The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (20 page)

That is, until about a couple years ago. I was going through the toughest time of my life. The end of a marriage, an unexpected rift with my parents, and the loss of a few friendships left me feeling like I was stuck in a deep pit, one that I could not, for the life of me, claw my way out of. At one particularly low point, during the holidays (isn't it always during the holidays?), I felt defeated. I was ready to give up.

To paraphrase a passage from David Foster Wallace's
Infinite Jest
, I was standing on the ledge of a burning building, and jumping seemed a lot more attractive than facing the fire. Fortunately, at the last moment, and for reasons I'm still not sure of, I stepped away from that metaphorical ledge. In the days that followed, Varanasi kept popping up: there it was in a magazine; there it was on TV; there it was on someone's Facebook profile. The city, I realized, was a place defined by life and death, where loss is viewed in a completely different way. If I was going to walk through the fire, I needed to go to Varanasi, where darkness is nothing to fear. And I'd be showing up with a lot of darkness.

“Welcome to the center of the universe, my friend. You're standing at the beginning and end of all life, the epicenter of creation, the spot of ultimate transformation, the passageway through which souls achieve
moksha
.” The man delivering this spiel, his face barely peeking out of a brown scarf that was wrapped over his head, had accosted me the second my foot landed on this supposedly most holy ground, Manikarnika ghat. And he wasn't just making this up as he went along. On my flight from New York, as I was reading a scholarly book on Varanasi, one line particularly struck me: “Just as India is the navel of the world, and Varanasi is the navel of India, so Manikarnika ghat is the navel of Varanasi.” I was standing in what was, for the 1 billion Hindus on the planet, the core of all creation.

The guy who had become my impromptu tour guide was one of the
doms
, the people who work at the cremation grounds. They're among the untouchable caste, the lowest of the low, and are more or less condemned, as were their ancestors, to exercise this profession all their lives.

“Look around,” he added, fanning his arm at what could have been a postapocalyptic landscape, a panorama dotted with bonfires, stacks of wood the size of a small house, the odd leaning temple spire in the distance, and a riverside sprinkled with bathers ritually immersing themselves in polluted Ganges River water. Impossible to ignore were the groups of a half-dozen men jogging lightly and carrying shroud-wrapped dead bodies on bamboo litters above their heads. They chanted,
“Rama nama satya hai!”
(Only the name of God is truth) and were headed right toward where we were standing, the main cremation ground in Varanasi.

“This spot, this ghat,” said the
dom
, “was not made by human hands. It was made by Lord Shiva 3,500 years ago.”

I followed him as he scurried up the ghat's muddy, irregular steps, past sleeping canines and garbage-grazing bovines that seemed unfazed by all the activity. Inside a portico overlooking the ghat, a flame, no bigger than what you'd see in an average fireplace, flickered. “This is the sacred fire,” he said, adding that it has been burning constantly for 3,500 years and had been lit, naturally, by Lord Shiva. “This is the flame with which all bodies are ignited,” he said. “This is the flame that sends people to
moksha
.”

Traditionally, that flame is controlled by the Dom Raja, the lord of the dead. He rules over the
doms
and is one of the richest people in town (despite his low caste). If you want to use the flame to cremate a loved one, you have to negotiate with him. As with royalty, the position is hereditary. When the Dom Raja dies, his title is handed down to the eldest son. But when the Dom Raja Kailash Choudhary passed away in 1985, something interesting happened: there was a power struggle in the family, and eventually his five sons decided to split the Dom Raja duties.

There's more to Varanasi than just death. Though nothing as compelling. Also called Benares, Kashi, City of Light, and Forest of Bliss, this city on the Ganges is not, despite the implied tranquillity of some of its nicknames, a peaceful haven. It's a cacophony of auto-rickshaw horns and buzzing motorbikes, a maelstrom of swirls of dust and more dust. The smell of exhaust fumes, chai, and curry, plus the occasional waft of incense, intermingle to create the olfactory imprint of this ancient city, said to be one of the oldest continually inhabited spots on the planet. Just up from the riverbank is a warren of narrow, twisting, dank, excrement-dolloped lanes where every second storefront seems to be a yoga or meditation school. To the first-time visitor, the walkways go on forever.

This is not the India of techie call-center employees and upwardly mobile professionals. Varanasi exists far removed from that India. One finds few trappings of globalization and almost no cosmopolitan culture here. There are no kitschy souvenir shops in Varanasi. No racks of postcards. No stands selling
My Uncle Went to Varanasi for Enlightenment and All I Got Was This Lousy Good Karma T-Shirt
T-shirts. Mumbai might have its Bollywood stars and Delhi its politicians, but Varanasi has its crumbling riverside palaces and temples, the dead, and the Dom Raja.

Still, besides gawking at the cremation grounds, one of the main things visitors to Varanasi do is stroll the 3-mile waterfront, which is lined with 84 ghats. Here, between the river and the mishmash of dilapidated palaces, one will be accosted every seven seconds by teenagers selling hash or wanting to take you out in a rowboat—“Boat? Boat, sir?”—and men befriending you so you'll pay a visit to their silk shops. Near the river, holy men meditate and children play cricket with tattered, taped-up balls. In the river, locals bathe and women wash bedsheets.

Each ghat has its own distinct personality and function. Gaya ghat, for example, near the northern end, is a place where pilgrims board boats to sail down the river, making stops at ghats that contain important temples. Dashashvamedha ghat, the “main ghat,” is the busiest, with holy men, or sadhus
, planted under mushroomlike wooden umbrellas, some beckoning tourists over to receive a bit of wisdom, maybe in exchange for a few rupees. At the opposite end from Gaya ghat is Assi ghat, which has become a backpackers' ghetto, chock-a-block with Western-friendly vegetarian restaurants and cheap hotels. In stark contrast, the other side of the wide river is a gloomy nothingness of brown dirt and haze.

Around the cremation ghats, Manikarnika and Harishchandra, the activity is relentless. For the denizens of Varanasi, it's all very commonplace. But as a newcomer I was paralyzed with morbid curiosity, my attention inexorably drawn to the transformation of bodies from flesh to ash in a theater of death played out 24/7 for all to watch. More than 30,000 bodies are burned annually here. Harishchandra ghat even has an audience platform, allowing onlookers, along with family members, to get a better view of the flaming spectacle. It may seem like a serious taboo for Westerners with eyes blanketed from death, but this sort of experience is exactly why we travel—to witness the “unreal,” to take in the extraordinary ordinariness of a way of life we could never have imagined.

The day after my haphazard introduction to Manikarnika ghat, I returned for a deeper exposure to its rituals and protocols. Flames from the pyres punctuated the smoky landscape. The
doms
quietly went about their business, poking at the fires with bamboo sticks. Human ashes rained down on my head and shoulders as I watched a body being laid upon a stack of wood. The corpse was wrapped in a gold shroud, which I was later told indicated that the deceased was an elderly man who had died a good death. Red flecked with yellow is for high-caste women who die before their husbands, and white is for most men. Five men from the deceased's family stood around the pyre. (Women aren't typically allowed here, for fear widows will throw themselves on the blaze.) One man, the chief mourner (according to tradition, the dead man's eldest son), held a thick sheaf of straw on which he balanced an ember from the sacred fire. The men circled the pyre five times, one circumnavigation for each element: fire, water, earth, air, and ether. They walked counterclockwise, because, as one
dom
said, “in death everything is reversed.” The chief mourner placed the hay and the smoldering ember upon shavings of sandalwood that had been sprinkled atop the body. Thus ignited, the body began to burn. The rituals, while no doubt profoundly spiritual, were performed in such a routine manner that it put me at ease.

Around the cremation grounds, I talked to several
doms
about their jobs. They seemed largely unaffected by living and working in the constant presence of death. “It's just a job,” said Gautam Choudhary, 22, when I asked about his work. Loulou Choudhary (all
doms
share the same last name, even if they're not related), 31, who has been doing the job since he was 16, wandered over a few minutes later and echoed Gautam's sentiments. “It's not a matter of like or dislike,” he said of his job. “This is what I do. This is what my ancestors have done”—he's a seventh-generation
dom
—“and it's what my children will do. After all,” he added, “we're untouchables.”

A body can take anywhere from 2 to 12 hours to burn. “It depends on one's karma,” another
dom
told me. “The better the karma earned in life, the faster you burn.” He then told me about the five types of people who can't be cremated: pregnant women, children, sadhus, lepers, and people who died from a cobra bite. These people get a rock tied to their bodies and are dropped into the Ganges.

About an hour after the elderly man's corpse had been lit, the chief mourner approached the pyre, carrying a bamboo pole. He raised the 4-foot stick over his head and then thwacked the corpse's skull. It split open. This, Loulou Choudhary told me, is the moment when the soul is officially freed from the body and travels to the afterlife. Calmly, the mourner walked away. He showed little emotion.

I showed plenty. The enormous difference between the American and Indian outlooks on death hit me like a lead pipe, or a bamboo stick. The idea of having to split open your father's and mother's skulls so that they can successfully achieve heavenly liberation was something that I had a hard time wrapping my own head around. I had to remind myself why I was here—to better understand some of the unfortunate choices I'd made (or almost made). But I was still having a hard time making sense of what was taking place in front of me. I didn't yet fully grasp the power of Varanasi, how the people here could be so accepting of death.

Then I met S. B. Patel. A 25-year-old college student in a nearby town, S.B. happened to sit next to me on the viewing platform at Harishchandra ghat the next day. We began chatting while an older man and a middle-aged woman were being cremated in separate pyres. The man's head was burned to a blackened crisp. The woman was almost all ashes. A man who had been swimming in the Ganges walked over to one of the pyres and held up his wet towel to dry a bit in the heat. A dog was sniffing around the other pyre.

“So what are you doing here?” I asked.

“You see that woman burning over there,” S.B. said. I looked over and nodded. “That's my sister.”

“Are you sad?” I asked, realizing this was about the dumbest question of all time.

“Yes,” he said. “But I can't show it. It's bad karma for the soul of the dead if mourners show grief during the cremation.” Forty-four years old and married, his sister had died of a heart attack. This was her funeral. I asked if it was strange that I and other people who didn't know his sister were watching this.

“No,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. “In Hinduism we try to let go of our ego. I'm appreciative that you're taking an interest. My sister would have liked it.”

Just then, someone crashed our death party. He was introduced to me as Nehna. He was one of the five Dom Raja brothers.

This Dom Raja of Varanasi was wearing gold chains and a tank top. His beach ball–sized belly protruded from under his shirt.

Nehna Choudhary, 32 years old, said he worked at Harishchandra ghat. (His brothers controlled Manikarnika.) He couldn't stay to talk; he had business to do, but he asked me to meet him here tomorrow.

The following day I met Dom Raja Nehna along the river at Harishchandra ghat. “We take a boat,” he said. Minutes later we were in the middle of the Ganges River. Smoke from three different cremations wafted toward the sky. Nehna explained the intricacies of splitting what had been one job several ways. He works about 105 days a year, he told me, as he rowed the boat toward the other side of the river. “I'm no longer fazed by what I see,” he said.

When Nehna spoke, he did so through his lower teeth, because he always had a chunk of betel nut stuffed in his lower lip. It made him sound like a subcontinental version of Marlon Brando's
Godfather
character. Which was fitting, since Nehna was pretty much an analogous godfather to the dead and their mourners.

“My idea of life and death hasn't changed,” Nehna said, interrupting my thoughts. “But I do get a sense of happiness when I'm on the cremation grounds.”

My ears pricked up when he said this. What would I learn from the Dom Raja, who has been around death all his life, where the acceptance of mortality is probably deep in his genes? “Because of
moksha
?” I asked. “Because it has made you see the important things in life, or it makes you feel redeemed about life on a daily basis? Because it reminds you of the impermanence of all things and that you have to live in the moment?”

In my excitement I was speaking too quickly for Nehna, who I suspected wasn't even listening to me anyway.

“I feel happiness when I'm there,” he said, “because I can see all the money I'm making.”