The City of Light: Varanasi, India spiritually illuminates both locals and visitors

“To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.”

- Henry Miller, The Colossus of Marousi

I suspect there are few places in the world that lift one’s eyelids in the way that Varanasi, India does. If you happen to meet someone who has been, watch his or her face very closely. There is a very good chance that you will see a spark; a trace of excitement burning in the memory. And how does this come about?

“Wake up,” the conductor said. “Twenty minutes.” I returned to that all-too-familiar state of half-consciousness. I had been on the train for at least 36 hours at this point and had yet again lost all sense of time. I had boarded near Pakistan, in Punjab, at the brink of sunrise two nights before. We were expecting to reach Varanasi within 20 hours, but being in India, my hopes were not high. When midnight rolled around, our arrival time became two, and at two, an official promised me that I would be woken before reaching the city. This was due to the fact that India was enveloped in one of the most dense fogs it had seen in decades. Many trains had crashed in the past weeks, so ours spent the night tiptoeing with caution. 

I reentered the real at 6 a.m. I threw my belongings in my pack and waited in the area between two cars. On these old Indian trains, many passengers spend their time waiting around here, smoking bidi cigarettes. I found myself in a funny situation. Picture four Indian guys, arms crossed, leaning against a wall glaring at you with unrelenting attention. It’s a little odd, but you have to get used to it in India. Since I was not in the mood for a staring contest, I shifted my gaze out onto the phantasmagoria of passing fields (cows, blue-tarp-roofed slums, laundry in garbage filled streams). Eventually, in typical Indian fashion, I was offered a bidi and a smile. 

When we arrived, it was only half past six and already a crowd had gathered that was probably capable of overturning the train. We screeched to a halt and I bolted. “Sir, sir. You need taxi, rickshaw, guesthouse?” I sailed through that ocean as fast as possible, making no eye contact, saying nothing, acknowledging nobody, for as a walking dollar-sign, there is only one way to navigate such situations. Nonetheless, I had at least three guys on my tail. Eventually, I made it into the parking lot. 

Step 1 - get into the city. “Where do you need to go? I have taxi. Local price. 500 rupees.” Knowing that the city was only a 20 minute drive away, there was no reason to pay more than 100 rupees, but lacking energy that morning I settled on a rickshaw for 150. After 30 minutes of assuring my driver that I already had a guesthouse, that I did not need to buy any hashish, and that I could find myself a good restaurant, he let me go. He left me at the top of the central street which led to the main ghat and wished me luck. 

I had really never seen fog like that. It looked as if the clouds had fallen from the sky and consumed the city whole. I could not see more than 10 feet in front of me. What a way to enter the “city of light.” I walked towards the river, for I had been told that most of the guesthouses sat on its banks. I didn’t realize how delirious I felt until right then – wading my way through the crowd, passing beggars, lepers, armed soldiers, and fleets of locals hired to pull me into one hole-in-the-wall guesthouse or another. Then the street opened up and I found myself atop the main ghat (a stone staircase leading down to a body of water). It was about seven now and so hazy that I could not even see the Ganges itself. All that existed, were distant, ghostly figures roaming the steps above piles of sleeping bodies. Nonetheless, I felt quite safe there - as welcome as anyone else slinking around at that hour. I stood in somewhat profound hesitation for quite a while before my body reminded me of its needs. It seemed to say, “Hey you. When are you gonna turn off that damn curiosity? I’m hungry as shit, and tired, and this pack is full of winter trekking gear. Remember comfort? Yeah, I wouldn’t mind something that resembled that right now.” In obedience, I started upriver. About two minutes later I heard a question that would become all too familiar, “You want boat ride?” And then a more surprising one, “Heroin?” “Whoa! Don’t worry about me,” I said. I could barely make out the confused and confusing reply, “But you are in Shiva’s city.”

Step 2 - find a cheap hostel. Being Lonely-Planet-less, and in no mood to search, I checked into the first guesthouse that I came across. I ordered myself the usual breakfast of fruit muesli and settled back into the old traveler’s silence. One thing that I believe traveling alone guarantees is rigorous training in the art of waiting. Sometimes one is waiting for a means of transportation or simply a conversation, but mostly it’s just the ancient pastime of acquainting oneself with boredom. I tried to remember what Heidegger wrote about boredom. As I know now, he wrote that boredom is a “drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, it removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference.” Indifference is tricky business, but I’m pretty sure passion wouldn’t be possible without it. The problem is that a moment of passion can be hard to find when it is being sought after. For me, such a parcel of light generally comes from outside of the self. Hence, a genuine wait is completely ignorant of the possibility of excitement; it is more of a perpetual search for stillness in the storm of thought. 

As I sat there wrestling with the moment, something spectacular happened. The sun, that existential alarm clock which had left my world for the past few days, decided to inhale the great cloud. Light! Varanasi had opened its arms. I jumped out of my seat, bid farewell to the veil of Maya and walked to the edge of the terrace hoping to see perhaps the holiest river in the world. At that moment, I could conceive of no place as colorful as Banaras. The ghats glow with a golden history, the ancient brick buildings hold all the shades of a red desert and all of this bounces off of the emerald mirror which the Ganges has become during its journey through the Himalayan foothills. There are old wooden boats of every shape and tone imaginable, women drifting by in shimmering garments and of course, goats wearing t-shirts. 

Step 3 - explore. It was about time to get lost. I’ve been told that Varanasi is believed to be around 3000 years old, making it one of the oldest cities in the world and most likely the oldest in India. This means that the old part of town has developed without any modern urban planning, and is, in essence, a labyrinth. In fact, the old town is a web of meandering alleyways no wider than 10 feet. This is something that separates Varanasi from any other modern Indian city. These winding streets are too thin and full of people for any motorized vehicle to pass through. This wonderful quality seems to preserve Varanasi’s ancient vibration. 

As I strolled up the first lane accessible I was instantly swept into the stream of locals that glides through the place. I was reminded of a quote from Jonah Blank’s book on his time tracing Rama’s footsteps through India, “Perhaps, I ventured, fate is a Borgesian Labyrinth. We are perfectly free to wander through it at will, but the paths we tread are wholly determined by the walls of the maze. We can select any route we please, even change routes from time to time, but we still must follow the corridors wherever they lead.” I spent the next few hours engaged in one of my favorite activities – utterly aimless wandering. The streets were filled with animals and their excrement, sadhus and tourists, soldiers and corpses, and shops selling sweets, textiles, Thali and, of course, chai. That afternoon, I did everything within my power to orient myself within the maze. This proved to be nearly futile; while at the end of my week there I was capable of navigating between three or four locations, any time that I strayed from these routes I would vanish for at least an hour. But a sense of invisibility is a hard thing to find and while many of the places I’ve visited lost their novelty in a matter of days, Varanasi possesses something simply inexhaustible.