Burning Gats

It is always the first one that we pay the most attention to, remember and contemplate. Your first job, first kiss, first foreign country, first burning body.

Yup.

I could say Darth Vader, at the end of the Return of the Jedi, was really my first, but even on big screen and Dolby stereo, you miss the smells and actual essence, even horror of the whole event. So, I will have to pass on that being my first and pass on this experience instead. It was still the warmer part of the afternoon, when the gats of Varanasi are quiet and the vendors and gurus have gone off to find shade or an afternoon nap. Boys wash the cows and buffalo in the Ganges at this time, and a few unfortunate workers are still out in the blazing sun finishing up the morning laundry, beating it against the stone slabs placed on the river bed.

This quiet is such a contrast from morning and evenings, where the gats come alive like any beach boardwalk might – the smells of the food and cries of the vendors, men touting boat rides, children begging for a few rupees to buy chapait, tourists with their cameras ever poised for a picture of a guru dressed only in a half orange sarong and white ash. People bathe and pray on the river’s edge. Kids and teens play cricket on any flat area large enough and stray balls peg onlookers in the back. Women sell post cards half eaten by their drooling toddlers who amuse themselves among the crowds unattended but watched by all. Dogs and cows scour the garbage looking for edibles.

But in two gats, on either end of the gats on the Ganges, a different ceremony is continuing as it has many hundreds of years – the cremation of those souls, who with good karma will now be free of this endless cycle of reincarnation. The men, and only men, carry the body, wrapped in white muslin and draped in orange silk and flowers down to the river and bathe it one last time. Some cheer, some are silent. The silk and flowers are removed, and the body is placed on the pyre of wood, then place more on top with incense and herbs and sandalwood. Eldest son, with newly shaved head lights straw from Shiva’s eternal flame and lights his father or mother or brother or sister alight.

It’s the feet that get me. They seem to always stand out from beyond the wood, so identifiable. My first were colored pink, left from Holi, and looked like little girls ballet slippers and white stockings with the flames slowly edging their way closer and closer. White turned to black, then the pink fell away into the smoke. It clears and what could be wood, or bone, protrudes out until it too falls into the ash pile below. You can make out the silhouette of a head, previously bashed in and broken, to let the soul escape. Whose job is that?

Then there are the Untouchables, the lowest caste whose life this is to pile wood and free ash into the river. The untouchables, who not long ago had to sweep the ground after them so even their footprints wouldn’t be touched by those above them. Still they are outcasts, out castes, working through the day and the night, burning 300 bodies a day.

It seems gruesome at first. Then turns to fascination, then even that disappears into some type of peace. Yes, these bodies aren’t needed anymore. These people have spent their whole lives watching this, knowing this ending, and many, from all over the country, even the world, come here to die in the dream of ending this cycle and finally setting their soul free on two gats on the Ganges in this most sacred spot of Varanasi.