Varanasi…
Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together.
WORDS BY CHRISTOPHER P BAKER
Excerpt from the foreword from the upcoming book India: West Meet East/East Meets West
by Jeremy Woodhouse & Abhishek Hajela
Varanasi, the holy city of the Ganges, is India in microcosm. “There is liberation for all creatures here,” chortled the near-naked sadhu, delighted by the notion of donkeys reaching Heaven. “Not only people; but birds and animals—even mosquitoes—attain moksha here, too!”
“How about Christians? Or Moslems?” I asked, mischievously.
“Of course! They are worth more than donkeys!”
“But not cows,” I mused silently as a sacred white bovine pushed past with leisurely sovereignty.
Below, flames crackled eerily in the pre-dawn light and smoke rose ethereally from the cremation pyres, while lepers and limbless beggars filled the air with their murmurings.
The sadhu assured me that Shiva was here, whispering words of immortality into the ear of the dying that crowd into Varanasi in hopes of reaching Nirvana directly; and in incarnate form as a newly arrived corpse, bound in white cloth, that to my side was being dipped into the Ganges before being hoisted onto a pyre. Far off, a vulture pecked at a human body floating in the midst of the river.
The Ganges flowed silver-gray like olive oil, its banks shrouded in ghostly mist. Then the sun rose and burned through the veil, splashing the city with vermilion fire and revealing a gilded crescent of temples, spires, minarets, and palaces suspended high above the river and extending to the misty horizon. It was an incredible sight, the whole riverfront infused with an atmosphere of devotion that spread like the rays of the rising sun.
The steep, looming ghats—stairways—that lead down to the Ganges were flooded with surreal scenes and motion. Forests of bamboo umbrellas rose upon the ghats like giant mushrooms. Beneath each sat an orange-clad Brahmin, daubed with sectarian marks: Oracles of the esoteric, like the hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. There were sadhu ascetics aplenty, smeared in ashes from the funeral pyres and dressed in loin-cloths or naked as the day they were born, performing their yoga exercises or sitting cross-legged, inert as reptiles, in the lotus position.
And color! Women gorgeously costumed in silk saris as red as bright lipstick and blue as the morning sky streamed in rainbows up and down the vast stairways. “[A] stunning, vivid, brilliant… storm of sweetpea blossoms passing on the winds of a hurricane,” wrote Mark Twain. Their garments clung to their bodies as they waded breast-deep into the soupy river and muttered invocations while ladling the holy liquid up with cupped hands before forming tiny steeples with their palms in gestures of benediction. Ablutions complete, they streamed back up the stairs carrying brass pots of Ganges water to pour on holy shrines.
The entirety of my experience was macabre, mesmerizing, and transcendent in equal measure.
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