Unlike the flight out, flying back to Delhi was always part of the plan, but I did move it up a day so I could come back to bum around Paharganj for another day. The advantage of doing this was that, rather than hanging around Delhi airport for 10 hours, I could stay in a hotel room until midnight and then go catch my 3:30AM flight to Bangkok. The disadvantage was that it's Paharganj.
Western hotels
The hotel in Varanasi had one song that it played in all public areas on continuous loop at all times. I thought for a while that the staff must be going mad, but maybe it's all the same to them -- in the same way that much Indian pop music might sound the same to me. Alternatively, they may have gone mad years ago.
Lots of things in a western hotel in India must be totally alien to the staff. The showers without buckets, the toilets, the food, the flouting of basic Indian etiquette. Ordering western food (which I almost never did) would sometimes cause great consternation. When I asked for one of the doughnuts on display in the hotel's 'coffee shop', the staff had a long conference. They were hashing out, I think, what a doughnut was, what preparation it required, how it should be presented, what cutlery and condiments were appropriate -- none of which is obvious if a doughnut is a completely foreign object.
I chewed paan in Varanasi. I bought it from a 12-year-old who sat at a stand behind a stack of betel leaves and wrapped them to order. He spoke no English, so a security guard from something nearby interpreted. What I got was, the guard said, a specialty of the city: areca nut, lime (the mineral), something that might have been candy, and something that looked like silver glitter, all wrapped up in a betel leaf, then wrapped again in another leaf and stuck through with a toothpick to hold the whole package together.
It was minty, sweet, and messy. Paan is a stimulant, but I didn't feel very much, probably because I didn't chew it long or competently enough. You have to spit out a mess of red juice and bits of leaf quite often. It's very elegant. Paan is legal in North America, and has the potential to be a fad drug there. It's exotic, it's natural, it's carcinogenic, and it makes you drip red slobber everywhere. 5 years from now, I like to think, there will be a magazine called Paan Aficionado -- on the cover every month, gap-toothed celebrities with bags under their eyes and red streaks on their chins.
Religion
Religion was everywhere in Varanasi: Cremations, pilgrims, pandals, sadhus and other holy men, and religious processions. There were more shrines, and it was more common to see people actually worshipping at them. One of the ghats had a shrine to Sitala, goddess of smallpox. It would be interesting to know what the eradication of smallpox meant for people who venerate Sitala. I haven't been able to find out.
In Sarnath, there was a Buddhist procession: A truck with speaker stacks playing a chant, more trucks garlanded with flowers and carrying cheerful-looking men in the back, and a tiny ambulance also garlanded with flowers, with motorcycles and scooters following along.
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| Jai Singh II's giant sundial (the Brihat Samrat Yantra) in Jaipur |
Vegetarianism
Most places I ate in served meat, but only chicken and fish. The McDonald's in Jodhpur worked this way; which is at least slightly interesting, because McDonald's is basically a hamburger restaurant. It seems to sell a lot of veggie burgers, which are fried patties of potatoes and peas.
In Varanasi, I passed four or five stray dogs huddled around a basement-level window. It was a very messy butcher's shop. Nearby, I saw what may be the first cat I've seen in India. My friend Jaclyn has a theory that there are very few stray cats here because there's very little meat to be had anywhere. Istanbul, where meat is everywhere, had an amazingly huge population of them.
