Varanasi

Uttar Pradesh, India

The City of Lord Shiva

“Are there not many holy places on this earth?
Yet which of them would equal in the balance one speck of [Varanasi’s] dust?
Are there not many rivers running to the sea?
Yet which of them is like the River of Heaven in [Varanasi]?
Are there not many fields of liberation on earth?
Yet not one equals the smallest part of the city never forsaken by Shiva.
The Ganges, Shiva and [Varanasi]: Where this Trinity is watchful, no wonder here is found the grace that leads one on to perfect bliss.”

—Kashi Khanda 35. 7-10

“Varanasi is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”

—Mark Twain

“I’M SO HAPPY

I’M SO HOME

I’M SO HERE”

—Me, Day 782

Day 773 – Day 831

21 March 2020 – 18 May 2020

Varanasi is the dirtiest place I have ever visited, and I have been very dirty very many times. Sometimes it felt as if the streets have less walking space than space occupied by garbage and animal waste. That part was okay though, because I was forbidden to step out the front door of the hostel.

Yoga grounded me during lockdown, but at the same time yoga made me feel like a mass murderer every morning. This was because dozens of black sugar ants ceaselessly scurried about my mat throughout my flow. They were entirely harmless, and entirely the victims of every lunge forward and step backwards.

The same yoga mat, as well as my body, would be coated in a thin layer of bamboo powder, a substance I termed to be “termite rain.” I meditated to the incessant chewing noises of these age-old pests.

Not too far off would be the latest batch of monkey poo left by the destructive rhesus macaques when they came through, along with any other debris from their cushion-tearing and glass-smashing fests. Such fresh odors would occasionally waft over to my nostrils, mixing with the termite dust and making up one fantastic inhale.

Once I was cooking in the kitchen as cockroaches scurried up my arms and shoulders. They were the small kind, several times smaller than the Florida versions I grew up with.

The mice in the kitchen were also small.

The sickly stray puppies wandering in and out were also small.

Every now and then, a deafening mosquito fogger would drive through the neighborhood. The milky cloud of chemicals was supposed to kill off the blood suckers, but all it did was choke us on fumes that smelled of diesel.

Power cuts shut off the fans and lights and fridge a few times a day. The temperature continued to creep upwards, week by week.

This went on for two months.

“Day 789:

Dog shits outside bedroom.

Barges into dog shit at 6am.

Steps back into bedroom out of shock.

Cleans shoes and carpet after yoga.

Washes whole outfit by hand.

Hangs up clothes after a hot shower.

Monkeys shred delicates.”

When I look back on my days in Varanasi, I feel warmth and gratitude. There were days of struggle. There were days of silence featuring sunsets of accessing spiritual bliss. There was drama, because we were nine individuals in our 20s and 30s cohabiting in one small building for eight weeks.

There were tears, laughter, screams, and allergic reactions that sent me to the hospital. We saw each other at some of our worsts and some of our bests.

I saw my own worst and best.

During these months the grip of lockdown was at its tightest. During this time of my life I had to overcome the most amount of fear and accepted the largest quantity of uncertainty that I ever have.

I got regular emails from the American embassy about repatriation flights (only a mere $3000; finding your way to the Delhi airport, and back home from wherever the plane might land in the big big USA, was your own problem).

An American couple arranged transport from Varanasi to Delhi, and invited me to quarantine with them in Joshua Tree National Park, California. Every day they urged me to escape with them. Others in California begged me to leave and offered to pay for all repatriation expenses for me, telling me my first lockdown post had moved them to tears. My family pressed me to flee for my life.

I abided. I would return to the US.

Then I realized all the momentum I had gained from 2+ years on the road, from cleansing from an American lifestyle conditioned by society, from healing my mental health and wounds inflicted by childhood traumas, would vanish in the moment I stepped foot into my home country. If I allowed myself to “pause” my trip, all the progress I made with spirituality and creativity, with facing my own shit, would unravel.

On Day 782, I jotted down,

“I can’t leave because this will never happen again and I’ll never find out what this is all leading to.”

So I willed myself to enter the darkness. How long was this tunnel? Where was it going? What was inside?

The American couple who wanted me to return with them to the United States asked me, “Will you stay in your room all summer?”

Already in a calm state of acceptance, I responded, “I don’t know.”

And with such unanswerable questions began me having the time of my life.

I couldn’t go outside. There were no trees around. The Ganges was just out of view.

Yet I was free.

I had one of the most productive spells of my life. I wrote long posts, made videos, and read thick books.

There was no eating out, no snacks to go shopping for, no runs or hikes or strolls or swims available. My life was simplified. All exploration took place in an invisible realm, and I was traveling in a vertical direction.

I had never clocked such hours of meditation like I did in Varanasi over the Spring of 2020, and I haven’t since.

My yoga took off. My childhood flexibility returned. I had never been so in tune with my body.

For many reasons, I shaved off all my hair.

Within the concrete jungle of my hostel and the surrounding neighborhood, I had never been so synched with the details of nature. The same rooftop view day after day began to tell me what time it was, so that I didn’t need to touch my phone at all. A glance at the position of the sun or the moon, the shade of the rising or setting sun, was enough. I really looked into the face of a common House Sparrow when they came to the windowsill, taking in all its delicate features and feathers of browns, grays, whites, and black.

Months back, I made a list of the Varanasi juxtapositions and clashes between nature and urban development that I will always miss, that I will always hold inside me:

• the roaring moos of wandering street cows
• the cooing, crying baby monkeys
• the call of the laughing doves
• the sparrows cleaning themselves outside my window
• the kites tearing through the sunset
• the dusk adhan calling out across a pink sky
• the violent temple bells
• the blue-gloss surface of a cleaner Ganges River
• a yellow sun-orb dropping through a parting in the thick, gray clouds
• chillum clouds
• the metal tridents accenting the residential rooftops
• the birds coming and going, a parakeet here, a crow there
• the sight of Venus every sundown
• the moon, growing, shrinking, growing, shrinking
• the Big Dipper, plastered right overhead while most other stars had been washed out by light pollution

Having already been toughened by long train rides across the Indian subcontinent, my tolerance for being able to fall asleep through utter cacophony only increased during lockdown. Clanging bells of temple rituals at sunrise, 4am dog fights, midnight shrieks of puppies screaming like they were being gutted out with a knife—that sort of concert.

As suddenly as all this magical chaos began, one day I was whirled into a 24-hour taxi journey and dumped off at the gates of an ashram located in another state.

Haridwar

Uttarakhand, India

The Gateway to Lord Vishnu

“When Ganga was brought to Haridwar, then all the Gods asked, ‘We wash all sins, but who will wash us?’

Ganga said this to Lord Vishnu: ‘Lord Vishnu Bhagwan, tell us, what should we do?’

Then the Lord said, ‘As many sadhus and saints are living in this world, every time they will bathe in Ganga, all your sins will be washed away [automatically].'”

—Anonymous

“Om Namo Narayan.”

—Pilot Baba Ashram

“Just the Ganga.

Just my breath.”

—Me, Day 832

Day Day 832 – Day 862

19 May 2020 – 18 June 2020

One baba ji, a term of endearment for a man who renounced his worldly possessions and devoted himself to the spiritual path, invited an Indian girl from our Varanasi hostel, along with anyone who’d like to join her, to stay at Pilot Baba Ashram in Haridwar.

His welcome, along with an electronic pass that granted us permission to move locations and that was laden with errors (both dudes in their 30s became 40-year-old women), got us safely transported to and accommodated in our new abode.

Another baba ji kicked us out of the ashram no more than three weeks later. It had less to do with us and more to do with a power struggle, egos, and interest in financial profit. The ashram administration had deemed my group to be too broke-looking, which was not entirely untrue. My baba ji strictly instructed me to save the rather generous donation I was planning to give the ashram, and to use it instead on those in the world who might truly need it.

In the meantime of those three weeks, I had fun. The property we were allowed to romp around was a shocking amount of freedom and nature in comparison with Varanasi.

Here is an excerpt from a letter that I wrote myself upon arrival to the ashram:

First Impressions

“One day you are woken up by roaring moos, fighting dogs, crying puppies, and the next day it’s wailing ashram geese.

One day you’re doing yoga, sweating everywhere, next to monkey shit, murdering too many ants that run over your mat, and your mat that is so worn it scrapes the skin off your toes when you get into downward dog. You look longingly at the sunrise. You look longingly at the distant trees.

Then suddenly you’re sitting on your own private ghat, with the same Ganges water, crystal clear, gushing around you, and you’re crying. Of course you’re crying. At how good life is to you. At how you asked for and expected nothing, and that is precisely what brought you here.

One day you wake up in a coronavirus red zone, the next day you’re in the green. Safe. Low cases. Space. Facilities. People who can get you help, fast.

After two months of feeling all the abundance in a dirty city, I am now filled with an abundance of green. Old things turn new. The leaves look new. Lying back and looking up into the trees as their leaves shimmy under the morning sunlight, is new. The birds who peer at me, birds who don’t know the terrors of city life, are new.

Two red-vented bulbuls, two pieces of sheer beauty.

The veins and greens within the leaves.

More tears come.

One day you’re ‘trapped’ (but feeling more free than you’ve ever known) in a crusty stoner hostel, befriending a nice, harmless guy troubled with a harmful affinity to ketamines, and the next you’re crying to a baba ji about this same addiction. You don’t want to judge your friend, or tell him to do anything, or help him. You just don’t want him to hurt himself, and you want to do the right thing if it starts up again. And the baba tells you to tell yourself,

‘I am alone.’

He tells you and your friends to be his guests, to stay in this ashram, his home, my home, for as long as we please, and the day we leave, to pay what we feel, if anything at all.

That is what an ashram really is.”

I identified new bird species, watched Japanese anime, and befriended adolescent village boys. The ashram had a private ghat on a diverted section of the Ganges. The boys would come looking for me to offer an inner tube in case I might be in the mood to float down the stream, fully clothed in my cotton kurti and long pants.

Of course I was in the mood.

I couldn’t go into town, but I ordered chocolates and drinking coconuts to the ashram’s little shop named the “Universal Spiritual Gallery.”

Twice a day the dining hall served hot meals in line with the traditional saatvic diet of a yogic lifestyle. That entailed loads of rice, lentils, chickpeas, and potatoes. I developed an obsession for the pumpkin dish that showed itself a couple times a week. The cooks and servers didn’t smile much, but they sure smiled at me when they saw me smiling at their bucket of pumpkin.

I looked past how the ashram was mosquito-infested, and how a huge mess of rabbits and ducks and geese and ostriches were all thrown together into one large cage, breeding like there was no tomorrow, the strong bullying the weak, the weak missing large patches of feathers and shriveled in the dirty corners, cowering in their misery.

There was also the contamination of the ashram’s drinking water supply that no one bothered to fix. After a glass of particularly rancid water from a tank which a resident had repeatedly assured me was perfectly drinkable, pain coursed through my belly after every meal, and in random spurts, for the next weeks.

I knew this sensation all too well. Parasites. The most effective solution was to starve them out by eliminating all grains, processed foods, and sugar from my diet. The only fruit I could have was papaya. It was easy enough; at meal times I only took vegetable curry and bean soup from the kitchen, and smothered it all in a high-quality ghee.

Kilos of body my weight fell off like layers of an onion.

I was high in physical energy and thriving on a high-fat, low-carb diet. After three weeks playing ashramite, we were booted to an unused guesthouse right on the waters. Some rooms gave the sensation of being aboard a cruise ship. We were no longer bound to ashram quarantine rules. We could venture into town or run over the miles of grassland right outside our door.

Newly bloomed roses greeted me every morning, before they were plucked by villagers and taken as offerings to Shiva. The only tap in my room that functioned let out water full of writhing mosquito larvae, so for every toilet flush and hand wash I ran with a bucket to the private ghats. Here I would also bathe myself. I didn’t shampoo for eight consecutive days.

We ventured from our host village where we stayed to Haridwar itself. The ghats were famous and held mythological significance, but it was the road leading up to them that struck me the deepest.

The squalid settlements on the roadsides of rural Uttarakhand was where I learned that all you need for a house is a rope tied to two trees, and a blanket thrown over it. The result is a cozy pyramidal tent.

In the surrounding space more blankets were lain about, some with couples seated in deep conversation. Conversation that I knew I could not take part in, at least not right then. From the view of my passing rickshaw, curiosity of what they might be discussing, of their love story and of their first meeting, would fully consume me.

No one had possessions beyond the bare essentials, yet families spent their time together and children played.

I witnessed the fundamental pastimes of life, the embodiment of living life itself, which have become so obsolete in most of today’s world. These communities exuded more purity and knowledge than the opulent ashrams and showy Brahmin rituals that surrounded them.

If I have any understanding of happiness, I can confidently say that no member of the tent settlements was deeply unhappy (as an American citizen who frequents China, it is easy to recognize deep unhappiness—I just have to listen to my friends and family speak for five minutes).

During this whole time in Haridwar, my yoga and meditation continued, but my devotion to them dropped drastically.

Tensions and drama within my group became too stressful to ignore. I opened Airbnb, found a beautiful home, and retreated to a world of comfort and convenience.

The solo traveler was solo at last.

Dehradun

Uttarakhand, India

Capital of Uttarakhand

“Doon.“

Day Day 863 – Day 873

19 June 2020 – 29 June 2020

This move did me good.

I laid out all my belongings in the master bedroom and organized groceries around a fully equipped kitchen. I enjoyed the rooftop lounging area that was full of botanicals. I implemented one of the greatest lessons from lockdown in Varanasi: how to make a very creamy, very spicy, very dark masala chai.

Here are some lines from Day 868:

“A generous swath of saffron stained the sky
like nectar.
Sweet, sacral nectar.

The heavens themselves
are an ocean.

The view from earth’s surface is as from an airplane
slicing across infinity.”

This treat was short-lived. The hosts asked me every couple days to move rooms in order to squeeze in more guests. That would be just fine, but they were unwilling to compromise on a reduction in rent that better fit my budget, so that I could stay the month. Other guests told me they were paying a fraction of what I was.

The atmosphere wasn’t for me. I was in the middle of an urban neighborhood, with traffic and dust and honking surrounding me on four sides.

My hosts dwelled in India’s upper middle class. They appeared to stay in bed all day, every so often projecting at the top of their lungs,

“Arrey, [insert name of unfortunate domestic helper]! [Insert name again]!!”

I hustled on outta there before the end of the month.

Rishikesh

Uttarakhand, India

Yoga Capital of The World

“I just lay there
In a bliss
Trying to hold on to all the little gems of the day.

Too late to write it down
Too weak.

So satisfied in my own space
My own world
My own way that I left everything I knew for.

To create it
To breathe it
To be it.”

—Me, Day 899

Day 874 – Day 961

30 June 2020 – 25 September 2020

Just before the monsoon rains began to slam down on the state of Uttarakhand, government buses fired their engines back up.

I got on one, got off, and not too long afterward, found myself crossing the iconic Laxman Jhula suspension bridge just outside of Rishikesh. In normal times a jam of humans, cows and their dung, and motorbikes blaring their horns, would make it very hard to protect one’s personal bubble. On June 30th, 2020, Laxman Jhula was deserted.

Suddenly all the afflictions I thought I grew out of during lockdown, resurfaced. Day by day more shops opened their doors. As an ultra-hub for foreigners visiting India, Rishikesh’s demand for green juices, soft Persian dates, and vegan chocolate was sky high. My wallet couldn’t be helped.

I was once again controlled by my greed to sample all the homemade nut butters and try every appealing item from the menus of my favorite cafes, one by one. Living next to an organic shop that was owned by a grandpa who made the best tahini that I have ever spooned and spooned and spooned, didn’t work in my favor either.

So I indulged. Then I would suffer from my freedom. What a privileged cycle to be caught inside.

Where to go each day? What to cook and eat? My simplified life began to complicate again. The complications sourced from my mind that wouldn’t stop whirring.

I did spend an inordinate amount of time doing one thing, though. Fighting mold. Monsoon Mold deserved its own role as a villain in a Marvel comic series.

First came the mildew. I noticed it flourishing on my windbreaker and winter shirts. Then I moved to a room right on the banks of the Ganges, and one day everything was moldy. Everything. My backpacks, the wooden spatula the guesthouse owner gave me from his home, my dry bags, my spices teas and coffee. It took over my sneakers, inside and out.

The other villain I tirelessly battled was Monsoon Moisture. I experienced the most painful foot fungus of my life. It’s not so easy to keep your feet clean and dry when you have one pair of mold-free shoes, and the sun disappears for days at a time. I boycotted socks for two months.

Another significant chunk of my time was dedicated to fighting monkeys. At the beginning of my time in India, I thought having latch locks on the outside of the doors was the stupidest thing. I was locked inside my room by my roommate within my first week in this country. Later, I mindlessly locked in other roommates from the outside. I had supposed it was because the doors didn’t close properly, so they had to be latched from the inside if you were home, and from the outside if you went out.

Once I sat up from bed to find a massive male monkey shoving his face into my cucumbers and mangoes with the most horrendous squishing noises. Noises are quite common and diverse in India, so I ignored it for 10 minutes before I bothered to find the source. The noises I’d dismissed suddenly became a lot less dismissible.

Another time, I was hanging my towel on the balcony of my room, and returned inside to a fang-baring, one-eyed fellow. He was going at the tomatoes. I yelled for help. Three men suddenly appeared on a neighboring balcony of another guest house, and alerted a guy on a third balcony back over at my guest house, who chased out the hairy intruder with an iron rod.

Now I understand Indian door latches.

I also have a newfound appreciation for Indian balconies.

These two incidents involved rhesus macaques, who are aggressive bullies. Other travelers swear that they memorize your face, run away when you wield a stick or a rock, and seek revenge when they later spy you crossing the bridge, weaponless.

The other rampant breed of primates are the langurs. They have mop top hairstyles and a funny way of chewing. Adult males are the size of a small human, and land their jumps with a force that causes entire buildings to tremor. They are slightly more civil than the macaques, but left lots fresh poop on my balcony. The babies played with my drying towels and underwear until it fell onto or near the poop, and lost themselves romping through the cloudy bliss of my mozzie net.

The langurs destroyed the communal kitchen a couple times (can’t forget them door latches). During their fights, they chased one another along the power lines, leaving behind a flurry of sparks and smoke. If the chase crossed my balcony and the open window pane was in their way, the first monkey would slam the window closed with such force that it would simply fly back open, and the next monkey would bash it again.

One day, the whole pane shattered all over the balcony. The next day, my toe was bled from hidden glass shards.

The rhesus macaques are scared of the langurs.

My good friend Shiv, who I met in university and who grew up in Delhi, told me his family’s old apartment complex had a serious macaque problem.

The solution was to hire a man with a pet langur and a bicycle. His job was to rickshaw around the neighborhood with his langur sitting behind him.

It worked.

“I can’t believe that was actually a thing.”

—Shiv, Langur Tales

The last thing in Rishikesh that consumed my time was bliss balls.

One day, with a latte already brought to my table and a fully charged laptop, I placed my fingers to the keyboard, ready to lose myself into my words. I pressed down. Nothing came out. I couldn’t log in. My keyboard stopped working.

This was perhaps thanks to villain no. 2, Monsoon Moisture, or the doing of vicious fire ants that found their way into everything (another life lesson from lockdown: always check your bath towel before you dry yourself).

So I used my creative energy to whip dates, almonds, walnuts, shredded coconut, flax powder, chia seeds, pink salt, and sometimes cacao, into raw vegan balls of bliss. I bought an Indian food processor, known as a mixer grinder, for this endeavor. I kneeled for long hours because my room had no chair, and waited out the frequent power cuts. The demand for my balls was higher what I was able to supply.

For all my labor I received thousands of rupees, but I never made a profit. The more money I was offered, the more I invested in quality ingredients. It was always about the fun and the honesty of my products.

I played artist, and left my creations in a shop. Later, with the support of a lovely Italian who knew everyone, I sold my healthy sweets at events and on the ghats.

On Day 945, I had written myself:

“I truly have the best job.

After a night of music, cabaret, and comedy in Spanglish, I drop onto my bed and pull out all the banknotes from my purse.

I take out the jars, all smothered in chocolate.

I even sneak myself a bliss ball (or two) and some stuffed dates (or two) from all the ingredients stock of the refrigerator upstairs.

It is nearly impossible for me to charge others for what I make. I just want them to enjoy it. Accepting money feels unfamiliar and silly. I only want so badly for what I make to be the best of the best, and when it’s sub-par I just want to do away with it.

I barely break even and often lose on my friends who give me special orders.”

I poured myself most of all into these orders.

One order was a birthday cake for a crowd. I had moved to a third guesthouse where my personal kitchen was a meter from my bed. There were still limitations and it took about 10 hours to complete. The fridge was two flights of stairs above me. It was a no-bake layered cake that needed to be chilled after every step. I woke up the following morning with a sore bum. A happy birthday boy was the only profit I cared for.

Laxman Jhula, Rishikesh now holds the record for the place I’ve stayed the longest outside of my hometown. After three months, there is one best word to describe my feelings for Rishi: saudades.

I don’t want to go back, for a great lesson of this lockdown was:

I am exactly where I need to be.

However, I certainly do miss the cows whose patterned faces became familiar, and how they roamed for a snack, ate banana peels out of my hand, itched themselves against scooters, formed cuddle puddles that blocked the roads, and plopped down in the middle of the suspension bridge to fearlessly nap above the Ganges rapids. They liked the bridge simply because that spot offered the best breeze in town.

These days when I make oatmeal in this mountain village, I think of the shop owners who supplied me all the contents of my bowl—pumpkin and chia seeds, coconuts and cashews and cinnamon—at low, wholesale prices. Saudades.

I think of my loyal customers for my vegan treats, eagerly waiting and asking when more would be ready. Saudades.

I remember Prashand who made the best ginger-cardamom chai in his little hidden shop that he filled with art. His cousin Deepak owned the second guesthouse I had stayed at, and told me that I was funny, after I asked if he could print me something to help me vote in the 2020 presidential elections to put an end to Namaste Trump.

(Deepak had no printer.)

I think of all the other bald female travelers of Rishikesh with fondness.

I will never forget the Indian grey hornbills and the Oriental pied hornbills soaring above the jungle canopy, nor will I forget the nectar-sipping male crimson sunbird cleaning itself at dawn.

I will always remember Lali the cow, who lived below me in my third guesthouse and who was on her tenth pregnancy. Her babies get placed on the streets with the other stray cows before they reach one year. The baby daddies were unknown street bulls. Bless her heart.

I used to get a cup of Lali‘s fresh milk at 7am, and use it to make my own chai and yogurt. It was my first dairy experience that involved neither antibiotics and growth hormones (to the best of my knowledge), nor plastic. It was the first time that my alarm clock took the form of an udder.

My belly recalls the vegan platters at Little Buddha Cafe and how ubiquitous hummus was throughout town (you could order by weight and get it doorstep delivered). Then there were the baked gnocchis, veggie pizzas, and sauvignon blanc paired with goat cheese spread on naan chips.

Here in the mountains, I finished my salted almond chocolate bar way faster than I expected. I took the last bite with a shot of saudades.