Today, I saw death gently burning on wooden slats. Life giving way like an old star to the sky. I look towards the slumped mud of the river bank, or ghat. An open crematorium on the riverfront filled with a slow, continual energy. Some sell chai and garlands of orange marigolds. Some pick their way through plastic piles of rubbish in flimsy sandals. A little behind it all, goats linger to tread on discarded flowers and chew on the chains of their stalks. In Manikarnika ghat, death decorates itself into the fabric of life. Weaving myself within the ebb and flow of Varanasi, I make my way onto the wooden slats of a boat.
Perched behind circles of smoke, curling to the heavens, lies the holy river Ganges. She crawls on, tired and old, seeming to trawl in the same tone she has done for centuries. In the haze of pollution, boats further away carry figures who I envision apparating and disappearing between threads a ghostly fabric. Almost indistinguishable in their flaking paints of blue and green, the boats drift within the thin veil between life and death. In these winter months, these vehicles, like slow moving creatures, bump against each other softly. Never directly touched by the sunlight, they are lit instead by the dim clouds ahead, illuminating the silhouettes of boatmen and their passengers. Including me. Inside them, the boatmen mix ancient stories with the river’s steady stream.
A teenage boy leaves the boat rocking as he jumps off, and uses his coarse hands to tie the splintering helm up. We make eye contact, and he beckons to the discoloured red chairs which balance precariously on the boat’s carpet. I can only imagine how many people it has carried. How many ashes. How many millions of tourists with their loud accents and large cameras. My step onto the boat feels heavier than it should, leaving ripples of water far beyond the fog. The boatman starts talking to me in Hindi, which I gather in snatches like a fisher would with their net. They fall like droplets of water.
*“*Shedding tears whilst the body is burnt provokes the soul to be attached, once more, to the material world,” he told us. *“*One must let the soul be carried, free from all attachments, to the Ganga’’. Though the chains of tears from families of the deceased are restricted, marigolds are stringed together like a necklace of pearls over the body. “Only then, without any wish to return back to one’s previous body, can the ashes fall into the willing flow of the Ganga.’’ Some lighted candles, dias, drift further into the water. Leaves falling from a tree to return to earth. Feathers shedding from a bird. These banks of the river, where lights wash up on the shores, are where we all return. To bodies of water as fluid and vast as my own. Water has always been holy. I have always drank from where my chaos has come from. I think of the canals tied to their banks back home as this boat rocks its way with weary oars across the river. We cross back to Manikarnika ghat where workers prepare the dead to rest with their softened hands. They pick the unburnt wooden pieces from the pyre to use for later warmth. And so the cycle shifts itself. A pulsing promise of constant change. The setting sun turns into a streaked line, the colour of a streaked marigold as I return back to the bank…
