Varanasi Two

We rose at around four in the morning (so that’s about three hours of sleep). I awoke with the stars still over my head. Our goal was to see the famous Ganges River at sunrise so we hastily dressed and walked into the city.



Varanasi is a lot like Lucknow in many ways. The streets are still clogged with rickshaws and signs are put up like wallpaper to hide chipped plaster or grey concrete buildings. But Varanasi has three unique properties, or at least three that I experienced. The first is the narrow lanes. The second is the temples.



The city is a holy city, a place of pilgrimage and there are temples on just about every street. The temples are usually painted red or bright orange and range in size from a closet to a cathedral. Some are little orange fences erected around trees, which are sacred for some reason or other, while others contain carved statues. The little ones tend to have pyramidal roofs while the large ones have these tall, roughly conical towers rich in carving.

We made our way through the grey dawn, stopping briefly at Rohit’s high school. Soon we met with the crowd of people going to do just what we were going to do: see the Ganges. We asked Rohit to explain the reason why it is a holy river but I think we were still both confused. If you're interested I'd advise you to google it and read several different versions of the story and take mine with a vast pinch a salt. If you’re going to go around telling people why the river is supposed to be holy, don’t use this description.

Apparently one of the gods had a kind of water container and in this water container was the sacred Ganges water. A saint prayed that the holy Ganges could come to earth but if the God had poured the entire container onto the earth, the planet would have been destroyed. So instead he poured the water onto Lord Shiva’s (another God) hair. The water dripped down his hair and Lord Shiva allowed the dripping from one of his hairs to touch the earth and it created the Ganges.