We were visiting the Temple of Love in the holy city of Varanasi one morning about dawn. The sun was filtering down through the leaves as  we climbed the stone steps up towards the temple. We arrived there

in what can be described as a large canoe.

            In the canoe there was a priest, a bramin, a rabbi, my sister

and I. We reached the temple at the top of a high hill. And I remember

the gasps of the others when they saw the temple.

                  The entire outside of the temple, all four walls were

covered in explicit carvings of people screwing. And not ordinary people

either. These people were so well-endowed and they had such stamina, they must have been

gods and goddesses.

             Indeed, the attendant pointed out one woman who was very busy indeed absorbed in her carnal pleasures with about four people. He pointed to her butt and said, “Kali”.

                    Now the worship of Kali is no joke. She is referred to as, “the dark one”. She is the one with about ten arms and legs. And it’s not unusual for one of her hands to hold a human skull. One arm makes the sign meaning, “It’s all right.”  The hand at the end of another arm holds a lethal knife.

             Anyway, on the outside of the Temple of Love, Kali is having sex. And the rest of the religious crew who were visiting the temple with me, they were so disgusted by the exterior walls covered by this continuous carved sex-fest that they wanted to leave immediately.

My sister didn’t want to leave but she escorted

the holy gang down to the boat. Deborah was

was being polite; she was also holding the boat for me.

*

        The early morning outside the Temple of Love, everything grew very quiet. All the offended chatterers were gone… At this point I got down on my hands and knees and tried to find the interior of the place.

            Out of the trees surrounding the temple came a man dressed in white robes with white hair and a white beard. He looked ascetic.

In fact he looked exactly like our idea of a Christian saint. Someone who

spends a lot of time fasting, in order to attain the visions that fasting will give sometimes… if you have great patience.

                Did I conjure this guy up? No,

impossible!  Did he come from Central Casting? Nope, he was real. He was carrying a staff.

He led me around to the other side of the temple. He gestured with

his staff towards an arched opening.

         I looked inside the Temple. The inside

of the place was immaculate. The floor was polished. At the center

of the floor was a raised rounded off phallic stone. Behind me the holy man said: “Yoni.”

*

          Outside of the Temple was this mass of carved coitus. The inside of the temple was

immaculate. “There’s a lesson to be learned here,” I thought.

*

The boatman had said a curious thing to me earlier when he was paddling up the river:

*

“THE BOAT’S IN THE WATER,

THERE’S NO WATER

IN THE BOAT.”

*

*

       I went back down to the boat. Everyone

was mad at me, except for the boatman and my sister, who had been trying to maintain order among this unruly crew, who were all deeply offended by the so-called obscenity of what they had seen.

                The boatman was laughing and I was

laughing, too. I had just made a discovery which later in my life was to become quite important to me.

            I tried to hide my laughter by looking out across the waters of the Ganges, gleaming in the morning sun.

 

 

 

(C)2016 by W.G. Milne