Good Morning Varanasi!

Waking up in Varanasi was a loud shout Welcome Back to India! Beeping horns, spitting, hacking, a muezzin call making my mind work in my semi state of sleep, as I try to remember or create the religious importance of the Holy Ganga for Muslims. The room is hot. The windows appear to be boarded shut with ply wood. The glass windows on the door are covered over with a poster of Shiva and Parbati as their faces merge to create a rather disturbing image of their child 'Ganesh' – the elephant god.

Outside of my locked room box is a small shrine guarded by iron gates, but inside all that stands protected are discarded sheets of old newspaper, which in the villages of Langtang would have been used to decorate yak shit walls.

The view from the flat walled roof reminds me of Jerusalem, with the main difference being that is is not quite so beautiful, but certainly as intricate. Below me rises a collage of houses awash with movement and lives: Washing lines full of colours, walls full of drying circles of cow shit, women watering plants potted in rusty tins, red bottomed monkeys idling away the morning, mongrel dogs trying to protect their roof top territory, there is even a man jogging around his small patch of sky-high cement. Electricity wires congregate in a muddle, and are decorated by a plethora of plastic kites, which are still trying desperately to escape into the wind. The majority of plastic shapes are coloured with the pattern of the Indian flags. I lift up my eyes and see a flock of other kites, being maneuvered over the tops of the city as small boys run backwards and forwards across different roof tops. Each one playing independently and yet adding to the mosaic of skyline activity.

A woman calls for her 'babu' and eventually a child's voice screams a reply. Rickshaw bells tring, taxi horns beep, voices merge into the sound of the street which are carried up on the scented warm air. Loaded with sound, the atmosphere feels full as the air rises around me, lifting away the dawn and welcoming me with the sounds of a vibrant full life, in this city famous for death.