To find words to describe Varanasi calls for writing skills way beyond those of a blogger. The best I can do is to use Bladerunner as a reference. Ridley Scott may well have taken inspiration from this city, but if he hadn’t, he could have done a lot worse than to hire the art department responsible for creating the other-worldly Manikarnika Ghat.
The smoke hangs in the air here from the fire, which is kept burning 24 hours a day by the untouchable dom. Logs are stacked in grim piles bigger than houses ready for burning the dead. Filthy water gushes from ornate, rusting balconies. The crumbling gothic buildings built one on top of the other are derelict apart from the cows, which wander the empty hallways like zombies and stand motionless in floor to ceiling holes where windows once framed The Ganges from opulent colonial living rooms. Sadhus sit cross-legged on every available inch of flat surface, from the water’s edge, way up to the roofs of the highest buildings, staring blankly across a river, which disappears, swirling into the mist. At dawn, their orange robes and the flames of the funeral pyre were the only bright colours we could make out amid the brown and grey.
For me, Varanasi has always been India. I think the Ghats were the first images I remember seeing, and they’ve stuck with me. The Taj Mahal is a picture post-card. The Gateway of India is a good spot to sit with the family and eat an ice-cream. And Delhi’s Connaught Place is perfect for shopping and a nice meal. But Varanasi is the unashamed, filthy guts of the country. It feels like all the bad you’ve ever heard about India can be found within a couple of blocks of the river. Charming would be one way to describe it. But it’s also sinister, menacing and more than a little bit disturbing.
It’s not unusual to feel out of place in a strange city. But in Varanasi at dawn this morning, I also felt out of time - a few hundred years out of time. We’ve passed through towns we’d describe as medieval, we even spent a hundred kilometres yesterday driving past village after village of houses made of mud and sticks. With its bicycles, carts, hand-drawn wells and gas lamps, the Varanasi I saw this morning certainly never got round to embracing the industrial revolution .
We mis-calculated slightly yesterday. We did in fact have a day in hand to get to Pokhara, but using that day would mean us arriving at the finish after dark. We decided to drive for half a day today, and to overnight halfway, instead of going the full 200km to Gorakhpur. The only catch was that instead of taking the NH29 National Highway via Ghazipur, we were directed wrongly out of Varanasi onto a narrower road. A longer route lay ahead of us, packed with bicycles, motorbikes, cargo carriers and endless villages, which spilled out onto the road. It didn’t help that The Shaw has developed yet another problem, this time with the gear box. Our half-day jaunt turned into another after dark slog.
We’re all exhausted, and with setbacks like this, our on-time arrival in Pokhara on Saturday is now coming down to the wire. All of a sudden, I’ve gone from feeling confident to feeling tense with the pressure of the challenge.
I felt a little uneasy on the road this afternoon. A bit like the feeling you have the morning after waking from a nightmare. I feel lucky to have seen Varanasi. The Ghats were as impressive as I’d imagined them to be. But those images I had as a boy have changed for good, and this dark feeling might stay with me until we leave India.
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