A story about Varanasi and India, written by our son, himself an adventurer in Asia and, in fact, the instigator of our own adventure:

How do you begin a travel story after so many months of silence? What medicines does one use to prime the engine of memory? Sitting now on the terrace of our bungalow, the details of the last six months' adventures feel impossibly distant. Watching the light scatter across the sea in the late afternoon (on a small island sixty kilometers from the coast, in the province of Chumphon, in southern Thailand), I find my memories are as unreachable as the mainland. And so, the harder I strain to find land on the horizon, the more deeply hidden any recollection of that continent in sedition seems to become.

Through my headphones I'm listening to Indian classical music, an attempt to prime the memory. The story can't be linear; the memories swallow me whole. A Zen disciple was walking along the shore of a lake with his master. He stopped and asked, "Master, what is the essence of water?" The master turned around and pushed him into the lake. Something similar, perhaps, happens to me when I try to describe our time in India. Perhaps the long silence has been nothing other than an inability to tell the story, to tell it to myself. The intensity I feel for that part of our journey will live, necessarily and exclusively, in that present tense.

The song is beginning to work. It's the same melody that made Avishek cry, a Brahmin friend we met one night in Varanasi, Benares, city of light. We never did find out why he wept. It was a weeping too deep, too nostalgic, for us to dare ask. Perhaps it was a cry of happiness. Only he and his god will ever know what was moving through his mind to the rhythm of the shanti-mantra.

Now, on the horizon of memory, I can see the Great Mother, the Ganges, the most sacred river of the Hindus, which skirts Varanasi on its long journey from the Himalayas to the sea. Anyone who dies in this mythical city escapes forever from the cycle of life and death. Varanasi, passport and visa to Nirvana. Varanasi, life and death, smile and tears. Varanasi, dark city, magical, tragic, eternal. In another twilight, on another continent, I walked to the bank of the Ganges to release my puja (a small offering plate of banana leaf, bathed in marigold flowers, with a little candle of hope dancing at its center). On an afternoon like this one, after an indescribable ritual steeped in the smell of incense, standing at the edge of Manikarnika Ghat, I watched my small lit boat drift away, and in the distance it seemed to join a procession of hundreds of other hopeful little vessels. On afternoons like this one we sat on the roof of our hotel and watched a wall of human smoke warp the horizon. Yes, in Varanasi they burn some of their dead. At the river's edge, at certain ghats, a great wooden pyre is built, and after a complicated ritual a body is turned to ash, leaving, two and a half hours later, only the most resistant bones of the hip and thorax to be scattered into the Ganges. But the wood for the burning is expensive. For some of the less affluent deceased, the pyre burns out before the job is done, leaving them half-cooked, which is no doubt cause for celebration among the scavenging dogs that inhabit said ghat. I can also confirm that many of the dead left part of their essence in my nose and lungs, evidence that lingered in a persistent mucus the color of coffee, the color of India.

Varanasi, dream and nightmare. Through the labyrinthine streets of the old city, we walked dodging sacred cows and water buffalo, through corridors lined with stained walls. My small lamp lights only the next few meters of the maze. You can hear dogs barking. At night, all across the country, these animals that seem so docile during the day come out to hunt in packs and become genuine monsters. I turn my head and fix my gaze on the darkness that discourages any thought of retreat. Here, the immediate past is already inaccessible. Here, there is no rear guard. There is no path but forward. I can only advance by watching the ground in front of me, and so, colliding with the present, in the middle of a liberating claustrophobia, I begin to discover my own fears. At last the corridor opens onto the river, and dodging the bundles of people sleeping on this kind of enormous terrace, I reach the stone railing. From here the faint lights reflect and scatter across the river, against magical buildings, in an iridescent dream from which I cannot wake. The further I move from my Western reality, the more it seems I am drawing closer to the origin of a great spiral, dizzy from curves that grow tighter the nearer I come to the source and the current. Night has fallen, the mantra has ended, and the memories that were flowing through the headphones have gone too. I feel tired, as though I had lived those days all over again. I hear the soft sound of waves on the beach, and with a final image of Avishek, a tear sliding down his cheek, a look of nostalgic pain, I understand that today the story must end here.

Marcel Ventosa