Varanasi

Oh.  My.  Life.  I just fell down the rabbit hole.  If David Lynch was to make a film about spirituality and death, and given funding by Muthoot Finance and the State Bank of India, I think it would turn out something like Varanasi.   Where do I even start to give you an impression of the most surreal place I have ever visited.  Of all my travels across the world, I have never, ever been anywhere like this.  It is beyond time.  I could honestly believe this place hasn’t changed for hundreds of years.  The narrow winding passages, frequently blocked by cows, swishing their dung encrusted tails that you have to skilfully time in passing to avoid being thwacked, twist and turn with angular frequency, intertwining the visitor into the old city, sewing everlasting impressions into the soul.  You don’t walk around this city, it moves through you, somehow.  

Varanasi is a holy city for Hindus, where they take their dead to be piled with wood, burnt and then scattered along the Ganga for their final journey.  The city sits on the a curve of the Ganga where two other rivers meet with it, and coils up and away from the Ghats that line it into a strange and beautiful world.  There are many Ghats along the side of the river, each having a different purpose.  There are Ghats where people wash their clothes, Ghats for bathing pilgrims, Ghats for washing buffalo, Gahts for morning and evening worship, and Ghats for burning the dead.  By far the most exotic and captivating are the burning Ghats.  Irregular buildings poke the sky with their dome like spires, clustered around the stone steps that lead down to the river.  On the steps and the path along the river, huge piles of wood are stacked to load on the bodies, funeral pyres burn all around, cows laze under flimsy sheds and along the path, and hundreds of people line the steps absorbed in the captivating peculiarity, watching as enshrouded bodies, wrapped in richly embroidered cloths, are carried on bamboo stretchers by loved ones down to the river.

There are no cars here, the streets are too narrow.  The streets are owned by the cows, goats, dogs, monkeys and people, all of which shit freely and without shame.  Never would I have imagined that I would be so entranced by a place where the streets are essentially an open sewer.   Dark alleys, where you need to look both up and down to check for what is on the floor and what is coming from the windows above, burst into long meandering streets brightly lit and shimmering from sequins, gold threaded clothes and twinkling bangles, teeming with people.   In the evening people fly kites from the roof tops and the sky is swimming with differing coloured paper diamonds. 

We were a little apprehensive before arriving.  The guide book says that the hassle here is, along with Agra, the worst in India.  Touts and scam artists relentlessly pestering exhausted tourists.  But apart from two unsavoury stalkers who were trying to secure commission from guest houses we visited, we have found nothing but amazing people.  People who want to tell you breathlessly about the world, freedom and love, orange robed babas with deep rumbling voices invite you to pose for photos, for a small fee of course, strangers take you by the hand, smile and welcome you to their city, children swarm around you laughing and mimicking you, there are happy calls of Namaste’s every third step, and hopeful boat owners eternal quest to get another tourist into their beaten, barely floating dingy’s.  And there is humour, so much humour.  Yesterday a man approached us while we were talking to another about sitars, a babe in arms, and asked if we wanted to buy a baby.  He said he had a baby making factory and needed to shift a few cheap.  There are the rhymes too.  Always a rhyme:  burning is learning, cremation education, no worry chicken curry, no cry banana fry.

My exhausted, happy soul, there is so much going on here.  It is a completely crazy assault on every single sense.  There is so much to say about the utter mentalness of this place.  We have seen river dolphins, I have no idea how they manage to survive in that sewer of a river, but we have seen them, quite indisputably; I have been into the Golden Temple to crowd in an even more frenetic and bizarre queue with the monkeys and the even closer people, to offer sweet smelling flowers and milk in a peculiar frenzy to Lord Shiva, in which I was meant to splash the offered milk across my face; watched the daily evening puja where crowds of hundreds of people watch from the steps and from boats upon the river, and listen with absolute reverence, as music is played to them while five orange men perform rituals, stood upon small stages covered in orange flowers, involving smoke, fire and clanging bells; there was the calm, ethereal boat ride at dawn across the still waters of the Ganga, watching as the mists cleared

and the sun rose up to face the city; tales of cannibals that steal the flesh of the burning bodies, their souls already committed to the devil; observed the delicate process of women kneading cow shit to make fuel logs on the Ghats; taken in to oil sellers houses, small two story houses which are home to 30 people and 7 cows, all living as I imagine people living 200 years ago; and this is all in just two days.  Two days that feels like a week.  We have one more day left here.  I think that will be enough for Alex.  He likes it, but the chaos is relentless and the filth is extensive, and he needs calm and clean.  I tell him he can have it in another 6 months, when we leave north India.  I am not sure how long I could last here, I think it would be easy to surrender to this place and fall into one of it crevices, emerging years later, never able to join Western society again…..

I have, for the first time in a while, seen something genuinely different, nothing compares to Varanasi.