Karma's a Bitch

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  Varanasi, India
Thursday, December 27, 2007

"Karma's a bitch" - anonymous.

Imagine your great aunt Mildred has died. You're sad, but it's been ten years since you last saw her. Besides, whenever you were forced to visit when you were a kid, she only had those crappy boiled candies that stuck together in a huge 5 kilogram clump covered in lint. So frankly, maybe it's for the best.

Still, she is family. You knot the tie, you put one the black dress (and if you do both at the same time, you once again cause another family scandal) and head to the funeral. Appropriate amounts of flowers are placed, other older members of the family sniffle into tissues, while silently giving thanks it's not them up there in that casket. The organ plays something appropriately sombre, and the pastor gets up to give the eulogy.

The door in the back is suddenly flung open, and a dozen Japanese/Slovenian/American/German/Israeli (take your pick) tourists come traipsing into the chapel. They look around, ohhing and awwing, commenting on the flowers, and the dress of the mourners, and then seeing the body, dash to the front of the church, cameras clicking away catching an image of dear old dead crappy candy giving Aunt Mildred. Turning, they come up to the pastor, give him a few coins, and hurry back out the door.

This takes place everyday in India. The Hindus are understandably sensitive about tourists wandering through the burning ghats, taking photos and interrupting the religious activities and mourning process of the deceased. There are signs up asking people not to take photos. Most tourists get around this by renting a row boat with a guide for a Ganges tour, and snapping safely from the boat as they pass the bodies burning away on shore.

This undoubtedly is a cause for a bit of bad karma.

Mine came not on the water, but land.

After a day of wandering up and down the ghats, Danayi and I were worn out and heading back towards our guesthouse on Schindia Ghat. To get there, we had to pass Minikarnika Ghat, the main burning ghat. While on the ghat before this, a couple hundred metres from the jumping flames of the bonfires, we were approached by a couple of young men. This was non-stop in Varanasi, and at the burning ghat, tourists were always approached by young men who claimed to volunteer at the hospice next to the ghat where the old and infirm waited for death. They would stress very strongly at the beginning that they didn't want money, but wanted to share information about the Hindu culture and religion. Inevitably, the conversation would turn to the price of the different types of wood used in the burning, and how it was very good karma to give a donation so the poor folk in the hospice could have the wood to ensure their corpses would be properly cremated.

While there is no doubt that some of these young men (perhaps even many) were legitimate both in their claimed duties and intentions, it is quite commonly believed that many of these simply hit up the tourists for money for "wood", grab an old lady hanging around the ghats who is supposed to be a matron, and then split or make off with the money afterwards. If you think this sounds unlikely, you have never travelled in India.

Our young men gave the usual spiel about the ghat, and we thanked them, but walked away having already had our "guide" experience around the ghat. We walked down to sit close to the water, and get away from the lurking men for a bit. In the distance, the flames from the bonfires danced in the night and highlighted the silhouettes of the people sitting around them. It was an evocative scene.

I respect other cultures. While not following a particular religion myself, I still have respect for them, especially in how they reflect the cultures to which they belong. I used to teach history, anthropology, and sociology. This gives me a desire to learn, poke around, and peel back the layers of a country to try and take a good look at it and understand.

Despite all this, I really wanted a photo of the burning ghat.

So, about 200 metres away, on another ghat, and turning off my flash, I extended my zoom to it's fullest length and snapped a couple of shots of the people around the burning fires in the night. I didn't go over, and I didn't poke around. I tried to be as respectful as I could.

In other words, I was sneaky.

But I forgot the auto focus light the camera shoots out in dark surroundings.

Within seconds, the young "guides" hanging around on our ghat came running over. Fury and indignation clear on their faces. They started yelling "Why did you take a photo? You know it is not allowed! Why would you do this! This is bad karma!"

In the face of their anger, and feeling bad because, while trying to be discrete, I had in fact taken photos, I apologized. Profusely.

If anything, this only intensified the anger of the young men. One began to yell "I could take your camera and smash it. We could have you arrested!" I told the men calmly that they would not touch my camera. I was sorry, I apologized, I could erase the photos if they wished, but they would not touch my camera.

The larger of the three men, about my size, stormed up and into my face. He began to growl. He said that if he yelled now, he could have 15 men run over from the ghats and they would beat me and smash my camera and I would be sorry. He demanded that I follow him to his "office" and pay a fine for doing this bad thing.

Now I genuinely felt bad for taking the photo, but all of a sudden this was feeling more like shakedown than religious indignation.

I looked at the man, and again in a calm voice, told him I would not be going anywhere in the dark with him, with my wife along. For sake of ease, Danayi and I had adopted the little white lie of being "married" while travelling around India (I suppose in our case, it was a little black and white lie). It simply made things easier, and while it did little to stop the leers of the millions of oversexed Indian men we encountered, they never quite got the courage to try and grab the "wife" of the big mean looking white guy. By evoking my "wife" all of a sudden, he looked a bit uncertain, and threw a quick look at the other men with him.

They then insisted that I now had bad karma, and had to come to the hospice and give a donation and have my karma cleansed. I told them that was fine, I was truly sorry for the photo, and would go to the hospice, out in the open and give a donation. Then not giving them the chance to try and take charge, I grabbed Danayi's hand and marched quickly towards the hospice building, leaving the men scrambling to try and catch up with me. Their malice and anger had turned to almost simpering politeness now that I was on my way to the hospice and about to give a donation.

As we approached the hospice, one of the men scurried ahead into the darkness of an arch leading into the building. No lights were on, nor could I see any sign of any people at all in the dark. After a minute he returned with a little old Indian woman, bent with age, and wearing an aspect of significant befuddlement. One of the men talked rapidly in Hindi, and told me to bend down so the old woman could put some flower petals on my head, and to repeat a prayer he translated. I did so, wrestling with guilt over the photo taking, but suspicion that this was a scam.

The old woman mumbled and moved her hand a bit, and then one of the young men pronounced that my karma was cleansed and to give my donation to the old woman. I took out 200 rupees and handed them to her. She looked at them confused and stared up at me blankly.

The largest of the men grabbed the rupees out of the old woman's hand, and turned to me. "This is not enough. You must pay more. You must pay for wood to help the poor. You did a bad thing, and have bad karma. You must pay at least 500 rupees!"

I looked at him calmly, but beginning to lose some of my patience, and modicum of my remorsefulness. "This is what my karma is worth. I am sorry for the photos, but I am not paying anymore. We have to go now."

Seeing his fish wriggling off the hook, he pointed at Danayi and said "She must have her karma cleansed, and she must also pay money!"

"I took the photo, not her. My karma is the dirty one. Hers is clean. Thank you, good night."

We turned and walked off. The woman continued to look befuddled and then turned and shuffled back into the dark. The men looked like they wanted to say something, thought better of it, and melted off into the dark.

We walked back to our hotel, the soot of burning bodies gently clinging to our clothes, and called it a night.

So far, nothing bad has happened. There does, however, remain an outside chance I'll be a maggot in a camel's hemorrhoid in my next life. I hope not. I hate camels.

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