Early evening in Varanasi, pinkish-grey dull sky stretches out over the wide brown Ganges. India is very unusually subdued, nature seems old here, like a weary god reflected in a sickening world. Our cheap hotel is south of the old city's centre, just off from the waterfront, just off from the steep stone steps leading down to the polluted holy waters of Hinduism's greatest river.

These ancient steps going down the steep banks have been used for bathing, praying and cremation for centuries (or longer).

Sombre broken palaces, bare temples and dessicated houses line the side of the Ganges, and although each a different colour, each in a different architectural style - in their worn down old age, their colours sun and rain bleached, they seem oddly at home together.

Dark men bathe in the opaque water, other sit with friends on the steps silently, dogs and goats wander, monkeys with pink arses pick among the rampants. A hawk with torn feathers sails low in the silent sky.

Old Varanasi is a difficult, contrasting place to take in. We pondered at the edge of the sluggish river, then climbed the vertiginous steps up into landings, battlements and narrow alleyways. The stepped slope up into the city proper breaks off into houses at different levels, leaving one suddenly walking across roofs or climbing upwards beyond turrets. Leaving my friends for a minute, I walk up and on, to a barred shrine about the size of a phone box. The man praying to it departed, I peered in. A melted orange stone figure, only vaguely humanoid, "head" sunken into its chest, yet with human like glass eyes inserted into its sockets. A garland of flowers has been draped around its neck, incense burns.
Through an archway, I hear chanting, up some steps, I come to the door of a little stone hall. Twenty young men are chanting, crosslegged in white, they wave me to come in but I decline.
With my friends, we walk further. A beautiful orange brick old building, standing alone against the remaining day's light, inside a walled garden.

Shuttered windows give it the feel of a Renaissance manor, we enter the gate to get a closer look. An old man leaning on a wooden stick weakly greets us, explains slowly he has been living here thirty years. With his permission, I peer in one window - complete blackness. I peer in the next, a few people, sitting without talking on a bed. "Do many people live in the house?", I ask him. "No, only my wife and I", he replies, confusingly. It would be an enornmous rickety place for just two people to be living in. But then, how could one fear ghosts in Varanasi, city of death? To die here, the centre of the Hindu universe, brings instant enlightenment and freedom from rebirth - many ageing Indians come to stay in the city exactly for that purpose. Is the heaviness in the air and grey in the sky in part due the cremation fires burning close upriver?

Gari and I spent our time in the city with Peter and Henrica, who were travelling together for a year pre-University. It was a very fun group being a four for a while, and we idled about two meals a day in the nearby Haifa restaurant, eating through the wonderful Middle Eastern menu.

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The Hindu sense of the holy is staggeringly robust. I imagine many Christians find it hard to feel God's presence in the sombre quiet of church - now imagine your church was open to the air, goats and monkeys were wandering around, tourists were snapping photos, guides were giving explanations of limited precision, children were trying to sell trinkets and boatmen were haggling, a few guys were taking a piss against a nearby wall, and on some level you knew the church building (in my analogy the Ganges) was deeply contaminated and dangerous to your long term health. Yet the bathers and riverside shrine chanters seem unaffected, their eyes intent, minds facing inwards.

Dawn meditation.

And in the more private setting of a temple, the intensity of Hindus going about their daily prayers is unsettling. In the modern built Tikal-like temple of Shiva in Varanasi's university grounds, Indians stood over the rock shrine to their god, at the centre of the building, and threw flowers, splashed Ganges water from little brass pots, and simply stared in a way that showed how immediate the divine was to them. In the "Shiva" restaurant, we chatted to a Hindu couple on their forth pilgramige to the city. They had visited now eight of the twelve holy sites to Shiva (they chose to worship only Shiva, out of the 300 million plus gods of the Hindu pantheon), and tonight they were leaving Varanasi towards the ninth.

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Varanasi is the city of sanctity, yet it swelters with scams and con artists. Back in a Delhi restaurant, Indians had warned us, "Even we get tricked when we go there". Every Indian Gari and I have spoken to has described the gurus and holy men (sadhus and brahmins) of the city as fraudsters and thieves - although, as it turned out, the tricksters we actually met in the city were of the more secular variety.

Our driver from the train station offered us an all day city tour for 500 rupees (plus something extra for him if we liked the tour). After a reduced price dawn boat ride on the Ganges and visits to a few temples, he took the four of us to the weavers of the Muslim quarter. In the ground floor of a dingy house, three extremely complex looms, manned by fathers and their very young sons, created intricate "brocade" Varanasi silk. All well and good up to this point - the "Mughal town" had been somewhere I'd read about and wanted to visit. Then the man explaining the weaving process guided us to a showroom. Our guide had explained to us previously that this was a fixed price exporter, so he couldn't get any commission - this was the best place to buy in the city. Writing this now, it all sounds obviously a set up, but all I can say is that it was only after the event that we pieced together all the manipulation. Although our guide, with his rotting teeth, thinning hair and tobacco spitting seemed rather wretched, he was I now see quite a skilled player of people.
We sat down on cushions, the manager of the shop indulged in some weak banter about England, another man drew our attention to their fair trade certificate framed on the wall. Then they began showing us their wares - he unfurled with a snap of the wrists sheet after sheet after sheet of silk patterns - each about five feet long and two wide with intricate designs. Quickly a huge multi coloured pile built up in front of us, slowly making us feel embarassed about not buying anything. He eased us into selecting the pieces we liked, to put them aside, no pressure to buy of course. "If you buy I will be smiling, if you don't buy I will still be smiling". He slowly, theatrically, pulled off each brocade from the pile in turn, putting silent pressure on one of us to agree that this lovely piece should be added to our "maybe" selections. No silk work was like Varanasi silk, these were entirely hand made, heirlooms that could be passed to our grandchildren, made by masters of their craft. The prices ranged from 900 rupees to 2400 (eleven to thirty pounds). Despite that none of us wanted to buy these overpriced over-colourful wall hangings/table covers, the pressure not to be rude and just agree to buy something was mounting for all four of us.

Fortunately, during the explanation of the weaving process, one of the kids at the looms had been continously saying, "Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello..." and whenever I met his eyes in response, he'd rubbed two fingers against his thumb in that standard Indian request for a donation ("baksheesh"). This, and the failure of any of the adults in the room to shut him up, had put me in a foul mood, so as the seemingly never ending array of silks mounted, I was little concerned about politeness - we were either going to buy something or we'd be there until evening. Plus I was feeling very protective of Peter and Henrica, who were just starting their trip and on a smaller budget than Gari and I were. "I'm going to get up and leave in a few minutes", I told Gari, and after some consultation, the four of us climbed to our feet and uncerimoniously scrambled out the shop. The shop manager was not, despite his promise, smiling, and neither was our guide. We've since heard that he would have earned a 40% commission from anything we bought (hence the inflated prices), so his unhappiness was understandable.

All these things are lessons, and the lesson I took from this encounter was that us tourists' desire not to be rude, to buy something out of politeness, is what these touts play on and amplify. We were in that shop in part out of a sense of responsibility to our guide - we agreed to see a second shop later that day just to make him happy (he was almost begging us to try it out by that point). We entered the second shop, and exactly the same brocades were laid down in front of us. There was no way we could have left either shop with a win win outcome, with mutual good feeling, and they were hoping our guilt would encourage us to be polite and buy something as a concession. I felt no regret at being rude and forceful given the situation.
I've also since heard that, rather than being an heirloom for one's grandchildren, the metal threads in these silk brocade blacken after ten or twelve years - what else had been a lie during that day?

We directed our now frustrated guide to take us to Sarnath, 10 kms north of Varanasi, the site of the Buddha's first sermon (Varanasi is that kind of place - even Jesus has probably showed up at some stage). The temples and ruins of the site sit among fenced parks, a strangely peaceful haven from the mad pushiness of India. We had a tour from a local Buddhist guide, then relaxed and chatted on the serene grass as the sun turned red, then walked among the great paintings of the interior of the temple to the Buddha.

[I probably don't need to say that our parting from and payment of our guide was less than harmonious - the whole experience with him led to Gari dubbing Varanasi: "Vara-nasty"].

The scam side of Varanasi isn't the only side to the city however, annd despite the great piles of cow shit, air thick with car fumes, and men who match pace with me, claiming to be students, then get aggressive when I decline the chance to chat, these don't dent the endearing, entrancing side of Varanasi, city of light.
The famous dawn boat trip past the great riverside temples and stone steps, while not especially spiritual for the tourist, is a showcase of India's antiquity and strangeness. Proud riverside palaces (with adverts for yoga classes graffitied on near the water level); bathers waist deep, letting water stream from their raised high palms; men with that Hindu ash grey painted in lines across their skin meditating; clothes washers smacking garments again and again against the stone; smoke rising like fingers from the cremation bonfires. Were I not feeling tired of travelling, I would certainly stay here longer and try to investigate the city's mysteries. I had great fun winding my ways through Varanasi's alleyways and narrow houses - finally I had found an Indian city designed for exploring on foot!
The city of death is also rather gregarious and welcoming. Varanasi people, at least the ones not involved with selling to tourists, were far more open and curious than in the other Indian cities I've been to (Delhi and Siliguri). School children quizzed us, little girls waved, mothers and fathers smiled at me as I meandered in the Venetian narrow lanes, boys playing cricket implored me to join in their game. One music group of Hindus in a long hall saw me peering in through the barred windows, and waved for me to come in. Three men sat playing, one with a sitar, one with little cymbals/metal hand clappers, one on some kind of keyboard accordian. I sat crosslegged listening for a while, and then the man with the hand cymbals took them off and handed them to me - I was being asked to join in the music. Every naff image of Westerners in India flashed in front of my eyes, beginning and ending with the Beatles - I couldn't do it, and declined. Perhaps also, I had this odd sense that money would be asked for at some point, and decided to trust in my instinct and smiled and left. Hours later, I came back the same way, and the same group was still playing and smiling to each other. Perhaps I got it wrong on that occasion.

Daniel, 27 September 2004, Delhi