Asia > India > Uttar Pradesh > Varanasi > Articles > Varanasi, City of Light

Something thudded softly against the prow of our boat as we pulled upstream, and in the half-light before dawn it was difficult to tell what it was. From its size, and the way it bobbed away behind us, belly up, it was either a piglet or a baby.

I watched as its silhouette encountered a flotilla of drifting candles. Somewhere among them was mine, a five rupee offering like the rest - one dry leaf with a few marigold petals on it and a wick stuck into a smear of butter-oil. Miraculously, though they wobbled about a bit, none of the candles capsized. They swirled around the corpse like an escort of fireflies.

Mr Sushil Kumar Roy, our guide, was in mystical mood.

"Varanasi", he crooned, "City of Light. If you think these reflections are something, you must see the market at night when there is electric decoration. It is nothing but beautiful."

Beautiful was not an adjective that sat comfortably with my first impressions of the Holy City of Benares, or Varanasi as it is known in post-British India. Already this morning we had just run the gauntlet of beggars from the door of our taxi down the hundred or so steps of Dasasvamedha Ghat to the river. Lepers lined the way like a reception committee, decked out in bandages and iodine wraps, with knuckles for hands. Leprosy is on the increase in Varanasi, Mr Roy told me as he parted with a coin,

"Their life is miserable, no ifs and buts."

Down at the water's edge we had to haggle for our boat, and then waited while the boat-boy finished his crap. A dog was trying to eat something so unspeakable it almost spat it out. A short distance away, the effluent from an open sewer trickled out on to the silt. The city's sewer system, built by the British in 1917 when the population was a tenth the size, has been literally over-run. In the monsoons, raw sewage rises like a souffle through the drains and into the houses. Even on a good day the river Ganges picks up levels of fecal coliform bacteria as it flows past Varanasi that are 10,000 times the World Health Organisation's standards for drinking water.

Yet drink the water is precisely what people come here to do. A million Hindus a year, from all over India, pilgrimage to this, the most sacred spot on India's most sacred river, to bathe in and to drink the water.

It's a contradiction that's not easy for the first time visitor to swallow: that one of the most patently polluted places on earth is a place where people come to be purified. And more than that. That this is one of the only places on earth where a soul is guaranteed to achieve moksha - liberation from the endless cycle of re-birth; that here, consumed by traffic fumes and sewage and the stench of rotting animal matter, one should be granted the privilege of breathing one's last. Die in Varanasi, the Hindu texts maintain, and you'll be released, once and for all, from the pain of existence, from the anguish of continual re-birth and death.

For Varanasi is a ford, or tirtha, between heaven and earth - one of those unique crossing points where gods and goddesses can descend to this world and mortals can be transferred direct to the after-life. Die here, in the embrace of Mother Ganga, in Shiva's sacred city, and your spirit will be united with the Absolute, will find its longed-for, eternal, perfect, peace.

There are six other tirthas in India, but none as powerful and auspicious as this. If you die in any of the others, they say, you'll still need one more stop before you make it to the other side: a final lifetime in the city of Varanasi.

"Even a donkey, or a Jew, or a Christian", explained Mr Roy in the taxi, beaming with condescention, "finds salvation if he dies in Varanasi. In an instant. Just like that. No ifs and buts."

I wondered stiffly about rapists and murderers who happened to expire here.

"Ah", said Mr Roy, like a teacher judiciously swatting an upstart, "if they have bathed and drunk the water of the Ganga in Varanasi then their soul is pure and all the evil deeds of their past are washed away. And if they have not, then they can't die here. No matter what they do, they will die elsewhere."

There's a movie in that, somewhere. The unpurified sinner trying to take the short cut to salvation by dying within the city limits: throwing himself into the traffic on Panchakroshi Road and emerging unscathed, swept up perhaps by the trunk of a passing elephant. No matter what he did, someone would leap in and snatch him from the jaws of death: a sort of Fatal Detraction.

Certainly people go to great lengths to die here, to achieve that physical full-stop. The aged and infirm arrive in a continuous drizzle - by bus, train, in the ubiquitous black Ambassador, by ox-cart, on foot - attended by posses of anxious and bewildered relatives and that small yet conspicuous bundle of possessions. They have ‘newcomer’ written all over them, and the con-artists and pick-pockets gravitate towards them like jackals scenting carrion.

Every backstreet advertises a hospice, administered - according to Mr Roy, who wrinkled his nose - to varying standards of sanitation and decorum, yet always with well-oiled connections to the network of Varanasi untouchables, the doms, who handle the ‘unclean’ business of washing, transporting and cremating the corpse. One can only imagine the pathetic urgency of the dying man who miscalculates the proximity of his demise; who carries on running up his family's bills because his time just refuses to run out.

Yet despite its devotion to death, Varanasi is not a morbid city. It began as an earthly paradise, devoted to the pleasures rather than the putrifaction of the flesh. It was a city chosen by Lord Shiva, that most sybaritic of gods, for his earthly abode. Looking down on the world from the high Himalayas, he saw a place so beautiful, with palaces and temples and gardens, he decided to bring his new wife, Parvati, here to live. The city was bathed in an extraordinary natural light, so he called it ‘Kashi’, the Luminous One - City of Light.

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