They say people come to Varanasi to die, but no one warns you that first, you must learn to breathe death. To tolerate it appearing in every corner of the city. To understand it, embrace it, honor it. This is not a city for tourists; it is for devotees, travelers, the mad, mystics, artists, saints, and the curious seeking a different kind of redemption. It is for people lost and found, damaged, disorganized, and troubled—those who question the order established by a system that defends consumption as the only eternal thing in this life.
This city is an interruption of common sense by the simple fact of its existence. Without effort. Without pretension. It is chaos elevated to the status of the sacred. Varanasi is contradictory, incomprehensible, indefinable, and unbearable. But it is also peaceful, healing, and reasonable. Its streets are a labyrinth where time stands still and space compresses. Yet, it is also where everything seems to expand exponentially.
The presence of death in every corner
Arriving in Varanasi is tumultuous, unpredictable, almost violent. There is no time to adapt because the city hardly lets you breathe. You want to think, feel, reflect, contemplate, and understand. But you can’t; there isn’t a single moment where nothing is happening. You want to walk the streets, but you get lost. You want to find a place to stop for a moment, but it feels as if something invisible is shaking your shoulders, forcing you to walk without knowing where. Then you realize you have to press yourself against a wall to let a cow, a motorcycle, or a group of men carrying a body wrapped in orange silk pass by. You cannot stop; you must keep going. You are inside a kaleidoscope or a surrealist dream.
Temples, cafes, clothing stalls, poverty, filth, fire, and water. Death as an obvious promise and life as a question mark. The Ganges River, as sacred as it is polluted, without that being a contradiction. All of this is Varanasi.
I arrived with the knot in my stomach of one who travels alone and feels the world is too big. But in Varanasi, that knot is forced apart because the city is so real it verges on the cruel. There is no room for pretension when the smoke from the funeral pyres seeps into your pores. When the chants echo through a city so ancient it seems to have escaped time itself. When life and death do not collide as opposites but fuse into a unity that, in Varanasi, feels natural.
Hinduism and the spiritual meaning of death in Varanasi
To understand why Varanasi breathes smoke, one must understand Hinduism. For the devotee, dying here is not a tragedy; it is the ultimate privilege: it is to achieve Moksha, the final liberation from the cycle of reincarnation (Samsara).
While in the West we struggle to retain, to accumulate, and to remain, in Varanasi, the goal is to let go, to release, to accept, to flow. The fire at Manikarnika Ghat is not merely combustion; it is the vehicle that returns the five elements to the universe. Observing the pyres that burn twenty-four hours a day is to witness the fulfillment of Dharma, the sacred order of things.
Death is an absolute that springs from each and every stone of the city. But it is not a full stop; it is a continuation, a bridge between this life and a higher order. A positive sign that resignifies and challenges our Western worldview regarding the act of dying.
I saw no tears, nor was there a tragic air in Varanasi. It wasn’t indifference either. Rather, it was a profound understanding that the body is merely an envelope. A radical acceptance of death that allowed the dead and the living to coexist, drinking chai while watching the fire with curiosity.
It was a certainty that I found moving. A promise that no one spoke because it wasn’t necessary to put into words. The infinite, the unnamable. That which all religions attempt to articulate—often in vain—was what I saw in the eyes of the people who went to Varanasi to die.
Cultural shock: What the West silences, Varanasi screams about death
My three days in Varanasi led me to compare the conception of death in both cultures. In our Western world, we have turned death into an uncomfortable secret. We hide it in sterile hospital rooms and dress it in black, as if silence could hide the inevitable. It is the subject no one wants to bring up at the table. A taboo. An inconvenience. A reason to be swept away by self-destruction. Tears and sorrow. Dark funerals, dismal nights.
Varanasi spat a different truth at me: death is bright orange and smells of fire.
By normalizing the end, the city resignifies life. There is no fear in the eyes of the elders waiting for their turn on the banks of the Ganges; there is a radical acceptance that denotes an absolute faith, which has nothing to do with Christianity. Seeing death so closely, without filters or marble walls, forced me to look at my own existence with a sharpness that hurt.
If death is as natural as the flowing river, why do we spend so much energy pretending it doesn’t exist?
Varanasi: A Radical Acceptance of the End
Walking through this chaotic city was like looking into a mirror of what we try to ignore. Watching children and dogs run among the bodies lying patiently by the river, I understood with a certain peace that death is not something that should be hidden.
Varanasi breaks your mental frameworks because it teaches you that peace does not come from avoiding the end, but from knowing that smoke is part of the air that we will all, sooner or later, breathe. In the end, we take nothing with us, except the lightness of having learned to walk through the flames without getting burned.
Varanasi was just one stop on this journey of deconstruction. You can find more chronicles and reflections from my travels through Asia here.