Alley

mad varanasi, tumbling into a triple combination of celebration as the dhrupad mela, shivatri (a guess at spelling, sivas wedding day) and the Chinese new year converge upon the ghats and beyond...

the alleys now a mass of flesh, the ghats busying themselves under hordes of pilgrims arriving to do puja; this day, lost in the alleys to the north of the main burning ghat, a cavalcade of motor bikes, the sudden wooden frames of cattle runs bringing unfamiliarity to known streets, overnight disguised in transformation a new intensity contorts, even further, the map of this place...

last night upon the ghats, sat watching the candles float through the blue hour, a flute seller playing some archaic folk memory, to me I heard "the green fields of Canada" arching and aching as I sit, in another century above kilala bay in dreams of exile, the lyrics of yeats merging with the watersounds .. tonight it's an older story, plough boy and weaver girl, a Chinese legend, and I'm told that today I should start to learn Chinese... later, as we talk the candles into dark, the ghats distil themselves into a place of pilgrimage, crowded swarms in returning haar walking barefoot between temples, fevered chantings between palaces and the river...the first in each dark and then, later, an increasing swathe as the faithful prepare to walk most of the night in the rhythmic chaos of the celebration..

this morning the ghats are full, a holiday, the intensity distilled as heavy haar cloaks the ganges: flashes of orange emerging, invisible bells and chants and closer, close enough to refute the haar, groups sat under the eldritch rhythms of sanskrit, others babbling across chai and breakfast...but today is different somehow...in the haar, once again gweilo, quiet moving in a dream of this place, watching the possibility of boats, ghosts floating oared silences upstream: how can we define time here?