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- Author, Pico Iyer*
- Scroll for BBC Travel
February 19, 2023
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Cremations in Varanasi take place 24 hours a day
For centuries, Hindu pilgrims have come to Varanasi to die, believing that doing so will bring salvation. But as writer Pico Iyer wanders aimlessly, he realizes that this city of death is actually a city of joy.
Read his story below.
There were fires, six, seven in number, rising through the winter mist. Groups of men, shawls wrapped around their heads, eyes gleaming in the halflight, crowded barefoot around the flames and advanced. A nearly naked figure with disheveled, dusty dreadlocks down to his waist stabbed a charred head with a bamboo pole. In the distance there was singing, bells rattling, angry drumming, and in the hellish darkness of New Year’s twilight I could make out little more than orange flames in the distance on the riverbank.
How much of it did I imagine? How strong was the effect of “alien fascination” or the result of jet lag and repression? People came at me out of the mist, covered from head to toe in ash, bearing the threepronged trident of the patron god of the holy city, Shiva the Destroyer.
As I walked through the small alleys behind the flames, I came to a maze of narrow alleys where an extinguished candle burned in the darkness of a dirtfloored cave. A boy sat on the floor behind a scale.
The cows ran incessantly down the clogged passage strewn with manure. Every now and then another group of singers would pass by, carrying a dead body under a gold shroud on a bamboo stretcher to the river. I pressed myself against the wall and felt a whisper of mortality.
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Varanasi is considered the spiritual center of India.
I groped my way through the utter darkness, through the maze of narrow passages, and another body emerged, two women in their best silk saris walking barefoot through the soft mud to the holy waters. I followed my intuition through the dark streets, past small candles flickering in shrines and openings where men whispered sacred syllables.
Then, as I turned a corner, I came to an intersection and three men stopped in front of me, guns visible behind them.
It was strange to think that seventytwo hours ago I’d been on the other side of the world, celebrating a peaceful New Year in the sunshine. Now goats with red spots on their foreheads trotted about, embers burned and lanterns swam across the river in the mist. Orange faces hung on the walls, laughing monkey gods, towering sacred phalluses.
Shops everywhere sold sandalwood paste and clarified butter oil for anointing the dead, and small clay urns for the ashes.
The City of Death was once known as “Kash” or “City of Light”. The English writer Richard Lannoy, who almost lost his soul to Varanasi, called it the city of darkness and dreams. In a long and often hallucinatory book, he quoted the former Benares City Chief Superintendent of Police, who described “the kidnapping of women from the temples, prostitution in the name of God, the proliferation of theft at the place of pilgrimage, the cannibalistic customs of the Aghoris, the drunken orgies of falsehood” described Tantriker”.
However, what surprised me the most when I started walking its streets was that the city of death was without a doubt a city of joy. People rushing past me to the burning pyres, carrying corpses to the holy river, raised their voices in praise and a great, overwhelming cry of thanks.
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At night only the lamps can be seen through the fog.
Urban India is all about immersion in intensity a kind of shock therapy but the holy city inhabits a category of its own. Traffic converged on every inch of the street from all directions, but true to its mystical defiance of reason, the town had no traffic lights. Here and there, an elderly policeman with a mask over his mouth stretched out a hopeful arm as cars, cows, bicycles and trucks recklessly passed him. Dogs slept in the middle of a busy street—Varanasi’s Fifth Avenue, I guessed—and men sprawled (sleeping, I hoped) at the edge and on the sidewalk. In the middle of the street, a crowd had gathered around a man who was dancing and brandishing swords.
I knew the holy waters should be my first stop, so I left my bags at a hotel and took a car to go to the Ghats (stairs that give access to the Ganges). During the 20minute tour, we passed two cheering funeral processions, two children’s parades.
“This is a very bad time,” a young local turned from the driver’s seat to warn me (behind him I could only see a mass of bodies and vehicles angry but not moving forward, their horns honking) . “Her name is Kharmas. Everyone hides around this time; nobody talks about weddings and things like that. Everyone is silent. It’s like a curse on the city.”
If this is Varanasi at its quietest, I thought, barely audible as a train also roared overhead on a brick bridge, I couldn’t imagine it on one of its frequent festival days. “The curse ends on January 14th,” my new friend told me. “Then let’s celebrate.” No reason to celebrate for someone who, like me, was due to leave on January 13th.
We got off at a Christian church and joined the heap of bodies being carried to the holy river. Signs along the street spoke of “oldest center of abacus classes” and “fame ladies’ seamstresses,” which made me wonder if the fame was with the ladies or with the sewing. “British School of Languages is now Trounce Education,” I read on another sign — a fun summary of the end of the Empire.
In Varanasi, half a million people are squeezed into the darkness of a square kilometer of lanes known as the Old City. The result is that some foreign visitors more or less give up, while others wonder if someone put a hallucinogenic substance in their drink.
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Processions of corpses fill the city streets towards the river
“Everything changes all the time here,” my guide proclaimed as we reached the riverbank, where holy men sat on the ground under colorful umbrellas, chanting and rubbing paste and ashes on their foreheads. “Different colors. different spirit. other energy. You must be on high alert when you come to my town.”
I had already noticed this.
We walked along the river, dodging garbage and excrement on all sides, and we passed a nearly naked man looking down at us, sheltered by a small fire in a shack.
“Does he meditate?” I asked.
“Everything is ashes to him,” was the reply. “These sadhus are very fond of living with cremation. They don’t wear clothes like us. They do nothing like people living in the material world. They want to live in a world of ash.”
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Sadhus, holy men, roam the streets of Varanasi
A little further down we almost bumped into a man in a light blue robe and turban who appeared to be joking as if he were chatting at the neighborhood barber shop (although here in Varanasi the neighborhood barber shop like the cemetery, church and zoo it was on the street, open to everyone).
“Laughing yoga master,” declared my guide, and he himself burst out laughing, as if abruptly spurred on by sudden enlightenment.
A huge, bloated cow floated past slowly. We stumbled aboard a small rocking boat as, on the beach, a handful of handsome young men in intricately gilded pantaloons held fivelight oil lamps and began to practice the purification by fire they would ritually perform that night. Other boats were carrying pilgrims to the other dark shore, a long, empty sandbank, as far as I could tell. Fires burned to the north and south, and the air was thick with the smell of carnations and coal fires.
“Only in this town, sir, do you see a 24hour cremation,” the bosun said, as if speaking from a supermarket. In other cities, crematoria are traditionally placed outside the city gates in the south. Here they burn in the center of all life.
I went back to my hotel to take it all in. “Everything is in flux,” my young Virgil (Dante’s guide in The Divine Comedy) told me as we walked along the river. “Everything is a continual sequence of futures. Nothing stays the same.”
This text was originally published at https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cxexp1mgzldo
*Pico Iyer is the author of several travel books. This account has been adapted from his latest book, The Half Known Life, which is unpublished in Portuguese.