Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and dropped handfuls of charcoal into the river. Then they dumped the rest out of the bags.
Tomorrow morning, I'm taking a couple to put a hundred and twenty fish into the river.”
“Living fish?” I asked.
“Living fish,” he said.
Kakoli shook her head. “Those fish will die.”
A printed picture of a blue-skinned deity came floating downstream. Before I could
make out if it was Shiva or Krishna, the oar struck it on the downstroke, folding the image
and plunging it into the black water.
A pair of men were bathing on the riverbank. A gull flew over our heads. Upriver we
saw a hawk, a tern. Over Ravinder's right shoulder, Nigambodh Ghat was coming into
view—the cremation ground. A trio of pyres burned on the shore, braiding the air into thick
tangles of heat.
The cremation ground is one of the few lively spots on the riverside, and a surprisingly
relaxing place to spend the morning. Kakoli and I had visited before going downriver to
find Ravinder. We had sat on a large concrete step and watched a group of young men build
one of the pyres now burning. (There was a gas-fired crematorium just down the bank, but
no person in his right mind wants to be cremated in a dank, indoor, gas crematorium. Not
if your family can afford the wood to burn you on the riverbank.)
On a low pallet, a man lay wrapped in white cloth, his head exposed. His face was
old. He was dead. The younger generation dribbled water on him from a plastic bottle
and sprinkled dirt over his body. Then they finished building the pyre, leaning planks and
branches against the man until they had formed a teepee of wood four or five feet tall. It
was ten in the morning.
“In Calcutta, people still go to bathe in the river,” Kakoli said. “Even wealthier people.
But in Delhi, people will not look at it. People will only come to the river to use it as a
cremation ground.”
A young man in black trousers and a red sweater walked around the pyre, holding a thin
strip of burning wood. It was the dead man's son, I assumed. He stopped at the head of
the pyre and lit it near the ground. A thin trail of smoke trickled out. That's where we all
go—not back to dust, but into the atmosphere, to join our emissions. The young man and
his five companions then retired to one of the concrete tiers facing the bank and began their
wait, chatting casually. It would take several hours for the pyre to burn.
Riding by the pyres in Ravinder's boat, I now noticed a pair of men standing knee-deep
in the water, mucking out scoops of mud. They were collecting ashes that had been cast into
the water from the riverbank. A cremated person may have been wearing rings, or been ad-
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