You Go Straight Up

Had a day to explore Varanasi yesterday.  Out on the Ganges.  Say the fabled word again.  It’s the first time to see this river.  I remember my high school Social Studies text and consider other first time riverine encounters, the Indus, the Mekong, he Niger.   My friend explains that the fires on the shore were funeral pyres.  I’ve read of such things in the days of the Vikings.  I didn’t know they still existed as a means of cremation.  “How” I asked, “do people get the bodies down the water’s edge?”  My friend approximated the gesture of a body slung over one’s shoulder.  I squinted.  Are there bodies on those piles?  If there are they’re pretty, far along.  Right, I see.  “And how” I proceeded “do they know that this was not just someone a bad-actor knocked on the head with a bottle in an alley?”  And, of course, there is a detailed registration process involved, before one can bring one’s loved one down to the shore and immolate them up to heaven.  You go straight up to heaven, it is suggested, if you’re cremated here by the riverside.

We chugged down past many named ghats and then turned and returned upstream to consider them again.  Apparently, the royalty of many principalities across the country had all built mini palaces for themselves and their entourage along the shoreline of this spiritual center.  We pulled up at one and settled-up with our captain.  Early in the day I’d learned that Siddhartha Gautama who’d achieved enlightenment, as the story goes, under a tree not far from here, couldn’t pay the fare to cross the river when charged and through his eternal benevolence, he fixed it so that not only he, but all such pilgrims could cross for free in the eons to come. 

We passed through the door to the steps and proceeded along a dark alley way lined with reclining bodies that would be worrisome most other parts of world.  These were largely thin, topless bearded men who appeared to be at turns resting and praying.  We wondered through the alleys of the ancient, honeycombed city en route to the Shiva temple, marvelling at the unconquerable squalor and the irresistible animate quality of this ancient organism. 

At the temple it would be shoes off.  They suggested socks off to but . . . you know, I kept em on.  Computers would need to stay in this room with lockers that, which it seemed, one hundred people passed through every ten minutes.  “Don’t worry” said someone I’d known for fifteen seconds, with an equivocating bob.  “I’ll be here.”  Right.  Another gent in a smart blue robe told us to follow him.  He wanted my passport.  I told him I’d keep it.  He asked me for it again.  I told him I’d keep it again.  But I understood.  I proceeded along with my hands in both pockets considering other times I’d had my pockets picked in crushing crowds. 

I felt modestly guilty and then did not as we cut the line and passed by some three hundred pilgrims and made our way first to the guard post.  Six tired, bored men in brown uniforms with rifles manned this post, splayed out in lounge chairs.  I considered their ability to spring into action should there have been a sudden need.  My chum bought a number of garlands.  I gave my passport to a be-spectacled fellow who slowly wrote down every salient piece of information on my passport page.  I imagined having to do the same thing with Chinese characters. 

The man in blue now lead us on and in.  This is the boiling, urgent faith of India, millenniums old, that China has, largely lost.  Surely faith and religious tradition have a faint pulse in China.  I’ll grant you.  But it is not easy to find, certainly not in major urban centers like this.  This is devotion, certainly.  And one wonders to what extent such adherence to tradition profits this nation.  A prince of Hyderabad if I remember correctly had paid to have this temples’ roof covered in real gold.  I look up and monkeys are walking across the wires that crisscrossed the area below the spire. 

What do I know about Shiva?  One of the three primal Hindu gods.  The destroyer.  What precisely are people praying to Shiva for?  “Don’t destroy me?”  “Don’t destroy me just yet?”  “Keep an eye out for me as you have lots of capacities and incarnations beyond simply the destruction facet?”  My friend dutifully lays a garland in a pit of a temple chamber where a man hands out something I can’t make out back to those who offer donations.  I bow out of respect and soon I am being pushed on by thin older ladies, peers perhaps, but emaciated, who look very serious about moving forward. 

Monday, 4/2/18