Beauty & Chaos..

This is Chet Singh Palace, a gorgeous old Fort that sits on the Gunga (Ganges River) not too far from our place. I took this photo at sunrise back in April this year and I simply love the way that the ubiquitous grime and sludge can momentarily disappear and the whole city begins to shine each day at first light. That the grime is gone is an illusion to be sure, but it's worth giving into the illusion, even just for a little bit, and simply bask in the stunning show of ancient beauty this place puts on each day.

I also love the way that even amongst the crazy flooding that's currently going on in our city the locals can take the time to make the most of the rising waters by combining elements that we can all enjoy; stunning ancient architecture - and jumping off tall things.

(All the following photos are taken of the tower on the left in the above image)

When my Winnie Wild Flower came home earlier she said "As I was walking up the path to our house I swear I saw a boy flying through the air over near the Gunga!" Turned out she wasn't half wrong.

 

It's worth noting the white writing on the wall down near the water as it identifies the high water mark from the biggest floods Varanasi had back in 1962. It's only a few more feet before it reaches that spot and the waters are still rising daily so it will be a very interesting next few days to see what happens and whether more parts of the city will go underwater. Prayers for the people of Banaras would certainly be worthwhile.

Strange Days Turning 30..

Nothing ever seems normal about this town. Just when I think I've seen or experienced all that this place has to offer, something completely unexpected pops up and grabs me completely by surprise. Today was one of those days.

I turned 30 a couple of days ago and was wanting to do something to celebrate. Over a year ago I had heard whispers about a Golf Course somewhere outside of town but had never seen it myself, nor did I really give it much thought, nor did I really believe it could possibly exist here, but lets face it, what could be a more natural way to celebrate turning 30 than for a couple of dirty hippies to be hanging out on a golf course in Banaras!? 

Getting to the course turned out to be no trouble as Jeb, my one-eighty, gun lovin', Republican votin' buddy from south Florida (yes.. we really are good friends!!) had been there once before. Getting onto the course however, proved to be a whole different matter entirely.

The course manager was sitting drinking chai with 3 of his friends and refused to let us on the course because we were “improperly dressed.” Can you believe it? Me improperly dressed for a round of golf! Outrageous! But this was where ole Jeb truly shined. His Hindi is fantastic and so for 45 minutes he sat with them and buttered them up big time and slowly but surly they began to come around to the idea of us playing. At one point I made a lame joke about swapping shirts with one of the older gentlemen in an attempt to win some favour.. No word of a lie, 5 minutes later this guy stands up, announces to the world that “I simply cannot disappoint anyone!” and proceeds to take off his shirt! Bareing his gloriously hairy Indian paunch for all to enjoy. At that moment, I loved the insanity of this country.

Caddies were mandatory (as were their hardhats!) and so we had to choose from a bunch of little guys who should have been in school but were all out working and thus super eager to get picked. I chose the kid with the most disco looking shirt. His name was super difficult to pronounce and none of us guys could really catch it, but it sounded a lot like the hindi word for the number 27, thus, for the next 9 holes it was Haviwah and Twenty-Seven Vs. the world! 

They ended up being a lot of fun and every time we were out of sight of the club house they would grab a ball and a club out of the bag and give it a hit down the fairway. Every time we'd hit a less than ideal shot (which was often) they'd say "no, no, no" or "not like this" and shake their heads in disappointment. I won’t mention the fact that on the 6^th they out drove a bunch of guys who were 3 and 4 times their age..

I have to admit that even though I hadn't swung a golf club in the last 10 years, this was the probably the closest thing to a "normal" experience I think I've had since moving to Asia almost 2 years back. But before you go off thinking it was "normal normal," keep in mind that we had 10 year old caddies each wearing hard hats, indian families sitting on the side of some fairways watching on, an empty Olympic sized swimming pool sitting half way down the 5^th fairway, and when Oodbilav (photo below) hit his ball into the dam on the 6^th his caddy stripped off, butt naked, dived in and 10 minutes later returned victorious, golf ball in hand. Normal tends to be a rather subjective thing.

In terms of a good way to celebrate hitting the 30 mark, golfing with a couple of mates in Banaras served its purpose pretty darn well and I thought I'd leave you with the one of the 'inspiration' golf quotes from one of the many signs around the course that summed up our day perfectly!


'Golf can best be defined as an endless series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle.' - Unknown

First Breath Of New Life..

In August 2012 I broke ground for the first time in the Resurrection Garden. We were in the middle of Monsoon so with lots of regular rain and sunshine a whole lot of weeds had begun feeling right at home right where I planned to create. Even from looking at it I could tell it was going to be a huge task but had made the decision that I really wanted to put the effort into cleaning out of all the rocks, rubbish and debris in the soil and so I built a large sieve from some wood and chicken wire and began work. Suffice to say, it didn’t take more that a couple of thrusts of the shovel to work out that I had massively underestimated the size of this project!

A brief list of items I’ve found while digging in the garden; batteries, shoes, spoons, plastic bags, chess pieces, bangles (by the thousands), broken toys, shirts, cups, roti plates, broken rolling pins, socks, saris, chip packets, clay chai cups, medicine bottles, diyas/candles, a library card, human poo wrapped in plastic, kite string, school homework, marbles, lolly wrappers, bike tyres, plastic syringes, bolts, rings, whistles, whiskey bottles, 15kg slabs of concrete, gloves, our neighbour’s left over breakfast, Paan packets (by the millions), animal bones and innumerable rocks, stones and broken bricks. And as you can see below, it wasn't just within the top few centimeters, even 2 and 3 feet down the earth kept spewing forth decades worth of discarded waste.

Within the first hour the sieve broke under the stress of all the rocks and debris being thrown against it. This didn’t phase me too much as I wasn’t finding it as useful as I'd first hoped and found I could extract the rubbish just as happily with my hands. Our neighbour’s found great delight in hanging out their windows or climbing onto the roof to watch the hairy Videshi (‘foreigner’) doing a job which no self respecting Indian would ever consider doing. On that first afternoon I probably had between 10-15 people, ageing from 5 to 100 watching me for the few hours that I was there. In this regard, even now, a whole year later, nothing much has changed.

Considering the temperatures were still so high and the humidity was through the roof it was really only possible for me to work from around 3pm till the mosquitoes came out just before sundown. I tried a couple of times to go out earlier in the day but after 15-20 minutes I'd end up with heat stroke and spend the rest of the day on the floor. As you can image, progress was slow. Really slow.

Every afternoon I was incinerating countless buckets of waste and amassing a rather large collection of broken bricks and began using them simply to mark out the boundaries of the garden. At some point I began stacking them and before long had a pretty sweet little garden wall happening. But in amongst all this, my most pressing problem was the weeds. In monsoon they grow so fast that even though I had a small section all cleared out it didn't take them long to fall in love with my work and grow intent on moving back on in. 

I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn't do all this work alone (something I had really wanted to do) and that I needed to work smarter, not harder, so one day in a conversation with my sweet friend Shoonkdedy bloom, she told me how in the past they had hired some day laborers to come in and dig some holes for them - and here's the kicker -  the average wage is around 350rupees a day (roughly AU$6.36)... I hired 4...

 

These guys achieved in one day what would have literally taken me months to do. Sadly they were a little on the dodgy side and didn't really do as I had asked (basically they cleared out some areas of soil then spread it out over the other areas to make it look like they had dug through the whole thing.. sneaky) but never the less, what work they did do was still super useful, Winnie got to make them a couple of sweet pots of Chai and they got paid above average wages for a days work (which is not so much for a Westerner but can be pretty big for someone living on the poverty line).

So finally, 3 month after I had first stuck a shovel in the ground the soil was clear of bricks and debris (well, sort of) but after the decades of mistreatment it had received it was still in bad shape. After all this work and countless hours messing around in the soil I hadn't laid my eyes on even one earth worm (maybe it was the heat stroke but one afternoon I began questioning the reason for their absence so much that I actually googled to check that they lived in this part of the world! They do by the way) So then it was time to start focusing on getting some love back into the soil, but I'll be saving that one for the next post. 

Hairy Love

The Rains Came Down & The Floods Came Up..

This is a photo I took a few months back when we took some friends on a sunrise boat ride on the Gunga ('River Ganges'). This is at a place called Assi and it's a great part of town to hang out. It's got some good places to eat, some semi-decent guesthouses and along the Ghats* there's plenty of 5 rupee chai wallas* (roughly AU$0.092) where you can sit, have a drink and just take it all in. 

Take a look at that line of orange flags in the background of this image that are on the right hand side. The ones above the guy on the right holding his washing. The ones way up high, far away from the river side.

 

Because they're the same one in this photo. The ones on the right hand side, blowin about in the morning breeze. And yep, that's the Gunga way down there behind them too.

Because those are the same one on the right hand side of this picture that I took 2 mornings ago. Torrential rain in the northern Indian states is traveling downstream and causing the worst flooding Banaras has seen in the last 10 years.

You can see the sign for the Pizzeria in the above image, I managed to get across and get just inside the top level of it to see the damage. Below is an old photo of the top level where orders are made and the food is prepared in the wood fire or tandoori oven (the seating is on both of the now completely submerged lower floors).

  

And this is a current photo of the top level.

Likewise, these are some before and after shots I took from the the roof of our friends pad.

I feel so strange about these floods.

Part of me finds the whole thing terribly exciting.. and I guess it makes sense. I've never seen flooding in a city like this before and seeing areas I'm so used to walking, sitting and hanging out in being covered by 50 feet of water is wild, it gives these areas I know so well a completely different feel and actually makes some of them more clean and green and peaceful. 

But the other side of me can't get past the reality that these floods are wiping away peoples lives. I don't mean people drowning in the rising waters (though that's certainly a possibility), but that hundreds of businesses are completely flooded out, a friend told me that some of the larger houses and building complexes near his house that were constructed on the sandy banks of the Gunga have partly collapsed into the waters, and countless homes, particularly of the poorest of the poor have been waterlogged and gutted. Our sweet helper Rina told us that the water in her house came up to her waist and that a large amount of their possessions have been ruined. I imagine that this is currently the same story for literally thousands of poor families who have settled their lives on the banks of the Gunga. If you're the praying kind,I'd encourage you to take a few moments and pray for the people of Banaras as many of them are going to be doing it particularly tough for the time to come.

* 'Ghats' = The stone steps that descend into the water that run the entire length of the city
* 'Walla' = Literally translates as 'the one,' used here to mean "The Chai guy"

The Dream Mobile..

I've never really owned my own car before. Eight years ago my parents gave us their old car as a wedding gift but because I was young and cheap, I didn't want to pay the money to transfer it over into my name, so I've never really officially owned one.. but that's all about to change! Well.. sort of..

As you can see, the traffic around here is straight up chaos and it takes a while to really understand how it works. A few tips I've picked up are that nobody has ever shoulder checked in their life, side/revision mirrors are completely irrelevant and it doesn't matter who has right of way (from a Western's perspective) the largest vehicle with the most obnoxious driver has right of way at all times. Thus transporting my family of 4 on a motorbike (including my 4 month old Son) with no safety gear weighs on me a bit. I do it - and I feel confidence to do it - but I don't ever truly feel 100% great about it. However, with the intense congestion and completely under planned roads the thought of getting a car in this city would simply drive me mad.


So here enters Bessie..

Winnie has been talking about it for a while now and I've finally caught up to her in thinking that we should look into getting our own Auto Rickshaw. I took this one for a test drive the other day and am now completely hooked! Sadly this one was a bit too old and a bit too expensive (it would have cost a third of the purchase price just to transfer the registration from a public to private) so now we're crunching some numbers to see if we can come up with the money and are continuing the search for the perfect set of wheels! 

And the perfect paint job! 

Below is Winnie's vision (apparently she didn't buy into my idea of black with flames streaked down the side).

  

Soon all that will be left is to take up chewing Paan to master the truly authentic experience.