Travels: Thailand/India 1997

Travel Letter #4

Varanasi

For me it was quite exiting to be back in Varanasi again, since I had some good memories from last visit when we stayed in an ashram in the slum area with a colourful Dutch priest called Father Francis. Unfortunately he was in Africa at this time, so we decided to stay in Varanasi as ordinary travelers. The city is regarded as the most holy in India, and offers and exotic experience of the bathing gaths (=steps) along the river Ganges were people do their early morning bath, making offerings to the sun, burn their corpses, wash their clothes, do their yoga etc. On a boattrip along the rivershore one morning, we spotted a quite fresh baby corpse floating in the water, as babies are one of the categories that are not cremated. (Quite possible this was a female baby, since they are so expensive to marry away, and Indian parents sometimes do anything to save money.)

As the town of Shiva, there are thousands of small temples and lingam-stones at every street corner. The most important temple is a place of frequent violent clashes between Muslims and Hindus, since the Mogul emperors some 2-300 years ago tore down the original Hindu temple and build a mosque on the same spot. With alleys as narrow as in Neapel, packed with heavy armed soldiers and pilgrims, the atmosphere is naturally quite nervous and hectic. As non-Hindus are not allowed inside many of the temples in India, and especially not in this city, there wasn't much for us to see our learn here.

But suddenly we were lead into a small temple attached to the bigger one. A priest supposedly wanted to show us some divine statues. But before we understood what was going one, he asked us if we had children, gathered our hands in his and mumbled some mantras in a hastily speed. Along the lines we could hear the words 100 rupees, 250 rupees, 500 rupees, 1000 rupees, 1500 rupees. When we finally realized he acted like a automated prayer-teller who would go on until we had no travel budget left, we forced him to stop. I think he was then somewhere between 500 and 1000 rupees, but since he didn't ask for our consent in the first place, we gave him a token 10 rupees note and got out of there as soon as possible with yellow flower garlands around our necks. But at least we are now Hindu-blessed for children!