The Finding of Faith

I was in Haridwar, where sin and ash were drained in the brown flood of the Ganga. I stood in a market of myth, where shops faced other shops. A slim street made of big broken stones ran between them, drain water seeped through the cracks, which mucky-footed stray dogs sipped on. Some shops sold harem pants with a pattern of Sanskrit verses along them, and a ponytail of key-chains with 3D images of changing gods hung were hung around. The music shop spun one disc after another. When they stopped to make a switch, I could hear temple bells ring; a therapy of sound from sound. A mention in the scriptures earned monkeys and cows a treat, the throw of steamed rice or a dunk of banana stems, they seemed content. Women abandoned themselves on temple stairs, everybody pretended to be widowed. Lying for survival was a quaint truth.
In this town, the rising sun is first seen through clear strains of water, by priests who stood a few feet deep into the river, with hands stretching a copper vessel in the direction of the light. The mornings woke up to the sound of bells, many bells, big and small, turning evermore lyrical inside a chorus of chants; chants from freshly bathed and cleansed throats. In Haridwar, eternity was an everyday effort. The wheel of birth, death and rebirth was churning night and day, day and night, in song and light, to restore something that wasn’t even fully destroyed. Was order being feared or desired? I peddled along the ghats, coolly moist in river breeze. Here, priests and the pious folk sat huddled under giant umbrellas, around small sacrificial fires, trying to establish contact with celestial bodies.
I saw riders vroom into town; they stopped to cool their faces by crouching under a stream of fresh water founts that were left inadequately plumbed. They wore washed out jeans, t-shirts with discoloured faces (of Che Guevara mostly) on them. Did they come here out of rebellion? I met white-skinned men, freshly bald and white-skinned women with hair partially wet from a sacred dip. Black cameras that defied gravity dangled from their necks. They came in, acquainted with terms from the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, maybe just popular terms; they came to know more. They were more exotic in their chase than the regular horde of day trippers that came packed in buses that were covered in a sheet of black fume, dried vomit stuck on every third window. They weren't aetheists like me, were we all, in some way, here for the same reason?