For Hindus, Varanasi (Benares) is the holiest place on earth, and the chosen home of the Hindu god Shiva. Those who die in Varanasi are guaranteed Moksha, or liberation from the cycle of death an rebirth, no matter what they may have done in their lifetimes. Thousands come daily to bathe in the sacred waters of the Ganges (Mother Ganga). For many devout Hindus, a visit to Benares is roughly akin to the Muslim Haj to Mecca. Around the city, dead bodies are a common sight, delivered to the roaring funeral pyres with the traditional chant, "Ram Nam Satyi Hai."
The Buddha came to Sarnath, on the outskirts of Benares, 2500 years ago to preach his first sermon after attaining allightenment under the Bodyi tree. He delivered his sermon in what was a thriving North Indian trading town on the banks of the Ganges. Benares is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, an imensely intense and enchanting maze of narrow alleyways filled with cows and small shops emptying out at the numerous Ghats spread along the river. Its sights and sounds and smells never cease to amaze.
I am back in India.
What a wild place.
My third time, but it always feels like the first.
Sitting in the back of a cycle rickshaw, the old man in rags peddling the last few kilometers through the dense early morning fog towards the Nepali-Indo border post. It feels like the most desolate place in the world in this early morning chill. Figures appear like ghosts out of the thick white soup, cloaked in homespun cloth, heads down, shielding from the cold. A hazy orange globe rising over the derelect border crossing marking the dawn of a new day, a new adventure, a new experience. Faces get browner and leaner, the stares more intense, it seems, at ever step I take. The usual border grime is omnipresent; why border towns in most of the world attract filth and scum I do not know, but this place is no exception. I walk on.
It hits like a hammer, the intensity of the stares, makes me suddenly bashful, forgetting this is the norm now. There are people, swarming, everywhere, everywhere you look, surounding everything you see, a great swelling mass of humanity at every glance. This place defies every Western notion of existence at every step, every move, everything is alive, laid bare for you to observe, no cloaks, no mirrors, just life. Stifling, overwhelming, beautiful, fascinating.
