Varanasi

We had a bit of a scare traveling from Agra to Varanasi. I had been very proud of myself for booking the tickets online; our seats said “35/36”. But those numbers were preceded by the letters RLWL,which it didn’t occur to me to Google. But it turns out that RLWL means “railway waiting list”, which means that I didn’t have a confirmed seat at all. The only option was to buy a “general” ticket, which would be 12 hours with no specified seat or berth. What to do? The railways are unusually crowded because of the last days of the Khumb Mela, the huge religious festival that happens every four years. I think that this year, 104 million people were expected to attend, over the course of two months. And my Google news feed tells me that the Kumbh Mela organizers are expecting to set a world record for longest line of buses: 500!

The sleeping coach bus was nice; two people per berth. Which was nice and snuggly for me and Declan, but I overheard a French woman complaining about having to sleep next to a stranger. It feels different, sleeping next to a stranger rather than nodding off next to the stranger sitting next to you.

I had really wanted to take Declan to Varanasi because it was one of the places that had the biggest impact on me, when I was there back in 1992. I have heard it called “the heart of India”, and “the key to understanding India”. I just remember the intensity of the cremation ghats, the dreadlocked holy men known as sadhus, the funeral processions winding their way through narrow alleys in the middle of the night.

And it’s all so incredible and wild and other-worldly. Dreadlocked sadhus, some of them naked and covered by the white ash of the recently cremated, smoking their chilums full of tobacco and hash, cross-legged meditating and chanting, laughing, sharing chai, building fires, bestowing blessings on the pious and photo-ops for the curious.

I walked through ghats, meeting a 27 year old sadhu named Pashupati. He invited me to his tent to smoke a chilum. He told me that he joined the sadhus at the age of nine; now he is the minister of his group of sadhus. He asked to be my Facebook friend, and for my WhatsApp. He had other people prepare his chilum for him. As the minister, he told me, it is the duty of the underlings to prepare his chillum for him. He told me that he negotiates with other sadhu leaders. He is proud of his tent; near the cows, near the Shiva statue, near the Ganges.

His tent has its own speaker; he connects it to his phone with an aux cable to have his own playlist on the ghat. I looked up whether sadhus could really become ministers; apparently there are some, but I don’t know if this guy really is. He has almost 5000 Facebook friends and he tells me he is looking for a wife.

One of our guides told me that there were 20,000 temples in Varanasi. I thought that sounded a bit excessive, so I googled it, and Google tells me that Varanasi actually has 23,000 temples. Incredible.

I went with a guide to visit the Durga temple. It was really a living temple, active since the 13th century. Very different from the temples of Angkor Wat, which were beautiful but like a museum, a place of ancient history. The Durga Temple was bustling with flowers and candles and incense and worshippers. There is a place in the back of the temple to kiss the foot of the god, if you have not bathed and are not able to properly enter the temple. Asam, my guide, told me that some people go to temple daily, others on special occasions.

We visited the Tulsi temple, named after the man who translated the Ramayana from Sanskrit to Hindi, to make it more accessible to the masses. The walls of the temple are covered with the words of the Ramayana; images from the Ramayana adorn the walls. We went into the inner sanctum, where they had moving diorama-type Ramayana scenes.

We walked through impossibly narrow alleyways, accessible only to pedestrians or intrepid motorcyclists, to see Muslim fabric-makers, weaving and dying by hand. Of course I went home with a scarf!

Hanuman temple, complete with monkeys. Declan skipped the temples to watch YouTube. I feel like a bad mom for not dragging him to theses cultural activities, but he has little patience for crowds and honking and staring. I am fascinated by the sadhus; he is a little bit afraid of them.

Sitting next to James the Vedic astrologer at dinner. Talking about the kinds of bodies that are not burned on the Ganges. Monks and sadhus are already holy and do not need the redemptive power of the cremation ghat; a heavy stone is attached to their body when they die, and their bodies sink to the bottom of the Ganges. Children who are bitten by cobras; their bodies are wrapped carefully in banana leaves, with identifying information, and placed at the edge of the Ganges, where a sadhu might be able to reverse the effects of the cobra venom. I wondered how many cobra bites would be going on these days. I have seen plenty of snake charmers, with cobras in baskets, but James the Vedic astrologer told me that there are plenty of cobras living outside of captivity. He lives next door to a wild cobra. “The cobra is a very sacred animal to Shiva,” he explained. “I think it would be difficult to find anyone in Varanasi who would kill a cobra.”

James is from Vancouver but has been living here for many years. He compared Varanasi to ancient Greece. Varanasi has been around for five thousand years, they think. “Just imagine the temples of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome. Varanasi is really like that: it is a center of religious and philosophical thought. Are you going to the classical music concert at 10 pm on the Tulsi Ghat?”

I had to bribe Declan to go to the concert, but he ended up enjoying it. Special concert just for the beginning of the Shivaratri. Some people travel to Varanasi specifically for this concert. Varanasi is a Shiva city, and there is an event called Shivaratri where all the sadhus come to Varanasi and celebrate Shiva things. They march around the city in a kind of parade, some of them naked, some of them fierce, visiting a route of Shiva sites. Since the Kumbh Mela is in Allahabad this year, just three hours away, many sadhus will come from Allahabad directly to Shivaratri. My friend Joerg tells me it is the most amazing photo opportunity, but we will mostly miss Shivaratri.

Morning aarti at the Assi Ghat. The place was packed, before sunrise, to witness the fire rituals and music two of the sunrise. So many people there, it was strange to think that this ritual happened every morning and every evening. On our first Varanasi evening, we went on a little boat ride along all of the ghats on the Ganges . We passed the cremation ghats, burning 24 hours a day, sanctifying the recently deceased. A body might take 3 to 4 hours to burn completely; the electric ghats are a bit cheaper and more efficient. You can see huge stacks of wood at the cremation ghats , floated down the Ganges to be used in the last rites.

Our evening canoe ride took us to the aarti at the main ghat. From what I understood, it is ritual lights to honor the sunrise and the sunset. Hundreds of boats converged upon the main God, listening to the conch shells and chanting and putting little floating flowered candles in the Ganges.

We stayed at the Bliss Guest House, a little hostel down an alley so narrow that the rickshaw driver could not pull in; we had to walk the last bit. Ramesh was the manager of the guesthouse; he and his family were so kind. He rolled his eyes a bit when Pashupati and his friend came to visit me and Declan, and we had tea and chilum up on the roof.

The wire from my sports bra was poking out, so I was very happy to see a tailor across the street. I explained the problem to him, wanting to leave the bra and pick it up the next day. It seemed a bit rude to just leave without a chat, but I needed to get to the boat for to see the sunset aarti celebration. When I came the next day and asked about the bra, he smiled and served me tea. We chatted about Declan, and about his two children. After about ten minutes of conversation, he handed me the bra. “No charge,” he told me. “It took me no time at all.” I still paid him 100 Rs, charmed that he would not want to fleece money from a tourist. “First time I work on a ladies’ bra…” he smiled at me.

We took the overnight bus to Delhi, as my railway ticket was still waitlisted. I was sad that Declan did not get to experience the overnight Indian Railways sleeper train. We arrived in Delhi just fine, staying at BloomRooms near the Paharganj railway station. Declan was relieved that the WiFi was fast. I jumped in the shower to wash off the bus ride, but soon there was a call from the front desk.

“There is a Mr. Bolz to see you,” he said.

I had made an appointment with the past. Joerg Linsenbolz was a German traveler that Julie and I had met in India back in 1992. We had a number of adventures together, including a bus ride from Nepal that was delayed by a tree in the road, a “general” railway ticket with no seat from the border in Patna to Puri, and a trip to Calcutta in 100+ degree heat. Joerg and I had connected on Facebook a year or so ago, and it turns out that he would be in Delhi for just one day, the same day as me. I had told him where we were staying, but it was still such a treat to get that call from the front desk and come downstairs to see a face I had not seen in 27 years.

Joerg comes to India most winters; he is a perpetual student in Germany and helps out his aging mother. He once stayed for six weeks at a guesthouse in Indonesia because they had the most amazing psychedelic mushrooms growing out back. Every day he thought about leaving and seeing more of Indonesia, but it was just so pleasant to laugh all day, surrounded by great natural beauty.

We had a thali at a little restaurant overlooking Paharganj, the same road that Julie and I had had our guesthouse all those years ago. I said goodbye to Joerg, so he could head to Varanasi and see the Shivaratri, and I prepared to take our flight to Cairo. Except that…I had missed it! I had changed my flight to give us an extra day in Egypt, but I forgot to make the change on the little Word document where I keep all of our plans organized. And because my credit card had been pickpocketed in Varanasi, it was going to be complicated to change the flight.

Peg to the rescue! And now, off to Egypt…