Varanasi
Travel Location: Varanasi,India
I shared a rickshaw from Bodhgaya to Gaya station and caught the afternoon train to Mughal Serai. I had arranged with my hotel a taxi to meet me at the station and to deliver me close to the place on the river where my hotel was. It was a short walk through the narrow winding streets of the old city to Meer Ghat.
Varanasi is the holiest of cities in Hinduism: if you die in Varanasi, your soul is released from the cycle of reincarnation and is allowed immediately to reach Nirvana.
maybe it is dirty for you, but it is clean for me
The city lies on the west bank of the Ganges, Great Mother Ganga. Each morning a red sun rises over the river, lighting the boatmen rowing tourists up and down, and the people on the ghats (the stepped west bank) already praying, bathing, swimming and washing clothes in the holy water.
Every evening crowds gather on Dasaswamedh Ghat for the ganga aarti ceremony. Ten young Brahmin stand along the ghat at a row of shrines, performing in synchrony a ritual involving a flaming lamp, an ornate paper fan, and what looks like a horsehair duster. Musicians sing and play tabla, and their music is heard amplified from speaker cabinets, competing with the tolling of bells strung high above the crowd, whose ropes are tugged ceaslessly by the children present at the ceremony.
There are several burning ghats on the river, where the bodies of the dead are cremated and their ashes washed into the river. At a funeral the colour of the outer shrowd that the body is wrapped in before being placed on the pyre indicates the age and sex of the deceased. The pyre is lit with a flame taken from the nearby eternally-burning Shiva fire. No women are present at the ceremony and crying is forbidden, as tears will catch a soul and prevent it from entering Nirvana. The chest of a man and the pelvis of a woman go into the river uncremated. The men who work the burning ghats are free to sift the ashes of the dead and to keep or sell whatever jewellery they find.
The bodies of infants, and of sadhus (holy men) are not cremated; they are weighed down with a stone and dropped whole into the river. The same is done with the bodies of animals that die in Varanassi: cows, dogs, goats, buffalo. Sometimes the current separates a body from its weight and brings it to the surface.
Thiry large sewers also discharge continuously into the Ganga at Varanasi. Accccording to the Lonely Planet, the water is septic – with no dissolved oxygen – and contains one and a half million faecal coliform bacteria per one hundred millilitres of water. In water that is safe for bathing this figure should be less than five hundred.
And yet hundreds of Hindus bathe and swim in the river each day, apparently without any ill effects; the boatmen will insist that the water is clean. I wonder if this is a demonstration of the power of faith. As a worker at one of the poor people’s hospices on the river bank told me, ‘maybe it is dirty for you, but it is clean for me’.
This is the faith, I believe, that gives Varanasi its characteristic atmosphere: not especially of piety, but rather of profound contentment.
