The town of Mitcham does not really exist: it is simply the agreed, arbitrary designation for a particular section of the continuum of London’s outer suburbia. Apart from one fairly anonymous Grade I listed Georgian building, now hedged in by a swathe of the by-pass and a parade of newsagents, hairdressers and car showrooms, it has nothing to entice the visitor or gratify the inhabitant.
I knew it only as a place on the way to other parts of that Surrey sprawl. For years I drove through it, never stopping, never really looking. But one landmark always caught my eye. Perhaps this was due to its position: on a corner along a stretch of road that was invariably congested. Sitting in the traffic I had plenty of time to contemplate that building.
It was called “Benares”, and was a simple curry house. Beyond that I know nothing. Except that as I sat there each morning, the word “Benares” would be stamped once more upon my mind. As it did so, it would translate across into “Varanasi” – the Indian name for the city of which “Benares” is the typically mangled English approximation, calling up to my mind’s eye huge, exotic vistas.
So when some time later I was in India, planning my itinerary, and my eye happened to alight on that name on the map, my heart leapt, and those same visions began insidiously to work their spell. And I went to Varanasi.
I went to Varanasi, and found myself in a city of exhausting proportions, a city which seemed to repeat itself endlessly, with market following scented market, rows of poor shops selling the same permutations of goods as a hundred or perhaps a thousand others. I found myself in muddy backstreets, dark even at noon so narrow were they, confronted and trapped there by the slow, stupid bulk of a roaming cow.
And above all I found myself in a boat on the Ganges at dawn, mist still hovering over its turbid waters. Behind me were huge sandy plains which, when the river rose, turned into a sheet of motionless shimmering, tens of miles wide. In front of me was the city. It was high above the waves now, but ominous markings fifty or more feet up the sides of the bank indicated the almost ungraspable rising of the Ganges in flood.
At the bottom of those banks were the temples and the ghats, the platforms and steps down to the river where pilgrims came to bathe – and were bathing now, even in that chill air – the men dressed in dhotis, the women still demurely robed in by-now wet and clinging saris. At one or two positions along the river there were the burning ghats. Here bodies were brought to be cremated, and from my riverside seat I now found myself gazing at the lurid orange flames licking around charred but half-recognisable shapes, with an all-too human leg emerging from one side.
I will always remember Varanasi and these image, which have now superseded the inchoate fantasies conjured up by the “Benares”. And I will always remember Varanasi for another reason: it was there that I was struck down with the worst food poisoning I have ever had.
(18.1.92)
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