The Silent Streets of Varanasi at Dawn

Before the city wakes, there is a window — perhaps twenty minutes — where Varanasi belongs only to the river, the smoke, and whoever is watching.

I had been told about the dawn. Every photographer who had been to Varanasi told me about the dawn. And still, when I first walked down to Dasaswamedh Ghat at four in the morning, I was not prepared.

The city smells of marigolds and wood smoke and the river — the Ganga here is not the clean river of postcards but a living, silted, sacred, complicated thing. Boats were already in the water. Priests were already lighting fires. Old men were sitting in the exact spots they had apparently always sat in, watching the darkness thin.

I made some photographs. I am not sure they are the best photographs I have ever taken. But I am certain that standing there, camera to my eye, I understood for the first time why people come here to die. There is something in Varanasi that has accepted the whole of life — its beauty, its difficulty, its final conclusion — without any particular drama. It simply is. And that quality, that radical acceptance, is almost impossible to photograph. Which is perhaps why photographers keep trying.

The light when it came was orange-grey, filtered through smoke and fog. The ghats emerged slowly from the dark, their stone steps worn into curves by centuries of feet. I stayed until the boats began to fill with tourists and the morning aartis were over. Then I walked back through streets that were now fully awake — chai sellers, flower sellers, sadhus, schoolchildren — and found a place to sit with my images.

None of them were what I had been trying to make. All of them were something. That seems right for Varanasi. You go there expecting one thing and you come back carrying something else entirely — something you cannot quite name, but that stays with you.