The best-placed spiders web in the world… across the iron work, by the all-night light on our balcony… catching dozens and dozens of flies small flies and moths… more food than a spider could eat in, maybe a life time… except every morning, as the spider must know, the hotel cleaners brush away the web… so that every day he has to try again, and every night catch the banquet of all spider banquets, and every morning see it all lost again
...
...
A flyblown table in the riverside café where the pakoda is the best I’ve had in India… the sugar bowl now pecked by the sparrows… now atted by the flies incessant in the shade … and every now and again, the small squirrel sneakily descends the tree trunk to nervily, looking round again and again, put his paws on the bowl side, stick his long nose in and cheekily nick a mouthful, and then another
...
And behind Priscilla the sparrows work at the broom, break off strands in their beaks and, thus whiskered, flit off to unseen nest
...
The water-buffalo
Cataract in one eye
Groaning like a slowly opening creaky door in a horror-movie
...
To get lost in some unknown offmap market
somewhere off the top, the north-east, of the ghats
Veg market
Silk market
Souk within souk
Gate within gate
Door within door
House within house
Family within family
Street upon street
Alley upon alley
Window upon window
Ornament upon ornament
Mosque upon mosque
The rattle and clatter and heavy rhythm of the silk looms behind the windows and through the doors through the doors
The hallooing kids
...
On the alleyways the spiders webs so thick and so old, they are like light muslin
...
The ghatside house of four floors
Each of different design and ornament
Different pillars, different wrought ironwork
Different arches doorways doors vents balconies paint tracery
And all unlike the buildings either side
And yet the floors of equal proportion and probable age
...
I wanted to come here for twenty years and finally got here 3 years ago
I’m in the same hotel as 3 years ago
[when i was with someone else]
and i think the hotel staff think i’m
on the run with a young floozy
or at best a Princess
... Princeszilla, in fact
...
The homeless dog… a rough-coated off-white creature with a dirt-greyed belly making its steady way along the riverside ghats, so every minute it enters the territory of a group of dogs who bark en masse before it gets there, as the dogs behind it begin to stop, while the forthcoming dogs shift and side and sidle closer to it to bark right at it and then move up behind it, barking closer and closer, only stopping moving when it stops, and only stopping barking when it turns to look at them, swiftly intimidating them with a growl, before moving on so that they wait a few cowardly seconds, till the tough-nut is safely a distance away, before barking again as it moves out of their territory and they keep barking, some barking and howling long after it has moved into the next territory, who’s dogs have already started barking at it… and on it moves, fearless, bringing perpetual aggravation all the way up as we follow the localised barking along the rover, across the descending stone, past the high ornate temples, the walls of bare stone, the kiteflying kids, the cricket playing young men, the red or saffron holy men, the kids selling postcards and flowers for floating, the men on the waterside crying “booooat?” …
...
But what happen when the itinerant meets a dog stronger and more fearless?
...
Jared Diamond says the average Papuan travels very little in their life, for moving unannounced and unpermitted into another tribal territory would create an inevitable violence they might not survive… and permission is never likely
...
The burning ghats, there’s two
A caste who carry the bodies down the steps to the water
The corpse, dressed in coloured silks
first placed in the river,
then atop the short wood pyre
And then burnt
The flames starting slow
...
They’ve been burning bodies here for thousands of years
And it feels it
As you might imagine
It makes it a very intense place
...
Yet there’s something matter of fact about the process
They just do it
There’s no sign of mourners
[maybe the sorrow is done with]
There’s little ceremony
A man brushing the wood and corpse with flame
[maybe the ceremony is before death?]
They just do it
And then everyone stands looking at it
And then they stop
And it burns away
...
...
Simply everybody offers to sell me hash…
I mean, it hasn’t happened so much on this trip as the last…
when, with my hair, I could so easily have been mistaken for a hippy type…
but here in
opium has also been mentioned…
while Priscilla never gets offered it…
but yesterday...
when I thought I,
with blondening wavy locks and a nice light-patterned cotton shirt,
looked more like an unfortunate relic from a
Wham video circa 1984...
i got offered it more than ever before
so maybe i don’t...
...
and for the past two days its been two offers a minute up past the busiest ghats
or down those narrow bustled streets...
hash?...
marijuana?...
you want something sir?
You want somesing sir?
...
...
Has
Well the TV adverts are definitely better
...
Its difficult for my eye to discern any other change much
Though
...
A bin a bin, its so good to see a bin…
so we can empty hands, and pockets and bags…
A bin a bin, its such a relief…
from the burden the guilt the hassle the worry
the complicit-down…
A bin, a bin, we want to dance round it singing
do a tango with it on the banks…
and who knows how long it will be till we see another…
A bin a bin, the last one we saw, in
was the size of an SUV and had most of a
chomping horse stuck out one end of it
A bin, a bin, its so good to walk up to a bin and…
simply…
put something in it
...
And three years ago
A boat up the
When suddenly
Half a million swallows fly down the river
And back up the road
And round again
Flitting in unbelievable mass and numbers
Thousands and thousands of them blizzarding close around us
Inches from my head
For ten fifteen minutes
A CGI nightmare
A biblical plague
A wholly unreal
...
Now i’ve no idea how many but
Well, half a million?
...
While this time its not swallows
But absolutely millions of flies and moths on the ghatside after dark
A plague an infestation a million
Filling the air and each flickering in the light
...
And a cycle over to Ramnagar across the pontoon bridge
Just about keeping down the simmering road rage
[if roadrage was an Indian thing it would be big and bloody]
The rundown fort with the lame museum
Abjectly kept textiles but,
As the place used to have its own gun factory,
A curious gun room
...
Eight barrelled primitive revolver
Four barrelled tiny ladies revolver
Long Indian sword fitted with two flintlock pistols either side of the beside the handle [to spread your bets]
Glass-handled daggers
Unnamed disembowelling weapons you stick into the gut, open, and then twist
Ivory tree with individual leaves
...
And a stuffed crocodile so decayed it is shameful its there and you have to look away
P says there was a stuffed bear as bad but i couldn’t look
Some things are very difficult to write
Like this description of a tree seen from under the leaves on the patio of the
cafe with the great veg pakoda
...
From beneath it looks like a still of a green pool with heavy raindrops rippling concentrically all across it
... because the twigs are radial out from the end of the branches ... and the smallish leaves on those twigs curve a little towards the branch end... so it seems as if they are concentric green circles around it, like ripples... and each branch has this and, seem from below, they overlap each other, like the ripples of raindrops...
Some things are very hard to describe
...
The flute man
With his tree of flutes
Plays his forlorn tune
As he moves salelessly past
...
As the blur of the last morning haze clears in the
Rising sun
...
And men sink their bare brown backs into the silver grey of the river
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