Impressions on the banks

• Last Updated: June 11. 2008 3:07PM UAE / June 11. 2008 11:07AM GMT

Indian holy men have early morning tea at Dasaswamedh ghat in Hinduism’s holiest city. AFP

I have been strolling along the Ganga in India, as the river is known, for little more than an hour when Matru begins telling me about karma. A wiry old man with ochre-yellow eyes and nine days of fuzzy stubble, what he really wants is for me to visit his silk shop. But for now karma is the topic of conversation.

Before us, covered by cloth and saffron garlands, lies a dead body on a wooden litter. I saw them earlier, someone’s mother, father, brother, sister, husband or wife, borne unceremoniously atop an auto-rickshaw through the tangle of traffic in the streets behind me to Hari Chandra ghat.

Matru launches into an interpretation of the Hindu way of death. “You see, when a person dies they are burnt. Their body is left to the river, and perhaps the fish will eat the ashes. Then the fish is caught, another person eats the fish, and all begins again. It is karma. My shop is just back there, just five minutes, very good prices.” To our side, a dhobi wallah rhythmically beats out his own mantra, thumping wet clothes against a slab of stone. I thank Matru and walk on.

The stereotype of an ancient metropolis, Varanasi is a maze of alleyways patrolled by vigilant mongooses, not to mention a few stray dogs and the occasional sacred cow. At the core of Varanasi, however, are the ghats, gateways between the temporal life of the urban jungle and the goddess embodied in the river Ganges.

Each ghat, a series of steps that lead down the bank to the water, has its own character, its own being. Some are well built – others are not. The Ram Singh ghat is overgrown and ruled over by squawking green parakeets. Another is populated by a herd of water buffalo; local women assemble mosaics of their dried dung to use as fuel and building material.

All human life is here too. In the river Ganges, people bathe, lathering themselves in a millennium-old ritual with brand new brand-name packet soap. There are scrawny youngsters, leaping and diving; portly businessmen who shuffle sedately along, trying to hide their bellies; and the holy men, their movements crafted, deliberate and serene.

At five in the evening, as the dusk draws in and the light over the river fades to a beige shadow, the bells of the temple at Kedar ghat begin to toll. I take off my shoes and, led by my guide, a boy called Manoj I met selling postcards, I step within the temple. The floor is moist on the soles of my bare feet, water from the goddess river herself, I assume.

I am greeted by a cacophony of bells and drums as the devout observe their duties. Murmuring their prayers at shrines and alcoves set into Sanskrit-inscribed walls, they bathe effigies of the sacred cow. The temple is a world of its own, sealed off from the outside by the clanging drama of the ritual.

Outside, another puja ceremony begins on the steps just off the river’s edge. Accompanied by Manoj and other boys on the tabard and gongs, the Brahmin wafts incense and commences the ritual of the flaming lamps, his face a mask of rapt concentration. He concludes by casting petals into the river below, where the twinkle of candlelights borne in flimsy paper coracles shimmers against the surface.

Another day arrives. The best time to take a boat ride – the finest way to view the ghats and the lives and deaths that go on around them – is in the early morning, but during winter the Ganges is veiled in fog. The boatmen still call out to me, a hundred Charons desperate to earn their 50 rupees (Dh4) on India’s Styx, but I opt again to walk.

I see only one “real” sadhu, a naked holy man covered from head to toe in ash. Though the idea is to imitate the appearance of Shiva, one of Hinduism’s trinity of major deities, he looks disturbingly corpse-like. The sadhus are indeed a dying breed, my escort Manoj tells me. “Every year we see less and less,” he confirms. “I don’t know why. Perhaps it is karma.”

At the largest ghat of all, Dasaswamedh, I am approached by yet another bearded eccentric but his intentions seem more altruistic. “Do not give us money,” he says, pointing to the line of ragged children seated by his feet. “But if you can, go to the market and bring rice and dal. I will use these to feed the children. It will be good karma.”

Everyone in Varanasi tells you about karma, and yes, it does verge on cliché.

By the time I depart, the city seems like nothing more than a series of interlinked impressions, like a stained-glass window seen up close – all parts and no whole, at least not one that I can understand. But there is something here, something intangible, a way to connect – however briefly – with the India that exists in western imaginations. It’s all part of the picture, something that I accept I don’t comprehend – but something that at least now I’ve seen.

On the waters behind me as I leave, a batch of candles has clumped together into a flotilla of flickering lights. As the boats row steadily upstream and the last body of the day burns out its pyre, still the boys of the ghats bat their cricket balls oblivious to the sound of the bells and their kites flit about the sky like bats enjoying the cool evening air. Distant silhouettes of hawkers and their donkeys fade into the evening haze and the broad slow ebb of the Ganges flows on.