Holy #$*&

It's been a little while since I've had access to a computer, but I'll try to catch up, and to do this in order.

My day in Varanasi actually went quite nicely, despite beginning with a bang (of sorts) and going out with a whimper (two, actually).

To begin with, I strongly recommend not showing up in Varanasi at night -- at least, not unless one is being met. The first rickshaw driver who accosted me showed me his little booklet filled with lengthy testimonials from various tourists, then informed me (correctly, as it turned out -- but who knew?) that no rickshaws, either auto or cycle, could make it to my hotel in the old city. He also triggered my suspicions by asking 50% more than the going rate -- to drop me in the main street some 15-20 minutes' walk from my destination, and by trying to convince me to go to a different hotel. A classic scam.

I got out of the rickshaw and telephoned my guesthouse, to see if they could send someone to pick me up. The man I spoke to told me to go to the tourist information booth, which I did, with the persistent first driver hounding me all the way. When I got to said booth, it was closed -- it was past midnight by now -- so I turned around and went back to try my luck with several more drivers. Finally, I found one who agreed, for the princely sum of 100 rupees, to both drive me as far as he could, and then walk me to the door of the hotel. I knew he was being an extortionist (the normal fare should have been 45 rps), but I'd heard the old city was dangerous -- not to mention extremely confusing -- and I really didn't feel like getting either robbed or lost. I was also pretty exhausted by then, and not in the mood for more of a hassle.

Sadly, my continuing journey was not to be hassle-free. Not two blocks from the station, the driver pulled over to the side of the road, and tried to talk me into another hotel. I became quite angry, and told him he had agreed to take me to the one I'd specified, and he was going to do it. He, in turn, became pretty angry with me, but continued driving. About 5 inutes later, a group of young men blocked the rickshaw and encircled it, bringing it to a stop in the middle of the street. They stared inside, exchanged a few words with the driver, and let us pass.

Great. Massive confidence-builder.

As a final blow, when the driver came to his stopping point, he told me he didn't want to walk me. I don't know if I pulled the memsahib, or just the mem (is that a word?), but I basically told him that he woudl be both a cheater and a dishonorable man to leave me to walk alone at night after he'd contracted to see me to my door. Grumbling, he plunged his way into the maze of narrow alleyways that comprise the old quarter of Varanasi, leaving me to stumble behind him in the dark over uneven cobblestones, trying to pick my way through invisible, but pungent, garbage. I could barely keep up. It ocurred to me that trusting myself to a total stranger just because he drove a cab for a living was, perhaps, utter insanity. Travis Bixler, anyone? Still, the journey involved at least a dozen turnings, and there's no way I would have made it without him.

When we finally made it to the house gate, he told me it would be 200 rps, not 100, plus 50 for the rickshaw. For once, though, I truly had the upper hand: I was where I wanted to go; I had my baggage. He should have tried it back in the main street. The last note in this tragicomedy, though, is that it turned out the hotelier HAD sent a driver: he'd meant me to wait by the tourist stand, not ask for help there. Oops. Moral for the future: learn Hindi.

I spent a restless, mostly sleepless night, agitated by my arrival experience and trouble by an incipient cold (which has now hit full force, thank you very much). I decided, within an hour of arriving in Varanasi, that I wasn't going to bring my students there next year. I hated it.

I was dragged out of bed far earlier than I wanted to be the next morning, by the sounds of dogs barking and people calling out on the street. I opened the doors onto the balcony of my room, and everything I'd felt about the city the night before was swept away by the view of the sun rising over the Ganges. I was staying in a budget hotel right on the riverbank. In monsoon season, the river rises dozens of feet, so the ghatside buildings have no windows (and, I think in most cases, no rooms) for the bottom few stories; on the "second" floor of the hotel, I was perched high overhead, like a cliffdweller, gazing out and down at a broad stretch of river life before me. The first thing I noticed, naturally, was a family of puppies being fed almost directly below me, at the cliff's foot.

The river is astonishingly broad and placid (at this time of year, at any rate), and at this time of day the near banks were crowded with boats carrying visitors there to watch the morning puja and bathing rituals of the city's residents and many pilgrims. Personally, I was a bit embarrassed to watch near-naked -- and occasionally naked -- me washing themselves, but then, they were choosing to do it in public view.

I'd arranged to spend the day with an Indian student, Jack Singh, who'd been recommeded to me though a complicated chain of acquaintences as someone who could show me around Varanasi -- and so he did. He showed up shortly after I finished breakfast, and we walked up the riverside, heading north, for about the next two hours. This I could certainly have done alone, but it was nice in this case having someone to point things out to me, and answer my questions. We talked a lot, too, about literacy and education in India, religion (he's from a Muslim family that converted from Hinduism, but he's personally a non-believer), and poverty.








After we'd spent the morning ghatside, Jack took me to a few more remote tourist sites, such as a fort on the other side of the river that was reached by a frighteningly rickety pontoon bridge. The bridge is torn down and rebuilt annually, in response to the monsoon, so perhaps it's no surprise that a lot of care isn't taken in its construction. The wood planks that made up the roadbed didn't exactly meet up in neat little joins; in fact, bouncing along in in the autorickshaw was a little like going off-roading in Nevada. A couple of times, I was thrown so far up off my seat that my head hit the roof. The fort was, I think, the only place I've been in India where foreigners and locals paid the same price for admission. That 12 rps got us into a shabby museum where the many and various treasures of the former owner were displayed in all their dusty, moth-eaten glamour. It was a bizarre collection of old cars, china, lots of antique firearms, and astonishingly intricate carved ivory figurines. I wouldn't exactly say the trip was worth it -- unless for the excitement of getting there and back -- but that was definitely something to add to my list of experiences.

We concluded the day by going to Jack's neighborhood, a Muslim and lower-class neighborhood where much of the city's silk-weaving trade goes on. Although there are a few electric looms, most of the silk is woven on handlooms, often by fairly young children (teenagers, at the oldest).

The patterns in the silk are determined by cardboard punchcards, which are themselves made in workhops nearby, by men pounding out the holes with hammers and a metal pattern-plate. So, what's the natural thing to do after seeing child labour? You got it: go shopping for some of what said children have produced. In my defense, I bought my silk sari from a cooperative that tries to also do things to benefit the weavers. Plus, it's absolutely gorgeous....OK, so that's not much of a defense.

Just after sundown, we went out on the Ganges in a boat, and rowed south (were rowed, that is) to see more ghats, including the southern of the two burning ghats, where Hindus bring their dead to be cremated.
We watching the burning for a while, then heading north, to see an regular evening religious/theatrical performance that involved troupes of priests/dancers offering up the 5 elements to the river, while standing under illuminated umbrellas and accompanied by miked music. Two troupes were performing side by side, with slightly different music and slightly out of sync with one another. It was only slightly jarring. Then, when Jack and the boatman foudn out I hadn't actually seen any bodies burning earlier, they insisted on taking me to the northern ghat, where we moored ourselves about 3 feet offshore, and watched a few cremations in detail. Before the bodies are placed on the pyres, they're carried to the river on stretchers, laden with flowers and usually draped in a gaudy cloth-of-gold covering (conveniently available for sale in the alley right behind the ghat). The stretchers are lowered into the river, and water is scooped over the bodies and faces of the departed. Since we were so close, this was happening about 8 inches away from me. Fascinating, in a troubling kind of way. Then I caught a glimpse of the funeral of a young mother, whose child was wailing next to the stretcher. It all somehow ceased to be quite as fascinating.

I had the boatman drop me off right at the steps to my hotel (very handy), said goodbye to Jack -- who, first among all the people I've encountered in India, said he didn't want any money (I gave him some anyway), and went upstairs to wait for my ride to the train station. This ride I'd arranged through the hotel: partly because it was easy (although expensive: 500 rupees for the 1/2 hour ride to the more distant of the two area stations!), partly because I still felt guilty about the missed connection of the night before (the driver who'd gone to the station had come up to me in the morning and let me know how pissed off he was). My departure turned out to be smoother than my arrival, though only just barely. We still walked through the alleyways, they were still dark, and my guide was still going too fast. I put my foot down and it slipped, as I lost traction and almost fell. The first whimper of my leaving? Mine, as I stepped in a huge pile of cow dung that curled its way up the side of my shoe. The second whimper came when I stood, finally, next to the card, and hopped onto one foot to wipe some of the mess off with the rage the driver had tossed me: I'd accidentally stepped on a dog who'd been lying, out of sight, in the shadow of a neighboring vehicle. The dog got up and limped away; I got off the worst of the mess, and left the city behind.