Remembering Benares: How a city inspired a novel

Remembering BenaresHow a city inspired a novel Pankaj Mishra (bio) More than twenty years ago, I published my first novel, The Romantics. The book was based partly on my own experience in the city of Benares, which I moved to in the winter of 1988 for a few months. I remember that when I arrived one early morning, the city seemed, from the last ghat in the south, to roll away on one side of the Ganges, old and bleached and smothered by mist, the only sign of life coming from the flicker and glow of the perennially burning funeral pyres. Then, as I stood there, marveling at what was more apparition than city, there came a strange sound—the hollow boom of a train invisibly crossing a bridge over the river in the north. I was nineteen years old, three years out of home, a few months out of university, and trying to get further away from the incessant [End Page 62] whispers around me: "Apply for jobs, marry and settle down." Benares was like no place I had known or read about, and it seemed to offer exactly what I wanted: a chance to live alone in a place that had no memories and associations for me and to look out at a world I did not understand but could perhaps begin to grasp. Writing these sentences today, I can feel the damp of the city's stone alleys, hear the creak of the waterwheel over the well in the courtyard of my decrepit house, smell the woodsmoke at the street-side dive where I ate a masala omelet every morning, and these memories of a dignified poverty give me a pang—not only a melancholy sense of the vanished years and the deepening confrontation with mortality that lay ahead but also bafflement over how a city whose crumbling buildings had persisted for so long—enshrining decay as the main principle of history—could be so quickly ruined. The ruination began not long after I left Benares. Criminal gangs specializing in kidnapping and extortion had already filled the vacuum created by failed industrialization in the region. In the 1990s, mafia dons from nearby districts began to shape local politics and to build shopping malls of glass and steel near the river. More recently, Narendra Modi, the city's elected member of the Indian parliament and the country's current prime minister, demolished ancient temples and alleys in order to plant his insecurely grand and ultra-modern monuments of Hindu supremacism. I, of course, had no hint of a future tainted by the promise of affluence and chauvinism. It seemed that I had all the time to spend. What would I have given then to know that I didn't, and to not have the misconception that makes the evanescence of youth seem so tragic in retrospect. My room on the roof of an old sitar player's house had a bed, a chair, a barred window—and nothing else. The rest of the house was similarly bare, equipped with the minimum of things necessary for eating, sleeping, dying, and making music. I had little money and ate only one full meal a day in order to economize. The electricity failed often, especially at night, and I had to read by the light of a kerosene lantern. But it was the first time I had a room of [End Page 63] my own, and the boon of privacy and solitude seemed to make up for my material deprivations. I also had my books—a carefully curated selection of European literature—and a romantic idea of myself as a thinker and writer. Indeed, the ambition to write, though timidly concealed and never shared with anyone, licensed this unconventional life I had chosen. Yet a black hole opened in my mind whenever I thought about what I could write. And the fear I felt then—the fear that I probably had no talent—deepened my loneliness. If writing seemed something I could not do, reading was no different. Books were to somehow open up the larger world; whatever I grasped of their richness, their meanings and beauty, was a...