At dawn we were at the banks of the Ganges River. The wake-up call the tour operators must have arranged to be sure the group was awake early enough had come at 4:25 am. I picked up the receiver and put it back down. It rang again immediately and I did the same. The third time in succession I finally said, “Hello,” and a rather exasperated Indian man at the other end said, “Good morning, madam, this is your wake-up call.” I guess the system is a little different here. I hadn’t meant to be rude. I didn’t know. Fifteen minutes later the phone rang again, the snooze equivalent, I figured. I had learned my lesson. This time I politely said, “Hello.” From the other end came

a click. They must have had enough Americans in the hotel to learn something themselves.

So there we were at sunrise on the holy river getting into boats. We had taken the buses as far as we could down to the ghats, the large concrete steps and openings onto the river, and then worked our way down through the muddy streets with beggars to the waterside concrete dock. We crammed into two large john-boat style boats, about thirty in each. At the front were two skinny old oarsmen who diligently rowed away with the heavy load, happy that they had a chance to earn some good money that day.

The sky was partly cloudy but you could see the orange haze of the sun over the eastern horizon as the shoreline of the muddy water came alive. This was the Ganges River, full of holy water for the Hindus. People were coming to bathe in the water the westerners in our boat knew was so dirty they were afraid to even touch it. The guide books say that thirty sewers empty into this river here, and the fecal coliform count is so high at all times that it is unsafe to swim. In fact, it is over a million times more than a safe limit. I don’t know if the Indians know it, but I don’t think it would matter. To them, the water itself is holy, can cure sickness, purify the soul, and take you into the next life. Hindus believe that when you die your ashes must be set free into the running water or your soul cannot reach heaven.

There were burning ghats, upstream from the bathers, where families built funeral pyres of wood and cremated their loved ones with ceremony at the riverside and then released their ashes. There were no funerals to witness that morning from the water. Another traveler said that they are often done at night with the blaze lighting up the darkness. Families from far away cremate at home, then make the pilgrimage to the Ganges to respectfully pour out the ashes.

I watched three people in our boat that morning doing the same, quietly to themselves at different times. Charlotte was one. She said her friend’s son had died in an automobile accident and she had asked that a small amount of his ashes be set free here. One of the Frenchman also, with video camera filming it with one hand, poured a few ashes from a small plastic zip lock bag into the river with the other.

As we were rowed back downstream from the burning ghats, we watched more and more people bathing and even brushing their teeth with the river water. One smiling old man had taken the mud from the bottom and smeared it all over himself from head to toe. When someone in our boat snapped a photo of him, a man behind him on the bank demanded money for the action, but was too far away to collect. Crowds of people had appeared on the shoreline, busy with their new day. We rowed past a colorful hodge-podge of abandoned buildings, storefronts, nice and not-so-nice hotels, and even an old castle of a maharaja.

It would have been a fantastic experience had it not been for the touts. Incredibly, they were on the water worse than they had been on the shore. At times during the ride, we would have three or four other boats filled with displayed goods on their wooden benches tied up to ours while the old men just kept rowing the entire assembly. Over and over again they asked us if we wanted to buy necklaces, small urns to fill with holy river water, and carved elephants among other things. It was difficult to enjoy the scene when someone behind your back won’t stop asking, “Madam? Madam? Madam?” trying to get your attention so that you will turn around so they can release their relentless sales pitches.

The most interesting of these salesmen were the ones with boats filled with buckets of small fish. Many people in my boat bought some, bartering down how many fish for how many rupees. The salesmen said they had purchased these small uneatable fish at the market. And the point was to buy them so that you could set them free, so they would not be killed for food. In doing so, you would create merit. It is good karma to save a life -or even two or seven - even if they are only small fish lives. It didn’t seem to matter that everyone knew this was a scam. They were not eatable fish. They had been caught only to sell and to be set free. Over and over again I watched pilgrim after pilgrim barter and then slowly pour a bucket of water and fish into the river. The supply was endless. Eventually all were tired of the diversion. But the salesmen just kept insisting that we needed to buy them for our good karma. Finally Jean, an obese gray-haired foster mother with a left facial nerve palsy who had bought buckets herself, turned around and exclaimed, “Why don’t you just GIVE us the fish? That would be good karma for YOU!” And with that, and as we were about back to the dock, they finally left us alone.

Once again on the riverbank, we were bombarded by beggars and touts. I realize that we were like a big neon sign flashing “money here” – all these westerners in a group attracting attention with cameras and, of course, Rinpoche. But it was so overwhelming. There were dirty children with raggedy clothes and their hands out, a boy of ten or eleven crippled by polio on crutches, disheveled mothers with babies in their arms and concerned looks on their faces as they pointed to their mouths. It was an endless array of sadness and poverty that followed us back to the big clean white tour buses.

I didn’t hand out a lot of money. The more demanding they are, pulling at my shirtsleeves, the less I find I want to give. I gave the most rupees to a couple of lepers. They were both old, gray-haired, skinny, dirty men. One was on a cart about a foot off of the ground. His right leg was missing up to just below the knee and his left foot was completely gone. As he held out his hand for money, I could see no fingers remaining on the stub. The other man who was pushing the cart looked like he could have been his brother. He also had leprosy and was missing fingers and toes and part of one foot, but his disease had not yet taken such a severe toll as with the first man.

I was thinking about these two later that night while drinking rum with a few of my new friends at a last night going away party. Thinley was there, the Tulku turned rum drinking tour company owner. Short, chubby and jovial, Thinley had depth in his dark eyes and was very worldly and street smart, knowing many cultures and particularly the Indian one in which he lived. I trusted his opinion and so asked him what he thought of my and Charlotte’s idea to set up a camp in Bodhgaya to treat these poor lepers and vaccinate against polio. He was adamant that there was no need to worry about polio. Government vaccination programs had now been in place for many years. I reminded him of the boy of about ten on crutches at the ghats, but then did realize that he was probably the youngest of the polio cripples I had come across. And the lepers? “That is how they make a living. They don’t want to be treated. They won’t go to the government programs. The more body parts they are missing, the more money people give them.”