Where Life Never Turns Away From Death

Can you smell that — woodsmoke, spices, wet clay from the riverbank? That's not just atmosphere. That's the air of a city that has been alive, without a single break, for more than three thousand years.

Varanasi sits where two rivers, the Varuna and the Assi, run into the Ganges. Their names are literally hidden inside the word "Varanasi." Babylon, Nineveh, early Rome — all of them came later, and none of them outlasted their own age. This city did.

Along the riverbank run eighty-four ghats — stone staircases leading down to the water. On some, people hold weddings. On others, monks wash their robes. On others still, you'll find philosophers arguing late into the night. But two of these ghats, Manikarnika and Harishchandra, are different. The fire there is never allowed to go out — by local tradition, for hundreds of years. Watch closely and you'll see it: on those very steps, an old man chants prayers over a newborn child, while two meters away a funeral pyre is burning. There's no wall between the two.

Mark Twain came through here in the late nineteenth century and wrote that Varanasi is older than history, older than legend, and looks twice as old as both put together.

A few kilometers away lies Sarnath. That's where the Buddha gave his very first sermon. Varanasi is older than Buddhism itself — but it was here that the teaching first stepped out into the world.

A city that for three thousand years never drew a line between the living and the dead now has to decide how it wants to grow old — carried along by the tide of tourism, or still keeping its own rhythm.

Some places exist simply to remind us of something. This is one of them.

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