To Believe... (contd)

My sister's wedding was held in Varanasi, UP last year and we travelled to the oldest city in our country with a bunch of relatives. Our hotel bookings had been confirmed a couple of months before and the wedding was 2 days after our arrival in Kashi. We still had some purchases and last minute arrangements there and we had planned a sightseeing tour for after the wedding day.

My Uncle, who was the senior most was the puppeteer and we were the puppets dancing to his tune. He held all the strings and he was quite good at it too. The women had all the fun stuff like Mehendi etc to do whereas the men did the running around. My husband was given the responsibility of receiving everybody at the railway station and airport and bringing them and their luggage safely to the hotel.

Everything was going on smoothly. It was the day of the wedding. The ladies were busy washing their hair, getting ready for their respective beauty appointments. Early morning, a set of relatives were arriving from Chennai and my hubby had gone to receive them. He left wearing his Adidas shorts and when he left with his bulging purse in his shorts pocket, I had a feeling that it was going to be picked. But before I could warn him, he had left. I did not worry much as my husband is very careful with his money. When he got back, my instinct had been right and it was gone. He was not sure if it fell off on the way to or from the station. In fact, he could not be sure if it had been picked or it had accidentally fallen off.

Everyone was tensed. The elders were full of premonitions about a bad omen on the day of marriage etc. We were more stressed as he had an awful lot of credit cards and debit cards in the purse. He said he didn't have much cash in it but he didn't even know which cards he had carried with him that day. My soon to be brother-in-law arrived and said that the people of Kashi were not thieves and were honest people. If the purse was missing, it would have fallen off. As he was born and brought up there, he was likely to be biased and I was not very encouraged. Anyway, my husband and a friend of the bridegroom left on a bike to search for the purse.

They didn't find it. So my husband went to a nearby cyber cafe and started cancelling all his credit cards and debit cards. The connection there was very poor and he could not cancel all of them. Moreover, in his worry and hurry, he didn't remember the ones he had cancelled! It was such a frustrating situation. We had worried about carrying too much cash with us from Mumbai so we had brought debit cards instead. Now all that was left was to borrow money from some of our relatives. It was altogether embarrassing and stressful. By lunchtime, we had come to terms with the fact that we would have to make do without those cards.

At around 4pm, my husband got a call from the hotel reception saying two people from Mughalsarai had come to meet him. We were a bit perplexed as we did not know anybody in those parts. One of them was a rickshaw driver and he had been in Varanasi railway station on that morning. My husband had traveled in his vehicle and had dropped his purse in it. The driver had gone all the way up to Mughalsarai when he discovered the purse. Luckily for us he was such an honest man, that he had gone to the length of coming back to give my husband's purse back. And when he opened it, the cash and even the change was intact. My brother-in-law had been right. The people of Kashi were honest people.

The wedding went off smoothly without any more glitches. After the wedding, we proceeded on our sightseeing tour as planned. One of the star attractions in Kashi is the Vishwanath(Shiva) temple near Dashashvamedha Ghat. It is said that the lingam over there is Svayambhu (meaning came up from the water on its own). We visited this temple in the night as it is less crowded at night time. The darshan we received was very good and we were coming out of the temple passing through the maze of gullies that make up old Kashi.

My mother was telling me that when she had gone there first there were so many cows and buffaloes in that narrow gully and had made walking impossible and how lucky we were that it was empty of cows now. The gullies are so narrow, we had to walk in a single file. So my daughter who was 6 then was walking ahead with my Mom behind her, then me and then the others behind us. Just when she finished saying this, two cows came running at full speed right at my daughter. Some one must have chased them off from the other end. We heard the noise and before we could think they were almost upon my daughter. I was so paralysed, I could not even scream. My mother even more so. Ananya (my daughter) just turned to tell me she had heard some noise and that saved her life that day. The cows missed her by just a whisker and I realised I had been holding my breath till then.

Both the things that happened in Varanasi put me in a dilemna. I am an agnostic and the 2 separate incidents that happened there were claimed as acts of God by all around me. They said that what holier place than Kashi for God to smile on you. Whatever it was, I fell in love with that quaint little city and would love to go back there sometime.

Thank you very much Bhagyashree. Only after reading your post "Faith" did I recollect these incidents. This post is dedicated to you!