Today I saw death burning on wooden slats. Standing on the sloped mud of the ghat, overseeing both the land and the holy river crawling on. Tired and old, it is, I suppose, how it always was. In its haze, some ghostly figures ride trailing on boats through the fog. The thin veil between life and death, where the sunlight never quite directly touches you in these winter months, but dimly lights the clouds. However empty it feels, watching the journeys these bodies make into and across the water, there always seems to be a crowd.
Some burn wood for the flame. A man pokes a stick between the pyre-- I hesitate to see what, exactly, it is, that is burning. The glimpse of a skeletal knuckle or foot could just as much be a twig as it could a part of a body. It is this blurry essence of everything that erases and recreates India. Where I see the foot of a dead body hanging out the wooden pyre, or maybe the wood with which it burns. Where some sell chai and garlands of orange marigolds. Where the goats then linger on the discarded flowers left behind and start chewing on the chains. In Manikarnika ghat, death decorates itself into the fabric of life.
The boat carrying figures I thought to be ethereal, on the verge of a ghostly fabric in the fog, return back to the bank. A teenage boy jumps off, and uses his coarse hands to tie splintering helm up. We make eye contact, and he beckons to the discoloured red chairs which balance precariously on the boat’s carpet. It is has probably been around longer than I have. Probably carried many. Many people. Many ashes. Many tourists with their loud accents and large cameras. My gentle step onto the boat leaves ripples of water into the distance. The boy starts talking to me in Hindi, and I gather snatches of it in my notebook. It is these that I relate to you:
Maya was both an illusion and from the grace of God. And so, all these patterns and colours and smalls are to play indistinguishable from the divine. Vedic script of sacrifice to kill the animal instinct. To give up, and let go. Not to kill. On the boat he told us that tears during the burning of the body provoke the soul to be attached, once more, to the material world. Though the chains of tears are restrained, the marigolds are stringed together like pearls over the body. It is carried to the Ganga. Dipped. Undressed. Burnt. And then the goats come to feed on the flowers. The ashes fall back the willing flows of the river. The dias lit drop the the river which will, at some point, become the sea. And they could almost be leaves falling from the tree. Almost be feathers dropping from a bird. At Sarnath, the wheel first turned. These banks of the river is where we all return.
I think of the fisherman from the canal back home as the still boat rocks into the fog. Though there is such distance, we are on the same side of the river, and rock with tired oars. We cross to Harishcandra ghat, the second official location for cremations. The workers, the Doms, prepare the dead with their dark hands. Pick the unburnt wooden pieces from the pyre to use for later warmth. And so the cycle shifts itself. Life streams, again, in all directions. A pulsing promise of constant change. Water has always been holy. I have always drank from where my chaos has come from. And now I know holy it is in harmony. Converging on the banks of this river.
It is said that the world started with a sacred sound. So, too, did the word. Until, soon, it was as multiple and infinite as it was before it began. Emerging in echoes. Resounding in rhythms. Engulfing all into the space of sound. On the second day at Varanasi, we follow this sound to the conch shell. Five priests are elevated on red carpets with saffron robes and adorning copper deities on a platform. But the moon insists something else that night. It peels away from the unrhythmic clashing of shouted shlokas. I ask the moon, from where did you achieve faith? I wait. Under its constant eye, a blink that sinks so far into the dark night. The smoke from the incense at aarti partake in the act of holiness. Feigning clouds to heave their way upwards towards the heavens. An attempt to make themselves light again, and escape all this rush and dust. There will be no response, to how the moon retains its faith. Both holy and changeable, both unreachable and infinite. I sit within the crowd, looking upwards and remain in wait for my own silver. An agori emerges from the shallows of the water, as if he has been here forever. Lingering at the side. The goats are huddled in the corner, disappearing petals into the backs of their mouth. The chai man is sat down, he is praying, or chanting, or shouting over the loud sounds of worships to sell his songs of cinnamon tea. And by the time the play is over, and the smiles of the priests start to slip, another performance begins. It is within all this holiness that my cramps begin, and the hotel becomes just as much of a refuge as the river.
In the entrance of the hotel, a group of musicians sit, poised to perform. Their tabla, voice, bansuri and harmonium lift feed towards something inside me, I sit by the fire, covering my pajamas in a shawl. Whilst I am unable to distinguish the Urdu they are sing in, I feel a strong belonging to each pull of a string, to each changing pitch of a key. I write through their rhythm. I write, I think, to you:
Invisible and watched by all,
I ask for Your name,
and perhaps it comes to being
through song. Perhaps this nameless song
cannot tell me to know, truly,
the name of God, nor from which direction it comes.
As a river it flows
sweet in honey and rich with perfume.
The flame he holds gives light
to others, and the Ganga holds holy