My Varanasi Adventures

In case you don't know, Varanasi is the holy city of India

, its Mecca. If you want to go to heaven, dying here and having your ashes scattered on the River Ganges after being burned on the Ghats will guarantee that. Apart from that, I know little about the city except that it is complete chaos, highly testing of one's serenity, and probably the most crassly commercial places I've ever been.

In Varanasi cattle walk freely through the grinding main avenue (which has no sense of direction or rhyme or reason at all) while a man thrashes an oxen mercilessly in a cursing rage at the side of the road. A westerner cannot walk two paces before being asked to buy or give something and is greeted with anger when he declines. People get broken ribs or worse by the horns of those same cows running free and too poor to go to the doctor, collapse on the side of the road.

The homeless (seemingly a third of the city) live in the train station, making it difficult to walk. On the platform, I watched the city's electric go off and on at about 15 minute intervals. The station man told me repeatedly that the train was coming soon but actually it was 12 hours late. Indian peasants climbing platform stairs in a long row like ants and carrying cement on their heads asked me in Hindi where they were supposed to deliver their load (I guess that's what they asked).

I gave a man a rupee who gave me the hungry face and looked back to see he and his friends laughing. Ahead of me was a skinny man with cracked bare feet and wearing nothing but a filthy loincloth pulling a rickshaw full of firewood twice as tall as he was. I asked the taxi driver to take us to the boatman for a river tour but he drove way out of town to take us to a silk shop instead. When I did get to a boatman, another taxi driver dropped us off at blind alleys full of packs of growling, teeth baring mangy dogs. And the hotel (all men) staff leered and joked about my wife lasciviously the whole time we were there. No wonder Gandhi had no patience for Varanasi.

The boat tour was magical.

My Varanasi Adventures

By: Dinah Jackson

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