Varanasi - Part 1
The Varanasi airport is on the outskirts of town, and bigger than it needs to be. Far from the crowds of the ghats, the place is surrounded by empty fields and tin-roofed shacks. All around the airport are giant monoliths dispensing air. Perhaps they are calling for their own pilgrimage.
The drive to the ghats is long and our car overheats and by the time we get to a place to stay we’re all too ready to drop our bags. We take the suite at the top of the building because it is our last night in India and what’s a last night without a great view?
After a rest we venture out toward the river, in search of sacred steps. Varanasi is one of the oldest cities in the world, they say, populated continuously since at least four thousand years ago. It sits on the Hindu holy river the Ganges. Each set of stairs is a ghat with it’s own name leading down to the river, a place where people can go to cleanse themselves, to be touched by the holy water of the river. At the same time, the Ganges is one of the most polluted rivers in the world, as over 100 cities sit on its banks, dumping waste all along the way. Hindus also burn their dead and spread the cremated remains in the river, although this is a very small percentage of the pollution.
We walked along the ghats, taking it all in, until we came to the first of the burning ghats, where they cremate the bodies. And so we stopped and sat at this holy place and did not take pictures and did not raise our voices out of respect for what happens there.
We sat there well into darkness, well after floodlights overhead bathed everything in an orange glow like the flicker of a jack-o-lantern. Children laughed and played nearby while men loaded bodies onto funeral pyres. Dogs lay near warm coals from old fires to keep themselves warm. Cell phones rang and people talked and it felt a long way from holy. The other side of the Ganges seems to have no development whatsoever, and perhaps that is by design. As night came and the other bank vanished in mist, no one could say where the river ended, or where the bodies might go. The Ganges became a river Styx to let loved ones drift into the afterlife. Lit by the fires of the dead, a man near the water’s edge began to wail.
Still we sat, letting an uneasy darkness creep over us. Something at the ghat felt like voodoo. It felt like dark magic. Looming over the scene stood the electric crematorium for those too poor to afford wood for their bodies. A crowd of men gathered around the wailing man to comfort him, if such a thing were possible.
Not far from us a pyre was ablaze with a body on top. I stared at it for a long while. I wanted to see. I could make out the shape of the body but I wanted to see the silks and clothes and wrap burn away to expose the person underneath. It wasn’t morbid curiosity, it was some stronger need: to prove the existence of death, the prove that we are all the same bodies of flesh and dust. I wanted to see their skull arched open in a silent scream, to understand why we burn our dead, to glimpse where the rest might go, the escape of 21 grams of soul or chi or some other thing undefined. I wanted the charred skull to turn to me and tell me “here is what death is.” I sat there and stared and stared and wondered what it meant about me and what it meant about them, what it meant about us, what it meant for those who would later drink the empty body from the holy river. Maybe there would be a hint on the skull of the land across the river, just out of sight, waiting patiently to take us all. Maybe the dead have all the answers.
We got up and left the ghat. We left men watching their relatives burn away, left children laughing and chasing one another, left dogs and other tourists would could do the gaping in our place. We ate dinner, went home, and each of us felt shaken in our own way, having seen something we didn’t have the capacity to understand, or shouldn’t have seen at all.
Late the next day we had to leave the city. We returned to the airport, too small and too far away, with the giant monoliths waiting for worshipers, shiny and metallic. Maybe they were waiting for us. They stayed silent as we passed through security. We weren’t meant for their secrets. We weren’t meant for whatever secrets anything held at all.
