Varanasi: The Ghat Walk

Today was my last full day in Varanasi, thanks to my Indian visa snafu that prevented me from getting on the plane to Kathmandu yesterday, and that I will explain in another post. I'm skipping a few days to write up today's activity while it's still fresh in my mind, but I promise I'll give a full account of Khajuraho, which was amazing.
        I had Alam, my driver, meet me at the hotel at 10:15 am, and we went off to the Bharat Kala Bhavan Art and Archeological Museum on the campus of Banaras Hindu University, at the southern end of the city.
The campus is huge and quite modern looking, with buildings all in the same architectural style, indicating their more or less simultaneous origin. The greenery is lush, as one would expect in this this climate, and in a completely controlled setting, gated off from the dusty bustle and poverty of the rest of the city. The Museum itself was dedicated in the early 90s and houses major collections of medieival Indian statuary, numismatics, and most stunningly of all, a collection of miniature paintings from several South Asian cultures, including Hindu, Mughal/Muslim, Persian and Buddhist. Although my Rough Guide said photography was permitted for an extra fee of 50 rs., it turned out that it was absolutely forbidden, unless one had applied for permission in advance of one's visit. I presented myself as an art journalist, and the security chief adamantly took side, but the assistant director was unmoved, and seemed to be a rather wooden-headed bureaucrat. I even made it up to the assistant curator, a scholar, who was sympathetic, but he said there was nothing he could do. I'd heard this song before in India. Though the fabric of daily life seems chaotic, there is a strong streak of rigidity in Indian culture, as exemplified by the caste system for example; but I also sense a subtext of anti-colonial self-assertion. It's mainly foreigners who would want to photograph India's treasures and take back with them pieces of India's soul. Never mind that spreading the word about the beauties contained in the museum might increase its pathetic attendance!
The stone sculpture was mainly from the 9th to 11th Centuries, that is, simultaneous with that of Khajuraho, but with little of Khajuraho's grace, and none of its eroticism. There was one piece of a solo woman, with the usual voluptuous breasts, in a highly provocative S-shaped pose, but that was it.
The miniatures were something else. Every one of them had a point to make; none were simply genre studies, as so many contemporary miniatures in historical styles tend to be. There was one face of a "Female Beauty" that looked like it could have been done by a contemporary of Picasso. There were two of Krishna "Killing Putana," in which Krishna is tiny and Putana is huge--does the word mean the same thing in Hindi that it does in Italian and Spanish? There was a large one of "Akbar's Court," the most cultivated and benevolent of the Mughal emperors. Each of the 30 odd faces was clearly a portrait, including the one Englishman. And there was another of the "Exodus of Moses," another Mughal piece, in which both the Israelites and the drowning Egyptians a the Red Sea all are wearing turbans. The detail in all the miniatures is exquisite, even if the composition is fanciful or mythological, and the colors are luminous. Some near lifesize reproductions were available in folio form at the ticket counter, but no proper catalogue. Their website is inside of the university's, bhu.ac.in.
Upstairs were a collection of rather divers galleries, including one devoted to the history of Varanasi/Banaras, a decorative arts gallery, a manuscript gallery, a prehistoric gallery, and one devoted to the life work of the Swiss artist Alice Boner (1889-1981), who took up Indian themes and styles in her painting in the 1920 and produced what we would call today visionary art based on her personal explorations into Indian philosophy and spirituality.
Next Alam my driver took me to the Vishwanath Temple, a contemporary construction on the campus, where the pious were waiting for it to reopen at 1 pm. Once open, we all proceeded through the shoe depository then via a green outdoor carpet into the Temple itself, where photography was prohibited. It is an imposing structure of smooth marble inside, that could be a state capital building in the U.S., except for the side chapels featuring effigies of Hindu gods. I exited with no photographic regrets, though the shoe depository was interesting visually, with its two shoe wallas, one of whom was a bit overly eager for his tip, so I made a grand gesture of placing it under a brick on his table rather than in his hand, to make sure his colleague received some benefit.

Once outside the Temple compound, I treated myself to a mango float (mango juice, ice and mango ice cream) for 20 rs (!), and a wonderful filled dosa--the most expensive thing on the menu at 70 rs ($1.14), which was a meal.

I rejoined my driver, and we were off to the Ghats. It was 2 pm, and I intended to walk the 4 km or so from South to North, and we planned to rendezvous between 5 and 5:30 in the street outside the Trilochan Ghat, after starting at the Assi Ghat.
It was mid-afternoon, and there was a lot less activity than there had been in the early morning last Thursday. Still, it was quite worthwhile seeing things from the side of the land. I had perfect views of the architecture, from fifty different versions of ramshackle, to imposing dames in brick and stone of bygone eras.

"Dames of bygone eras..."

           I saw bathers, women washing their children, a group of pilgrims from Malaysia (I was informed), some with shaved heads, a group repairing a tour boat, whom I visited and talked with, two herds of water buffalo in the water, and of course the two burning ghats.

 At the first one I was informed that it offered cremation service to all religions, including Buddhists and Jains, and my guide gave me an account of the procedure: how the body is prepared by smearing it with ghee at home, then brought to the ghat and dunked in the Ganges. The each family member takes some Ganges water and puts it in the deceased's mouth. Men are wrapped in white and women in "red" (really orange). Four hundred kilos of wood must be purchased, and there was a fund for poor families, to which I contribued 100 rs. My informant also mentioned the practice of sati, where a wife is burned alive along with her dead husband, which we both agreed was odious. I mentioned Anand Patwardan's film about women in India, where he interviews the men who encouraged the last recorded sati, in 1984. He knew of the film. I mentioned that he had captured the men saying that they would construct a temple in the woman's honor--cold comfort for the victim--and then my guide proceeded to show me the very temple the men in the film were referring to! It was a small construction, like an oven, with an inner chamber measuring perhaps 2.5 feet square. Inside was a relief carving of a stylized husband and wife, painted in red ochre with staring black and white eyes.

A few ghats later I reached the main burning ghat, Manikaranika Ghat, which I had seen and photographed twice from a boat. Before I reached it, a young man appointed himself my guide and said he could secure permission from the boss of the ghat for me to photograph the proceedigs, even though it was normally forbidden. How much, I wondered, 15,000 rs for 15 minutes, he said. I declined the offer. He led me to the threshold of the ghat, where painted on the wall was a the injunction not to photograph, with an arrow pointing towards the ghat. I said, but on the other side of the arrow, one could do it, and I proceeded to take a picture. He said, no I shouldn't, but he'd talk to the boss for me.
We found the short rather portly fellow almost immediately, and my guide quickly ratted on me. Now I was in trouble, he said. I'd have to pay a $100 fine, or else $100 for 15 minutes photography privilege. I offered to delete the photo, and they both said, no, no, no. They were now bearing down threateningly on me, and I reconsidered: it really would be a fantastic photo, and I would have a kind of exclusive on it. This is, after all, what I had my emergency fund for, and I was carrying it in a money belt. So I agreed. We went up to the boss's "office," and I took out two sweaty fifties and handed them to him. They both accompanied me, but now it was only five minutes! I snapped away and really liked what I got, but objected that they had said 15 minutes a few minutes ago. The boss agreed to give me another five and took out his cell phone to time me. I took a few more shots, and was satisfied. I had not walked among the crowd, but my wide angle views really did capture the scene. Then my guide insisted on taking me to his fabric shop to show me his shawls. I was adamant about not buying anything, and after seeing a few--they were quite luxurious and mostly solid colors, I walked out. He came after me , told me I must NOT share or publish the photos I had just paid $100 for the privilege of taking (yeah, right), and asked for a tip. I was flabbergasted. First he betrayed me to the burning ghat boss, and now he wants a commission? I told him to take his cut from the $100 fee. He said, no, that that all went to buying wood for the poor, and that I should give him a modest tip of $20 or $30. I told him he was out of his mind and turned and walked off. He did not pursue me.

         I ran into several groups of people, young and old, who asked me to photograph them, and I was happy to oblige. One group of pilgrims from other parts of India was so delightful that I gave them my last three good-will cards. I captured a group of boys somersaulting over a boat, three of them in the air at one time. Every so often I'd run into an old bearded man in robes, the sadu or holy man get-up. They inevitably expected money if I photographed them. It now felt like a racket. One of them was so  insistent that I decided to tell  him I would charge him, since I was a professional. He declined, of course, and when  child nearby asked to be photographed I made a point of being generous and offering it for free.
I finally reached the Trilochan Ghat, where I had agreed to met Alam, my driver in the nearby road. There was only one problem: the narrow passage was filled with monkeys! Barbara had warned me about them in Khajuraho--that they would jump me, take my equipment and I wouldn't get it back (her words). I asked someone nearby if it was OK to walk into the crowd of them, and he said there was not problem. So I did, and the scattered, two of them carrying nursing babies, clinging to their underside, and not impeding their movement at all.

I found my way out of the winding allyways, but once on the road could not locate Alam.i walked back and forth for about half an hour. Finally, I picked an identifiable location, the entry to a spiffy polychrome temple, and asked to borrow a passerby's cell phone to call him. He had thought I was to meet him farther along. Meanwhile, I drew another crowd of mostly old me, whom I had fun photographing as two of them teased each other.

         Alam showed up in about 15 minutes and took me to a second excellent vegetarian restaurant, where we both had sumptuous dinners for a total of 510 rs., including tip. My hotel turned out to be five minutes away--a blessing--and I set my camera up on its rooftop to capture the night, dawn and day in the same framing.

Varanasi: 3 Days' Activity in One--on Three Hours Sleep

         I don't recommend this pace of travel, but we were in Varanasi for such a short time that every daylight hour was precious. The second day and first morning we were there, my auto-scooter driver showed up at 5 am to take me for my dawn boatride on the Ganges. Traffic was light, but it still took us a good half-hour to get there. Barbara and I had arranged to go together to the Buddhist Shrine city of Sarnath at 10, so I absolutely had to be back by 9 in time for breakfast.
         The same boatman as the previous night sold me on a two-hour tour, and I had a different man rowing this time, one who spoke a lot less, for which I was grateful. I had brought along the tiny GoPro wide-angle video camera that my brother had given me, along with a clamp and flexible arm to attach it to the side of the boat--and it worked perfectly.
 As soon as I took my seat in the stern, I had company. An old man was there seemingly out of nowhere, and thrust into my hand a paper plate filled with orange flowers and dark read powder (a spice?) arranged around a dollop of tallow with a wick in it making a small free-form hand-fashioned candle, which was already lit. "Good karma," he said, asking for 50 rs. (about 90 cents). The boatman instructed me to lay it in the river with my right hand, and off it floated; when I turned back the old man had disappeared.

          We went upriver first, against the current. I noticed a large contingent of yoga practitioners on a broad pavilion up some alternating pink and white steps. It was just 6 am, and the sun was rising dramatically in a cloudless sky across the river. What a marvelous time for yoga! the coolest part of the day.

          Soon we turned around and headed back, taking advantage of the current, and passing the same area as I had visited the previous night. Now the bathers were out in force, and many more women and children. Many poured water over their heads with pot-bellied brass vessels. The children mostly swam and played in the water. The women were dressed from head to foot, while the men were mostly in shorts.

            I didn't see any cattle being bathed, as I had the previous night, but the clothes washers were out in force, taking up broad swathes of riverfront. They stood in the water up to their calves and whammed the garment they were washing, over their head and onto the nearest hard surface. I wondered how many of these vigorous--not to say brutal--washings my own rather thin but technologically advanced Ex Officio travel shirts and pants could endure. Then they spread everything out to dry,
covering large areas of unpaved ground above them. There were no clotheslines.

         Unlike the previous evening the river was now full of other tourist and pilgrim laden boats. The pilgrims' boats were the largest, carrying as many as 20+ people, the women dressed in their Indian finery and the men dressed conservatively; there were children, too. The tourist boats contained Westerners snapping away as I was, sometimes in spaces I would have liked, but I got plenty of good views. We all greeted each other, pilgrims and tourists, as we floated by.

         Many of the boats moored in large groups against the shore were quite colorful, including one with a face painted on it. There was also what looked like a 19th Century submarine, also with a face. It didn't look very plunge-worthy.

         A dead body floated by: buttocks and legs of some unfortunate, still with pants on, and you could smell it. I saw a dead dog, too. I had heard of these things, so I was glad my tour included them.

         We made it down to the burning Ghat, where most of the tourist boats were gathered. There was less activity than the previous night, and the view was more blocked. After that we turned around and my boatman rowed upriver back to our embarkation point, and I was able to get good images of the submarine and the dead body, since I was prepared for them.

         Along the way another boat pulled up with a man selling floating karma candles. I told him I had already bought one, but he insisted on giving me one, "for your family," he said, and then another "for business success." This could keep going, I thought. Why not for sexual prowess, safe travel, the proper functioning of all my photo equipment, and to slow down climate change? There were apparently no limits to the power of the Holy Ganga for Good. I laid them in the water with my right hand. Then he asked for a donation! And sure enough, the suggested amount was 50 rs. each. I had no small bills, so my boatment lent me 100 rs., and the guy was gone. (I reported the incident to my daughters in an email, and Nora said she had already felt the benefit on the other side of the world!)
          We disembarked a little over two hours after we had started, and the boat owner insisted on 1600 rs., although I had 1200 in mind. I didn't argue. It had truly been wonderful, with the cooperation of the sunrise. I was eager to get back to the hotel, however.
         But as my driver and I walked back to his auto-scooter, I noticed a statue factory (idol factory...). I was hoping to find this factory, since I had seen a photo from it in a collection of photos of Varanasi on the Lumix camera website by an Australian photographer whose name escapes me at the moment. I plunged in, armed with my super-wide angle, whose exaggerated perspectives I love, ever since I saw them in William Klein's work on Moscow and Tokyo in the 60s.

         We stopped off on the way back to the hotel for me to buy a toothbrush and tooth paste (40 rupees=69 cents), since after two days, including delayed luggage with my toothbrush in it, my mouth was beginning to take on the allure of the ubiquitous cow dung.
         Back at the hotel, I brushed my teeth and joined Barbara for the wonderful buffet breakfast there: papaya and pineapple for fruit, watermelon juice for juice, chapatis, yogurt, potato puffs, a spiced vegetable stew, a muffin. Again I managed to avoid eggs, which had had been so inevitable in Madagascar, Kenya and Jordan.
         At 10 Barbara's auto-scooter driver picked us up and took us to the Buddhist shrine of Sarnath, about half an hour north of the city. This is a relatively recent creation, built upon the spot where the Buddha had his famous Enlightenment in the 7th Century BCE, that all suffering is based on desire for some unattainable object. Of course, he was a prince, so wanted for nothing. The suffering he was referring to was a matter of empathy not existential experience. Still Buddhists are as devoted to him and his teachings as any devotees are to their objects of veneration. What surprised both Barbara and me was the level of idolotrous near-deification of the Buddha himself--in his younger (thinner) versions, of couse. This was Bodie tree era stuff. The main shrine, which closed for lunch 15 minutes after we got there, as our self-appointed guide hastened to inform us, consisted of about three-times life size polychrome polyglas statues of the sitting Buddha and his six initial disciples, in a round covered structure that in a different context could have housed a small merry-go-round. We had to doff our shoes to enter its precincts, and there was a shoe walla there to watch over them and give us a shoe-check for them. The Buddha in the round was flanked on two sides by a long row of prayer wheels that visitors could spin as they walked by, effortless acts of piety requiring no thought on the part of the participant; and large plaques, perhaps 60x40 inches, offering the basic tenets of Buddhism in what must have been 20 languages and nearly as many scripts. The Bodie tree was a replacement of the original, but it was a real tree. I don't know what its closest relative might be in American forestry.

         We collected our shoes, and I gave the shoe walla 10 rs. and then proceeded to the Buddhist and Jain temples. Each temple had its shoe walla, dutifully watching our shoes, and in two cases giving us a number on a tag for them, and expecting a 10 rs. tip. At the Jain temple we had to take off our socks, too. The Jain's are proud of the practice of ahinsa, or extreme non-violence. They don't swat mosquitoes, for example, or crush cockroaches. Really? Then what do they do about vermin? The interior of their temple was dominated by polychrome paintings of the lives of their saints and had some fine stone carving in abstract designs. They're also known for their fine work in lattice wood.

The interior of the Buddhist temple. Note frescoes on the wall.

The interior of the Jain temple, including ceiling, plus the injunction to remove shoes, socks and leather items (that represent violence against animals).

         We also encountered a magnificent banyan tree; it was my first of many such encounters. I had met my first banyan tree in Venice, Florida, in 1996 and revisited the same tree in 2006, after it had grown considerably and thickened its adventitious roots. The banyans in India, however, were of another order. Larger, older, with more clusters of stringy tendrils, not yet developed into proper external roots (perhaps they were pared down to prevent the trees from taking up too much space in populated areas), but with more intertwined branches. I hadn't seen this before. It's as if a second branch, growing upwards, had overtaken an older branch and embraced it in its growth. I have a number of closeup photos of this phenomenon. In the next several days I encountered banyans in public squares, in the wild, and most notably, providing the shelter for a rural bus stop, outside of Khajuraho.

         We crossed the street to enter the Buddhist park, still accompanied by our self-appointed guide. I tend to be skeptical of guides, and Barbara tries to avoid them altogether, preferring to contemplate the attraction at her own pace and in her own spiritual space. I find that guides are often too intrusive; I recoil from their photo advice (though it's sometimes good); and they often don't understand that I need to search for perspectives to properly represent a scene in a photograph. But our guide let us take our time and provided very interesting commentary. The park was dominated by a scaled-down replica of one of the giant Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2002. It was completed in 2011. It also featured a long pool of water, whose low water level rendered it rather pathetic, and a historical temple. The whole thing created a successful world center for Buddhist (and Jain) veneration in a very pleasant setting, with the street near the entrance lined with souvenir stalls; but this was not the India I had come to see. We thanked and tipped our guide and returned to the hotel.

         I thought I was going to get in a nap, but there wasn't even time for lunch. It was nearing 4 pm, and I had to return to the Foreign Bureau with my documents to get my exit visa. My driver was waiting for me at the hotel, and off we went. Half an hour later, I was in the office, but there were no bureaucrats. A man in an adjoining cubicle working on some Hindi website told me they'd be back in "five minutes." This became 25 minutes, as I became increasingly impatient watching my afternoon drain away. Finally, they returned, having attended a Modi rally. There was an election coming up, and Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, was running for Prime Minister on the BJP, the Hindu fundamentalist party. There were street parades all over town that day with men wearing orange paper Nedicks hats (the way I think of them: two long rectangles of paper that open on one side, or Veterans hats) indicating their support for Modi. Our driver wore one. The previous day supporters of the opposing candidate marched about in white Nedicks hats. Arundati Roy had written about this party in Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, where she said that one of their PMs had countenanced murderous pogroms against Muslims.
         After presenting my papers to the main man, I was told to come back (!), but that they would be open until 8 pm.
         Off I went with my driver, telling him I wanted to see the "Monkey Temple," aka the Durga Temple, which was in the southern part of the city. There were several attractions in Varanasi listed on the sheet from the hotel, and I knew I couldn't see them all. First, though, he brought me to the Mother India Temple, which I had read about and forgotten. Inside the main (and only) feature is a huge relief map of India and its surroundings in marble. It had been dedicated by Gandhi himself in 1938. The interior rose on pillars, offering a view of the map from above. The second floor however, was locked with a gate that was just too high for me to shimmy over. I called to the attendant, and he said it was closed.
         "Can you open it for me?"
         In a minute he was there, unlocking the gate.

 I promised I would only take two minutes, which was all I needed, and then proceeded to his souvenir counter. I strongly suspected that the lock was a device to put the rare visitor in his debt, making him (me) feel obligated to buy something. When I got downstairs, he took out a laser pointer and showed me Mount Everest and a number of other points of interest. The Himalayas were way out of scale, being about 5 inches tall, which would have made them about 200 miles high, rather than the 5 miles that they are. He tried to sell me an illustrated book about Varanasi, but I couldn't take the weight. I settled on a DVD about the city, which he assured me was good (450 rs., about $8) and threw in the postcard of the marble relief map. But most astonishing was the collection of books at his stall, including the marvelous novel The White Tiger, and The Life of Pi, but also a number of spiritual books, such as Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, and ironically, one book of popular science, James Glieck's Chaos, which could have been subtitled "A Mental Preparation for Visiting Varanasi."

 The laser pointer indicates Mount Everest, but the Himalayas are not created to scale.

         Outside in the parking lot was a rather seedy looking man in a turban with a python around his neck and two monkeys on string leashes. He offered to let me put the python around my neck, but I declined, not out of fear, but out of time consciousness. Then he announced that he would show is cobra. I stayed. He opened a round basket about a foot in diameter, removed a dark cloth, and there it was coiled up. It immediately reared its head and spread its neck, looking around menacingly. His owner prodded him on the back of his neck with his fingers. The cobra did not strike. It gave me the impression that it was old, quite tired of its act, but resigned to its powerlessness and the life of a show cobra who spent most of its time in a dark basket two inches thick. There was no flute playing.

 The showman replaced the cobra in the basket and then made some sort of crude music, to which the  monkey on the left did somersaults, while the monkey on the right beat a small drum. I managed to get some video of the act, and I tipped the guy 50 rs., at which he complained he had expected 100. I said, "Get some money from the other onlookers." There was a big tour bus in the parking lot, but it seemed empty. He laughed and gestured around him. There must have been about 6-7 men there, but they were all his local cronies.
         There were also a number of cycle rickshaw parked there. I was especially impressed by the stamped and painted logos on the polished chrome, which I had noticed in the street, and now had a chance to capture close up.

       Among the fruit offerings in the stalls, I had occasionally seen papayas. When we passed a papaya and mango seller with a cart, I asked my driver to stop, and he helped me buy a medium size papaya and to mangoes. Later at dinner I had the hotel restaurant cut up my papaya, and I ate it over the next two days. I stashed the mangoes in my B&H plastic food bag that I carried on planes.

         Our next stop was a brief one at a small but impressive marble temple inside a fenced-in park. I could have taken my standard architecture photos, but there were some boys playing on the marble area to one side of the temple. As soon as I started photographing them they stopped doing their somersaults and pushed to get into the picture. I had to direct them back to their antics before I arrived before I would show them any results. Two of them pursued me back to he auto-rickshaw asking for money, but I knew that if I gave one of them anything, they'd all rush me.

         My driver and I continued on to the Durga (Monkey) Temple, which was not far. The Temple was accessed through a narrow passageway from this side, marked by the presence of a devotional flower stall, brimming with orange marigolds and small red flowers. The passage led to a broad open space, that would have been a park, except for the abundance of garbage, that a cow was rummaging through for edibles. On the right, a balustrade overlooked a lake; on the far end stairs led up to the temple courtyard--more stalls selling devotional items: flowers, incense, statuettes. It was a Hindu mini-Lourdes. At the entrance to the temple proper was the inevitable shoe walla, who gave me a brass disk with a number on it for my shoes, which I left on the ground. This guy clearly expected a substantial tip, probably upwards of 20 rs. (34 cents, but it could buy you a liter of cold water or two delicious street dhosas).

         Inside the deep red ochre painted temple there were two levels. One entered from this side on the upper level. To my left was a covered gallery with what looked like mendicants on blankets lining the wall. Stairs led down to the lower level, where people came to touch and kiss the right side of the wall of the main building. On the left side of this building was a raised covered platform, where the priest, surrounded candles and flowers was dispensing some holy thing one by one to a line of devotees. All construction was in stone. Facing the platform was another entrance, this one on the lower level and surrounded by bells of many sizes. When a devotee arrived or (who knows?) felt the spirit, she or he would ring one of the bells by shoving the clapper to the side. I was taking photographs like mad, when a man seated on the raised part of the entrance with the bells gestured sharply to me that I should desist. He then beckoned me over and put a large red dot on my forehead, my very own third eye, for which I tipped him (of course) 10 rs. I then felt entitled to ring one of the bells, and I went out that entrance. In this second courtyard, I could photograph at will, and a middle aged couple came out and asked me to take their picture, which I did, knowing I could never send it to them. They were grateful just to be photographed. I then reentered the temple and perched myself on the upper level near my original entrance from whence I could more discreetly take photos. Once outside, I recovered my shoes, tipped the shoe walla 10 rs., and made a quick review of the devotional object stalls. Then I turned to find my way back to my driver, noticing as I did, in large white letters on a light blue background across the top of the entrace wall about 15 feet from the ground, "PHOTOGRAPHY IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED INSIDE THE TEMPLE." I wondered why only the third-eye walla had said anything about it to me.

The Hindu mini-Lourdes outside the temple...

         It was now past sunset and turning dark. My driver made one more stop--at a beautiful old building, reminiscent of 19th Century India. I was very grateful to him for enriching our tour. 

Now we had to stop by the Foreign Registration office to pick up my exit visa. Half an hour later we were there; there was no one in the office, but there was my document, with my two passport photos glued to a printout of the web-form. I lifted it from the pile and put it in my pocket. We were back at the hotel in another half hour. When I asked my wonderful driver what I owed him, he said, "Whatever you want." This was the second time a driver had said this to me. When I paid him 1000 rs. ($17) he gave me a hang-dog look, so I gave him another 200 rs. He was still not overjoyed. The trtadition of subservience made business practices primitive in this country, I thought. Then I went to the hotel restaurant for my first meal since breakfast. It was hard not to overeat the food in the hotel restaurant, and I failed again that night. I was beyond exhausted, having gotten up that day at 4:40 am. I made it to bed by 10 pm on a rather overfilled stomach.