An excerpt from my novel "Escaping the Magic" - location: Varanasi, India

An excerpt from my novel "Escaping the Magic" - location: Varanasi, India

February 7, 2019 From that blog I started but closed again

The time in Varanasi was strange. It was so cold and foggy, and the showers had only cold water. Lucy was frozen stiff most of the time, and it paralysed her.

But it didn’t stop her from continuing her strict meditation-pranayama-yoga routine every morning. She had bought the classical yoga book “Light on Yoga” by B.K.S. Iyengar in a book stall on Sudder Street, and had started going through it, page by page, experimenting with all the asanas. She removed the dusty old mattress from one of the beds, and practiced there. She had the book in front of her, the naked light bulb providing its harsh light, the cold foggy air coming from the windows, doing asana after asana, staying excruciatingly long in each posture. It was so hard, and so painful, but her will was strong. She was going to get there. Wherever that was…

In the afternoon when it had warmed a bit she went down to the honey-lemon-ginger place and sat there for a few hours, now studying the spiritual people close up. She wanted to feel their energy, their vibe, so she sat in between them, and just pretended to gaze out to the river, like they were doing. She wasn’t really gazing at the river though; she was looking at them, feeling them, trying to figure them out. What were they wearing? How were they talking? What was their spiritual practice?

The river was as beautiful as it was disgusting. Little flower offerings constantly floated past in a steady stream, with incense and candles burning, and the sound of Sanskrit mantras always played in the background. Sometimes a human arm or a whole body floated past. The fog was majestic and mystical, and at the same time scary and claustrophobic, usually lifting in the afternoon. The overriding aroma was a mix of incense and dried piss - from humans and from all the homeless dogs.

She and Matthew wrote to each other every now and then. In one email he wrote, “I hope you don’t hate me too much.” She replied, “Of course I don’t hate you. On the contrary, I am so grateful that you chose to spend some time in my life.”

That was exactly the type of expression and way of speaking that she’d heard the spiritual people use when they spoke. She listened to them and observed them, and then she used it with Matthew, as part of her game to win him over. It felt like with each passing moment her resolve grew, to become the ultimate spiritual goddess, so magnificent he could never resist her.

She thought for days about the correct things to say, the spiritual way of talking. She kept the emails extremely short, and very spiritual-sounding. Cryptic, mysterious. Not giving up any information at all.

And it appeared to be working. When she arrived in Varanasi, he started emailing her more often. He told her he was deeply impressed that she had survived Bangladesh. “You’re a very, very brave woman!” he wrote. She felt proud. Proud to get a compliment from him, and proud because her game was working.

“Varanasi is majestic and detestable,” she wrote.

“You are right in the middle of the deepest transformation,” he wrote back.

In one email she felt very encouraged by his compliments, and after describing the scene of the burning ghat, with all the dead bodies on their funeral pyres and all the mantras and rituals surrounding it, she finished her email off with, “ You and I are not done with each other.”

He responded with one phrase: “No, we are definitely not done with each other!”

Every day she ate her lunch in the same place, up the steps from the main ghat. Fried bread called paratha, with spinach curry called palak paneer. She added mango chutney and raita and she had a very tasty meal. Most of the food didn’t work for her. She didn’t like it all that much, in truth. But she was afraid to confess this to anyone, even herself, because if you were a spiritual person travelling on a spiritual journey in India, you were supposed to love Indian food. Otherwise you would be a hypocrite, right?

The view from the restaurant was a constant flow of chaos. She sat at the front row of the restaurant, ate with her hands from the stainless steel plate, and watched the steady stream of people in constant movement. In front of the restaurant the cooks sat on the ground, in front of their enormous frying pans and pots, where they made thousands of samosas every day. Women in long saris stopped and bought freshly fried samosas which they got wrapped in newspaper, and then they continued their walk on the muddy ground, constantly stepping on the lower edge of their sari, which was completely brown from the muddy ground. Beggars stopped constantly at the huge frying pans and each one got either a samosa or a small coin.

Dying men and women were lying on the ground outside, wearing clothes so dirty and worn out that they were like a grey melted mass, just like their skin and hair. Their eyes were yellow, their bodies rotten from illness. They stank. But they had made the trip to Varanasi, to die there. According to Hindu belief, Varanasi is the holiest place to die in. If you leave your body here, you are more likely to be reborn into a better caste in your next life, or if you are already spiritually up there, you are more likely to not be reborn at all, which is the ultimate goal, moksha, enlightenment.

After the lunch, she went back to her room, which had warmed up slightly by now, and continued reading spiritual books and studying the spiritual people from her window. At around 5 she went out again, started with a honey-lemon-ginger at the spiritual step-cafe, then had an early dinner, and continued walking around, somehow dealing with all the shocking craziness going on constantly. Monkeys, dead bodies. Bodies burning, bodies thrown in the river.

By 7, she was back in her room. She didn’t feel safe on the streets. She was particularly afraid of the humongous cows that took up almost all the space in the narrow alleyways. She’d walked into one and saw a cow standing there, she turned back but stepped in the cow faeces, she was so stressed, she slipped in it with her flipflop, the plastic shoe got stuck in it, sucked into it. Oh God.

She was fascinated by the whole scenario but at the same time she wanted to escape it all. It was all too much. Everything was so in your face, all the time. And she had this constant feeling of underlying anxiety, which just wouldn’t leave her alone.

That night she daydreamed about the tropics. About palm trees and humidity. She never got to feel warm. The cold seemed to seep all the way into her bones. She still had the diarrhoea from Calcutta. She could control it, it didn’t control her. She knew which hours of the day she had to be close to a bathroom. It had become a routine of specific times of the day when she either had to be in her room resting, or when she felt better and could be outside.

After two weeks of this routine, she’d had enough. The train ride to the south was going to take three days. She didn’t care - as long as she got out of this fog and this cold that reached all the way inside her bones, she was prepared to do anything.