India is Really Just a Big Small Town

When I first moved to New York, I was always caught off guard when I randomly ran into someone I knew on the street. But that tiny island is really like a small town sometimes, and it can lead to plenty of random encounters and connections. India can be like that too, apparently.

In Dehradun, a city of about 250,000 people, I used to run into my students and their families all the time on my days off. This didn't surprise me too much, and it was nice because they would usually give me rides or stop and have chai with me.

I arrived in Varanasi this morning, and I'm staying at the absolutely wonderful Hotel Temple on the Ganges. While I was eating breakfast on the rooftop, I saw a woman who looked really familiar to me. She was apprently thinking the same of me and came over to chat. Turns out our paths crossed in Dharamsala a few weeks ago. And here we were, in the same place again. The more I thought about this, the less coincidental it seemed. Most foreign travelers hit the same cities and are using the same guidebooks with the same hotels listed in them. Nonetheless, it was nice to see a semi-familiar face.

She invited me to spend the day with her and another friend she had made through her travels, a man from England. We went to Saranath, which is just outside Varanasi and the site of the Buddha's firs and famous sermon in Deer Park. Saranath was an interesting little place with dotted with Buddhist temples in the fashion of temples from various Buddhist countries from Thailand to Burma to Japan. We also saw the ruins of some of the oldest Buddhist structures and, of course, deer in Deer Park.