River of life carries away the dead

AS a small child one rainy day in my aunt and uncle's Dublin house, I ran out of drawing paper. My uncle Gerry found a blank notebook in some obscure drawer and gave it to me to scribble in. Having been born in India in the early years of the century, my uncle was the most gloriously exotic relative of my childhood. I daubed and scribbled; the rain passed. Years later, the notebook reappeared in our attic flotsam of familial junk. It was only then I examined it properly and found the signature of Jawaharlal Nehru - India's first Prime Minister - on the hand cut flyleaf; a secret waiting to be uncovered all those years, unexpected and astonishing as I discovered India itself to be.

India is the definition of confusion. With a population of 850 million, 3,000 languages and dialects and a medley of religions, everything about it is extreme. In my four months there, criss crossing the country as part of an overland journey from Kathmandu to Istanbul, I vacillated constantly between culture shock and culture kick. It's a country where nothing is wasted and everything is recycled. Burst tyres re sole shoes. Pages of old text books are gummed together to make bags for the pakoras and samosas sold at street stalls. Old saris become street canopies. Dung is used for cooking fuel, banana leaves for plates.

Even the English language - a legacy from the Raj - is recycled. Spoken fluently now by less than 5 per cent of the population, English is nonetheless the language that links official business, government and commerce. Half a century after the departure of its native speakers, the language echoes on, odd and ghost like now. Its meaning strays unintentionally out of context in all kinds of ways, particularly in public notices.

In Jaipur, a van passed me which proclaimed itself to be Ambassador Dry Cleaning - No Branches Anywhere". In Jaiselmere, a souvenir shop declared "We make and sell old paintings". On a wall at Kulu were daubed the words Go home Multy Nations. Be Indian. Buy Indians". A bootleg version of the Scotch whisky Black & White, advertised itself as "Double Dog". My favourite was the sign outside a Delhi pharmacy which read Durex. Guaranteed pleasure. Thank you for your visit. Please come again". And there is the phenomenon of backside. Nowhere in India is behind somewhere else, it is backside to it. Directions always involve lots of backsides. It was Paul Durcan country. Backsides to the wind on every corner. Of all the places I travelled to in those months, perhaps it is Varanasi that best encapsulates the underlying amazing confusions of India. The confluence of the Ganges flows through Varanasi, making it India's most sacred city and the destination of millions of Hindus, who come to bathe in its holy waters. It is the desire of every Hindu to be cremated in Varanasi and have their ashes scattered on the Ganges. Only by dying in Varanasi can the soul be set free from the wheel of life and the endless Hindu cycle of birth and rebirth.

Varanasi is one of the oldest cities in the world, contemporary with Thebes, Babylon and Nineveh, and nowhere is this more evident than on the river. The buildings along the shore are immense medieval looking structures, painted ochre and sienna and burnt orange. They appear roofless, as if they are somehow boundless and contain half the sky as a ceiling on their top floors. They are so enormous that they gave the illusion of seeming even larger each time I saw them, as if the rooms multiplied by night.

Varanasi is a place infused with extraordinary spirituality, where it was impossible to be unaware of the Ganges. The river has the potency of an unexploded bomb and even when it is out of sight, its energy goes thrumming through the air. In the writhing eel like laneways of the old city, whenever I heard a funeral procession approaching, I had to dive into the nearest doorway to get out of the way. The bodies are carried on bamboo stretchers, wrapped in white silk or cotton and bound with ropes of marigolds. The processions pass swift and unexpected, accompanied by ferocious drumming; the marigold ropes appearing to ignite with light, as if the journey to the burning sites was some kind of unstoppable lava flow.

At the Yogi Lodge in the old city, was woken every morning at first light by the chanting of pilgrims passing beneath my window on their way to the river. I would lie for a couple of minutes, still half asleep and this sound would echo weirdly round the room as if the walls were sighing. Some mornings, I got up and followed them down to the river, the sun beginning to burn off the mist that lay like snowdrifts everywhere. There was something ethereal about the glimmering light of those early mornings when everything seemed insubstantial, even the ancient buildings on the river front moving in and out of focus.

THE meaning of the Ganges is contained like a complex spiritual map within its 108 names, among them: Svarea sopanasarini, "flowing like a staircase to heaven" and Amrtakara salila, "whose water is a mine of nectar". By every rational law, the Ganges water should be unspeakably polluted. Nobody is sure of the exact figures, but more than 45,000 remains a year are cast into the river. Yet confusingly, it is simultaneously burial ground and drinking supply, sewer and bathing place. Dolphins live in it. I saw them one morning, rising and falling on the opposite side of the river. Amrtakara salila, whose water is a mine of nectar: the last words I would have associated with the Ganges. The boatman who rowed me downriver one afternoon lay on his oars every now and then, dipped his head in the water and drank. "I drink only Ganga water," he told me solemnly, as I looked at the bloated bodies of cows cast up like flotsam on the mud flats and the winding cloth of a dead person unravelling slowly in the middle of the river.

Time passes insidiously in Varanasi. The days disappear, melt away. Plans unravel, time becomes as fluid as the river. I was there for days and days and yet it was only on my last night that I saw the sky lamps. Down by the darkened river, I saw scores of tiny flickering butter lamps suspended on bamboo rods. They are lit at dusk to guide the souls of the dead on their final journey. In that depthless Varanasi evening, I stood beside the Ganges and watched the sky lamps emerge like quiet stars.