Prologue

Varanasi is a circle, just as the earth is a circle; and a brief stay in the place is not enough to go all the way around. After three days in Varanasi with Marc, Marie-Do’s brother, I was thrown from horror to revulsion to thought to meditation. I was ricocheted from anger to joy and from hatred to comprehension.

In the end I was literally thrown out of Varanasi; a sacred cow at the train station turned it’s head just as I was running past it. The horn of the beast hit me in the thigh and sent me flying two metres. I landed on my back, but my right hand – my write hand – was severely crippled by the shock of landing. The result is a fractured Carpal Sacaphoid in the hand; and I can never thank Dr. Benoit of the French Embassy enough for his help.

In Varanasi, in Hinduism, they burn bodies. It is considered of great portent to die in Varanasi and people spend fortunes in getting their bodies there within days of death to be incinerated. There are, as far as I could see, two places on the banks of the River Ganges where the fires burn day and night. Imagine the scene, if you can. Photography is strictly forbidden.

You walk through tiny alley-ways littered with chapels to different gods. Shiva, Ganesh, Kali…the lot. Every chapel is littered with flower petals, some fresh – some rotting. Swarms of flies and bees surround the petals giving them an instant second life. Brown men sleep in the chapels, on their backs with their legs bent at the knees so as not to point their feet at anyone. They wear loin cloths and sometimes their testicles hang out, brown and aged.

I arrived at the pyres from a ghat, which is a set of ancient stone steps leading to the waters of the Ganges where people come to bathe and drink the holy water. They immerse their bodies three times and this is supposed to wash them clean of any spiritual imperfections and prepare their karma for the next round. They strip down and after the dunking, smear their bodies with ash.

Ash.

First Impression

We reached Varanasi early morning by the night train and we were kept awake all night by the police hitting people who had fallen asleep on the floor. Full of the dazed apprehension of the sleepless, we walked to the ghat of pyres. We were shown a building of three levels. The lower level was off limits as it was reserved for the families of the deceased and the second level was for those waiting to die. The uppermost level was for us. Here is what I wrote in my diary after having left that place:

Seeing burning bodies is what we came for, and yet nothing can come near to the emotional discharge of seeing legs burnt off above the knees being lifted and replaced on the fire like kindling.

The arms rise slowly as the fire releases them from the tissue which surrounds them; on the back of the hands heat blisters break out the size of golf balls until the skin breaks like paper and releases the air.

It takes an adult human body three hours to burn by firewood. In men, the last and most difficult place to burn is the chest. In women it is the hips.

There are four or five pyres burning at any one time during the monsoon season, more in spring when the river recedes and the bank expands. As each skull heats up, it pops with a hollow explosion as the brains come to a boil. Boiling minds, then, come to the Ganges for quick relief.

Some details plunge me deeper and deeper into horror. As hard as I try to put into perspective the whole life/death-all-is-one stuff, I cannot help but feel horror.

There are old women waiting for death. They have no money to buy the wood needed to burn their bodies and so they beg. The official guide, who takes no money, introduces us to one of them. She is frail and sits there all day every day watching her fellow Hindus going up in smoke, watching their limbs swell and the burning blood seeping like sap out of the cuts in their twisted feet. No matter; this is what she wants.

There are bits of flesh, huge chunks as large as a joint of mutton which are thrown to a dog who tears the meat off as though it were a Sunday picnic. The dog, a reincarnation of the lord Shiva I am told, has every right to the flesh and the dead person can rejoice in knowing he has fed a god. The deceased is happy and the dog is happy but I want to vomit.

I want to kill that dog who is taking for granted something as sacred as a human body.

I want to faint as the sickly-sweet smell of burning human flesh climbs the hot afternoon air and invests the balcony where we stand.

Of course I am reminded of the stories of Auschwitz survivors who say that once you have smelt a human body burning it stays in your nostrils forever; and it is at this point where I nearly faint, when all these anonymous and grateful Hindus are replaced by my own kind, charred against their will.

Am I such an asshole, then, that I can only relate to pain when it touches me directly? Not so sure. For the Hindus, this is not pain, and incineration in Varanasi is joyful and a release.

Some are not burned. Children, as well as victims of smallpox, and cobra bites – sacred afflictions – are sent into the river, their bodies cast off the side of a boat with a rock tied around their bodies. Sadhus, holy wanderers, are put on a raft to float down the Ganges.

Horrible, horrible. I want to kill that dog and the Hindus for making this filthy nightmare possible.

 

First Impression Revisited

Well, there you have it. Day one at the body burnings. The next day I went back after a boat trip on the Ganges. We awoke at five A.M. and took a boat from the north of the city to the centre. I knew exactly what I wanted, but the boatman didn’t agree since he wanted to take us out for more than the agreed upon hour. More haggling followed by my giving orders, ‘You go there, now!’ I know this is longer than most pieces on the site, but if you bear with me, something might just come of it. Here are some selected passages from my diary immediately after the boat ride:

Boat trip on the Ganges brings me once again from the ablutions ghats down to the horrid equation of burnt flesh and fat-seeping limbs.

Pilgrims bob in their saris and wraps, sadhus spread the ashes of the dead on their faces: life is the mirror of death, death reflecting itself in life. Sometimes the river water is poured back into the river from silver vessels. Children plunge in and bits of ash and charred wood float by.

A boat leaves the ghat, and on it the small slender body of a child. Eight, maybe nine years of struggle closed upon it like a marble door. The body is wrapped in a shroud for decency’s sake and placed on a large square stone. Ropes are used to tie the body and the stone fast. The boat leaves the ghat, for this body is not for the flames, but for the cooling waters of the Ganges. The boat sets out and only a few meters later the bundle is heaved into the waters. The boy doing the heaving gives the sinking body one last salute, hands joined and then touched ear to ear. The boat turns back. No final farewells.

This time at the pyre we are brought to a lower platform and led near the bodies. A smouldering foot is literally poking its heat-bloated disarray in our faces. Fat leaks from a hole in the calf. The flesh is broken and under the flesh is more flesh, muscle and tissue.

A Hindu is surprised that I come here twice. ‘Why?’, he asks. I must be crazy, I answer. I want to cry and he says that here no one cries and if I want to cry then I must really be crazy. Here, no one cries.

The smell of burning flesh is heavy in my nostrils. It won’t go away.

 

 

Last(ing) Impression

Now, during this time something else is beginning to develop. I have begun yoga classes once a day at the hotel. There is a Hatha breathing exercise in which you lie on your back and relax, breathing normally. But at the end of every breath, in and out, you’ve got to pause, just hold it for a millisecond.

This is the final exercise, after an hour of contortions and effort, and it was during this millisecond that I saw myself on the pyre, feeling no pain. I felt that I was beginning to understand something. I was horrified by what I had seen because I imagined the pain of a burning body and now I was able to imagine the non-being of death. But there was more to come. Back to the diary:

There is a relationship between the burning of bodies and the perfection sought in yoga. Just as every position is an absolute; a complete twisting and a total contortion leading to all ends, likewise the End is as brutal and irrevocable as possible. There is something between the bits of leg severed by fire and lying like thrown logs and the lotus position which seeks to place them in a perfect axis.

After all that training those legs sit scattered on the pyre, combustion among combustion, the heels no longer joined and the breathing stopped now – not for a split second – but for the instant of eternity.

The diary ends there. I was looking forward to arriving in Delhi and writing the rest but with a crippled right hand it had to wait. One of the things that kept rattling in my mind was the inherent contradiction between my gut feeling that yoga was a perfect discipline and that Hinduism, its context, was idol worshipping paganism.

Walking through the streets and entering the temples I could not help but think about Abraham, the founder of Monotheism. More specifically, I could not help but wonder about the spirituality of Babylon and Ur Kasdim, his home town. Was it like this? Were the streets full of crowding pilgrims, searching to elevate themselves? In our tradition their religion has been painted as barbaric and primitive, full of child sacrifices and slavish obedience. Just what was Abraham up against?

It was very difficult to position myself in relation to all I was seeing, and as much as I tried not to position myself – to just flow with it – having a position and knowing where you are is an ingrained reflex, part of our civilisation’s way of dealing with the outside world.

And now for something totally different. The universe works in strange ways. In our hotel, the rather comfortable Ganga Yogi Lodge, there was a guy named Dino. Nice guy, an Australian, easy going and good company as Australians tend to be. Dino believes that the world has fallen victim to an extra-terrestrial conspiracy led by reptiles of a sublime and evil intelligence. All world leaders have sat with these creatures and signed pacts with them.

This is not the fruit of a vision; Dino has been reading and studying and researching this and he really and truly believes it. He will cite you facts and figures and historical events.

Also at the hotel was an English girl named Lydia, who is endowed with enchanting insight and intelligence. The night Dino left, she and I sat on the roof of the hotel along with an Irishman. We were trying to put Varanasi into perspective and of course, trying to put Dino into perspective.

At one point she said something to the effect that if Dino is way out there and everybody else on the planet is also on their own weird trip, then it’s amazing we were all able to live in the same world and not fall off.

The problem, you see, is that everybody thinks they are right. Dino totally believes in what he is saying. So does George Bush JR., so does our yoga teacher, so did Mother Theresa and so did Hitler and so did Freud and Jesus and Moses. If everybody is out there with their own belief systems and quirks then the human race must look like a huge confused porcupine. Who is right, where is the truth?

I began wondering, what if everybody were a little bit right? Or even stranger, what if everybody were totally right? I began to play with the possibility that all extremes, all thought and philosophy had their inherent place in a huge matrix which was so complex and yet so simple that it allowed for, and even encouraged, the pushing of belief and personality to the limit. The human race looked like a giant porcupine.

It was then that I began to understand Hinduism. Their multitude of gods with their strange faces and bodies were in fact every possibility gone wild. On one extreme a god of creation; on the other a god of destruction. Somewhere else there’s a monkey god and a rat god. The god of death rides a giant turtle. The god of war has four faces. Another god wears a necklace of bloody skulls; yet another sits on a lotus flower, has green skin and smiles all the time. There’s a god who’s head was cut off and replaced with that of an elephant; he had two wives, goddesses to be sure. The River Ganges is a god.

So total and radical is the thing; the Hindus don’t believe that the statues in their temples represent their gods, they are their gods. That’s really taking it to an extreme. Dino believes in reptiles, I believe in one God, and the Hindus will maintain that they also believe in one God.

The world contains all of us and we don’t fall off. Hinduism contains all those gods, and yet it functions as a unit efficient enough to have given us several forms of yoga.

What if everybody were right?

If everybody is right then the world of humans can contain all potentials, and God is the greatest mastermind possible. For all this paradox and beauty and ugliness is Its creation. I will try to go back to Varanasi soon, once I am healed.

I know it has more to tell me.

Many thanks to Mitch Dabach for his help in proof-reading, editing, and encouraging.