Third Ear

I don’t remember the sounds at all—not the voice of our driver, not the call of the chai wallahs, not the rumbling traffic—when we first arrived in Varanasi. But I do remember the corpse. Lucie and I were riding in a taxi from the airport, through streets choked with rickshaws, motorbikes, turbaned men, veiled women, ownerless cows, and dogs that somehow slept in the road amid the mayhem. Their dreaming canine heads, surrendering to fate, lay perilously close to the traffic. Yet somehow they lived and slept on peacefully.

We had talked to several friends about their trips to India and when asked where we should go, they didn’t hesitate. “Varanasi,” they said. “The best and worst of India, its ugliness and its beauty in one place.” We decided to start our journey there, not knowing at the time that it would be the only place we would see in India, and that our trip would be cut short.

The arrival, after 36 hours of transit from Oregon, was a hallucinatory experience. Orange-robed holy men with painted faces, scraggly beards, and walking sticks, hobbling right out of an ancient story, next to businessmen in Western suits, busily chatting on their cell phones or texting. Women hidden in shapeless black burqas jostled in the market with those whose bare bellies peeked out from colorful saris and scarves.

The corpse was right in front of us the whole time, but we didn’t know it. Not until the driver pointed it out atop the ramshackle van ahead of us in traffic. Strings of orange flowers cascaded over the mound that rode atop the car. “An old man,” the driver said. “You can tell by the color of his shroud.” Down below the body, through the half-open back doors of the van, were the countless drawn faces of the family, the mourners, staring vacantly at us, or past us, stuffed into the back of the vehicle that barreled toward the Old City along the Ganges. “People come from all around,” the driver said. “Three to four hundred bodies are burned here each day. Some by an electrical method, most by fire.”

Even staring us in the face, however, death remained abstract to us. It hid beneath those flowers, behind fascinating and unfamiliar ritual. The day we actually felt death’s breath on our necks was still two days away.

We quickly fell in love with the city that refused to keep life and death separate, each one alternating and overlapping from moment to moment, place to place. The pedestrian labyrinth of alleyways could lead you to either one. A delightfully sunny path, the wafting smells of incense, chai, and fried dosas, a troop of monkeys sifting through some leaves, goats standing on a bench, supplicants waiting to enter a temple. Or down a dark and forsaken street, marked by excrement and trash, unbelievable stench, standing water, and shadow.

The river itself, arising from the purest of Himalayan sources, was polluted by industrial effluent, the corpses of cows, the bones of the cremated, the bodies of holy men and children weighted down and sunk by stones. Yet pilgrims bathed there as if the water had traveled untouched from its rocky spring source. And we felt like we had traveled untouched as well. We had heard from so many how difficult traveling in India was, but found everything to be easy and inviting. Things flowed, the way the swarm of human, animal, and vehicular traffic seemed to magically flow along without incident, wheels avoiding the heads of dogs as if an unseen hand orchestrated the whole thing.

Our last night in Varanasi was only our third of a planned six. We had just returned from a trip to the town of Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon. Temple murals there depict the Buddha’s life—his birth, his spiritual battles, his enlightenment. But it was the Buddha’s ears that particularly captivated me. Unusually long, hanging almost to his shoulders when in meditation pose, his ears seemed even larger in the deathbed scene. Here the Buddha lay on his...