Fiction: Benares

"Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together" Mark Twain.... _____________________________________________ Moksha, myths, illusions, ghosts, life, death… One can find them all on the ghats and the alleyways here. Legend has it that the serpentine Ganges had given birth to Benares over 5000 years ago during the time of Mesopotamia. It was a cremation ground then, where Shiva and his consort Parvati had lived. He had cursed an ancestor of the current Domes – the caretakers of the dead bodies at cremation grounds- that he would live the rest of his life on the cremation ground looking after the burning of the dead bodies that were brought here and so would all his descendents. And so as time passed a city grew around this cremation ground where people came from all corners of the Earth to take a dip in the holy waters where Shiva had once bathed. My tryst with this city began at the beginning of 2005. I had read and heard of this city but had never met anybody from my world of modern New Delhi who had actually been there or even really cared to go there. It is just too incomprehensible a place for many of the people in my world. So I left for the city one day with no real expectation of being inspired. But I have returned ever since time and time again. Benares, the city of lights, is a world of contradictions. The cremation grounds, the place of death is rife with life. A part of the city gets swallowed by the river when it rains and the same river literally dies when the city is parched of the rains. High caste Brahmins live beside the Dalits, the untouchables. Untouchability holds fast onto the life here unwilling to let go easily. Widows are abandoned in the temples here to live their new lives in devotion to the Gods. The old come here to live, to die. Death is omnipresent here. But it neither overwhelms nor stabs the heart with the pain of loss. Instead a strange white calm envelopes the city. A sense of duty to cremate the loved one in this city is bolstered by the strong faith in achieving Moksha – salvation- prevails. And as the sun tired it brings to life, in its shadows, the strange creatures and illusions that have haunted the imagination of Benares for all time. In my work I have documented the old city of Benares in the light from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s world of Magical Realism.