The Far Shore

Arriving in late afternoon, it was my desire to scout the central ghats before bed to orient myself. There is no such orientation in Banaras, I would soon find. The place doesn’t even have a single name, least of all a center-point. वाराणसी, Varanasi, the geographic incantation, refers to where the two rivers Varuna and Assi meet (or the space between them). बनारस, Banaras, the most frequently spoken incantation (or at least in my Bharat domestic experience), is a linguistic evolution of Varanasi. काशी, Kashi, “the shining”, the oldest incantation, meaning colloquially “City of Light”. Various other religious or poetic incantations also present, in the form of आनंदवन, Anandavana, “Forest of Bliss”; महाशमशान, Mahashmashana, “Great Land of the Dead”, a nod to the cremation temple ghats, which would forsooth burn into the memory of my olfaction; and finally, two names that illustrate the city’s principal resident, Lord Shiva: रुद्रवास, Rudravasa, “Shiva’s address”, and अविमुक्त, Avimukta, meaning “don’t let go”, referring to the god’s unwillingness to destroy the city at the end of time.

In the north of the city, the Varuna River meets the perpendicular गंगा, the Ganga, or Ganges, meaning “the going”. Every globetrotter’s wanderlust inevitably draws them, like moths to a flame, to the Ganga. Ganga is a goddess, whose own wanderlust compels her to traverse the continent, paving a clear way for humanity; however, all along the way, she longs for her home in the mountains. The Ganga flows southeast from the far northwest of the Indian Himalayas, eventually pouring out into the Bengal Delta, and into the Bay of Bengal. However, in Varanasi, the river takes a detour north before continuing onward (perhaps carried by an eternal breeze) out of Uttar Pradesh through Bihar to termination in West Bengal. The city is concentrated on the west bank of the Ganga, पश्चिम तट, Paschim Tat, “the Living Bank”, where hard concrete walls made of “kankar” limestone line the western shore and prevent the Ganga from reclaiming it. This sense-defying detour is called उत्तरवाहिनी, Uttarvahini, “north flowing”, where Ganga can no longer resist her homeward longing and, for a brief moment, U-turns.

The eastern shore of the city पूर्व तट, Purva Tat, or रेती, Reti, “the sands”, is, except for a few pilgrim amusements, uninhabited. Paschim Tat is what’s scientifically called an erosional bank, meaning that the reinforcement from the limestone precludes the Ganga from penetrating through it in any way in its meandering (the actual physics nomenclature for lazy river wanderings). No such fortification is available to Purva Tat, a depositional bank, and is therefore flooded seasonally from the monsoon, earning another nickname, “the Empty Side”.

My accommodation where I would stage my exploration was just beside Assi Ghat, technically the south side of the city where the Assi River flows into the Ganga. Given the orientation of Uttarvahini, and the fact that the river flowed north to Varuna Ghat, it certainly felt possible that I was in fact staying in the north side and hiking down (technically up) alongside the flow the Ganga to the south (technically the north). Although the spine of the city was Paschim Tat, of which Assi Ghat would be the coccyx, it made little sense to think in ordinary directional terms and I abandoned that measure altogether. I would simply begin at Assi Ghat and amble to Dashashwamedh and Manikarnika Ghats, the “central” ghats, to see what was going on and nurse a lassi.

घाट, Ghat, is a series of steps leading down into water. From Assi Ghat to Varuna Ghat, Paschim Tat is lined indeed, like a fortified spine, with an uninterrupted succession of 84 ghats. An additional complication in the attempt to apprehend orientation, since the Ganga here flows vertically: the ghats are horizontal, each leading a descent from west to east, from the profane drought of fleeting nature into the cleansing baths of the eternal. Each ghat represents a तीर्थ, Tirtha, “auspicious crossing”, and the ghats are effectively river temples. There are two essential ghats in the Forest of Bliss, to which Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and a constellation of similar sibling systems of beliefs, have made pilgrimage for various purposes over consecutive millennia. It wasn’t until later that I would realize, I was on Hindu Hajj.

स्नान घट, Snana Ghats, are the bathing ghats, used for Snana, where sins are purified by having a swim in the Ganga, and one’s soul is renewed. Snana literally means “bathing”, or “washing”. दशाश्वमेध, Dashashwamedh, meaning “ten horse sacrifice”, referring to a myth wherein the god of creation Brahma murdered ten horses to welcome Shiva back to the city after a stint of banishment, is a bathing ghat. Of the 84 ghats on the Ganga in Banaras, 82 are Snana Ghats. And as it transpired, my pilgrimage coincided with a particularly auspicious event, मकर संक्रांति, Makar Sankranti, meaning “into Capricorn”, a Hindu astrological version of new year, where the sun begins to move north once again and the heat displaces cold.

Bathing in the morning on Makar Sankranti is the spiritual equivalent to a Muslim making dua in the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca; it yields higher merit in your karma balance (the multiplier for Muslims is roughly a hundred thousand; not sure about precise number for the Hindus). You get more points, which is curious, because I’d read somewhere that supposedly karma accumulation, both negative and positive, is paused in the City of Light. Nevertheless, this bathing is an especially crucial performance if you believe, as most pilgrims do, that you are carrying a karmic balance from previous lives through this one and into the next. More on that later.

श्मशान, Shmashana Ghats, are the so-called burning ghats. Shmashana in Sanskrit means roughly “the bed of corpses”; a (final) resting place for the body. It is from this word that one of the avatars of the city derives its eponymous title, Mahashmashana, ‘the great cremation ground’. Shmashana Ghats or cremation temples are found throughout India; usually far outside of the city, and it is customary to bathe after a visit to one, since Shmashanas are considered to pollute one’s spirit. Alas, like everything else in Banaras that appears ass-fucking-backwards, the two Shmashana Ghats are located front and center, ensconced among the center of the bathing. Corpses have been burned on the two Shmashana Ghats continuously in the Great Land of the Dead for thousands of years. At least, at the larger of the two, Manikarnika Ghat, which in a year operates 24 hours a day, 365 days.  The older of the two, Harishchandra Ghat, pauses cremations at night; however, its embers are burning continuously. Indeed, when you are burned on a Ganga ghat in Banaras, you are ignited from a flame that has burned for thousands of years.

Amongst the untold countless fascinations of Harishchandra and Manikarnika, there are a few highlights. There is a dedicated underclass caste of Dalits (untouchables) called Doms that are committed caretakers of the ghats, with rituals and traditions far too complex for this miniature account, and who are led by a king, the Dom Raja. They charge a premium for burning wood, including sandalwood for the wealthy, along with mango, and banyan. There is a dedicated sect of monks that live and meditate amongst the ashes of the ghats. Weeping and wailing over a loved one burning on the ghats is forbidden at Manikarnika Ghat explicitly, because tears are believed to tether the departing soul back to earth, and apart from transient tourists, the majority of the bereaved in attendance at Manikarnika are men. Corpses are bathed at a Snana ghat before being doused in ghee and decorated, and Manikarnika contains within it a dedicated Snana, and is actually therefore somewhat of a half-breed.

मणिकर्णिका, Manikarnika Ghat, sits directly beside Dashashwamedh, and means in Sanskrit “The Ghat of the Jeweled Earring”, for reasons too banal to explain. Negotiating Manikarnika is a challenge, not unlike the rest of India. If it’s not enough that all of the passageways and alleys around and inside of the ghat are so narrow you can barely fit a row of four people through them, but also there are motorbikes, cows, goats, vendors, entrepreneurs, grifters, eccentrics, drug dealers, priests, ghat-dwelling children (more on those rascals shortly), barbers, tourist Sadhus trying to extort you for a third eye, and an endless march of mourners mixed with pilgrims. It is through all this chaos that Doms pall-bear a perpetual stream of departed. The only women I saw that weren’t moving expeditiously through the crowds on their way elsewhere were two aging pale Russian VK bimbos, being harassed by loitering grifters for a tip, and blocking the stairwell to the plateau of one of the primary cremation pyres, presumably captured by awe. 

The auditory nerve from the inner ear leads directly down into the brainstem, through only a handful of synapses. Light, however, traverses the retinas along the optic nerves and across the entire brain to the occipital lobe, where a dozen or more synapses process myriad elements such as depth, or motion, or color. I didn’t understand the delay between these two senses until the very first moment I made my ascent to the plateau of the Manikarnika cremation pyre. Pushing through the awestruck transients, dodging cheerful mourners and cow shit, I fortuitously (or traumatically) witnessed a ritual called कपाल क्रिया, Kapal Kriya, “the cracking of the skull”, where the soul from an enflamed corpse is freed by a strike to the forehead with a pole of bamboo from a living relative, commonly the eldest son. Like a bolt of lightning, the sound electrified down into my brainstem before the image reached my mind, in some macabre form of ASMR. Not sure of to what exactly I had just been subjected, I turned my head rightward, where, several meters from the liberation of one corpse, a much further along departed was being managed by an attentive Dom, who, also wielding a pole of bamboo, instigated a Tarantino-style burst of pressurized arterial liquefaction. “What the fuck is this place?” was my first and only coherent thought for the half hour I spent atop the pyre.

I paid no entrance fee, wielded no ticket, surmounted no barriers or fences, no guards. Particularly at Harishchandra Ghat, where there are benches and is far less chaos than Manikarnika, I dwelt for as long as I could stand it, utterly rapt. Just there, beside the Ganga, hanging out with mourning relatives, homeless beggars, and Lord Shiva, who was busily liberating souls. Lord Shiva’s favorite pastimes include squatting out at the burning ghats, lotioning himself in the ashes of the dead, wearing cobras as necklaces and bracelets, adorning the bloody skins of elephants and tigers, and most notably, endowing moksha to the departed. मोक्ष, moksha, meaning “to let go”, or colloquially, “liberation”, is guaranteed by death the Forest of Bliss, granted by Shiva, the god of time and destruction, who liberates souls from samsara, the endless damnation of the soul to reincarnation, to be born again over and over for eternity, bound to a pre-determined fleshy coil, based on eternal karmic balance. Shiva intervenes on this process on behalf of the departing soul, and destroys its next incarnation. Har Har Mahadev. The Buddhist equivalent might be more recognizable to most Occidentalists as “nirvana”, or, in our shorthand parlance, enlightenment. 

Liberation. Think about this for just a moment. Think about what is believed here. You are born with a balance, and not the fun mystical or physical or psychic or emotional notions; economic balance, accounting, like a current account; in your previous life, you were born fairly wealthy. Let’s assume middle class. You earned it from a few incarnations. But this time, you weren’t kind or benevolent. You were a massive piece of shit, each instance of which is charged to the account. You went on rampant compulsive whoring binges, not showering first and refusing to tip the whores; perhaps, you trafficked them; perhaps, to the world’s rich and famous; you ripped people off, and I don’t mean gullible tourists who probably deserve it, I mean regular working people trying to make it from paycheck to paycheck; you sold only sugary foods, cheaply, and then overcharged for insulin; you cheered brutal deportations, incarcerations, and in general, crackdowns on people who didn’t believe in your gods, eat your foods, listen to your music, wear your clothes, follow your financial determination, or have your skin pigmentation; you blasted short form videos from your phone in public without headphones; you forced people to remove items from their carry-on luggage to meet weight requirements; you turned in traffic without signaling, and also drove at night with your high beams on permanently; you snitched on your colleagues for leaving early; you pissed and shit all over the toilets in public; you accepted a rideshare or food order request, didn’t move for twenty minutes, and then cancelled; etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.

Now, this life, you’re born with that negative ethical balance, and must make up the difference; because you chose to do all those things, and now the balance is due. And the way that you make up that difference is not necessarily by a catalogue of gracious and kind-hearted deeds; but rather, by knowing your place. You polluted your immortal soul and now you must be quarantined. Your sole (soul?) purpose in this life is to work off the debt from a previous life, by suffering. So you’re cast out, and expected to perform the function of begging. Oh, yes. It’s your duty, your धर्म, your dharma, if you wish to be reincarnated higher, or liberated entirely, in the next life, then you cannot escape paying your debt in this life.

Remember those bathers at Dashashwamedh? Having a swim in the Ganga to renew their souls, to wash off all the stupid shit they’ve been up to that’s accumulated negative karma. Well, multiplying your positive karma is achieved tenfold due to the Banaras inflated exchange rates, especially on Makar Sankranti, by giving alms, “charity”, दान, daan. By giving daan, in the form of money, blankets, lentils, rice, etcetera, you generate positive karma. Indeed, you can see long queues of people lining up to eat free Kichdi, a lentil dish, and Makar Sankranti is also known as Kichdi Day.

In order for you to generate your positive karma, there has to be someone there to accept it. Because every time you give daan, likewise that you receive positive karma, also a bit of your negative karma evaporates. So not only is your begging and receiving daan required first, for you, to survive and to generate positive karma, but second also for the giver, to ditch some of their negative karma, and generate more positive karma, so that they might rise higher in the next life, or, preferably, receive moksha. Liberation from the cycle. You’re all part of the spinning wheel of samsara, giving and begging. And you do your dharma, wherever you land, to ensure you ascend the wheel in the next life. Remember this the next time you hear someone casually issue reference to “karma” as meaning something that will come around to bite them in the ass; for the originators who really believe in it, the consequences aren’t so glib.

And if you are lucky enough to die in the City of Light, and therefore are guaranteed liberation, or true destruction, they say as you slip out of consciousness, you can hear Lord Shiva himself chanting the तारक मंत्र, Taraka Mantra, to you, the “Mantra of the Crossing”. Sound, deep in the brain stem, is at death the final sense to fail in the body. And once liberated, you travel to पार, Par, the far shore, the shore beyond, bypassing the eastern shore completely, escaping reality, ending the cycle of rebirth, destroyed by Lord Shiva. This is, of course, only if you die on the western shore, Paschim Tat. If you are unfortunate enough to die on Purva Tat, the eastern shore, on the sands, you will not be granted moksha, nor will you have the now supreme luxury of being reborn based on your karma; not a Brahmin high priest; not a superstar diva; not a middle class administrator; not even a lowly beggar; you will, and I’m dead fucking serious, be born as a donkey.

Begging is a banal occurrence everywhere in India, such that I’ve learned to dissociate from the immediate demands of the need and just let the individual features of appearance of each of the beggars wash over my thoughts as I pass them. “He’s old. She’s old. She’s pregnant. Her baby has eyeliner on. His pan is cracked. She has no left leg. His hands look blown off. He has no right arm. She’s crying. His balls are hanging out.” I’ve noticed especially amongst the Sadhus or the elderly, a very specific facial expression shot to me upon eye contact that I have struggled to comprehend. Walking past, one may lock into eye contact with a beggar. Their face immediately turns yin-yang; half is stiffened downward in a stern blend of concern and disappointment, and the other half cocks raised in sarcastic exasperation, and the entire complete expression alarms on arrival to one’s attention, as if to say: “you! What the fuck are you doing? I’m hungry! I’ve been waiting here for sixteen goddamn hours, and you finally show up, empty handed! Give me something, what the fuck is wrong with you? You had one job, to feed me!” 

Occasionally I have encountered in India amongst elderly beggars a version of the thousand yard stare that might be termed the thousandth samsara stare, as if they are so deeply reincarnated, and so deeply indebted with negative karma, that liberation and ultimate destruction will be impossible, and they are traumatized by this fact, and in their terror can do nothing but desperately plead to you for alms. One such instance of this stare seemed especially tragic in Assi Ghat; an elderly woman whose bulging eyes pierced with desperation; hopelessly wondering what the fuck exactly it was that she had done across generations of previous incarnations to have secured herself a place in such a fucking shitty situation. I always try to imagine them as children, being indoctrinated with the fatalist belief that it’s their station to beg.

Children abound on the ghats, often wielding metal begging pans, or this week, under the auspices of Makar Sankranti, kites. I read about these पतंग, patang, before arriving. I had in my mind pictured delicate arts and crafts kites, the kind perhaps made under the direction of Grandma. Alas, these are ballistic kites, engineered in the skunkworks of Grandpa, designed to dogfight other kites. Cotton string caked in a glass powder paste called the मांझा, manhja, is attached to an agile tissue and bamboo sail, deployed to the winds, crossing the manjha of adversary patang and, occasionally, marooning them. Synthetic manjha (or, if you prefer a local epithet, “Chinese manjha”) made of nylon and plastic are officially banned due to the more perennial damage they inflict on local birds. The finely ground light bulb paste of the endorsed manjha, after all, is effectively just sand, and along with the cotton will disintegrate more rapidly.

Piloting a patang is an ordeal; the manjha wound on a spool zigzags erratically as the sail darts like an electron up, down, left, right, across the wind, while the pilot stares directly into the sun, which shines bright in the City of Light (supposedly, this entire ordeal itself was a promotion of sun-bathing; for people to emerge from the shaded alleys and banyans and into the great basking and absorption of Vitamin D). You know the pilot has a real patang if they look like they are jerking off into a cyclone; knees bent, arms held between thighs, either gripping the spool handles, or with the manjha wrapped around wrists, resisting the urge of the manjha to ascend with the sail far beyond the pilot’s reach.

Inferring the backgrounds of children is achieved on the ghats by their proximity to adults, and is an inefficient science, therefore, for the foreigner. Frequently children run around in mini hordes, and I assumed these were either local living or nomadic, either way entirely accustomed to the ghats, either from familiarity in the case of the former, or comfortability with unfamiliarity in the case of the latter. The only children looking askance and out of place seemed to loiter near to adults. Generally, bathing pilgrims didn’t look so unusual on the bathing ghats; rather, unusually, they took far more time and care with their non-bathing clothing. At what appeared to me as either a middle- or upper-class bathing ghat, where a mix of kempt and unkempt seemed to focus on the bathing of the overall already kempt, the women and children changed clothes behind folding screens. Elsewhere on the ghats, no such screen was used, and most families seemed less involved with their non-bathing clothing than with just getting the damned things off and getting their Snana on.

It would be in error to say that the Banaras ghats of the western shore are a source of endless entertainment only for children; firstly, for the world itself is endlessly entertaining generally to most children, and secondly, the ghats in the Forest of Bliss should be endlessly entertaining to anyone with a pulse. I felt part temple-hiker part temple-dancer (I wish I could have produced these Michael Jackson maneuvers on actual dance floors) dodging frantically running and screaming children, all giggling as if their lives depended on it, chasing patang, or each other, or cash.

Marching past one encampment, with only children, a baker’s dozen of varying ages, the young ones saw me all simultaneously, producing at once the most perfect Duchenne smiles I’ve ever seen, all forming a line behind me, waving eagerly and singing, “Hello! Hello! Hello!”; until the tallest and oldest of the bunch, previously engaged with maintaining a fire, caught a glimpse of me (I assume my unlikeness to them, and the pigmentation of my skin, instantly activated the rupee network of neurons in her brain) burst around and chanted, “Money! Money! Money”, as if silver and gold coins were streaming out of my trouser pockets. Without skipping a beat, all the younger ones joined the older, and a harmonious clannish chant from the entirety of the group sang, “Money! Money! Money!” as I marched past. I’d almost be offended if they weren’t so damned cute, so sincere in their expressions, no furrowed brows or desperate pleas, no sense of harassment or lingering. None of them chased or followed. They stood, at the edge of the ghat, waving and chanting and smiling.

It would stand out in all my experiences with children across India, if it were unique. In fact, it is difficult to recall any negative experiences with children in India (which is not to say they don’t exist; to be sure, I’ve been in fleeting moments irked by children in India, but never to the point of singeing neurons with a wretched memory, one of those from which you learn nothing on repeat recollections, as numerous of the adults have done). By far and away the most amusing specific encounter occurred on my first night in Banaras. Returning from my central ghat scout mission; perturbed, bewildered, in spiritual and emotional shock, I trudged down (or up?) to Assi Ghat. I came upon a stone stairwell with two pairs of stairs on either side, with the center stone cut into a wedge, or ramp, as if for wheelchairs. Two young girls (practically toddlers) ensconced on the sides of the ramps, one on the left and one on the right, singing to themselves, smiling, and hawking at each pilgrim climbing up or down the stairs with metal pan in hand, swinging between the ramp and the stairs back and forth depending on which corridor was busier, or perhaps the jib of a particular pilgrim looked especially generous, more likely to give Daan; each pan swapped back and forth out of sync; until, that is, the corridors in front of me all cleared, no one else but me and my trudging forth; and in a flash, as if in a Disney movie, the two girls’ minds synced, in such simultaneity that if their realizations appeared above their little heads as lightbulbs, they would be cosmically weaved; and their eyes now locking on mine, and pans swinging in perfect unison together right at my knees, facing the stairwell down the center ramp up which I began my ascent, suddenly both pans facing one another, as both girls tried to hawk something at me, but were swallowed up in their throats by their own giggling. I trudged past, laughing audibly at what I had just seen, as if it was a moment of design, just for our three's enjoyment.  

A “bhang lassi”, which, indistinct from a cow pie, is effectively hash in yogurt. I enjoyed both the flavors and psychoactive effects of one on the steps of Dashashwamedh on the eve of Makar Sankranti, and watched the Gangotri Seva Samiti organized Ganga Aarti, a sunset ceremony performed by young pandits (priests). If you want to be deafened, travel to Banaras for an Aarti. Beside the fact that there is already in almost every crevasse and cranny of Kashi an ambient cacophony of singing, chanting, bells, drums, skull crackings, boat motors, river police sirens, and the full variety of familiar human and dog noises; onto all of that, Dashashwamedh Aarti blasts a variety of classical and modern sub-continental music at full volume from stadium-sized amplifiers, alongside the conch shell blowing, brass bell ringing, drum beating priests who wave torches of fire around in the air. The spectacle can be enjoyed from the steps of the ghat on the riverbank for free, as I had selected, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of others, or via a paid version on a commercial boat, crowded up along the Paschim Tat shoreline. 

Near to the apex of the Uttarvahini crescent, is the Palm Jumeirah of the Ganga. Indeed, I wondered why some rich Indian Muslims hadn’t purchased a ghat and transformed it into a palm-shape ghat mosque. Or even why some Bangalorean or “Cyber”abadian filthy rich tech gurus wouldn’t buy out a ghat and shape it like a banyan, housing a 24 hours 365 days nonstop Ganga rave. Or a giant Shiva ghat, hosted by the radical flesh-eating ascetics that emulate the deity, who survive on a steady diet of whiskey, chillums, and the ashes of the cremated, chased by Ganga water. नमो, Namo Ghat, where Namo means “salutation”, or “to bow”, the same root as namaste, scratches just this itch. Towering concrete sculptures of folded hands “welcome” BJP tourists and pilgrims for a gentrified riverbank fair experience. Namo was inaugurated in 2022 by another famous “NaMo”, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, branding himself into the Hindu identity at its religious capital. Indeed, NaMo, leader of the dominant Bharatiya Janata Party, a conservative Hindu nationalist movement, managed to bend the severe protections of the Ganga ghats at Varanasi in order to renovate a section into the impressive spectacle, a rare occurrence along Paschim Tat in the past half century.

This concrete gentrification-cum-propaganda takes an ethereal spiritual form, espoused by countless BJP uncles professing in tangential diatribe the Sanatana dharma, सनातन धर्म, “eternal law”. Indeed, whilst idling on a bench beside the blazing corpse of his former landlord, one especially devout mourner ranted uninterrupted at me for half an hour about the Sanatana dharma; “It’s not religion, you see. It’s the fundamental philosophy that encompasses all of us. We’re a family of humanity, all riding on a boat, trying to get to the shore, and this isn’t Hindutva; this is Sanatana dharma, and Hinduism never really existed in the first place.” Sanatana dharma proselytizations can be added to the cacophony of deafening Banarasi sounds.

If the BJP represents the Hindu version of MAGA, a NaMo spearheaded nationalist movement breathlessly trying to reverse the liberal multicultural movements of the 20th century, then the Sanatana dharma represents the emboldened evangelical Christianity intensifying it, attempting in desperate gasps to resurrect its hegemonic spiritual supremacy. Sanatana mythologizes the claim that the Mughals, and Islam, oppressed and buried Sanatana dharma, and that by equating the Sanatana dharma with religion, it therein diluted and minimized its significance, allowing Western secularism to further suppress it after the Mughals by the British, and finally by self-imposed Indian secular democracy. The uncles insist that Sanatana dharma is not religion; it is cosmic science, and therefore cannot be sidelined or separated from government in the same way as, say, the journeyman religions of Christianity, or Islam. Its prescriptions are as fundamental and unquestionable as gravity, or the second law of thermodynamics. Such revisionist projects smuggle Hinduism into the political operating philosophy of a secular state, thereby redefining the national, political, and spiritual identities of hundreds of millions of people.

To the extent that the forces of caste are implied in the Sanatana dharma, that far outreaches my comfort zone to discuss. It is a broad topic that I have only a shallow grasp on. I have been corrected by more than one of my Indian friends and colleagues for speaking on this issue, and until my understanding of it matures, I will refrain from discussing the possible repercussions of Sanatana dharma on the necessary project of emancipating humans from caste beliefs in the subcontinent. Indeed, I’ve been warned against discussing religion so flagrantly; but I also wonder who warned the uncles for opening the discussion with me in the first place? Before moving to Arabia, I was warned about the forceful proselytizing of eager Muslims; with one or two exceptions, I have rarely been proselytized to, and never by a Saudi. They have discussed topics with me broadly, mainly political, and usually initiated by questions that I solicited; but never in the ways I was told to expect, and at least, never with the provocative insistence of American Christians or Sanatana dharma uncles.

I met this uncle, who, despite my criticisms, was very friendly and forthright, and with whom I would gladly converse again, at Harishchandra Ghat, where my jacket acquired a stank of the tangy combo of sandalwood and human flesh (not sure if it was persuaded to Sanatana dharma). Harishchandra Ghat nests at the far bottom corner of a neighborhood of Banaras called Bengali Tola, where wealthy devout residents of Kolkata parked their retirement funds for several centuries, transforming the neighborhood into a microcosm of Bengal (and in the process probably depriving that city of the passive benefits of its own exploited labor). Fatigued with pacing the riverside, I eventually embarked on a winding tour of the alleys and streets of Bengali Tola, where I was hissed at by a snake charmer, encountered a white Sadhu sannyasin who looked a few centuries old himself, saw an African woman in a sari, and was entranced by the basket of a peddler selling ochre third eyes, the surface of which was so bright that it looked positively radioactive. Further outside of the alleys along the roads nearby, I also saw the first and only female rickshaw driver I’ve ever seen in my (then) 5 expeditions to India, not far from some male rickshaw drivers smoking chillums.

Turning a corner in a Bengali Tola alley to suddenly encounter a cow is amongst the most terrifying experiences I have ever had. I don’t consider cows to be dangerous or particularly fearsome; however this cow had fearsome horns, and was so rotund that he took up the full width of the alley. Something about this cow also exuded confidence, an aura of belonging and authority, and I expected for a moment that it was going to detain and interrogate me. As my heart pounded, I realized I was, for the first time in Kashi, for the most part, alone; it was just me and the cow. Directionless, not knowing if I was going up or down, east or west, not even knowing if I wanted to go through the alley past it to the other side, hugging the alley wall, I carefully and gently brushed past his majesty, whispering to him हर हर महादेव!, Har har Mahadev!, “Hail to the destroyer!”, Lord Shiva’s battle cry, and the standard greeting in Banaras. This phrase is the password to Kashi; reciting it will guarantee someone reflexively replies to you with the same phrase, a Hindu version of retrieving وَعَلَيْكُمُ ٱلسَّلَامُ, wa-alaykum salaam, after announcing ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ, as-salaam alauykum, or during Easter in an orthodox Melkite community receiving “Truly, he has risen!” after deploying “Christ has risen!”.

I’m not sure if the cow replied to me, as it didn’t reply to me in English, and neither do I speak cow, nor can I read their minds, nor receive the transmissions of their spirits. As I slipped by the rear of the cow, a splatter of shit came out of its ass, and as slow, infrequent scratching against cobblestone of a broken bamboo scaffold punctured the silence, and a man appeared, followed by another man, taking a video with a button phone, followed by another, peddling, and asking me, “Hello sir, would you like some spicy?”, to which I replied, simply, “hail to the destroyer!”.