ANTICIPATING ASSI GHAT
The ancient city of Varanasi is one of the most sacred places in India. It is built along the carved out curve of the Ganges River, the Ganga, with permanent stone steps descending down the steep bank from the most ancient and colorful part of the city with it’s narrow lanes and no vehicular traffic. There are 88 of these sets of steps, ghats, each with a different religious or historical significance. The most up river of all the ghats is Assi Ghat. And during the many visits with student groups, and without them, Susie and I have found our way to Assi Ghat where we have found places to stay, gradually moving up from cheap and simple to very pleasant and simple, finally settling on the inexpensive but wonderful Sahi River Guest House which is closest to the most beautiful and charming of the guest houses (but more expensive), the Hotel Ganges View.
At the Sahi River View guest house with a view of the Ganges the rooms are above the main street down to the ghat with a very holy pipal tree just down from the guest house where on auspicious days women come to circle the tree and pray for fertility and children. Beyond that are the stone steps of the ghat and the wide, muddy Ganga with flat wooden boats everywhere. On the shallow flat sands on the other side of the river, flooded during the monsoon, there are no buildings to interrupt the rising morning sun.
This is the part of Varanasi I am most familiar with and where I have taken thousands of photographs and been invited into a few homes of ordinary boatmen or bicycle rickshaw drivers. I have taken photographs of weddings, a local community of poor Bengalis (from Bengal), a school for orphan girls, orange robed sadhus of all types, and the open air vegetable market. It is a place where I both feel very comfortable and very uncomfortable because I am both delighted by the sensual life of the streets around Assi Ghat and I know a little of the pain of some of the inhabitants which contrasts with my stopping by for a few weeks to be stimulated again by the life of Assi Ghat in contrast to the hard life of many of the inhabitants for whom Assi Ghat and just getting by is all they know or will experience of the world.
So these photographs are what I am both anticipating with pleasure and a little dread for a stay of two weeks three months from now.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 