On the Ganges

by George Black

  * * *

  We headed out on S-5, the state highway south of Varanasi. At the entrance to one small village, someone had strung a rope across the road. Some men were sitting around watching boys playing cricket in a dried-up irrigation canal. One of them wandered over and stuck his palm through the window of the car. The driver gave him ten rupees. The man slung a garland of marigolds over the steering wheel.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Pinku.

  “Oh, this village has some kind of local demigod. He’s supposed to be very twisted and … what is the word in English? Short-tempered? So you have to give a donation to his temple.”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else he might make your car crash.”

  Thirty miles on, past the nondescript town of Ahraura, we pulled over at a chai stall. To the west of the road a small, pretty river meandered through scrubby woodland splashed with crimson blooms of Java cassia. To the east was a wildlife sanctuary where the forest was denser and there were said to be pythons and gharials—fish-eating crocodiles—as well as various rare species of deer and antelope.

  We hiked upstream. The river was low and bony in the blistering heat, and it was easy to hop from one side to the other across the flat shelves of exposed bedrock. Eventually the scrub gave way to thicker forest, and after half an hour or so, the trail ended abruptly at a deep horseshoe-shaped pool. Trees grew out of the sheer, layered rock face that encircled the pool, and half a dozen bridal-veil falls dropped sixty or seventy feet into the pale green water. I stood under the cloud of spray to cool off by the roofless ruins of a hermit’s hut. It was a place of great serenity, and it was easy to see why a renunciant would come here to find refuge from the turmoil of the world.

  We had seen no one on the way to the waterfalls, but on the way back along the narrow forest path, we passed three woodcutters, a man and two women, carrying axes. Another man was silhouetted against the sky as he labored up a nearby hillside, balancing on his head a stack of tree limbs that looked like a miniature funeral pyre.

  We stopped again at the chai stall, where the owner was tending his kettle over a mud stove. Some men were building a wall, knee-deep in muck. The chaiwalla’s name was Chote Lal. He was a bespectacled man with an air of resignation to the follies of the world. His little shop had been robbed seven times, although there didn’t seem much to steal except for a plastic cooler with some cold drinks, a few packets of salty snacks, a cheap wall clock, and some out-of-date calendars with images of Shiva, Vishnu, and Hanuman. I doubted that there were more than a few hundred rupees in the cashbox.

  Despite the heat radiating from the stove, on top of the heat of the day, Chote Lal wore a long-sleeved shirt, an undershirt, and a pink scarf. He said that his guru had lived in the ruined hermitage beneath the waterfall. He showed me a photograph of a stick insect of a man, all knees and elbows and dressed only in a white langoti, barely enough to cover his genitals.

  “I’ve lived here for forty-five years,” he said. “This all used to be thick forest. There were tigers and bears and leopards. Now humans are the only animals here, and the forest is almost gone.”

  Yes, of course the woodcutters were breaking the law, but what could you do?

  “Don’t the forest rangers patrol?” I asked.

  That earned an indulgent half-smile at the naïveté of foreigners. “Of course they do. You see them patrolling every day, five or six of them together. But it isn’t to report the woodcutters; they’re looking for bribes. They can earn five or six hundred rupees a day that way. Then they let the woodcutters load their wood onto bikes and pickup trucks and take it to the markets in Ahraura, Robertsganj, Narayanpur. They get four or five rupees a kilo. In Varanasi, they can get eight. And maybe they cut fifty or sixty kilos a day. I know all about this, but I never say anything. Why ask for trouble?”

  THE COMMISSION MEN

  “Where do you get your wood from?” I asked one of the wood sellers at Manikarnika. There are eight or ten dealers in the alleys around the ghat, and many of them, like this one, are members of the milkman caste, the Yadavs, who are a political force in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

  “Are you going to write about this?” he asked. “If you do, tell people in America and England that I am looking for a wife.” He smiled roguishly. He already had a wife, and three children.

  “You want to write about our country? This is the most corrupt country in the world. Everywhere there is a commission man! If you are not using the commission man, you cannot get business. The moment they see a body coming, the brokers are looking for a way to make money.”

  “In Banarsi culture, when you’re born, you pay a commission,” another man chipped in. “When you go to a temple, you pay a commission. When you die, you pay a commission.”

  “But seriously,” I said, “where does the wood come from?”

  “Mostly from the government depots. Some is from dead trees or ones that fall down in a storm. But even then, you can’t just take it. You have to inform the Forest Department, and they will come and pick it up. Then there are trees that are cut down for official purposes, like building a mine or a highway. And tribal people get special permits. I’m off to one of the tribal areas tomorrow for three days, in fact. These people still use bows and arrows! Can you imagine?”

  He stopped and smiled. “And then of course there’s the illegal logging.”

  * * *

  That evening I met one of the commission men in a darkened house on a darkened street near Raj Ghat, where the logging trucks arrive at night to unload for the boats that will carry the wood upstream to the cremation grounds the next morning. Keeping the lights off was not enough for the commission man; he also insisted on setting up a blinding LED bulb in a wall niche behind his head that shone straight in my eyes and made it impossible to make out anything of his face.

  “The wood is sold by auction at the government depots,” he said. “My job is to match up auctioneers with buyers, and for this I am charging a commission.” There was a small depot at Sarnath, a town a few miles from Varanasi where the Buddha preached his first sermon. There was a larger one at Mirzapur, thirty miles upriver. There was a lot of illegal logging around Mirzapur, he said, but it was an area he didn’t like to venture into because of the Maoist Naxalite guerrillas, who were active there, still fighting the endless, futile fight they’d started half a century ago. The biggest depot of all was farther away still, in the neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh, eight or nine hours on a bad road. MP was notorious for its logging mafia, he said, and that was where most of the wood for the cremation grounds came from. Some illegal wood also came from the forests near Chote Lal’s chai stall, brought into Raj Ghat at night by boat from Narayanpur.

  “How can you cover up illegal logging on that scale?” I asked.

  “You’d better ask the government that,” he said, and I could hear his smile in the darkness of the room. “For cremation, it’s a very sensitive issue, because people will always need wood. It’s one requirement you can’t ignore.”

  The forest rangers and government inspectors, the auctioneers at the depot, the brokers and middlemen, the truckers, the boatmen, the wood sellers at Manikarnika, the Doms, the funeral priests—all of them had an incentive to cut, sell, and burn as much wood as possible. Each one charged a commission to the next person in the chain, the police took their cut, and there wasn’t much the mourners themselves could do to resist the final sales pitch. It was especially easy to swindle unsophisticated people who came in from the outlying villages. Wood is sold by the maund, a bit more than eighty pounds. Odd numbers are auspicious. A rich family might burn fifteen maunds, more than half a ton. You couldn’t get away with less than five if you wanted to be sure of burning the body completely, and even then, some dealers might take two as their commission. Seven was better; nine better still. And it was always a good idea to throw in some sandalwood, or mango and wood apple, which are also sacred. How could you not honor the tradition
s of your ancestors? How would you feel if the feral dogs started chewing on the unburned parts of your mother or father? There was a time when the problem of partly burned bodies was so bad that the government decided to introduce flesh-eating turtles into the river, but the polluted waters didn’t agree with them, and no one had seen one in years.

  “There’s a truck coming in from Mirzapur around three in the morning,” the commission man said. “They’ll start loading the boats before seven, so if you want to see them, you’d better get there early.”

  * * *

  One truckload equals one boatload, a little over eight tons, and by sunrise, the team of ten porters already had the first of the wood on board. There were no steps for pilgrims or bathers at Raj Ghat, and the truck had dumped the wood at the top of a steep, rough slope. The porters loaded up and jogged down to the river, through the garbage and the shit and the discarded shrouds that had floated downstream from Manikarnika, then wobbled up a precarious gangplank to dump their wood on top of the growing pile.

  “This is a skilled job, you know,” one of them said to me. “You have to have special training to carry that amount of wood on your shoulders.” For the heavier loads, which could weigh more than two hundred pounds, it took eight men to get all the logs and branches properly positioned. I doubted that many of the porters weighed more than a hundred and twenty. Now that it was summer, when temperatures would go up to mad-dogs-and-Englishmen levels, more people died, and dealers built up their stockpiles before the monsoon broke, the porters’ pay would go up accordingly, to about two and a half dollars a day.

  By a little after one o’clock, the job was done, and the men went back up the hill to sit in the shade by a tiled shrine to Hanuman and stuffed their cheeks with paan. They introduced themselves. Ramesh Sahni, Rajkumar Sahni, Chamru Sahni. Most of the ten turned out to be Sahnis, which identified them as members of the boatman caste, the Mallah. Several of them were graybeards in their fifties, though they looked even older. “I started working here in 1978,” one man said, spitting out a scarlet gob of paan juice. “But I had to stop for a while because I drove a nail through my foot.”

  “The oldest of the porters is seventy,” one of the Sahnis said. “He carries as much as he can, and everyone is kind to him because we all think about what our own lives will be like when we’re old.”

  “And how old are you?” I asked the man sitting at the end of the row. He was bigger than the others, and his thick black beard and knotted headscarf gave him a piratical look. “Twelve,” he said. “Or maybe thirteen. I can’t remember.” Everyone cackled.

  They sat there patiently, chewing their paan and waiting for their money.

  “And then you’ll go home to your wives?” I said.

  “No,” the pirate said. “Then we’ll go and get drunk.”

  ASHES TO ASHES

  I found, tucked away behind one of the woodpiles at Manikarnika, a vermilion stone with the worn figures of a man and his wife. It marked the spot where virtuous widows had once committed sati, immolating themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres. The practice honored Sati, who may have been the first wife of Shiva, or perhaps his second, or perhaps she was the same person as Parvati, or perhaps her reincarnation. It was another of those confusing stories. I heard an expanded version later in Calcutta, in which the identity of Sati/Parvati became more confusing still.

  Lord William Bentinck, governor-general of Bengal and later of all India, found a good many reasons to wrinkle his long, patrician nose at the barbaric habits he observed among the Hindoos. Nothing appalled him more than suttee, as the British called it, and in 1829 he outlawed the practice in Bengal, denouncing it as “revolting to the feelings of human nature.” The City of Shiva, which also happened to be where the British had first come upon the phenomenon of female infanticide, was the most egregious offender. Sati was “a spectacle which occurred more frequently in Benares than in any other part of the [East India] Company’s territories,” wrote the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register in 1833, the year in which the ban was extended to the rest of India. Even so, there were those who quibbled. If his lordship made sati illegal, would that not antagonize our subject people and make them harder to control? And if one form of cremation were banned, might that not implicitly endorse other kinds? After all, every good Christian was disgusted by the very idea of setting fire to a body, with its dark pagan associations.

  But revulsion is a matter of culture, and attitudes can shift with time. At the Vienna Exposition of 1873, some learned gentlemen from Italy, working “in the name of public health and civilization,” demonstrated Professor Brunetti’s remarkable apparatus for reducing the human body to a neat pile of white ash that you could put on your mantelpiece in a decorative urn. Sir Henry Thompson, an expert on diseases of the genitourinary tract and surgeon to Queen Victoria, empress of India, was most impressed. He invited a group of notables, including the novelist Anthony Trollope and the painter John Everett Millais, to his home at 35 Wimpole Street, where they drew up a declaration. “We the undersigned disapprove of the present custom of burying the dead, and we desire to substitute some mode which shall rapidly resolve the body into its component elements, by a process that cannot offend the living, and shall render the remains perfectly innocuous.” A plot of land was bought in a discreet corner of the Surrey countryside, with help from the London Necropolis Company. Professor Paolo Gorini of Lodi was invited to give a demonstration. He tried it on a horse. Most efficacious, Sir Henry thought, although it took another six years for parliament to make cremation legal.

  But the living, or at least the English living, were still offended by what went on in Benares, where the ritual was conducted in public, large numbers of partly burned bodies went into the Ganges, and the cremation grounds were located in the very heart of the city. Why the devil could they not be on the outskirts, as they were in most Indian towns, often to the south, toward the domain of Yama, the lord of death? It took another half century before British administrators bent to reality: this was where the jewel of the ear had fallen, and Kashi’s conception of purity would never mesh with London’s notions of hygiene. The annual municipal report for 1925 concluded with a sigh, “It is impossible to remove the burning ghats from their present location, it is not that the Manikarnika and Harishchandra ghats are there for the city, but that the city is there for the ghats.”

  * * *

  Harishchandra is the second and smaller of Varanasi’s cremation grounds. It takes its name from the story of a ruler of the kingdom of Ayodhya, an ancestor of Lord Ram. The Doms are in charge here, as they are in Manikarnika, and the story of Harishchandra is also their creation myth, the source of their authority on the burning ghats.

  Indra, the god of thunder and war, was pondering a question one day. Was there, in all the world, such a thing as a truly honest man? The name of Harishchandra came up, and while he sounded promising, the gods decided that his integrity had to be put to the test. They entrusted the task to a particularly vindictive sage named Vishwamitra. First, he ordered Harishchandra to give away all his worldly possessions. Then wild beasts and a plague of insects were let loose on his kingdom. More Job-like trials followed, and when the king had nothing left to give, Vishwamitra demanded the clothes off his back, as well as those of his wife, Taramati, and their son, Rohitashwa. Still that wasn’t enough, and since Harishchandra was destitute now, all that remained was to sell his wife and child, give the proceeds to Vishwamitra, and wander the land in search of menial labor. He found it at last with a chandala, an untouchable named Kallu Dom, a foul-breathed drunk who was the caretaker of the cremation ground in Kashi. Harishchandra agreed to become his slave and collect the fees that the Dom was allowed to charge for each cremation.

  Taramati, meanwhile, was going through her own tribulations at the hands of the evil Brahmin to whom her husband had sold her. One day, while wandering in the forest, young Rohitashwa was bitten by a snake and died. Overcome with grief, she brough
t her son’s body to Manikarnika. But Harishchandra failed to recognize either of them and demanded the usual fee. She had nothing to give, but he was implacable. “Go and pawn your mangalsutra,” he suggested, the necklace that identified her as a married woman.

  The story continues through further trials and disasters, the details depending as usual on which of the Vedas and the Puranas you preferred. In one version, Harishchandra is even ordered to execute his wife by cutting off her head, and agrees—and only then finally realizes who she is. But since this is intended as an inspirational tale, all the variant endings are of course happy ones. Harishchandra passes the test of the gods; light streams down on the family from heaven; young Rohitashwa is restored to life. The Doms, having forced a king to do their bidding, might still occupy the lowest rung on the ladder of caste, but on the cremation grounds, they acquire their own kind of nobility. From now on, the supreme authority among them will be known as the Dom Raja.

  Gandhi used to say that the story of King Harishchandra always made him weep, and it is still taught in schools as a parable of honesty and integrity. However, you will also sometimes hear Indians using the king’s name as a term of derision, applied to someone who takes those qualities to a pigheaded extreme.

  SLOWLY-SLOWLY

  Other than a raised plinth where notable citizens are sometimes cremated, Harishchandra Ghat isn’t much to look at. Usually there are only one or two fires burning there. When I strolled past the ghat one morning, a man was gearing up for the skull-breaking. “My mother!” he shouted at me, raising the stick above his head in a samurai pose. “Hundred-dollar photo only! Hundred-dollar photo!”

  Behind him was a building that was a tour de force of ramshackle ugliness. It was perched on cement columns that were staggered to conform to the slope above the ghat. Snugged into the open space between the columns was the Vadav Tea Stall, with a sign that read, “Mineral Water Toilet Paper Coke Pepsi Chocolate & Sigrate.” The building itself had brick walls that seemed unfinished, although one of them was painted an inexplicable lipstick pink. There were eccentric balconies and crenellations, and turret windows had been tacked onto the walls. Two spindly smokestacks rose from the roof, one metal and the other encased in a concrete base and both of them held upright with guy ropes. It was like some demented LEGO version of a cross between a medieval castle, a Mughal palace, and a power plant.