He woke again as we began to slow down for the approach to Varanasi Junction. He climbed down from his bunk, still without a glance in my direction, and pulled open the curtain of the berth where his wife and child were breakfasting on snacks out of a plastic bag. He began to play a game with the boy, chanting an endlessly repeated phrase that seemed to involve the threat of tickling. After a few minutes, the child grew bored and squirmed away. The man grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around, and slapped him hard across the face, so hard that he might as well have used a cricket bat. The boy howled, and his mother stared resolutely out of the window into the brown haze.
JEWEL OF THE EAR
Gorakhpur was the armpit of the universe; India, according to scripture, was the navel of the universe, and Kashi, or Banaras, or Benares, or Varanasi, was the navel of India.
As usual in the canon of Hindu mythology, it was impossible to pin down one single version of how this came to be. By the time I got ready for my third trip to Varanasi, I’d assembled a shelfful of scholarship—hefty volumes by Western academics, popular digests of Hindu mythology I’d picked up at Wheeler railway bookstalls—and while they brought me some enlightenment, at least in an intellectual sense, they also brought an equal amount of confusion.
For early Christian mapmakers, wrote Diana Eck, a distinguished professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard, Jerusalem was the physical center of the known world, the continents fanning out around it like lotus petals. For Muslims, Mecca sits directly beneath the throne of Allah. For Hindus, Kashi, the City of Shiva, the City of Light, is where the universe was created in the first place.
In the telling of Jonathan Parry, a British scholar at the London School of Economics, Kashi is not attached to the earth. It floats suspended in the sky. It stands outside of space and time. It is where time began and where time stands still. That being so, Varanasi is immune from the ravages of time. It cannot suffer the physical degradation that afflicts the rest of the world in the age of Kali, and no one will ever go hungry there, no matter that the ebb of raw sewage, the crumbling back alleys, the crowds of emaciated and crippled beggars, the dying widows, the perpetual gray smoke of the cremation fires, and the general filth and squalor might suggest otherwise.
* * *
The fattest doorstop of all these works of scholarship was The Hindus, by Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago. Fortunately, I’d bought it in New York, because all copies here, to the fury of Indian intellectuals, had just been pulped by Penguin Books India after a right-wing Hindu nationalist group brought criminal charges against the author for “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.”
I was reading The Hindus one evening in a favorite restaurant. One of Doniger’s main offenses, it seemed, was the mass of scholarly evidence she had gathered to show that the Brahmin elite had had no monopoly over the writing of the sacred texts; women and the lower castes had also played an important role in their creation. In Doniger’s account, Sita, the wife of Lord Ram, who is abducted in the Rāmāyaṇa by Ravan, the demon king of Lanka, and then liberated by Hanuman and his monkey army, was anything but the usual insipid stereotype of the virtuous, submissive wife. In fact, she was a determined, independent woman with a strong sense of herself as a sexual being.
The waiter brought my food, and as I laid the book aside, I noticed that a young man at the next table was staring at me. Eventually he walked over and asked if he could join me.
“Why are you reading this book?” he asked.
“Because it’s fascinating. I’m learning a lot about Hinduism.”
He was still frowning. “I’m a policeman.”
“That must be interesting work,” I said.
He paused. “So what does it say about our religion?”
“Oh, that it’s very tolerant and open to lots of opinions. You have lots of sacred texts, not just one single holy book like the Bible or the Qu’ran. No popes or bishops. The priests can’t tell you what to think. You can believe anything you like.”
“But the book is illegal. It has been banned in our country.”
“Well, not exactly,” I said, trying not to sound like the patronizing foreigner and probably failing. “It’s just been withdrawn from sale because the publisher didn’t want to offend people who might turn violent.”
He was nodding thoughtfully now. He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he smiled shyly and laid his iPhone on the table.
“The reason I wanted to ask you these questions is that I read about all the problems with this book, and this has made me curious. So I downloaded it onto my phone. Now after we have talked, I will read it.”
“Well,” I said, “you might find it a bit of a challenge to read on such a small screen. It’s almost eight hundred pages long.”
We both laughed.
“Can we be friends on Facebook?” he asked. “My username is Smokin’ Hot.”
I looked him up later that night, but I never did manage to find his page.
* * *
Diana Eck gives one version of the creation myth of Kashi. After their wedding in the Himalayas, Shiva is under pressure from his new bride, Parvati, and his fussy mother-in-law to find a more permanent home. He looks down on the world from Mount Kailash, sees Kashi, where the Ganges bends auspiciously to the north, and decides this is the only place fit for their residence. But first he has to remove its ruler, King Divodasa, who has defied the gods for thousands of years. So right away that presented a cosmological conundrum: If the Himalayas already existed, and so did Kashi, how could the universe not?
An alternate version, as told by Jonathan Parry, is that Shiva and Parvati are wandering one day in the primordial forest of bliss. Again, it seems that Kashi already exists, since they decide that their main task is to bestow moksha, meaning liberation from samsara, the unending cycle of birth, death, and one of the 840,000 possible forms of reincarnation, on all those who die here, regardless of their caste or karma. In Kashi, there will be no need to fear an encounter with “the hard-hearted men of Yama”—the fearsome god of death—“terrifying, foul-smelling, with hammers and maces in their hands.”
To free themselves up for this demanding task, Shiva and Parvati need help with the creation of the universe. So they bring into being a creature of astonishing beauty, Vishnu. In one of his four hands, Vishnu carries a serrated discus, a terrible weapon that he will use to vanquish evil and defend the righteous. Its first use, however, is to dig a ritual bathing tank. As usual in Hindu myth, this is slow work. It takes Vishnu fifty thousand years, and by the time he is done, he is burning with the fires of his austerity, and the tank is filled with the sweat of his labors. Parvati is so moved by the sight that she trembles with joy and one of her earrings falls off. Shiva decrees that the place will henceforth be called Manikarnika, the jewel of the ear. India is the navel of the universe, Kashi is the navel of India, and Manikarnika is the navel of Kashi. The touts and tour guides call it the burning place.
SACRED FIRE
On a rise of ground above Manikarnika, one of the city’s innumerable temples dedicated to Shiva has a narrow balcony that looks down across the woodpiles to the cremation fires. I went up there one morning and pulled out my cell phone to take a couple of photographs. Within seconds, a villainous-looking character with unfortunate teeth materialized at my elbow.
“This is against the law. You must pay me if you want to take a photograph.”
“And how much would that be?” I asked.
“Fifteen thousand dollars.”
I laughed. He glared.
“The money is not for me. It will be given to the orphanage.” He gestured vaguely upstream.
“Excuse me, please let me past,” I said.
The man shook his head. “If you are not making this contribution, you must come wi
th us.”
The boy moved closer, bunching his fists. He seemed to be practicing the kind of menacing scowl he had presumably learned as a muscleman in training. The balcony was much too narrow to squeeze past them in either direction. I glanced over the edge, but decided that leaving that way would be undignified and, besides, it seemed likely to result in a broken ankle.
I pulled myself up to my full height, which was six inches taller than either of them. “Okay, I’m going down to Manikarnika now. They’re expecting me. I’m planning to be there all day with two friends. One of them is a person of great influence in Benares.”
This threw him. “What do you mean? Who is expecting you?”
“The Doms. It’s all been arranged.”
“That is impossible. I would know about it.”
In fact, this being India, the impossible had become possible once an acceptable number of high-denomination bills had been transferred from one pocket to another. In this case, it had taken extended negotiations between an acquaintance of mine named Ajay, whose friends call him Pinku, a member of an old Benares Brahmin family who seemed to know everyone in the city, and someone he called “a kind of bully person” who set the terms of access to the cremation ground. The definition of acceptable was eventually agreed to be five thousand rupees, about eighty dollars. With that, my request was granted: unlimited time at Manikarnika, with no restrictions. My friend Agnès, a French photographer, was free to shoot wherever and whatever she wanted. I could hang out for as long as I liked with the Doms, members of the dalit caste that has sole authority to light the sacred fire that ignites the funeral pyre and make sure that the body is fully burned before the ashes are shoveled into the Ganges, all for a price levied on the mourners. A good chunk of my five thousand rupees would go to the Doms. A small amount would go to a couple of favored temples. Fifty percent would go to the local police. Death here was a business like any other.
I could see the man’s mental wheels turning. Was I bluffing? And if so, how did I imagine I was going to get away with it, since I was outnumbered two to one?
“Look, if you don’t believe me, come and see for yourself,” I said. “I’ll introduce you to the person who made all the arrangements.”
Eventually he grunted and jerked his head at the muscleboy, and off we went, with me squeezed between the two of them like a prisoner doing the perp walk, down the steps and past the woodpiles to Manikarnika. The alleyways around the ghat were lined with small stores selling cremation goods: tinseled shrouds, bamboo for the bier, the clay water pot that the chief mourner tosses over his shoulder at the end of the ceremony, fragrant copal resin, small blocks of costly sandalwood, though sometimes these were no more than fraudulent pieces of ordinary wood splashed with perfume.
My Brahmin friend was waiting for me on the smoky arcaded balcony that the Doms use as their base of operations. He grinned at my escort and steepled his fingers and said, “Namaste!” Then he turned to me and murmured, “This is the bully person I was telling you about. But I see you have already met!”
* * *
Several fires were burning when we got to the ghat, one of them freshly set and a couple of others already collapsing into ash. Men were putting the finishing touches to another pyre, laying the pieces of wood crosswise like Lincoln Logs. A few tourists were gawking from boats. Manikarnika had its own resident menagerie. A mongoose scuttled in and out of a woodpile. Cows lay around placidly, dusted with ash, untroubled by the heat and smoke. A rib-thin goat nibbled on a discarded garland of marigolds. Monkeys squatted on the nearby rooftops, observing the human comedy. A pair of yellow dogs engaged in a sudden, vicious squabble that left one of them bleeding and whining.
I found a place to sit on the balcony among the Doms. The first corpse arrived a few minutes later, laid out on a bamboo bier that was constructed like a ladder and carried by four men who came half walking and half jogging down the steps to the chant of Ram Nam Satya Hai—“Truth is the name of Ram,” one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. All the mourners were male. Women are considered too fainthearted to be allowed on the cremation ground; their job is to stay home to weep and grieve and try to hang on to the corpse as it’s taken away to be burned. The scene looked chaotic at first, but in fact everyone had an appointed role, bustling about like waiters in a busy restaurant.
Wood sellers were weighing out logs on their ancient iron scales and making a tidy profit. Barbers were on hand to tonsure the chief mourners, who were usually the eldest sons of the deceased. Priests waited to greet the new arrivals and pocket their fees. Jonathan Parry calls them the “ritual technicians of Sanskrit Hinduism,” although that doesn’t imply that they have any special expertise. “The reputation of the priests for chicanery is at least as great as their reputation for scholarship,” he writes, much as Fanny Parkes had written about the priests in Allahabad 150 years earlier. “The mantras they recite are learned by rote, with little idea of their real meaning, and they often mumble or talk nonsense, confident that the mourners will not know any better.”
I settled myself in a corner in the shade and took Parry’s book out of my backpack. Not every body goes to the pyres, I learned; there are exceptions. A baby should not be cremated before its first teeth have come in and it’s able to chew. Lepers can’t be burned because their bodies will give off a noxious gas. People who die of snakebite are sometimes placed on a raft of banana leaves and floated downriver; the theory is that their bodies, overheated by the venom, may cool down and come back to life, and the raft will save them from drowning.
The trickiest are those who are judged to have had a “bad death,” a term that seemed to have no precise definition. Parry says that burning them releases a malignant ghost in the form of shit or vomit. They have to make do with the “method of the effigy,” which is an especially lucrative affair for the funeral priests. The corpse itself goes into the river. Its effigy, which will later be burned in the usual way, is constructed from fifty-six different ingredients. The blood is honey, the veins are grass, the hair is wool. The nipples are red beads, the pubic hair is coconut fiber, the penis is an eggplant. All the bodies I saw on my visits to Manikarnika appeared to have died a good death, and there was never an eggplant in sight.
A second group of mourners came jogging down the steps. They took their corpse to the river’s edge, dipped it headfirst in the murk, then laid it on a fresh pyre. When they removed the shroud, it revealed a balding man in his late middle years with a gray toothbrush mustache. One of the Doms, a wraithlike figure in a loose white robe, touched a bunch of holy kusa grass to the flame that burns around the clock on the balcony, by Shiva’s trident, and handed it to the chief mourner. Within minutes, they had a nice blaze going. It was all very businesslike. The mourners chatted and snapped close-ups of the dead man’s face on their cell phones. Agnès took photographs of the men taking photographs. One recalcitrant leg kept springing out of the fire at a ninety-degree angle, burned and blackened but with the elastic tendons apparently still intact. A man in a Tennessee State University T-shirt hawked and spat, looking irritated, and pushed it down, but it soon sprang up again. Eventually he wrapped a protective cloth around his hand and with considerable effort managed to snap it off at the knee. He dropped the lower half, and it rolled away, but one of his companions grabbed two pieces of bamboo and, using them like chopsticks, managed to ram the leg back into the flames before one of the yellow dogs could make a lunge for it.
Even though the body was now burning furiously, it still was not dead. Death does not occur when the heart stops or the major organs fail but when the soul, the “vital breath,” is released through the skull
, and for that the skull has to be broken open along the suture lines that close during infancy. This part of the ceremony, the kapal kriya, is the most difficult for the chief mourner, and I found it hard to watch brains boil and bubble out of a fractured skull. It is the only moment when the mourner is allowed to weep. Otherwise the ghost will drink his tears. I saw the rite performed in many different ways during the time I spent on the cremation grounds. Some men went about it in a perfunctory way, jabbing at the skull once with a stick, no more than a symbolic gesture. Others were more energetic, as if they were beating a dusty carpet, making a loud thwack that reminded me of the washermen pounding their laundry on the flat stone slabs at the Dhobi Ghat, a little way upstream.
THE SPECTACLE OF WOOD
Sometimes, Pinku said, as the mourners wait for the flame to be lit and debate the purpose and meaning of life, you may hear a song by the sixteenth-century poet-saint Kabir.
Dekh tamasha lakri ka
Jite lakri
Marte lakri
Kabir is subject to endless subtleties of translation, but in essence this meant:
Behold the spectacle of wood
Wood when you are alive
Wood when you die
As the afternoon faded into dusk at Manikarnika, a group of men built the largest and most elaborate pyre I’d seen all day, right at the water’s edge, stacking a latticework of whole logs that were almost a foot in diameter and topping it with greenery and sandalwood. It was a display of piety and also a show of the family’s wealth. For reasons both spiritual, worldly, and downright venal, everyone involved in the business of death on the cremation grounds has a reason to burn as much wood as they can.
But I wanted to know where all the wood came from, now that India’s Supreme Court had upheld a law that prohibited, with only a few exceptions, the cutting of any tree in an effort to conserve the country’s vanishing forests. That at least was the theory.