A short drive north of Varanasi, we climbed out of the rickshaw.

A man stepped into our path.

“Guide, sir? Guide? Without me, you will see, but you won’t understand.”

We smiled, thanked him, and kept walking.

After twenty steps Dani stopped.

“We should get a guide.”

I turned around, but the first man had already disappeared. Our rickshaw driver pointed instead to a friend sitting in in his vehicle.

“This is Vivaan.”

“Okay.”

We climbed in.

~

Vivaan walked fast.

He talked faster.

He led us through temple gates, talking the entire time. His English was good enough that we recognized individual words, but not enough to connect them together before he had moved on.

At the Japanese temple, he pointed through the doorway.

“Reclining Buddha.”

Then he was already walking back toward the rickshaw.

A hundred feet later we climbed out again at a white peace pagoda.

“This Buddha teaches.”

He pointed.

“This Buddha blesses.”

Another.

“This Buddha meditates.”

Then the reclining figure.

“This is enlightenment.”

I stopped.

“Why those poses? Why this building? Why here?”

But he’d already started walking again.

~

Back beside the giant Buddha he spoke with complete confidence.

“The wheel on India’s flag has twenty-four spokes because there are twenty-four hours in a day.”

Above me a wheeled flag snapped in the breeze.

“Buddha was born, enlightened, and died in one day.”

I looked at Dani.

She shrugged.

~

The largest monument in Sarnath stood beyond an iron fence: an immense cylinder of weathered brick rising above the trees.

“What is that?”

“Stupa.”

“What does it do?”

He stacked one hand on top of the other.

“Brick and brick and brick.”

“No inside.”

I pointed at the carved stone wrapped around the lower walls.

“What about those?”

He smiled.

“Brick.”

Then he turned toward the rickshaw.

This time, we didn’t follow.

~

At the gate Dani found a tiny clay Buddha from a street vendor.

When we climbed back into the waiting rickshaw, she held hers up with a smile.

I then reached into my pocket to show her mine.

We stared at each other.

We’d both picked one up.