India Trip with My Parents: Varanasi

An ancient maze of streets where two people and a cow barely pass each other, storefronts the size of a little room where someone operates an antique sewing machine, a coal iron or a paan (chewable betel nut) stand, piles of trash where creatures bovine and simian happily take their repast--that is Varanasi, one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world.

So are the hundreds of saddhus--holy ascetics dressed in saffron robes--who congregate in this holy city on the Ganges. When not praying or gathering and drying choice cow dung patties, most of them will also happily mug for a paid photo; this is also a city of touts and scams.

A riverfront filled with stately, tall palaces, many of them in the Mughal style; Varanasi was last razed to the ground by the invading Mughal army in the 16th century, who then built the city up in their own style.

A Shivaite pilgrimage place where there is a crude altar everywhere you turn, sometimes just a Shiva lingam smeared with red ash, or a frightful crude orange outline signifying the monkey god Hanuman.

People doing ablutions in the icy-cold, filthy holy water, chanting all the while. Human cremations going on twenty-four hours a day; the deceased will go straight to heaven if his or her ashes are deposed in the Ganges. An old woman in a corner is gathering money for her impending cremation; gathering enough wood to burn a body is expensive, and she is taking care of her karma in this lifetime--that, too, is Varanasi.

An elaborate evening prayer ceremony where young long-haired priests reverently wield objects like torches, conch shells, whisks, and marigold garlands, all to the constant pealing of bells and monotonous chanting--that is Varanasi as well.

A time capsule into some ageless and age-old universe, an elegant architectural ensemble, and a freak show at the same time, it is perhaps my favorite city in India.