Day 114 - Living With the Dead

We did, in fact, find our way around Varanasi. We had been warned that we would be mobbed by touts and overwhelmed with filth. We did not find this the case at all, though perhaps it was because we had built it up so much in our minds. We started the day off with a round of intense haggling for a dawn boat ride on the Ganges. Locals pay between 35-50 rupees for a boat. Boatmen typically ask foreigners for 150 and up. We managed to haggle our price down to 70 per person, on the condition that we would have the boat to ourselves.

The city slowly wakes up as the sun rises over the river. At every ghat, the local people go about their morning routines of bathing, washing clothes, worshipping, and selling. Boats glide on silent oars up and down the length of the river carrying loads of tourists and locals alike. It is easy to feel the ancient pulse of the place.

Photos are forbidden at the burning ghats (understandably so). Visitors are allowed to walk between the pyres, which do their work 24 hours a day, all year round. People bring relatives from all over India to be cremated at Varanasi, because to be cremated here means instant delivery to paradise, rather than round after round of reincarnation.

While walking near the fires, we passed a dog gnawing on what looked like a human femur with a little barbequed flesh still attached. On the boat ride back to our guesthouse, we passed a body floating in the water. Most people at Varanassi are cremated. However, children under ten, holy men, and pregnant ladies are sunk whole with large stones tied to their bodies. Suicides, too, sometimes drown themselves in the holy river, so it is not uncommon to see someone's remains drifting by. Oddly, these things did not affect me.

More affecting was the charity house where poor people went to spend their final days or months. Acquiring wood to build one's pyre is expensive. Old people without family cannot afford the expense, and are reduced to begging alms to buy their wood one kilo at a time. This confrontation with mortality - the living preparing for their death in such a direct way - I found far more powerful than the past-tense deaths of the bodies on the pyres or floating in the river.

And Varanasi's relationship with death is part of what makes the city such a powerful place. Every day, nearly every business, in some way, deals with death or religion surrounding death. That said, it is vibrant, vital city, pulsing with life.

After our boatride, we hired a cycle rickshaw to explore the rest of the city. Our first stop was a modern temple. It is a place of worsip, but it is better known for the large relief-map of India on its ground floor. From there, we went on to the Durga Temple, famous for its population of red-faced monkeys. Thankfully there were fewer monkeys than in past years, and we made our passage unmolested. After the temples, we stoppped for lunch at a small restaurant. We ordered far too much food, and invited our rickshaw driver in to join us. He must have been starving, having been cycling steadily all day, but he ate with far more tidiness and better manners than any of us piggish westerners.

After our meal, we rode down to Assi Ghat, at the southernmost tip of the ghats, and walked our way back along the river toward our guesthouse. Along the way, life pased all around us, both sacred and profane. On the same steps, we passed men on holy pilgrimage, boys playing cricket on the ghat stairs, even water buffalo having their daily baths.

After sunset, the ghats come alive with a night time ritual at the Ganges. We didn't quite understand what was happening, other than there were new Brahmin priests being initiated and sending flowers and candles to float down the Ganges. Cz having been touted earlier by three well spoken children to buy two of those said candles, we lit them with our well wishes to my papa (it was his birthday).

Back in the alleyways near home, we met a friendly cow. Her belly was so wide (or perhaps the alley was so narrow) that she brushed her ribs on both sides. For me, this has been the defining image of india, where people, animals, life, and death all rub shoulders unabashed.