Varanasi

Smoke curls from the burning ghats before the sun clears the rooftops. The Ganges slides past in the half-light, dark and oily, carrying marigold garlands and the ash of the dead. Varanasi wakes like nowhere else — the sacred and the profane tangled so tightly that pulling them apart would destroy both.

Varanasi is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, a place where Hindu pilgrims come to die because cremation on the banks of the Ganges here is believed to break the cycle of rebirth. Eighty-seven ghats line the western bank, each with its own rituals and rhythms — dawn bathers at Assi, evening aarti fire ceremonies at Dashashwamedh, and the constant orange glow of Manikarnika, where funeral pyres burn around the clock. The old city behind the ghats is a labyrinth of silk-weaving workshops, Mughal-era mosques, and sweet shops selling malaiyyo — a winter-only saffron milk froth set overnight on rooftops using the cold dew. Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon, sits ten kilometres north.