Opposite the Dandpan Temple are stalls selling temple offerings: garlands, leaves, petals and small clay urns of Ganges water. Shailesh takes us through the dense crowd shuffling and pushing for position near the sacred tank which has replaced the sacred well. We see an evolution of Twain’s ceremony. He “bent over the Well and looked. If the fates are propitious, you will see your face pictured in the water far down in the well.
...so we turn inland and there find the Well of the Earring, where as he noted, one can find “Temporary Cleansing from Sin”.
Twain’s next stop, the Kameshwar Temple. It’s only about a minute away but that minute in the eccentricities of the Benares Chowk provides the usual hour’s worth of entertainment. This temple is the very opposite of the Golden Temple, being no more than extension of someone’s ramshackle house. It’s the shabbiest temple we have seen in all our time here, but then the immediate area all around it is equally shabby, including the old Honda motorbike parked right up close to Shiva’s gate.
Once inside [the Golden Temple], we are looking for the Well of the Knowledge of Salvation. It hasn’t changed for many a year, and certainly not since Twain’s visit:
An uncannily accurate description of what one finds there now with one, overwhelming exception: monkeys—and yet more monkeys, hundreds of them, squabbling, stealing, frightening and out of control numerically and behaviorally. If one finds the Venetian pigeons are ruining St. Mark’s Square the same can be said of the Indian monkeys in the Golden Temple.
We must be nearing our second stop, in theory Benares’ most famous site, the Golden Temple.
“Why are we starting here?” I ask. [This is actually Mark Twain's eleventh point on his itinerary for a pilgrim]
“Because this temple, Sakhi Binayak, is dedicated to the god Ganesha, the god of prosperity and good luck, so every new venture starts with a visit to Ganesha. We are touring the temples, that’s a new venture, so we should start here. Everyone can worship Ganesha and everyone does.”
I look at my notes and say, “Mark Twain came here to have his redemption recorded after the 44-mile pilgrimage he didn’t—and we won’t—be making. Could that be right?”
The winter waters here were recently Himalayan snow and the chilliness is only to be expected; not so the state of the Ganges. The pollution is now causing concern to even the most convinced Hindu.
Elsewhere in Benares too Twain found that “There are plenty of monkeys about the place. Being sacred, they make themselves very free, and scramble around wherever they please.” Again true, but now much more so. Most animals we humans meet day to day are afraid of us. Not the Indian monkey; as they have become more and more numerous and confident they can see we are more afraid of them than they of us. They must think we are just another breed of monkey—and let’s face it we must look as much like monkeys to them as they do to us—some of us more so than others.
From Ian Strathcarron's "The Indian Equator":
In fact, none of the idols in Benares are handsome or attractive. And what a swarm of them there is! The town is a vast museum of idols—and all of them crude, misshapen, and ugly. They flock through one's dreams at night, a wild mob of nightmares. When you get tired of them in the temples and take a trip on the river, you find idol giants, flashily painted, stretched out side by side on the shore. And apparently wherever there is room for one more lingam, a lingam is there. If Vishnu had foreseen what his town was going to be, he would have called it Idolville or Lingamburg.