Children laughed and played nearby while men loaded bodies onto funeral pyres. Dogs lay near warm coals from old fires to keep themselves warm. Cell phones rang and people talked and it felt a long way from holy. The other side of the Ganges seems to have no development whatsoever, and perhaps that is by design. As night came and the other bank vanished in mist, no one could say where the river ended, or where the bodies might go. The Ganges became a river Styx to let loved ones drift into the afterlife. Lit by the fires of the dead, a man near the water’s edge began to wail.
Still we sat, letting an uneasy darkness creep over us. Something at the ghat felt like voodoo. It felt like dark magic.
“
| — |
Monsterbeard: Varanasi - Part 1
I’m still fondling and hoarding my words from this city, not yet sure what I’m supposed to build with them. It still feels very dark and very light and totally unknowable.
I love when I read something that has me nodding like this did, nodding like a witness and saying yes. it happened just like this.
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“Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love, and devotion.
These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us, Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India.”
― Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
I read The White Tiger while we were gone and I can’t stop thinking about it and the complexities and layers and facades and reverence and disparities and traditions and anger of India. I’m in the middle of another Adiga now and there’s the same sticky silkiness of a spider’s web. Can you even fathom writing so well, so ensnaringly?
Reentry to Western reality is a pair of heavy boots. Things that are keeping me grateful this week:
Oh right - that we were lucky enough to get away at all;
LA finally found fall while we were gone. A cold open night window and a daytime sweater feels pretty damn good;
The joy of wading through a galaxy of pictures and finding one that brings back a day, a moment like a snap. I can almost still feel all these small strong faithful hands at my back, spinning and shuffling me aside on their way to temple. Can almost still hear the pedestrian river and collective chant and billow of smoke that separated us.
I still have this right here.
