The train to the holy city was late and long and after a cold cycle rickshaw and a winding trail through narrow shit smeared lanes, cobbled and stoned, we finally got to the guesthouse. Sophie crashed into the bed and was done to the world. I, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep. I decided to go for a walk.
Walking back down the crooked narrow lanes, I found myself recollecting Venice. The mismatched stone tilts and everywhere askance as the passageways, ceilinged only by narrow jagged strips of open brightening blue. Shit piss and spit cakes the ground and the foot of every wall. Dark openings appear as barbers and paan makers, trinket sellers and all the like begin the morning ritual of the day. Signs pointing me back to my guesthouse litter every corner and I feel free to meander and get lost in the sandstone colored tumult.
I come across a street lined with vegetable sellers. Old dirty wicker baskets, worn clean are filled and piled with cabbage, kale, eggplant, potatoes, carrots, and green peppers. My meandering leads to an awaiting space, empty at the end of the corridor of sellers. The cool hazy air is thick and I look into the distance, walking towards it. I cannot see the other side, and before me the ground falls out in an ordered stone procession: stone steps, the Ghats leading down to the river Ganges.
In the dim morning light the holy parallels are already speckled, spotted and down the way - up the river - teeming with people. Boats are tied in thick packs at the banks edge. Men and boys in shorts and sometimes less stand knee, thigh, chest and neck deep in water. Women still wrapped in saris submerge themselves. Holy men dot each outcropping jutting out from the Ghats. Each with elaborate colors and shapes adorning their faces and all of them with the three white lines, horizontal on their foreheads - the lines of Shiva’s soul. Most of them sit on small raised platforms with hug umbrellas, like wicker parasols poised above them pointing o the rising sun. Each has a collection of cups and jars filled with flowers and color of yellow marigold and bright red. An Indian couple sits before one on his matted platform and listen to his oracle - his blessing, with their hands joined between them.
The plop of circular magnets, tied to strings and thrown from steps dot the trickling sounds cape. Boys hurling the trinket hooks, stand at the edge of stairs and from the prows of dirt colored boats. Among the wet rustle of clothing and oars, the squawk of gulls harassing boat goers in the center of the calm river.
A snake charmer demands 20 rupees for permission of a picture. He opens a second wicker basket and hit’s the edge in the same motion, awakening a second cobra crammed in coils. It springs up to the height of the first, angry, widening its hood. Automatically and with wandering eyes he raised a buzzing flute to his lips and the sound seems to keep the snakes still, erect, starring straight at the flute’s end.
Small tin foil bowls, each shallow and filled with marigolds and red flowers with a candle centered are piled into a larger wicker basket carried atop a girl’s head. She asks for rupees in exchange for the floating tribute to the payee’s god. The floating shrines are everywhere in the water, some still with a flame tugging against the light breeze.
Across the fiver is a bare bank with only a few river boats and some people congregated. As the sun lifts, the haze clears a little and I am tempted to think it is an island. In the whitened grey distance I think I see the outline of trees on another bank.
A large woman with her husband steps carefully into the Ganges. She looks back at her husband. She is elated and I wonder if she is from some other part of India, delighted to be -finally- bathing in the Ganges. Her smile is like a child too young to be embarrassed with the exuberance of the emotion behind it. It is a mark of the Indian people- they feel no embarrassment for their emotion, smiling and scolding with honesty.
The whole city of buildings is crowded on only one side of the Ganges. And slowly I walk back to the hotel, only to find Sophie still asleep. I ascend the stairs to the rooftop restaurant, and finally feeling the high breeze, I see that I am in one of the highest points of all Varanasi. It is Sunday morning and the sky above Varanasi is filled with kites. Twitching and gliding above the city, hundreds, if not thousands of tissue diamonds fluttered - simple squares turned askance and fixed to a cross of wood, each one a different color, each one a different design.
One boy, on a rooftop near and below mine stood casually watching his kite and with quick tugs and pulls at the sagging string he rose the colored square higher into the sky.
For the next week I had breakfast on the rooftop to the sound of a light wind and the flutter of tissue paper soaring through the hazy blue sky.
We walked along the Ghats and came across a human knee, femur, fibula and tibia, the bones all cracked and charred with some of the flesh still caked and caramelized to the bone. We walked farther and came across large piles of wood and beyond them flames churned into the sky from several points on the ash covered Ghats. We stood hypnotized by the bright movement. A boy standing next to me, dressed in rip-off designer jeans, and a matching shirt with a silver cross dangling from his neck turned to us and asked us the usual questions. Where we were from. He looked at Sophie and told her she was far too white. She feigned offense and he addendumed the comment by saying that she was 'cool'. Before the cremations he offered us the opportunity to buy hashish, opium, ecstasy and every other imaginable substance. We walked to a different point of view. A man dressed in simple white clothes approached me and asked me if I knew what was going on. I had read of these charity workers and I knew he was looking for an outrageous donation. I told him I did know what was going on. He asked 'how?'. I told him I'd read about it in a book. He said I could not learn everything from a book and that he could tell me the real details of what I was looking at. I told him that I was not interested in his offer. He continued on with his salesman pitch and as I walked away he yelled "You come to a Holy City and you don't learn about Karma?". There seemed to be spite in his voice.
The day Sophie and I took a boat ride in the Ganges, I dipped a small empty bottle into the river so that I could bring it back home with me and add to my collection of water. That night I got violently sick. When I had recovered several days later, Sophie and I went for a walk along the Ghats. I dipped my toe in the water next to a man who was bathing. That night I got violently sick. The two instances are just coincidences, I'm sure, but the truth is that the Ganges is incredibly polluted to the point where one could say it is poisonous. Not only does every variety of excrement find its way into the river, and burned bodies dumped into its water, but upstream factories unload incredible amounts of heavy metals and toxins into the water making it contaminated in a plethora of ways. Then again if the air wafting through the Vatican was just as polluted, I'm sure it wouldn't stop believers from breathing in with delight and praising their god.
All in all, Varanasi was my favorite city. I already miss those mornings of drinking chai and watching the kites flutter above the city.
Walking back down the crooked narrow lanes, I found myself recollecting Venice. The mismatched stone tilts and everywhere askance as the passageways, ceilinged only by narrow jagged strips of open brightening blue. Shit piss and spit cakes the ground and the foot of every wall. Dark openings appear as barbers and paan makers, trinket sellers and all the like begin the morning ritual of the day. Signs pointing me back to my guesthouse litter every corner and I feel free to meander and get lost in the sandstone colored tumult.
I come across a street lined with vegetable sellers. Old dirty wicker baskets, worn clean are filled and piled with cabbage, kale, eggplant, potatoes, carrots, and green peppers. My meandering leads to an awaiting space, empty at the end of the corridor of sellers. The cool hazy air is thick and I look into the distance, walking towards it. I cannot see the other side, and before me the ground falls out in an ordered stone procession: stone steps, the Ghats leading down to the river Ganges.
In the dim morning light the holy parallels are already speckled, spotted and down the way - up the river - teeming with people. Boats are tied in thick packs at the banks edge. Men and boys in shorts and sometimes less stand knee, thigh, chest and neck deep in water. Women still wrapped in saris submerge themselves. Holy men dot each outcropping jutting out from the Ghats. Each with elaborate colors and shapes adorning their faces and all of them with the three white lines, horizontal on their foreheads - the lines of Shiva’s soul. Most of them sit on small raised platforms with hug umbrellas, like wicker parasols poised above them pointing o the rising sun. Each has a collection of cups and jars filled with flowers and color of yellow marigold and bright red. An Indian couple sits before one on his matted platform and listen to his oracle - his blessing, with their hands joined between them.
The plop of circular magnets, tied to strings and thrown from steps dot the trickling sounds cape. Boys hurling the trinket hooks, stand at the edge of stairs and from the prows of dirt colored boats. Among the wet rustle of clothing and oars, the squawk of gulls harassing boat goers in the center of the calm river.
A snake charmer demands 20 rupees for permission of a picture. He opens a second wicker basket and hit’s the edge in the same motion, awakening a second cobra crammed in coils. It springs up to the height of the first, angry, widening its hood. Automatically and with wandering eyes he raised a buzzing flute to his lips and the sound seems to keep the snakes still, erect, starring straight at the flute’s end.
Small tin foil bowls, each shallow and filled with marigolds and red flowers with a candle centered are piled into a larger wicker basket carried atop a girl’s head. She asks for rupees in exchange for the floating tribute to the payee’s god. The floating shrines are everywhere in the water, some still with a flame tugging against the light breeze.
Across the fiver is a bare bank with only a few river boats and some people congregated. As the sun lifts, the haze clears a little and I am tempted to think it is an island. In the whitened grey distance I think I see the outline of trees on another bank.
A large woman with her husband steps carefully into the Ganges. She looks back at her husband. She is elated and I wonder if she is from some other part of India, delighted to be -finally- bathing in the Ganges. Her smile is like a child too young to be embarrassed with the exuberance of the emotion behind it. It is a mark of the Indian people- they feel no embarrassment for their emotion, smiling and scolding with honesty.
The whole city of buildings is crowded on only one side of the Ganges. And slowly I walk back to the hotel, only to find Sophie still asleep. I ascend the stairs to the rooftop restaurant, and finally feeling the high breeze, I see that I am in one of the highest points of all Varanasi. It is Sunday morning and the sky above Varanasi is filled with kites. Twitching and gliding above the city, hundreds, if not thousands of tissue diamonds fluttered - simple squares turned askance and fixed to a cross of wood, each one a different color, each one a different design.
One boy, on a rooftop near and below mine stood casually watching his kite and with quick tugs and pulls at the sagging string he rose the colored square higher into the sky.
For the next week I had breakfast on the rooftop to the sound of a light wind and the flutter of tissue paper soaring through the hazy blue sky.
We walked along the Ghats and came across a human knee, femur, fibula and tibia, the bones all cracked and charred with some of the flesh still caked and caramelized to the bone. We walked farther and came across large piles of wood and beyond them flames churned into the sky from several points on the ash covered Ghats. We stood hypnotized by the bright movement. A boy standing next to me, dressed in rip-off designer jeans, and a matching shirt with a silver cross dangling from his neck turned to us and asked us the usual questions. Where we were from. He looked at Sophie and told her she was far too white. She feigned offense and he addendumed the comment by saying that she was 'cool'. Before the cremations he offered us the opportunity to buy hashish, opium, ecstasy and every other imaginable substance. We walked to a different point of view. A man dressed in simple white clothes approached me and asked me if I knew what was going on. I had read of these charity workers and I knew he was looking for an outrageous donation. I told him I did know what was going on. He asked 'how?'. I told him I'd read about it in a book. He said I could not learn everything from a book and that he could tell me the real details of what I was looking at. I told him that I was not interested in his offer. He continued on with his salesman pitch and as I walked away he yelled "You come to a Holy City and you don't learn about Karma?". There seemed to be spite in his voice.
The day Sophie and I took a boat ride in the Ganges, I dipped a small empty bottle into the river so that I could bring it back home with me and add to my collection of water. That night I got violently sick. When I had recovered several days later, Sophie and I went for a walk along the Ghats. I dipped my toe in the water next to a man who was bathing. That night I got violently sick. The two instances are just coincidences, I'm sure, but the truth is that the Ganges is incredibly polluted to the point where one could say it is poisonous. Not only does every variety of excrement find its way into the river, and burned bodies dumped into its water, but upstream factories unload incredible amounts of heavy metals and toxins into the water making it contaminated in a plethora of ways. Then again if the air wafting through the Vatican was just as polluted, I'm sure it wouldn't stop believers from breathing in with delight and praising their god.
All in all, Varanasi was my favorite city. I already miss those mornings of drinking chai and watching the kites flutter above the city.
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