Varanasi and too many corpses
We spent a day in Lucknow, which gave us just long enough to visit ‘The Residency’, the scene of the Indian Mutiny in 1875. All 3000 of Lucknow’s British occupants and anyone else opposed to the Indian independence movement fled there and sheltered in the basements. 2000 of them perished. So many people died at once that they dug mass graves around the church. Then the church was blown to smithereens by cannons. There wasn’t as much left of the buildings as I had imagined- I had pictured a great Victorian house with a few bullet holes in it, dust covers over Victorian chaise longues like at Miss Haversham‘s. In fact it was less intact than many roman ruins I’ve seen. There were a lot of bullet holes though, so I got that bit right. The most interesting feature was the chipmunks. They had the run of the place, and peered at the tourists with distaste. Our ride to Varanasi was very wet. The rain started by ‘blattering‘, and quickly moved on to ‘bucketing‘, with ‘sheeting’ stra...