Long Way Back Home

Bazaar travels to Benaras with acclaimed author Aatish Taseer, whose new book looks at how this ancient city deals with the repercussions of modern India

- Esha Mahajan

A line from Pretty Woman comes to mind as I reflect upon Benaras: “That’s just geography”. Why else would the cosmopolises of New York and London seem more familiar than Benaras, an hour-long flight away from Delhi? The sense of dissonance here isn’t jet lag—it’s as if time, somehow, has paused. You come across a keen awareness of ancestry and lineage, dating back generations; you hear Sanskrit spoken effortlessly and casually; you see death and decay so closely it becomes an enduring motif of the ghats, as natural as the water in the Ganges. It’s telling that it is the only city exempt from Bazaar’s style guide—Bombay is Mumbai and Pondicherry is Puducherry, but Benaras is never Varanasi.

It is this idea that Aatish Taseer explores in his thoughtful new book The Twice-Born: Life and Death in the Ganges (HarperCollins). “I was interested in the idea of distance that wasn’t physical. This was a lateral journey, to try to understand the distance between people who are very near to each other. I was interested in the experience of travelling back over centuries. That distance is not benign. People who find themselves on the other side find that their world is changing in profound, even violent ways,” he says.