours. Once the pyre is lit, the mourners, their foreheads smeared with crimson, abandon the corpse to the men Twain referred to as 8220;the stokers8221;.

When I quote Twain8217;s famous pronouncement8212;8220;Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend8221;8212;and wonder why a city so ancient must imitate other shrines, Professor Singh apprises me of its history of invasions. Indologist Diana Eck writes that no major religious sanctuary in the city predates the time of Aurangzeb in the 17th century. The Mughal emperor ordered the demolition of the revered Vishwanath temple, since rebuilt by Ahilya Bai of Gwalior and known as the Golden Temple, after Raja Ranjit Singh added a golden covering to the spires and the dome. Located, quite symbolically, between the mosque8212;Twain climbed its lofty minarets, which later crumbled to dust8212;superimposed by Aurangzeb on the ruins of the original temple, and the present Hindu structure, is the Jnanavapi Koop, romanticised by Twain as 8220;the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation8221;. Legend has it that Shiva, on whose trident the city is said to be perched, dug the well and promised to reside in it for eternity.

In the premises of the temple8212;guarded by a bevy of policemen who do not permit me to carry a ballpoint pen8212;is the quaint, 200-year-old dwelling of Pandit Kedarnath Vyas, a descendant of the family of priests authorised to occupy the throne beside the well, where, for centuries, they have consummated the pilgrim8217;s yatra with a final prayer-8212;it is no coincidence that this is also the last stop in Twain8217;s pilgrimage. While the priest shows me around, I am privy to esoteric information: the devi temple at Durga Kund, where goats are sacrificed even today, does not contain a murti; the original Vishwanath lingam was made of emerald; the temple of Kashi Karvat, where one must lean in for a glimpse of the lingam that stands two storeys below, was the site of forced suicides in pre-colonial times. The

75-year-old man is a well of knowledge himself.

While in Banaras, Twain met a 8220;living god8221; who kindled his spiritual spark. A marble monument, erected in 1910, now stands at the samadhi of Sri 108 Swami Bhaskarananda Saraswati. 8220;When he dies, Nirvana is his; he will be absorbed into the substance of the Supreme Deity and be at peace forever,8221; Twain wrote. He could not have had any foreboding of this day: a policeman enjoys his afternoon nap on the steps of the guru8217;s resting place and women squabble about everyday inanities.

The city of mystics is now a mouldering mass of memories8212;of grand old palaces on the banks of the Ganga; of a flourishing market in the shawls of the north, the diamonds of the south and the muslins of the east; of brahminical gurukuls and echoes of vedparayan. It is a lost world where snake-charmers still recreate the ultimate oriental spectacle and where tongas still ply; where scroungers, sadhus, widows and vagabonds make an impossible compossibility; where everything, from old books to idols and corpses, is returned to the primordial elements. Banaras is a cosmogram of sacred spaces; a veritable cache of gods, men and middlemen; an abiding talisman of faith.