Watching the Dead Burn

I’m going to talk about death for a bit – I have no choice after witnessing the fires. If you’re reading this in the morning over your first cup of coffee let me apologize if this bums you out, or better yet just stop reading and visit this YouTube video of a tiny hamster eating tiny burritos. If it’s the end of a really bad day just go straight to the burrito-eating hamster and don’t continue on….don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Death confronts you in Varanasi in a way that’s all too real.

As I mentioned previously this is a sacred city to Hindus. Bathing in the Ganges is believed to wash away all of life’s sins. Mecca is to Muslims as Varanasi is to Hindus and the devout make it a point to visit once in a lifetime. For some of these people, it will be the last place they see. Reincarnation is a large part of the Hindu belief system – which one can clearly observe on a daily basis in the way they drive, ha ha.

Dying in Varanasi is believed to release a person’s soul from the endless cycle of death and rebirth and believers come here specifically to die. I’m hardly comfortable talking about or thinking about death, let alone could I conceive of actively considering where to take my final breaths.

Being alive is pretty great and any thoughts about mortality put me in a mood where I don’t want to be around anyone. Like a dog crawling under a porch to take its final rest alone, apparently, that’s the mood I get in – it’s not a good time to invite me to a child’s birthday party, let’s put it that way.

So it’s even a mystery to me that I made it a point in Varanasi to visit the burning Ghats, to see death up close and personal. Maybe it was morbid curiosity.

Ghats are concrete steps and walkways leading from the streets above down to the banks of the Ganges. Varanasi has over 84 Ghats. The Ghats are a part of everyday life in this city. They’re a place to socialize, to perform religious rituals, to bathe and wash clothes.

Two of the Ghats are used specifically for public cremation.

Yes, you read that right.

Ceremonies are performed, heads are shorn in rituals, and corpses are carried down to the river and washed before being placed upon a pyre of wood then lit on fire. Each body is allotted three hours to burn and fires continue day and night on the Ghats – several hundred bodies a day are reduced to ash as a greasy black and gray smoke wafts skyward.

I couldn’t visit this sacred city and avoid confrontation with the uncomfortable reality of inevitable nonexistence and so I set forth one night in the direction of the burning Ghats.

The description of what I saw will get graphic so those that are prone to easy imagery or that are a bit squeamish be fairly warned.

The sun would soon set over the Ganges as I began my long slow walk from Assi Ghat where I was staying towards Harishchandra Ghat – one of the Ghats where public cremations take place. I passed by people bathing, people washing clothes, people walking, talking and being very much alive.

I doubt many of us have smelled a corpse being burned. I don’t think any of us really want to. It’s hard to describe a smell that you’ve never encountered before and if I hadn’t known where I was walking to it’s likely I would have just screwed up my face in a strange look and thought “what the hell is that weird smell?“. Instead, like it was perfectly natural, as the air carried the scent towards my olfactory senses my brain calmly stated “huh, so that’s what a burning body smells like“.

Like it was perfectly normal thing to think.

The matter-of-fact manner in which I calmly absorbed this information even now makes me wonder if there’s some part of me that’s cold and unsympathetic. A part that can face those sorts of things and fail to be affected as long as they’re abstract and impersonal. I wonder if that’s a bad thing.

I put my camera away – only the worst kind of tourist would view something like this as appropriate to document as if you’d whip a photo out of a cremation amongst the sunset snapshots. Imagine if you were at a funeral and some foreigner came in waving a camera around – that’s not cool and some bad karma points for sure.

I walked over to a platform where a funeral pyre was raging in torrents of yellow and orange and gray. The wood smoldered and cracked slowly turning black as it did its work, and as it did so I discerned the vague shape of a body before I saw the legs sticking out of the fire……

The body had been previously wrapped in a white should. You could tell this from the small bit of cloth remaining around the one leg. A leg now turned to one side after the fire had burned through the ligaments and flesh which had previously attached it to the knee. The other leg was blackened like overcooked chicken at a barbecue and I could see the bone sticking out of the top.

I stared and couldn’t turn away. Those were legs. Someone’s legs. Someone who used to use them to walk to a friend’s or trudge a path to work. They were crackling in a fire.

Suddenly a chanting group of Indian men made their way down the steps to the river carrying the body of a deceased person. The fully shrouded body would be washed in the river as part of the cremation ritual. As the pallbearers approached the riverbank two of them slipped and the stretcher shifted to one side almost dumping the body on the garbage-strewn mud at the water’s edge.

Still chanting, the group placed the stretcher into the river and I saw the uncovered face of a man who looked barely older than me. His mustache was neatly trimmed and his mouth partially open. His friends and family moved the body into slightly deeper water and submerged the corpse seven times, pushing him under and pulling back up. It seems like this scene went on forever. They then poured water in his mouth and I looked away and back at the already burning corpse.

My brain must have sent a signal not to feel anything more – frankly, I’m glad it did because when I saw the torso split open like an overripe piece of fruit I’d probably have felt like I do now remembering and writing this. The heat from the fire had expanded the gas in the intestines pushing them out of the abdomen. They looked like a coil of pale overstuffed sausages piled in a heap.

It was then that I’d had enough.

**I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever fully process this experience. It’s unlikely I’ll ever see something like that again and to be honest I don’t think I’d like to. I’m feeling a strange mix of being grateful that I could witness something normally hidden from view yet still shocked at facing the finality of death in such a raw manner.

It’s hard.**

Bio

Traveler. DJ. Scooterist. Alleged “responsible adult”. Follow my journey as I backpack around the world writing, photographing and perhaps inspiring you to do the same. I hope you enjoy reading my blog and perhaps I’ll see you on the road one day! I’d love to hear from you so feel free to email, comment or Facebook message me.