Some twenty years back passed through Banares, sucked in it’s smells, sounds and images for an hour and moved on. But then I lived in Allahabad for a few years and I believe Banares is but only a lot more intense Allahabad. Crimson towns these! Paan chewing men looking at heaven while talking to you until their mouth saturated with saliva and splat! The wall gets colored. Arms sporting colored threads, saris, bangles, gamchas, bindies, hard cover of holy books and the cloth that wraps them, fluttering flags atop temples and ugly unplastered walls of houses; everywhere shades of red. From distance these places look inanimate, trapped in a forgotten time warp yet like anthills bustling with activities inside. These antiquated microcosms provide a sense of Gulliver to big town folks who occasionally deign to descend on these insignificant places and seek abstract.
But looking for ‘Nothing’ in Banares is a mistake, instead look for ‘Void’. Buddha in me says these words connote different things and I tend to agree. Void is everywhere permeating everything. You could see it in the wrinkles of that rickshaw-puller politely trying to strike a conversation, in the hollow boast of boatman, in the beady glazed eyes of shocked widows, and blank innocence of orphaned children and awed bystanders.
It must have been at the place where bomb exploded and surely in the mind of brainwashed zombie who planted the bomb.
But ‘Void’ is not a substitute for ‘Nothing’ if you want nothing but ‘Nothing’
