The Romantics

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WHEN I FIRST CAME TO BENARES in the severe winter of 1989 I stayed in a crumbling riverside house. It is not the kind of place you can easily find any more. Cut-price ‘guest houses’ for Japanese tourists and German pastry shops now line the riverfront; touts at the railway station and airport are likely to lead you to the modern concrete-and-glass hotels in the newer parts of the city. The new middle-class prosperity of India has at last come to Benares. This holiest of pilgrimage sites that Hindus for millennia have visited in order to attain liberation from the cycle of rebirths has grown into a noisy little commercial town.

This is as it should be; one can’t feel too sad about such changes. Benares — destroyed and rebuilt so many times during centuries of Muslim and British rule — is, the Hindus say, the abode of Shiva, the god of perpetual creation and destruction. The world constantly renews itself and when you look at it that way, regret and nostalgia seem equally futile.

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