Midnight in Varanasi

The ghats don’t sleep. Neither did I, the first time I saw them lit by a thousand oil lamps.

I arrived in Varanasi at eleven at night, which is both the worst and best time to arrive. Worst because the auto-rickshaw drivers at the station have a particular brand of aggression that is unique to holy cities. Best because the city reveals itself to you in darkness first, and there is something right about that.

The River

The Ganga at midnight is not the river you see in photographs. In photographs, it is golden hour and flowers and the suggestion of spirituality. At midnight, it is black and ancient and indifferent. It has been here longer than the city, longer than the temples, longer than the idea of India itself.

I sat on Dashashwamedh Ghat with my feet hanging over the stone steps, watching the last embers of the evening aarti fade into the water. A sadhu sat twenty feet away, smoking something that was not a cigarette. A dog curled up between us, equidistant, belonging to neither.

What the City Teaches You

Varanasi teaches you about time differently than any other place. In most cities, time moves forward. In Varanasi, time is a stack — everything happening at once, the ancient and the modern layered on top of each other like geological strata.

A funeral pyre burns at Manikarnika Ghat twenty-four hours a day. It has not stopped in centuries. Nearby, a teenager scrolls through his phone. Both are equally real, equally present.

I stayed for five days. I intended to stay for two. That’s what Varanasi does — it adjusts your internal clock to its own rhythm, which is slower and older and somehow more honest than the one you arrived with.