Varanasi One

I recently returned from my trip to Varanasi, one of the most famous and holy cities of India.

Rohit, Melody and I left work early at four thirty and took a bicycle rickshaw to the train station. The three train stations I’ve seen in India all look relatively similar. In Canada if you see someone sleeping on the ground in a public place they’re a bum, a hobo, one of the lowest rung of society. In India it’s a perfectly common thing. In the station hundreds of people sleep on thin blankets or newspapers. The stations are crowded, dirty and incredibly stinky right near the tracks.

The trains in India have sections just like in a plane. I’ve heard plenty of stories about the third class coaches, in which people are packed so close that they can’t move, even to use the bathroom. Imagine standing in one place, surrounded by people and burdened with luggage for eight hours. Suffice it to say we took the first class seats. The first class coaches have ample legroom and air-conditioning. It was Rohit’s first time in first class and he found it very cold. We noticed that all the people in first class were relatively heavy, compared to the people in third class. In India having a certain amount of weight is sometimes seen as a sign of wealth, since only rich people can afford to eat that much.




We spent most of the six-hour train ride playing pictionary, which resulted in much hilarity. We left Lucknow at about six and arrived in Varanasi at around midnight. On the train we had only gotten about forty-five minutes of sleep so we were understandably tired as we stepped into Varanasi.

It was midnight. We hopped on a rickshaw and quickly left the busy train station behind. The streets were almost empty. After a while we got out on foot, and passed from the wider streets into the narrow lanes. These were entire neighbourhoods of skinny streets winding on for kilometres. The flagstone ground was uneven, the buildings old and geometric. We finally came to Rohit’s family house.

Rohit has an extremely lovely family, and he considered everyone in his neighbourhood as a member of his family. In his house we met his father, mother, sister, sister-in-law, and brother. We had dinner of chipatis (round flat bread), a vegetable dish and yoghurt. I was exhausted at this point and eventually we settled down to sleep on the flat rooftop at about one thirty in the morning. In India the rooftops are made to stand on, with railings and clothing lines. It was beautifully cool up there and I was overjoyed to see a large amount of stars for the first time since I had arrived in India. In Lucknow only a few stars can pierce the bowl of smog that the city sits in. They had spread blankets on the floor for us and I slept with my dupatta (the obligatory scarf part of my outfit) wrapped around me as a mosquito net. I expected to be bitten but it was worth it to go to sleep with stars overhead.

I got twenty-nine mosquito bites.