RAMESH SINGH BOUNDARY
For four years, since I was here last in 2019, the Ramesh Singh Boundary has been on my mind. This is a colony of makeshift houses combining doors and odds and ends and lots of sheets of plastic down two lanes in a walled empty lot in Lanka, the next section of Varanasi from Assi Ghat. I went through a door in a gate about ten years ago and took photographs of the people who live here, families of boatmen and rickshaw drivers and workers in hotels, most of them from Bengal who speak Bengali rather than Hindi as their native language. I returned two days later with the printed photographs and have been taking photographs and printing them on the four or so visits in the last ten years. If people were dubious at first about the motives of an old white guy that has given way to acceptance and lots and lots of photographs shared. This time when Susie, Todd and I entered the gate after an absence of four years we were swarmed and I took photograph after photograph for twenty minutes and then promised to be back and left. Yesterday I took the photographs to be printed at a photo studio in Lanka and tomorrow I will take them the first set of photographs and then take some more.
But this time I came with trepidation, wondering how badly they had suffered during Covid. How many of them had gotten sucked packed into these tiny one room houses with a large bed in the middle, a cook stove in a corner, maybe an ancient tv, and tin boxes to keep their clothes in. But I never got a chance to ask them how things were and would have had trouble in my broken Hindi and their broken English.
But I had heard from Praveen Tiwari, a travel agent that I know well, that times were very hard during the pandemic. There were many, many deaths in Assi Ghat and intense fear. Everyone was out of work with most businesses closing and certainly the tourist business completely shut down. The travel agent said there were bodies everywhere. And the photographer to whom I took the photographs to be printed said that he got sick on the first wave and all of his family on the second wave and when they went to the crematorium for the cremation and last rites of a friend there were bodies everywhere. So I know there was great fear and enforced curfews and almost no work for anyone. But somehow people got through and now the Indian tourist business if flourishing with everyone wanting to travel but with almost no Westerners around.
But the people of the Ramesh Singh Boundary all seem cheerful. I asked about the little girl of 12 or so who invited me into her school to take photographs during the school day of all the classes which I enlarged and framed so they could be put up on the walls. But she was no longer here. She was married last year at the age of 15 or 16 and lives in another part of Varanasi.
I will go back tomorrow to learn a little more. But whenever I think about fairness in the world I think of these houses in the Ramesh Singh Boundary and of my house, a mansion on a hill with a half acre estate around it in comparison, although mine is one of the smallest houses on the street, but way more room than a single person needs and filled with belongings of all kinds, I realize how extremely wealthy I am, rich beyond the dreams of anyone in the Ramesh Singh Boundary, rich and entitled without having done anything to deserve it. There are plenty of well to do Indians, but for most Indians a pilgrimage to Varanasi is a once in a lifetime grand trip, while I flit around the world because a modest American income allows me to if I am careful and travel as cheaply as possible. It simply isn’t fair.
And yet, there is never a hint of jealousy, I guess similar to my not feeling jealous of the lifestyle of Jared and Ivanka and their mansion in Miami. I feel wealthy and able to do what I most want to do in life and am satisfied. And it could be that these people are also satisfied with little things like a propane stove or a new cycle rickshaw being all they have ever dreamed of having.
Here are some photographs of my first visit.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 