Terror-Creatures From Beyond The Ghats

edit: forgot to mention, Kushinagar and new Varanasi pics are up. Also, this is the 100th post on this blog. How did THAT happen?

Upon returning from Nepal I ticked off the last stop on my tour of the great Buddhist pilgrimages of India, the village of Kushinagar, where the Buddha died.

Even for a Buddhist pilgrimage site in a country that is less than 1% Buddhist, Kushinagar is so sleepy it's almost sad. It's located in a poor, rural part of Uttar Pradesh not far from the Bihar border and is little more than a wheat-farming village with a handful of incongruous temples along one of the roads. Even the monasteries sort of blend in, the ones from the poorer Buddhist countries being indistinguishable from your standard village brick-piles save for the fact that their cheaply-painted murals offer fortune-cookie tips to spiritual enlightenment rather than competing manufacturers of steel rods. In the center of town are the excavated ruins of old Kushinagar, which aren't much to look at now, and in the center of these is the new-ish Mahaparinirvana Temple. This temple allegedly marks the precise spot where Buddha died and achieved the ultimate Nirvana. It's an odd space-ship'y building blending the ancient design with a bit too much modernism. Inside is an enormous gold-covered statue of the Buddha lying serenely on his deathbed, a scene so inspirational it is the one place I have actually observed Hindu people being silent. I saw it firsthand. This is the Indian equivalent of sending a swirling, screeching jar of distilled ectoplasm to the home addresses of the Nobel committee. Aside from the statue, however, the interior of this most important temple is truly hideous. It has polished stone floors, but halfway up the walls become plain, unpainted concrete, and you can see the rusty ventilation fans hanging in the upper windows. It looks like the lobby of a deceptive budget hotel in New Delhi with a massive ancient treasure ready to disappear into a shipping container somewhere.

Beyond the temple and a row of monasteries one could mistake for hardware stores there is basically just a lot of rice and wheat. I found myself on a bit of a stroll through the "village", which was mostly unfinished boundary-walls and stacked blocks of cow-dung fuel next to thatched huts. After about fifteen minutes of surprising quiet in which I saw more ditch-lounging buffaloes than people, I finally found what I was looking for: the ruins of the huge ancient stupa erected on the site where Buddha was cremated. Sure enough, it's still there, in vaguely stupa form, in a blissfully quiet little lawn dotted with palm trees, with nothing but empty fields stretching in every direction. It was fabulous.

I was making my way south from Nepal to Madhya Pradesh, because I hate myself. More about M.P. and Ghostface Buddha's ingrained masochism* later, but the point is I found it convenient to stop in Varanasi as I headed south. *nobody's ever loved me

I arrived in Varanasi six months to the day from my previous sojourn here, and some things have certainly changed. The city seems strangely empty in comparison, perhaps because it is not now the peak of one of India's largest festivals, or perhaps because I am now irredeemably accustomed to suffocating multitudes. The Ganges river, after a problematically dry winter and spring, has fallen many feet, and it is now possible to actually walk up to the door of the sunken temple just off of Scindia Ghat. I would have taken a peek inside the small chamber that is normally immersed in the sacred waters, but feared that it would merely lead me down into a vast lower temple where I would have to negotiate an arcane system of traps dependent on magically-changing water levels and playing wind instruments. On the other hand, the narrow alleys of the old city surely remain the world's most dangerous bottlenecks of cow-shittery. The more things change the more they stay the same.

I went wandering about the alleys again, this time with bolder explorations in mind. As I twisted through the confounding maze of alleys, I couldn't help but notice the heavily-armed platoons of paramilitary police at every corner, and got the strange feeling of being under some sort of quarantine. Then it all made sense...

Varanasi is plagued by zombies.

Think about it: how else to explain the massive paramilitary deployment, the unspoken nocturnal curfew, the photography prohibitions, the insistence upon burning all bodies immediately upon death? The Vedas were telling no mere parable when they declared that Varanasi is "ungoverned by the Lord of Death"! So many pieces fall together. Why are there so many raving holy men seeking nothing but a liberation from further "lives"? Why are the inhabitants of the city so compulsively vegetarian? You would be too if the consumption of flesh brought horrific reminders of the insatiable undead! And why else is there such a profusion of arcane rituals if not to root out zombies incapable of following through with the complex motions? Why are so many buffaloes necessary, if not as mounts for the cow-headed, buffalo-riding Death god Yama? And is it mere coincidence that the interminable ringing of bells - a virtual homing beacon of living worshipers- takes place on elevated platforms or behind closely guarded doors? I think not. And do the authorities think that a mere zombie plague excuses them from clearing the streets of cow shit? OVER MY DEAD BODY

Like it or not, I was not given a chance to do battle with the living dead as I was confined by the curfew. Slipping through the alleys just before lockdown I had a chance at least to test my reflexes, and almost took off the head of an elderly woman who reached with a whispered groan towards my arm from a dark recess in the street. A city where people go to die can be a creepy place.

Ultimately, the greatest threat to my well-being came from others among the living, and as usual, from myself. I was poking about alleys as before, and found myself at an intriguing-looking Hindu temple, and decided to peek inside. I discovered later that it was a semi-underground super-hardcore orthodox temple, one of those that had been established precisely as a spiteful answer to the other temples of Varanasi which were now letting the likes of the lowest castes into their hallowed grounds, and one of the last places it would be wise for me to be. What I discovered then, however, was that this foreigner was clearly not wanted, an insinuation made less than subtly by an angry, screaming mob dragging me into the streets by my shirt. Shit, as they say, got real. I was subjected to a rapid barrage of half-shouted, half-spat, somewhat rhetorical questions like "DO YOU RESPECT RELIGION?" and "WHY DO YOU BRING YOUR DIRT HERE?" I walked a tightrope of apology and defiance, spouting as much semi-relevant Hindu theology as I could muster to save my ass, apologizing profusely, wriggling free of my immediate assailants, and stalwartly refusing to go into the darkened temple offices to "see the high priests for a discussion." Instead I managed to talk so much I drew away a handful of English-speaking mob members and carefully increased my distance from the furious rabble until I backed around a corner within sight of a police patrol. The police and the small detachment from the mob both hesitated; clearly the mob knew there could be trouble and didn't know what to do, and the police were waiting for an indication from the mob to see whether I should be hauled away for a discussion with them instead. In the awkward no-man's land I made another burst of quick apologies, some praises to the various Almighties, and passed off about $11 dollars in bribe before quickly spinning off into a warren of lanes leading to the waterfront.

The moral of the story? Conservative clergymen are assholes. I'll take the zombies any day. At least if you disintegrate their heads you don't have to perform ten thousand fire-stake penances or take a basket of 108 conch shells on a pilgrimage to the fucking moon. Amen.