More on Varanasi

WELL,
as always we are trying to buy our train ticket out of a city within 24hours of when we want to leave. This means that we are not sure if we are leaving or what class we will be in, but like every other time something unexpected will happen and we will get to say "it was meant to be!" To be honest if we don't get to leave tonight I won't be upset. Varanasi is a city that I can only take in little bit at a time. We leave for our shopping for the day or whatever and then I need time to decompress afterward, sitting high on our rooftop or quietly in our room. The day before yesterday as I was trying to get back to the room I got really, I mean really, lost in the ally maze that is the old city of Varanasi. I walked passed houses that have been there for hundreds of years and have the same way of doing things as back then. Yesterday while waiting for my friend who was inside a temple another guy we met and I had some beggar kids come up to us. This is not special and happens all the time, everyday, but because we were kind of stuck where we were about ten-15 of them eventually came up and started to play with us. We played with them for at least 30min. Of course they asked for a rupee, but in all that time they only asked twice. They were having so much fun with me just clapping hands and practicing their English counting that we all forgot about everything else. It was really interesting, and once again this is totally common, after we started talking to just a few who were under 10 one of them called to some of their friends something like bring over the babies. Well some 4/5 year olds brought over 3 babies, under 2 years old one was no more than 5 months old. This is one of their strategies i guess. Every beggar girl or woman has a baby under two that they have with them. Every single one. Well anyway this story isn't about that. Right away the kids could tell that we were not going to give them money, but we were going to give them time. my friend kind of held all the babies while i played games with the older ones. I had to make sure every one got a turn clapping and counting because there were two girls who kind of ran the show and pushed the littler ones around and wanted all the attention. After a while a man came up, and we think for many reasons he was kind of like their boss man just like in Slumdog Millionaire. We just ignored him and kept on playing.
Its so easy, when you see all of these various horrible things, to want to blame someone. It has to be one particular person's fault. Like the boss man for the kids. But in reality he is the only one feeding them or giving them any sort of anything. Another interesting experience happened just last night, we were in a tuk tuk with a young driver and a police man stopped him and just smacked him. A few min. later the kid had to give him a 50rupee bribe. There were a lot of things going on at the time but when it comes down to it my friends and I think this: First our new friend was sitting in the front seat next to the driver so the police man easily saw that westerns were in the tuk tuk. Of course we gave the guy an extra 50 later to pay for the bribe. I think the police man new we would pay the kid back. Now police men barley make enough money for shelter and food for their family's. Everything else they have to pay for with bribe money. So maybe that police man needed 50 for something so out of all the drivers he chose ours, maybe, knowing that in the end the kid wouldn't really have to pay for it. That still means the cop was an asshole and the police force is majorly corrupted here, BUT it also shows a bit of humanity in all of it. The kid was just 19 years old and didn't know his way around. Who knows how long he had been driving- a week? a month?
Anyway you can kind of imagine how a person could feel overwhelmed here, externally as well as internally. I am constantly thinking and processing what happens around me. Ever since I got here, to this city in particular, I feel that all of my sense are heightened. I smell more of the world, I see more color. And my heart is just trying to keep up with it all, trying to be a real part of it while still reserving some of myself. If I don't hold just a little of myself back, well, I can put it this way:For a selfish reason I wouldn't let myself hold the 5 month old yesterday. I just knew that if I held that baby it would be too much for me. I don't know what would have happened, maybe I would have cried or maybe I would be coming home with a little baby but I knew that holding that particular emaciated calcium deprived baby would kill me inside. I had a great time with the kids and I know they will remember it just like I always will, but that one baby would have somehow opened me up too much...
Like I said, still processing, still taking it all in, always wondering what will happen next.