Varanasi Pt. 2

 

Nov. 4^th, 2012

On our second day in Varanasi, we started out by going to a local school for underprivileged children. It was run by a local NGO that received part of its funding from the bakery and café we had eaten at the day before. After we had asked about it, Mama decided she wanted to go and visit, since they encouraged people to come volunteer or see what the school was doing.

The school was in the upstairs of a small compound. In fact, it was actually just two small classrooms within a family’s home. The fact that the organization was started by a local family was inspiring. They had other programs in other parts of the city, but their focus was in education. We sat in a classroom of very young kids during an English lesson. I took a look at their workbooks which I always find interesting. Soon after we got there, a few more foreigners showed up. I got really self-conscious of our presence at this point, since I felt that we were being a distraction. Soon there was a tea break, and one of the teachers brought us some chai. We chatted with them about the programs and learned as much as we could about the program and how they work. Mama wanted to make a donation to them, but I tend to be skeptical of many aid organizations, especially those that work in touristy areas. A lot of their stuff seemed legit, though I was not totally excited about how they encourage people to come on visits like we were doing simply because they were trading a distraction to their students for donations. After talking to the teacher and some of the kids, we went with the head master’s room and chatted some more before making a donation to the school. 

Teacher and students.

Mama and the kids.

 

 

We spent most of the rest of the day walking along the ghats. We went past where most of the touristy areas of the ghats and just kept walking. Every few hundred feet or so we would see something interesting we had never seen before. Along a lot of the river, people had large hoses connected to water pumps. They were spraying water from the Ganges at large chunks of mud and dirt that covered a lot of the steps leading to the river. I wasn’t sure, but I imagine this was a seasonal necessity. The river would rise during the monsoon, then slowly lower throughout the dry season, leaving huge deposits of mud all over along the rive banks. The dirt was caked several meters thick at some spots. There was a lot of work to be done. We saw a group of men on their pilgrimage, getting their heads, faces and armpits shaved with a straight razor. Nearby a couple of men were climbing in and out of a whole in the ground, carrying buckets of mud or clay, perhaps for construction purposes. It was an interesting place to see people from all over India carrying out their various rituals as they made their pilgrimage.

A man washes himself on a platform in the river.

Painting the Ghats

Water Buffalo

Spraying mud off the ghats.

Getting shaved.

Men pulling what I believe to be mud or clay from a well

Spraying mud off the ghats.

Trying to spray me off the ghats.

Shiva lingams

Eventually we reached a smaller, lesser-known burning ghat than the one we had visited the night before. We sat at a distance and watched the whole process of a few cremations. We were never bothered by anyone. There were several in the process at the same moment. One body, wrapped tightly in white cloth and adorned with marigolds was waiting in line on a bamboo stretcher. The corpse looked shockingly thin. Members of a scheduled cast carry out the cremations. The corpse soon had liquefied ghee poured all over it to help it burn evenly. A pile of wood was erected and the body was lifted on top of it and then set on fire. The men would occasionally tend to each pyre, poking at the coals, moving pieces of wood or adjusting the body. Usually the body’s calves would be hanging out of the fire and would remain unburned. They would have to wait until the knees were burn through to push the legs backward into the flames. I would see the funeral workers frequently poking at the bottom of the feet, checking to see if they could be flipped back yet. They also have to use their stick to puncture the skull at some point to prevent it from exploding. It all seems pretty morbid, and I wondered if Mama was going to get squeamish or find it hard to watch. In fact, she found it all fascinating and didn’t want to stop watching. We sat there for at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half. And honestly, it was one of the more relaxing moments in Varanasi. We were sitting instead of battling crowds in narrow streets and nobody was hassling us.

Afterword, we ascended some nearby steps that led up to a Jain temple. The steps were so steep and narrow that I was actually afraid to go back down them. So after walking through the temple, we walked into the neighborhoods behind it to avoid the potentially treacherous descent. We strolled back the way we had come, but away from the river, under the cover of the tightly-packed neighborhoods. Like the area we were staying in, the roads were too narrow for cars. It was not crowded and very peaceful. One area seemed to be a Muslim neighborhood and there was a mosque wedged into one of the buildings. Nobody bothered us until we got to a small touristy strip with guesthouses, trinket shops, western-food cafes and CD stalls.

Cow dung drying on the wall to be used for fuel.

Women and a tourist.

Electricians at work.

That night we treated ourselves to a nice dinner at the rooftop restaurant at one of Varanasi’s nicer hotels. We mostly did it for the view, but also because we hadn’t had any upscale Indian food since Mama had been visiting. I had actually been to this restaurant five years earlier, but it was a lot different. As far as I remember, the building it sat on top of was not a fancy hotel, and the restaurant was basic and grubby. Since then, they had capitalized on their prime location and view of the Ganges. At $6 or $7 a plate I couldn’t believe the prices, but it was Mama’s treat, so I sat back and enjoyed the food and the view.

View from the restaurant

Boats gather around a ghat for the nightly ceremony.

After dinner, we walked to a nearby ghat where a nightly puja ceremony takes place. We had to shove through buckets of hustlers and little kids selling postcards before we could find a spot in the crowd to watch the puja. The offering featured a lot of fire and chanting, so it held our attention. It was somehow chaotic and serene at the same time. 

Later that night, when we were back at our hotel, I went back into the street to get a Sprite for Mama. On my way back a guy started following me and trying to sell me hash. By this point, I was so fed up with the hassles of this town that I turned to him without hesitation and yelled, “No! Go away!” He froze, shocked, and just said, “Oh my god!” It’s disappointing, but it often seems that the best way to deal with the worst of India is to lose your cool. The point doesn’t really get across otherwise.

In the morning we relaxed on the terrace at our hotel and just watched river life go by. I went out to get us some idlis for breakfast. I had gotten the fluffy rice cakes with sambar and coconut chutney the day before and Mama had liked them. She had commented, though, that she thought they would work well as a sweet dish rather than with savory sauces. So I got hers without the condiments and got some sugar from the hotel’s café.  We coated the idlis in sugar and they turned out to be delicious. Good idea Mama. While we ate, we saw a snake charmer sit down and start to perform. It was very sporadic as he only wanted to charm his snake as foreigners passed by. If they ignored him it wasn’t worth his effort to continue. Then a flute salesman walked by. He stopped, amused by the snake charmer, and tried to mimic the charmer’s playing. It wasn’t correct at all, and the charmer seemed annoyed. Realizing he had chose a terrible spot to perform, he got up and left.

Idli with sugar

We had the rest of the day free, before we had to get on the train that night. We had wondered what it would be like to see the other side of the river. There was absolutely nothing built on the opposite bank. There was just a big stretch of sand that was exposed when the river receded after the monsoon. We could see that there were a few people scattered about the sand, and the occasional boat would go across the river. So we ventured down to the banks and asked around to find a boat that would take us across. Plenty of people said they would take us across in a private boat, but we eventually found the boat that was loading up lots of people and would take us across for a small fee. When we reached the other side, I didn’t see anybody paying anything, so we just got off and nobody said anything. And there we were, standing on what now felt like a desert. The sand was expansive and hot and the sun beat down on us. I wasn’t quite sure where everyone dispersed to, but after a couple minutes of walking into the sand, we were alone. I turned around and looked at the city across the river. It looked incredible and amazingly distant. It looked ancient and almost unreal.

A boy walks across the sand with his kite.

Mama

We continued to walk and eventually found some men dispersed throughout the landscape flying kites. It looked like there was some sort of competition going on so we sat around and watched for a while.

Men and kites.

When we had seen enough, and gotten hot enough, we headed back to the river bank. There was a place where there were a few boats and people gathering. I still didn’t understand for what reason, other than kiting, people would come to this side of the river. Perhaps there were villages deep in the savannah in the distance. It seemed that some of the people disappeared into or emerged from the foliage.

A young, flamboyant guy approached us. He was excited to meet foreigners and asked if he could take a picture with me. He put his arm around me and his friend snapped a couple pictures of us. He was pretty giddy for the experience. I just pretended I was some sort of celebrity and soaked it up. A nearby woman thought this was a good idea, so she had someone take a picture of her with Mama.

We then found a boat going back across the river. When we arrived, there was some disagreement about the price. We paid the ten rupees each that we saw everyone else paying, although the driver was demanding 100 from us. I looked around for help, but suddenly everyone that had been on the boat with us had disappeared. So we just walked away after paying him what we assumed was fair.

We had to get back to the train station, and finding a ride there was not the easiest task. Walking through town with backpacks on makes you even more of a target than normal. I tried to play several rickshaw drivers off each other to get a lower price. It worked decently, and we got a ride with a driver with some sort of substance in his mouth that was turning his mouth, teeth and spit a bright green. Just before leaving, a cop came up and got in the front of the rickshaw. Normally, if taxi or rickshaw driver tries to let a friend ride with us I will refuse to proceed. The fact that it was a police officer, though, eased my hesitations. I didn’t want to worry Mama, but I was still nervous about our extra passenger. The traffic in Varanasi is horrific, and was especially treacherous at the time of day that we left. Our driver ditched the arterial and started working his way through back streets. This didn’t excite me, but at the same time, I knew we were probably going to get to the station slightly faster. The driver drove like an absolute maniac, and I even mean relative to most Indian drivers. When we tried to rejoin the main road, though, we were met with a traffic jam. Several cars were sitting there, stationary, refusing to yield to the other cars. The jam was only caused by a few drivers stubbornness. Suddenly the cop hopped out of the rickshaw, walked into the traffic jam and started waving his baton around. Magically, the cars started moving and the jam dissipated. We saw a limping dog making its way across the street, weaving through the slow-moving traffic. As it got closer, I saw that the dog was probably in the worst shape I had ever seen a living dog. It barely made it to the concrete median before collapsing between the two lanes of traffic. It was missing a lot of its hair, had scars and cuts all over its body and was missing an ear. Worst of all, though, it was missing about a third of its skull and you could see its exposed, and seemingly rotting brain. I don’t know how the dog had ended up like this, but it almost looked like someone had taken a swing at its head with a sharp machete. I hoped that the dog would just die soon as it lay there, oblivious to the traffic going on around it.  Eventually we reached the place that the cop wanted to get off at and he silently left without paying anything. Later, we were dropped off across several lanes of traffic from the train station. The drive had been a long and exhausting white-knuckle roller-coaster of a ride (even for India). My nerves were frayed, and I wasn’t in the mood to cross six-lanes of cutthroat Indian traffic with a concrete barrier in the middle. Alas, there was no other option. I took Mama’s hand and we carefully made it to the middle. As we were crossing the final three lanes, I saw a large horse attached to a carriage behind it. Then I saw a young man with madness in his eyes and thick burn scars on his face run towards the horse with a hop in his step. I could see what was about to happen, but even still, I didn’t believe that he was really going to do it. As he got to the horse, he cocked his arm back and unleashed a right hook right into the horse’s nose. The horse sprang up onto its hind legs, panicking. The wild man put his arms up in some sort of celebratory pose as if to say, “Hey, I just punched your horse, what are you going to do about it?” Simultaneously the horse and its two owners that were standing nearby chased the boy into the street. He didn’t run away. He wanted a fight, and he got one, right in the middle of the street, stopping traffic. The horse anxiously stood by in support as the two men took the young guy to the ground. A few punches were exchanged, but nothing seemed to phase the horse-puncher. The scuffle fizzled out quickly and the crazy man wriggled away and sauntered off laughing at the chaos he had brought. We had stood by and watched in shock. I couldn’t believe that this guy had really just punched a horse, unprovoked. I said to my mom, “Did you see that guy’s face? It was all burnt.” Just then, I turned and realized I was standing next to a man in a suit with an orange turban and a face that had been burnt beyond all recognition. The sight of him sent a sucker punch to my gut, and I really hoped he had not heard me.

We proceeded to the train station and made our way to the ticket office for foreigners. We had been unable to secure a first class ticket for the way back, but there is always a chance that more seats will open up the day of the train. We were not so lucky, and we were forced to get a sleeper class ticket. I was used to riding sleeper class, but the idea of it made Mama nervous. I had done the best I could, but if we wanted to get back to Kolkata in time for Mama’s flight, we would have to take the sleeper class.  It would be dirtier, much less comfortable and a lot more crowded.

I could tell Mama was nervous as we waited on the platform. It was dark now, and the scene around us was growing more menacing. Rats were running around us and there was a junky shooting up in a nearby dark corner. I don’t know if things were actually more sketchy than normal, or if I was just more aware of it since I was with Mama. Just before the train arrived, a young guy came up and greeted us. I was guarded at first and admittedly acted cold to him. So many of my interactions with people in Varanasi had left a bitter taste in my mouth and I was more untrusting than ever. I soon realized, though, that he was a good guy and just wanted to meet us and maybe practice a little English. I was actually relieved to have someone that seemed trustworthy with us, who could give us a hand when the train came. Although we had assigned berths, unlike in third class, which is a free-for-all that gets packed to the gills, it can be stressful to get onto the train as everyone is pushing and shoving as they vie for luggage space.

The train was crowded, but not nearly as bad as others I had been on. Mama was nervous at first, but eventually relaxed. I felt bad that we had not gotten a nicer train car, but in the end, Mama was glad to have the experience. It was less comfortable than what we had had on the way to Varanasi, but it was more interesting and different. I felt relieved later that Mama had come to terms with the train and would later have fond memories of it.