Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I saw. His eyes felt like twigs stabbing at my nervous system. I
had to agree with him. All the fires were sacred. The business
was
a
license to print money.
Another gruesome perk, I learned, was gold. The gold from dental
fillings that are raked out when a pyre has burned to cool ash, but
before the cool ash is surrendered to Mother Ganges. Amar
speculated that, retrieval being an imprecise business, there were
probably several tons of gold fillings deep below the riverbed. The
doms couldn't survey a corpse's mouth before burning it, since the
bodies arrive shrouded.
Suddenly, appalling screams came from below. Two old women
were thrashing with their fists at an aghori sadhu, a massive figure, at
least six foot six, entirely naked but for the ash that gave his body an
eerie incandescence in the firelight. He held a giant metal trident in
one hand, and had the other raised high above his head, its fingers
forming an odd forked mudra. His hair was coiled up on the crown
of his head in a tangled turret that made him seem even taller; and
on his forehead, painted in blood-red, was the crescent moon
clutching a star between its pincers: a Saivite symbol that I have very
rarely seen, identical to the emblem of Islam.
Unperturbed, the dom raja walked down with a stately gait to this
disturbing scene. The women were hysterical, cursing the sadhu,
smashing at his chest with their little fists. He stood immobile, a
man preoccupied with weightier matters. He was immense by any
standards, let alone for an ascetic. His eyes looked somewhere else,
seeing into another world perhaps. A yard or so from flames that
scorched bystanders ten feet away, he seemed to feel nothing,
although his hair
was
steaming. And behind the pyre's glaring
eruptions and its spitting tongues, I noticed, he also had some friends.
Ten or so more aghoris steadily advanced as if materialising from
the smoke. None of them was as menacing as this titan, though.
'What's the fuss about?' I asked the king of death.
'Little problem.'
He spoke sharply to the women in what sounded like Bengali.
They merely screamed on incoherently, and kept whacking and
pushing at the giant sadhu, who might as well have been made of
granite.
