We arrived at precisely the wrong and right time in the ancient, sacred city of Varanasi, the most holy of India’s seven holiest. Thick and chugged with rush hour traffic, through streets that reminded one of the older parts of Bangkok, that then progressively narrowed into what I remembered as the older looking India, early eighties, as we followed Chaalak’s (an alias that means ‘driver’ in Hindi) GPS. It took us an hour to even get near the ‘Benares Guest House’ at Hathi Phatak Pandey Ghat—one of the more popular, and sonorously named, ghats for locals and tourists—and to secure parking. Then it was a backpack and rolling luggage trek through even worse traffic for another ten or fifteen minutes. The word hermetic comes to mind to parse this leg of the journey, as we were siphoned toward our destination through the narrowest of streets, some parts worrisome to negotiate when as a stuff-burdened pedestrian we met oncoming motorbikes. Not remembering hardly anything from the 1981 visit, something suddenly clicked when we came up a ‘sixties looking’ sign designating, ‘The Monalisa German Bakery.’ Yum. Many stoner, ironically un-Teutonic sounding taste treats, such as Wood Oven Pizza, Apple Crumble, Cheese Cake, and Brownies, were advertised below an odd monosyllabic rendering of that moniker most synonymous with the quirkiest of smiles. All in all, a highly successful trigger for cannabis addicted Western seekers. We stopped and I stared up at the sign, hoping to recover lost memories. But all I got was hungry. “Can we eat here?” But my friends had a more pressing agenda and their clock was ticking. So we ventured just a little further toward the ‘Banaras’ (Varanasi’s modern name) Rest House, ascended a few steep and narrow steps, and laid our burdens down. The receptionist started taking our details and then she looked curiously up at me and asked if we were all friends. I smiled and said we are now. True to that, I made sure they got the bigger room, there were two of them, and we quickly settled in, showered, and met in the lobby directly. I’d forgotten what was on the itinerary and just let them lead the way through the narrow alley streets paved with one third meter sized stones polished by pet destinations for hard to say how long. We passed endless opened stalls draped with finery and edible goods and store fronts painted pastel blues, pinks, and yellows, the interiors of which looked like someone’s cushy bedroom, where tea and talked were served lavishly, while bolts of the highest quality silks in the world were peddled. Occasionally stepping over a fresh pile of glistening cow poop, also among the finest aromas in the world, we eventually entered onto an open street of some breath where crowds were conceding as if to enter a stadium or amphitheater. The air was charged and could see up ahead we were approaching the famed Hathi Phatak Pandey Ghat, where bodies probably hadn’t been burned form some time. Rather, crowds of several thousands gathered nightly to observe what Alak identified as an offering puja to the river. It was in fact a fire puja, and as we approached the ghats, the singing sound of finger cymbals welcomed us as we submerged into a sea of silken saris and Levi clad moderns, most with their phone cameras held high to document what was happening on a stage near to the Ganga River’s edge. Fire pujas were the main reason I’d made the trip to India. This then would be my third fire puja, and decidedly Hindu and not Buddhist it was quite different. Yet, in purpose, it was similar to the first two, both held at Ngor Monastery, the first for the parinirvana of their beloved Khenpo, was overflowing with Tibetans, lay people and monastics. The second was far modest, just me trying to fulfill my vows with the indispensable aid of trained tantric professionals. The ‘pacification’ here this night was not made by repeated offerings of handfuls of grains, branches, and legumes, but the element of fire itself, flaring dramatically in a harp shaped lamp, it’s base a tube connecting to pots, and on top of the front one a half meter sized tree of flaming cups fed by the pots. This unique instrument was whirled around and held in place high into the air to supplicate and appease “‘Ganga’ (Sanskrit: गङ्गा, romanized: Gaṅgā), the personification of the river Ganges, who is worshipped by Hindus as the goddess of purification and forgiveness. Known by many names, Ganga is often depicted as a fair, beautiful woman, riding a divine crocodile-like creature called the makara.” Anyone living in Cambodia (a big shout out to you!) would be familiar with this lore, as it’s a shared riverine—substitute Mekong for Ganges—mythology. In Varanasi, as with the Mekong, or perhaps more so with the great Nile (the Mekong has an overflow outlet into Cambodia’s Tonle Sap) riverine inhabitants live in a seasonal fear of their respective rivers overflow its banks. Moved by this thousands-fold collective spirit of purification and forgiveness, I was moved to tell my new spiritual friend about the child my ex and I had lost at the Kalhan Hospital in Dehradun. This, if one has followed along, is what I’d vowed to do back on Vulture Peak. Of course, sharing such an intimate and breathless confession, while simultaneously weaving through hordes of people on the ghats of Varanasi, is not optimal. I say ‘confession’ for I’m certain it’s considered a sin, or negative deed, in the ethical systems of most religions to have intercourse with a late term pregnant woman, which then leads to a premature birth, causing or contributing to the child’s death, and most certainly to his extreme discomfort. (In this case, there was onset premature cervical dilation, either just before, during, or just after intercourse. It can’t honestly be rationalized away.) And so too, here and now, I confess it again, as such prohibitions are best followed and not excused. What I exactly said to Alak, however, was not the above. But something more about the aftermath: interring the child in an urn while Tibetan monks chanted for a favorable rebirth and then submerging it upriver Ganges at Haridwar. My ‘hook’ in this sad account was an actual hook made of transcendental light and it came down and plunged into the water before as if to properly deposit our baby’s continuum in the holiest of cities to us as we stood on the banks of the holiest river for our first time. That was in 1981, and I was probably the only one to have seen it, though I’ve never asked our baby’s mother if she saw it or not. What Alak understood was hardly as replete as what’s expressed above, but it was enough to elicit from him a heartfelt sorrow and a focused consolation. Pity, in other words. Is that what I wanted back on Vulture Peak? I don’t think so.
The next morning was magic, as they say. We were up with the dawn and down to the boats on mother Ganga before the crowds gathered. We had a rosy colored sunrise turning the sand banks pink-ish, just as our dear friend and guide, Sonam Tenzin, advertised they would be, back in Dehradun, January 1981. But then, at that time, we didn’t go out on the water. All I remember is the above mentioned hook of transcendental light coming down, signaling the final resting place of our premie baby in Varanasi, and standing on the ghats early midmorning in front of the Hotel Sita, which I’m pretty sure we stayed at. Unpleasantly, we were being swarmed by hordes of beggar children, almost everywhere we went. The younger ones we insensitively told to bhag jaow, or scram, as we had little money ourselves, while the older ones we tried to hold intelligent conversations with, as they practiced their Raj school English on us and mostly wanted to know what we did for a living in America. My then wife proudly informed them she worked on movies. Which was quite true, though not Hollywood ones. This really impressed them. I told that too, though I was still mostly working as a carpenter and only sometimes as a production assistant. I remember at the time feeling very competitive and trying to keep my sense of self worth afloat. But this morning, a seeming lifetime later, I had no such worries as I had done my forty years of toil, accumulated two pensions, and left behind a legacy of accomplishments in which I was no longer interested. Now, being rowed along with Alak, life was but a dream, and the long ago promised ‘pink sands of the Ganges’ moment arrived, with some camels thrown in as well. During the recent pandemic, my guide Alak informed me, the tourist board, or whomever, imported camels to give people crossing to the other side a ride, in T. E. Lawrence style, upon those famed pink sands. I have to stop here and say, what’s with the tourist attraction to the color pink? In Ojai California, where I grew up, there was the locally prided ‘pink moment,’ when the setting sun blazed through the higher levels of particulate matter and colored the looming Topa Topa (gopher, gopher) Bluffs a gorgeous pink and yellow. People would come from all over to see and ask about it. Anyway, relishing in this sensuous excursion upon the Ganges, I saw smoking bodies burn in flames, and people in various states of undress, not so smoking, doing their morning ablutions. There were both numerous Indian and foreign tourists in large white, motorized boats criss-crossing the ancient waters, and on the banks, all the various names of each ghat artistically labeled with their related stays and hotels interestedly advertised. Nothing was garish or loud or too much. The place had dignity. Because, after all, while cruising the ghats, one can see it’s really nothing but a big cemetery and open air crematorium, teeming with walking skeletons, brightly clad, still with their hair—gaggles of happy corpse endlessly dying and being reborn. The sacred city reeked of renunciation and material modestly, at least from an American tourist point of view. That’s how I can jointly remember it from both visits some forty-two years apart. But actually feeling it this second time, I experienced what was beyond the pink sands: its beauty of form and colors, its various and engaging aromas, its ability to focus the mind on what really matters. Perhaps in my maturity, not having concerns of livelihood, right or wrong, or the princes’ curse of ‘how shall we be known?’ I was better equipped to appreciated its finer points, its harmonizing of body, mind, and surroundings, chastened by life’s ephemerality timely set. Varanasi, in its integration of all five elements, inclusive of space as well is, for my money, still the mother of all cities, both East and West.
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