Wishing You a Very Varanasi Christmas

The Scindhia Hotel where we are staying is just steps away from one of the holiest places in India, the ghats of Varanasi.

The Old City of Varanasi, located along the Ganges, is both grungy (more than the usual amounts of animal poop laying about) and beautiful with its randomness and colour.  When the auto rickshaw driver dropped us off outside the Old City and told us that his brother would escort us to the hotel, we weren’t sure whether to trust him or not.  It was soon obvious why we needed an escort. The only way to get through the Old City is by foot or perhaps by bike. The narrow “streets” are an eye-boggling maze of tiny shops selling scarves, trinkets, food/drink and sometimes services like getting a haircut.  (David really needs a haircut, but so far, he’s too chicken to step in to one of these shops.)

Using a map here is useless… you have to depend on the many signs painted on the sides of buildings leading the way to various tourist lodges and eateries.  After a day or so, you start to get your bearings as to how to get to that nice little German bakery (a pleasant surprise for us), or the vegetarian restaurant that serves affordable thalis (kind of like an Indian combo meal of various dishes, except we never seem to know what’s on the menu before it arrives at our table).

Until Varanasi, the most  common phrase heard each day was “Madame, auto? Taxi"?”  Here, it is “Hello… boat?” numerous times as you walk up the stretch of ghats.  They’re quite persistent if you acknowledge them, so the only effective way to deal with this is to simply ignore them, which feels rude and counter-intuitive to us.

We are staying just downwind of the Manikarnika burning ghat, one of the most sacred ghats in Varanasi. It is constantly smoky and it’s beginning to take its toll on our breathing.  While the pollution of cities like Delhi is quite bad, it lets up during the day as people don’t have a need to start fires to stay warm.  The only upside to the air quality in Varanasi is that the smoke is mostly from burning natural products (bamboo apparently) rather than garbage.

According to the Hindu mythology, being burned here provides an instant gateway to liberation from the cycle of births and rebirths. Manikarnika Ghat symbolizes both creation and destruction where the bodies are cremated with prayers for the souls to rest in eternal peace. Following the cremation, the families of the deceased will bathe and purify in the Ganges River.

According to health specialists, water is considered clean enough to bathe in at less than 500 fecal coliform bacteria/litre of water. Samples show that parts of the Ganges has 1.5 million and the river is so polluted in parts that the water is actually septic.

The pilgrims and citizens here use the Ganges for all aspects of life – playing, bathing, laundry and even directly drinking from it.

I have mixed feelings about this site. When you see the men carrying the body, covered with a simple drop cloth and adorned with additional ceremonial cloth, it feels eerie to witness this ceremony; I felt like a voyeur.  In addition, there are scam artists all over this sacred place telling foreigners like ourselves that we would get good Karma for providing a donation to the local hospice that shelters the old and sick who are waiting to die and be cremated here. We were warned about this by the hotel manager, as well as other perils, and it was confirmed in a post that I read online from another traveller about his experience actually seeking out this hospice and his conclusion that it didn’t exist. 

There is a certain irony about the whole thing… it is clearly marked that no photos are to be taken in the burning ghat area, which is easy to appreciate.  I wouldn’t want tourists taking photos of my loved one being cremated either. But these touts, some who pose as priests apparently, will also offer to take you up to their “cousin’s place on the roof” to get a birds-eye view for photos.  Children selling postcards of Varanasi, including the burning ghat, contradicts this request for respect and privacy as well.  (By the way, we did not take any photos, we found the photo above on the Internet.)

Varanasi has a particularly bad reputation for tourist scams, and we have certainly seen evidence of it so far.  We’re constantly on guard and it detracts from the experience.  Perhaps because I’m feeling a tad homesick on Christmas eve or maybe I’m crashing with culture shock, this morning I started to feel particularly affected by what I’m seeing and experiencing around me.

It feels like more the rule than the exception that a casual conversation with locals feels like an opportunity to make money from the naive foreigner.  Our trip here started with chance meetings with helpful and honest folk and we let our guard down too much. The result was several disappointing encounters which make us now question everyone’s motivations. Like women being treated as objects by some men, David feels that we are treated as money trees by most less- fortunate Indians. There are certainly exceptions, such children who simply want to say hello to someone looking very different from them and other kind strangers previously mentioned in our blog. Being someone who can easily make conversation with strangers, it is frustrating to hold back and stay in my little bubble.

However, oddly, we feel somewhat secure knowing that there is a very high police and soldier presence in this high-traffic area following a recent bomb blast at one of the ghats early in December 2010.  I know, it seems like backwards thinking but while we’re here we know that we can ask for help from relatively reliable and legit sources even if it means there is potential danger from militants.

All of this makes us very thankful this Christmas for the good lives we have back home. By the way, here is the closest thing to a tree and blinking lights we can find in Varanasi this Christmas eve – a daily ritual to worship the Ganga river, a source of purification in life and death.

Merry Christmas!