Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Aurangzeb, for obvious reasons. Today Benares may be the oldest
city on earth. Even if it is not, it is unquestionably the holiest place
on earth for a Hindu. Every Hindu yearns to visit that one place of
pilgrimage, and hopes to die there, too. For those who do die here
are said not to go straight to heaven as a Christian might wish, but
to finally escape the wheel of birth and death forever. No one seems
to know who said this or where it is written, yet all believe it. The
Hindu views heaven as a place where the good are punished before
they return once more to this great stage of fools.
If one city can ever represent anything so vast and so sensationally
heterogeneous as Hindu India, Benares is that city. Kashi, it is called
in the legends, where the very first king built the very first city in a
forest dense with sacred kusha grass, a 'City of Light,' a 'City of
Knowledge.' It is Siva's city, entirely dedicated to him, and he is
believed to live here still, watching over all the two thousand-odd
temples dedicated to him. And Kashi still feels as if Siva lives there:
it is fierce, full of death, austere yet grandly beautiful, sinister, if not
dangerous, and singularly attractive.
During my first night there, walking the maze of pitch-dark or
blazingly overlit alleys and bazaars weaving down toward the ghats,
the tiers of long stone steps leading to the Ganges, I felt as if I had
entered a zone linked invisibly but tangibly to another world, a realm
more subtle and more powerful than ours.
Figures wearing long, grotesque white hoods - a sort of Ku Klux
Klan minidress - thrust oarlike poles into the blazing funeral pyres
on the burning ghats, the riverside cremation grounds, shifting a
sizzling human thigh to where the flames were more intense. Skulls
popping. Bodies wrapped in shrouds, like mummies, awaiting their
turn. The shrouds white - except the red ones, which identify
women who have died before their husbands. The fires burning
night and day; the supply of corpses endless. Shielded from the
heat, the final fire, these stokers in their hoods seem nonchalant
about their job. Huddled groups of friends and relatives watching
husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, even children - sorrowful, stunted
little bundles - go forever, purified by flame into ash, the ash then
pouring into the soul of Ganga Mata, Mother Ganges. The goddess
