Varanasi

A man told me that this was the “Eternal Flame” that has been burning for the last 3,000 years and is the source of fire that lights all the funeral pyres in Varanasi. This morning the fire was dead. Oops.

I shared this room with a lizard, for no extra charge.

    

What’s been happening in India… Long walks on crowded streets with people and animals doing everything you could possibly imagine a person or an animal doing; sleeping, eating, bathing, washing clothes, pulling pants down and peeing in the middle of everything, getting ears cleaned, beards shaved, hair trimmed, shooing dogs, ignoring bugs, smacking children, playing chess with friends, cows milling around in traffic, donkeys lingering on train platforms, playing with baby monkeys chained to rocks, breaking the necks of chickens, leading goats to slaughter, sitting in solitude enjoying a spot of sunshine, shopping, praying, prostrating, obliging, disobeying, horn honking, yelling at traffic, arguing over money, arguing over problems, arguing over anything that distracts from nothingness, dancing, singing, laughing because it feels good, laughing to make someone feel bad, laughing just not to cry, laughing because there’s nothing better left to do. Life is full of stuff that I know nothing about and have a hard time making sense of even after someone has explained it to me, and now I’m here trying to tell you all about it. Impossible, but maybe I’ll start here:

A thought that’s been floating through my mind on the regular these days is: Being a tourist is weird. There’s something in Physics called the Observer Effect. It shows that just by virtue of observing phenomenon we alter it, and are left looking at something that we have inherently changed with our own presence, not actually what we set out to observe. This is the biggest conundrum in traveling, for me. We’re drawn to beautiful places and we tell our friends about them and more people go, then before you know it we’re building concrete staircases up the sides of mountains and billions of people are bussing out, stomping on the flowers, tossing trash on the grass, and clogging up the landscape to the point that all you really see is people snapping photos of concrete staircases, beaten down daisies, and littered lawns. You want a broader perspective and understanding of what’s going on in the world, so you leave home hoping to chat a little with people outside your social paradigm, but once you get there you decide you’d also like to buy some poofy pants, scarves, and trinkets, so now the people living there don’t have time to talk anymore because they’re too busy arguing with you over the price of the poofy pants, scarves, and trinkets, that haven’t even been made there anyway but were conceived of and manufactured elsewhere for the sole purpose of getting tourists to pull out their wallets. Weird.

Money. That’s another weird thing, a ghostly and ephemeral concept of value that has no real meaning other than the fact that we’ve all agreed that this stack of paper can be exchanged for that pile of stuff, and now with things like credit cards and direct deposit it’s not even physical anymore, it’s just pulses of electricity, invisible ideas floating through the airwaves. For a long time I’ve had a lingering belief that at this point in human development life could be free, no money changing hands, but everyone has enough to live well. From a material perspective I think it’s true. We have more stuff sitting in stores, warehouses, our homes, and storage spaces than could ever be sold, used, or needed. Think of all the time, space, and mental energy that billions put into creating all this excess. What could we do with our lives if we dedicated all those resources to something higher, something less cyclical? It would take a huge shift in consciousness for us to get there mentally. Fear, greed, jealousy, pride, lack of accountability, and a feeling that we are separate, independent rather than interdependent, are all obstacles… Oh god. Sometimes I make myself want to barf when I start talking like this. You’re not barfing, are you? If I don’t download my thoughts here I’ll end up as one of those raving lunatics in the streets proselytizing with a megaphone.

Speaking of drunks (nobody was, but let’s do it anyway) I decided to have a beer the other night and stopped at a little liquor shop, outside the train station in Gaya. Almost as soon as I stepped up to the window to order my beer I was surrounded by a massive crowd of what I thought were other customers. I paid, and as soon as I walked away the crowd dispersed. It seems there was an intense amount of interest amongst the general public about what I might be doing. It was about 7pm and I had a train to catch at 5am. I had been entertaining the notion that I would just hang out at the train station until then, but after the inordinate amount of curiosity around my beer purchase, and a flashback to the man in the Kolkata train station who started petting my hair without invitation, I decided that sleeping in public probably wasn’t a wise choice. For the last couple of weeks I have been traveling with a friend, a guy, and had encountered nothing more than some long stares and polite questions, but now without the invisible force field of imagined male ownership things have started to get a little kooky. Luckily nothing majorly weird has happened, aside from crowds of twenty or more people forming a circle around me to stop, stare, and listen if one person decides to approach me with some conversation.

My 5am train finally showed up at 10:30am and I made it to Varanasi just before the sunset. Within the first ten minutes of exploration I was confronted with a half dozen corpses waiting on the banks of the Ganges for their ritual washing before being cremated on an open fire at Manikarnika Ghat, the main burning ghat. Out of respect for the deceased and their families you’re not permitted to take photos, but a man who started talking with me (later requesting a “donation” to pay for the wood in a funeral pyre) told me I could photograph the “Eternal Flame” that had been lit for the last 3,000 years and is the source of fire that ignites all the pyres. Early the next morning I took a boat ride down the Ganges and passed by the flame when I disembarked. The coals were grey and cold. I guess someone was sleeping on the job. They had a good run with the last 3,000 years though.

Other than corpses the city is full of Hindu pilgrims come to bathe in the Ganges River, holy cows lounging everywhere, painted Sadhus, huge amounts of extremely skilled kite flyers, and even larger amounts of monkeys. In fact, a gang of about twenty monkeys just climbed past my window. I’m in heaven.

The air in India is thick with pollution and grime, to the point that when I wash my hands after just taking a walk a stream of brown filth comes running off of them. Varanasi’s air is some of the worst I’ve seen so far. You can barely see across the narrow river, it’s so thick. People keep calling it “mist” but it’s brown and heavy, maybe due in part to all the smoke and ash from burning bodies. My guesthouse is just steps away from Manikarnika, and my room is covered in a fine dusting of the recently deceased. I’m about to order a bucket of hot water and see if I can’t brighten myself up then head out for some chai, I’ll have one for you too. xoxo.