Varanasi by night

Varanasi is a mess…there are cows and cars and bikes and people everywhere along the narrow little roadways. The dogs are mangy and the monkeys are street-tough thugs that own the roofline. It feels ancient here. This is one of the earliest cities in the world; it was just beginning to set its foundations when the Buddha was ambling about the countryside.

The city was wrapping up its day of bustle and there were only a few men that approached us offering rickshaw rides or drugs as we walked out to get one last look at the Ganges. The little single room shops that crowd around the street were beginning to look skeletal without the garmets and bags and pictures and postcards hanging out on display. We walked down to the ghats shortly after sunset, but the sky had been grey and wintery the whole afternoon. It started to spit rain on us as we watched all the people pulling their lives together underneath the cover of tarps and rooftops.

The wind began to shift and a cool breeze whooshed through the streets sending up little clods of debris and trash. The homeless folk alongside the river jerked up their tarps over their head or else shuffled under awnings and a pack of dogs trotted past and up into the streets. A flash of light blinked through the clouds and fog and haze like a firework and the power went out. We were left in nearly total darkness and the sound of the river crescendoed into the void. I thought about how the sound of the Guadalupe River had filled a similar darkness in Texas on many a campfire night.

We slowly strolled along the ghats breathing in the fresh wet air when the rain picked up. I was getting soaked, but this was the cleanest, holiest water in all of India. Once it hits the Ganges it becomes a river goddess, but the streets are flowing sludge now. I’m not sure how long it had been since the rains fell in Varanasi, but it would need to rain hard for weeks to flush everything out.

We began to pick our way back through the night to our hotel. Everything looked different without the lights and the rain wasn’t helping our sense of direction, but we were alone on the streets now, except for the cows. They own this place and have an unquestionable right-of-way on the roads. The big bulls walk out into the center of an intersection and alter the entire flow of traffic for a mile in each direction. They laze about in the medians, they wander up to open doorways, they get stuck at the top of stairwells, they shit everywhere and they are completely and unerringly holy. It would be amazing to experience a day in the life of a Varanasi bull. He would cover about 100 meters or so in an afternoon, grazing on the rubbish treats that abound in the gutters. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of faces would rush by every hour on every imaginable mode of transportation. Jacob and I decided that if there were an alien race attempting to understand the way of life in Varanasi, a cow would be the ideal disguise. Who knows if those dull dumb eyes are really as vacant as they seem. Little Gliblitz might be behind there taking notes for the mothership.

We finally sloshed back into the hotel and climbed up to our fourth floor room. I couldn’t sleep so I walked up to the rooftop and gazed out over the now sleeping city. The rains had stopped but the dull rumblings of thunder could still be heard bouncing off the buildings. I had grown to love this little rooftop and the view it afforded of the city.

Perhaps the most striking image I’ve seen yet in India I took in from this very spot. Across the alley way there a collection of brick walls jumbled together on the irregular buildings. Projected onto one of them was the silhouette of a figure deftly jerking its limbs and bobbing side to side. It looked like some sort of madcap puppet shadow show being put on especially for us. Darting up above was a little patch of color, barely visible in the fading light. It was a kite, and the shadow belonged to the boy fighting to keep it aloft. All the kites here are the same exact little size and diamond shape, but the different patterns, like heraldry of Scottish clans, are what allow the pilots below to diferentiate their kite from the hundreds that clutter the skys. Opposing rooftop forces battle one another and try to cut the stings of their enemies leaving the loser’s kite to helplessly drift back to Earth. There are kites in trees and strung up in the electrical wires around town, slowly succombing to the passage of time. Butat that moment there was only this one kid and his lone kite dancing around in the hazy, starless night.

The next morning we woke up at 6 a.m. hoping to see the aarti on the Ganges, but it was pouring down rain. The boaters were on strike for the duration of our stay, so we were unable to watch the sunrise light up the ghats from the water. I feel like the whole town was suffocating. The ghats are supposed to be vibrant and alive with people and products cruising along the river, but instead there was a lonely row of empty boats floating back and forth. Someday I’ll have to come back and see Varanasi in full form, but now we are moving on to Bodh Gaya.