Christmas on the Ganges

I turned 21 awaiting

My Iran visa

In Istanbul

“Go to Goa” mantra

Filled my hopes

And grabbed my soul

The pie shops of Istanbul were full of backpackers. Listening. Speaking. Deciding.

It’s not only a geographical crossroads, the gateway from Europe to Asia. On the Hippie Trail of the 1970s, Istanbul was the place to fish or cut bait: head overland to India or call it a gap year and go home. We’d linger over Turkish coffee or tea, playing games with matchsticks or folding paper swans out of gum wrappers as we listened to one colorful pilgrim or another on his last leg home from the land of mystics and monkeys. Everybody at the table, strangers until now, had hitchhiked across Europe, loitered on the Greek Islands, shared rooms or filled hostel bunks, and learned to exist on three bucks a day. We were from a half dozen countries, but at that moment we were all best friends.

“I had a hammock on the beach and a pet monkey. My yogi was teaching me some deep meditation shit,” a guy with stringy long hair, a dashiki shirt, big wooden beads and New York accent was saying. “But the money ran out.” He wished he could stay in India longer, especially since the rumor was that the Rolling Stones were going to play in Goa, a former Portuguese colony on India’s southwest coast.

His testimony alone could have convinced me to take the leap East, but I was already mostly committed to the trip, a journey of three or four weeks by train and minibus across most of Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Two weeks earlier, while I stood in line at a post office to mail a package home from Greece, a man in his 60s behind me asked about my travels. I shared mine, and he told me he was German and had spent time in India studying under a yogi in Varanasi, holy city to three religions on the Ganges River in northern India. He urged me to go, and wrote down his yogi’s name and address. I took that as a fateful encounter.

I was too engaged in my journey to feel homesick after several months into my journey. But as anyone who has been away from home on his own can tell you, holidays can be lonely. I felt a bit of it in Iran at Thanksgiving, and even went to the U.S. Embassy in Tehran hoping there might be a turkey dinner for expats. No luck, but I did get a look at a scene that became famous seven years later when Iranian students took the embassy and its staff hostage.

By late December, I reached Varanasi, better known locally by its ancient name of Benares. The trip had been tedious at times, miles cramped inside a minibus on potholed roads in Iran and Afghanistan, shivering at night in my sleeping bag at rustic inns with no heat, sharing rooms with a changing cast of fellow travelers. The exotic interludes between travel made up for the discomfort: Camel stew, squatter toilets, tinny calls to prayer, hash-filled hookahs, hot tea all day, ghostly burka-clad women and men who seemed to look through you. This wasn’t Kansas, Toto.

In Varanasi, everything was strange, yet somehow embracing. I followed a funeral procession taking a shrouded body to the ghat, a riverfront landing where the funeral pyres were built. I watched as they burned the bodies of the Hindu devout, many of whom came to the city to die. As I walked from the ghat, a holy man in only a loincloth marked my forehead with a smear of red. I have no idea why he did, but I felt that it was a kind and meaningful gesture.

The pilgrimage to see the German’s yogi seemed anticlimactic but has proved powerful over the years. The yogi lived on the second floor of a British colonial concrete building. His windowless room had one light bulb suspended from the ceiling, and barely enough room for his cot, a tiny table and a chair. He was as sparse as his room, an old man in simple knee-length linen shirt and trousers.

He told me he was working on a book, his second. The gist of it was that proper yoga techniques allow the spine to become a cobra, extending itself until it’s flattened head aligns with the third eye. None of that made sense to me.

I told him I intended to find a meditation school, and to be given a mantra. I told him that I loved my family, but that I disliked where I grew up in the Chicago suburbs. I thought the people were shallow, judgmental and non-spiritual. I asked him for advice.

“Learn to love your home,” he said. “You cannot love yourself if you do not love what has made you.”

“I will give you a mantra. Be still and ask yourself, ‘Who am I?’”

“Do not give your money to a meditation school. Give your money to the beggars. Your spirit will grow more from an act of charity than from enriching those who charge foreigners for truths.”

That was it. Maybe a half hour with a guy I traveled a month to see. It’s taken decades to process the wisdom of what he shared. When life gets hectic, I still find a quiet space inside me and ask, over and over, “Who am I?” I still don’t have the answer, but I’m getting close.

While in Varanasi, I met up with three or four other backpackers who joined me in renting a houseboat on the Ganges. The boat was about 30 feet long with a few wooden bunks inside and a toilet that was basically an outhouse with a direct drop into the river. There was a small area on the bow where we could cook on a tiny charcoal stove made of clay. My boatmates were all Europeans but didn’t seem to show any enthusiasm for Christmas. With a 40-day Hindu chant over a nearby loudspeaker, daily bathers in the holy waters around us and burning funeral pyres on the next ghat, Christmas was literally a long way off.

For the first time in months I felt homesick as I sat on the roof of our boat on Christmas morning. I thought of my folks worrying about how I was and wishing the whole family could be together.

As I indulged my self-pity, a rowboat approached from the middle of the river. Two men, oddly dressed in Western-style suits, approached. One rowed, the other stood. They began to sing.

“We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmassss. And a Happy New Year.”

This was a land of mystery, and I had witnessed yet another mystery. The men rowed on down the river without explaining themselves.

 I still missed my family. But I knew I wasn’t alone for the holiday.