(I was going to call this post "You're a better man than I am" so it would jibe with the name of yesterday's post, in case anyone missed the pun. But - assuming you get the pun - you'll have got it already yesterday, and the gesture at humility it contained.)
Today I crossed the Ganges with my student friend. A rowboat took us southeast to the fortress of Ramnagar, where the local maharaja lives. It had a goofy museum, dusty and poorly labeled, with objets from the maharajas' collections - lots of old weapons, an array of vehicles from elephant hausas through chariots to a Ply Mouth 1918, an astrological clock which tells time and date in western and traditional Indian measures, formal portraits, stuffed animals (tigers, crocodiles, a strangely dog-like bear), gifts to the maharaja from other potentates (including a photo with Ronald Reagan), you name it. What made it fun was that we were the only non-Indians there, as evidently in the whole town. This was suddenly the India unscarred by tourism we'd both been mourning in the boat on the way over! An impressive Durga temple nearby to which we went by rickshaw (through a big market with no touts singling us out) might have been in deepest Madhya Pradesh - the place which our group enjoyed most and where we felt the warmth and joy of India most.
All of this just across the river from Varanasi, where - clearly - nobody ever goes, and may it stay that way!
I don't have much else to report, really, except that there is a spreading sweetness as we finish our tour. Arrival in Varanasi is hellacious, but we've been here just long enough to find ways of seeing beyond that (or is it overlooking it) to the weird and wonderful religious bazaar on the ghats, and the constant overlapping of nature/divine and human as people bathe and wash in the Ganga. I didn't do it myself, less because the Ganga is a cemetery than because of pollution from industry upstream. But I was tempted, precisely because it is the same river in which so many bathe.
And of course it was lovely to be with someone I know who cares about things I care about! As we had tea and walked through the rather hippy area of Asi Ghat we bumped into several people he knows, people Indian and foreign I would love, had I but time, to get to know. (Inevitably one of them was from Melbourne.) For the first time I was able to imagine what it would be like to be here as more than a tourist.
And then, as I headed up the ghats (and he headed to get a blood test at a hospital; India's not been nice to him), the light of late afternoon gilding bathers, holy men and strollers alike, the strangest thing happened. Nobody attacked me. No touts, no pan-handling sadhus, no little girls with postcards, no little boys with uncles with silk shops, no people wanting to be photographed or to take a picture with me, and just one drug-dealer. The river side, at least, of Varanasi, showed itself to be part of the joyous India across the river and not just a facade for the frantic and manipulative city behind it.
I was able to feel, fleetingly but sweetly, comfortable here.
