Varanasi the washout

Not for us the guidebook promised experience of the great Hindu city of Varanasi stretching itself along the banks of the Ganges. Varanasi, Kashi to the devout – the Luminous, City of Light – founded by Shiva, one of the oldest living cities in the world, a centre of spiritual life since before the sixth century BC, built at one of the holiest of all Ganges tirthas, crossing places, where the divine is in earth, water and fire, where the devout come daily to the many stepped ghats for their ablutions in the holy Ganges, where the dead are brought on their continuing passage through deathlifedeath, where the elderly come to await death and the promise of enlightenment. 

Not for us this Varanasi. 

Instead days of heavy rains, at times torrential. The holy Ganges, surging down the Himalayas and across the plains, is up a dangerous 30 feet, lapping at the upper steps and edges of temples, flowing across doorsteps, the rushing currents sweeping garbage, bodies and Himalayan silt towards Kolkata, the streets one morning knee and waist deep in muck, reports of 24 lives lost, rickshaws and tuktuks abandoned in unseen potholes, the holy ghats grey, dripping and forlorn, the fires smoldering ash. Indra, King of the Gods, Lord of Heaven, God of War, Storms and Rainfall is having his way with Varanasi.

Yesterday we attempted to walk on higher land through mazy laneways, their crannies still so full of activity. Men stitch sequins and tiny beads on saris, the chuffing of a small flour mill, a bicycle repair operation scattered along the lane stones, the part skeleton of one ancient bike upsidedown, the parts of others set out nearby. Cows and bulls wander these same narrow lanes (and the congested main Varanasi streets), their wet brown droppings and pools of piss everywhere. Men pee against walls and into gullies, urchins run in play through damp slippery alleys. 
 

Immediately the waters subside, the streets are immediately crammed with vegetable sellers catching up from the flood, their wheeled carts piled with cucumbers, garlics, peppers, chillies, tomatoes, oranges, apples. Men pull rickshaws free of the muck. Cows again mosey around the street corners, grazing amongst vegetable waste and plastic chai cups.

 

How to talk about our first hours in India?

It feels impossible to describe – to be true to – our first hours’ experience of India today, driving south from the Nepal-India border across heavily populated Uttar Pradesh to the city of Varanasi. 

Far easier, it is, to write about the bright white tips of the Annapurna Range to the north, those shy mountains, so far veiled in clouds, giving us a first and final glimpse of their beauty. 

Or to say that we drove across vast fertile alluvial plains that run along the Ganges and its tributaries, their rice paddies about to be harvested, lush market and household vegetable gardens edging the road. 

Or to describe the frenzy of jostling buses, transports, motorbikes, cyclists, three-wheeled moto taxis, pairs of oxen pulling farm wagons and carts, so many people walking on the roadside, small gatherings of people conversing at the road edge, cows, bulls and goats ambling along an imaginary centerline. 

All this, or something remotely approximate, is possible to put into words. 

But there were other dimensions, other qualities in what we have experienced that felt astonishing, so new and so immediate. A kind of physical, especially visual, rawness. Life raw, exposed, public, teeming and seemingly frantic.  (“Especially visual” because so far we have been passing observers, cocooned for much of the day in our van.)  

Along our way … 

A lean white-haired man wearing a worn, dust-coloured lunghi pulled up around his waist, squats at the pavement’s edge, genitals hanging black beneath his hips, shitting and pissing a breath away from the torrent of speeding lorries, cars and motorbikes. 

Another man tends a fat-filled vat of sizzling pakoras and samosas in a tied together shelter of poles at the edge of a shallow ditch filled with muddy wet garbage around which whiskered men sit chatting, their voices sucked out of hearing by a cacophony of honking drivers of every kind of two, three, four and eight wheeled vehicles slithering, like a school of mackerel, around a bull lifting its tail, the impatient drivers pushing ever- so- slowly on into an ever-thickening mass as bull piss pools between their tires. 

Each town’s streets, really a churning rapids of street-walkway-parking lot-market, seem inhabited by a restless frenzied energy that tosses people back and forth in frantic, noisy swirls and eddies as the cows, as if blind and deaf, continue their sleepy meandering .... 

There are quieter courtyards and alleyways here and there beyond this din, but here anywhere close to the street the inside is outside, or there is no inside at all. 

The goods of shallow shops and workshops – rolls of electrical wire, great hanging stems of bananas, lines of shirts, bras and caps – spill onto the streets and into …carts of roasted peanuts; a patch of ground strewn with bicycle parts, men straightening a wheel frame; pyramids of apples and aubergines; six men squatting over a parchese game; a woman in paddy green sari with gold trim haggling over garlics; groups of passing uniformed school children pointing towards our van, chattering, giggling, looking preposterously clean and bright, like the women in saris, against the mucky streets and rain-stained, rust-corroded, worn brown-greyness of so many of the shop fronts.

Especially surprising – against this world of what so often seems like the utterly threadbare and frenzied – is the attention to personal cleanliness and beauty, and to moments of created order. 

Like those gloriously harmonious designs and combination of colour I see on women’s saris, their figures like bright red, orange, green, gold, blue flames rising from the dust and rust. 

Or the mounds of oranges, apples, cucumbers and aubergines, rows and pyramids and half-moons of purple, orange, pink, red, green, so carefully arranged each morning by marketers.  

Or the dignified bearing of so many people we pass or talk briefly with, the men’s neatly timed beards, the women’s graceful subtle hand gestures, the erect long backs and delicate footsteps around the muck and water-filled potholes. 

Astonishing – these signs of grace and beauty.

Pushing our way to Varanasi

Car troubles on the long day’s drive from Lumbini (Nepal) to Varanasi (India). A dying battery or a poor battery connection, then a blown air conditioning fuse. Now we have stopped for a bathroom break and our van won’t start. We get out and push, there’s ignition. Someone remarks on our driver lousy jump-starting techniques. 

Not far alone, we slow to dip through one of the countless potholes on our way. Again the van stalls. Again we jump out to push. Another few kilometres, another pothole, another stall, another push. This time, as the van jerks ahead, our driver jams on the brakes, sending Keith (a travel mate) slamming forehead first into the open door he has been pushing. 

Two towns along, a welt now as big as an Indian puri on Keith’s forehead, we scan the street sides for another battery and cables, and a cold bottle of pop for Keith’s wound.

An hour or so later. We – thirteen people in our tour group – hang out along a fence railing near our van, now parked along a road-cum-market-cum-vehicle part and vegetable stalls. Batteries and cables come and go, as do a long queue of expert but failing solutions to our car problems. A crowd of curious, mostly male, on-lookers has grown steadily, first along the opposite side of the road, then circling around us, inching as close as possible to the young fair-skinned women in our group, the men and boys staring, fascinated, curious. We – pale skinned, Wayne’s lime green bandana and snug in his  yellow t-shirt, ambiguous Alex’s tight dark pink pants and closely-cropped hair, several other fair-haired women in tight sleeveless tops – have become the exotic strangers; they, the townsfolk, the curious watchers. 

I find freshly fried potato samosas and pass them around. A big hit, so Bo (another traveller in our group) and I go off in search of more. Heh, look at the strangers trying our food. Like we are Hollywood movie or satellite sitcom phantoms made flesh.

The Olympian bus ticket collector

Ahead of us, through our van windshield, a youth runs down the road after a moving bus on which, it turns out, he works as a ticket collector. 

Moments before he had jumped off the bus to pay a local road toll. Now he chases and outruns the bus, grabs the lower rung of a rear ladder that reaches to the bus roof, clambers up the ladder, nimbly runs forward along the bouncing, swaying rooftop over and around mounds of bags and bundles, lowers himself down the front side of the bus, perches on a window edge, then swings through the window, ready again to check people’s tickets.