We have to haul all the water out that we haul in so every bucket from the river returns to the river. Cupfuls of water dumped on the wall and by hand alone or with a coconut husk we scrub off the fine silt, different then sand, softer and yet denser. Some is dried hard and is like fused clay becoming part of the walls, you have to be careful not to get to rough with the walls there are bits of them that aren't' river mud just rough, you hate when you chip away a piece and then realize that it's part of the temple. I have blissful blisters that heal in one day when I return home this night.

The two days of the Bangladeshi work crew are charming and awe inspiring. Teelu and Madan have been building a new family house across the river in the village; here is a cluster of Bangladeshi families that are here for work. On all construction projects women do most of the direct loading and carrying. In their saris' with such a powerful grace anything I do seems clumsy next to them. They have ten or 15 kilos of silt in a basket and don't loose a fold on the sari or the smile on their face. Of course as a foreman I'm loose, chai every two hours, pan and paying more than the daily rate. We also break a few boundaries by just having eye contact and sharing laughs. They won't let me get near a basket though, if I dropped it would be back luck and a lot of crap from the old man that comes over with them but doesn't work at all.

By rough calculations the amount of silt we pull our seems staggering; two 10 kilo baskets a minute, 9 hours a day, so around 1600 kilos. Yeah and not having to retie the sari at that! You can see from the photo that we create a huge pile of mud just outside the temple where for three days we cleaned. It will only take a morning to flush it into the river but it's a bit counter productive. Next time we pile it up and make a sculpture.

The last days cleaning is reverent and joyful, we've gone through a lot to get this far. Done with hands and buckets and buckets of water. Carried in and then scooped up and carried out. It slowly changes color and becomes clearer and cleared. Then we wipe the walls with almond oil, the stone gleams and if possible has a huge smile crawling across it. I can feel the Mandir is happy with the attention. It's the first part of any ritual or puja; to clean from floor to ceiling. Then we run down all the lingams with ghee, oil, honey, milk and curd. More washing. Now it's ready to be dressed with sacred leaves, flowers, lighting of the camphor, blessings with incense and then the noise, mantra, drums, bells and the conch shell. The boys couldn't really get a sound out of the conch and the gori grabs it. It has to be one of my favorite moments blowing the conch so loud we get the attention of some sadhus and Brahmins who come down to see what we're up to. The bhang and sugar Prasad never tasted so good; this feeling lasts all day, late into the night and into the next morning when after a morning dip in the Ganga I go to do my first absolutions at the fresh temple.

At this point I don't know if the motivations were clear all I can perceive is the feeling which won't be confined to words but has smiles, tears and a pulsing rhythm to it. Just a simple house cleaning but something that made more than my week brighten up. As a postscript I did the panch chosi this year an all night 100 Km walk that is a yatra. You do it without shoes; I'll post a separate blog about it. It begins at the Mankarnika ghat and ends there, you walk out into the country and do puja at the five major Goddess temples. When I returned, spent, tired, elated and grateful, this little sinking Mandir was my goal. Walking down the ghat steps slowly with my blistered and trashed feet was such blend of intense and pure feelings. Maybe that was my motivation; to have a place to start and return to.

************

So after days of cleaning around the temple we finally get the doors open and this is whats in there. It's huge really, you can see that we've already dug away when I stopped to take this picture. All of this came out to make the pile of mud in the picture lower down. Still it was a joy to get the doors to open again.

You have to see it in motion. I'll post a couple of mpegs later. These women worked with diligence, grace and strength. I'm sure they do that every day but these to days it was for the temple and I got the feeling that they really enjoyed coming over to Benaras and working on the temple.

Yeah lets see you wrap a sari and carry 10 kilos on your head with hypnotizing grace, still crack a joke and push your sister to work faster. The chai and the pan help I'm sure but come on you have to give up some props here.

I've worked on alot of differant crews, lead teams and been lead in teams. This of course was an exotic venture, but the comraderie that developed and the sheer directed force that this crew gave up puts it high on my all time list of great days at work.

This is the pile that we created. Actually it's just during the first day, it got alot bigger. I do think that given the opportunity to do it again, Bhagwan willing, we'll pile it up and make a huge statue of it that Mother Ganga can come and claim the following monsoon. It has this really raw and refined texture that's hard to picture or describe, you just have to dig your hands into it.

This is more like it. A clean temple, pure before we get to the puja. This photo is really a bit before that. We have to finish the gentle cleaning and then get to the magic of wiping it down with the oil. She looked so happy, you could really feel the stone smiling and laughing. Maybe it was fatigue but I wasn't the only one to notice it.

So now she's finally got the flowers, water, flames and smoke. She looks so good I couldn't leave. We had done it all, cleaned, drummed, chanted, burned. We couldn't leave, like to go meant it was over. The great thing is the rains will come, the river will rise and she'll fill up again. With the blessing of the divine I'll get to be a part of cleaning her again. At this point I'm really proud to be the insane gori, honky, gringo who was dumb enough to think he could clean out the abandoned sinking temple.

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