THE evening light is tinged with a benevolent cataract of smoke. It masks the sun and shrouds everything in a kind of soft focus. It’s as if the cosmos has half-closed its eyes against the agony that’s happening in this place. Like an impressionist painter who wants the beauty but not the reality. But Varanasi is all reality. From the ghats along the River Ganges spikes of colourful flame pierce the opaque air, reminding of what the curtain hides. Out here on the water, the flames look as innocuous as autumn leaves falling through mist. There is a soft, distant hum. Voices. A clipped mantra. Chanting, the tinkling of cymbals and sound of a bell. A coolness, like the onset of sleep, rises from the river as it laps the sides of the boat. Even this far from shore, the pastel pink-blue dusky air is acrid and hard-edged—a contradiction, like everything in India.
Varanasi is proudly, joyously, the city of death. Its antiquity stretches back 2,500 years. It is one of the oldest inhabited places on earth and has received the souls of millions and millions of pilgrims who have journeyed to die in its arms. The funeral pyres on Manikarnika Ghat blaze day-and-night. Pyres built for the wealthy burn aromatic sandalwood and camphor. Poorer folk must settle for wood of the cork tree or the humble versatile neem tree, whose wood India uses for every purpose from making cradles to cleaning teeth. But the very poor, those who can afford only enough cow dung to cremate half a body, must consign what’s left of a loved one directly to the river.
Barges wait, heavy-laden with timber. Huge stockpiles stand ready ashore. Great logs. Bundles of kindling. Sunrise to sunrise every day, the ghats—the ancient stone steps leading to the river—witness the cremation of two hundred or more corpses. Cows and stray dogs nose the remains. Ashes swirl in the updrafts. The feet of mourners crush underfoot chunks of seeming flame. But they are marigolds, bright little luminosities, flame twins, used to wreathe the deceased and attract the impetuous fire-god.
