Paris and Me

Hilton, that is, have more in common than I ever imagined.

(Be advised that there's strong language for gentle ears in this one.)

Early this morning I walked to the small temple near my flat, as I do each morning, to watch. I sit on a stone bench where people sometimes sit before they step onto the raised platform that marks the boundary of the sacred space around the temple, which in this case is a kind of small chapel with a sanctum sanctorum holding a shrine in a space a little bit larger than a telephone booth. From the sheltering roof rises a characteristically shaped, orange-colored shikhara or spire. The outside walls of the chapel enclosing the shrine are a little larger in area, but not much. The chapel sits on a patio-like concrete base, a kind of smooth-surfaced porch supported by narrow wooden posts. Before it is a larger plaza area on which sits a marble sarcophagus of a great man, whose name I haven’t yet been able to work out. It was lovely and several folks spoke to me. Folks are so pleased to share their faith and so proud of it.

The biggest temple in Banaras is Vishwanath on campus, about a ten-minute walk from me. It was built in the 1930s as a response to the caste discrimination practiced by another extremely important temple with the same name. Worshp there is quite a different experience. The ritual is impressive. It unfolds much the same way each time, presided over by highly trained Brahmin pujaris. the first time I saw it I was gobsmacked, and maybe I’ll describe it sometime. (Hindu ceremonies are not short; it's a long description.) The smaller temples, vernacular structures of all different kinds, from the tiniest and most humble shrines to somewhat larger but still modest structures, like my temple, are far more varied in what happens there. My temple is a shrine to Hanuman, the famous monkey god who helps Rama win back Sita.

I bought some bananas at the tiny stand fairly near my flat (practicing my Hindi), then after I had worked some hours, my friend Megan (who studies the local prostitute community) and I went on a shopping trip. Shopping for anything but vegetables and basic household goods is a major affair logistically. The shops you need to go to aren’t necessarily close to each other, you don't know what shops to go to, if you do they're hard to find, nobody except locals can figure out the names of the roads (no signs, of course, and naps aren't detailed enough or reliable--the roads change their names according to which stretch you're on and worse, which side of the road) and the drivers mostly aren’t literate (30% literacy rate in Varanasi, a university town) so you can’t show them an address. Then there’s the whole issue of whether the place they take you is actually the place.

But we had Megan’s regular driver, and Megan speaks Hindi, so we were fine. We shopped for kitchen utensils and towels and sheets and saw some potted plants we liked and added those to the collection we were amassing in the tiny autorickshaw we were traveling in. When we were all done and worn out, Megan’s sweet driver Raju brought us tea in little clay cups from a chai stall. It’s the custom after you're done to break the cups by throwing them on the ground so they can work themselves back into the earth.

We dropped our stuff at Megan's flat and intended to walk to a nearby veg restaurant. We were navigating a narrow little gulli, the name for the small, twisting alleys for which Banaras is famous, when a water buffalo approached us going at a trot in the opposite direction. Cows and buffalos are all over the place, slow moving, and generally no problem but you have to watch their horns if they start to move quickly. I find them to be upstanding members of the polity. They’re calm, and the cows especially have beautiful faces. Because they're holy they wander anywhere they want. This bull was moving a little fast, and I suddenly saw he was having a bad bout of diarrhea. In that narrow little alley, I thought the problem was going to be sidestepping what was hitting the flagstones as he moved past, but before we could think, all this stuff came out of him and splatted all over us as he went by.

As point person I suddenly had big polkadots of bull shit, the real stuff, all over the front of my little powder blue light cotton shirt, my cargo pants, and my sandals. As he passed, I felt it hit my arms, my nose, my forehead, my chin and just above my lip. My purse also got baptized. Megan got splattered too, a little less thoroughly. I’m sure it's in my hair, so I’ll take a tap bath in the room that serves as my shower room when I’m done writing this. Well, we just stood there for a minute, and it really stank and I gagged a little, and I thought everyone would laugh at the pasty girls getting it, but they didn’t. Nobody wants to get nailed by buffalo diarrhea.

There was no question of going to the restaurant, so we went back to Megan’s, stripped off our shirts, put them under the shower, and jabbered about how much awfuler it would have been if we hadn't been close to Megan's flat. I scrubbed face and arms and hands and purse. We put on new shirts and went off to an excellent tasty meal of spicy cabbage salad and vegetable biriyani and some fabulous vegetable concoction called sabze kohlapuri, after the place it originated.

There is a passage in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, the current hot novel about Varanasi, in which the protagonist gets a shit-soaked cow tail smack in his open mouth as he walks down an alley. Cows are very dusty here but they don’t walk around caked in shit at all, and until tonight it like seemed a very implausible incident. We didn't even get good old healthy cow manure. (I see women going to market balancing neatly stacked pyramidal towers of sun dried cow patties in large baskets on their heads to sell for fuel.) This was one sick ungulate.

The Paris Hilton part is her famous line at the 2003 Billboard Music Awards: “Have you ever tried to get cow shit out of a Prada purse? It's not so fucking simple.” The FCC socked Fox TV for some ridiculous amount of money for indecent speech. But her point was correct....

I submit truth as a defense.

Megan, who’s lived in India a lot (though this was a first for her, too) knew of a Fulbrighter who, the first day she was in India, stood under a tree and a monkey pissed on her. I've considered it, and I think it's worse to be peed on by a monkey.

After dinner, I loaded my shopping booty onto a bicycle rickshaw home, and the rickshaw wallah and I sped through the warm night breeze and all the people out on the streets socializing and selling vegetables and food. Balance in rickshaws is a little precarious, and i was juggling plants and sacks. At one point I thought I would lose it all, and the rickshaw-wallah stopped to help me reorganize. I gladly awarded him the extra he asked for when we got home.

Later in the evening I went to another little temple. After I paid my respects to the Mother Goddess, I was invited to share in a dinner prasad taking place on the hard dirt in front of the temple for maybe 20 boys in their early 20s, a great young-men age, which I accepted just exactly to establish my credibility with the neighborhood folks. There was daal and mashed potatoes and some vegetable mash I didn’t recognize in the dark (or the small portions I ate) and a coarse-crusted bread I thought at first was a small baked potato, all scooped out directly onto our plates by the hands of the boys who were serving it (afterwards they washed the dishes in the water spigot outside the temple that purifies the hands and feet and heads of devotees). Thus I broke most of the rules of eating Indian food that you aren’t sure is safe, and had a grand time.

When it was over, along with everyone else, I took my paper plate and threw it in the grass nearby. Trash disposal in Varanasi.

P.S. This morning, the next day, I acted out in fractured Hindi an account of last night's adventure for Irmila, the woman helping me clean this week. Much merriment all around.