Bowling Through India Read online

  India’s ringleader, unaware of the news, approached me again. ‘Game?’ he asked once more, throwing the ball from hand to hand.

  I couldn’t think. ‘No, sorry. No game.’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘No, seriously, not now.’

  ‘Short game!’

  ‘We’ve had some bad news from home.’

  He nodded, a look of compassion on his face. ‘Oh,’ he said, putting his hands together in the prayer position and putting them up to his chin. ‘Emergency?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Emergency.’

  He placed one hand on his heart. His other non-English-speaking friends were obviously anxious to get another game started. He quickly shut them up, explaining in Hindi what had happened. A look of unease and intrigue in their eyes. They shadowed us from the ground, again past Mr Thomas’ modest hut.

  ‘My family and I are very sorry for your loss,’ said Mr Thomas. He opened the sliding door to the Goldfish Bowl and we drove off.

  One thing was clear: John would have to somehow get back to New Zealand to be with his daughter. Later we learned that he would have to go to Cairo — during Eid, the busiest time in the Muslim calendar — to collect Anna’s body, and then attend her funeral two days before Christmas.

  He had never liked Varanasi.

  LOSING THE PLOT

  The taxi ride from the cemetery back to our hotel was one of the most unforgettable of my life, yet I can’t remember one thing about it. Poverty and squalid surroundings — usually provoking disdain and disbelief — caused no reaction whatsoever. It was as though we were driving on air. Images came and went. Beggars continued to knock on the windows. But we had our own troubles. And yet our shock and sadness for John counted for nothing: it was him who had to perform tasks over the next week which would test even the most hardened. All we could do was be his mate.

  Once back at the hotel, the only thing to do was head for the bar. John would need to be near his phone for the foreseeable future; the least we could do was provide him with whisky. Other than that, we felt like spare pricks at a wedding. I called Amy to ask if she could make some calls on John’s behalf. Stew and Brendon called their families too. Suddenly, making mobile phone calls to New Zealand meant squat. After all, this is when you needed them most.

  The pregnant receptionist started to cry when John, in passing, told her what had happened that morning. Embarrassed, John recoiled slightly, then attempted to console her. We all felt for him. He was in a tough situation. He and Anna had separated two years before. On the one hand, they had spent twenty-three years together. On the other, they were no longer a couple and led detached lives. As a result, John was clearly and understandably on another planet as he gulped his whisky. He sat at the bar and checked his emails while the rest of us reflected on a horrifically bizarre day. To break up the mood, Reece proceeded to tell the world’s most inappropriate joke. The punch line, possibly the worst part of it, was said with such vigour and volume that it made the couple enjoying a pre-lunch drink to our immediate right get up and leave. Even funnier than the joke was Reece not knowing how inappropriate he was being. Or how loud. It was as if he were a headmaster in front of an assembly. He projected like a thespian. He used language like Billy Connolly. And, perhaps funniest of all, he had absolutely no idea that he’d offended a couple who had spent their entire life savings on a trip to India.

  But at least it made us think about other things.

  We were always going to visit the River Ganges. Now, with John’s situation, it seemed to take on new meaning. He had been on the phone all afternoon and was beat. We convinced him to come. Meanwhile, the Goldfish Bowl waited outside the foyer like a loyal servant. Soon we were back in Mayhem Central driving past a long, gangly man asleep on a busy footpath. All that separated his butt from uneven stone, dust and cigarette papers was a thin layer of potato sack. Yet he looked as relaxed and unperturbed as a dozing baby, his shoes by his side. How, I wondered, could anyone fall asleep like that? I guess, though, if home was two hours away by rickshaw you couldn’t pop off for a lunchtime siesta. You sleep where and when you can. Maybe, without making it sound too frivolous, it’s a little like camping: no one ever sleeps well on the first night. After that, you’re so tired, you have no choice.

  Thoughts like these were never far from your mind in any Indian city. Another recurring issue: how can people live amid such squalor and actually smile? Answer: they have to. If they don’t, they die. It’s mouse on the treadmill stuff. If you don’t get up to shine shoes today, you’ll lose your place on the footpath tomorrow. It’s the same for the people who weigh people on scales for money. Or clean customers’ ears with cotton buds. As Dora says in Finding Nemo, ‘Just keep swimming.’ And yet amid such poverty, mums were always well dressed and their kids spotless.

  Varanasi is said to be the oldest inhabited place on earth. It features so heavily in mythology, fables and childhood stories that it’s hard to believe it even exists — until you stand on its riverbanks and find its aura so intoxicating you feel drunk with hope.

  Driving through the city had been a storm; this was the calm. We walked down the steps to the Ganges and, for the first time in India, heard absolutely nothing. Not a horn, not a crow, not a truck. From a distance the river looked like a Monet painting; up close, it looked like his long drop. But even with the obvious pollution, this stretch of water came with an undeniable reputation. Maybe the bedlam we had witnessed highlighted the river’s tranquillity. Maybe New Zealand was always this quiet and we never appreciated it.

  Whatever, Reece was right: this place had spirituality in bucket-loads. It was heaven-like. I haven’t visited a more stirring, peaceful place. ‘But fuck living here!’ I told him.

  Living there is exactly what he did in 1991. Indeed, part of the reason he wanted to visit the river this afternoon was to book his accommodation for Christmas Eve. (We would leave Mumbai for New Zealand at the conclusion of the trip; Reece had an economy train ticket booked from Mumbai to Varanasi, something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.)

  ‘You’re going to come back here?’ asked a dumbfounded Stew.

  ‘You betcha!’ said Reece. ‘Christmas in Varanasi, it’ll be great.’

  ‘Is that a dead dog in the river?’ Brendon asked.

  ‘Probably,’ grinned Reece.

  ‘And that bloke’s brushing his teeth with the same water?’ I asked.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Reece, nonchalantly. He motioned us to walk down to the river edge where an old Indian couple waited for us.

  ‘This is my Ma and Baap!’ said Reece proudly. He and the couple embraced and laughed. I think I even saw Reece cry. He had known Ma and Baap for seventeen years. Keshav, their grown-up son, also hugged Reece and didn’t let him go. It had clearly been too long between drinks. Back in 1991 Keshav gave Reece a boat tour of the Ganges. Two years later, when Reece returned there to live, Keshav recognised him instantly, demanding that he accept a free boat ride and meal with his family. At the time, the one-room shack they lived in housed twelve family members. Despite no electricity or running water, Reece was treated to chapattis and dal — the staple diet of five hundred million north Indians every night of the week — cooked on a cow-dung fire. With acrid, tear-jerking smoke filling the tiny space, Reece ate delicious food in pitch darkness and, from that moment, was one of the family.

  A few months later, Reece bought Keshav a bigger boat so he could start taking bigger groups along the Ganges. And when he got married, Reece bought him ten thousand bricks so they could add another room to their shack.

  ‘Ten thousand bricks?’ I said. ‘How much did that cost?’

  ‘About five thousand rupees,’ he replied. That’s about $US200.

  Sixteen years later, the family home has expanded somewhat, no doubt to accommodate the twenty-four people who now live there. The single room has expanded to three storeys, with a breezy roof-top terrace, and the cow-dung fire has given way to kerosene burners. There
are also windows and, for the five hours a day that Varanasi has power, there are even a couple of bare electric bulbs.

  Reece later told me that when Keshav’s parents informed him they had found him a bride, he demanded to see her before the wedding (this, of course, being against the rules). First impressions weren’t great. Having come from a family who had been boatmen for the past seven hundred years, no less, he was disgusted to find that his bride-to-be came from a flower-growing family. The horror. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m going to marry a flower girl.’

  Reece the peacemaker tried to calm his adopted brother. ‘But, but, a flower girl!’ Keshav had insisted. ‘Reece, I know which village she comes from. Promise me to take a photo of every flower girl you see, then come back and I might have some idea of who I’m marrying.’

  Reece did as he was asked and, thank Shiva, the story ends happily. The boatman married the flower girl, they had two beautiful children and to this day, according to Blanket Boy, are utterly besotted with each other.

  We bowed to Ma and Baap, who stood on their boat and welcomed us. As we got on board, with our ridiculous cricket bat and even more ridiculous scorebook, Keshav helped his mother off and we departed. As the sun set, our ears rang with silence. (Thank God the horn sales rep hadn’t found boat owners of the Ganges.) Reece, obviously missing his past vocation, soon kicked into tour guide-speak upon seeing our first funeral pyre. Made of wood, and sitting by the water’s edge, this was where a body was burned as part of the funeral rite. A good healthy flame licked the brazen sky as family members gathered around a dead loved one.

  ‘When the person dies,’ said Reece, ‘the family wrap the body, dress it and take it to the temple. Then they bless it and walk it down to the river.’ He smiled. ‘Then they stand around it and light it.’

  Collective gulps. A body continued to burn fifty metres from our boat. We could hear the crackles and sparks. Everyone else along the river went about their daily business.

  ‘But the best bit,’ said Reece, eyes widening, ‘is waiting for the skull to explode.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Piss off!’

  ‘You’re pulling our leg!’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘The eldest boy, or son-in-law if there is no son, must wait for the body to burn, which can take hours. And he can’t leave until the skull explodes. If it doesn’t explode, he has to give it a helping hand with a block of wood.’

  ‘A helping hand,’ I offered queasily.

  ‘By bashing it in, wa-la!’

  ‘And how do you know if the skull has exploded?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, you’d know all right. It’s like bloody fireworks when it happens.’

  We continued to watch someone else’s family member incinerate.

  India: it’s not a holiday.

  Even in the middle of the world’s most sacred waterway, no one is safe from touts. Making his way towards our boat was a boy of about ten, expertly rowing and parking beside ours. He handed us five floating candles in exchange for fifty rupees. We placed them on the water for Anna. They would float downriver, past cow-laden alleyways, past boys playing cricket on the steps and, weeks later, into Ganga Sagar, a pilgrim town at the mouth of the Ganges, before finally drifting into the Bay of Bengal south of Kolkata.

  We were all waiting for the skull on shore to explode, but it wasn’t going to happen. We could only imagine what bones and other body parts lay below us in the waters of the Ganges. Another dead dog floated past, its pock-marked body, hairless in parts, forcing us to keep our hands firmly above board.

  ‘Not everyone is allowed to be cremated,’ said Reece. ‘There are five categories who can’t be. Lepers aren’t allowed to be because they’re still paying the price for a bad deed in a past life.’

  ‘That’s hardly fair. Surely in death they can be spared?’

  ‘Sadly not.’

  ‘Who else can’t be cremated?’ asked Brendon.

  ‘Pregnant women. Or snake-bite victims, supposedly because that way of death will send them straight to heaven. Oh, and sadhus can’t be cremated either.’

  ‘What are sadhus again?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re ascetics who leave their families behind and dedicate themselves to the teachings of one of the many saints. Saints occupy what is known as a “mutt”, their home base. Every sadhu will be connected to a particular mutt and its resident saint, but spends most of his time wandering India, visiting all the holy places. They spend the summer months in the Himalaya cultivating marijuana — in reverence to their lord Shiva, who spent ten thousand years smoking dope in the Himalaya in order to achieve enlightenment.’

  ‘And because of this, they’re spared being set alight?’ Stew asked.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Lepers, pregnant women, sadhus and snake-bite victims?’ I asked. ‘You said there were five categories that can’t be cremated.’

  ‘And children under twelve.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Stew asked.

  ‘They’re innocent. Haven’t committed any sins.’

  ‘So if they can’t cremate kids,’ I asked, not really wanting to know, ‘how do they . . . surely they don’t just throw them in the river?’

  ‘No, they tie rocks to their feet first.’

  Back on dry land, we thanked Baap and Keshav, who reserved a tender embrace for his Kiwi brother. We grabbed our bat and scorebook and watched some boys play cricket on impossible terrain. The steps leading to the Ganges were far from the MCG but these kids found it a more than an adequate place to have a hit. Others played a version of what would otherwise be known as ‘Bat Down’. The batter would belt a rock as far as he could and their friend then had to roll it back and hit the cricket bat, which lay at the feet of the hitter.

  At our feet was a skinny mongrel bitch with, no word of a lie, thirty pups sucking from her teats. Clearly she was looking after two other litters as well as her own. As a result, she looked harassed, the pups literally hanging off her, draining what life was left of her dilapidated rib-cage of a body. The banquet soon came to an abrupt halt, however, when the bitch finally lost it and took off, pups falling off one by one as she ran. Cue a lumbering, barn-door-sized heifer walking up the passage’s cobblestones with an accomplice. Two cows; thirty rat-sized pups. Only one thing could happen, and it did. We moved out of the way. One of the pups wasn’t so lucky. One hundred and eighty kilos versus two — hardly a fair fight. The result was a sound which still sticks in my mind. The puppy yelped as if someone had dropped a laptop on its foot. On and on it went, hysterical, careering around in a helpless fit, unable to sit still. It is one of the most affecting things I have ever heard. It’s pathetic, I know. A puppy, one of thirty no less, with a mum who hadn’t eaten in weeks, was never going to survive, but to be stepped on by a cow! Give me a heart attack any day. Eventually, a dreadlocked European backpacker sprinted over and cradled the screaming pup. She ran back to her accommodation, rocking her newly acquired bad debt as if it were her own.

  ‘Would have been better to wring its neck and throw it in the bloody river,’ said the no-nonsense farmer.

  Even the less hardened among us tended to agree.

  The Goldfish Bowl got us safely home, where we predictably headed towards food and beer. It had been a big day. A weird day. We felt guilty not being able to do more for John. Death should make your world stop, but in India nothing does. Talk began of how Reece had single-handedly managed to clear the bar with his joke earlier. John, phone (which hadn’t stopped ringing all afternoon) by his side, was busy checking emails, flight plans and words of comfort from friends and family in New Zealand. He found a welcome distraction in a joke which would rival his second cousin’s.

  ‘Here’s one,’ he said, looking at his computer screen. ‘Four guys are seen carrying a coffin down Fifth Ave in New York. A guy sees them and thinks, “That’s strange.” Half an hour later, he sees them again carrying the coffin on the subway. ‘That’s really weird,” t
hinks the guy. An hour later he sees them again in Central Park, to which he finally concludes, “They’ve lost the fucking plot!”’

  The joke provided the release we needed. We looked up to see an affable businessman, immaculately dressed, with his equally stylish wife. Both were in their late fifties or early sixties. He possessed charm and a full head of silver hair, she a girlish figure and shoes worth more than Brendon’s camera.

  ‘Where do you suppose I’m from?’ he asked us, in what sounded like an Eastern European accent. His wife was smiling.

  ‘Greece?’ I asked.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Croatia,’ said Reece.

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Russia,’ said Brendon.

  He nudged his wife, then answered. ‘No. I’m from bloody Australia, mate!’ He said ‘St-ra-ya’ the way that only Australians can. It was little wonder he had been so successful in business: he was charismatic, easy to talk to, interested and made you feel as though you were the only person in the room. He and his wife had been staying with some sultan on some island in some castle the size of Kashmir. Being Australian, and right into cricket, he was incredibly keen on what we were doing.

  Whether or not he intended it that way, John had been Dad since Singapore, mainly because he had been looking after the slush fund. The rest of us, apart from Reece whose Hindi came in useful every now and again, had been the annoying sons. Myself, I’ll admit that I was particularly skilled on the ‘irritating same joke every day atrocious Indian accent’ front. (The sleepwalking didn’t help either.) This journey so far had all the makings of a from Lord of the Flies or an episode of Survivor: who would drive who nuts? Whose bowels wouldn’t last the journey? More important, who would be kicked off the island first? Predictably, everyone had believed that it would be me but now, for much sadder reasons, it was John who was counting rupees and passing them to his much less able second cousin.