Where The Ancient Meets The Surreal
India As A Portal To Another Time
My fiancée Laura and I arrive in Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges river, the oldest and holiest city in India, one of the two or three oldest living cities in the world.
Mark Twain was here 120 years ago and said of this place:
“Varanasi is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”
It’s colorful and full of life along the edge of the Ganges. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people are bathing on the banks of the river on any given day. Women wash their hair and clean their colorful clothes in the water, children swim and frolic, men lather their bodies with soap and chat with their friends, sometimes a water buffalo ambles down and takes a cold dip.
Up above the river narrow winding alleys meander through the city according to street plans written before the Old Testament was finished. Thousand-year-old buildings teeter on the brink of collapse after hundreds of years of neglect.
Along the riverbanks barbers shave men’s faces with antique straight razors right out on the street. Boat builders are hammering oversized iron nails into half-built river boats on the sidewalk. Snake charmers and itinerant magicians languish on street corners. A set of cows nuzzle each other affectionately — an elderly man stops and gives each of them a back massage.
According to Hindu tradition anyone who dies in Varanasi will liberate the karmic cycle, so the streets are full of people who look as old as Mark Twain waiting patiently for their earthly end to arrive. The dead are cremated outdoors, in public on the banks of the Ganges. Thousands of felled trees stacked twenty to thirty feet high loom over the cremation grounds waiting their turn to join the fire.
Outside of the biggest cities like Delhi and Bombay an overwhelming majority of Indians are religious to a degree that’s probably hard for most westerners to wrap their heads around. Hinduism and its psychedelic pantheon of gods is ingrained in India’s psyche far more deeply than Christianity’s considerable influence over American culture — an informal survey of locals I meet has me guesstimate that 70-80% of Indian Hindus believe the literal interpretation of their ancient religious texts. The weight of Hindu tradition is as palpable as the humidity in the air. No place in India more so than this city.
A family walks by me on the street, they’ve all shaven their heads — mother, father, grandmother, children, all of them. I learn it’s an act of piety as they grieve the death of someone close to them.
We pass by a man sitting full lotus on the sidewalk with a beard down to his waist, dreadlocks streaming off his head and ash smeared across his face. He’s chanting under his breath from a weather-beaten book, absolutely focused on his work. He is a sadhu, a man who’s dropped out of society and left everyone in his old life behind to pursue spiritual goals. I’ve learned just enough about sadhus to know that he’ll probably continue to sit and do just what he’s doing right now pretty much every day for the rest of his life.
Being in India sometimes feels like stepping in to a time machine.
Storefront typists take dictation on vintage typewriters. Hotels keep their guest’s information in giant ledger books written on carbon copies, in triplicate. Tractors haul heavy goods through narrow city streets. Many taxi cabs still hail from the middle of the last century.
Everyday objects like padlocks, door keys, sewing machines and weight scales are crafted from heavy steel and are dramatically oversized, as if forged by a blacksmith from another era. Giant clothing irons are heated with steaming coal housed in a compartment inside the appliance.
Buildings age rapidly in the tropical humidity and are often covered in decades of soot, facades crumbling, paint peeling off the walls, the occasional banyan tree strangling its way in to the structure’s foundation.
Things just feel old.
Other times it’s as if the time machine took us back to the Dark Ages.
Tens of millions of people across the country still live in mud huts.
Many locals still draw their water from hand cranked wells.
Handmade wooden flatbed trucks are drawn by cattle, oxen, water buffalo, horses, camels, any beast of burden available — not just on back roads, but in cities of millions of people.
Cities built 500 or 1,000 years ago are lit by flickering candlelight after dark if there’s an electrical outage, which happens a lot. One out of three Indians doesn’t have electricity, period.
There’s an elephant on the street and people are lining up to give it spare change. The elephant picks the money up out of your hand with the agile tip of its huge trunk and hands the cash to its caretaker. Then it gently, lovingly caresses the top of your head with its trunk — you’ve just been blessed by the elephant god Ganesh.
The streets of Varanasi are full of animals. The elephants are incredible, but the monkeys are my favorite. They roam free and wild here, tarzaning off of rooftops, dangling from fire escapes, grooming their young, wrestling, mating and eating whatever’s tasty, all right out in the open living parallel lives to the people around them, a fixture of life as normal here as a flock of pigeons is to us.
It’s early morning and the two of us walk into our hotel’s rooftop restaurant. We’re alone in the dining area — it takes us a moment to notice that there’s a monkey relaxing at a table. He must have climbed in through an open window and seated himself when nobody was looking. He’s got this ‘when’s the waiter gonna take my order?’ kind of look on his face.
We’ve spent a while in Varanasi, and we’re ready to move on. We’ve hired a driver to take us to our next stop — he’s friendly and enthusiastic, I like him right away. Five minutes after we get on the road he decides to stop for a relaxing cup of tea. This is normal and routine here: concepts of time, service and priorities roll to a different rhythm. We join him — doing anything else would be swimming upstream.
Later he makes another unscheduled stop, this time at a roadside temple to pray. Again, this is normal — bus drivers are known for delaying their passengers for as long as they like while they stop at a shrine to honor their god of choice. But there’s a rich twist here: the god of the temple we stop at isn’t Shiva or Vishnu. It’s a motorcycle.
The bike was like any other when its driver, a sadhu, crashed into a tree and died back in the 1980's. The cops moved the undriveable but mostly intact bike to their local station, but in this land of magical realism the motorcycle drove itself back to the tree, the holy dead owner ghost-riding it the whole way. Afterwards the bike came to be worshipped as a deity — now it sits on display by the tree, covered in garlands of flowers. Thousands of people stop by to worship it every day, just like our driver has.
This moment is a perfect microcosm of our experience in surreal India. Reality marches to a whole other drumbeat in so many ways it’s hard to keep track.
Most people in India might think everything we saw is just how things work, business as usual — and who am I to say that a billion people are wrong? What a wonderful crazy world this is.
Cowritten with Laura Wald
While you’re here check out some more of my photos…
