Varanasi: walking through the holy city of death in India – 04/11/2023 – Tourism

For centuries, Hindu pilgrims have come to Varanasi to die, believing it will bring salvation. But when walking aimlessly, writer Pico Iyer realizes that this city of death is actually a city of joy.

Read his story below.

There were fires, six, seven of them, rising through the winter mist. Clusters of men, scarves wrapped around their heads, eyes gleaming in the half-light, were clustered, barefoot, around the flames, moving closer. A nearly naked figure with tangled, dusty dreadlocks down to his waist poked a charred head with a bamboo pole. There was chanting in the distance, bells rattling, furious drumming, and in the hellish darkness of the New Year’s twilight I could make out little more than orange flames far away by the riverside.

How much of this was I imagining? How much was the effect of a “foreign fascination”, or the result of jet lag and displacement? People came towards me out of the mist, covered in ash from head to toe, carrying the three-pronged trident of the holy city’s patron god, Shiva the destroyer.

Passing through the small alleys behind the flames, I came to a labyrinth of narrow streets, in which a spent candle burned in the darkness of a cave with an earthen floor. A boy was sitting on the floor behind a scale.

The cows made their way incessantly down the clogged, manure-strewn alley. Every now and then another group of singers would pass by, carrying a dead body under a golden shroud on a bamboo stretcher, towards the river. I pressed myself against the wall and felt a whisper of mortality.

I groped my way through the total darkness, through the maze of narrow passageways, and another corpse appeared, two women in their best silk saris, walking barefoot through the soft mud towards the holy waters. I followed my intuition through the darkened streets, past small candles flickering in shrines and openings where men whispered sacred syllables.

Then, turning a corner, I came to an intersection and three men stopped in front of me, guns visible at their backs.

It was strange to think that just seventy-two hours ago I had been on the other side of the world, celebrating a peaceful new year in the sunshine. Now there were goats with red marks on their foreheads trotting around, embers burning and lanterns floating across the river in the mist. Along the walls were orange-painted faces, laughing monkey gods, towering sacred phalluses.

Shops everywhere sold sandalwood paste and clarified butter oil for anointing the bodies of the dead, and small clay urns for ashes.

The city of death was once known as Kash”, or City of Light. The English writer Richard Lannoy, who almost lost his soul to Varanasi, called it the City of Darkness and Dreams. In a long and often hallucinatory book, he quoted the Chief Superintendent of Police of what was formerly called Benares, describing “the abduction of women from the temples, prostitution in the name of God, the prevalence of theft on the scene of pilgrims, the cannibalistic customs of the Aghoris, the drunken orgies of false tantrics”.

However, what surprised me the most when I started walking through its streets was that the city of death was, without a doubt, a city of joy. People rushing past me towards the burning pyres, carrying corpses towards the holy river, raised their voices in praise and a great, overwhelming shout of thanks.

Urban India is an immersion in intensity everywhere – a kind of shock therapy – but the holy city inhabits a category of its own. Traffic converged on every inch of the road from all directions, but true to its mystical disregard for reason, the place had no traffic lights. Here and there, an elderly policeman with a mask covering his mouth extended a hopeful arm as cars, cows, bicycles, trucks recklessly passed him. Dogs were sleeping in the middle of a busy street – Varanasi’s Fifth Avenue, I guessed – and men were sprawled (asleep, I hoped) along the side and on the sidewalk. A crowd had gathered in the middle of the street around a man who was dancing, swinging swords.

I knew that the sacred waters should be my first stop, so I left my bags at a hotel and took a car to head towards the ghats (stairs that give access to the river Ganges). In the course of the 20-minute tour, we passed two jubilant processions of corpses, two parades of children.

“This is a very inauspicious time,” a young local man turned from the driver’s seat to warn me (behind him I could just see a mass of bodies and vehicles furious but not moving forward, honking their horns). “It’s called kharmas. Everyone is hidden at this time; no one talks about weddings, stuff like that. Everyone is silent. It’s like a curse placed on the city.”

If this was Varanasi at its quietest, I thought, barely able to hear it as a train also thundered by on a brick bridge above us, I couldn’t imagine it on one of its frequent festival days. “The curse ends January 14th,” my new friend told me. “Then we celebrate.” This was no cause for celebration for someone who was due, like me, to leave on January 13th.

We got off at a Christian church and joined the pile of bodies being carried towards the holy river. Signs along the road spoke of “oldest center for abacus classes” and “glorious ladies seamstresses”, making me wonder if the glory was with the ladies or the sewing. “British School of Languages ​​is now Trounce Education,” I read on another sign — a humorous summary of the end of the Empire.

In Varanasi, half a million people are squeezed into the darkness of a square kilometer of alleys known as the Old City. The result is that some foreign visitors more or less give up, while others wonder if someone has slipped a hallucinogenic substance into their drink.

“Everything is always changing here,” my guide announced when we reached the riverbank, where holy men sat under colorful umbrellas on the ground, chanting and rubbing paste and ashes on their foreheads. “Different colors. Different spirit. Different energy. You have to be on high alert when you come to my city.”

This I had already noticed.

We started walking along the river, dodging rubbish and excrement on all sides, and we passed a nearly naked man looking down at us from the shelter of a small fire in a hut.

“Is he meditating?” I asked.

“All to him are ashes,” was the answer. “These sadhus are very fond of living with cremation. They don’t wear clothes like we do. They don’t do anything like people who live in the material world. They want to live in a world of ashes.”

A little further down, we almost bumped into a man in a bright blue robe and turban who was making what sounded like jokes, as if he were chatting in the neighborhood barbershop (although, here in Varanasi, the neighborhood barbershop—like the cemetery , the church and the zoo — it was on the street, open to all).

“Laughing yoga master,” explained my guide, and he himself burst out laughing, as if abruptly propelled by a sudden illumination.

A huge, bloated cow slowly floated by. We staggered aboard a small rocking boat as, on the beach, a handful of handsome young men in elaborate gilded pantaloons held five-flame oil lamps and began to practice the purification by fire they would ritually perform that night. Other boats carried pilgrims to the other dark shore, a long, empty sandbar as far as I could tell. Fires burned to the north and south, and the air was thick with the smell of carnations and coal fires.

“Only in this city, sir, do you see 24-hour cremation,” said the boatman, as if he were talking about a convenience store. In other cities, crematoriums are traditionally placed outside the city gates to the south. Here, they burn at the center of all life.

I went back to my hotel to take it all in. “Everything is in flux,” my young Virgil (Dante’s guide in The Divine Comedy) told me as we walked along the river. “Everything is a constant succession of futures. Nothing remains the same.”

This text was originally published in

*Pico Iyer is the author of several books on travel. This account was adapted from his most recent book, The Half Known Life (the half-known life, in free translation), not yet published in Portuguese.