Chapter 3

In the privacy of the faceless crowds at its shore there lies solitude, so profound that you can truly listen to your inner voice. An exalted I, preferred to converse with an amiable Ganga only to witness my excitement leveling; and when poignant, I yearned to embrace a caring Ganga, only to perceive my melancholy getting dissolved in its flow. It once had the divine motherly offerings of eternal wisdom and edifying solace. Truly living to its claim, it was a confluence of death and life; It offered those looking for salvation every opportunity. I had always got what I had pined for. I have died and reborn various times at its bank. I have witnessed the cremation of my ego at Manikarnika, and resurrection of my internal sagacity at Dasaswamedh. At that time I wished never to grow up….. a childish wish, a wish that was soon denied.

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Assi, an integral part of the name Varanasi. Varanasi is derived from Varuna and Assi, one a small tributary to Ganga in the north and the other a rivulet cum drain in the south, both running parallel to other, fostering the older city in-between. The ghats, the stony flight of steps, extending from the crowded narrow winding lanes flanked by roadside shops and scores of Hindu temples, and descending into the composed shores and thus acting as a buffer between bedlam and equanimity, continuously abuts the river bank. Without leaving an inch gap inbetween, from the double-deck truss bridge at Rajghat, and stretching over three Km till the mouth of Assi, the ghats counts eighty-assi- in number, and thus the name Assi. The thing which distinguishes seraphic Assi, the south cornered eightieth ghat, from rest Seventy Nine is its majority populace of professional painters amateur photographers cerebral scholars effervescent students seeking foreigners and young and old lovers over that of priests, making Assi more youthfully spiritual than untidily religious, a fact which makes it a core of foreign tourists in Varanasi.

Like every other evening, that day too Assi was covered black and white with equal populace of Indian inhabitant and foreign vacationer. It was always amusing to come across the white people, burned to red skin by the scorching heat, wandering about the city in their sorts hauling heavy rucksacks, in hunt of its culture; only to be bamboozled into shredding cash by the ‘pundit’ posed touts, and to be tricked by the middlemen into buying cheap stuffs at soaring rates at the handicraft shops, and to be confused amid the narrow alleys by the prolonged rickshaw drives, and to be misguided by the hin-glish words of the uninformed guides into believing their own self emanated history of the very aged Kashi. I wondered…. ‘What draws them to India?’