I should confess upfront: I am not a natural pilgrim. As a solo traveller — and an Indian solo traveller at that — I have always been wary of religiously driven tourism. Faith, in my household, was something you carried on the inside and wore lightly on the outside. Being respectful was considered the highest form of spirituality, full stop. I was taught basic mantras to keep the nervous system in check, and that in moments of crisis you turn to prayer rather than to less constructive alternatives. But never at the cost of your fundamental responsibilities. I was allowed to skip temples. Never school. Never the library.
And yet, for all of that, I have a persistent habit of ending up in places saturated with what I can only describe as deva energy — places that hum with something older and larger than the present moment. Perhaps, as I have come to suspect, they simply like it when I drop by.
Kashi was next.
The City
It was Christmas of 2017. A direct flight from Mumbai to what I had least anticipated and was wholly unprepared for. Pre-COVID years feel, in retrospect, like they belonged to a different dimension entirely — not quite real, not quite gone. I arrived in Banaras with very little expectation and considerable personal weight.
Kashi — known interchangeably as Varanasi, Banaras, and a dozen other names accumulated over five thousand years — is said to be the first city ever established on the banks of the Ganga. It carries that antiquity visibly, in its bones and its atmosphere. There is an eeriness to it even in broad daylight; a quality that has nothing to do with darkness and everything to do with the peculiar presence of a place that has been witnessing human life and human death, without interruption, for longer than most civilisations have existed.
People say the city changes you. That it either pulls you toward spiritual detachment or plunges you deeper into material obsession. What is consistent, in every account I have heard and in my own experience, is that it does something. It does not leave you where it found you.
The Temple
The Kashi Vishwanath temple — one of the twelve Jyotirlingas, one of the most sacred Shiva temples known to Hinduism — is exactly what you imagine and nothing like you expect.
The lanes approaching it are narrow and pressing, the energy dense,
and by the time you arrive at the sanctum you have been jostled adequately. There are lingas everywhere — I nearly stepped on one and the resulting near-miss was less graceful than I would like to admit. For an ascetic space, it is richly adorned: flowers, oil lamps, the particular smell of milk and devotion that clings to old temples. The maha pandit alone may touch the deity. The rest of us are moved along, our offerings deposited on the god's behalf by someone more authorised to do so.
Standing there, slightly disheveled, having had my flowers redistributed by a priest with considerable efficiency, I found myself wondering what the deity makes of it — the sheer volume of milk and water poured in daily faith. And then I found myself wondering whether one small, honest prayer delivered with whatever faith you have left might not be the more elegant transaction.
The Aarti
The priests are perfectly synchronised — not a flame out of place, not a word misaligned. Watching it, you become quietly aware of how provisional your sense of control really is. All that careful management of your daily life, all that orchestration of plans and timelines — and here is this ancient ritual, conducted with a precision and devotion that makes your version of discipline look somewhat amateur. The devotees around you believe, with complete sincerity, that the sacred water will wash away the karma of past lives, that the river carries their fears and faults downstream and dissolves them. Whether or not you share the belief, the collective weight of that faith pressing against the night air is its own kind of force.
Manikarnika
What unsettled me was not the city's proud dilapidation, nor its crowds, nor its noise. It was the smoke.
But what no one adequately prepares you for is the democracy of it.
The rich and the poor, the mourned and the un-mourned, the surrounded and the alone — they all arrive here eventually. The difference lies not in the destination but in the departure. For those who die with no one to claim them, the rites are minimal and the pyre communal. Stacked and burned, without ceremony, without witnesses, without anyone to carry their name forward.
I stood there watching the smoke rise and something in me went very quiet. Not the peaceful kind of quiet — the kind that arrives when something you have been avoiding finally makes itself undeniable. All the things we accumulate and protect and fight for — the relationships, the designations, the carefully managed reputations — none of it is visible in that smoke. What is visible, achingly so, is whether or not someone came.
A part of me that had been clinging — to people, to outcomes, to the idea that control is possible — released its grip, there on that ghat, without drama and without my full permission.
What Kashi Does
They say Kashi calls you when you need to be shaken loose from whatever dungeon you have made comfortable. I had been in one — grappling with a loss that had been inevitable for a long time, but one my logical mind refused to accept. Standing at Manikarnika, in the smoke and the firelight, the realization finally arrived not as a thought but as something felt: the one I had lost had been given a dignified ending. Surrounded by love, their final chapter had been honored. And that was enough.
Such is the quiet, fierce power of Varanasi. It purifies you without requiring you to participate in the purification. It frees you from fear not through ceremony but through confrontation — with mortality, with impermanence, with the radical simplicity of what actually matters when the smoke rises and the crowd disperses.
It shook me. It reoriented me. And when I left, I left lighter — not because I had left anything behind on the ghats, but because I had finally, quietly, put something down.
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