The Ganga

Raj Ghat (Outside the city of Varanasi)
The Ganga flows quiet to the sea. Boats ply the wide and lazy waters; fishermen cast out thin strings of net and boatmen ferry passengers, slicing the water with hand-fashioned oars, or with motors that break the river’s smooth silence, a steady pah-pah-pah that dissolves in the distant restless hum of Varanasi. Ripples massage the Ganga’s surface, lifted by wind and passing wooden hulls, touching down on dark shoals that bubble with untreated sewage.

Hovering in the haze of the river, a two-story bridge connects the distant shores, arcs of rusting metal perched on smooth brick footings. Trains approach with a muffled whistle, then a deepening rumble, powering across the lower deck of the bridge, the air vibrating with the heavy scrape of steel upon steel. Colors, gray and blue, red, gold and green, rise off the waters, changing with the light and the wind and the passing of the day.

Along the Ganga’s banks, wide swaths of land slope towards the water. Women crouch amidst plots of tomatoes, peas and vegetables, culling mounds of limp weeds, brilliant wisps of sari draped across their faces in the hot day sun. Dogs sweep up and down the rivers edge, stopping to lap a drink, their paws sinking into thick blackened mud, or wading out to feed on a bloated carcass, animal or human, that has become lodged in the shallows. When the rains come, in two, maybe three months, the vegetable plots, decaying bodies, and muddy shoals will disappear beneath the rising swollen river.

Here, in the shadows of Varanasi, the Ganga is everything.

There are places in India where language and reason fail. Images resist synthesis, the scope of paradox too wide. Careful observation isn’t enough; the mystery will not unlock. Varanasi is such a place.

The city is an epicenter of Hindu religious life. The ancient Vedas described Varanasi as a “shaft of light”, stating that a bath in its holy waters will lead to “moksha”, liberation, freedom from the pain and sorrows of rebirth. The city is also the abode of Shiva, god of creation and destruction, who came down from the Himalayas to make his home by the banks of the Ganga.

Away from the river, Varanasi breathes, swims, and churns like any Indian city. Rickshaws jostle for advantage on gnarled streets; their jingling bells rolling like a den of chimes. Generators spill spew and noise into the air, exhaust mixing with smoke, burning garbage, lingering dust, a gray haze hovers over the street. Flanks of pedestrians pass by row upon row of glossy silk shops, windows ablaze with the latest colors and fashions, as waiting attendants call out murmurs of invitations. Cars and motorbikes search for the slightest opening, seizing the space until it again closes, blaring their horns with utter abandon. Idle cows, oblivious to the hustle, rummage through piles of garbage and debris, mouths circling in a slow methodical churn.

The constant chaotic flow of the Indian street, which for some inexplicable reason works, this is a world that I know and understand. It’s everywhere, in every respectable city, from Bombay to Chenai, Varanasi to Bhopal. It makes sense; it has a logic open to the senses, a flow of its own. With practice, I can navigate its extremes.
Approach the river, however, and the Varanasi world, like the alleyways themselves, narrow and dim. Small shops, not more than two strides long, line the cement path. City becomes labyrinth, no compass, no bearings, the passage six feet wide narrowing to two, every turn a right turn, a full 90 degrees. If memory works, I arrive at my destination. If it fails, a question, or two, or three, from the shopkeepers who recline on the podium of their shops- “What are you looking for?”

And then it’s there; the water, the river, the ghats, the Ganga. Every opening the same, gateways to the Ganga, portals of light, from narrow to expanse, something wholly different, the air, the sounds, the texture, everything placed in proper context: relative, transitory, human. Everything made small except for the river.

For five days, I wandered across the ghats. Part paths, part platforms, part steps, the ghats follow the graceful, slow arc of the Ganga on the northern banks of the city. Numbering more than eighty, each ghat is stage for a mini-drama, a small vignette of sights, smells, and sounds. All of Indian life takes place there, no detail spared: the thwack of washing clothes, the screech of infants, the deep bellows of pleasure from soaking water buffaloes, the acrid, crusty brine of urine, the bells and chants of the Brahmins (priests), the drying flattened disks of cow dung readied for market, the stillness of empty space, the slow wander of sadhus (saints), the shouts and protestations of cricket matches, the din, costumes and dance of marriages, the bodies and smoke of the cremation grounds, the crouch of defecation, the persistent call of the boatmen, yelling “Hello sir, boat?”, and the countless, small, forgettable acts of devotion.

It’s all happening simultaneously, side-by-side, one blending into the next. Everything taking place on the uninterrupted sweep of the ghats; the human meeting ground between tall, looming, rampart-like buildings and the calm, still waters of the Ganga.

The Ghats also present numerous opportunities for conversation. Many of these encounters follow a brief and predictable path. The questioners exhaust their shallow reserve of English, falling silent after learning my name, country, and profession. Or, if they are vendors, selling postcards, toys, or hashish, I wave them off with a repeated, “Ne, ne, ne” (no, no, no.)

Not all conversations, however, lapse as quickly as they arise. During my five, languid, days in Varanasi, I had a series of brief encounters that, in hindsight, shed flickers of light on the mysterious mind of the Indians, and their ancient and forever renewing relationship with the Ganga. In the process, the conversations helped to illuminate, and in some ways add to, Varanasi’s shifting world of contradictions.

Manikarnika Ghat
I sat on the Manikarnika Ghat, the most auspicious of Varanasi’s cremation grounds, watching the constant parade of death. Smoke clung to the hot, dense air, rising from five separate fires burning on the flats below. A disheveled man, his eyes thick and tired and yellow, sat down next to me and started rattling through his well-worn facts.

“No women allowed on the ghat, too much crying. Each funeral costs twenty thousand, thirty thousand rupees. Wood is very expensive. Three hundred cremations every day here. The oldest son lights the fire, the one with the shaved head” and he pointed at a frail man holding a clutch of burning straw. “He circles the pyre five times, one for each element: water, air, fire… This allows the dead person to reach liberation.” He continued on for a while longer, speaking in a flat and disinterested voice

Then he shifted. “I help the poor,” he said, and I could sense the approach of his pitch. “I help them for no money so that they can have a proper burning. Every day I help them.” I looked at his round, well-fed stomach and asked how he survived with no money. “I stay with my parents, they take care of me so that I can help the poor. If you want, you can make a donation, 500 rupees, 200 rupees, 1000 rupees, whatever you like, no problem.” I reached into my pocket and handed him 50 reluctant rupees, payment for the information and, I hoped, his absence. He adopted an air of disappointment and protested for a few more minutes, reciting again the prices of wood and needs of the poor, but finally he gave up, thanked me, and moved in search of the next customer.

I looked across the jutting, uneven ghat. Towering piles of wood leaned against buildings and temples darkened with soot. More stacks rose up from the hulls of tethered boats, sunk with weight, the prows an inch above water. A cow climbed up the ghat clearing a wary path of bystanders, and goats nibbled at the scatterings of bark. Men lowered a stretcher into the river, the body disappearing beneath the murky shallows. Another, dripping with water, was placed atop a pile of wood, and then covered with layers of thick, angling tree limbs. People stared at the glowing mounds of fire, ash and smoke, watching, waiting, with no place to go.

Every five minutes they brought another body, a jostling hint of something on a bamboo stretcher, wrapped in glittering cloths of red and gold and green, colors that told a story, woman, child, man, but whose meaning I had already forgot. Everyday, three hundred bodies, three hundred stacks of wood, three hundred families, ‘just the men’ he said, circles of old and young, watching wood, body, and ash fold into nothing. Everyday, all year long, without stop, the fires burn.

I came back the next day, same scene, same heat, same unmistakable air. I sat and sipped a chai, finding a narrow open space in a line of seated men, all sipping chai. They stared at me, the way only Indians can do, observing my every move with undistracted attention. Eventually one of them spoke- “Which country?” he asked.
And with that, we began a slow, halting conversation, simple questions and answers traded back and forth, like cards from a deck. “Grandfather dead,” he said, “over there” and motioned towards a smoldering mound of embers. I told him “Marc,” and followed with my profession, “social work”. He said, “eighty-seven, long life,” and after a pause, asked “take us to your country. We work hard.” I told him “difficult”. We spoke like this, perhaps for five minutes, and with each exchange, the answers rustled through the men in small murmuring waves. And finally, as we ran dry of things to say, he asked for “photo”.

I took three pictures of the Kumar family that day. Three lines of men, sitting on the Manikarnika Ghat, looking straight into the camera, not a hint of smile, eyes open and undisturbed. Afterward, they crowded around the view screen, pointing and laughing and jostling for position. One of the young men wrote his email in my small, blue pad, and I promised to send him the pictures.

Then, as I got up to leave, I said- “I’m sorry about your grandfather.” The comment fell into a sea of silence. They just looked at me, eyes blinking, hearing my words as a jumble of sound and mystery. I tried again, this time pronouncing each word with slow, clear intent. One of the men, the leader of the photo sessions, gave a classic Indian bob, a little side-to-side wag of the head, before turning his attention back to the fire. And so I walked away, sorting through the awkwardness of the moment, my out-of-place comment, leaving behind the Kumar family and the smoke and muted air of Manikarnika Ghat.

Tulsi Ghat
I walked up the ghats, racing the heat and sun, moving with determined purpose towards Tulsi ghat. I wanted to speak with someone from the Sankat Mochan Foundation, a watchdog and advocacy group dedicated to cleaning the Ganga. In Varanasi, untreated sewage pours directly into the river from more than thirty drains. By the time the Ganga reaches the eastern limits of the city, the shoals seethe with sewage. Bubbles of methane rise from the gray-green murk, and the air carries the heavy, unmistakable smell of a sewer.

The issue nagged at me. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief and overlook the obvious; the Ganga was polluted, slowly drowning in a river of human and industrial waste. The foundation spoke a language I understood in simple, clear terms- “The Ganga Mother is sick.”

After an hour, I reached Tulsi Ghat and climbed its steep narrow steps. The foundation stood at the top of the ghat, a fading blue building with a quiet, forgotten air. I wandered around the complex, poking my head in any open doorway. Eventually a man pointed me towards an office, a small, dimly lit room with a couple of computers, and large stacks of paper claiming every available space. “Out to lunch” he said, “back in an hour” and he handed me a thick publication that celebrated the foundation’s 25th anniversary. An hour is a nebulous thing, particularly in India, so I decided not to wait.

Later, I thumbed through the publication, matching the facts to the vivid images of Varanasi. According to the foundation, 60,000 pilgrims come to the Ganga every day for a ritual bath. The Ganga also provides drinking water for more than 40% of Indians, nearly 500 million people, and is a major source of agricultural irrigation.
The foundation has been meticulously measuring pollution levels along the banks of the city. At the western edge, just as the Ganga begins its slow, gentle arc, bacteria levels make bathing and drinking dangerously unsafe. By the time the waters reach the eastern edge, the domain of fishermen and villagers, pollution levels reach astronomical levels.

Sankat Mochan has developed a two-pronged initiative to “save the Ganga”. First, the foundation is building popular awareness of the Ganga’s plight, working with residents whose very existence depends upon the river: priests, fishermen, farmers, and boatmen. Second, the foundation is waging a prolonged battle with the state government, pushing for an innovative sewage treatment plan, which would effectively clean the Ganga. So far, their plan has met stiff resistance but the issue is pending in the courts. In the meantime, the sewage continues to flow, eighty million gallons each day.

Rana Ghat
It was early, the air cool and still. I sat on a step, drinking chai after chai, watching the morning unfold. The river was slowly waking with activity. Four or five men bobbed up and down, taking their ritual bath, plunging and surfacing, sending smooth circles of ripples against tethered boats. Others stood waist deep, scooping handfuls of water into their mouths, swishing and rinsing, and then taking long draughts of the river. On the steps just above the water, a man sat with his face tilted to the side while a barber, standing two steps down, pulled a straight metal razor across a lathered cheek. A few others, old men with thin narrow bodies of bone and muscle, wringed water from washed cloths, shaking and spreading the paper-thin white and orange wraps over the descending steps.

A young man lowered his heavy frame next to me with a burst of air. He was round and a little unkempt, his cheeks thick with stubble. Three chalky white lines crossed his forehead with a large yellow dot in the middle. Leaning towards the chai wallah, he reached for a newspaper, cigarette, and small glass of tea.

After a while we struck up a conversation, covering the usual ground of “name and country” before turning to the Ganga. “This is my mother.” He said, motioning to the morning river. “This is the mother of all rivers. More than one thousand gods live here. This water is pure. I love her.” He paused for a while, taking full, deep drags from the cigarette, his elbows resting on a white cotton skirt.

“She is also my business. I am a priest, a Brahmin. I have a small platform, over there, with my father.” He pointed down the ghats to a long row of cement umbrellas, which hovered over small wooden platforms. “I sit on one of those platforms and wait for pilgrims. Sometimes people pay me 100 rupees ($2.50), or 150 rupees. I do puja, I make blessing for them.”

I asked the priest about pollution and whether he thought it was a problem. “Yes” he said, “there is pollution, it’s a problem. But what to do?” and as he said this, he shrugged his shoulders. “Too much corruption. I hate the politicians; they’re all thieves. Nothing changes. You know the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, he is coming here on Thursday. For two days, no business. They won’t allow us on the ghat, none of us. Not the chai stands, the laundry wallahs, the priests, none of us.” We sat for a while longer, ruminating about this and that, watching the come and go. And then he pushed up to his feet, invited me to stop by his platform, and ambled off to work.

I looked down the ghat, taking note of the feverish preparations for the Prime Minister’s visit. Workers chipped away at narrow blocks of stone, fitting finished blocks into a gaping hole. Lines of white cal traced the edges of walls and steps, coating and masking the dark stains of urine. A crew of workers sprayed water at large mounds of silt, pushing the grime, garbage and muck back into the river. A newly erected fence cut across the ghat, halting the flow of people and animals. Police roamed through the crowds, shifting here and there, arms pulled back, bamboo batons in hands.

They were scrubbing Varanasi clean of itself, removing the underbelly of the city, the call of the boatmen, the cluttered lines of drying clothes, the chaotic rush of the pilgrims. Everything was being put in order, sanitized and polished. All of the city’s contradictions were being cleansed and erased, any hint of daily life, suppressed, except for a few sanctioned ceremonies, and the eternal fires of the cremation ghats. Death takes no breaks, not even for visiting dignitaries.

Later that afternoon, I flipped through the paper. There was a small article, not more than three inches long, announcing that city officials were shutting the city sewer drains. For three full days, the daily flow of sewage would be shipped farther down stream, away from the eye and nose of the prime minister.

Dasaswamedh Ghat
From the early dark of morning, the central Dasaswamedh Ghat buzzes with activity. It’s a shifting jumble of pilgrims and beggars and priests and marriage parties, weaving in an out, coming and going, in a dizzying blur of color and motion. Everything relentless noise; drums beating, vendors calling, boatmen shouting, pilgrims yelling, beggars begging, a continuous din of voices that blend together into some new universal language.

Right up to the fall of evening. Then, with the first tentative notes of the Vedic chant, a slow calm settles across the ghat. People take seats on the stone steps, voices quiet, ears open to the music, and attention gathers on the priests below, white on yellow. Even the crazed woman slips into a devoted silence, her random bursts of anger stilled by the rise of music.

I sat on a step listening to the chants, watching the priests wave their incense and fire. People clapped with the beat of the melodic tabla, singing when they knew the verse. Boats hovered on the edge of darkness filled with tourists, Indian and foreign, watching in trance, cameras clicking, flashes blinking off the water. Further out, in the deep dark of the river, small timid lights, candles and flowers fastened in boats of leaves, rode the Ganga’s slow current.

Later, an attendant of the ceremony circled through the crowd holding a plate of yellow and orange marigolds. Two young men seated to my right reached for the plate, dropped a couple of rupees, and then offered me a clutch of the wilted flowers. I took a couple, balancing them in my palm, and asked about their significance. “They’re blessed,” they said. “They bring good luck.”

As the ceremony drew to a close, after the priests gave a few final blasts from the conch shells, I began talking with my two neighbors, first learning their names: Ajay and Jogir. “We come here often, it’s peaceful.” Ajay said, in a soft, rolling voice. “We are from Shimla, it’s a small city in the mountains, about thirty hours travel from Varanasi.”

“Shimla is nothing like here,” Jogir continued, his voice cloaked in rasp. “It’s clean and organized, and there are a lot of trees. When we first came to Varanasi five years ago to study Sanskrit, ‘wow’, what a shock, the heat, the dirt, the pollution. Now we like it here, we’ve gotten used to this place.”

I listened to their stories; their studies at the Varanasi Sanskrit University, plans for the future, eventual marriage, arranged of course, work, and life in Shimla. They also asked about my travels and life; why I wasn’t married, my impressions of India, what I did for work. By the time we finished, the crowds had filtered off the steps and the ghat fell back to its normal pitch of motion and noise. As we got up to leave, we decided to meet the next evening and continue our conversation.

Jogir was the first to arrive, walking hand in hand with another friend, Anir. We headed away from Dasaswamedh Ghat, taking a seat further up the Ganga next to a chai stand.

It was a quiet spot. A few empty boats lay tethered below. Sparrows flung across the coloring sky, rising to tremendous heights in swirling, careening clusters, like specks of dust caught in whirlwind.

Ajay arrived a short while later, and opened a small, new, notebook. He pulled out a pen and wrote “Marc’s experiences” in dark blue ink at the top of an empty page, setting it upon the stone pillar. “We want to write down what you think of this place,” he said. And then the three of them; Anir, shy, smiling and silent, Ajay, head curved down, pen in hand, and Jogir, narrow face filled with small, delicate features, they all leaned forward and waited for my response.

Not wanting to disappoint, I began a rambling discourse, starting with the beauty of the river and swinging my arm in a broad sweep towards the Ganga. Then I plunged forward with all the different images I had seen: the cows, the cremation ghats, the rituals, and the pollution... I stumbled from one subject to the next, spinning an ever wider web of confusion. They were, of course, polite; they nodded their heads in agreement. But after I had stopped, and the natural sounds of the ghat seeped back in, I noticed that the page was still empty, just “Marc’s experiences” sitting on top of two uneven lines.

And so I asked them about the Ganga. Ajay spoke first, and I leaned forward to capture his words. “The Ganga,” he explained, “I don’t know how to say… It enters very deep,” and he pulled his hand against his chest. “This water is holy water, it is pure. It is like our mother. It is our mother. She frees us from sorrow, cures our illness, she offers us…” he struggled with a word and asked Jogir, who picked up the sentence. “She offers us salvation. She cleans us. So many people come here. Millions of people are cremated and their ashes put in the river every year. Last year, we brought my grandfather’s ashes here. So many people come to the Ganga.”

“Look at all the businesses,” Jogir continued, motioning around. “The hotels, the boats, the people who carry the firewood for the cremations, the priests. The river provides income. If the Ganga were not holy, Varanasi would be nothing.”

I asked why, if the river was holy, there wasn’t more concern about pollution. “It’s complicated,” Ajay said. “The people, they don’t understand. Its cultural, they don’t know not to throw things in the water, the garbage, the plastic, the flowers. To them, you can’t make the water dirty. It’s pure. And the politicians, they’re all corrupt. The Prime Minister is ok, but the others, they steal the money for themselves.”

We sat in silence, listening to the distant drift of music from the evening ceremony. After a while, Ajay rose to his feet, saying that he had another appointment. Before leaving, he invited me to visit their college. “It’s a beautiful place,” he said, “built by the British but it’s poorly maintained.” We agreed on Sunday, and he turned and left.

Jogir, Anir, and I stayed for a while longer, our faces fading into the dark. The conversation turned to America and I spoke of subjects that felt easy and familiar: Obama and Hillary, immigrants, minimum wage laws, and the costs of life. We made quick calculations in our heads, converting rupees to dollars, comparing and contrasting our two countries. At the end of the evening, as we readied to leave, Jogir said; “I have learned a lot tonight. I think your country doesn’t sound so easy. I think it’s better to stay here, live my life, with my teaching job, even if it only pays 6000 rupees a month ($150).”

The following Sunday, Ajay and I met by the river. The air cracked with heat, surrounding the skin, squeezing moisture from every pore. We fled the ghat and the sun, making the quick journey to his University in a cycle rickshaw, the driver tilting from side to side, bringing all of his limited weight to bear on the bare metal pedals.

The University was, as described, both beautiful and neglected. Large symmetrical stone buildings, visions of English culture and order, dotted the spacious campus. As we drew close, however, details of decay and dilapidation came into focus; missing panes of glass, weeds sprouting from parapets, doors that wouldn’t close; the slow, inexorable toll of India.

After the tour, we retreated to Jogir’s room to escape the heat and drink some chai. I sat on a thin, meager mattress, leaning my back against the cool green wall. Students came and went, cracking jokes, reviewing homework, shooting questions, typical student things in a typical Indian dorm room. I spoke with Sharma, a young student from the Sikhim, a small mountainous state to the north. At some point our conversation turned to Varanasi, and Sharma gave voice to thoughts that I had harbored since my arrival.

“When I first came here,” he said, “I didn’t understand this place. ‘What is this’ I said to myself. The body is burning and the family is sitting there eating. People are washing their clothes. There are people right next door getting married. They bring the dead bodies propped up in a rickshaw, I couldn’t believe it, and then carry them down the alleys right next to you. In Sikhim, we stay away from the body. We don’t want to go near it. And when a person dies, people are quiet and the family cries.”

He continued- “Now, I’ve been here for four years, and I like it. We all know it’s going to happen. We are going to die. Why keep it separate? Now I understand. I think it’s because there are more people here than in Sikhim. Death is always happening.”

We talked for a while longer, four of us, about school and future plans. And then, Ajay and I headed back to the ghats, pulled along by the slow pedaling of a weathered old man.

Raj Ghat
The next day, just before departing for my train to Calcutta, I joined some friends for tea in the dining room of the Krihsnamurti Foundation. One young man, a Kenyan of Indian origin, was sharing his thoughts from a previous day’s trip to Varanasi. His voice moved with a musical quality, each word precise and autonomous. When he spoke, he drew us in, almost irresistibly, like eyes around a fire.

“I realized,” he said, his voice rising and falling like a scale, “that there are two ways to take in the ghats. You can walk the length of them, observing the different activities that take place on each ghat, drifting from one to next, seeing the whole context of the ghats. This is one way to see what happens. Or you can sit and watch just one ghat all day long: its flow of life and rhythm, the sounds, the change of light from morning to night, the comings and goings. You get a totally different feel, you touch its nuances and texture.”

“You’re right” I said, “I couldn’t agree more.”

Calcutta, (also on the banks of the Ganga)
Now, nearly a week out from its spell and Varanasi begins to fade, replaced by the authentic and crowded streets of Calcutta. What remains is an open and perhaps unanswerable question. I could return time and again, happily, to watch and sit, walk and observe, converse and question, see, feel, smell, and lose myself on the ghats of the river, and still the mystery might not open.

There is something about Varanasi that defies definition. It could be the sheer human scale of the ghats, containing everything that is India, from sacred to mundane. Or it could be the river, the beautiful, polluted, Ganga, mother of all rivers, abode of Shiva, larger than life, more ancient than myth, memory, and man, flowing quiet to the sea.

Photos of Varanasi are at the bottom of the Blog...