I have spent most of my working life arranging honeymoons to places where the water is turquoise and the resort sends a private car. Varanasi is not that. Varanasi is brown river water in the lamp-light, narrow stone lanes that smell of marigold and woodsmoke, and an aarti that I am not sure I have words for, even now.
I went last November, on my own, not on work. My grandmother in Chennai had passed away in October, and I wanted to do a kind of quiet thing for her, a personal thing. My mother suggested Varanasi. I had not planned to write about it. But something about the trip changed the way I think about travel itself, and I thought it might be worth sharing for any couple who is thinking of Varanasi as a meaningful trip rather than a tick-the-box one. (I have since had two couples ask to include Varanasi as a brief stop on their honeymoon, between Delhi and somewhere else. Both came back saying it was the part of the trip they remembered most.)
I flew Bangalore to Varanasi direct, about two and a half hours. The airport is small. The drive into the city took forty minutes and ended at a narrow lane where the car could not go further. A man from the hotel came out with a small luggage trolley and we walked the last hundred metres past a tea stall, past a man selling marigold garlands, past three cows who did not move when we approached but were polite enough to swish their tails.
The hotel was a converted haveli, two hundred years old, with a rooftop that looked over the river. Six rooms, four-thousand-five-hundred rupees a night with breakfast. From the rooftop I could see Dashashwamedh Ghat to the right and Manikarnika to the left, and between them, the river, brown and wide and going slowly, as if it had decided long ago that there was no hurry.
The first thing I will tell you is to not do the aarti from the ghat. Everyone tells you to go to Dashashwamedh and stand on the steps. By the time the aarti starts, the steps are packed, you cannot see anything except the back of someone's head, and the only way to take a photo is to hold your phone up so high that you cannot see the screen yourself. The aarti is worth experiencing properly, not photographically.
What you do instead: hire a small wooden boat at six in the evening, around five hundred rupees per person if you bargain, eight hundred if you do not. The boatman rows you out maybe thirty metres into the river, drops a small anchor, and you sit there facing the ghat. The priests stand in a row in their saffron, the lamps are lit one by one, the bells start, and the lamps reflect on the water. From the boat you can see the whole choreography of it, not just one corner.
I sat in that boat for forty-five minutes. The boatman, an old man with a face that suggested he had been doing this for fifty years, did not say a word the whole time. At the end he turned the boat around and rowed me back. As we approached the ghat steps I gave him the money, and he said, in Hindi, "first time?" and I said yes, and he said, "come back tomorrow morning, before sunrise." Then he wrote his name on a piece of paper, gave it to me, and rowed away.
I went the next morning at five-thirty. He was already there. The river at that hour is empty. There were perhaps three other boats in sight, all far away. The mist was thick. He rowed me past Manikarnika, where the cremation fires from the night were still burning low and the family members of the deceased were sitting wrapped in shawls watching the embers. We did not stop. We did not photograph. He just rowed past, slowly, with respect, and continued upriver.
The east bank caught the first light. Pink, then gold. Sadhus came down to the river to bathe, the same routine they have been doing for centuries. A woman in a yellow sari floated a small lamp on a leaf-boat. A bell rang somewhere. The boatman rowed in silence.
If anyone asks me what the soul of Varanasi is, I will say it is that ninety minutes on the river before sunrise. The evening aarti is the spectacle. The dawn boat ride is the prayer.
I came back to the hotel, had a kachori-sabzi breakfast on the rooftop with a small clay cup of tea, and went back out into the lanes. Walking through the lanes at seven in the morning, before the tourists are awake, is the second best thing Varanasi has to offer. The shopkeepers are just opening their shutters. Schoolchildren in starched uniforms are walking past widows in white saris who live their last years in old buildings here, as a final stop, as a quiet preparation. Pandits in tiny temples no bigger than cupboards are chanting morning verses. The air smells of incense and damp stone and the first round of frying jalebis.
Across three days I built a small routine. Morning boat. Walk through the lanes. Late breakfast on the rooftop. Mid-morning nap. Lassi at the Blue Lassi Shop, in a clay cup, in a lane so narrow my shoulder brushed the wall. Afternoon at Kashi Chaat Bhandar for the tamatar chaat. An hour at Pizzeria Vaatika Cafe one afternoon, just to give myself a small mental break with familiar food on a rooftop. Evening aarti from the boat again on the second night, this time from a slightly different angle. Sleep early.
On the second afternoon I took a taxi to Sarnath, half an hour out of the city. This is where the Buddha gave his first sermon after his enlightenment. The complex is calm, the lawns are green, the stupa is enormous. I sat there for an hour and did not move. A young monk in maroon robes sat down nearby and read a small book. We did not speak. At one point a dog walked up to him, lay down at his feet, and went to sleep. He smiled at the dog and continued reading.
For couples who are doing Varanasi as part of a honeymoon, here is what I would say. Stay three nights, not less. Stay in the old city at a small heritage haveli, not in the cantonment. The cantonment is forty-five minutes by taxi to the ghats and you will miss the early-morning walks which are half the point. Pick a hotel with a rooftop view. Three to seven thousand a night is the mid-range, and the best of these come with breakfast and a small library of Indian classical music CDs in the lobby that I would not have noticed if I had been in a hurry.
Eat at the small old-city places, not at the hotel restaurants. Kashi Chaat Bhandar is famous and the fame is deserved. Blue Lassi Shop will be touristy but the lassi is genuinely good. Try the kachori sabzi breakfast at any small wooden stall in the old city for sixty rupees, Banaras-style. If you are doing Jain food, the bigger hotels can arrange it, but tell them a day in advance.
If you want a quiet add-on, ask your hotel about a Hindustani classical concert at one of the old havelis. They happen most evenings during winter season, a small audience of twenty or thirty people sitting on white sheets, a sitar or a tabla artist, sometimes a vocalist, for about ninety minutes. Most hotels will know which haveli is hosting that night.
October to March is the right window. May and June are too hot. July and August the river swells and the lower ghats are partly underwater. December has the best texture but the coldest mornings.
The total for me, three nights, heritage hotel, boats both mornings, taxis to Sarnath, all meals, was around twenty-eight thousand. From Bangalore including flights, about thirty-five.
One small thing on photography that I will say firmly. Do not photograph the cremation ghats up close. Do not photograph the sadhus without first asking, and accept that the answer may be no. The city is a working spiritual city, not a film set, and the dignity of what happens at Manikarnika is not yours to take with a phone.
I came back from Varanasi feeling like something had been gently rearranged. The trip did not solve anything. My grandmother was still gone. But there is a particular way the river moves in the morning that does something to your sense of time, and I have not been able to explain it more clearly than that.
Give it three nights. The city will give itself back.