The following is from Devika Rege’s debut novel Quarterlife. Rege was born in Pune, India, and lives in Bangalore. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell.
The season, of course, was winter.The vapour in the air stung like dry ice and smelled of camphor. Slowly, Varanasi appeared through the mist, its faint ramparts and shikharas the colour of dirty bone. I had arrived in the city at dawn, and warmed by little more than a steaming cup of milk and a prickly sweater, I stood on the terrace of Sita Guesthouse surveying the Ganga. Nine months after my father died, I learned of his request to have his ashes scattered here. It seemed quaint, to say the least, from a man whose ancestors had lived for generations on the south-western coast of the country, who was born in Pune, studied in the States, raised a family and a small business in Mumbai, and for whom faith was such a private affair that when I asked at the age of seven if god existed, he told me to find out for myself. I knew from the small but cherished library in his bedroom that, as a young man, he had read several religious texts including the Bible, the Gita, the Quran and some works of Zen Buddhism, but he had also read Darwin, the Russian novelists and existentialist thinkers in vogue during his student days, and a prolific range of histories.And while I hadn’t forgotten the quiet relish with which he would remind us that the idea of swaraj and the man who wrote our constitution were both born in our state, he was as quick to distance himself from Marathi people he considered ‘extreme’, like the Maratha sons of the soil or staunch Chitpavans, as opposed to his own privileged subcaste that he never mentioned except with some embarrassment when asked outright. A year before he died, once politics was no longer beyond the purview of dinner-table talk, he clarified his position as an ‘unapologetic liberal’.
In sum, my father’s yearning, as he died, for a city that he had never visited in his life went beyond what might easily be ascribed to his genetics, education or temperament. Were it to do with divinity alone, he might have requested us to dispatch his ashes exactly as my brother and I did, which was to drive an hour north of Pune and immerse them in the Indrayani river at the thirteenth-century temple town of Alandi. While Hindus believe that releasing the ashes of the dead in Varanasi leads to freedom from the cycle of rebirth,Alandi has a local reputation for achieving the same. Varanasi, however, is mentioned in the oldest epics of Hindu literature and Alandi is not. Any yearning that reached past Alandi to the fount of Hinduism itself was more than religious; it was civilizational.
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Now, before the reference to civilization sets up lofty expectations, let me clarify that this is not an epilogue. In any long-steeped fiction, the premise evolves, fissions or becomes irrelevant as the story grows; new answers give rise to newer and subtler questions. This chapter, then, is simply the next movement in a long and diffused meditation. As to the relationship of the Marathi man to Varanasi, and of all people to their Varanasis by whatever name they call them, it is one of several nebulous and recurring anxieties in the work, foregrounded here for no reason other than my own reaction to my father’s request. I was visiting my mother on what would have been their fortieth wedding anniversary.Touching the thin gold chain that had replaced her mangalsutra, she told me that she had barely registered his wish in the terror of his final days, and later, splintered by grief and the chaos of a Hindu funeral, it slipped her mind entirely as the family elders decided on Alandi. She then contradicted herself, saying that she had in fact remembered, but could not imagine the logistics of carting his ashes to a faraway northern city where we didn’t know a soul, and did not want to burden those who were already being so helpful with a demand they would find hard to ignore.When I assured her that my father would have understood, she sighed,‘But Kashi …’ and in her discarding the city’s textbook name for its ancient Hindu one, I could see that she was berating herself for more than failing his request.The ghats at Alandi, like those in Wai, are built in the image of Varanasi, and she regretted that the soul she loved most had been released at a place short of the real deal. And for all the irony implicit in that phrase, ‘the real deal’ – how different was I? I had spent years working on a novel set almost entirely in Maharashtra. Several of my characters spoke Marathi, but given the times, even those who did not were forced to contend with the question of why Hindu nationalism was taking hold of this vast state so far away from the Hindi-speaking heartland. And though Varanasi was hardly on my mind as I wrote, the project suddenly seemed incomplete without visiting the prototype of the ghats in Wai, and by extension, inappropriate to conclude in Jaffrey, Jaipur, Pune or even Mumbai.
By the time I finished my milk, the mist had risen. On either side of the roof, Varanasi stretched out in an arc, its sandstone walls catching the light until they shone a rich sepia gold. The Ganga was a luminous scroll on the city’s lap, and in the distance, a dull cacophony of bells filled the silences between the screech of gulls and the slap of oars as the dinghies left the ghats. I recalled a line from a Ghalib poem: In Kashi, every grain of sand glows like a sun. I shut my eyes and opened them slowly, trying to take in the ancient capital like all those pilgrims who walk thousands of miles for darshan, which is to say, not as Varanasi but as Kashi. And how easy it would be to describe the undertow in my chest for that sombre pageant of a many-thousand-year-old heritage, unified and transcendent in the morning light, but I had never felt more detached from my writing or the goings-on in the country; to say I was in Varanasi from creative integrity was only a little less dubious than saying I was there from familial duty. I was in grief, and since my parent’s untimely death, I too was yearning for something that holds beyond the pain and terror of the moment. In the weeks before my trip, I told no one besides my mother of my plans. And while I rarely give up the chance to jest or philosophize with a fellow traveller, getting in on the overnight train from Mumbai, I did not encourage conversation with the family across the aisle. Varanasi was the closest I had come to any kind of motivation in months, and it felt dangerous to analyse why; my only journal entry from that time is a single line: I am going to the place where seekers go, even when they do not know what they are seeking.
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From Quarterlife by Devika Rege. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright. Copyright © 2024 by Devika Rege.
