Benares: A Lone Pilgrim

Schedules were more or less approximations and the dilapidated red and yellow busses seemed to depart according to their own arbitrary time tables. When we finally rolled out of the chaotic Bangalore station, my clothes and skin were already damp and salty from sweat and sticky from the exhaust fumes of the worn diesel engines. I was on the road at last, and I was excited. I chose to travel on local busses instead of the vintage Hindustan Airlines DC-3 that flew the northern routes, or the more dependable trains for my long trip to Benares. I wanted to take a leisurely farewell of South India after my years there, savoring the flavors along the way and etching the experience into my memory.

Most of the busses had no windows and on one the door was tied shut with a piece of rope. The seats weren’t cushioned and the inadequate suspension didn’t do much to dampen the jolts from the uneven roads. We piled in one after the other, sat shoulder to shoulder, jostling, making room where there wasn’t any. I had long since gotten over the need that Westerners have for a lot of personal space and felt at home in the teeming crush of farmers, students, snake charmers, saried women carrying their possessions in bundles on their heads, a few hens with tied legs, and jute sacks filled with grain and rice. Our bus was already dangerously overloaded but we still stopped at every village to take on passengers. When all the seats and standing room were taken, people climbed up on the roof; a flock of ticketless lifters sitting among the enormous pile of suitcases strapped to the top.

I was looking for the soul of India and true to what Ghandi said discovered it in all its intensity in her towns and villages. In the stations along the way travelers waited patiently for their busses, sometimes as it happened, for days.  The  inferno of sights and sounds that I experienced at every stop was life continuing as it always had. Men in colourful turbans sat on their haunches and smoked bidis or chillums that they held in a grip between their fingers, sucking the smoke from the rough tobacco through their clenched fists. They squatted, chatting, passing time as though they were at home in their villages. 

I bought fruit and sweet tea in clay cups that the chai wallahs passed through the open windows of the bus. In the afternoons we stopped and ate rice and vegetables outdoors in the shade of leafy pulpa trees or under the thatched roofs of simple tiffin stalls. Our food was usually ladled up on broad, shiny plantain leaves placed on coarse wooden tables that had been polished smooth over the years by countless travelers. I ate my rice and sambar with the fingers and thumb of my right hand. The left hand was the toilet hand and for obvious reasons considered unclean, as you wiped yourself with it and water. Toilet paper was nonexistent. When it was time to answer the call of nature the bushes or fields were a pleasanter alternative if you had a choice, as Indian latrines weren’t for the squeamish or anyone with even a slight case of bacteria phobia. As a rule they were just a slab of concrete with a trough at the bottom.  There was no flush and the stench of urine and ammonia was overwhelming in the heat. If the need arose to defecate, which could be often if you had the trots, you squatted over a slimy hole in the floor, and tried not to lean against the unpainted, cockroach covered walls. Afterwards, if you were acclimatized, you washed yourself clean with the left hand and knew that there was no use looking for the soap dispenser. If you ever let your thoughts wander, and wondered where that fly had just been before it landed on your dinner, this was absolutely no place for you.

I was in no hurry as I bounced and shook my way up through Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andra Pradesh, and then on to Uttar Pradesh. I spent the nights in small hotels by the bus stations, ate dosai for breakfast, explored the towns, and then bought a ticket on the next bus that was going north. When I finally arrived at Benares, I tumbled into the throbbing cacophony of the milling crowds and rainbow of colour that you found in all Indian cities, a surprisingly dissonant, pulsing life, in this place where death was the main business. Bells rang from hundreds of temples, dogs barked; cycle rickshaws vied for customers among vendor’s carts and the sacred cows that wandered unattended through the crowds of pilgrims. Saffron robed sadhus, ascetics with matted hair and bodies caked in ash, prayed and chanted mantras in Sanskrit. The ambient drone of thousands of devotees contrasted the silent flow of the Ganges as it wound grey and silky to the Arabian sea.

Benares had always fascinated me. The holy city on the Ganges was a Jerusalem, Mecca and Rome all combined. It was here that Hindus came to purify their bodies and souls in the sacred river before they died, hopefully achieving the promise of redemption from their sins and the liberation from the perpetual cycle of reincarnation. Pilgrims came to die with the river in sight and then be cremated on its banks. The smoke from the funeral pyres mixed with the dust and turned the opaque evening sky a dull amber. The fires were still smoldering when I first saw them from the window of my small room overlooking the river. In the evening I watched as sandal wood logs were neatly piled on one another, and the dead, after being carried through the streets, were laid upon them and doused with ghee. I watched as the beds were ignited by white robed men with shaved heads and the bodies were consumed by the flames. When the ashes cooled they would be spread on the water.  The dead that couldn’t be cremated for religious or social reasons were shrouded and decorated with garlands of flowers and then rowed out to mid-stream to be submerged in the sacred waters. Hindu families from the whole country would often send a member on a pilgrimage to spread the ashes of dead relatives and take a bottle of Ganges water home with them.

It could easily have been the seventeen-seventies or the eighteen-seventies, not the nineteen-seventies. I had a feeling of being fixed in a remote past. I awoke early on the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday to meditate at the bathing ghats and watch the crimson sun rise as though it was sprung directly from the river. I left my kurtha and dhoti on the top landing and placed my sandals on them as a weight. I waded in among the ritual bathers, women doing laundry, and the ashes of the cremated. I rinsed my mouth in the sacred water like the other pilgrims and washed myself in the Indian manner, standing waste deep in the river, my cotton boxers held securely in place by their draw string. I swam out from the shore in among the flat bottomed boats that were carrying the dead on their last voyages. Vultures took to the air, circling up, riding the thermals that were created as the sun rose higher. Others were silhouetted on the far bank of the river, standing patiently, and black suited and ominous like attentive undertakers, their size magnified by the early morning haze. Those large birds understood instinctively that everything dies. It was the Hindu belief that nature builds a house for our souls and then tears it down, builds it up, tears it down. It was a belief in the endless cycle of deaths and rebirth.

My swim in the "River of Life ”was a symbolic purification of sorts, but I didn’t regard it as a ritual cleansing and forgiveness of sin as the Hindus did, but rather as a demarcation, the end of one period of my life and the beginning of a new. After drying myself in the sun, I approached a sadhu. His mahogany hued skin was smeared with the purifying ash from burnt cow dung and he was naked except for a loincloth. His hands were outstretched and motionless and he seemed as frail and delicate as a sparrow. I had observed him every morning saying mantras and meditating. He sat without affectation, a detached island of tranquility in that sea of humanity.  He acknowledged me with what I perceived as a light that came from the eyes. I gave him alms and asked if he would perform puja as was the custom when you began a new venture or wanted to give thanks. I sat cross-legged opposite him. He chanted a prayer while rotating a small earthen oil lamp in front of my face, dipped his ring, middle and forefingers in yellow kum-kum powder and pulled them slowly down my forehead, marking it from my hairline to the bridge of my nose.

India taught me that by giving you receive. It was the custom to give gifts on your birthday as well as get them. The thought was that the recipient of a gift accepts a little bit of the karma of the giver and vice versa. Accordingly, I bought sweets to give to the people who witnessed my blessing. By giving a gift, I shared my birthday, my good fortune and a little of myself with them.  It was a simple beginning...