Varanasi Hotel

India has changed the way I view the world. In general, people seem to enjoy comfort, structure, familiar places, and foods. For me, I prefer wooden beams, ceiling corners, and lofty spaces. My entire trip has been one adjustment after another. From the open, jam-packed cars and mopeds–with four people, including a mother nursing a baby–swerving around cows in the road, to the intense spiritual beliefs and rituals (which have gotten me out of more than enough trouble, it’s like I’m a deity!). My time in here has been unveiling.

After the taxi plane ride, which most people paid for, I climbed out into a new city: Varanasi. It was no issue finding space on a tuk-tuk. The driver wore a dark blue turban and held a sign that read, ‘Varanasi Hotel, Mikormik’, while he waited. So far, all the drivers I’ve hitch-hiked with have been a gamble. Some were patient and tailored to the foreigners in the back seat, who would be sweating and shaking but trying to cover it up by talking about nothing. While others were full of local talent, heads out of windows, slurs in Arabic, Hindi, Gujarati, and horns every 30 seconds! Due to the constant obstructions on the roads, people use their horns more than anywhere else I’ve been. In fact, most trucks have “blow horn” painted on their trunks in blue and red lettering so that passing cars know to announce themselves.

The Americans are always entertaining. Whenever a horn goes off, they cinch up like a drawstring bag and look like they smelled rotten mango. So much stress is attached to the sound in their culture; these people can’t sleep at night! In India, a honk on the horn can mean many things. It can mean: I’m passing, look out here I come, I’m driving, there is a cow, don’t merge too left or right, HEY!, hey, don’t cross the street because I’m not stopping, and many more. I don't understand it, but it does seem to keep everyone highly alert. For example, no one is looking down while driving. But accidents do happen.

One day, leaving Agra, I climbed into the trunk of a big car while two travelers sat in the backseat. They had just spent three hours going through vigorous security and asked the driver to minimize the honking so they could rest. The driver was hot, but he whispered his mantra and kept his eyes forward. Moments passed, and everyone was settled into place. I was thinking about the crowd at the Taj–rude, they were quite rude, circling the fences, jumping on the humans, stealing food and shiny possessions out of their bags. When, BANG! A sound, like dropping an iron bell, rang through my ears, which were meters in front of me by now, awaiting my arrival.

Whoever caused the crash was made an example of. It didn’t matter what caste, religion, or sect. If you rear-ended someone or swerved and hit a biker, cars, motorcyclists, and passersby would chase you down and beat you for spreading such chaos. If it was as bad as it was this time, they raided your car too and left it smashed and stripped.

Still, we found ourselves swerving through bulls, cows, camels, stray dogs, mopeds, people, bicyclists, and other obstacles traveling from the airport to the next hotel. The driver was very excited to mention that they were building a new overpass to hopefully avoid all the animals and chaos at street level. It wasn’t open to the public, but it was for me. I squeezed out onto the roof and snagged a eucalyptus branch that ran up into the support beams. Up there, steel rebar protruded out from slabs of concrete, stretching for miles like a track toward the river. Oh, how I love to swing.

The closer I got to the Ganges River, the thicker the crowd in the street got. Tonight was some sort of Muslim festival, and the streets were extra packed, which meant it was time to amp up the horn usage. I tried to avoid the noise and use the rooftops and awnings as much as possible. Below, people pushed wooden carts loaded with all sorts of vegetables, organized and color coordinated. There were pineapples, mangoes, jackfruit, carambola, guava, and other exotic produce. Some stands sold pink cotton candy, others necklaces made of (fake) sandalwood, oils, bone carvings, and small religious idols. There were many times when the street became so thick I thought even roofs would be impassable, and every time I was proven wrong. I don’t know how it works, but the traffic always flows. I’ve only seen one stop sign in all my journeys, and when I did, I laughed. As one of the more eager drivers had once said to his passenger, “No police?” scanning the area around the red light, “Let’s go!” as he gassed up through the intersection, the one traveler fainting upon the act.

Eventually, the road ended for cars, even though I hadn’t seen a single car for the last kilometer. Except one, with a driver in a blue turban who was handing luggage over to a guide who led the couple down a footpath alleyway, just wide enough for a bull and a motorcycle. And when there were both of those things, the couple and the guide had to push their backs up against the wall to allow one of them to pass before continuing. Zipping left, right, then left– even I lost my sense of direction. But when I did, I found a high point, usually atop a banyan, and reoriented myself. I passed a vendor selling fried veggie dough from a giant wok, which smelled delicious. A few beggars sitting on the cobblestone, some missing limbs, were wrapped in white and saffron colored robes, trying to secure enough rupees to buy dinner. There were plenty of shops, each with their own salesman out front trying to get tired travelers inside to peek at the handmade harem pants, pashminas, shirts, scarves, saris, sheets, tablecloths, and tapestries. “Looking is free,” they would all say. But once they have you in their shop and chai in your hands, it’s hard not to be pushed into buying something. And even if you decide on one thing, they try to push two more things onto you, and recommend a shoemaker who is a cousin of the shopkeeper! I jumped onto the next roof and caught up with the guided couple. I heard the guide say that Varanasi was created by Shiva, the god of destruction (all truths are half-truths–paradoxes), five thousand years ago.

It was nighttime, the air was dense and smelled of hay, when they reached the hotel. Hotel Varanasi was quite funky. It was composed of red cement walls with yellow trim and colorful sacred paintings done directly on the surface. There was an open courtyard in the middle of all the rooms, which was shaded by a net where floral vines had sewn themselves into the fabric, offering more shade. It was right on the Ganges River, which flows down from the Himalayas and is considered by many to be a very spiritual vein of water. Nearly three hundred bodies are cremated next to it daily, and the ashes are spread into the river. Next to this practice, you can find people bathing and washing their clothes. It’s just something that’s done here, and that’s okay.

I slept fine in the hotel that night. Room 22 had a cracked door, and there was a fruit net strung up in a corner, which made for a wonderful hammock. Around 4 AM, I got hot and woke up when I heard a noise. I climbed down onto the floor, knelt down onto the indigo rug, and peeped under the chair only to find an adorable little brown mouse. I looked at him as if to let him know that I saw him and was cool with sharing the room as long as he did not eat my fruits or scratch my face in my sleep. He stared at me with unproportionally large black eyes and seemed to understand our agreement, which was good.

The next morning, I climbed the marble stairs, up the wall, and onto the roof. The couple, an American mother and son, were meeting for breakfast. I locked eyes with a plate of vegetable masala with rice, which I followed, but not before hearing the boy explain to his mother about a mouse he saw in the middle of the night. The mother began to laugh, telling the son that a big part of being able to travel to new places is being able to adapt to new situations. It’s important to live outside of your comfort zone so that you can visit non-developed places in the world, to enrich your understanding of humanity and that which is universally felt. These special places maintain a certain way of living that gentrified places eliminate and then try to recreate. She’s not wrong, I thought, as I ate my first meal in days, melting under the smoggy afternoon sky.