Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
All along the main ghats are circular straw umbrellas like huge,
old, dry, thin mushrooms from Wonderland. Beneath them squat
pundits, astrologers and, oddly enough, masseurs. No other
professions squat there, shaded from the sun - even at night. We
walked over to this man's spot. I lay on the warm stone, and a
bunched rag was placed beneath my head. Suddenly I felt four men
seize a limb each and begin massaging with strong, practised fingers.
'Maharaja massage,' the soft, perfumed man explained, as I looked
up in surprise.
If you've never been massaged by four people at once, try it. There
was something perversely enjoyable about the helplessness and the
surrender required of me. My whole body was kneaded, pummelled,
squeezed, tossed around like a doll. Few tourists - fearing for their
wallets, their lives, ever take up these riverside massage offers. They
should. Where else can you get four expert masseurs to extract twenty
years of tension in twenty minutes for ten cents?
By the end I felt as if I'd been filleted, reduced to a great happy
blob of tender meat. I glowed. I hummed. I wondered if this meant
I might be gay after all . . . And standing over me was Amar.
In his early twenties, gaunt and wonderfully laconic, he gazed at
me with the dreamy, liquid eyes of the opium addict. Only his silks
and his mud-stained Reebok trainers betrayed wealth. Wealth in
India betrays itself differently from the ways it does in the West -
although it's usually wealthier.
'First we take
bhang lassi
,' Amar suggested, after I'd paid the
masseurs and strolled off with him along the hectic ghat. 'Dom
Raja is having some business. You like the
bhang
?'
Near the top steps was a stall bearing a large, buckled, rusted tin
sign hanging at a twenty-degree angle. It read GOVT. SHOP OF
BHANG in English and Hindi, and bore two images - one a Siva
lingam decorated with the Om symbol, the other what appeared to
be an empty sardine can.
Bhang
is a mild blend of hashish - like beer compared to whiskey
and, although the drug is illegal in India, the government in Benares
obviously felt a need to control its sale. Many chillum-toting
'skyclad' sadhus smoke it as a sacrament, an ancient rite connected
to Siva, and no Indian government wanted to get into the kind of
