Sunday, October 5, 2014

River obstacles

Floating Durgas

Our wooden row boat bumps into something with a loud thump. I look over the side and see a bamboo structure floating in the water, a section still solid with mud resembles several arms outreached. A bit of cloth is wrapped around the base. This is what remains of a statue of Durga that got dropped into the river yesterday. It was hard not to notice the groups of devotees that came clapping and chanting their way down the steps of a ghat yesterday evening as we sat to watch the aarti. A group seemed to descend every 5-10 minutes, sometimes one right after another, carrying one to four statues painted up and dressed in finery. The statues started as small as your arm and extended to one and a half the height of the men trying to navigate their way down the steps without endangering their holy cargo. At the bottom they loaded the statue into a boat and set off onto the Ganges river to continue their ceremony for several hours before placing the statue in the Ganges and allowing it to float away. Turns out my visit to Varanasi coincided with the Durga puja.


Loading Durga in the boat

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