In the days since I've left this city, I've come to realize how indescribable it really is. With so much going on, representation is going to be inherently reductive. This is why people travel, I think, to experience an extraordinary place directly, without the dilution of mediation.
A shopkeeper tells me there are few Americans who visit, relative to other much smaller countries like Israel and Finland. "Which country?" young and old hustlers ask. "USA. America." Consistently returns hushed responses and sometimes a "Very nice country. Very powerful country." The Bush Administration has just green-lighted India's plans to build nuclear power plants. "What currency you use?" the old train conductor asked me. "The Dollar." He lays his arms on the bunk above my head. "I have never seen a dollar. My wife never see. May I have a dollar to show my wife?" Supposedly only 5% of Americans have passports.
The Varanasi experience is like a great ledger, with credits and debits in balance. On the credit side, there are the bathers, who cleanse soul and skin in the holy river, who grab at and dunk in the water. An ambiance, ancient and dark, pervades the Ghats and Old City. The treasury of The Golden Temple, with eight thousand kilos of gold casing the spired roof, protects an endless stream of pilgrims that circumambulate around the dank inner temple ramparts, defying notions of mortal time. Likewise the stores and leased machinery of the silk shops, punch-card patterns mechanically spun into iridescent pattern to the rhythm of the weavers foot pedal, stacks of textile lining every tourist shop dozens deep. And the towering stacks of logs and tree trunks down by the Ghats, burned night and day under the corpses of lucky Hindus and replenished from the forests around Hampi in South India, the trees around Varanasi long, long ago felled.
The business of Varanasi is spirituality. Religious pilgrims have been coming for decades, and the pushy Brahman temple keepers and street peddlers have perfected their script for visitors. The debit side also includes the tourists who gawk and photograph at the funeral pyres, against an explicit prohibition. It's unfortunate, but this is severe condition...the slightest interest or acknowledgment can trigger a very persistent hassle.
But underneath the business side of the city, the tourist catcalls and din and spectacle of tourist-purposed religious ceremonies, there is an Old City -- still congregating in the lightless alleyways and local squares when the sun goes down, between the Muslim If-tar and dinner call. Wondering away from the tourist alleys, I am immersed in Old Country life, but urban. Children shriek and play in the narrow passages, in the dirt and under the roaming cows, families open their low hung doors and hovel windows, emitting warm creases of light in the blue dark. The sense of family is palpable. As is the sense of fully accounted for ways of being, of dense impenetrable relationships to place, culture and kind. Tourism, with its promise of self-discovery through world exploration, of modernism and self-determination has not gained a foothold on the ancient cobblestone squares in this world. And yet, the wholeness of this subculture seems to beacon a better life than one without familial obligation, economic mobility and the possibility to explore witness other worlds..
In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz writes
It's not true that people who are rich are happier than those who are subsisting. There have been a lot of studies across every age and society, and the result is that additional wealth contributes virtually nothing to happiness. The things that matter most the well-being and happiness are close relations. The single most important determinant of how happy people are, how satisfied people are with their lives, is how good their relations are with their friends, their family and the members of their community. The second most significant factor is to be able to engage in meaningful work.
The thing to notice about close relations is that they're not liberating at all. What it means to be in that kind of close relation is that you are in a network of mutual obligation. These things hem you in enormously & yet contribute more than anything else to people's sense of well-being...
Families spill into the street to do last minute shopping in the vegetable baskets below the busy, exhaust-spewing traffic while the store lights dangle above the din. The city is vibrant, a spark of urban life at this last moment of day.
