This blog is typically Griffonian, with a calico mishmash of silly anecdotes and my actual thoughts. Forgive the inconsistent tone and topic, but hey, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not super picky. For context, this was entirely written about a month after the fact on the plane ride home, between Lome, Togo, and New York USA. Pizza and Beer soon!! Also written without spell check, soo… typo-haters beware! This post talks about Varanasi, Caste, Karma, Shivatri, Bodh Gaya, and tutoring. 

From Jaipur I took my second night bus of the trip, again encapsulated in a private sleeper pod. It is surprising, the amount of airtime that can be achieved by these India busses hurtling along the roads that sometimes seem to be more pothole than not. The bus arrived in Varanasi in the late morning. An hour or so before arrival, I asked the conductor if there was a toilet on board (there was, I just needed to know if it was functional, and it wasn’t), and the driver very kindly just stopped the entire bus on the highway. I had to go #2 unfortunately and, being a bit too shy to relive myself in full view of the left half of the bus and the highway, I deduced that the best course of action was to fake peeing on the side of the highway. Well, I’m not a great actor I guess, and the driver, just a couple feet away from the scene of my act, gave me an odd look as I furtively re-boarded the bus. 

My accommodation in Varanasi was perhaps the grimmest I’ve ever had. I’m really pretty low maintenance, or I try to be, but this was a rough spot. Seven narrow cots jammed into a large room, wires hanging from the ceiling to the floor, and about half the room taken up by  storage of nonspecific metal contraptions, spare blankets, broken fridges, and finally a small shrine the owner’s mom used for her early morning prayers every day I stayed there. The owner, named Somit, was a very nice guy, and gave good advice about sightseeing and hosts an after school tutoring program for poor kids (more on that later). I paid for a massage that he organized, which ended up being incredibly painful (half of the hair on the back of my calves removed through friction) and in a strange spare room in the hostel. I try not to complain about stuff like this; I just want to convey that my main emotion here is *smile and shrug*. 

The rough accommodation was hardly an issue, though, when everything outside was so entirely moving and striking. Varanasi is a place that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Out of everywhere I’ve ever been, it might be the place that I would recommend visiting above all others. Its importance in India and Hinduism is monumental. To die in Varanasi, with the proper post-mortem procedures, is to achieve Moksha, breaking your soul’s cycle of reincarnation, achieving a final death and an ultimate relief. I met a guy in Jaisalmer, we talked around a campfire in the desert until the small hours of the night, whose family records of death and birth are kept in bound leather books in Varanasi, going back over 1600 years. He is a member of the Brahmin caste, the priests, at the top of the social hierarchy. 

The city blooms on the West bank of the Ganges (or Ganga in India) river. The Ganges, the holiest river in Hinduism, is said to be so pure that nothing can taint it. Many Hindu people make a pilgrimage to bathe in its waters and cleanse themselves. In parallel to the spiritual cleansing the Ganges offers, it is also the lifeblood of the Gangetic plain which houses about a quarter of India’s population. The state of Uttar Pradesh, wiich includes Varanasi, alone would be the 6th largest country in the world if it gained independence. 

The waste of these hundreds of millions primarily drains into the Ganges, which by the time it reaches Varansi has a concentration of fecal matter about 100-120 times greater than the recommended maximum amount. Alongside the hundreds of millions of liters of sewage that drain through the Ganges every day, the ashes and bodies of many people are introduced to the river’s waters as well. The offering of remains to the Ganges is a key and final step in achieving Moksha. I opted to not take a purifying dunk in the river, and I met a handful of Indians who shared the sentiment of concern for one’s health. 

Creeping west from the river bank is the meat of the city of Varanasi. Along the river are the dozens of Ghats, each a point from which one can enter the water. Beyond that is a quarter mile wide strip of labyrinthine alleys and paths impenetrable to cars, dizzyingly tangled and teeming with temples, home stays, and eateries. When walking though this claustrophobic maze, the wide space of the first drivable main road feels like a gasping breath of fresh air, quickly stifled by the need to figure out where the hell you’re going. The rest of Varanasi extends for many miles in all directions, much like other Indian cities I saw, just with a decidedly higher density of temples. 

The entirety of Varanasi is increidbly spiritual, with temples and shrines on almost every corner. At all hours, drums and bells can be heard from near and far. Bearded monks in turbans and togas and loincloths walk barefoot everywhere. But the heart of the city is on the river, in the Ghats. The eighty-plus Ghats are string together into four or five miles of ramshackle walkway, Easily the most intense, poignant, and spiritually significant locations are the burning Ghats, where there are live, open-air cremations, where families will bring their dead ones and keep vigil as they transform into ash over the course of several hours. There are two main Ghats that carry out cremations. One has a handful of pyres just feet away from the walkway. A casual bypasser might mistake the pyres as simply large cooking fires if they walked past without pausing to look deeper within the flames. 

The other burning ghat is called Manikarnan, which has cremations going 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year. The accumulated ashes are moved into the Ganges every morning at 7. A tall building with a large, flat roof is reserved for cremations of the Brahmin caste, with three levels far below for members of other castes, with the literal height of the cremation correlating with the caste of the deceased. I will never forget the images of the burning Ghats. 

At Manikarnan, local guys look for stunned tourists and act as impromptu guides, explaining what is going on and leading the dazed onlookers like cattle though the ghat. The final stop on the tour is the Eternal Flame, which they say has been tended by the same family for over 1600 years, and is used to ignite a bundle of reeds used to light each cremation pyre. The “guide” then asks for a hefty donation to support homeless families who cannot afford wood for a pyre. Further internet searches conclude that a well-endowed foundation provides pyre wood for everyone, regardless of income. Of all the scams and hustles I saw and fell prey to, this one is definitely top 5 for bad tastes left in mouth.

In Varanasi I felt compelled to reflect on Karma and Caste more than ever. Until this point it had been mostly a removed, intellectual curiosity about a social construct which was alien to me. A few things in Varanasi made me contemplate caste in a new way. Seeing the literal spatial hierarchy of cremations at Manikarnan ghat was striking, of course. In addition, I was moved by the Agorhi of Varanasi. To describe them, I think a brief summary of my understanding of Karma and Caste might be useful.

A quick anecdote on the topic of karma before I dive into my real thoughts. In Mumbai, maybe my second or third day in India, I met a man called Kamlesh. My friendship with him was brief and confusing, and almost surely an elaborate scam on his part, which was largely successful (go figure). When we met, he took me for a tea, and I thanked him. He waved off my thanks, saying that he was not doing it to be nice. He was doing it for karma, with the knowledge that his generosity would come back to help him in the future. I’m definitely biased to be cynical of Kamlesh, but I’m not sure that I prefer that kind of generosity.

As I heard more from Indian people, I started to understand Karma as one of the most “west-washed” ideas I’ve come across. In the past, I just thought of Karma as “you get what you give”, or that good deeds will come back to you in time as good fortune, and the inverse with negative deeds. I like this idea, but it is separated from the Hindu concept of reincarnation. In Hindu societies, people are born into Castes, or (simplistically) social levels determining their place in the grand social hierarchy as well as profession, lifestyle, marriage options (some parents still kill their children if they pursue inter-caste marriage). Two key things to understand about caste: it is immobile (although I was told that one can now file to legally have their caste changed. When people meet, they can usually tell the other’s caste based on surname), and it is determined by Karma, and in that sense, it is earned. 

If someone had accrued a lot of bad Karma in the past, they would be born into a lower caste–they earned it. If someone had gained lots of good karma, they would be reincarnated into a higher caste– they earned it. I think that this aspect of caste is what makes it so effective in its oppression: it states that those at the outskirts of society, those living on the streets and pavement, deserve it, and that those who are enjoying the products of this system, benefiting from the oppression, also deserve it. 

In addition to being determined by actions, the caste one is born in to is believed to be influenced by polluting actions, such as contact with human waste or remains, public indecency, and pretty much anything else you can think of. The Dalit caste, also called “untouchable”, exists at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, technically outside of the hierarchy entirely. People born into this caste are assigned the most polluting jobs in society, like waste management and sanitation. Doing these jobs further “pollutes” their souls, dooming them to be reincarnated into the Dalit caste again and again. Dalit translates from Hindi to English as “broken”, or “scattered”. 

There is a sect of Hinsuism called the Aghori. They are a group of male monks, mostly concentrated in Varanasi. They believe that all things created by God are equally holy, equally sacred. They reject the concept of caste and hierarchy in general, with the basis that it is impossible for anything created by God to be polluted at all. To prove their commitment to this idea, they perform the most polluting acts that they can think of. They cover their entire bodies in human ash, they hang out naked on the walkway along the Ganges, they get frightening body modifications like piercings (I saw one guy with a large totem hanging form a piercing somewhere on his junk– I didn’t look too closely– and another with tattooed eyeballs). They are also said to engage with human remains in frightening ways, including blood rituals, praying and performing ceremonies while sitting on dead bodies, using human skulls in rituals and as decoration, and even eating the flesh. Intense, and all from the base of a beautiful philosophy, in protest of one of the most suffocating and enduring systems of oppression in history. 

February 15th is the Hindu holiday, Shivatri, which celebrates the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, and is one of the biggest holidays in Hinduism. Varanasi, being the spiritual center of the Hindu world and India, was quite the place to be for it. It is celebrated with spiritual contemplation, and people often take overnight vigils, silently meditating until the sun rises.

 In Varanasi, every night around sunset, there is the Ganga Ceremony, during which a number of monks perform an elaborate prayer and offering to the Ganga. On Shivatri, the Ganga ceremony is the place to be for the celebrations. I found myself on the upper deck of a crowded boat, facing the bank. The boat was shimmied into a messy flotilla of hundreds of other boats, small and large, all facing towards the ceremony. On the stepped bank of the river sat the rest of the crowd, numbering easily in the thousands. After the ceremony, the boat took a tour up and down the river, showcasing the lit up silhouettes of the dozens of temples. 

On my last full day in Varanasi, I decided to do a day trip to Bodh Gaya, where Siddartha became the enlightened Buddha. The trip itself was brutal– wake up at 5, walk 20 minutes through dog-filled alleys, get a 30 minute taxi to the train station, 3 hour train, hour taxi to Bodh Gaya, the actual meat of the visit, and then the whole thing in reverse. It felt ironic to be rushing through my time at a world center of Buddhism, but my options were to do this or not visit at all, and gosh I am glad I went for it. 

At the main temple in Bodh Gaya is the location where Siddhartha sat beneath a tree and became enlightened– the exact spot! There is a tree there too, an ancient one , and while it’s not the same one he sat under, it is the exact same kind. I sat there and took a handful of deep breaths and let the calmness wash over me. It was palpable, like drinking the soothing energy in the cool air with a straw. 

Walking around at a different temple I was approached by these two guys, brothers they said, and they offered to take me on a tour for a couple hours before I had to catch my train back to Varanasi. I shrugged and said sure, and hopped on their motorcycle sandwiched between them, and rocketed off. They took me to a few spots outside the main campus of temples, including a cave where Siddhartha is said to have meditated for over 6 years without food or water, a huge banyan tree under which he rested, and the site where he was offered his first sustenance, a small portion of milk rice. 

One unannounced stop they made was at a small village school. In three poorly lit concrete rooms were three classes of about 25 elementary school students each. My guides told me that they wanted to show me a place that was important to them, and that the students were all orphaned by the Covid pandemic. The kids were unbelievably adorable, and stood in unison, saying “Hello sir how are you”, some grinning naughtily, some bored senseless. After the brief tour, my guides took me to the office of the principal, who requested a generous donation from me.

One of the most challenging parts of this trip has been situations like this. I gave the principal about 25 USD in Rupees– how could anyone refuse helping those awesome kids? But internally, I have to decide if I think that my guides got a commission for my money, or if the principal kept any for himself. It is my nature to trust, but that has been stretched, warped, and bruised time and time again on this trip. It is hard to believe that there was zero commission for my guides, but if I accept that, then it means that they took me to a school in a village and used a bunch of struggling kids to make a couple bucks off a sympathetic outsider. In some ways, sure, I get the hustle, and there is some broad justice in transplanting money from the West into the Global South, but it just rankles, and it hurts my trusting heart. 

Regardless of their conduct, the guys were adamant that I would catch my train on time. Between the final stop on the tour and the train station was about an hour of the most terrifying, dusty, and weaving motoring I’ve ever experienced. Still sandwiched between the brothers on a motorbike (they switched to a second, faster, bike for the commute), we darted through trucks and traffic, legitimately spending more time in the oncoming lane than our own. To make matters worse, the road was slathered with a thick coat of dust that excelled at hanging suspended in midair. Naturally, none of us had touched a helmet the entire time, and I was the only one wearing sunglasses. Within ten seconds of embarking, my vision was blurred with tears, and my eyes screamed to be slammed shut. The only thing less attractive than blocking out the wind and dust by closing my eyes tight for the entirety of the ride was to be sitting on that station-bound comet without any sense of what was going on. So, squinting, I hung on for dear life, and was treated to the sight of the driver cleaning out his own eyes with a hefty scrub of the inside of his elbow, about every ten seconds. I made it to the train station with 45 minutes to spare. 

On my last day in Varanasi I did a temple tour, too soon again on the back of a motorcycle, though this driver was considerably more timid than those in Bodh Gaya. In the evening, I volunteered at my hostel to help out at an afterschool teaching program. A dozen kids sat at small tables and asked me for “plus minus” problems for the first hour, and then asked me to write down the English spellings of about a hundred different words they wanted to know, ranging from colors to geography to feelings to birds to flowers.

My bus from Varanasi to Agra was perhaps the most nightmarish of the whole trip, as it began with an hour wait at a highwayside chai shop starting at 10pm, followed by a surprise bonus two hours of delayed waiting for the bus, to the finally find a brusque gentleman sleeping in my bed. After about twenty minutes of glaring at him while sitting in my cot (he also sat, with his bag and large blanket), I dozed.

Varanasi took a lot out of me. Seeing the burning Ghats was one of the most intense things I’ve ever seen. The night bus to Varanasi was rough, and I was just hitting a general climax of travel fatigue. I was behind on my calories, sleep, and hydration, and the air quality was catching up with me. With the Delhi marathon knocking on my door, I was feeling glum, beaten down, and exhausted.