91/ 100 Motorbike Dog
The Two-Wheeled Peril
During our visit to Varanasi this year we kept hearing the same statement over and over again from friends, cafe owners and shopkeepers. The number of tourists, especially non-Indian tourists, is dropping rapidly each year. We heard tales of half-empty guesthouses and closed cafes every day. Our all-time favourite fabric and hand-made clothing store even admitted that he had to stock far fewer items for tourists, replacing them with cheaper alternatives that Indian people would buy, even though it went against his entire business ethos and it pained him to do so.
Of course, there could be loads of reasons for that but some seem so blindingly obvious that it’s hard to understand why the people who live and work there haven’t done anything about them. The dirtiness of the city has become known nation-wide (more about that later) and that would put off a lot of the visitors I imagine, as would the ludicrously bad traffic that makes it virtually impossible to move anywhere around the city. One other huge problem, mentioned by all the other travellers we spent time with there, and possibly one of the most dangerous issues, are the ridiculously annoying motorbikes. I ought to add at this point that when I refer to motorbikes I am including scooters too.
Varanasi is enormous and sprawls westwards from the river Ganges. Think of it in a series of layers. The first layer is the wide river itself, then, along the 7 kilometres of western shore there are over 80 sets of ancient stone steps, or ghats, leading steeply down from the edge of the city to the edge of the water itself. The river is enormously busy, but the ghats are even more so. Pilgrims, tourists and locals mix with hawkers trying to sell you boat rides, ear cleaning, hairy dried calves’ testicles, haircuts, chess sets, bangles, paintings, cannabis, pan masala, plastic containers (empty so that you can take a bit of the soupy Ganges home), and advice from spiritual Babas. This narrow pathway of sandstone steps is the domain of the people. A long and narrow paved escarpment mercifully free of vehicles of any kind, unless you can ride a cow.
Once you have walked up the numerous steep and uneven steps, home to groups of smoking teenagers, chai-drinking holy men, playful puppies and sleeping goats you reach the next layer of the city. Assuming you are in the vicinity of the main ghat, Dashashwamedh, you will find yourself in a wonderful maze of very narrow streets, squeezed into the space between the ghats and Sonarpura road — a thoroughfare that is so choked with vehicles that navigating along it is virtually pointless. That narrow maze of streets above the ghats is heaven for a visitor or, at least, it could be.
Very narrow and deep pathways run like cool shaded streams at the bottom of buildings whose height is unknowable. They are lined with shops and cafes of every kind. Street-food stalls sell chai and anything that can be fried in a smoking-hot kadai. A single doorway becomes a portal into a tiny room with barely enough space for the little old lady who sits nestled into her hoard of household offerings. Men and dogs hunt out narrow shafts of sunlight on any ledge available and spend time dozing in the warmth. Wandering along these lanes would be hugely enjoyable were it not for the motorbikes.
Picture this — you are walking down a very narrow lane that’s barely wide enough for two people to pass each other. If the person walking towards you is, in fact, a cow then you probably can’t pass at all and have to wait a while behind a queue of other people, nestled into a slightly wider part of the lane, until the slow lumbering creature has moved past. Then you hear it, a loud grumbling noise reverberating along the stone walls, soon followed by the inevitable horn. Don’t think that this is a gentle peep of a horn — the rider of this machine will have his finger firmly secured to the button for as long as it takes for everyone, and the cow, to make way for them. It doesn’t even matter if it is physically too narrow to pass. With more horn pressing, and the will of Shiva, the bike riders demand that the pathway is cleared.
These people almost never wait. Even when there is obviously no space. You can expect to feel the end of a shiny brake-lever jam into one of your buttocks as they fly by if you don’t move quickly enough. As you can see, this makes navigating the lanes hugely unpleasant. Now imagine that there is almost no let-up in bike traffic and you can begin to see why I hate it so much.
I recall one particular incident where the human / machine traffic mixture had reached a choke-point in the roadway as the lane snaked tightly around a shrine. A mail-delivery bike was coming towards us, followed by several other bikes and pedestrians. In front of me was a line of about six motorbikes with the first one’s front wheel pressed tightly up against the front wheel of its competitor. You couldn’t squeeze a chapati past this ridiculous standoff, let alone a bike, and neither side was going to concede. I then became aware of a nudging against the back of my leg.
Turning around I saw a young boy on an enormous Royal Enfield who had decided that he would simply use some magical powers provided by his expensive bike to simply pass cleanly through his adversary’s bodies. Sadly for him, I was blocking his path to freedom and his magic wasn’t working. The obvious hopelessness of the situation didn’t deter this chap from nudging me again, and again and, even when I turned to glare at him, a final nudge pushed me to within a hair’s-breadth of losing my composure. Seconds before I was about to do something that could get me deported back to Scotland an older man in a suit said something in Hindi to the young lad and he actually fell back a few centimetres.
The kind man then said, in perfect English, “I told him you were very angry and that if he didn’t stop what he was doing you were probably going to punch him in the face”. He was clearly a very astute person.
So are these bikes responsible for the drop in tourists? It’s not my place to give a definitive answer to that, but I do know that they make navigating the best and most touristic parts of the city completely miserable. All the lovely quaint paths that have attracted travellers for centuries are now the domain of the motorbike so the tourists are simply spending more time on the ghats where it is safer.
Our good friend Sonu has spent his entire life living in these very streets and he told us it is worse than ever. He tells us that until just a few years ago children would play cricket in the slightly sider areas. In years past you could stand and have a chat with your friends for as long as you liked without getting constant hassle. Now Sonu has a child and he worries about his safety. The once-empty road past his house is lined on both sides now with motorbikes with only enough space left for one more to pass up the middle.
There are accidents galore too. Each time we saw a mangled dog someone would tell us it was hit by a bike. The young son of Santos, the once-cheery owner of a cafe we liked to frequent, lost his life to a motorbike right outside the front door of his house.
Could this problem be fixed? Not in Varanasi. They don’t seem to be able to keep a handle on anything there these days. We heard from so many people that bribes and corruption are king now. Many folk have become wealthier and therefore so many more of them can afford a motorbike. The lanes simply weren’t designed for traffic, but I don’t expect the people who live there would agree to pedestrianise them. Of course, even our friend Sonu has a bike of his own, which he insists on keeping right outside his house.
Fortunately many of the indie dogs have the perfect solution. They live by the motto ‘sleep on thine enemy’.
