Myth and Missing
Varanasi is perhaps what I thought I might find in India. The ghats (wharves) are all painted faces and temples and cows and signs painted on the narrow alleyways, and elaborate lacy architecture, and stone streets, and everywhere filth and garbage and exuberance. Walking along the ghats in the evening, reveling in the busy and the beauty of the river and the steps, I can almost believe.
Almost. Something was tearing at me, some internal contradiction. Nowhere else have I seen the Hindu tradition so vivid, so lively, so appealing. There’s a relentless logic here, from the sacred cows roaming the streets to the shambling, almost running, chanting processions carrying the dead down to the river, bodies covered in brightly-bangled red cloth. The architecture reinforces it all, a warren of connected buildings old and new, passages through shops and people’s living rooms, secret courtyards. No cars in here, and few motorbikes. Reminds me of Venice, another old pedestrian jewel by the sea. And yet.
I want to believe. I want so badly to say it is beautiful and spiritual and that their religion is a force for good. Maybe it is. I chatted with the owner of my guesthouse today over tea. I asked him about the changes he’s seen in Varanasi in his lifetime. He says the young generation is more “independent”, that they go out and make their own way and they’re not reliant on their family for money. They dispose of their own income however they like. But, also, they have no respect. “Money is their new god,” he said. And there are already two malls in Varanasi, with more on the way, he told me sadly, wisely, as if this said everything. Maybe it does. Is the new really better than the old?
And why is the old succumbing? We can spout again all the reasons why religion has failed us. For one thing, the myths are just not true. They’re fable. Worse, Hinduism is a fable about a world that cannot ever exist again, an agrarian society ruled by a monarch-deity, where caste was karma and justified class. You were born low and you will stay low. That’s a fatalism I just can’t agree with, a sad disregard for the here and now – a disregard for the real, the only real, the present. So I don’t want that story. I don’t think it’s good for anyone anymore. And yet.
I finally pinpointed my unease, maybe, as I sat on the steps of some big ghat and watched people bathing, ringing bells, chanting, eating ice cream, practicing cricket pitches… I want to love these people. This is the first time I have seen their old social fabric properly glittering. This is the multi-colored saree of a city. This old town is what their culture was meant to be, an ideal. I fell a little in love today. I grieve a little, again, for how quickly it is fading – not five blocks away from the river, the modern city starts, with its wide roads and its modern and horrible traffic. Truly horrible traffic, choking and dangerous with no sidewalks and I have no idea how they can sit at the edges of the road and savor their chai amid exhaust clouds. I couldn’t live like that. They can, and that is India too.
What is the beauty of the future? If we can no longer be unified by ancient and glorious ideas, what are the modern and noble equivalents? In all our diversity – diversity which I cannot help but feel is a good thing — what can we agree upon? Perhaps we really do need the sacred to remind us of what the world could be. But what could it be? What is the texture of the iPod utopia? What are the grand myths of the new, technological, secular, globalized world? And not the sullied American Dream; we all know by now that two cars and two kids are not nearly enough for fulfillment. Something better, something richer. And, hopefully, something true as well.
