45/ 100 Cafe Window Dog
Worried Worshippers
The streets of Varanasi are lined with temples and places of worship but perhaps the biggest of all is the magnificent Shri Kashi Vishwanath Temple. I say magnificent, because I assume it is. We have never actually made it there. We had every intention of paying a visit this trip but, largely because of the extra-special once every 144 year Kumbh Mela, we couldn’t physically get there without resorting to unfair methods.
The queue for the temple during our stay was a ridiculous length. It was taking several hours for the worshippers to make their way along the designated lanes. One such pathway ran right past the Shree Cafe. I was getting particularly hangry and really needed a coffee and a biscuit. The only thing between me and my morning sugar fix was a metre-wide road completely packed with countless numbers of people waiting to say their prayers.
The only person more tetchy than me was the cafe owner. None of the worshippers would go into his cafe otherwise they’d lose their place in the queue, but they all prevented his customers from coming in to buy a drink by virtue of the fact that you couldn’t get through them to his door. His grumpy demeanour was understandable really.
Inside the Shree cafe was a very beautiful Alsatian. It appeared to be extremely placid and content to simply be sat behind the owner on the same large wooden chair as him, watching the world pass by the cafe through a convenient glassless window. Now, although, as I have written before, the people we saw in India seemed to happily co-exist alongside the dogs, they were not particularly huge fans of a large Alsatian’s face resting on a window ledge at almost head hight.
We spent an amusing half hour watching people warily file by, a few centimetres from the dog’s damp nose, unable to avoid its proximity simply because there was no space in the lane. It seemed to be like a game of musical chairs – how far forward in the queue can you get without being the one who has to stop by the huge head in the window for a few minutes.
I think the cafe owner actually encouraged it as some silent retribution for lost business and he was more than happy for me to photograph it.
