24 Hours in India

24 hours in India-

I once again took a local (AKA crowded and miserable) bus 8 hours from Pokhara in Nepal to the border town of Sunauli. From there I had to take a bus 2.5 hours to Gorakhpur, followed by a 10 hour train to Varanasi. I had been repeatedly warned about the intensity of India and Varanasi in particular. It was meant to make the chaos of Katmandu seem like an inflatable bouncy castle in comparison. I was sharpened and prepared and expecting the unexpected.

The border and immigration was unbelievably seamless, but I knew I was in a different place when I got on my first Indian bus and an old relic of a man with one eye puts on his glasses to see me better. Crossing the other side into India is like becoming entangled in a grey curtain. Peddlers are more aggressive, the people less friendly. The surrounding landscape was immediately more barren and sad. The brown polluted horizon took up 3/4 of the sky and so thick that you could look straight into the sun. The depressing twilight of dusk lasted about 2 hours.

I had a 3 hour layover from bus to train and I was happy to have the time to figure out the predictably backwards train system. It took me those 3 hours to reach about a 30% confidence that I knew what was going on. Me and the 3 other foreigners formed a small alliance. We consisted of a pair of old Russians, a long bearded hippie Asian type guy in his 30’s and me. literally the only 4 non Indians in the entire station of several thousand. We all had 2nd class AC reservations, but were just happy to get on the right train and take what we got. Luckily we did get on the right train and what we got was the basic open sleeper cabins. I lost track if the Asian type guy, but saw the Russians get bumped from their seats a few times. It’s midnight at this point and I’ve been traveling already for 19 hours. I crawled into the coffin size top of a row of 3 bunks, used my shoes as a pillow, bear hugged my backpack, pulled my hat over my eyes and didn’t move for 9 hours. Though at one point someone did try to move me, when they could see the look on my face that I wasn’t having it and they moved on. I woke up dazed and confused from the coffin, but quickly regained my bearings.

Thankfully I had Nepal to act as a buffer before India. I couldn’t imaging coming here without haven’t had recent exposure to different cultures. There is poverty and tragedy in a 360 degree view. Bulls, cows, buffalo and goats in the streets outnumber people. Men and women of every age group sleeping wherever they can find a spot. People with deformities, disfigurements, amputations, dragging themselves on the ground and begging for money. The indisputable smell of urine. As if that weren’t enough it’s the peak of summer. My first afternoon it was 118 degrees fahrenheit with about 98% humidity.

When I was in Venice I saw a used syringe in the canal which to me was the quintessential filth. Like a perfect symbol for as bad as a waterway gets. There can’t POSSIBLY be anything worse than that!… After 5 minutes of walking around at the ghats of the Ganges River I see a floating dead body. These “ghats” (big steps were people get in to bathe) have different meaning and uses. Two of the main ghats are used for public cremations and having seen this in Nepal I wasn’t surprised by it. This dead body was different, because it had nothing to do with the cremations, only the river.

The city of Varanasi can be looked at as one giant hospice center. Because the Ganges is viewed as a holy burial leading to a greater reincarnation people literally come here from all over India, to die. Since poverty is so wide spread a large portion of the population cannot afford the wood necessary to cremate the body, but that doesn’t stop the holy burial, what happens is that the family sneaks out in the cover of night and simply dumps the recently departed into the river. This body I saw floating around was exactly that. I’ll avoid the description except to say you can tell they’d been dead for a while. It wasn’t a pretty sight. I can’t get over the complete indifference on many levels. First that there is no governing body to remove PEOPLE from the river and since nobody claimed them they are just left there to rot until they sink to the bottom and become slowly decaying food. Second is that people are BATHING!.. BRUSHING THEIR TEETH!! Kids are running and DIVING head first off the ghat steps into the rive. A group of 4 kids were playing in the water within 10 feet of the body. It’s something you can never forget… This is my first day in India.

Bob