Priorities

A chai stall: kettle, saucepan, glasses, strainer, biscuits. Instant satisfaction.
Most street chai comes in tiny throwaway clay cups but this stall, located somewhere in the Varanasi old city, served such great chai that I offer it as the type irrespective of the atypical glassware. The best chai I drank in Varanasi, and probably in India was at Ashish Café just off Assi Ghat. Ashish might be the loveliest man in Varanasi, a smiling man who cooks delicious food very slowly and serves it on his verandah; his chai is heavy with fresh ginger and served as an excellent antidote to the cold I contracted whilst in town. There’s plenty of air pollution everywhere in India so it’s not beyond my imagination why one might wear a facemask to filter out the gunk. Still, tourists in Calcutta, Bodhgaya and Varanasi prancing around, their respiratory systems protected by clean white masks, did not strike me as particularly dignified or sensitive. It was only when my nose and eyes had been streaming for a couple of days that I realised what a great service the masks might have been.

Ashish’s gingery chai has eased my cold and kept me walking up and down the ghats. ‘Burning is learning,’ a young chap told me on my first day in Varanasi. This line runs through my head each time I walk past the burning ghats where bodies are being constantly cremated. I can’t quite bring myself to watch the duration of a burning (three to four hours, I’m told) or even a funeral, I just rush on by. If burning is learning, I think I’ve learnt that I’m a little uncomfortable with death rites as a tourist spectacle. If the numbers of foreigners hanging out to watch the burnings are any indication, I may not be siding with majority opinion on this one.

I’ve had to get used to it though as I need to pass Harishchandra Ghat, a burning ghat, to reach Mansarowar Ghat from where I’m staying. The Lotus Lounge is located at Mansarowar and I’ve been able to satisfy my dumpling cravings there. I was initially a little reluctant to patronise the Lotus, it being so obviously a retreat for foreigners from the Ganges-side trials. Everybody wants to pretend they’re being intrepid and doing it like the locals and places like the Lotus – with a shiny pink and green and white balcony over the Ganges, clean low tables, a snazzy, well designed sign painted all over town, menus in proofread English and, each time I’ve visited, an Indian-free clientele – don’t really help to sustain the illusions. On the plus side, the food is cheap and delicious, the cushions are comfortable, and there is a happy absence of marauding children. Sitting on the balcony, I couldn’t help thinking of the Lotus in Potts Point and, had I a 2011 resident on hand, I would have offered for discussion the contention that the Lotus of Mansarowar Ghat is Varanasi’s answer to the Lotus of Challis Ave: really rather lovely once one has discarded the notion that one should be languishing in slightly seamier surroundings. The PP Lotus may have charming wallpaper and a bewilderingly lengthy cocktail menu but it doesn’t have the dumplings offered on the shores of the Holy River. Up there on the balcony, one more dazzling success was registered for the Tibetan veg momo, the dumpling of 2008, as far as I am concerned.
Stuffed with a gooey, garlicky mix of softened veges, steamed and lightly fried like gyoza, these dumplings are a stunning riposte to any existential angst. Is life worth living? With dumplings like this, most certainly, yes. Any doubts can be quelled with reference to the sauce. Someone has taken handfuls of garlic, chilli and tomato (raw), thrown them in a blender with a dose of salt and pressed pulverise. From my rheumy perspective, this sauce embodies the qualities some people seek in a guru: healing powers, charisma, certainty, sex appeal. I have always been easily lead.

Alas, I fear that whilst I live within reach of such delicacies, my spiritual well-being will lag. I have been to two Buddhist holy sites in the last week, Bodhgaya and Sarnath, and have been sleeping in one of Hinduism’s holiest cities. Whatever it is that is in the air in these sacred places, it has given me a cold and I find myself, as ever, bound to earthly cravings.