Meanwhile the ghat-side buildings - an incomprehensible tangle of the sacred and profane - appear to slide just a little further as you watch into the murky mother Ganga, their primordial appearance belying post-18th century construction for most; earlier sackings having destroyed most of the city's truly ancient buildings.
Then: 'Sir boat? Massage? Very good massage, you are from which country sir?' England - accepting an extended hand under the vice-like grip of which it seamlessly becomes an elaborate arm-massage, shoulder-massage and on to the forehead. The inevitable and unavoidable payment is laughingly handed over at the coerced-massage, this first of Varanasi shakedowns, in our recognition of a true craftsman at work. But you don't accept a handshake twice (and, really, who wants to be that guy??) So for T it's the boat-massage-hashish guys (he's doing a strong line in drug pitches - the 'hashish' is pretty standard but it's so ubiquitous and so instantly followed by 'LSD? Opium?' - as if it's simply the intoxicant of choice that is lacking - we're starting to assume it's the Beard). And for me it's the candle-bindi-postcard girls - the six, seven, eight year old sales madams with their Varanasi-on-sea postcard decks, their henna, their boxes of sparkling coloured powders - the virtues of which, 'Very beautiful', are demonstrated on the back of my hand - and their candles to offer the Ganga as the sun starts to drop in the sky.
And so it is that in this holiest and most singular of Indian towns, set along a few twists and turns of the heartland of the river (which starts so ice clear and pure up in the Himalayas, practically drinkable even by Rishikesh), which guarantees those who die or burn here instant moksha, release from the mortal cycle, that the visitor easily spends half her day fielding hustlers, con-men and a steady, semi-desperate stream of straightforward but incessant sales and donation requests. And, for the latter, who can blame them? Life is brutal and the competition is fierce. There's really little choice but to be the first petitioner of the day or, alternatively, the one who finally scoops the jackpot when the beleagured tourist finally lets their guard drop.
That's Kashi - city of contradiction. Cheaters and saints; day-trippers and pilgrims; cheap salesmen and revered scholars; sites of worship that predate even Hinduism, where the sun God Surya was honoured long before Shiva lost his earring in Marnikarnika well and where thousands travel to cremate their loved ones on open pyres by the water's edge; but where tourists can be rowed profanely close to the very same spots to get their perfect Kodak moment of a stranger's journey to the other side - and where spiritual purity is surpassed only by the festering refuse lining the Old City's labyrinthine alleyways. The Ganga may cleanse your soul but, full of lead, trash and decomposing biological matter, it will poison your body faster.T hated it. Couldn't see past the rubbish, the smell and the shit. Fair enough, you might say (and indeed some rogue bug picked up in Calcutta by us both had him laid up for 36 hours of our stay, poisoned and half delirious, which hardly helped). But I was fascinated a week or two later to read a very similar response from a 19th century traveller to Benares in Sunil Khilnani's excellent The Idea of India - a searingly insightful and articulate analysis of the post-Independence political landscape and identities of the country. Explaining the evolution of Indian cities, the psycho-geographies of Imperial urban planning and the ways in which so many cities had to be essentially re-colonised after Independence - otherwise alien impositions requiring reclamation by their own inhabitants - he is particularly striking on the collision between European and subcontinental understandings of public and private space. Only one of the most apparent areas of conflict, he notes, is the wildly different responses and attitudes to waste - and here Varanasi-Benares-Kashi offers a prime example.
Whether as rubbish, as excrement or as death, the city has no borders, no rationalised geographical division between public spaces and their refuse: 'Benares seemed, to the foreign eye, indifferent to the need to constitute itself as a city of public arenas, with distinct borders between public and private acts, the hygienic and the unhygienic'. Instead, waste in all its forms - from corpse to dung - is right there with you all the way, crowding the streets, the ghats, the river, the temples. Fascinatingly, he notes that even Gandhi was pained by his first visit to the city, where approaching the hallowed Visvanath temple, he was distressed to find it full of decomposing flowers, the sacred contemplative space he'd expected at the end of a grimy alleyway full of noisy shopkeepers, pilgrims and flies.Still, when drifting along the river just after dawn - even alongside a number of others, motorboats full to bursting with Indian tourists and pilgrims, guides bellowing to their wards by tannoy, while rickety rowboats carrying Westerners pursuing an unattainable and misguided mirage of 'authenticity', clutching their Nikon SLRs (yes yes, me too - just with a cheaper lens) - I find it hard to care about the seedier side, the hassle and the squalor.
Here all of human experience is laid out ahead; strung out precarious but resilient along the water's edge, from ghat to ghat. At ablutions and at prayer, its most privileged and its wretched, its ancient and its young - washing clothes or playing cards, meditating or watching the last embers die down from the night's funeral pyre. And yes, sometimes calling 'Mam, massage??' And you can't look away.
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