varanasi is the holiest city in hinduism. rumor has it that if your body is cremated here and the ashes deposited in the ganges river your soul goes straight to nirvana. that means no chance of being a tapeworm in the next life! we are staying in a really great guesthouse right above the main burning ghat, where this cremation happens on big pyres of wood. there’s a funeral procession through the narrow, winding streets down to the river every few minutes. deceased people are flown here from all over india and around the world. most of the time the bodies are wrapped up elaborately, but sometimes they’re not – which is pretty gnarly when they burn the person right there in front of you. the people doing this work are the dalit, or the “untouchables” – but its a lucrative business so some of them have become the richest people in town. there’s a list of kinds of people who can’t be burned – they are tied to rocks and deposited in the ganges. of course, this being india, most of the time the rope breaks. so there’s all kinds of dead bodies floating in the river and washing up on the shores. along with all the feces from the city. and thousands of cows and buffaloes trying to escape the heat (aside – there are people who spend all day in the water scrubbing down the cows, perhaps for karma). all this in the water that everyone here seems to love to drink.
the first day we were here we fell for a scam about a hospice for dying people right beside the burning ghat. we went up to this “hospice” with a guy, and of course it wasn’t one and they demanded money. then some young guys started physically accosting me and i may have almost lost my temper again. moral of the story: stay away from the burning ghat. varanasi has dozens of ghats though (these are stairs leading down to the river). they are quite nice to walk along, and brilliantly photogenic.
behind these ghats is an intense old city with kilometer after kilometer of narrow streets filled with cows, their excrement, flies, temples and people selling stuff. on some of the ghats there are fire pujas every night, which are ceremonies performed by elaborately dressed young brahmins (the highest caste) involving lots of fire, flowers, what seems like some sort of interpretive dance and continuous noise (some of it provided by automated machines that power mallets that bang cymbals, drums and bells). after one little one of these they handed out this delicious pudding desert that may have been the only free thing i’ve ever received in india. oh, except for some partial body massages. the massagers come up to you and start massaging you without your permission – and you’ve got to literally beat them off before they have a chance to get their posse to surround you to ensure you pay for your massage. but we’d always let it go for at least a little while, because they sure did feel good!
on our second day here devin, lauren and i found a shopping mall and indulged ourselves in american style buttery corn and ice cream. then we went to a hindi bollywood movie at the cinema, in large part because the facilities were air conditioned. the film could not have been more entertaining. it was a romantic comedy that had about ten different basically unrelated storylines. wonderful. we also went on a couple boat rides on the ganges – one at night when people set afloat little floaters with flowers and a candle on it, and one very early in the morning when everyone in the city and their dirty laundry come down to the ganges for their bath and their swimming/yoga lessons.
we also went to an interesting “christian ashram.” a typical ashram is a hindu communal retreat center that focuses on attainment of spiritual enlightenment through the teachings of a guru. so i don’t really know what we were expecting from a christian ashram – i suppose some sort of fushion of hindu practice and faith in Christ. basically we were curious. well, it turns out the place was less of an ashram and more of a chill hangout with christian hippies. we had a communal meal, and then, being hippies, they passed a guitar around the circle for any of the ten people there to play. and a guy put in a good effort trying to play an indian flute thing that he is in india long term to apparently become proficient at playing. there is a soft spoken aussie guy with a head full of dreads and a rather sparse beard and his – you guessed it – musically inclined, artsy, and even more soft spoken wife and their child that have established this place to show Jesus to all the backpackers coming through seeking spiritual enlightenment. we had some interesting light-hearted discussions about such things as spiritual contextualization and different ways of interpreting the great commission; it was good. i appreciated them because you could tell that their hippiness was extraneous to their genuine desire to be missionaries without calling themselves or even necessarily considering themselves said, which in a way was rather refreshing. its all about the love man, not about the colonialism. don’t worry though mom – i’m holding off on the dreads. and by the way, happy mother’s day!!
varanasi
