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Chapter One

    I am the keeper of a small guest house in the holiest city in India. For more than twenty years—all my adult life—I have lived here: my great weight sunk, torpid in the heat, into this sagged chair on my rooftop patio, or presiding downstairs at the table that guards the entryway: a once-American woman, taking down the passport number of each traveler, managing this inn for the Mohan Joshi family.

    The newly arrived always stare: at my bloated flesh bathing in sweat, my fair coloring marked by freckles. I am not what one expects to find hidden away in Varanasi.

    This is my home, though, the Saraswati, eleven rooms and a little restaurant, a view of the river, which at this moment burns with early morning light. From my roof, I watch it go by: the Ganges, Ganga it is called in Hindi by those who revere the river goddess.

    I gave myself a Hindi name long ago, just weeks after my arrival here. I am Natraja. It has come to suit me well. I answer to it in my dreams; never mind that I was born Estelle, forty-odd years ago. Such an old-fashioned North Carolina farm-wife name did not fit me.

    As Natraja, I have gained a modest fame. The Lonely Planet travel guide each year advises the adventurous to come to my table: "Mother Natraja at the Saraswati is worth a side trip. A one-woman blend of East and West."

    What the guidebook does not mention is that I weigh perhaps four hundred pounds, twenty-five-or-so stone. I have more flesh than Ganesha, the elephant-faced god.Yet I'm told that, once on my feet, I move like an Indian, sinuous and flowing. I've darkened some from the sun, but my hair is still ashyblond, long and straggly with threads of grey, and my eyes are light brown to the point of gold. Having these eyes, this huge body, helps me: people keep their distance. In a place just next to the Ganges, close to the pyres of burning bodies, newcomers especially are careful of anything that might unsettle them more.

    Even so, the tourists ask me their questions. I rarely tell them anything. They can fend for themselves.

    What they want to know I tell again and again to the waters that flow below this perch, a new audience with every moment, or to Shiva, with his many aspects and faces. In a sense, I have named myself for this most seductive deadly god; Natraja is Shiva's dance, dance of the one who creates and destroys. The river itself springs from his brow, carrying both waters of healing and ashes of the dead.

    From where I sit, my left leg gone prickly from the edge of the chair, I can easily see one of the phallic shrines to Shiva, the linga. It is below, there just at the edge of the water, the stone image of a penis, waist-high nearly and thick as an oak, a smooth pillar giving off a dull glow where it is touched by sun, garlands of orange marigolds looped at its base. A worshipper adds a fresh offering now—he hunches like a gardener tending a shrub, arranging the yellow flowers, pouring river water from a brass kettle over the rounded head.

    The base of the shrine is a vulva, but people rarely notice the female organs, no more than grooves which serve as a drain for the pourings of water. On some linga, a serpent swims in the female canal; on others it may coil upward, winding itself about the phallus, or not appear at all. My shrine is too far away for me to see its details. But then, I require no reminder of the serpent within.

    I see all I need to see, from this filthy rope-weave chair, l have planted myself at the city's center. Of the million pilgrims who come to Varanasi each year, many will stop first at this bit of shore. My house sits yards from Dashashvamedh, the main bathing ghat. The city's waterfront stretches out on either side, a long curve of riverbend made into a series of waterfront ghats, each a tall flight of steep concrete stairs climbing several stories from the river to the level of the city's winding lanes. The bank is a huge set of bleachers, facing the flow of Ganga, mobbed with bathers. I supervise them from my roof.

    At the other side of my house, though I never look that way, is the city's complicated core: the galis, a great labyrinth of lanes so narrow a rickshaw can't enter. This maze guards my house—like a thorny hedge, or the moat around a castle.

    I live my life here, sitting and watching, the sweat soaking my sari and strands of my hair. With Ramesh to do our shopping—and surely he is the one to know what he needs for his kitchen—a year and more can pass without my stepping beyond the scarred table downstairs by the entrance.

    I have no reason to leave the house, though once or twice in these years Ramesh has led me down the gali for a glimpse of the market. But I will never re-enter the world. My conscience does not allow it. Those who come to me do so of their own will. And they bring me more news from outside than I wish to hear.

    Fortunately, I have learned many ways to end a conversation. Should I simply start to rise from my chair in the dining room, the guests at my table will look away, embarrassed at my panting effort. I come up here, latch the door behind me.

    It is different of course with Ramesh—I watch him as I sit here each morning.

    He stands in my sight, waist-deep in the river, at a distance of perhaps a dozen lengths of unwound saris. From here, he is clearly visible, though the wet flesh of other bathers presses so close around him that the water does not shine between one person and the next. And I know him from the motion of his arms and head, he cups river water in his big wide-fingered hands, lets it stream down his face. I imagine it lukewarm, filmed with soap and oil like dishwater left standing. I feel it in my own hands, water that both soils and cleans. I feel it running down my face. I recognize his way of holding his shoulders, standing so erect that his shoulderblades nearly meet in the middle of his narrow back. I study him out of habit as much as anything; a mind cannot remain empty or unwelcome thought will flood in.

    For the devout, this is the hour of the bath. The sun is just up. Prayer and singing are over. Ramesh scrubs up under one arm; he bends his knees to let the water rinse through his underwrappings. He and the others are simply washing now, ridding themselves of their dirt and their sins. What crimes could he believe he has committed since this time yesterday, my irascible old companion, fellow monastic? He and I have lived beside each other in this house so long: he sleeping on his servant's cot at the wall of the dining room, I in my cell of a room.

    There is a rattling behind me—who is it? But the door to the stairwell is shut. No one here. Perhaps my eyes closed for a moment and I dreamed it. Though if I dozed, it was not for long; or else the sun is slow in its journey up today. There is Ramesh still at the water, brushing his teeth with a neem twig, finishing his toilette.

    My eyes return to a waking focus.

    Then from below—a thumping, something being dragged. It's a little peculiar, though not of sufficient interest to move me from my chair. Travelers do arrive sometimes with great trunks, bringing with them all they own, and enough pills to set up a hospital.

    Most of that sort would never reach me, stopping, no doubt, when they take one look at the path that leads toward my house. The galis, even more than the cremation grounds or the river itself, unnerve a foreigner. They have a hellish feel. Not enough light filters down between the buildings; it's too dark at noon to take a picture. Newcomers think they have entered the underworld.

    I laugh at the uneasiness of my guests, coming in at dusk their first day, white and shaken in a way that heat and dehydration don't account for. They've read on the train: this is the Hindu holy city, the place to die, to have the body burned and offered to Ganga, the place to bathe and be purified. Yet they don't know how it feels to walk into a lane only two sets of shoulders wide and look behind them to discover the exit is no longer in sight. A fear rises, of being buried alive. But it's the only way to reach this spot, either by river or through these galis.

    That sound again—

    Odd.

    Now it's like the wind moaning almost, but surely not in this stagnant heat.

    It is a priest no doubt, blowing a long note on his conch shell, somewhere close by. Breath in a conchshell is an inhuman cry.

    But Ramesh has stopped his washing. He stares toward a spot at the base of the building.

    Pushing upward, I rock forward onto my feet.

    Ramesh and so many around him, they are turned this way— something is wrong.

    Close to the guardwall with my unsteady weight, I look over to the gali floor below, hear a scream.

    The white-clad backs of two men, no three, running head-down for their lives—they disappear into the alley beyond the next building.

    Below, a man lies fallen to the paving—his legs struggle, feet digging at the stone. His face, in the building's shadow, is cut off from view....

    Where is Ramesh?

    There—coming out of the water. Behind him in the water, parents huddle together with their children, faces averted so as not to have seen. Ramesh is hurrying up the steps though, wrapping his dhoti over his wet underbinding as he goes.

    I wave at him to stop. He must stay where he is and not look.

    He continues to climb, scowl on his face, lips pressed down hard. He comes up and up the steep steps, looking toward that same spot.

    "Ramesh," I call out.

    He glances once my way, but keeps climbing. I know he has seen me. "Ramesh!" I scream. My voice has gone shrill "Go back!"

    But he does not.

    I feel myself swaying. I must get into the house. The ends of my fingers hunger for the cool walls.

    Lurching toward the door, I am seasick — where is the doorlatch? Inside all will be as usual; I'll find him downstairs in the kitchen.