Life on the Ganges

We’re in an airport again (there’s certainly been a lot of that, this trip!), this time in Varanasi, the city where we’ve spent the last three days with our friends Jeanne and Wally. Now we’re about to fly to Chandigarh, not too far north of Delhi, where we’ll meet up with them again tomorrow morning. The reason we’re going separately is that they are taking an overnight train from Varanasi to Chandigarh – not only a 12+ hour trip to begin with (they leave in the late afternoon, and arrive at 4:30 a.m.), but also, according to the Internet, one for which the average delay is nine hours. When Bob heard those statistics, there was NO way he was going on that train. Jeanne argued that prolonged train rides, delays and all, were an important part of the full Indian experience, which may be true, but this was a part of the full Indian experience that Bob wanted no part of. So we are flying to Chandigarh instead.

After living in gritty, land-locked, Anand for three months, I found Varanasi liberating by contrast. The hotel we were staying in, the Ganges View, was right on the river, with sweeping views of the water and the ghats (the stepped plazas leading down from the city to the water’s edge). Converted from an old mansion, the hotel had spacious terraces, colorful with many pots of flowers, on the second and third floors on which you could drink your morning tea while looking over the lively scene below. Both the terraces and the rooms were furnished with beautiful old furniture that looked like it could have come from the original mansion, as well as decorated with paintings, masks, textiles, and other art pieces depicting gods, goddesses, and scenes from the various Hindu epics. It was a lovely place.

The first morning I woke up in time to see the sun rise over the Ganges, which was gorgeous, since the view was directly to the east. The sounds at that time of day are also glorious: the clanging of bells and the soothing music of chanting as people do morning worship before starting their day. Below on the plaza closest to the river at the bottom of the ghat on which the hotel sits (Assi Ghat), people are beginning their day’s activity: boatmen taking their first load of riders out on the river, stall owners setting out their wares, flower sellers piling up bright orange garlands in their baskets. I was happy just to sit and watch the swirl of humanity. The other wonderful thing about that time of day is the weather, which is cool and refreshing; as the sun rose, it got progressively hotter, so that by 11 or 12 it was intensely, and unpleasantly, warm. That was the major downside of being in Varanasi in late March, as opposed to January, which is when I visited once before on my first trip to India. In the middle of day, the heat was exhausting.

Mostly while we were there we just walked along the river by the different ghats, each with its own particular character (some busy with commerce, some almost deserted, some set aside as cremation ghats for the funeral pyres of the dead – it is a great honor to be cremated in Varanasi, by the holy Ganges). But we did try to go to the biggest Hindu temple – I’ve forgotten its name – which is down a twisting maze of alleys crammed with multitudes of shops selling scarves, spices, souvenirs, and jewelry. For reasons I’m not sure of except general levels of “communal” violence (this is the term that’s used for Hindu/Muslim conflict), there was a huge amount of military and police presence – uniformed men with guns stationed regularly along the alleys, and clustered at the entrances and exits that led into or out of the temple grounds. When, after winding our way through what seemed like a corkscrew journey, we finally came to the place that led directly into the temple area, we had to give up our cameras, cell phones, and purses (we let Bob and Wally, who were willing to go second, held on to them, rather than the soldiers) before going in. Once we were inside, it turned out there was an extremely long line of people waiting to get into the temple, many of them holding offerings of flowers or fruit – and that even if we had been willing to wait on the line (which looked like it could easily be more than a half hour wait), we weren’t going to be allowed into the actual temple anyway, since only Hindus could go in. We glimpsed the grounds through some openings in the fence, and took our leave.

It was also in Varanasi that I had my first -- and really only -- experience of feeling totally alien from the Indian experience, when one night at our hotel there was a concert of "dhrupad" singing. I find a lot of Indian classical music something of an acquired taste, with its unfamiliar scale and wandering, unaccustomed melodies, but this was truly extraordinary. Two large stringed instruments -- I'm not sure of the name -- put out a constant, almost one-note drone, and two brothers, who were the singers, made sounds that had almost no "musical" qualities in the western sense whatsoever, but seemed to emerge and disappear out of nowhere, mostly quite quietly. At the same time, the "singing" was accompanied by gestures and heavenward looks by the brothers that could only suggest either a deep devotional trance or being completed stoned. Jeanne was so shocked by the performance that she whispered to me it must be a fraud meant to bamboozle the western tourists who stay at the hotel, but if it was western tourists they wanted to appeal to, this was not the way to go! Besides, the audience was actually more Indian than western, and I was pretty sure this was, in fact, a totally legitimate art. It was, however, something I could not relate to in the least -- perhaps if I had been stoned, it would have worked better for me. Discreetly, I left about midway through -- as did the rest of our party.