Confused Understanding

The sign on the Embassy was just for show, so after one last day of Kathmandu we slept on the pavement again. This time we blatantly demonstrated our ability to learn lessons and slept comfortably in our sleeping bags with heads perched on down coats like clouds. After picking up our ludicrously expensive and obnoxiously hard-to-get stickers in our passports, the journey begins. Night bus to Sonauli, morning Sonauli to Gorackhur, afternoon Varanasi and 27 hours after Kathmandu we're smack in the heart of India.

India is plastered on everything from textiles to newspapers to philosophies. The name invigorates the mind just by its sound. Ideas of its mystique still misguide millions. The fountain of the wisdom of the East lines the minds of most, but defies true understanding. Any individual's conception of this place, many would agree, is mere illusion. And among travelers especially, ideas of India are trapped in minds still not wholly able to comprehend, yet visibly awestruck. "You're going to Varanasi? Magic. Just Fucking Magical. You're in for it..."

And all of it is true - we are here in the heart of irrationality. A land where perhaps thousands of sacred cows sleep on main streets as rickshaw drivers struggle to move their hundreds of pounds of cargo around them; and where pigs rummage through city trash. The urinals here are open to the street; and more often than not a gutter will do just fine. But more than a dirty, uncivilized city, Varanasi is simply a different mentality. When a Westerner arrives and says "ugh...how could you live like this?" he should really look for the antithesis of his reality. How can HE live so clean? Why must he have his neatly arranged culture, with its monotheistic snobbery and its "pure" water clear of pollutants? To challenge the very idea of your existence, drop yourself in India.

However, a brief sojourn on the banks of the Ganges will try the most open soul. Dead cows, pigs, goats float by. A quadrapolegic corpse decays on the banks near the drinking water intake. At the burning ghat, piles of wood barely conceal sizzling flesh on bodies returning to pure carbon to be thrown in the current. Sewers empty the soiled discharge upstream from bathing worshippers. You see, the Ganges is holy. It is pure in a purely Eastern sense though the epitome of impure in our Western minds. We see only disease, filth, decay, and the end of life. India sees a gateway, a ghat, to a new world. It sees rebirth and a cleanliness of the divine. Rationality has no place in Varanasi, so please leave it at home while you bathe with corpses.

However, the challenge remains to cross the rift of philosophies; and to cross one must first truly want to cross. I, however, have perhaps an overdose of rationality embedded on my mind. That, along with stories of other travelers feeling more violently ill than they've ever felt just for a drop of the Water Ganga in their mouths, means I will not partake in the local ritual. I will not be among those lucky souls said to attain Nirvana by losing their lives in this holy city.

After our first dose of cows and cremations, we lost ourselves in the Islamic section of town and were quickly sucked into a silk factory. We sat on a mattress with the owner as he threw silk cloths of all colors and designs across the floor in a flurry of sensory overload. Blues, greens, purples, reds flying across the room like a technicolor dream screamed to our eyes that we were where we thought we were going after all: India. Of course, the India of silks and spices is only one of many misconceptions of this land: evidenced by the fact that curry as an all-encompassing term does not exist here. Rather, it is a British invention.

In fact, it is both easy to ignore and hard to forget that the British ruled this land for centuries as English cars still honk their way through glowing wedding parades drumming in the night streets. Thus, it seems interesting to us that we might enter this sub-continent of confusion on Thanksgiving: the day celebrating British in America alongside the natives. Let's be perfectly clear: How many Indians did YOU have your thanksgiving dinner with this year? Check and mate.

Onward we go...