The Indian Equator Read online

  Benares is the most auspicious place for Hindus to die and the holy Ganges the most auspicious river on which their ashes can be laid. After squeezing past the overcrowding in the alleys and flinching at the decibels on the roads the newcomer to Benares next notices the markedly aged population. One could say that death keeps the city alive: not only do the nearly-dead come here in anticipation of their demise but the recently widowed or widowered stay behind and await their turn. A large part of the mounds of litter in the streets and on the river is the detritus of death. With its “God’s waiting room” clientele it could easily be twinned with Venice, Florida or Eastbourne, Sussex but here the attitude to death is so completely different that comparisons soon wither in the smoke haze. Death here is not the end of the life but an end of a life - and ending this life here is a sensible precaution towards a better next life.

  For better or worse, the cremation ghats hold an irresistible attraction for tourists. We foreigners can go for as long as our lives have been so far and never see a dead body and yet here within the space of an hour see a dozen - and in various stages of vaporization. They die here according to their means. I don’t mean to be flippant about death and dying, but here in Benares one can break down the Ganges-bound into four classes - almost into four castes - which Shailesh explains as we take the gruesome, unstoppable-watchable tour down-ghat.

  The A-listers are cremated at Manikarnika Ghat. Piles of size-sorted logs sit on the ghat steps waiting their turn on the pyre. Reinforcements are piled high in barges tied up under the ghats. The pyres are laid out, half a dozen at a time, on two layers of stone ledges leading down to the water. Smoke drifts and billows in the sunlight, swirling around the temple spires. Hot cinders fly forth like confused fireflies. Teams of the low-caste doms bring a steady roster of bodies down to the shore on bamboos litters. The bodies are wrapped in brightly colored paper and ribbons, not unlike Christmas presents. Next the body, still on its litter, is shown the water’s edge, not for total immersion but for the relatives to splash the Ganges water onto the corpse. The body is then taken onto the pyre, the latter arranged in cross-stitch pattern about a dozen logs deep. The eldest son then undoes the many layers of shrouding to reach the bare face and then pours some urnfuls of Ganges water onto it. The male members of the family then walk seven times[36] around the pyre, sprinkle various seeds and ointments on it and then the eldest son lights the metaphorical blue touch paper and they all retire.

  Photographing all this is a sensitive subject. On the one hand the family mourners all whisk out their mobile phones to photograph the open, watered face one last time immediately prior to - and then during - the lighting ceremony; on the other hand any tourist seen photographing the scene is swiftly told not to do so. It happens to me thus:

  “No photo, no photo.”

  “Oh, OK. But, why not? They photo...”

  “Photo negative dead man’s soul no good.”

  “Ah, but there is no negative, it’s digital.”

  “No photo, no photo.”

  I can see the point - it is a bit like gawping - but it’s hard not to photograph what, for us, is such an extraordinary yet matter-of-fact scene. Apart from the burning bodies and the attendant relatives and the busy, rag-wearing, dark doms there is the usual Indian farmyard pageant standing by: cows wander around the pyres grazing on discarded garlands, goats chomp on the trash, dogs sleep just feet away from the burning bodies, monkeys scratch and fidget, water buffalo wallow just upstream, crows fly and croak in and out, kite-hawks hover in and out of the spiraling smoke, dom children wander around barefoot in the smoldering ash and cowpats, puppies play with each other - all this as though death was the most natural thing in the world - which of course it is.

  The same squeamishness about photography applies to looking and staring. I mean, how close is it polite to stand near a body-draped pyre, near somebody’s late mother, somebody’s late son? The Japanese tourists, who always wear face-masks in India anyway, have no compunction about walking right up to a pyre, practically to within prodding distance. The photography issue goes away when one is photographing from a boat, by the way, as it seems quite in order to stand up on board and snap away from the river. Shailesh says that is because the river is holy and so everything that happens on it is instantly forgiven. And, the heathen reflects, you get much better shots.

  There is no mourning at the cremation as that has already taken place immediately after death and it is considered bad luck, reincarnation-wise, to mourn overtly at the time of cremation. After the fire is lit the family disperses and only the doms with their long and blackened bamboo poles remain to hasten the burning of the remains, prodding various limbs back into the fire and poking the fire to keep it going. Still, it takes a surprisingly long time - about two hours - until the ashes of flesh and wood are ready to be scooped up and emptied (nothing as ceremonial as scattered) into the river or, as Shailesh explains, back to the source, back to from whence we all came.

  This A-list ghat is a big budget operation; it costs ten thousand rupees, about US$200, to be cremated here. It is run with seamless efficiency; in fact the unkind might suggest it is one of the very few efficient Indian undertakings. And like the undertakers back home the doms know how to charge. They say it needs nearly eight hundredweight of wood to be burned, whereas, as we shall see in the B-list ghat, it needs nothing like that. Then they have invented a story that sandalwood is the most auspicious wood and so of course that is extra. And then there’s the fire, as Twain noted: “The fire used is sacred, of course - for there is money in it. Ordinary fire is forbidden; there is no money in it. I was told that this sacred fire is all furnished by one person, and that he has a monopoly of it and charges a good price for it. Sometimes a rich mourner pays a thousand rupees for it. To get to paradise from India is an expensive thing. Every detail connected with the matter costs something, and helps to fatten a priest. I suppose it is quite safe to conclude that that fire-bug is in holy orders.”

  The whole scene we see now is exactly as he would have seen it then. Actually I am surprised that he found the whole affair as distasteful as he did since, as we have seen, at the time he was a great champion of cremation.

  It is a dismal business. The stokers did not sit down in idleness, but moved briskly about, punching up the fires with long poles, and now and then adding fuel. Sometimes they hoisted the half of a skeleton into the air, then slammed it down and beat it with the pole, breaking it up so that it would burn better. They hoisted skulls up in the same way and banged and battered them.

  The sight was hard to bear; it would have been harder if the mourners had stayed to witness it. I had but a moderate desire to see a cremation, so it was soon satisfied. For sanitary reasons it would be well if cremation were universal; but this form is revolting, and not to be recommended. In all I saw nine corpses burned. I should not wish to see any more of it, unless I might select the parties.

  Sita is as blasé as only the young can be but neither Gillian nor I find it nearly so gruesome as did our earlier visitor, and given an understanding of Hinduism and Shailesh’s running commentary it seems like a good inter-life career move for a rich and righteous Indian to take, given all the other options. I must admit my main concern is ecological as the tons of trees - and the wonton waste of wood built into the charging system - that must have to be chopped down to keep the pyres burning and the subsequent smoke arising is plainly too wasteful for a withered world. It sets one to thinking that there must be some kind of microwave version of cremation that could do the job just as well - and there is, just down river to where we heading.

  So that’s the A-listers; the B-listers are cremated at Harishchandra Ghat near to where we started this rather ghoulish boat ride. As one is hand-propelled up river and up-ghat one is conscious for the first time that the smoke that one has been coming across for the last few days contains remnants of old flesh and bones to
o.

  Drifting off Harishchandra Ghat it is immediately apparent that this is a far more low-key affair. There are no stone ledges, just banks of mud. Like Manikarnika, they cremate half a dozen at a time but the doms are also B-list, shuffling around aimlessly. The ceremonies at the water’s edge and on the pyres are haphazard - as are the corpses, some once loved in poverty and others as unloved in life as they now are in death. The farmyard contingent is lackluster too; there just aren’t the lavish pickings to be found here and so only the B-list cows and B-list goats clear the detritus and without much enthusiasm; the others don’t even bother to show. Shailesh reckons this is a thousand-rupee cremation and agrees with my assessment that there is room in the market, or along the ghats, for a middle way, for an A- or B+ cremation.

  But if the gap between death’s smart ghat and death’s scruffy ghat seems too large we now see the same between the B- and the C-listers’ options. It’s all close by. Right behind the smoldering Harishchandra Ghat is a large, modern, shoddy circular construction on concrete stilts. It’s not designed to fit into the ancient surroundings and seems uncaring and bare-bricked in its duty as a municipal human incinerator, for that is what it is. A large sign on the back announces that this is the 200-rupee option. Shailesh says it is known locally as the Electric Ghat. It only runs once a day at dusk. There is a long ramp up to an open door. Corpses are taken up on bamboo litters and dumped in a bowl. You can tell it’s low-budget because here the bamboo is reused and doesn’t form part of the pyre. Come the time a switch is thrown, immense heat is generated, the extractor fans whirl and while the bodies vaporize dark grey smoke puffs out of the long galvanized chimney. The following morning at dusk when the remnants have cooled down in the night, doms empty the bowl from below and deposit the collective ashes in the holy river. Again, one can’t help feeling the gap in indignity is too large and that there should be B- and C+ options to more accurately reflect the cremation grading of the dead with the caste grading of the living.

  Lastly come the D-listers who aren’t cremated at all but soaked and drowned into the next life. It all happens at Harishchandra Ghat, and Twain saw then what we see now: “They do not burn fakirs - those revered mendicants. They are so holy that they can get to their place without that sacrament, provided they be consigned to the consecrating river. We saw one carried to mid-stream and thrown overboard. He was sandwiched between two great slabs of stone.” Exactly that, except it’s not just fakirs these days but any destitute person, the unknown and the homeless. Here the doms wrap the corpse in left-over shrouds and tie a loop-knot around the neck. One then rows a boat out to mid-stream while another sits on the stern with his hand through the loop-knot, towing the still-floating corpse through the water like a reluctant water-skier. A slab of stone, tied onto the loop knot, sits on the stern and when the time is nigh the stern rider chucks the slab overboard and the corpse sinks, leaving behind only the a few lonely bubbles in exchange for a lonely life.

  ***

  All this death is giving us a thirst and after we take our place among the flotilla watching the son-et-lumière, Golap, our highly skilled hand-propellist, leaps off the bow of our commodious ark and brings back some beer. Shailesh, being a good Pandit, declines - and he has seen it all before. Sita prefers Bollywood and heads off to find a cinema.

  We say good-bye; it has been quite a day. We both doze off before the show ends but from what little I see I’m sure it is well done. The last memory is of Twain’s quote in The Calcutta Patriot two weeks later: “I think Benares is one of the most wonderful places I have ever seen. It struck me that a Westerner feels in Benares very much as an Oriental must feel when he is planted down in the middle of London. Everything is so strange, so utterly unlike the whole of one’s previous experience.”

  Hinduism

  It is a truism that foreigners either love India or loathe it. This is not a country from which one returns and tells friends: “Oh, I suppose it was alright.” Whether you love it or loathe it depends on how you react to chaos - and farmyards. Mark Twain and I clearly love it, and yet I can quite see why an equal number of people head screaming for the nearest airport, or in his case seaport; what to one person is happy, crazy, freewheeling, maximized, anarchic chaos is to another a gigantic urban-farmyard-cum-uncleaned-lavatory-cum-garbage dump where the animals have taken over and the chain doesn’t pull. India is not for the faint of heart nor mild of spirit nor weak of mind nor dull of sense nor correct of politic; it is a concurrent explosion of energy, contradictions, spontaneity, degradation, opportunity, hopelessness and vitality, a country without padding where a few hundred million have grabbed the twenty-first century by the whiskers and many more hundred million still tuck the nineteenth century into bed at night.

  On one point though the love-it and loathe-it brigades agree - or at least they ask the same question. How can India, as a society, put up with itself? Anywhere else 1.2 plus billion people living cheek-by-jowl would be thinking of new ways to lay waste to each other and yet they all seem to rub along quite happily together. Why, when four of the ten richest people in the world are Indian, when the intermediary nouveaux riches are uniformly vulgarian and flauntatious and think the Indian tradition of philanthropy is a fancy word for extra-curricular leg-over, when the mass of the hoi polloi are destined to live in acute poverty, and many in down-dirty squalor, why with all this blatant injustice isn’t there a revolution? How come any of us can walk home at night, stepping over bodies sleeping on the sidewalks, knowing that even that thing around our wrist is worth enough to keep any of them going for six months, and do so without any fear of a dispossessed vagrant taking a pop at us? Why, given the sophistication and urbanity of the elite, are all the politicians in the world’s biggest democracy tribal embezzlers at best and outright gangsters at worst. How on earth do they put up with it all - and with each other?

  The answer is that mainstay of Indian life, Hinduism. I carefully avoided putting the word “religion” in front of Hinduism as I sensed several thousand pedants reaching for their quills - and strictly speaking the pedants are right: Hinduism is not a religion in the sense that it has an all-powerful, all-knowing superhuman figure its followers must worship and obey. The problem is that there is no single word in English to describe what the Oxford dictionary has as a “diverse family of devotional and ascetic cults and philosophical schools, all sharing a belief in reincarnation and involving the worship of one or more of a large pantheon of gods and goddesses”. Fair enough, although “large” is a bit of an understatement but we’ll come to that later. In fact we are swimming in gloomy waters trying to define Hinduism in words at all as the whole point of the practice of treating with the pantheon is to take us beyond the limitation of words, beyond the subsequent differentiating formulation of subject/verb/object which affects our whole way of thinking, beyond our mental concepts restricted by time and space and into a transcendent sphere where we realize the godhead within us - and equally within all of us - and within everything we perceive.

  And this surely is the answer to the foreigners’ question. These 1.2 billion souls living on top of each other are not 1.2 billion egos but 1.2 billion aspects of the same Consciousness. To harm one aspect-holder is to harm all aspect-holders, including oneself as a fellow aspect-holder.

  For us foreigners the best-known part of Hinduism is karma which we have allied, philosophically, to the Golden Rule. In Hinduism karma goes further than that as it is an integral part of re-incarnation and to live by the laws of karma becomes simple common sense; man is not punished for his sins but by his sins. To sin is simply counterproductive, the spiritual equivalent of banging your head against a brick wall.

  ***

  Like most visitors to India Mark Twain thought he should learn about Hinduism and like most visitors he made the mistake of trying to learn it as a series of facts - as we would learn the names and dates of the presidents or state capitals. I made th
e same mistake: I found something like “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hinduism” and got as far as page 5 before reaching for the drinks cabinet. We came to the same conclusion:

  I should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of Hindoo theology, but the difficulties were too great, the matter was too intricate. Even the mere A, B, C of it is baffling.

  There is a trinity - Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu - independent powers, apparently, though one cannot feel quite sure of that, because in one of the temples there is an image where an attempt has been made to concentrate the three in one person. The three have other names and plenty of them, and this makes confusion in one’s mind. The three have wives and the wives have several names, and this increases the confusion. There are children, the children have many names, and thus the confusion goes on and on. It is not worth while to try to get any grip upon the cloud of minor gods, there are too many of them.”

  That is absolutely right; the Western, conditioned adult mind is soon way out of its depth. Apart from the 330 million gods and goddesses there are different god-teams and then different god-days, -weeks and -months. The next day Twain noted with some frustration that “The great god Vishnu has 108 names - 108 special ones - 108 peculiarly holy names and just for Sunday use only.” Someone forgot to tell him that Vishnu has at least 892 other names as do all the other major gods and goddesses, and their respective consorts and incarnations-as-children have thousands of names as well. Multilimbing as well as multinaming is the norm.

  Then there are the chariots. The gods and goddesses each need a vehicle to transport them around the imagination. This is seldom what one would expect, so that Ganesha, part-man part-elephant, has for his transport not as one would expect a mammoth or juggernaut (another offshoot of Indian mythology) but a... mouse. One’s instinct is to look for parallels in our own classical mythology where gods are also omnipotent and immortal, but Hindu mythology is so convoluted by the fantastical that it makes the goings on of the Greek gods and demigods seem as simplistic as Robin Hood. It is truly - and truly meant to be - beyond the limitations of the day-to-day mind.