Lessons I’ve Learned

If life is a classroom then Varanasi is a lecture hall that I find myself frequenting daily. As time continues to passe, I am able to observe the emotional ebbs and flows this experience has produced for me. Have I been inter-culturally effective? Manulea, our CIDA facilitator with whom we took an ‘intercultural effective course’ prior to our departure to India, might diagnose me as ‘right on track,’ the point in the trip where the graph levels out. With the honeymoon and homesick phases over and done with I am now feeling like a regular Varanasi resident, so much so that I would like to drop in at a city meeting and voice my opinion re: electrical power outages; but that’s a whole different blog.

My Varanasi residency brings with it an uncanny sense of familiarity with the city. The warmth and unmatched Indian hospitality create this feeling, as does the daily encounters with the chai walas, the slow moving street cows who have been great teachers in patience. My patience has also been tested in the Tulsi Kunj library. The combination of deadlines and scorching heat have had an exhausting effect on my energy levels, which are consistently tested by the ‘hard to say no to’ faces of children pleading me to play with them. As I write this blog in the Gandhi room of the Tulsi Kunj library I have eight of these beautiful young faces who are, periodically peering up at me from their books, begging me to entertain them. At last I oblige and show them pictures from a wedding I attended last night.

The epic and long anticipated wedding has come and gone. Shitanshue, The Banaras office’s program director, is married! The excitement for this wedding rippled down to us interns who, I can confidently say, have been looking forward to this wedding since our arrival three and a half months ago. An opportunity to buy and wear a sari might have had something to do with our level of anticipation. Shopping for saris: a monumental event alluded to in a former blog.

After the wedding, on our late night rickshaw ride home, buzzing with happy exhaustion, we began tailing the rear of a tractor pulling a truck full of men chanting a haunting chorus: “Ram Ram Satya Ram, Ram Ram Satya Ram.” The disturbing and evocative mantra moved us from our post wedding contentment into sober reflection. The men were traveling to the Ganges with the body of a dead relative. Their chant translates into “Ram is our God, Ram is our God.” Aware of the stark proximity of life and death in Varanasi, for me this was a palpable example of how vivaciousness lives a rickshaw away from mortality in this city of contrasts.

I remember our first meeting in Toronto when Mamta Mishra described Varanasi’s ability

to cultivate resilience in the absence of the West’s artifice surrounding death; now I can see that she was completely right. Watching a boy fly a kite next to a funeral pyre on a burning ghat or leaving the bliss of a wedding only to run up against a funeral procession has stripped away some of my fear of and blindness towards death. A beautiful Buddhist proverb says: “when you were born you cried and the world rejoiced and when you die the world cries and you rejoice.” Death has a whole new meaning in Varanasi, an ancient meaning. As the days march on I know the lessons I teach my students in the Tulsi library will always fall short of the lessons I continue to learn from the ghats of Varanasi.