Pura Vida

When we arrived in Varanasi, India, we told our rickshaw driver the name of a hotel, but he refused to take us there. This was nothing new: in India, someone or something else was making our decisions for us. We could have fought for control, but we were like two grains of sand trying the dam the Ganges. It was better ride to the current. In this case, the rickshaw driver's hunger for a commission led us to three dingy, poo and fly infested hotels before we settled on a clean, spacious room with a big bed, towels, soap, and a balcony overlooking the Ganges River - the holiest river in India, at the holiest curve of the river. The Hindus believe the Ganges not merely represents purity, but is in fact purity itself.

From our balcony, we witnessed the public life of Varanasi, which spills out into the river. Events that are strictly separated and sequestered into private arenas in the West mingle raw and unabashedly naked along the riverfront ghats of Varanasi. In this place, play and meditation, asceticism and greed, survival and death, the ancient and the modern, mix into one giant whirlpool.

We bunked above a crematorium. Funeral processions paraded below during all hours of the day and night. Petite corpses wrapped in cloth, orange with geranium blossoms, tied to banyan stretchers, flowed through crowds of people, cows, goats, dogs, and buffalo, down concrete steps to the shore. The corpses were ritualistically bathed, blessed, and carefully placed on 250 kilogram stacks of wood. Eruptions of banging drums and bells announced the journey of souls. When a body is burned alongside the Ganges, the Hindus believe the soul proceeds directly to heaven, without enduring another wretched cycle of birth, life, and death.

Immediately in front of the funeral pyres, a man fished in the ash and flesh rich waters (certain bodies get dropped into the river unburned). Next to the fisherman, a herd of buffalo cooled themselves in the river. Beside the buffalo, lines of washermen slap, slap, slapped clothes, whacking them on rocks in the river. Alongside the washermen, women prayerfully dunked themselves into the river, fully clothed in colorful saris, jeweled with bangles and rings. Between the women and the buffalo, men in terry cloth underwear soaped their protruding bellies in the communal river tub. All the while, frolicking swimmers squirted the Ganges in arcs from their mouths.

On the wide concrete steps leading down to the river, pooping goats, dogs, and cows lingered among squatting men pissing under loin cloths. Poo farmers carefully crafted cow patties, lined up in neat rows on concrete steps to dry. Riverside food vendors cooked veggies and dough patties directly on cow patty coals. Boys played cricket adjacent to the burning ghat, with balls bouncing occasionally off creamatorium wood stacks. Along side the cricket game, bare-chested sadhus wearing orange skirts, face and arms painted with white stripes, red dots in middle of foreheads, meditated lotus-style. Elbow-high children weaved among cricket players and meditators, peddling floating flower candles. Back and belly fat flowed from colorful saris draped over female forms. A tourist wearing white pants skidded on a fresh cow patty and grimmaced.

How could we make sense of these wild juxtopositions? We were staring across a cultural divide that was deeper than anything we had experienced. But rather than feeling separted from this alien culture, we felt subsumed by this blur of humanity. The ego which publicly witnesses these discordant sights shrinks in humble recognition of that which we share as lifeforms on our blue marbled planet. The ego feels, then, not so unique, not so powerful, and more willing to recognize its place in flux among many in the inexplicable river of life.

After a few days in Varanasi, we flowed out of town like droplets in the monsoon, and we were washed away in the flux among the multitude in New Dehli, before floating off to Paris.