DEAR CORNERSTONE FRIENDS (My Friday old man’s group)
I am sitting here in the midst of screaming horns and a general street hubbub with a view below me of a street leading down to Assi Ghat, the stone steps leading down to the Ganges river, filled with boats. Beyond the trees is a view across the blue Ganges to the sands on the other side of the river. Varanasi, the holy city, is packed with Indian pilgrims and tourists with a few Westerners sprinkled in. It turns out that this is an especially holy time of the year with a huge festival honoring Shiva, Shiv Ratri, coming up in about two weeks, just as we are hoping to leave for the Himalaya Mountains to where I went to boarding school as a boy. We are having great trouble getting a train ticket out of Varanasi and may end up renting a car and driver for the full day’s drive, 15 hours, to Mussoorie.
All of this makes me feel the great gulf between your sitting in the Cornerstone eating the Cornerstone special breakfast of fried eggs and hash browns (eggs are considered to be non vegetarian in this holy Hindu city and are not on the menu) and the breakfast we just ate at the AUM Cafe of idlis (rice balls) and sambar (coconut) and a sweet curry (150 rupees, $2).
The United States seems like an oddly imagined place with very odd ways of doing things, but so does Varanasi with its horns and whistles and general cacophony. And neither of them seems more real than the other. Our hotel, the Sahi River View, two floors up with a wide glassed in porch and glass topped tables where I am sitting seems a step away from the hubbub of the street.
The $12 rooms are clean and comfortable with hot water but no heat. I’ve been chilly ever since getting to India with the temperatures at night being in the high 40’s and low 50’s and no central heating, or any kind of heating anywhere. But Varanasi seems to be a little warmer than our week in Gujurat was. After four two hour sessions getting 2 implants, 2 crowns, a root canal and an extraction the throbbing in my jaw is beginning to lessen and I am able to chew again. I have one more session in Delhi on the 28th and be glad to finally be done with the dentist. The last two out of three nights were on the train in comfortable berths with sheets and pillows and heavy wool blankets. One night was very cold, one was pleasantly warm in what were supposed to be heated cabins.
I know that you have trouble imagining any of this and that I am mainly talking to myself hoping that by writing down my passage I will remember the surreal feeling of living in two imagined places at the same time. I can empathize a little with the feeling that Elham must have in living with Vickie and Don, as he lives in two places at the same time.
Enjoy your Cornerstone Special. I’ll connect again next week. Yours, Bill.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 