90/ 100 Crate Dog

The problem with revisiting a beautiful place over a period of time is that you begin to notice when things have changed.

On each of the four occasions we have visited India over the course of eight years, we have been drawn to one of the very oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world — Varanasi or, as it has been known since ancient times, Kashi.

During each visit we have stayed in the same guesthouse, at roughly the same time of year, just after Christmas, and the pace of change has been very rapid indeed — and most definitely not in a good way. I am conscious of writing about too much negativity in one post, so I’ll split this one into a couple of parts, with a cheerier story in between.

The dog in the picture above had claimed a dirty yellow plastic crate for its own. It was there every time we passed this year and seemed to have made a strange little home for itself. The crate, and the dog, are sitting within a red metal railing that continues to circle an ancient tree, with one its two trunks torn in half by some enormous force. Also inside the railings are some empty brick shrines, partly covered in broken orange tiles, and heaps of junk.

Old parasols, tarpaulins, litter of every kind, building rubble, old blankets, faeces and the paraphernalia collected by the countless homeless people who now sleep there and drink their cheap alcohol fill every square centimetre of earth at the base of the tree. If I had never seen this tree before I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. However, I knew that only one year previously — and for goodness knows how many years before that — this tree and the ground around it were sacred.

In the photograph in this post from 2020 you can see ladies, just before sunrise, walking clockwise around the tree in a movement called parikrama, trailing coloured threads and making blessings to each of the temples and statues that were around the base, often praying for help with their families. They did this every morning because the tree was a deeply sacred bodhi tree (sometimes called a peepal tree). In Hinduism the bodhi tree is believed to house, or represent, several deities, especially Vishnu. It is also famous in Buddhism because the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment beneath such a tree at Bodh Gaya.

On the day I made the photograph of the dog in its crate there were no worshippers, and I felt a great sadness. Once people lose their connection to nature it feels like a significant downward step. For countless years that tree was celebrated and treated with the greatest respect, and now, for whatever reason, someone allowed it to be consumed by modern ‘improvement’ works carried out by the government. I do understand that places need to be allowed to change and make way for a more modern way of living, but some things, such as this tree and its shrines, are irreplaceable, and it saddens me to see their destruction.