A festival, new friends, and some mischief!

        Well, it has been a very fruitful few days. I feel as if I have finally come to enjoy India. This last weekend I met a pair of travelers from Germany. Their names are Simone and Sebastian, and they have been traveling their entire holiday (3-4 months long!!!). Well, we shopped along Deshdwamedha Ghat in Benares. We had plans to meet up with my friends a little later to watch a ceremony along the Ghat near my home, Assi Ghat. Having failed to connect with my friends, we decided to continue on to the ceremony with them. This ceremony is performed every night along a few of the ghats in the city. Everyone lines up as the young priest repeats a prayer, if I'm not mistaken, which thanks the Ganga for life or some such holy reason. Everyone was then handed flower pedals to put into the river and push them into its current. Following this ceremony, there was a little snack (like one piece of grain) provided for each person involved with the ceremony. However, being the type who does not want to further aggravate one’s stomach, I decided to pass on the communal offering. 

       After having partaken in my first Hindu ceremony, my new found friends and I went to a local restaurant that has phenomenal hindustani food. We sat and ate this dinner where the cost, in USD, was about $10, FOR ALL 3 OF US!!! After dinner we decided to have a few drinks... We went to this hole in the wall “British Wine Shop” and procured a few Indian Kingfisher beers about twice the size of us beers, and twice as potent. Having headed back to my place, sat back and chilled in my common room, we chatted for a few hours. When my friend/housemate Will, decided to join us we discovered that we had been locked IN our house... The not only locked the front door, with a padlock, from the inside, but they locked the main gate with a huge padlock. My new made friends found themselves as prisoners in my new humble abode. In this Indian style home their is a courtyard surrounded by the house. If you can try to imagine a square house with a hole in the middle for a small open garden area. After a few looks of concern between my guests, I broke it to them that we had a chance to be a bit rebellious. Typically throughout the house the windows are barred so that no one/nothing can get in. Feeling a bit oppressed with this, I had already found a way around this little hiccough. Being the resourceful young fellow that I am,   I paid close attention to my rooms windows when I picked it. The bathroom window’s gate ended up being broken and it was able to swing open. Opening along the side of the house my friends and I, feeling as if we were young teenagers escaping our parents’ tyrannical curfew limits, we booked out the window, climbed the wall and the landed safely in the Indian street at 1:30AM Monday morning. 

Early in the day I had heard of another festival/ceremony taking place in the city. This religious ritual involves the fertility rights of Hindu couples. When an Indian couple is having difficulties getting pregnant, they come to Benares and perform this ritual. The couple, coming to this certain well in Benares, about a quarter mile from the river, walk down the stairs into this 100 ft. deep well. They come down to the water and dunk themselves a few times, washing away their old life. They leave their old clothes and any belongings with which they were wearing behind, next to the well. 

This cleansing symbolizes the beginning of the new life they have just been birthed from. These couples not only sacrifice their material belongings, but their symbolical ones as well. Having started a new life, they discard their old wedding vows, thus having to be remarried at a later date. This must not be an easy decision to come to. One of my professors later told me that these couples are pressured by their family, especially by the woman’s mother, to bear children, and that they may have to caste off their old lives and perform this ritual. 

At the same time that this festival occurs, many women who have previously performed this ritual (successfully) return with the child they had born, and they bathe that child in the Ganges as well as back in the well, but only after shaving the young ones head completely bald. 

You may find yourself asking the question, Well Craig, why in the hell is this all so important to the story you were telling me? The answer to that lies in what we found in the streets when were were wandering them at 2 in the morning, the night before I leave for two weeks. We began to see that the streets were not dead as we had once expected, but after passing a police check point, that had never been there before, we began to see hundreds and hundreds of people lined along the street. Well, we decided to take a closer look, so we walked to the ghat, named Tulsi Ghat, where the woman bathe their new born child in the Ganges. This normally peaceful ghat, which has an occasional worshipper and a passing goat or two, was completely filled with people. We continued to wonder down the small alleyway, toward the Well we had seen earlier. A normally 3 minute walk took us about 10 minutes, as the alleyway was jam packed with people sleeping along it, awaiting their turn to bathe. When we finally reached the temple, we saw a few thousand people lined up ready to enter the well. Remember, it is 2AM on a Monday morning. We entered the temple to get a better view of what was going on, being sure not to do anything disrespectful, we got a front row view of the beginning of this wonderful ceremony. No more than 2 minutes after we got a view of the well, from within this Hindu temple, we heard bells ringing on the other side of the well. They opened the gates and people began to pour down the steps and dunk themselves into the water, performing all the above mentioned requirements. This was a simply mesmerizing experience. We were the only white (‘western’ what have you) people that I saw the entire night, so I felt extremely privileged to have a front row seat to this important festival.

After watching this for a while, we decided to was time to take our leave, and we headed to Simone and Sebastian’s hostel room. We went up on their roof and chatted about what had happened or about anything else that struck up in our minds. I sat on this tall building in Benares at 3AM, for the first time mesmerized, not disgusted. Intrigued not perturbed. Excited and ready to seek out new adventure in this wonderful city. 

Heading back to our apartment, after saying the goodbyes to my new friends and getting back into our house through those unconventional means, I began to pack for my trip to Mussoorie. The train left in less than 3 hours and I hadn’t even begun to pack yet. Moving at half speed, I got my stuff packed in an hour, and caught about an hour of shuteye before I forced myself up and went down to the hotel to meet for the taxi that would take me to the train station. Having had my first good adventure in Benares, let alone in India, I left on a 24 hour train ride for a new adventure: The foothills of the Himalayas. But that story is for another day.