Walter Benjamin called Paris “a labyrinth, whose passages are in continual movement”. Paris also taught him the “art of straying”. This imagery of a mobile maze is echoed when you stray in another flaneur’s paradise, Varanasi, which is a city of interlocked alleys juxtaposed by the linear, untangled, Ganga.Varanasi is a forest of bliss where people come and wait for death. In an old Purana myth, Brahma and Vishnu were arguing about who was the greater god between th