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To get to know a country, even your own, you must get to know its people. In India there are few better ways to do this than to visit Varanasi, Benares, the holy city on the banks of the river Ganges. But my family in Delhi warned me not to go

. “It’s incredibly dirty,” my father informed me. “Full of filth and squalor. Don’t go there!”

“I don’t know why you want to go,” added my cousin. “You’ll get hassled by street hawkers all day and you won’t like it.”
“There is no spirituality there, only cheats,” confirmed his wife.

Of course, none of them had ever been there. The blacker a place is painted, the more you appreciate its true colours once you arrive. So I went anyway. A 12-hour train ride later and I was strolling around one of the oldest cities in the world.

For millennia, Varanasi has stood at the edge of the river Ganges that flows 1,500 miles from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal. It is a maze of alleyways, the stereotype of an ancient city. The houses are decorated if decrepit and the street level is patrolled by vigilant pairs of mongooses, not to mention a few stray dogs and the occasional sacred cow.

At the core of Varanasi, however, are the ghats, gateways between the temporal life of the urban jungle and the goddess embodied in the river Ganges. Each ghat, in reality a series of steps that lead down the bank to the water, has its own character, its own life. Some are well built – others are not. The Ram Singh ghat is overgrown and ruled over by squawking green parakeets. Another is populated by a herd of water buffalo and women assemble mosaics of their dried patties to use as fuel and building material.

All human life is here. In the river Ganges, people bathe, lathering themselves with packet soap. There are scrawny youngsters, leaping and diving; portly businessmen who shuffle sedately along, trying to hide their bellies; and the holy men, their movements crafted, deliberate and serene.

I have been strolling along the Ganga, as it is known, for little more than an hour when Matru begins telling me about karma. A wiry old man with three days of fuzzy stubble and ochre-yellow eyes who calls himself the ‘owner’ of Hari Chandra ghat, what he really wants is for me to visit his silk shop. But for now karma is the topic of conversation.

Before us, covered by cloth and saffron garlands, lies a dead body on a wooden litter. I saw them earlier, someone’s mother, father, brother, sister, husband or wife, borne unceremoniously atop an autorickshaw through the tangle of traffic in the streets behind me. Matru throws back his shawl and explains why no women are allowed among the mourners at a Varanasi cremation.

“There is still the danger of suttee,” he says. “Even now. Sometimes the woman will throw herself on the pyre – so we do not allow women close enough to the flames.”

He launches into a convoluted interpretation of the Hindu way of death. “You see, if a person eats fish, when they die they are burned. Their body is left to the river, and perhaps the fish will eat the ashes.

“Then the fish is caught, a person eats the fish, and all begins again. It is karma. My shop is just back there, just five minutes, very good prices.” To our side a dhobi wallah rhythmically beats out his own mantra, beating wet clothes against a slab of stone. I thank Matru and walk on.

At five in the evening, as the dusk draws in and the light over the river fades to a beige shadow, the bells of the temple at the summit of Kedar ghat begin to toll. Painted somewhat incongruously in a pink-and-white candy stripe scheme and adorned with figurines of the gods, Kedar ghat is otherwise typical of its hundred or so counterparts, though like all of them it still has its own distinct character. I doff my shoes – there is nowhere to place them but upon the marble memorial stones at the temple’s entrance – and led by my guide, a boy called Manoj I met selling postcards of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, I step within the temple.

I am greeted by a cacophony of bells and drums as the devout observe their duties. Murmuring their prayers at shrines and alcoves set into Sanskrit-inscribed walls, they bathe effigies of the sacred cow and the phallic lingam that symbolises Shiva. The temple is a world of its own, sealed off from the outside by the clanging drama of the ritual. The floor is moist on the soles of my bare feet, water from the Ganges itself, I assume.

Outside, another puja begins on the steps just off the river’s edge. Accompanied by Manoj and other boys on the tabard and gongs, the Brahmin wafts incense and commences the ritual of the flaming lamps, his face a mask of rapt concentration. He concludes by casting petals into the river below, where the twinkle of candlelights borne in flimsy paper coracles shimmers against the surface.

Another day arrives. The best time to take a boat ride – the finest way to view the ghats and the lives and deaths that go on around them – is in the early morning, but during December the Ganges is veiled in fog. The boatmen still call out to me, a hundred Charons desperate to earn their 50 rupees on India’s Styx, but I opt again to walk.

I see only one ‘real’ sadhu, a naked holy man covered from head to toe in ash. Though the idea is to imitate Shiva, he looks disturbingly corpse-like. The sadhus are indeed a dying breed, my escort Manoj tells me. “Every year we see less and less,” he confirms. “I don’t know why. Perhaps it is karma.”

However, there are many more less spectacular ascetics who conduct their daily business around the ghats. One has even built himself a hut and surrounded by his followers, a pack of sleepy dogs, he sits there eying me suspiciously. Grain by grain he fingers rice into his mouth and pretends to ignore us.

And then there are the fakes, skeletal individuals with matted hair and lips stained red from chewing paan, a mild narcotic. Manoj warns me not to give them money: “A real sadhu never needs money, he has nothing and wants nothing,” he says. “These are just beggars.”

At the largest ghat of all, Dasaswamedh, I am approached by yet another bearded eccentric but his intentions seem more altruistic. “Do not give us money,” he says, pointing to the line of ragged children seated by his feet. “But if you can, go to the market and bring rice and dal. I will use these to feed the children. It will be good karma.”

Everyone in Varanasi tells you about karma, and yes, it does verge on a cliché. Apart from the machinations of silk-stall touts and fake sadhus, the tacky side of Varanasi continues to manifest itself in the tourists themselves. There’s a proliferation of the beardie-weirdie here like nowhere else in India – the dreadlocked types dressed from head to toe in baggy ‘ethnic’ garb, less interested in discovering the Ganga than in smoking the gangaa. They may well be devouring Varanasi’s spirituality too, but I don’t think they understand it any more than I.

By the time I depart, the city is nothing more than a series of interlinked impressions, rather than one coherent ‘big picture’. It’s like a stained glass window seen up close – all parts and no whole, at least not one that I can understand. I can see why I was warned not to come; it is not what I expected.

There again, Varanasi is run down for sure, but not as dilapidated as I was led to believe. If anything the touts and rickshaw-wallahs are less aggressive than elsewhere, accepting your rejections with a karmic head-wobble of acknowledgement rather than chasing after you as they might in hot-spots like Delhi and Agra. And there is something else here, something intangible, a way to connect however briefly with the India that exists in our Western imaginations. It’s all part of the picture that makes up India, something that I accept I don’t comprehend – but something that at least now I’ve seen.

On the waters behind me as I leave, a batch of candles has clumped together into a flotilla of flickering lights. As the boats row steadily upstream and the last body of the day burns out its pyre, still the boys of the ghats bat their cricket balls oblivious to the sound of the bells and their kites flit about the sky like bats enjoying the cool evening air. Distant silhouettes of hawkers and their donkeys fade into the evening haze and the broad slow ebb of the Ganges lingers on. What will I tell my family? Perhaps I won’t say anything at all. NEED TO KNOW
Getting there: The Imaginative Travellers’ Indian Images and North India Highlights tours let you spend three days at Varanasi (0800-316 2717, www.imaginative-traveller.com).
Red tape: British passport holders need a tourist visa, £30 from the Indian High Commission (020-7836 8484, www.hcilondon.net). Visa information: 0906 844 4544 (calls 60p a min).
Reading: India Handbook (Footprint, £15.99) and India (Rough Guides, £15.99).
Further information: Government of India Tourist Office (020-7437 3677, www.incredibleindia.org).

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