Varanasi; formerly Benares and still called that by some of the locals. Aside from an enlightening boat ride down the septic Ganges, and a brief tour of some of the cultural highlights of the city, Richard and I did nothing with our time here: we were too exhausted.
The Ganges was really quite something, lined with ghats - stairways down from the street to the water's edge - and crowded with people even as we headed there at sunrise. The Ganges is a holy river, and dramatically important in the Hindu religion; so much so that it is a place of pilgrimmage much like Sarnath is for Buddhists. It is so sad to know that the river is dead. It is so polluted that nothing can live in it anymore, yet still people come down to the river to wash themselves and their clothes and their pots and pans. It horrified me to imagine what I might be eating out of at our next meal.
The Ganges is also where people come to die, and to be cremated. In our boat, Richard, myself and a Japanese salaryman on a week's vacation, we sat in awe as we watched a blazing funeral pyre, the fire burning bright red and orange against the blue tones of the pre-sunrise dawn. "No photographs," our guide whispered, waving his hand as I raised my camera. I nodded and looked on in awed silence, as a burning mound was pushed into the river and I realised that it wasn't simply a mound, it was a person who used to be.
Time passed slowly for us in our hotel in Varanasi, on the long train ride to Delhi, and for the last couple of days we spent there before returning home via Dubai, yet at no stage were we bored. We played games, word games and geography quizes: how many countries can you name for each letter? The letter "R" is a tricky one - you can spend ages trying to think of countries, as it's such an important letter, but there are only three: Rwanda, Romania and Russia.
With just three days to go before England, I finally made the effort to call home. Previously I had relied on email, and even then I had sent only a few: there were better things to do than sit in an intensely stuffy little room typing and dehydrating. The call home made the wait to return infinitely more difficult, as I was informed of my father's death. I wished that I could have been with the rest of my family, to help, and felt as though I had abandoned them, even though I immediately knew that wasn't true.
I passed the last two days in Delhi, and one in Dubai, in something of a haze, as though I had died become a ghost left to wander the world, unable to touch or taste or feel. I was not sad to leave India, nor was I happy to return to England; I had simultaneously nothing and everything to return to.
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