Varanasi (Benares)

As usual, buying train tickets takes nearly a full day but at the end of it we have four, first class, air-conditioned coach, train tickets to Varanasi.  Expensive tickets to be sure, but we are all feeling out-of-sorts and rather unwell in the past 24 hours. We can't face up to another grueling journey and we want to pamper ourselves.

Varanasi, or as it was formerly known, Benares, is one of the most legendary of the holy cities of India.  The line in Yoganada's autobiography , "We entrained for Benares..." leaps into my mind as I am holding the tickets.  New Delhi has been a wonderful introduction but now we are finally heading for the "heart " of India, home of sadhus, holy men and the Great Mother Ganges.  If there is to be a spiritual revelation for us, it is surely to be found there.

The train journey is 16 hours from Delhi.  We depart at 1:30 the next day and are due to arrive at 6 a.m. the following morning. On board, I have a wonderful conversation with a wood craftsman and furniture maker from Lucknow, the kind of conversation that is now becoming common-place here in this land of the living spirit.  He is young, my age, but with a wisdom and world-perspective far beyond my years and such an elegant speaker!  To listen to him is to become enchanted and entranced.  Yet, he is confused.

Here in the river of India's purely spiritual traditions, he is a man in search of water. The best he can manage when it comes to the subject of god is,  "I think there may be something there..." but he reluctantly admits this amidst scathing criticism of religions, gurus and the "tom-foolery of the business of saving souls"!

I like to think I understand his dismay and disdain for all that he considers false and hypocritical, holding his people and his country "back" and down, in terms of modern progress.   He is a great admirer of the Sikhs, although himself a Hindu by birth and speaks knowledgeably about the friction between Moslems, Hindus and Sikhs.

We talk well into the night until he reaches his stop.  Before leaving he asks me what I have thought about his comments.  I sum it up by saying that I hope he will somehow reach a state of inner certainty and faith, (for I sense he would be a marvelous "spiritual" man) but I have the distinct impression that he feels I have missed his point. Our handshake at the very end though, is warm and firm.

He is replaced in our compartment by a rather noisy and restless individual who upsets the cozy ambiance we have thus far achieved and we are not able to get to sleep until the wee hours.

We are wakened by the familiar strains of the chai wallah and by a sound that makes the hair on the back of my neck tingle. We have been used to hearing Western-style music everywhere with its heavy production and techno-sounds but what more perfect welcoming into Benares than the haunting, mystical music of the sitar, amplified throughout the train station.  I can scarcely believe my ears, it sounds like Ravi Shankar.

The feelings this evokes in me are those of high romance.  Here we are in the holiest of the holy cities and finally, Indian music!  I am  reminded again of how much the Western world has intruded into this country.  The music seems somehow a blessing, a benediction and a good omen for our stay here.

A dusty wind is blowing and we are sitting in the courtyard of the elegant old Hotel de Paris on old rattan lounge chairs.  Karen says she is reminded of a scene from the film "A Passage to India" based on the book by E.M. Forester.

Only that afternoon I had been browsing through our "Lonely Planet" travel guide and happened to notice that 20 km to the north of the city of Gaya, very close to here, are the Barabar Caves, dating back to 200 B.C.  The guide suggested that these are the historical setting of Forester's "Marabar Caves" in his novel.

We decide that since we will be going on to Bodh Ghaya we will probably visit this site, famous in the book for the atmosphere it evokes and its inexplicable effect on Western travelers.

I seem to be more and more susceptible to the subtle effects of atmosphere since coming to India, or perhaps more aware of its effect on me.  This afternoon, Karen decides that we should visit the Monkey Temple described in our guide, mainly because she is fond of monkeys.  I had read in the guide book that the temple was sacred to Durga, "...a terrible form of Shiva's consort, Parvati, so at festivals there are sacrifices of goats." and it added that the temple was closed to unbelievers.

I assume, wrongly, that this means "closed to foreigners" because when we arrive there, we are welcomed directly inside.  Nothing would have prepared me for what we experience that afternoon.

After a 20 minute scooter ride through the narrow, dense Benares lanes we arrive at the 18th century "Bengali Temple" sitting alongside its huge rectangular pool of water.  The guidebook said it was stained red with ochre but actually the whole temple seems to be the color of dried blood, a dark, dense, opaque, reddish-brown hue and in an advanced state of dilapidation.  The walls and niches are peopled by monkeys of assorted sizes and shapes.

I had expected something quaint-looking but the moment we get out of the scooter I experience or sense something "namelessly oppressive" in the atmosphere. Where we approach the temple there are the traditional sellers of floral garlands, mostly marigolds but I do not feel in the least festive, or inclined to buy.  I feel a twinge of the same repulsion I felt with Arvind at the Hanuman Temple and experience a reluctance to go inside.  However, this time Karen and the kids are eager. There are monkeys here, after all!

When I enter the temple I am further surprised at my reaction, for where in most temples I feel an immediate inclination to bow and worship, the last thing I feel like doing here is bowing to what feels like an essentially negative, fearful Deity.

After removing our shoes we are allowed inside but even the stones under my feet feel  somehow unclean and there is the smell of monkey dung everywhere.  Yet, at the top of the steps there is an orange-robed priest motioning us up towards an altar and we follow his direction obediently.  The priest drops marigold garlands around the children's heads and motions me to make a donation to an attendant priest who is sitting nearby looking thoroughly bored.  The faces of both these men are not pleasant, there is a hardness and coldness about them and I immediately think of the sacrificial goats being led up to the altar.

I lay a single rupee note, almost in defiance, on the altar. I cannot bow. The priest then steps forward with some ash and places tikas on our foreheads, all except for Karen who, never one to bow to social obligation, has beaten a hasty retreat and is already well out of reach. This is probably just as well, for even the priest's touch fills me with revulsion.

We all walk around the central shrine surrounding the altar. Into the outer walls are built small, barred cells in and out of which the monkeys seem to roam freely. At this point, a mean, ferocious-looking monkey approaches the children and the priest who has been observing us, leaps into action, waving the monkey back and motioning to us that he is dangerous.

We immediately begin to leave the grounds but the priest confronts at the exit with his hand out for a donation. I hesitate and he looks at me sternly, making eating motions with his hands and mouth.  I give him nothing and at last as we are leaving he positions himself one more time with his hand outstretched and an angry expression that reads,  "What kind of cheap pilgrim are you?"

After we pick up our shoes I look back at the priest whose eyes are as white and abstract as flashing knives.  Then he turns away and I am left wondering whether I am imagining all of this. Yet as we walk away, the feeling of disgust persists and all I can think about is finding some water to wash the ash from our faces, throw the garlands away and cleanse myself and the children from whatever impurities, physical or otherwise, we may have picked up there.  My mind is filled with the images of those ghoulish-colored walls emblazoned with swastikas and the temple's colony of demon-monkeys.

On the way we pass another temple but when I see Shiva's trident atop it I say to myself, "No more Lord Shiva thank you, not if he hangs out with women like Durga" and as if in reaction to my mood I am met on all sides by hostile stares and even the rickshaw drivers pass us by until we are some distance from the Monkey Temple.

We finally hail a rickshaw driver who stops and takes us to the Ganges embankment where we hire, or are hired by (I'm not sure which) a boatman who takes us out on the river.  The impression of the Durga temple still upon me, I wash off the last traces of the red ash from our faces in the river water.  The boatman smiles at our ablutions, commenting "Ganja",  knowingly, kindly, although initially he too had seemed distant, even hostile to us.

At one point, passing the ghats, we see two bodies being cremated, red fires leaping high among the logs and two more shrouded bodies at the river's edge, being readied for cremation.  Near the fire, a little girl is gathering ashes into a sack.  She can't be more than seven.  Earlier we had seen two dead dogs lying in the street, abuzz with flies.  This has been a day for our encounter with the dark side of India.

Even as we are leaving, the boatman begins haranguing us for an extra five rupees and as we walk up the steps of the ghat into the teeming streets full of hawkers and vendors and buyers and pushers and beggars and cripples, it seems we are entering a city of tortured souls and I feel like Dante without a Virgil to guide me, only my dear family to give me a sense of sacred tenderness and protection which makes my fear and unease seem small in comparison.

An image from the Durga temple returns to me.  As we were leaving, a group of three or four men entered the temple carrying an orange-clad yogi whose legs were permanently fixed in a full lotus but crippled and deformed. They set him erectly at the altar where he performed a reverent puja, like a living stone Buddha. Then, he turned himself fully on his hands to face our direction but his face was not the shining face of an enlightened one but rather one full of misery and suffering.

We are walking through the teeming streets and I notice another face, this time in a group of old men sitting by the roadside.  This face is a venerable one with white, white eyebrows and hair, a rugged, browned, serene and handsome face with eyes that look like they have been through hell and yet come out the other side, to paradise.  There is an effulgence in them that is not so much benign as completely unworldly. The lines from Coleridge spring to mind..."For he on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise."  However, the strength in his face belies the poetic utterance the sight of his eyes gives voice to.

The city of Benares we pass through on a bicycle rickshaw, returning to the hotel, is not the sentimentally spiritual city I had pictured reading Yogananda.  Neither is it the romantic place of beauty the early morning's sitar music had conjured up.  Rather it seems a place of great suffering, poverty beyond imagination and above all, confusion, wearing the mask of religion.  I begin to understand in more depth the comments of the young furniture maker on our way here.

How brilliant the light of the Buddha must have been to shine through all this suffering and darkness!  Although I hate to admit it, I can easily imagine both Moslem and Christian, in a holy zeal, laying waste to this apparent Hindu desolation and desecration of the spirit.  I could never have imagined myself savoring a bad taste around the mantra Om Namah Shivayah but there it is.  How Western I am, after all!

We arrange with the same rickshaw driver to pick us up before sunrise the next day to take us to the Ganges for an early morning boat-ride. As I am paying my fare, he suggests that I pay a little more and I refuse.  His face is hard and pocked marked, the face of  a seasoned convict and yet he grins at me, bows and says ironically, "You are an old soul, Sahib."

My spirits are immediately lifted when we walk into our hotel room.  The room has been completely cleaned, beds made and around our little wooden Buddha, a carving I have brought with us from Delhi and placed on a table by the bed, someone has arranged an impressive and colorful offering of flowers.

The next morning our Rickshaw driver is waiting for us at the gates of the hotel, patiently certain that we will keep our appointment.  He is smiling and friendly and dutifully pedals us off to our "Holy Mother Ganges Sunrise Darshan".

Our family puja is completed successfully as we sail past the ghats, navigating carefully among the little lighted floral offerings floating on the river's surface, observing the hundreds of pilgrims performing their daily ritual ablutions in the filthy water and offering our own largely silent, unspoken prayers of thanks to the Universe for giving us the gift of this experience.

Back at the hotel after a nap, we take tea on the front lawn while the children bathe naked in a sprinkler hose under what appears to be a huge eucalyptus tree.  If this is paradise, we are suddenly and gratefully in it again.

I am now reading Sayyed Hussein Nasr's "Living Sufism".  I find that this extreme Shiva business we have experienced has caused some commotion inside of me and I am retreating favorably into the writings on a tradition that arises from the same soil as Christianity, the familiar religion I was born into.  This cut and dried sacredness, at least in the academic atmosphere of a book, seems worlds away from "blood-stained temples".  Of course, one look into history would quickly blow that notion to the winds like so much dandelion fluff.  For the moment however, I am comforted.  The author is discussing how modern man has lost his sense of the "permanent" in the wake of his preoccupation with the "ever-changing".  I am forced to concentrate deeply to follow the author's thought and that too is comforting to someone like me who is, metaphysically, at sea.

The next day we take a trip to Sarnath to visit the fabled "Deer Park" where the Buddha first preached his sermon on enlightenment and in doing so "turned the dharma wheel of the law".  Also, I still have that little postcard of the Buddha in the museum there and intend see it for myself, to touch it if possible as a kind of pilgrimage and grounding in a new reality that I had once only dreamed about.

Sarnath is now a children's park, a huge Buddhist temple and a wildlife park complete with deer, storks, peacocks and other assorted exotic wild birds whose names I do not learn.  The day is very hot.  Nika and I wander among the ruins while Karen disappears and later informs me she has taught a classroom full of young students an English lesson and has the photographs to prove it.

I find the museum and touch the silken, smooth carved feet of the little Buddha who visited me in the Oakridge Library so many years before. We meet with and talk briefly to some Tibetan monks who are also there on a pilgrimage.  I take a photo of Nika approaching them along the dirt road, their maroon robes brilliant against a flowering roadside shrub of a similar hue.  They are very friendly and familiar to us.

On the way home, we pass a road crew, sweating  in the hot sun.  They all stop working, standing as a group in their khaki work clothes, smiling beatifically, to have their photo taken by us.  "Would a Canadian road crew do the same?" I can't help but wonder.

Back at the hotel, we find a fresh offering of flowers and incense around the little Buddha in our room, which is once again, scrupulously cleansed.

That night we take a trip down to the main ghats after dark, to see the city at night. Our rickshaw driver waits over 2 and a half hours for us while we disappear into the bowels of the market en route to the Golden Temple,  whose dome is reputed to be comprised of 80 kilos of gold.  There are armed guards in and around the temple. It  is dedicated to Vishveswara, Shiva as Lord of the Universe and was rebuilt in 1776.  Non-Hindus are not allowed inside but as I gaze through the dimly illuminated splendor of the open doorway a voice behind me shouts a hearty "welcome" and as I turn toward it I am garlanded with marigolds.  The priest bestowing this blessing clasps my hands firmly in his, wishes me a long life and then, of course, demands money.  I refuse, which now an immediate reaction and he waves the whole matter away with a magnanimous sweep of his hand.  This endears him instantly to me and I dig in my pocket for a few rupees.

An old man steps forward from the crowd around the temple and introducing himself familiarly, becomes our impromptu guide.  Deeper and deeper into the labyrinth we go, past older and more venerable and ancient temples and into the holy of holies, the house of his brother-in-law, a rug merchant. We don't escape until we have had tea and viewed the samples.

On the way back a group of six or seven orange-robed and giggling nuns stop to take our picture and we theirs.  They pose proudly with our children and then with us, linking arms as though we have all been out on the same pub-crawl.  By now we do feel slightly intoxicated and the atmosphere is close to hallucinogenic.

Finally we emerge from the market and find our trustworthy rickshaw driver still awaiting us.  It is already late but a 25 minute ride takes us back to the Cantonment area, our hotel and the more familiar world of "our reality".

The kids take full advantage of this breather to blow off a little steam, resorting to tears and bedtime mischief which tax our tired patience a little more.  I build up a head of steam, wind up shouting and this sets the kids off for another half hour of tears.  This too is familiar territory and we indulge in it, as if to counter the effects of our other-worldly journey into a reality so different from the one we have known.