On our last day in Rishikesh, Julia was talking on Skype with her mother, and I overheard her describe our next destination in the city of Varanasi as “The place in India where people go to die.” While this was probably not the best way to describe the city to her poor, worried mother, it was not completely inaccurate. Varanasi is one of the holiest cities in the world to people of the Hindu faith, which encompasses more than 800 million people in India. If a Hindu dies in Varanasi, their soul is liberated from the cycle of death and rebirth. Elderly and sick people from all over the country come here when they are close to dying. They stay in holy temples along the banks of the Ganges where their hospice care is administered by priests and nuns.
We visited the site along the Ganges where Hindus live out their last days. A Brahman priest took us around the site, where we witnessed the bodies being burned in funeral pyres. The priest explained that only male family members are allowed at the cremation because women are too emotional and before the ban there was a lot of social pressure for women to throw themselves on their husband’s fires. When the body is done burning, the ashes, along with any bones or unburned body parts, are pushed into the river. The priest explained to Julia and I that there are many types of deceased people that do not need purification through cremation and are therefore not burned in the pyres, like pregnant women or those who die from a snake bite. When Julia asked him what they do with these bodies, he replied nonchalantly, “We bring them out to the middle of the river and sink them with a rock.”
The Ganges in Varanasi is also considered to have great powers of purification for those who bathe in its waters. Dressed in bright colors, Hindus gather every morning at the ghats to perform rituals, sending off flowers and candles into the river before immersing themselves in the water and praying. Between the sunken corpses and burned bodies, the hundreds of miles the Ganges has come across India by this point, and the toxic chemicals released into the river by industrial plants just upstream, Julia and I remained spectators for the event. But I must say, the bathing ceremony at the ghats on the banks of the Ganges at sunrise was one of the most breathtaking cultural phenomena we’ve witnessed so far on our trip.
Being in India has a way of making one reflect on life and death. One frequently hears visitors who have returned from here say “India is so alive.” Sometimes, like when I’m riding an auto-rickshaw in which the driver casually maneuvers into oncoming traffic while overtaking a guy on a bike full of sharpened bamboo shafts, I think what they mean to say is “After visiting India, I can’t believe I’m alive.” Another one of these times was yesterday when we found ourselves in one of the holiest Hindu cities on the day a long awaited high court decision was to be announced over a bitterly disputed holy site between Hindus and Muslims. Headlines in India and all over the world were predicting rioting and violence similar to the events of 1992 when the dispute first went to court and over 2,000 people were killed.
Some other travelers warned us over breakfast to be off the streets for the afternoon because of the potential for strife. This was confirmed for us by the shopkeepers who all started closing up shop after noon and by the thousands of armed military police in riot gear throughout the city. We arrived back to the hotel to see an Israeli heading out for the afternoon. I warned them about the problem , but they headed out anyway, shrugging as if to say “A bunch of religious extremists who want to kill us?... yeah, in Israel we call that Tuesday!” So instead of the “rainy afternoon activities” we had to come up with in Central America or the “blazing hot afternoon activities” that kept us busy in Turkey, Julia and I had to entertain ourselves with some “violent religious conflict activities” for the rest of the afternoon in our hotel room. Luckily it appears as though things have changed in the last couple of decades and the decision to give a 1/3 share to each of the three religious parties did not cause any problems in India.
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