Marigolds
Richard Schwarzenberger

An orange glow suffuses the riverbank, as a crescent of fire pierces the haze. Here comes the sun.

“Boat, sir?” a boy of about eleven asks, approaching. It’s probably the tenth time I’ve been asked that question this hour. Gliding by offshore are boats loaded with tourists. Indifferent to their cameras and the soapsuds and the floating scuzz, a man with a trimmed white beard wearing a scarlet turban brushes his teeth with a twig, his spindly shins piercing the water like a river bird’s. This section of steps, a ghat, is the southernmost along the Ganges at Varanasi, and the tourists have snapped so many pictures by this point that the flashes are only intermittent.

“No boat, no thank you.”

“What is your name, sir?” He sits down beside me, resting his head on his bony knees, watching me sideways. . Pankaj is his name. “Maybe later, sir, you will like.”

“Maybe.”

On gray, trampled silt deposited last summer by the monsoon-swollen river, a man in a loincloth jumps up and down, exercising. Nearby a boy in a school uniform, white shirt, blue trousers and red tie, reads the newspaper amid a thicket of bamboo poles dangling oil lanterns. When he puts a section of it aside, a dusty black goat descends to nibble the edges. The boy rattles the paper, but the goat is unperturbed. It gives the paper a chew, ingesting all but a corner that floats lazily back to the step.
Halfway between the river and me fifteen women sit in an oval, chanting, rhythmically clapping. I ask Pankaj if they are local or if they’ve come on pilgrimage. “From here,” he says. “Varanasi women.” The newborn sun irradiates the shawls covering their heads and shoulders, yellows, greens, blues, reds.

Pankaj sits upright. “My uncle has beautiful silk shop. He is very famous. His picture in magazine. You want to see?”

“No silk shop,” I say. He raises his eyebrows as if to ask, why are you so skeptical? Have I ever lied to you?

“I show you,” he says and bounds up the stairs and is gone.

The women stop chanting and each takes a marigold and holds it forward, rotating it clockwise through the air. Then, with gentle prying, they loosen the petals from the flower, which they toss into the center. One of the elders uplifts a brass teapot and pours Ganges water over the petals, reminding me of a moment from yesterday...urgent chanting, a litter borne by four men emerging from the alleyways, a corpse swaddled in orange, taken to the river and submerged briefly before being laid out on the cremation pyre.

“I come to India because here spirituality is alive,” I heard a tourist say yesterday, and I thought, put a cork in it. If spirituality is alive, it ought to be alive everywhere, especially at home. But here I am, watching another sunrise bloom over the gently flowing, polluted holy-of-holies, the Ganges, with an attention that might be reverence, or a prelude to it. How many times this past year have I watched a sunrise at home?

"Here,” cries Pankaj, out of breath. “I told you.” He leans his body against mine and deposits a magazine in my lap with a cover photo of Catherine Deneuve. With his index finger he flips open the page with a picture of her eyeing a gold sari draped over the arms of a pudgy man in glasses. Pankaj says, “You see? My uncle.”

“Your famous uncle. What about her? Is she famous too?” He shrugs. “Parlez-vous francais?”

“Oui. Et toi?”

“Oui,” he says, “et japonais.”

A sparsely toothed woman, her red shawl streaming behind her, rushes up the steps. She yells and claps trying to rout the goats foraging on the ficus leaves she uses to mold the saucers that hold the lighted wicks launched at nightfall on the river. The wicks, embedded in a dollop of wax on top of marigold petals, burn for a few minutes, then go out, but not before the current strings them into a garland floating downstream.

Light in the darkness, fire afloat on water, earth (corpse or a marigold) doused with water, set aflame…all the elements weaving, woven together…perhaps that’s what gives these ceremonies the feeling of sanctity, the elevation of the ordinary.

What’s more ordinary than a marigold? They barely registered in my scope before now, unless scorn is factored in. I’ve planted, I think, twelve marigolds in my life, two six-packs. I was twenty-two, back from tramping through Greece, and I arrived at Aunt Dot’s door (she was putting me up until I figured out what next) with dirty clothes and the marigolds. I planted them in a bed near the kitchen window. The next morning there was no hint of orange. Stolen, I thought. Aunt Dot had a better explanation. Although all leaves and flowers were gone, slimed stalks remained. Snails. I could tell she suspected this might happen, and didn’t mind terribly.

Where do all these Indian marigolds come from? They are numerous as prayers; in fact, they are prayers. Yesterday at the Hanuman temple not far from here I watched as marigolds were strung into 40-foot ropes to decorate the outer walls of the temple. A young disciple of the Monkey God draped a marigold garland over my neck, a heavy, damp weight. I wore it to an internet café where a priest has just blessed the computers, leaving a marigold on each monitor. I was hungry, and while I waited for the server to connect, I considered nibbling at the marigolds, like the high-strung, lovelorn character in Monsoon Wedding.

Watching the women perform their ceremonies, I see what else a marigold is: sunrise on a stalk, a replica and a relic to bless the hours ahead, if in no other way than a smell on the fingertips.

The women stand, begin to disperse. The light is paler, the day is launched.
An ordinary day. But how much ordinariness, even gussied up in ceremony, is tolerable before the urge to escape re-surfaces, inevitable as the moon? Besides boats, massages, incense, floating lanterns, silks, yoga lessons, you can also score hashish along the river. Isn’t travel known as getting away? The urge to weave together runs head on into the drive for derangement, for fiery crashes, for negation. Kali, goddess of destruction, must be reckoned with. Portrayed, she stands with her foot on Shiva’s chest. She would have obliterated creation but Shiva interposed his body. So here we are. Varanasi is also Kashi, the City of Light, Shiva’s abode. If you die here and your ashes are dispersed in the Ganges, you are liberated from the wheel of karma, the cycles of rebirth. Another way of escape. There was a woman on the train coming here, gaunt, wheezing, attended by her stalwart grandsons and her grieving husband. I wondered if she would survive the long trip. Yesterday I saw her on a cot in the hospice above the cremation ghat. This morning she was gone.

I need to move. I rise, and stretch my limbs. “Okay,” I say. “Which boat?” Pankaj springs to his feet, astonished. He’d given up on me. “You want boat? You will like. Very nice boat.” He runs down the ghat toward a moored flotilla. After a brief discussion with an “uncle” he waves for me to come toward one, appropriately orange. I walk down the steps passing the women climbing upward. Six goats are already hoovering the place of every scrap of marigold petal.

This day, still before breakfast, already seems ancient. Time is a lazy river, yet it flows unstoppably forward, onward. Row your boat. Life is but a dream.

… the very figure and image of a felt interest in life… the supreme case of a taste for life as personal living, of an endlessly active and yet, somehow, a careless, an illusionless, a sublimely forewarned curiosity about it. — From the memoirs of Henry James.

“No,” Alice cries, horrified, “that’s terrible. They can’t want that. Not to come back?”
I have been telling her about the women in the hospice along the Ganges. We sit under an umbrella on her deck, the keen sun coaxing spring along. Below in her garden the tips of the persimmon tree, planted twenty years ago over the ashes of her son, show pinches of furled green leaves. Alice has had a rough winter, a tumble, a cracked pelvis, confinement to a wheelchair, but she’s not dwelling on it. She’s walking again and appears indestructible.

“I can understand it," I say, “not to want to be reborn. Not that I necessarily believe in reincarnation. But I can see how a person might think, enough is enough.”

By the look on her face I judge I have never said anything so shocking. “Oh,” she says, “I would accept just about anything, anything but death, that is. Let me be a bird or better yet a cat, as long as I am living.” She fills our glasses with wine, emptying the bottle. “You’re not yourself today.”

It’s my turn to be surprised, pleasantly. I’m glad that she reads me this way, a partisan of “more life.” Numerous times I’ve prayed, let me be like Alice when I am her age. How about now, for that matter?

“Or a squirrel. Look,” she says. A tiny squirrel digging under the persimmon tree has unearthed a walnut twice the size of its head and after a getting it in its chompers, staggers, and hops erratically. We both watch it for a few seconds. Alice laughs, a melodious ripple. “Why does it remind me of our president? “ She laughs again. “Tell me more about your trip. You inspire me. I have to go someplace. I’m sure I have one more good trip in me.”

I am wondering if the squirrel, like the resident cats and the occasional raccoon, climbs the supporting beams to the deck. I brought Alice some marigold seedlings, the first batch in the nursery, and while she made lunch, I planted them in the pots on her deck, a surprise for her and a reprise, perhaps a successful one, of my experience with marigolds and Aunt Dot. Planting them felt like a ceremony composed in ordinary time. I figured the marigolds would be safe here from slugs and snails, but I didn’t factor in squirrels. Oh well.
Alice sighs. “Aren’t they adorable? Green darlings. ‘The marigold that goes to bed with the sun, and with him rises weeping.’ Why ‘weeping’? Who is that? Shakespeare, no doubt, but what? The way my memory is going, pretty soon the only thing I’ll remember is Shakespeare.” She laughs. “That wouldn't be so bad. Did I tell you my idea? I’m going to type everything I do into the computer, and that way I won’t have to worry about remembering. Isn’t that keen? Just listen to me. I’ve been housebound too long. Maybe if I stopped talking for a minute you could tell me more about your trip. First let me get some coffee. You’ll surely want some lemon pie.”

I surely do. She goes indoors, and I shift my chair to be in the shade of the umbrella. Yes, why ‘weeping’? Weeping, no doubt, for joy, for sorrow, for the fullness of things and the emptiness of things. But I wonder, do marigolds literally weep, exude drops of moisture during the night? I’ll have to ask Alice, if and when these bloom.