Death Becomes it in Varanssi

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  Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
Monday, November 10, 2008

There aren't many cities in the world where you can sit down to breakfast, stare out of your hotel window and watch dead bodies being burnt. Varanasi is one such place. Welcome to India's strangest and most compelling city, where it's happy hour at the crazy buffet twenty-four-seven!
I knew to expect the strange and unexpected here but this still didn't stop my omlette hovering mid way to my mouth for a very long time. As I watched the embalmed bodies being raised onto the funeral pyres on one of the burning ghats (terraced steps) beside the Ganges, I sent Ian a quick text telling him what I was witnessing. His astonished response was enough to reassure me that, yes this place is completely fucking mental!
But then why else would you choose to visit Varanasi? It's not just one of India's holiest cities but also one of the oldest in the world. It's also a fairly accurate microcosm of all that's fascinating, unique and utterly bewildering about India. As a city it has more implausible goings-on, loopy characters and downright oddness than anywhere else in the country - and that's saying something.
And then there's death. It's omnipresent. You can turn a corner and be greeted by a funeral procession carrying the remains of a loved one fully embalmed and ready for a fiery entrance to the afterlife. Or you can idle along the river bank and have your eyes pop out of your head as you spy a body part nudging out of the water. Or indeed watch the lower caste workmen split the wood for the funeral pyres, weigh the timber on huge metal scales - so the correct amount is used for each body - and then scatter the ashes into the river. Or just do like I did and walk out onto the balcony of my bedroom and watch a group of children playing on top of a coffin. Yes this is the place where normality (and many of the very devout elderly) come to die. It's said that if a Hindu dies in Varanasi then his or her passage to Nirvana is greatly sped up. Think of it as a very macabre Florida......
The best way to get a sense of the city is to take a boat trip along the Ganges either at dusk or dawn. I did both, and it was an incredible experience. As we headed off just before nightfall from Dasaswamedh Ghat, the biggest and most important of the ghats that line the river, it was already a riot of colour. Hundreds of pilgrims were by the shore for of the evening puja  (ceremony), bells ringing out into the evening air already thick with the scent of incense and the sound of chanting. As we made our way slowly down by the river bank, watching the various ceremonies and floating candles that flecked the snot-green water, a bright and fat full moon lit up the river. It was beyond perfect.
A guide on the boat explained some of the history of the city and the background some of the ceremonies. His English wasn't the best, but as far as I could make out, cremation is conducted to purify the remains of the deceased. However cremation is forbidden for some groups namely children, pregnant women, holy men, victims of cobra bite, lepers and albinos (seriously). They're simply wrapped in linen and tossed into the river. Hmmmm.....
There are three burning ghats in the city and they're on the go constantly. About 350 bodies are cremated every single day! Apart from the abovementioned groups - the other sector of society that's precluded from cremation is the poor. Around 350 kilos of wood are needed for the whole cremation and with every kilo costing around 3 Euro a pop, its enough to put rapid salvation out for only the truly well off. As a result it's not unusual to see people at many of the ghats begging for money so they can get a proper and expedient send off in the next world.
Each cremation lasts around three hours. The embalmed corpse is transported on a bamboo stretcher by members of the family to the Ganges and is then purified by  submerging it in the holy Ganga waters. Then it is placed on top of the wood pile, doused with incense and the eldest son, dressed in white and with his head shaved (again more purification), bathes in the river and starts the fire. After the body is fully cremated, the son takes some water from the river and throws it into the ashes. And that's it. Women, by the way aren't allowed to be present for the ceremony . Apparently this rule was brought in after a few grief stricken widows lost the run of themselves and decided to join their husbands on the other side by throwing themselves onto the fire.
Such peculiarities aside, the cremation ceremony is an astonishing sight to behold, though it was a little bit disconcerting to watch some tourists intrude on the  private grief of some familes and defy local custom by filming or photographing the cremation. Thoughtless in the extreme.
As you can imagine the river itself is not the cleanest. That's a polite way of saying it one of the most polluted, foul looking stretches of pea-soup viscosity on the planet. And yet......despite the presence of human ashes, the occasional body part and a considerable amount of chemical pollution each morning hundreds of pilgrims line the ghats to bathe in the holy waters. Some even drink the esteemed liquid!
Further along the shore local washerwomen are busy beating the stains from their laundry. Be warned, as I walked along one morning I saw bed linen from some of the local hotels getting a thorough scrubbing in the river and, unless there's been a sudden preference for Calvin Klein's amongst the city faithful, most of the backpackers' laundry appears gets done here as well. Well at least you're smalls will be dead spotless afterwards!
Speaking of death, Varanasi was also the only place in India where I felt my own mortality was being tested. On my last evening I took, what I thought would be a fairly harmless stroll downtown to locate an ATM (always a challenge in India). How wrong I was. After about five minutes of dodging cars, cows, tuk tuks and an never ending stream of traffic I was paralyzed with fear. It was just unrelenting. In all my time in India I'd never witnessed anything like it. I eventually found a kindly tuk tuk driver who negotiated this death-trap on my behalf......but I couldn't help but wonder if there wasn't some subtle collusion between all this business of death and life as it's lived here? I didn't wait to find out. Nepal and not nirvana was my next destination.

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