Varanasi (Benares)

“An old woman with an umbrella was sitting very still on one of the park benches. She has the kind of stillness that draw attention to itself.”

 

“There’s a dead body on top of that car. There’s a dead body on top of that car. There’s a dead body on top of that car.”

She keeps repeating it, I don’t know why she keeps repeating it. Here it appears to be a game. A dangerous combination of leap frog and chicken. Pass as many cars as you can. My hair is wild, my skin buffeted by the wind, but I keep the window completely down. I want to feel it all. The smoky air stings my eyes and I can feel each and every one of my eyelashes press against my eyelids with the force of the air pushing against them, but I refuse to roll up the window, not even an inch. We are all buffeted and blown about by the sounds and the colors and the people and the presence and the pressure of it all. And then we aren’t. We are quietly floating away from waving children, clinging to the shore, demanding pens that we don’t even possess to give them. We recede from the bank like a wave, not present here. We aren’t present here. We float by flickering candles, perched precariously on the water. It appears haunted, this place. A dim cemetery world, where water dampens sound and feeling. But not the kind of haunting that occurs in movies, all secret and frightening. This haunting is comfortable, it is acknowledged. It is accepted for what it is. I am in Varanasi, the city of the dead. Only those lucky enough to have made it here to die with in it are allowed to be cremated on the shores. I am drifting on the Holy river Ganga, the last resting spot of those lucky bodies. The air is smoke and citrus. My mind is smoke and citrus.

We are on a roof top, doing yoga and passing around a bottle of rum from Mustang, or Kathmandu. Some place that has no footing here. I hate rum.  I acknowledge this city’s ghosts and greet them, along with the living, who are much more troubling. It is Halloween in Varanasi and I am glad to be here.

I stand on the same roof top the next morning and watch the 20 monkeys on the next roof over as they clean each other. Muslim prayers resonate grainily from loud speakers. Boats glide through the haze, as thick as the water. It is the morning of November first. In DC it is Halloween night. Friends are in costumes, drinking at parties. I can feel the bass of the music. I can sense the sudden fear, the tightening of drunken tendons, the beating of blood suddenly doubling in veins, when a knuckle comes down against the door. UPD? No, just another reveler. Fears dissipate in laughter. Come in, grab a cup. It is a situation and feeling I know so well and right now I am so far removed from it.

Sarnath

“Lisboa is a city which has a relationship with the visible world like no other city. It plays a game. Its squares and streets are paved with patterns of white and colored stones, as if, instead of being roads, they were ceilings.”

We take jeeps to Sarnath. I turn the iPod up to match the physical volume of the driving. I like to go fast, I like this game today. Gypsy punk roars into my ears as I watch women in Saris, side-saddle on motorcycles, passing rickshaws. Sarnath feels dusty. It is not that it necessarily is dusty, but it feels that way. Like the sunlight is filtered.

Today I walked around the Deer Park, where the Buddha gave his first sermon after reaching enlightenment. The crumbling stupas were decorated with marigold garlands and rose petals. Smelled so good, I wanted to drink the air. There were actually deer in the deer park. Go figure.

At night, we follow our Tibetan teachers and watch a Burmese parade, trying Betel nut. It is like chewing tobacco, but a nut. It is mixed with coconut, and paste, and tons of other stuff, and wrapped in a leaf. It turns your mouth red and causes you to spit every ten seconds. Everywhere in India, liquid red lines score walls from spitters of Betel nut. Julie puts the wadded leaf in her mouth and bites down. Her face contorts, immediately showing her feelings. She can’t hide anything, this girl. Now we are laughing, and she is laughing while still making faces, chewing in slow motion. In another 3 minutes she announces that she loves it, the sounds she makes are something resembling words, as her mouth is still full, and now slightly numb.

Bodhgaya

“When she wept, she tried to turn away from me.  This may have been to spare me, but it was also because her tears took her back to other times, before I had been thought of.  While she was crying, I waited, like you wait for a long train to pass at a level crossing.”

I am in Bihar, the poorest state in India. Ingoglia told me not to come here. It was uncharacteristic, him giving me travel advice, so it stuck in my mind. But here I am. For where else would the Buddha have obtained enlightenment, than under a tree in the poorest part of India? Alex spilled her tea all over me. I laughed so hard I almost cried. Too hard, too close to tears. We were never given a chance to cry. Not this time though. No, that would be too much. I was my pants off and climb back in the back of the car. I am on the edge, in the back, so my body sinks towards the middle. I have to balance on one ass cheek to avoid laying on the person in the middle. After four or six hours, my side aches from this maneuver.

Back in the cars. Music reminds me of books that remind me of life. I like that. I live in these realms of memories, of things I haven’t experienced, but know anyway. You can see how enlightenment could be attained here. It must have been lovely, once. It still is, in the park. But it is full of so many poor people, who follow us, won’t leave us alone, some how know where we are staying. The tree though. It is a great-great-great-great-etc grand daughter of that Buddha’s tree, and it exudes peaceful contemplation. Such a lovely, peaceful tree, surrounded by such poor, desperate people, who follow us for streets, clinging to our ankles in a disturbed crab crawl that does not belong to the human form, involving missing limbs and contorted features. Please, just stop talking to me, crawling towards me, sending me such destitution.

Rajgeer

“This is not a city, my boy, which fucks itself up.  That’s why I’m here.”

Okay, who slipped me the pills? This place is a mother fucking trip. It is known for its use of horse carts and its non-use of cars. These are not modern, somehow cool, horse carts. These are pieces of plywood held together with what appears to be betel nut juice and the anachronistic dreams of tourists. They dip and creak when you step on them. Much like the hotel beds. It is quite obvious that the sheets have never been washed. And either some murders or tantric blood letting rituals have gone down in the rooms. Nate swears the shit stain on the wall moved when he was asleep. Power surges cause our one florescent light to turn itself on and flicker through the night, as well as making the fan go into hyperspeed, threatening to fly off the ceiling. The mosquitos appear to have ingested some uranium that has made them giant and loud and super human. They buzz around our heads, making sleep impossible. The one road is lined with solar lights. Sounds cool. Wrong, my friend. This is the height of the acid-tacular experience. The lights line both sides and the middle of the mile and a half long road, surrounded on both sides with jungle, and absoultey no other lights. The lights are red. Bright red. They blink about every .5 seconds. Imagine that the only thing you can see is a mile and a half of blinking red lights. With the occasion horse cart coming out of fucking nowhere. After wandering in a daze through this psychedelic maze, we come to a tea shop where a man speaks to us in what he assumes in English. It most assuredly is not. We smile and nod, and suddenly salty boiled eggs are placed before us. No thanks. Then raisins. Sure, i’ll have a raisin. “Maggot in the raisins! Maggot in the raisins!” Ok, no more raisins. The waiter walks us all the way back to our hotel, speaking god knows what. He thinks he is coming in with us. How to ditch someone who doesn’t speak the same language? Conundrum. We get it across. He pees on the lawn and shakes our hands. Immediately. His hands are wet. Great. Let me go wash it in the bath room without a light, with the toilet without a flushing mechanism, in the mosquito swamp, next to the empty betel-nut stained elevator shaft. I turn on the tap in the morning and am surprised that blood doesn’t flow from it.

Kushinagar

“There is a man holding a megaphone, so he must have been the voice of God. Bystanders claimed they saw angels flying up and down the park. They must have been attached to wires, I saw one laying on the lawn with a broken arm. So I called 911. Well, that’s one less founded opinion, one more cause for a dispute, so the street filled like a basin up with cameras and their crews, and they washed away the rumors leaving just the concrete truth. It was a spectacle… no, I… I mean a miracle.”

We are on a train. Or we are in a zoo. We are the main attractions. In Nepal they look, in India they stare. There are 40 people crowded around us, staring blankly and taking pictures. We get a police escort. We are at the spot of the Parinirvana. Thai pilgrims tilt their heads while prostrating, making sure the camera gets their good side. They are lead in mass, by a monk with a megaphone. So much merit, so little time.  I have no right to judge them.  But I do anyway. 

Lumbini

“You said you’d let your hair down, you got enough to go around, said you’d let your hair down, but you’ve been telling me that since the day we met. She’s laughing like a choir girl, she’s laughing like a choir girl, when she doubles over, sounds like halleluiah.”

I ride on top of the bus, shaking out my hair, freeing it to the force of the wind. Do with me what you will. Every time we pass another buss with passengers on top, we all mutually, spontaneously scream. It is an ecstatic recognition of shared knowledge. We know the feeling of the wind in our hair, and bugs hitting our faces at high speeds. We share the knowledge of deep bruises on our asses and lower backs where the metal rods dig in. We know to duck when a low tree branch approaches. We know the songs of birds and the setting of the sun as no one else does. All this we scream to each other, reaching out our arms, although we know we will never touch.

We almost weren’t let back into Nepal. I was almost attacked by dogs in a hotel stupa. This is how it goes.

Kathmandu

“Sally was a 15 year old girl from Nebraska.  Gypsies were passing through her little town.  They dropped something on the road, she picked up.  Cultural revolution right away began.”

My host family didn’t know I was leaving. Somehow they conjured a present out of nowhere. Ama-la again tells me that it is good that my hair is past my shoulders. Her daughter, Tsechok, she is always cutting her hair. No good. Hair must be past your shoulders. This is the first time my hair has been past my shoulders in seven years. She tells me she feels like I am her daughter. So how can I not agree when they ask me to take some incense to America for her sister? Sure, just a little package of incense, no problem. Except it is like 80 packages of incense. And shoes. All wrapped carefully and sewn in to a bag. They tell me to put it into my suitcase and then give me a lock for it. I really hope I have not just been made a drug smuggler for a Tibetan family.

I am in Delhi, waiting for the night bus to Dharamsala. I love you all.

OM MANI PADME HUM