David and Sons in Varanasi

The “Indian experience” cannot get more intense than Varanasi, the pilgrimage city on the Ganges. Where you see bodies on the funeral pyres at the burning ghats, one with a foot extending out from under the shroud; where you see deceased sacred cows floating down the river; where all the pre-deceased sacred cows give rise to a whole new dimension of “holy shit” wherever you step or (in the unseasonable monsoon-like downpours we encountered) slip. But, supposedly, where:That sentiment is only aspirational here. Luckily so for all the hungry cows, bulls, water buffalo and goats that walk the streets.Varanasi is also a place where you can get talked into doing something that you’d never allow yourself to do anywhere else. Like Max and Jonathan walking along the main ghat in the evening and discovering that, ultimately, “no” means “yes” when faced with a persistent solicitation for a massage. Amidst thousands of passersby, they allowed themselves to be stretched out side by side on a wooden platform (photos in Lora’s posting on Varanasi), with 2 men working on them, pulling and shaking and crunching their limbs. In spite of those efforts, Max said that their wallets got more massaged than they did.A similar experience befell all of us when, as we left a restaurant after lunch, we asked the waiter how to find a certain place. “The restaurant isn’t busy so I’ll take you there. You don’t have to pay me anything.” That last comment meant the situation was not going to end well. After leading us in circles for 15 minutes we happened upon his friend, who happened to work in one of the weaving operations that filled every building in that section of the city, and who happened to have some time to show us the entire operation from the spinning of the yarn, to the punching of the player piano-like templates that controlled the creation of the patterns in the woven cloth, to the overwhelming clatter of the looms that emerged from every sweat shop room in the area. After an hour, it was “Let me show you the final product. You don’t have to buy anything.” How could we say “no” when the guy had just given us an hour of his time to take us on a very interesting tour. At that moment, we just happened to be outside a door that led to a large room with thousands of bolts of cloth surrounding a circle of floor cushions on which we were invited to sit. We got taken for more than just a tour.One of the best things to do in Varanasi is to simply wander in the old city’s labyrinth of alleys. The only thing that kept us from panicking that we were lost forever was knowing that we would inevitably come to the Ganges if we kept walking east.