Morning on the Ganges

Morning on the Ganga (Ganges), is slow and peaceful. The air is warm, hinting at the heat to come. People bath in one of the most holy and most polluted bodies of water on the planet. The breeze is strong. It ripples the flags and makes stained glass out of the water. Black birds with red beaks and white tail splotches dip in and out of air currents. From here, on the balcony of Alka Hotel, the trash is hardly visible. Through the haze I can almost imagine what it must have looked like during the Roman Empire. But the smells! The smells are unique to India today. Cow dung, ripe mangoes, rotting trash, fried puri. These smells are softer in the morning, the day has yet to magnify them and waft them through the impossibly tiny old streets.