A Listing Fancy...and the best of Indian English

I'm a list maker by nature. Groans? Chuckles? Knowing sighs? Yes, I'll make a list of just about anything. In the most neurotic stretches of my college career, I would give in to insomnia and sit up at the computer, making a Master List. A list of lists. That way I would always have another list to work on. I must have felt that this meta-list, if it could only be made thorough enough, would define me as a person. Take one particular sub-list, that of favorite music: surely a few data points (say, The Fall, Chopin nocturnes, and Doc Watson) taken together would define a unique individual, just as three points uniquely determine a mathematical plane? Something like that. This was list-making as an exercise in self-definition, at a time when a sturdy identity is worth its weight in Monte Cristo sandwiches. But greasy culinary adventures are another topic, and another list, entirely.


I've been indulging in the old vice again, now largely as a way to get a handle on the ungainly, wildly varied mass of memories that have piled up over the course of my travels this season. List making as mnemonic device, an age-old strategy, I suppose. And there's the thought that each list harbors the seed for one or more pieces of writing. Little seeds I hoard jealously, as, now that I've embarked on the solo phase of this trip, writing is my lifeline. Lord help me if I can't come up with something to write. So, lists.

Here then, are parts of my master list for this time and place, with each item to be made flesh by the great Word as my fancy and/or readers demand:


Best Samples of Indian English
Best Hole-in-the-Wall Eateries
Worst Hotel Experiences
Most Memorable People Encountered
Causes of Continued Culture Shock


In fact the first of these lists is easily completed--or at least begun. Without further ado, then, here are my favorite examples from signs, menus, etc. across the Subcontinent, of the way English is used and abused around here.

"Yes...we are less dirty" - restaurant

"We all made out of one radiation" - ashram banner

"Sweets problem? Solves with us" - sweets shop

Oil Pouch, Water Pouch, Es Cambal - egg preparations on a menu

Butter Scrotch - ice cream flavor

Cheaf & Best - hotel advertisement

Beans Coffee - menu item

Testy Snakes - menu heading

Fooding and Lodging - ubiquitous hotel offer

Shirting and Suiting - tailor's sign


...and many more, if only I could remember them all. Or figure out which mildewed, scrunched up notebook I'd jotted them all down in.

Holy Shit

Another day in Varanasi.  The sun rises red on the far side of the Ganga; down by the Ghats, boatmen ply their services to groups of pink-faced tourists whom they lead down the grimy steps between bodies in repose to the water's edge.  Ah, the water's edge.  The broad sweep of the ghats and their steep stone stairways, the boats boring their way upstream or floating serenely down at dawn and dusk; multitudes of pilgrims bathing their sins away in the turgid drink--these are the images that Varanasi has impressed upon the psyche of generations of visitors, domestic and foreign, from Lord Rama to Mark Twain.  There is a great deal more to the city than the river, of course.  But not for nothing is a twilit Ganga scene the memory millions of visitors will take home with them.  The river at the liminal dawn and dusk hours is a fitting encapsulation of this place, of its simultaneous subtlety and grossness and all of its other contradictions.  Let the image linger: legions of devout purifying themselves in a mighty river of filth.

*    *    *

As I write this, I can feel the shit drying on my heel.  This is the price of a moment of abstraction in the twisting lanes of the old city--and this is An Old City--a mis-step into a mass of cow mess.  To call it manure is optimistic, when it will fertilize no more than an algal bloom in the river 30 yards away, and when the cow's diet consists of what it can forage from trash strewn along the roads and--gods' grace--the occasional sweetmeat or dosa.  It is shit.  And it is in fine company: the narrow alleys are smeared, plastered, and adorned with excrement of all sorts.  It is so ubiquitous that one quickly grows used to regular, garden-variety crap; it is the diseased stuff that continues to horrify.  That, and the stuff that looks like it might have come from a human. 

But between whiffs of fecal matter wafts the aroma of flowers.  Marigolds, jasmine, garlands in orange and white; the streets are decked with blossoms.  Every petal is destined to be placed lovingly around the neck of a god, draped across one of the city's thousands of Shiva Lingas.  This, after all, is Shiva's city, the City of Light.  At night especially the whole place glows,and no beacons burn brighter than the multitudinous temples.  The maze of alleys around Vishwanath temple, site of the most famous of the 12 Jyotir Linga--lingas of light--blaze like a carnival.  To the eagles that circle above the city, this district must appear as a network of multicolored glowsticks arranged end-to-end.  At street level, the effect is dazzling.  But not all the luminosity comes from the god-houses.  Looming equally large in the minds of masses are Banarasi sarees, silken ones with metallic threads worked in.  And bangles, yes, bangles in teetering stacks, colored and shaped for every woman's wrist.  Other stalls hawk metalwares, fried and spiced snack mixes, you name it.  Benares, they say, is not just the best place to die.  It is the best place to live!  The betel leaf mixture called paan is legendary here, the sweets succulent and profuse, the perfume and attars sublime.  Surely Benares is the best of both worlds!

But a casual visitor could be forgiven for thinking that religious matters have been forgotten altogether out on the main thoroughfares.  The bustle and din here is unbelievable: it's the usual Indian mash-up of cycle rickshaws, pedestrians, three-wheelers, bullocks, and swarms of pedestrians all inching their ways along.  Along either side are hundreds more fabric shops, bank branches (with ATM), and snack vendors.  Indian society (by some measures, apparently) is the most materialistic on earth, and in the City of Extremes the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming.  On closer inspection, though, one of the little shops is found to be a "government shop," i.e. the official distributor of sacred marijuana products: powdered "pollen" mixed (for locals) or unmixed (for tourists) with holy Ganga water.  Less officially but no less visibly, the lassi sellers at the corner offer a conspicuously green "special lassi" that is likely to offer a great deal of bang for the rupee.  Shiva-ji loves his bhang, or at least his devotees do.  It's not just the ash-smeared saddhus who partake of this sacrament; so do most of the foreign tourists, and plenty of shopkeepers I've run into in the Bengali neighborhood I'm staying in.  The flute teacher who sits in the doorway of his music shop-cum-opium den, and the two equally-stoned proprietors of a dosa-and-idly restaurant a few doors down.  The City of Light has a decidedly cloudy side.

Piercing the haze are the ever-sharp eyes of the beggars.  Religious mendicants sincere, charlatan, or in between; old women and lepers; undersized children slipping barefoot through the labyrinth they know better than the minotaur.  And bovines.  As a rule, locals ignore the children, mischievous or desperate as they are, give an occasional coin to the helpless, may hand out regular alms to the sannyasi, and feed the beloved cows lavish treats.  The ever-resourceful children (the others have been culled by natural selection by now) have learned to solicit the foreign faces, unused to such stark inequalities.  And who can say no to a grubby, bright-eyed boy who knowingly takes you by the hand and leads you to the store where your 24 rupees (75 cents or less) can buy him enough biskoot for him and his little sister, too?  My own guilt-assuaging strategy has been to sit these kids down in the restaurant with us and get them some real food rather than put coins into outstretched hands.  On a larger scale, the city is a hotbed of charitable organizations, which may for all I know attract more of the destitute.  The city is a magnet for rich and poor.

For sinners as well as saints.  And what more attractive place for the rogue with the slightest religious tendency than the city that promises to wipe out the accumulated karma of all who so much as bathe in the holy river?  Dying here is better still, which is why, according to Diana L. Eck in City of Light, the truly devout take a vow never to leave the confines of the old city even to venture to Benares Hindu University a scant few yards South of the official line.  The greater the negative karmic load, the greater the incentive to stick around the maze beside the river and thus end up on a pyre at the burning ghat.  Less sinister but more menacing are the touts and hecklers at every turn, those who at the sight of fresh tourist meat may go so far as to try and lead you bodily into their trinket shop.  Here as everywhere else, the thin get thinner and the fat fatter as the wheels of commerce grind on.

Up another narrow galli from the touristy Bengali Tola lane I have found a bastion removed from worldly concerns, at least if one can get past the 100 rupee ticket: the grandiosely named International Music Ashram.  Twice a week a modest crowd of mostly (indeed) internationals gathers to have the latest generation of classical Hindustani musicians lull them into an intoxicated state without the use of any chemicals save those produced in our brains at the prompting of sitars' microtones and tablas' polyrhythms.  The ceiling fans blow, the sweat drips, the mosquitoes bite, and I don't care.  The trio seated cross-legged on the white-draped little stage has rendered me one-pointed.  Another day in Benares, redeemed.

*    *    *

The Ganga flows on as rivers are wont to do, swollen now by the monsoon and carrying along with bits of vegetation votive offering of flowers and ghee lamps.  In the depth of its channel, the unburnable bodies of pregant women, children, lepers and animals must be scuffling along, inching closer to the Bay of Bengal.  The bathers, whose rank I will be joining tomorrow on my last day in the City of Holy Shit, pay no heed to this or to the fact that open sewers continue to empty themselves into the great river, but continue placidly to wash themselves.  They may have noticed a striking fact: despite the feces, the chemical load that must permeate these waters, and the corpses burning around the clock, down by the Ganga there is not a trace of a bad smell.