Window Seat

We arrived in Varanasi close to midnight, and its riverside heart was somewhat daunting: more knots of more shifty-looking men, huddles of slumbering cows, shadowy slinking dogs, big bold rats, garbage-rich alleyways, and the shit of multiple beings. Not a Starbucks in sight. My driver eventually found my hotel, and we parted with mutual relief. Hotel Alka was time-worn and timeless all at once, the real deal, a comfortable hotel with that “character” for which travelers always search. I found it through the train travel site, The Man in Seat 61. The whole day became perfect. Twenty-four hours a day, I had one whole wall open to the ebb and flow of life on the Ganges River of India. That Ganges, India’s great river of purification and rejuvenation and cremation. It was quiet, just the Ganges rowers in their shabby-bright little conveyances. Everything was old along this waterfront. The hotels, restaurants, boats, crematorium, me. I was extraordinarily comfortable and at peace. For me, it was all about the river. That slow-flowing muddy brown water carrying the impurities of our bodies, cleansed in life and death by ritual bathing in the Ganges, on down to the Bay of Bengal. Around the crematorium the water appeared literally to be thick with ashes, and one looked for other death debris. I always thought this must be a grisly place but it turned out not to be. I was deeply moved by everything about this cremation process. On a slope up from the river lies the Manikarnika Ghat, that famous Indian crematorium I’d always heard about, but not quite believed was real. I was rowed there two evenings, and one morning I went for an informal but fairly in-depth visit. Six or eight concrete platforms with steel side bars rise from the river on a fairly sharp incline, stopping at the base of what once were imposing buildings. The platforms are lined up at different levels on the hillside. At the top, large chunks of wood are stacked into piles on the bare-packed earth, with the usual cows and dogs lazing about. Barges are constantly unloading the expensive sandalwood, naturally perfumed to overpower odors from the decomposing bodies as they burn. A hearse-boat brings bodies from all over India and pulls up at the waters’ edge. During my daytime visit, one body arrived, wrapped in simple cotton and carried on a stretcher of bamboo. A worker explained that the body would have first rested in the family home for two days of visitations, before being brought to the ghat. I watched as the recently deceased person was unloaded and then immersed in the river a few times for purification. The body was then laid out, still in the dripping sheets, to dry for an hour on the steps leading up the hill. Alongside were two other recently departed souls. After this initial drying period, the bodies were wrapped in prettier cloths, with color and glitter and ribbon. It was explained that this fabric was just for show; before the actual cremation, the shiny stuff would be removed, because much of it was plastic. Then each body would proceed into the fire in only a simple wrap, with the wood placed mostly on top of the corpse, as it lay on its concrete bed. A body had recently finished burning near where I was sitting, with only the skull left in the ashes. The rib cages of men and the pelvic bone structures of women are the last to fully burn, so in some cases they were pulled from the ashes and thrown into the river. Six categories of living creatures cannot be cremated. Children are inherently pure, so they have no need for purification rites; this extends to pregnant women as well as holy men. Snake-bit humans, lepers, and people with smallpox are not cremated either. The crematorium I visited had been owned and operated by the same family for generations. They were of the Dalit caste (formerly known as the Untouchables), the only caste allowed to oversee the handling of bodies and burial of people. In the daytime the place felt dreamlike—thick clouds of smoke, stacks of buff-colored wood, and a small number of workers moving busily about between the resident animals and still bodies, sweeping up everything into the river. The family member who lights the fire for their loved one is shaved completely, and then bathes in the Ganges to purify himself for his task. Only the men of the family can directly participate because, I was told, women get too emotional and have been known to throw themselves into the fires of their husbands or children. By night, looking on from a boat, the tableau becomes truly surreal, as the fires burn briskly, crackling, snapping, smoking. On the bank they unload the tightly shrouded bodies to be dipped in the river, then laid out for drying. Then it is onto the pyre. The outlines of the family members gathered on the different levels are darkly visible. Flames flicker and shadows shift I have a great desire to feel comfortable with death. I am in that age category called old-old, so now would be the time to separate fear of the unknown from fear of the process, and try to come to terms with each. Easier said than done. That visit to the Ganges and the Manikarnika Ghat was part of trying to get under that tough skin of the unknown, by knowing more about how cultures approach death. In the West, we’ve removed ourselves from it as far as we can. We kill people with assault rifles and drones, then stack up flowers and utter pieties at the funerals. We kill animals out of eye and ear range, then pretend that tasty meat dish arrived at our table with no suffering or death involved. Here in the flames of the Manikarnika Ghat, death was up close and personal, disturbing but touchable, in a way I still ponder.