My back hurt.  Sleeping on a hard bunk on an Indian train without blankets or a pillow can do that to you I suppose.  We were on a train bound for Varanasi, one of the Seven Sacred Cities of the Hindu.  I had no idea what to expect from this new place.  Every city we had visited on the trip had been completely different.  Rishikesh with it's mountain setting and Sadhus (Holy men) smoking marijuana, Agra with it's pushy sales people, overpriced attractions and rooftop views, Orchha with it's small town feel and abandoned palaces, where one could sit in peaceful contemplation while soft tunes from a homemade flute drifted up and added emotion to the place, and now Varanasi, a holy city, famous for it's many ghats.  I hadn't seen a decent picture of the Ghats at Varanasi, though attempts surrounded me on postcards, guidebooks, and posters throughout my trip.   Ghats, I came to understand, were wide stairways where people approached the holy river Ganga, or sat during a holy festival.  In all honesty, I couldn't see the appeal or interest in such a thing as we pulled in to the Varanasi station.

            The traffic was terrible.  Agra was bigger, at about one and a half million people, but for some reason Varanasi was terribly crowded, despite the fact that it was half the size.  We drove down a two-lane road that had 8 lanes of traffic and finally came to our hotel, right on the ghats of the Ganges.  Our hotel manager was an arrogant Brahmin (a member of the highest 'caste' in Hindu society.  A caste is a kind of social stratification that determines what jobs and respect you have in life.) who wanted to charge us 2000 rupees for each room.   For that moment we accepted.  It was my father's last day in India, and we thought some comfort and a visit to the important sights of Varanasi were well worth the money (later we checked online and found that the room was only 1500 on the website.  We all checked out the next day and paid only the internet price.  One must be careful in a country where 'ATM' is essentially stamped on your white forehead).  

            We walked down to the ghats as evening approached.  I looked both ways.   It was incredible to see how far they stretched in either direction.  We walked north along the banks of the river, and looked at the activities of each ghat.  Every one had it's own life and activity.  Some were used to wash clothes, others were gyms, a few had stoneworkers, and one even had a group of people playing cricket.   Every single ghat had it's own special name, too, and a history.  I took a picture of a group of, I thought, Japanese people that each had a multi-thousand dollar camera.   Upon seeing my camera a boy, his age being about 10, ran up to me.  He didn't speak any English, but I eventually figured out that he wanted me to take a picture of him (his repeating "Snap me" only adding to the confusion).  By the time I figured this out, two younger boys, seeing the commotion, ran over to join in.  I positioned my camera.   They kept coming towards me to try to be in the front of the picture.  I tried to tell them to back up.  As I did this, more kids started running towards me.  I sighed, but had little choice but to try to organize them into a photograph.  This was, of course, about as easy as trying to get a group of cows to tap dance.   I tried to explain to the first boy, who felt empowered since he had found me, that he was too tall to be in the front.  Many of the kids I know had were as young as 5.   He finally understood and moved back, though he stuck his head boldly forward between the younger boys to make sure it was still a picture of him.   I took the picture.  They ran over and took the camera.  I tried to keep a hand on it, to make sure it didn't break, but I couldn't always.  The camera took a picture of their feet while it was being passed around, and without knowing how to go back to the picture of them, they impatiently waited for me to delete it so they could see themselves again.   Finally I took it back.  They followed me, laughing all the way, and tried to get me to take pictures of each of them individually.  I continued to brush them aside, and eventually they left me alone, seeing the Japanese group with their super big and fancy cameras (though the group ignored them completely).   I raised my eyebrows at my father.  He gave a half smile in return.  

            We followed a small parade like processional up past a few more ghats.   More and more people were gathering for 'Puja', the same type of ceremony I myself participated in on my first day in Haradwar, though there wasn't much activity among them.

            "They don't seem nearly as into it as those people in Orchha." My father noted.   I thought back to the auctioneer-class Brahmin who was trying to take offerings from 200 people a minute it seemed in the tiny temple of Orchha; he was always throwing flowers over his shoulder, tossing rice and sweets, and collecting money.  The whole place was a flurry of activity and religious fervor.  I had to agree with my father.

            "Maybe things will change once sundown comes." I said.  He nodded at that possibility.  We continued up the river and I came to a woman with a crying child, about age four.  She was sitting in the back, and was clearly embarrassed and angry that her son was being so loud and obnoxious at this holy pilgrimage site.  She hit him on the back a few times with her hand.  He didn't stop.  She grabbed him by the ear and yanked on it a bit, shouting at him.  He only cried louder.  She then took of her shoe, and started hitting him with it, a few times on the back, and a few times on the face.  Still nothing.  She handed the shoe to her younger son, who looked to be about a year younger than the crier, and he smacked his brother with the shoe a few times on the head, giggling as he did it.   I watched somewhat impassively.  It was hard to just accept it, as the people around her did, but I had learned it's harder still to try to fight it, and only hold on to your own ideas of culture in a place that was not your own.  Perhaps she would think it even more abusive that people in the U.S.A. sometimes give their children everything they ask for when they cry.  When I thought about it, I decided that it was hard to tell what was necessarily worse.  I also held fast to my belief that by giving the shoe to the other son, who followed her example, she was only encouraging him to beat his wife or kids someday as well.

A little ways beyond her we finally came to the famous 'Burning Ghats'.  

            "No pictures allowed here." said Stefan.  Though I had already guessed as much and returned my camera to my pocket.  We passed two colorful items on the ground, each covered in yellow decorative silk.  

            "Bodies," said Stefan, "Waiting to be burned."

            "It's every Hindu's wish to be burned at Varanasi, and their ashes cast in the Ganga," said Renate, our personal expert on Hindu culture, "It means they will not have to be reincarnated, and live another life full of pain.  It's a happy thing, because it means you instead are going to Nirvana."

            I didn't have a reply.  There wasn't anything I could think of to say.   Several pyres were burning at once.  We moved up a few stairs on the ghat and sat down at a place that felt far enough away to not be intrusive, yet close enough that all the activities were very clear.  Stefan stayed closer to the action, watching it all at close range, though we took the bag he was carrying and kept it with us.  I could see that this was also kind of a hang out for the thugs and outcasts of the society.  Behind us, and just around the corner, a group of 10 guys, about in their late teen years, maybe even young adults, were playing with another guy who was unfortunate enough to be caught between them.  They pushed him around, stole things from him so he'd have to try to get it back, and smacked him a few times with some cloth until he was rescued by someone who clearly had more prestige, and they wouldn't dare touch.  They noticed Renate, my father, and I sitting close by, and I saw one of them gesture toward us and say something.  I gave him my toughest and best 'you come over here and cause me trouble, and I will gladly kill you' look, and after a quick and quiet discussion they walked away.   I went back to watching the burning ghats. 

People always argued for a while about the price of wood, and after it was bought a funeral pyre was built.  The body was kept in it's elaborately decorated silk wrapping and the firstborn son of the deceased, with a shaved head and a white outfit, was given straw to light the fire.   A circle of family and friends (only men, though) stood in a semi-circle around the body and watched as the fire made it's way into the flesh, and the white smoke that came from just the wood turned black as it burned the body.   It took a while to burn someone, and screams echoed through my mind as I thought of a time when women would, voluntarily or not, be cast into the funeral pyres for their dead husbands.   There was no emotion, though, when watching the burnings, and I could feel the fire dancing across my eyes as I sat like a statue, cold and unfeeling, and watched the many lives go up in smoke.   I lost track of time at just stared, thinking thoughts that can never be remembered, as each person's spirit freed itself from this earth, and found nirvana.  

"Ready to go?" asked Renate.

"Sure," replied my father, "Ian?"

I awoke from my trance and nodded.  We started walking back toward the Puja ceremonies that were just now beginning.  We passed a body lying by the river.  Two people were trying to move it onto a small rowboat.

"They will just dump that one in the river." commented Stefan.  I wondered why.   Maybe they couldn't afford the wood.  Maybe they weren't of an appropriate caste.  The silk cover slipped.  It was a woman; she was tiny.  I couldn't tell though, in that second, if she was just very old, or maybe very young.  They re-covered her, and got her into the boat.   The rower pushed off to take her somewhere into the heart of holy Ganga, and leave her behind. 

We decided to take a large rowboat ourselves, and a man agreed to take us out for an hour, down along all the ghats, for 200 rupees (One dollar is about 39 rupees, for the economically curious, though the value of the dollar had been declining dramatically, even as we've been here.   "You should change all of your dollars to euros you know." is one of Stefan's favorite lines.  "Your currency is shit.").   He took us past all of the ghats again, but this time we saw something completely different from before.  Each ghat had over a thousand people at it, each overly crowded with people trying to send out small floating flowers and candles, or else to drink or bathe in some of the holy Ganga water.  Policemen were in boats, and would blow their whistle and glare angrily whenever someone completely submerged themselves or else had some lewd body part exposed accidentally by the river, who, it seemed, had a sense of humor.   We passed by these many thousands of people, and I kept taking pictures at each of the many ghats, in some hopeless effort to bring back an idea of the overwhelming numbers of people.  My camera failed to do the impossible task I appointed it, and I eventually gave up, preferring to simply watch the music and activities, as well as the little offering boats with their lone flames dancing down the river, reflecting upon the water with ripples of warm color.   We landed just south of our hotel, and my father and I went out in search of a phone and an internet connection.  We coincidentally ended up at the same place, and while I waited for an available computer, I was asked the usual barrage of questions (counted in India, of course, as small talk) of what my name was, when I arrived in Varanasi, where I came from, where I am going next, what my home country was, who I was here with, whether or not I thought USA was a powerful country, what my religious beliefs were, and then finally, one of the most interesting ones to answer: what do you of India.  I glanced at the people working on their computers.  I still had some time.

"India is a beautiful country," I began, hearing from Stefan and Renate that many Indian's liked that answer best.  The shop owner continued to look at me expectantly, his eyes carrying with them a desire to hear what my opinion really was.  This time, I decided, I'd elaborate.   "India has so many different things to offer.  We have been to many different cities and each one so far has had it's own energy, and life that makes it unique to everywhere else you could go in the world.  There is so much vibrant color, and so much energy in this country, that you cannot help but be carried with it.  In America we simply don't have that feel.   The cities are colder feeling, they're more intimidating, and they have, by comparison, so little that makes them unique from all the others.   You can see the historic and tourist sites in each city, and maybe enjoy them, but then you are just in another city.  Here, you do not feel like you're in another city that is like the others even within this one state, let alone the whole diverse country.  Every city is energetic and new and refreshing.  It's something we simply do not have in America.  America is an incredibly boring place a lot of the time, especially compared to here."

He seemed satisfied with the answer.

So was I.

back to Stefan & Renate...