To sharpen your
senses, take a dose of Varanasi.
On exiting the train
station, you are assaulted by the heat, the touts, the traffic, the odours,
the loudness in all its forms... A frantic chaos giving way to a harmony of
cultures and religion underpinning this place… The oldest living city
on Earth.
I know I’ve written
about chaos previously, but this city… This city takes the chaotic cake-cherry-on-top.
If you haven’t learnt to relax and let India take a hold of you, suck you up
and spit you out; let this city swallow you whole and gargle you on the way
down. That’s what happens to you and the more you fight this process, the
longer it’ll be before you can settle into Varanai’s rhythm.
Namaste!
Namaskar! Hello! How are you! … Rickshaw Sir? Boat ride Madam? Cold water?
Cigarettes? Chillum? Chai? … No Nahey, No thank you, Not today… Which country?
Where you stay? First time India? You need something?... No thanks, See you,
Thank you… I give you good price! Hey! Hello!... And so on and so on
until you turn a corner. And… repeat.
The first walk
through the lanes and around the banks of Mother Ganges (Mama Ganga) is impressionable.
The jagged openings that make up the labyrinth behind the ghats are like the
cracks left behind after seismic urban activity centuries ago, forming the Old
City. I found myself constantly looking down as I took each stride,
meaningfully placing my feet in carefully chosen spots as we cut through the
laneways. Doing my best to avoid the wet bits, the cow shit, the other
non-descript shit, the sleeping mangy dogs, the resting cows, other insect and
animal-life, the rubbish and food scraps… But at the same time, also trying to keep
my head at eye level to greet the friendly shop owners, passers by, and the
police holding large semi-automatic rifles.
The tiny shop fronts,
remarkably aesthetic, are worn away from generations of use and bubbling with
life, lassi, every type of fried and so many other and foods as well as every
trade you can think of. Even ‘city-farmers’ have their allocated small spaces,
keeping their cows and buffalos in openings no more than a few metres wide and
deep. I look up and through the curtains of light and shadow, and I see smoke,
dust, power lines, monkey and human heads popping out of windows, inspecting
the thoroughfare below from their perch in the layers of now crumbling colonial
architecture, built on the foundations of giant sandstone slabs that were
placed there by ancient inhabitants.
As I approach the
Main Ghats, the number of babas and holy men increase as with the flow of the
holy colours… Pink, orange, red, yellow… The colours dance through my darting
eyes, trying to keep up with the input to process it… flower blessings, dhotis,
saris, silk shops, souvenir shops, blessed faces… the list goes on.
All this,
intermingles with brightly painted temples and steady human traffic, going or
coming from puja or conducting Hindu rituals to idols,
paintings and images of gods that line every passage. A family passes by
chanting in lyrical Hindi. It’s a procession for a dead relative receiving a
traditional Hindu burial. A small flock of people, swarm to the river’s burning
ghat, Manikarnika, to see their loved be set ablaze and release them back into Mama Ganga’s arms to complete the cycle of death and rebirth. I can hear,
see and feel the spectacle of the ritual from the inside, out. No one is
crying. It seems as though all goodbyes have been said. Once the body is lit,
people move away to let it be taken by the flames alone and watch from a
distance.
To escape the
clamour, I climb to a roof-top and look out… The glorious Ganges is said to be
forged from Shiva’s own hair. It flows to the corners of my eyes and a holy vision
of the city from above arrests me all over again. Kites and birds flutter
around me and I can hear murmurs of animals, humans and machines co-exiting
below. It calls for a few deep breaths to take in the reverence of this wild
and holy place.
All this in the first
few hours of arriving…
I like what I feel.
More please.
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