Varanasi
I am standing on our little half-moon-shaped balcony at the Hotel Sonmony in Varanasi. The hotel is five stories tall, a building of ungraceful cylindrical architecture and muted pastel color schemes. The stariways are mildewy, the silhouettes of geckoes appear on grimy, half-tinted windows. Andrew and I are paying six dollars a night for a double room. Not four feet from the balcony where I stand is a large tower of utility power lines. Next to this grimy trap of wires is an abandoned construction site, covered in dust, overrun by mangy, gray-haired monkeys. (Later, we would watch a man nearly fall from the window of this building as he slapped his sandal at one of the offending monkeys). Next to the construction site is some sort of Hindu temple lined with orange and blue and green tiles and icons of Shiva and Pavrati. Beyond the temple and the half-finished building are a set of stairs – called a ghat – that lead down to the Ganges river which runs the Western length of the city. I look down and see five men carrying something on their shoulders through the narrow dirt street to the river. The bundle is not difficult to discern: it’s a human corpse. Two small lumps: feet, with toes pointed up; a gentler rise: the forehead, nose, mouth, chin. The body, resting on a stretcher devised from green bamboo, is wrapped in a reflective silver material. Partially layered on top of this is an orange shroud and on top of this are coils of bright yellow flowers that recall Hawaiian leis. There are four men carrying the body, while another follows them, throwing handfuls of rice on their heads and on the body itself. Nearby someone plays drums and chants and rings a bell. It strikes me that the languid chaos of the street does not pause for this procession. A man passes in front of the body carrying a bicycle with a bent frame; a boy pushes a wheelbarrow of vegetables alongside. No acknowledgement of the body. The men carrying the body sidestep an older man sleeping in the middle of street, tilting the stretcher to maintain balance. They thread their way between massive water buffalo who treat the streets of Varanasi as their own pasture. Trailing the men is a string of five or six goats, one with a broken leg that flaps beneath it rather gruesomely. It is difficult to read the expressions on the faces of the stretcher-bearers. Their faces seem placid, even ambivalent, which is strange, given what rests on their shoulders. For the lack of registered emotion, I catch myself thinking of bakers carrying a colorful wedding cake. The procession disappears from my view behind the dilapidated building.
The orange paint of the balcony where I stand has been dulled to a brownish gray. The day before I had been in Calcutta, where building façades are sepia-toned with dust and grunge of the traffic. The grime on this balcony, though, isn’t from cars and rickshaws. It’s ash from bodies that have been burned on the banks of the Ganges. The body that was just carried beneath my window will be brought down the Harischandra Ghat to the shore of the river and laid on a wooden pyre. The pyre will be lit, the body will burn in the open air and eventually the deceased’s ashes will be scattered into the sacred Ganges. According to Hindus, having your ashes scattered on the Ganges helps you escape the cycle of reincarnation. People come from all over India to die in Varanasi.
Andrew and I made our way down to the edge of the Ganges to watch the cremation. Piled ten feet high along the street leading to this ghat are heaps of wooden logs that will eventually be used to construct the pyres. We watch a pair of goats clamber up a woodpile. We are told later that 360 kilograms of wood are required to construct one pyre. The ceremony we see as we descend the ghat takes place twice a day – at sunrise and sunset. The amount of cremations, I suppose, depends on the amount of bodies at a given time; that evening, five bodies would be cremated. (At Marnikarnika, the larger of the two burning ghats, the rate may be twice that). We sit down on some benches facing the slow-moving, murky Ganges.
Men of a low caste – outcasts called doms or untouchables – carry wood down from the piles on the street. They build the pyre on the riverbank, five or six feet from the water. The cost of the funeral depends on the type of wood used, sandalwood being the most expensive. The body is unwrapped of its colorful dressings, leaving only a simple white covering. The face is left exposed and we see that this is an elderly woman. The body is laid on the pyre while ten or fifteen men (women, we are told, are not allowed to attend the cremations) mill around, talking quietly or sitting on the ground around the body. We begin talking with the Indian man sitting next to us on the bench and he quietly explains what is happening. One man – the eldest son of the deceased, we are told – strips down to his underwear and puts on a flowing two-piece white robe. His head has been shaved except for a small shock of hair in the back. This particular man has some sort of skin disease which leaves a marbled design on his scalp. He is handed a bundle of straw, which is then lit, and everyone watches as he circles the pyre five times while saying a prayer. Finally, he drops the straw on the wood and the pyre begins to burn.
Again, I am struck by the informality of the ceremony. The lack of ceremony, I guess. A creek of sewage running from beneath the ghat and into the river passes not five feet from the body. One cluster of mourners jumps to their feet to avoid a cow pissing a few feet away. Just upstream, people are doing their laundry, slapping wet shirts against wooden planks. When the bright silver and orange dressings are removed from the body and cast aside on the beach, street children run up to steal it and scamper away. Someone kicks at a goat who has wriggled through the crowd to nibble at the foot of the body. The tone of the ceremony is subdued, everything is very matter-of-fact. The man chat amongst themselves sociably as though they had met on the beach by chance. There are certainly no theatrics. After a moment, the man who had been explaining the ceremony gets up and thanks us. ‘I must go,’ he says. ‘This is the mother of my wife.’ And he walks down to join the people clustered around the burning body. When the wind shifts, we start coughing on the smoke. I think of where that smoke is coming from, recoil a little, then immediately feel prudish for doing so.
Over the next few days, we would see dozens of bodies carried past us on the street. These encounters bring on the strangest sort of double-takes. We pass a van parked in front of our hotel. Pressed against the inside window, contorted at an odd angle, is a gray human foot. One morning, we get up at dawn to see the main burning ghat at Marnikarnika (the one in front of our hotel, Harischandra, is the secondary burning ghat). Apart from being a clusterfuck of men hounding you with offers of boat rides, this is an eerie and surreal place. Wood is stacked high everywhere, all of it blackened with ash from the cremations. One of the wood-bearers points out a sort of hotel rising up behind the burning pit. This, he says, is where the dying come to spend their last days before being carried down and laid out on a pyre for cremation. This appropriately dilapidated façade is black with soot and ash. It seems too macabre to be real. The kind of thing that wouldn’t even seem plausible in a B horror movie. While crossing a pontoon bridge on our way to an old military fort down the river from the burning ghats, Andrew and I look down to see a human skull washed up on the edge of a sandbar.
The remarkable part of this is the role of the Ganges in the everyday life of Varanasi. A woman washes the family’s clothes in the river, just ten yards from where a little boy dumps a week’s worth of garbage. Families bathe here every morning. (There are specific ghats meant for bathing, but some are just a hundred meters from where bodies are incinerated). Men catch fish on the river – the menu at the hotel restaurant is points out that fish dishes are ‘not Ganga fish.’ Kids swim and splash each other and climb on top of the water buffalo. At dawn we see bearded Gurus meditating on the riverbank with sun rising over eastern shore. Later, we pass men sitting on the banks, brushing their teeth with Ganges water.
This is all a little unsettling at first, but I think there’s a beautiful order to the river and to the cremation ceremonies and to the Hindu relationship with death. According to Hinduism a body is just a vessel: in death, the soul of the deceased leaves the body and continues in a cycle until it is reincarnated in another body. When a body is cremated on the Ganges, its ashes are cast off into the river which is the lifeforce of the community; the dead, in a way, recirculate and are reincarnated when a mother bathes her child in the river, or when a man brings home a Ganga fish for his family, or even in a load of laundry. It’s appropriate, too, that a corpse carried through the streets passes unnoticed by the boy pushing a wagon of vegetables. Death isn’t any dramatic event, just something that is thrown in with the rest of life.
Photos of Varanasi here.
