Varanasi: A Three-Part Journey in Oils

A city I have never visited, and will never be able to unsee.

There are places that live in us long before we arrive in them — cities that enter through stories, through scent, through something ancestral that settles quietly in the chest. For me, Varanasi has always been one of those places. The name alone arrives fully formed, carrying layers of myth, memory, devotion, and longing that feel older than my own life.

I’ll admit something that might sound strange: I am almost afraid to visit. Not because I doubt its magic — but because I worry that reality might gently dissolve the mystical world I have built around it over a lifetime. And so Varanasi has lived, vivid and sacred, in my imagination.

It was there, in that imagined city on the banks of the Ganges, that I returned to painting.

Coming Home to the Canvas

I had been away from oils for nearly two decades when the pandemic brought me back. The world had contracted to the walls of our homes, and somewhere in that stillness, I found the easel again. It felt less like picking up a hobby and more like answering a call I had been quietly ignoring.

And the first thing that called to me — was Varanasi.

What began as a single experiment became something I didn’t entirely plan: a three-painting series, each piece moving closer to the heart of a city I carry inside me. Looking back, the series feels like an unconscious act of moving closer — the way you circle a flame, getting closer with each pass.

The Ghat — Where It All Began

Oils on canvas. 36" × 48"

The Ghat, Oils on Canvas 36"x48" © 2022 Malini Rao

The first painting holds the widest frame. The Ganges at dawn: abstract, serene, expansive. Humanity is barely a whisper on the water and the morning mist. There is space here, and breath — that stolen hour when the river still belongs to the birds, to the murmur of ablutions, to prayers rising with the mist, before the ghats fill and the day reclaims everything with its beautiful, relentless chaos.

I worked on this piece for close to a year, working only at the close of the work day. Returning to oils after more than two decades was a slow reacquainting — from the very first brush stroke to the signature, I was remembering what I had always loved about the medium. The weight of it. The way it moves and holds. The way it rewards patience.

My home is filled with paintings from earlier years of my life, and there is something quietly profound about adding a new piece to those walls — about the conversation that begins between who you were and who you are becoming. The Ghat was that conversation beginning.

Ganga Arati — A Charged Memory Finally Speaks

Oils on canvas. 24" × 36"

The Ganga Arati, Oils on Canvas 36"x24" © 2025 Malini Rao

Three years passed between the first painting and the second. The world had changed; I had changed. Where The Ghat was born out of pandemic stillness, Ganga Arati became a source of sanity amid an increasingly chaotic and evolving world— As I’d spent recent months integrating AI into nearly every aspect of my life and work, this painting stood apart as sacred ground — a deliberate counterpoint to instantaneity in being slow, tactile, and profoundly human.

I worked on it over three to four months in what I can only describe as a meditative rhythm, mixing colors directly on the canvas, allowing each session to reveal the painting organically. No algorithms, no prompts or shortcuts. Just paint, patience, and presence.

The image itself had lived in my subconscious for decades. I first witnessed the Ganga Arati as a young adult at Hari Ki Pauri in Haridwar — the flames, the chanting, the river’s presence, all woven together in a multi-sensory memory so powerful it imprinted itself permanently. I had sketched the composition at least two years before I finally began the painting. Perhaps it simply wasn’t time until it was.

Where The Ghat offered distance and whispered prayers at dawn, Ganga Arati narrows the lens to the charged nightly rhythm of the ghats — devotion, fire, surrender. Man becomes both witness and participant and the atmosphere electric with the golden glow of lights offered to a river that has been receiving prayers for thousands of years.

The Sadhu — A Portrait, A Completion

Oils on Canvas. 18"x24"

Sadhu, Oils on Canvas 18"x24" © 2026 Malini Rao

The third painting brought me to the closest frame of all: a portrait. The Sadhu and Varanasi merging into a single presence — serenity and fierce radiance existing as the same truth.

Throughout the series, I had been pushing my visual language, exploring cubist geometry as an expression of our instinct to find structure and pattern in lived experience. The angular lines felt right for the ghats and even for the architecture of devotion and ritual.

But the Sadhu resisted.

His dreads refused to be contained by angular lines. The geometry that had served me across the series suddenly felt like a cage. And somewhere in that resistance — in the wrestling between structure and wildness — I found the metaphor I hadn’t known I was looking for.

The lines weren’t a cage. They were the counterpoint. The structure that made his wild and expansive freedom legible.

I kept the Sadhu on the easel longer than I needed to. Perhaps I wasn’t ready to let the series — or the city — go. When I finally signed my name, I understood something for the first time: Varanasi was always going to teach me about surrender. About the Ganges, yes. But more than that: about the kind of letting go that comes when you stop resisting the current and trust that you were always headed somewhere true.

What This Journey Has Taught Me

Four years. Three paintings. One city I have never visited and will never be able to unsee.

This series has extended far beyond the canvas. It has changed how I think, how I work, how I move through uncertainty — in my creative life, my professional life, my inner life. I have spent recent years integrating new tools and technologies into the way I work, and yet these paintings stood apart as something irreducibly human: slow, tactile, and made entirely by hand. They reminded me that creativity is not separate from living. It is one of its deepest forms.

If you’ve been sitting on something — a dormant skill, an unfinished project, a place or idea that has lived inside you for years without expression — I hope this series reminds you: the canvas will wait. And it will reward you when you’re ready.

On Commissions: Inviting You In

A painting like this is not simply a decorative object. It is the residue of a journey — of years of thought, feeling, craft, and the kind of slow attention that has become genuinely rare. When you live with a piece of original art, you live with all of that. You bring something irreplaceable into your home.

I am now open to commissioned work.

A commission is, to me, an act of mutual trust. You invite me into your world — your story, your spaces, the images and ideas and places that matter to you — and I bring to them the same depth of attention I have given to Varanasi. The result is something that exists nowhere else in the world: a painting made specifically for you, carrying both your vision and my hand.

If you have a place that lives in you the way Varanasi lives in me — a person, a memory, a landscape, a feeling — I would be honored to help you find its form on canvas.

Reach out. Let’s begin.

Thank you, Varanasi. 🙏