In the Arms of Mother Ganga

Susannah: One of the things that affluent westerners find uncomfortable about India is that the things we like to hide away and forget about are left exposed to the senses: poverty, disease, death, trash, sewage. Nowhere is this more true than in Varanasi (Benares), the ancient city of the gods on the banks of the sacred Ganges.

Mixed in with the sadhus, pilgrims and flower vendors along the ghats are horribly deformed beggars, people shitting in corners, dogs and cows with bloody wounds. The astounding thing is that people are completely unfazed; they laugh and gossip, their children run around barefoot and play happily with kites made of colored paper plucked from the piles of trash. Life goes on.

Our first evening in the city we walked past the burning ghats, open-air crematoria where people from all over India bring their deceased family members to spread their ashes in the holy waters. Watching the brightly shrouded bodies placed on the fires, the sparks spraying into the inky sky, I was overwhelmed by the nearness of death. In the next alley over, happy music blared out of the shops while customers haggled loudly over candles, miniature deities and other trappings of Hindu worship.

Early the next morning, we hired a small boat to look at the ghats from a different perspective. Thousands of people were bathing in the holy water, some praying as they did so, others splashing each other playfully. Rowing by the bathers, we passed two floating corpses lodged between moored boats, then watched a charred torso drift by.

Just as deities of both creation and destruction are worshiped and understood to have their place, life on the banks of the Ganga embraces the myriad joys and pains of existence.