Chapter 18: The Dead Dog, Part 4

I have been God: that feeling is probably the most nauseating thing in the universe.
It is difficult to say precisely where we went and how the day ended. It is difficult to try and estimate how many hours or minutes or seconds or days or eons the experience lasted. It is especially difficult to differentiate fact from fiction and certainty from the imaginary and real from illusion and hallucination.
But who said that The Imaginary can’t be Real? While sitting on top of the guesthouse that day, the mild pain I had had in the back of my neck for the past month had suddenly begun to burn. It burned and it tortured me and it travelled down my spine and then to the front and oh shit it fucking hurt.
Was that real pain? Did I imagine it? Then what about the beeping sound in my ears at the café that evening? Was I really hearing something? Were my ears hearing it or was it simply transmitting within my mind?
If I imagined it, then why did my neck hurt like that? That sound was definitely not fiction. My ideas and all the myths and those all-knowing whispers and the cloudy white skies in the mind were really there!
Maybe we imagine all that we sense..! Maybe the mind is the only anaesthesia! I have heard about hypnotists that make you fearless and physically, factually, numb. Is that imaginary numbness?
What the FUCK is reality?
Every single book I had picked up on enlightenment and the aghorees and the tantrics and yoga and Shiva had one common underlying theme: the universe we sense is nothing more than mere illusion, put here in front of us ignorant barely-conscious beings who end up spending a million lifetimes as million different things in a unifying hypnotized, narcoleptic trance. Only those who are lucky enough to achieve moksh and release from this cycle go on to see the Real.
But I understand now that the very crux of the maya and the atman of the illusionary and the reality of the whole universe is in itself as illusionary as I want it to be. Real is whatever I imagine Real to be.

On a hot monsoon Sunday afternoon which threatened of a stormy wet evening to follow, Shubham and I had hopped on Rakesh’s motorbike and transported deep into the old city and into the Gadaulia area. Rakesh stopped the bike outside a small electronic shop while I tried to keep my cool in the humidity and the ruckus of human traffic and the mosquitoes.
We set off on foot and followed Rakesh as he took a sharp turn into the thinnest of lanes. I dodged a reckless bicycler, side-stepped a bull, and hopped over a pile of shit that the bull had left behind. Rakesh took another unexpected left turn inside what looked like a small tea shop except it had no tables, chairs, or lights. The two of us crept behind him and had just enough space to stand flat with our backs against the wall and next to a marble shelf full of large mud jars and polythene bags. Another thin corridor next to Rakesh led deeper inside the shop.
We were greeted by a sweaty moustached man who sat on the only remaining space on the dusty floor next to us.
The moment I had a chance to exhale the stuffy air I nudged Rakesh’s shoulder. “Are you sure this is the place?”
He smiled, “Yes, yes, trust me, yaar.”
These were the last few days of Rakesh’s summer break, so he was especially excited to bring us out. On the other hand, Shubham, whom I had only met a few times before, was looking nervous as hell.
“Rakesh, yaar,” he whispered, “Where have you brought us? Is this legal?”
“Legal enough,” Rakesh quipped.
The man on the floor pointed at Rakesh and asked him to go in the corridor. The three of us took a few steps in and were suddenly greeted by a refreshing gift of relatively ample space and bright lights.
“Whoa!” I adjusted my eyes into the new room. It was the size of maybe three toilet cubicles, but at that moment felt larger than a cricket field. A bright yellowish light illuminated the room. It had three benches around three sides, and a long table in the middle. The only signs of decoration were a full-body mirror on the fourth side and a portrait of Shiva below the light.
“Take a seat,” Rakesh said, before taking one himself.
I was still in awe. “This looks like… this looks like someone’s hideout… or a mafia meeting point…”
Rakesh laughed, “It probably is!”
Shubham and I were not only relative strangers to each other, but were also quite foreign to the experience about to be unleashed upon us.
“So, neither of you has ever done this?” Rakesh asked.
Shubham shook his head nervously. I sat pokerfaced, responseless.
I realized over time that Shubham barely ever spoke, argued, or offered an opinion. He would question things every once in a while, but then always passively buckle himself in for the ride. He was slightly shorter than me and much chubbier, with his eyes constantly behind a set of large round spectacles and his ears constantly being fed English Rock music from a set of earphones attached to his walkman.
Rakesh slapped him behind his ear, “Put the music off now,” he said, “Your brain is going to become a fucking radio soon enough.”
Shubham complied, and seconds later, The Sweaty Moustached Man who seemed to own the place entered our little mafia den. Rakesh put up three fingers and gave him a confident nod; The Man disappeared in the corridor again.
“So, Azad…” Shubham asked, “How long are you back in town for?
I had been asked this before. “Oh, I don’t know… shit, it could be anything… days, months, years… Time has different rules in Varanasi, doesn’t it?”
He smiled, “Are you working? Studying?”
“No, no, nothing… just drifting along…”
No work, no Chachi, and nothing to do in this bloody city except wait to die.
An enthusiastic clap from Rakesh interrupted us – The Man had returned with three cold unhygienic-looking glasses of Thandai. I scrutinized my drink, which matched the colour of the light from the fluorescent bulb above us. We waited for Rakesh’s orders; although I had had this local beverage several times before, I knew that it was going to be enhanced by certain special flavours today.
The Man went back out and quickly returned with a muddy brown handful of what looked like someone’s constipated shit.
“Time to pounce!” Rakesh ordered again, before breaking off a small ball of the stuff from The Man’s hand and dropping it in his drink. I watched him curiously as he took the remaining bit of brown goo which was still stuck to his fingers and, standing up to face the Shiva portrait, marked it expertly on the image’s smiling blue face. He then sat down and swirled the Thandai with his finger to mix it.
He looked up at us, “This is tradition here. You cannot have bhang before offering some to Shiva first.”
“Are you serious?” I smirked.
“Yes, yaar! The only other thing that Shiva loves as much as Varanasi and his women is bhang… You can’t leave him out of the party!”
Shubham and I looked at each other. “How much do I take?” Shubham asked The Man.
“However much you see fit,” came the least helpful direction of the day.
Shubham broke off a piece slightly smaller than what Rakesh had taken. I dug my fingers into the goo and enthusiastically broke off the largest handful. Rakesh gave me a quizzing stare, to which I responded, “He said ‘however much’, right?”
“Ok – cheers!” Rakesh bellowed, “Drain it down as quick as you can – this isn’t fucking wine.”
And so down my throat the drink went. It wasn’t pleasant, but I fought against the taste. We slammed our glasses down at precisely the same time. Then I slurped off the remaining bit off my moustache.
“Yeah!” Rakesh said, “Now let’s get the fuck out of here!”
I paused and waited for something to happen – something, anything. I got up and sat back down and got up again. I threw clueless looks at both Rakesh and Shubham. I tried to think hard to test whether I could think hard. Nothing.
“Nothing’s happening,” I told Rakesh as we stepped out of the shop.
“Be patient,” he said.
“Nothing’s happening,” I told him 10 minutes later, as we dodged another wave of heavy human and vehicular traffic to get inside a thin stony lane crowded with vendors selling garlands and sweets and strange musical instruments and other prayer material.
“Be patient,” Rakesh replied.
“Nothing’s happening,” I said as we went deeper and deeper into that thin stony gullie, and had a cup of tea and were threatened by a curiously unhappy-looking bull and taken twists and turns into more and more gullies full of litter and dung and Godly things and more people.
“Relax, yaar, just be patient,” he repeated.
I kept on staring at the time on my wristwatch but soon lost track of when I had begun keeping track. Shubham had stayed quiet for the past half an hour. Or was it 45 minutes? I didn’t remember and then I didn’t care.
We walked deeper and deeper in… or was it further and further away? The buildings changed hue and shape and age. Rakesh led the way, unconscionably taking random turns and twirls as we followed. I wanted to know where we were going but wasn’t in the mood to ask.
We passed small temples, smaller shrines, and large old trees that had been converted into more shrines. We crossed little devotional music stores and jumped over more piles of scattered shit.
Then Rakesh started laughing and stopped to look back at us.
“That door,” he pointed to the entrance of a pint-sized house on his side, “Look at that door!”
We did; it was small, had a small image of Ganesha painted on it, and was mostly blue.
“What about it?” I asked.
Rakesh continued laughing. “Just look at it! He-he-he-he!” he pointed, “It’s so tiny – like a dwarf door! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
I smirked. Rakesh shook his head and then started walking again, still giggling to himself.
A few minutes later, Shubham began to laugh, too. “Ha! That really was a small door, wasn’t it?”
We saw many more doors; wooden and not wooden, small and slightly larger, colourful and full of God. Until we reached a thin, steep row of steps that headed downwards, where we walked down and soon reached a sudden clearing. The steps got wider and the wind got pleasantly harsher and there was the Ganga river.
“That’s brilliant,” Shubham whispered.
It wasn’t a new sight – I had been down to this ghat dozens of times before – but each time I tended to see the landscape from a different eye. This time, the Ganga looked mightier than ever before.
We walked closer to the raging river and sat down on the steps just a few metres above it. Dozens of people walked ritually around us as the descending sun had set up their cue for another dip in the dirty holy water. More bulls wandered around and a few Caucasian tourists were stared at.
I fell deeper into myself. Every noise I heard echoed in my ears over and over before fading slowly, slowly away. I felt like I was alone in my own shell and disconnected with whatever that did connect everyone and everything else. An invisible force that caused the smile on Rakesh’s face resonated with the flow of the Ganga and in the gleeful shouting of a child that had just caught a cricket ball somewhere behind me. But when the force approached me and my shell it just moved on and into the cracks of the old riverside steps and into the meditative minds of the ascetics dipping in the water.
I lifted up my left hand to examine it. My best hand. At that point, it began to feel lighter than the air in which it floated and that lightness spread down to my arm and then all of me started to detach itself from the environment. And then, I wondered why I had decided to lift up the left hand instead of the right one. I wondered why I had even pondered on the different point of views of examination of each hand. I then wondered if I had begun to wonder because something caused me to or that I wondered because that’s what I did to be.
I remained silent and Shubham did too. Rakesh stoop up and asked us to follow him. We walked along the ghat for a few minutes, until I saw grey and black clouds of smoke refracting the orangish hue of the setting sun. The smoke stemmed from the burning pyres of the cremation ghat and hovered hauntingly over the river.
The book on Kashi had spoken about this. The souls of all cremated here would be assisted by Shiva across our realm and across our river and I’m sure I saw a few of them floating around between the smoke clouds. At the ghat itself, large crowds were gathered around a small pond where more Gods stood.
This is where it all began. And a discus held by Vishnu set off a gleaming beam of energy that made the water that birth the fishes which brought a lot of us and I was born on that trident itself while living a life bouncing around it and making my way back. All the other ways began to be when I looked into the pond to see their reflections.
We walked further on: through the hordes of more ascetics and protectors of the cremation fire and tourists and logs of wood and children trying to study the Vedas and children trying to sell us drugs and temples. Rakesh led us away from the river and into the gullies again, where the route got thinner and the sky dimmer.
Tea shop number two. Or three, maybe. We sat by the end of a long bench, which stretched to occupy half a dozen other people. A heated discussion was already in process.
“No no, that’s not what the solution is,” said one seemingly enlightened old soul, “What they need to do is put all the electrical wires underground. That will solve the power problems.”
“What rubbish are you talking?” said another, “You think the state really wants to solve our problems?” he looked around for affirmation, “That bloody Mulayam Singh only wants to confuse us.”
And so on and so on. “Raoji!” the table occupiers greeted a familiar old square face as he sat down with deep green eyes and his green half-sweater and his cup of tea. Raoji, I recalled instantaneously, was one of the old time professors at the university, and was in the same faculty as Papa.
“This city will never change,” Raoji soon spoke in his constantly irritated nasal voice, “Never change.”
And they spoke about the lazy neverchanging city which is also somehow kinetically everchanging. Rakesh threw in his opinion about the old temples. Raoji threw in an entire fucking essay about them.
“There are two kinds of enlightenments in Kashi,” he said, “The Yog and the Bhog. You all have seen the statue in the Karmadeshwar Temple, right?”
My ears began beeping and echoing with his words, each of which became harder and harder to store in my memory vaults. “… spiritual means and material means…” I heard him say, “… understanding the atman or destructing the mind… enlightenment and intoxication…”
I had two more of tea, but was still thirsty for more.
“That new commissioner?” I heard a new voice start a new topic, “He’s a fraud, sala.”
Rakesh coaxed us to move on, and so we did.
We arrived at a well-maintained, large building surrounded by many more fascinating little doors leading to other little worlds that I didn’t care about. “Let’s go upstairs,” Rakesh ordered and we listened and I got inside to discover that the place was some sort of a guesthouse or hotel or something. We walked up hundreds of flights of stairs and got higher and higher until we reached near the peak.
“What is this place?” I asked Rakesh.
He smiled, “Just look around.”
I did. We had to go up one more row of stairs and then I saw where we were. There was a restaurant on the rooftop, and it was so high that I could see the entire city from up here.
The wind slapped against my face as I looked around excitedly and was bubbling with energy again. The descending rays of the sun illuminated the Ganga which gleamed back confidently. On the other side, I saw an intricate maze of gullies stretching out its tentacles around me – the thin lanes spread like tributaries of the Ganga, making its way to the main road through the old homes and slums and colour. Monkeys jumped from building to building and the crescent shape of the city and Shiva’s forehead revealed itself.
There was a wall in my mind, with each brick firmly cemented to the other. There were bricks about the songs I like and the friends I had spoken to, and one brick reminded me of my age. The bricks on the top were looser and more prone to getting blowing away by the whirlwind in my head and there were bricks way down in the wall’s foundations which were supposed to stay firm for life.
But then the space between the bricks began to loosen and expand. The first few layers on the top got jettisoned off by the late afternoon breeze. I forgot about some of my college courses and couldn’t recall the colour of Rakesh’s motorbike.
“This place is beautiful, isn’t it?” I heard one of the others say.
I nodded. Then the bricks began to fly away some more. The back of my neck started to hurt but I couldn’t remember why.
“Now… Saley!” Rakesh began laughing again, “Fuckers! Now do you feel something?”
I smiled back an affirmation, because the only thing I could think about was the vibration on my neck. Shubham had slid away to the other side of the rooftop, humming along to the music from his walkman.
Rakesh was feeling talkative. “Crazy, right?” he asked, “This is a whole different zone…”
It was, I knew it. But something was wrong. “What did we really have?” I heard that my own voice sounded sore, “This doesn’t feel right. It really doesn’t feel right.”
I kept on saying “feel right” to myself as my voice trailed away. Rakesh laughed even louder. “Just enjoy it; you’ll be okay in a few hours.”
But it really didn’t feel right. This must be more… It just didn’t feel right.
When it began to get darker, we decided to walk down the infinite flight of steps to leave the guesthouse. Ages later, we found ourselves in the gullie again. “Let’s go out to the main road,” said Rakesh.
So we did. We saw many more of the same things in our attempt to be unlost as we did in our initial deliberation to get lost. More doors, more shit, more tourists, and more dancing drug addicts. The lanes got thinner as we walked in the direction opposite to that of the river. None of us knew the way, but we walked on and on, instinctively twisting and turning and dodging and guessing. There seemed to be no end to it, as each gullie seemed to resemble the last, but at the same time brought us into unfamiliar new worlds. By the time we escaped the maze, the sun had retired for the day. We came out to be greeted by the noise and bright glittering lights of the Chawk main road and market.
On the way there, I continued to lose more and more bits of myself with each step. The wall that defined each part of my personality, of who Azad Shanker was, of all of my me-ness, seemed to be disintegrating.
I laughed at jokes made that I couldn’t have laughed at otherwise. But when I was finished with my hysteria, I wondered if the Real Me laughs at everything? I saw a sallow-faced, infested-armed, maggoty-mouthed little boy and I didn’t stop to look twice. Is it in my nature to feel pity for the less fortunate or am I someone who just ignores them? Do I have a nature?
“Let’s walk till we find a rickshaw, okay?” I heard Rakesh say over the cacophony of motor sounds on the main road, “We’ll head down to that coffee shop in Asi.”
I agreed. Shubham probably did, too. We walked in a single file manner on the roadside between the electronic and silk shops on our left and the chaotic traffic of scooters, bullock-carts, motorbikes, small cars, people, and other animals on the right. I walked in the middle, with Rakesh in front and Shubham behind me. Rakesh sped up and Shubham slowed down, and I probably remained constant, and so I was left alone amongst hundreds of others.
The noises got louder but I calmed them down again. A car whooshed by with a deafening vroom. Another followed, but this time I chose to mute it away. A few more bricks fell apart; I couldn’t remember where I was going or who I was with.
Rakesh… Rakesh… I forced myself to recall… and Shubham… Who the fuck is Shubham? How well does he know me? How well must he know me?
I walked further down. A man on a scooter passed by while staring at me, and I was certain that he was my primary school Geography teacher. It’s a pity that he had to see me in this state. I looked inside a book shop on the right side of the road and I immediately knew that the balding store owner in his blue and white checked shirt recognized me from all the time I had spent in there rummaging through his ‘Spirituality’ section. I saw another man inside the shop throw me a look of contempt and disgust that matched the look on the shop owner’s face. Further ahead, two more people recognized me and stared at me; one was definitely an employee of Deepu Chachu and the other actually looked like one of my classmates from Lucknow. What’s his name..? Ravi? Ram? Ramana? Yes… Ramama… Rammy..! What the hell is he doing here?
They can all see me. They all know who I am and what I’m being. I swiftly walked on.
I struggled to remember what day of the week it was. Then, a few more bricks were blown off as I forgot about my favourite comic book hero (Super Commando Who?) and who my college roommates had been. How did I talk to them? How was it different to how I speak to people here in Varanasi? When a music store on the left side blasted a boisterous Punjabi tune, I began to wonder whether or not I liked it and what qualitative standards I had set for myself when it came to appreciating music.
The familiar faces continued, until out of paranoia I decided to not look at them and focus on each of my little steps on the road ahead. I was distracted, when, amongst the potpourri of obscure loud sounds, I now began to hear whispers.
“Look at him – look how he’s walking,” I heard a female voice. When I looked up, I spotted two girls, probably around my own age, standing far away and across the road. Across the car honks and the Hindi music and the loud shopkeepers. But all the other sounds died and I heard them.
The second girl replied, “Forget him – Let’s go back in. My mother-in-law is going to be angry.”
“Oh yes, mine too,” the first one said, “I overspent on the dinner budget.”
I walked on, but even as I left the women far behind, I could still make out titbits of their conversation. When their voices finally ended, another, deeper voice hit my ears.
“What’s wrong with you?” A man inside a clothing store asked the store’s owner.
The owner sighed and whispered back haplessly, “I don’t know where to go anymore.”
By then I had entered the Madanpura area, and the dome-shaped houses and mosques and the weaving and Urdu writing on the walls. “Looks like we’ve entered Kabul,” I’m sure I heard the friend Whateverhisnameis behind me say.
I nodded. The whispers had stopped now, but the cracks in the wall were only widening. I felt light-headed, suddenly freed from the presuppositions of memory and being. I walked unconsciously. I tried to remember that one other person whom I really loved or was interested in or was obsessed with or something but couldn’t recall what she looked like.
The whispers had stopped, yes, but the mute voices were just beginning to get themselves heard… I looked around the busy street, and each pair of eyes I focused on seemed to shout out their own stories.
A man in a white kurta and kufi hat stepped out of his shop. My turn to stay awake, he thought, Another long night…
Oh, I hope it doesn’t rain tonight, thought a raggedy old beggar who also silently told me that she was a widow as she dusted off her dirty sari. This is all that I have to wear.
I couldn’t take it anymore, so I closed my eyes and allowed the forces of nothingness to take me forward. It didn’t work, because I could still see everyone and everything, and feel everyone and be everyone. A thin white thread stretched out of my head and out to the young girl with a black veil covering her face who had been married off way too early to a violent older man and to the accountant on his scooter who hadn’t taken a holiday in four years and to Deepu Chachu who still cried for Chachi in his sleep every night.
Bricks flew off at alarmingly accelerating speeds from my vacuous memory. Whoosh! went my childhood and Bam! disappeared my parents. As this happened, I flew higher and higher until the dark clouds parted and a clear white sky was visible high above. I began to zoom closer towards it.
Closer and closer I went, until nothing was left between me and the white nothingness except for a stretchy transparent cloth which felt like the inside of a balloon. So this is where I’ve been for so long. When the last of the bricks began to fly away, the only thing holding me down were the foundation stones: And they were Chachu and Chachi and I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about them.
An infinite instant later, I was distracted and brought back down by the unexplainably familiar scent of death.
I looked around the chaos and saw what it was – I had walked all the way to Sonarpura, and in the middle of the road lay the corpse of a mustard-coloured mongrel. Its colour was still ripe with life, but the mouth-open, tongue-out pose and its awkwardly crossed legs which were flattened by skid marks that stretched out to its crushed rib cage confirmed otherwise.
I examined the dog and then I knew how it had happened. Don’t do this to yourself had been the animal’s final thought and I agreed with it. A few of the bricks fell tumbling back on the wall and I knew who and what I was.
I walked on, but the thoughts of The Others didn’t leave me. Neither did the dead dog.

Time sped up as the night grew riper. A rickshaw may or may not have been taken, food was eaten, senseless jokes were laughed at. We ate Kachauris and Samosas and Gulab Jamuns and lots more. Deep philosophical discussions took place and were duly forgotten the next morning. More food was eaten.
We sat inside a small café which was decorated with the right combination of colours and shapes and furniture to make it look cosy rather than cramped. I’d tried the savouries and the caffeinated, the sweet and the sweeter.
Rakesh and Shubham spoke to me, but it took intense concentration of all my senses to understand their words. Plus, there was a beeping sound that clouded my eardrums.
“Did you guys hear that?” I asked them.
“Hear what?” they answer-asked together.
“That… that beeping.” It grew louder.
“Nope,” said one. “What the fuck are you talking about?” asked the other.
The beeping grew louder.
Suddenly, we were at a different restaurant, having a different meal.
“Where did you leave the bike?” Shubham asked Rakesh.
“We brought bikes?” was Rakesh’s response.
Somehow, I got back to Chachu’s place that night, and by then had become much more aware of the environment. I still didn’t believe in it, though.