I long to visit Varanasi. Einar, one of my college roommates, studied at Banaras Hindu University and returned to DePauw a changed man. During his 1896 world tour, Mark Twain wrote: “Banaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” I’m eager to travel to the city and environs.

As I read my journal though, Varanasi produces the most contradictory feelings of my whole experience.

On the one hand, I am often angrier in Varanasi than any other place or time in India. My anger may have resulted due to our traveling on our own; my anger may have resulted from the wearing down and exhaustion of seven weeks of travel.

Numerous experiences create and reinforce feelings of frustration. Here are some that I remember. The taxi driver and his friend who transports us from the airport to the hotel does not want to accept the agreed upon price; instead, they want three times the amount. The rickshaw driver who agrees to take us back to our hotel for twenty rupees, but upon arrival at the hotel demands twice that amount. The young boy who shows us around Varanasi’s old city  for an hour would not accept the amount upon which we agreed. He also wants more. The young man who appears at our hotel with $100 in silk products we had bought from his family. He wants me to pay for his rickshaw from the hotel back to his family’s business. The Nanji Bookstore who, when we return a second time to purchase a volume of the Cultural Heritage of India series, tells Carl that the day before, Carl has been mischarged by one hundred rupees the day. More gracious than I, Carl agrees to pay fifty rupees of that amount. The managers at the Taj Ganges Hotel which have agreed to our price in writing decide as we were checking out that the price was insufficient. We are to pay more!

On the one hand, I am often amazed at the sights, sounds, and smells around me. With the Ganga at high flood stage, there is more movement and life than I expect. Carl and I walked the alley ways and the ghats continually. Sometimes there seems to be only room for the wandering cow or dog. Frequently, the streets are lined with merchants sitting on pallets trying to convince any passerby to purchase silk. Then there is the walk of the ghats at sunrise and sunset. Ethereal.

Given my interest in religious communities and their sense of the sacred, I am overwhelmed with Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu religious actions and places. We visit temple after temple. We peer into a pool to try to see Parvati’s “lost earing.” We visit the “Mother India” temple because of the large sculptured map of India which is in the center of the temple. With so many temples, one feels as though the city of Varanasi itself is a temple, a sacred space. Which it is for Hindus! More about that in another blog!