Ramdhun Chaurasia gazes benignly upon us from his perch opposite Varanasi’s Chowk Police Station. Five feet by five feet, his paan shop provides the perfect frame for his flowing white beard and thick-framed glasses. When I stop to take his picture, he folds his hands in a dignified namaste and then waves us on into the maze known as Godhuliya.
A tourist boat returns to the ghats at dusk
The heart of Varanasi, the essence of Kashi, this network of lanes lies slantwise along the northern bank of the Ganga and leads to 80-odd ghats. At least two of these are also crematoriums—Manikarnika and Harishchandra (where the king of legend is supposed to have stoked the pyres)—while the largest of them all is the Dashashwamedh Ghat.
It is 11.30am as Guptaji, our self-appointed guide, leads us across the road from Chowk Police Station into the mouth of the maze, shoving aside a stray bull with a slap on the rump. Smiling through a mouthful of paan, he says, “Chaar cheez se bana Kashi—raanrh, saand, seedhi aur sanyasi”. The four things that define Kashi. I can understand the bulls, stairs, mendicants, but I’m discomfited by the casual use of raanrh—a term used interchangeably for widows and prostitutes in this city of piety.
A few wisps of wood smoke linger in the lanes of Varanasi, rising above the smell of rotting flowers. But those are the grace notes. The smell of incense is much stronger, and strongest of all is the smell of camphor. With good reason—this is the highway to heaven, the network of lanes leading to Manikarnika Ghat, where cremation and immersion guarantee salvation, and all day and all night the pyres burn by the water’s edge.
As we pause at a corner, we are shooed aside with chants of Ram naam satya hai (Ram’s name is the truth). A small procession trails after a chaarpai (cot). As it passes, we catch a glimpse of a bright Banarasi silk sari. About 250 dead people pass through these lanes every day. I’m not much for spooks and haunts, but I really wouldn’t like to walk these lanes in the dead of night.
But now, in the late morning leading into a coppery noonday, Godhuliya is bustling. Near the main road, the lanes are lined with shops. Sweets, religious tracts, flowers, unidentified multi-hued swathes of cloth, tacky silvery fabric with glimmering fringes that could be used to scare away birds at airfields. There are few buyers as yet. It’s too early in the morning—they will stop by after they have visited their Lord in his sanctum farther inside the maze, in the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir.
The temple itself is strangely disappointing. The courtyard now looks like the forecourt of a government office—railings of steel tubing, cemented pavements and dozens of policemen. Cameras are not permitted. “Security” is high because a disputed mosque lies within the temple perimeter, and we have to pass through a metal detector.