Road maps in India are very misleading. It's not that they're inaccurate; it's that roads in India aren't anything like roads elsewhere. When I look at a map in a hotel room, I for some reason still picture clean, well-signed streets. Sometimes, I even imagine sidewalks. But the lines on the map represent something completely different here -- narrow Indian roads choked with traffic, possibly unpaved, littered with garbage piles and cattle, and often unnamed (my hotel in Jodhpur gave its address as 'near such-and-such senior girls' school, Jodhpur').
The road to Sarnath was a half-dried river of mud. Buffalo wallowed in flooded roadside holes. From now on, I won't call any pothole bad that doesn't have a water buffalo wallowing in it. Dry spots were full of people or garbage. Cows stood on the road, ignoring the people and eating the garbage; one was nibbling the flowers off a discarded garland.
Sarnath itself was a deer park where Gautama Buddha gave his first sermon after attaining enlightenment. There's a swampy deer park there again, though it's now more of a petting zoo, and killing the deer for sport is discouraged. There's a neighbouring archaeological park full of ruined temples. Buddhist pilgrims in white walk respectfully around the perimeter, while tourists climb around the ruins and picnic on the grass. It's full of some large, evil, biting insect, possibly deerflies.
In the park, I watched a small, harmless-looking snake move across some ruined stupas a few feet away. The postcard- and trinket-sellers saw it and got very excited. They told me it was a cobra, shouted to their friends, and alarmed it enough that it went into some bushes. They threw stones into the bushes to drive it out again, and then stamped their feet and threw their sandals at it until it went through the fence into a temple complex, which seemed to satisfy them.
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| Postcard vendors hassling a cobra (you'll have to trust me) |
Sarnath had sidewalks, which are very rare in India. To a tourist, the absence of sidewalks seems like India's most desperate problem. But the ones in Sarnath were overgrown, and no one used them, except to nap on.
Tuktuks and scooters
To scooter drivers here, transporting anything by scooter is just a matter of determination. Most of the time it's large families or building supplies, but I also passed a man moving an enormous mass of garlands; he was just a head and arms poking out from a mass of marigolds.
On the way down to the old city yesterday, a tiny old man in a very baggy policeman's uniform held out his cane to stop my tuktuk. He got in and began talking to the driver. His uniform was very old and faded, and the rope around his left shoulder was dirty and frayed. We went on for a couple of blocks, and then he stopped us, got out again, and swaggered off. The driver looked around at me and tapped his temple, which I took to mean that we hadn't been commandeered by a corrupt policeman, but had been humouring an unfortunate old man.
He took me much farther than the driver had my first day, going into the alleys of the old city. I hadn't thought these were navigable to tuktuks. Now I know it can be done; it's just not very smart. When even he could go no further, he got out and showed me to the river on foot. The way to the nearest ghat was through a long, narrow, unlit passageway; halfway along it, where it was darkest, an emaciated old man was lying on the floor.
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| Paan |
Drugs
The drugs you can buy legally in Varanasi are bhang, beer, and betel (paan). There are countless little shops and stands where paan is prepared and sold. Many of the tuktuk drivers are paan fiends, with stained red lips and broken teeth, and there are streaks of red spittle all over the streets. For bhang, there's a small government shop -- actually just an old man sitting behind a barred window -- and also countless eager touts and lassi sellers. Beer is by far the hardest to find, and buying it is a shady business. The one beer store I found was a narrow opening closed off by barred doors secured with a chain and padlock. There are three top-opening fridges in a small room, and in the little space that's left a 20-year-old lies across two chairs listening to headphones. If you can get his attention, he'll sell you 500ml cans of Kingfisher for 100 rupees ($2) each; you pass the money through the bars, and he passes the beer out.
The hotel slips a free copy of the Hindustan Times under my door most mornings. Usually, there are two sections, one of news, one of celebrity gossip (maybe 70% Bollywood and 30% Hollywood). The Sunday edition, though, included a third section of classified ads called 'matrimonials', which are placed by families looking for matches for their children. The 'children' are all in their 20s or 30s. The ads are organized mostly by caste, but there are also headings for ethnic groups, religions, and occupations
Always included in the ads: Age, height, degrees, and occupation. Sometimes included: Employer (if it's a government or a multinational corporation), parents' occupations (if prestigious), actual salaries (if high), 'no dowry' (in 'brides wanted'), 'caste no bar', complexion ('fair' or 'very fair'), and something general about the status and respectability of the family.
Kite flying is huge among the children of Varanasi, as big here as video games or obesity among kids in the West. From the window of my hotel room, I can usually see several of them. Swimming in the Ganges is also popular. On one stretch, there are two or three large octagonal platforms that stick out into the water, and when I passed kids were cannonballing off them into the river. On an odd observation platform nearby, two kids were playing cricket -- ignoring and ignored by a half-dozen ascetics lying on the platform, people sitting on the steps, people standing at the platform railing, a small group of cows, and a heavily pregnant goat. It seemed a very bad place to play cricket; but there was probably nowhere better for miles around.
The burning ghat
The alleys around the burning ghats are full of policemen, who sit around in groups of five to eight. They carry a strange variety of rifles, some of them dangerous-looking automatic things, some of them WWI-era antiques that look entirely manual (in the sense that you throw the bullet and then use the rifle as a club).
As I got closer to the ghat, a tout attached himself to me. He urged me to visit a shop, but as we got to the ghat he switched to describing the scene and offering to take me up into one of the hospices overlooking the scene. He tried to solicit donations for the hospices -- something I would have been happy to donate to, if I'd thought money given to him or to the friend he summoned was any likelier to reach them than money fed to the goat who was equally close at hand.
The top of the ghat was full of great stacks of wood. In the river, buffalo wallowed, and down on the platform, three pyres were burning. People walked around them doing the necessary practical work, and others stood and watched. I stood at the top of the steps for a minute or two and then went away again.
