Death becomes Varanasi

I could see the eyes burning. The flames in the pyre, pacific and tired, slowly ate up the skin on the face and moved up and around. This was the first time I was seeing a body burning from up-close. I never liked funerals. In fact, I dreaded them. My mother knew this. Which is why when I told her I was going to Varanasi to shoot a short film, she couldn’t hide her surprise. Is this where they burn bodies in rows and columns, she asked. You’d be surrounded by death and, of course, corpses, she warned. I saw the first body on my way to Varanasi city from Babatpur’s Lal Bahadur Shastri International Airport. It was perched on a small van, decked in marigold. The day was sunny, bright and hot. The dead, covered with garlands and wreaths, lay in peace as the van negotiated the busy road. The living — seven sullen faces crammed into the vehicle — appeared impatient to reach their destination.

Their destination — the famous ghats of Varanasi on the Ganges — seemed a big, busy alley of death. The air near Manikarnika Ghat (Varanasi has some hundred ghats) was pungent and thick. Flowers and agarbattis (joss sticks) marked every stone and wall around. Narrow, dingy lanes gushing down from the town, into the ghats below, were filled with shops and people, many carrying the dead for last rites.

The night air was unexpectedly cold. Winter had just ended and people were not wearing woollens any more. Even I didn’t have any. So when the cold wind from across the river passed through the ghats, I longed for warmth. I couldn’t find a tea-seller nearby. Our shoot was nearing end and it would be a while before we got back to the hotel. Shivering, I moved towards a burning pyre nonchalantly. The flames made me warm and I wanted to stand closer. That’s when I noticed the eyes of the body. The flames had licked away the eyelids by then and the burning eyes looked glazed.

I peered deeper into the pyre as I felt much warmer. In all likelihood, I would never have met this man or woman. ‘It’ might have lived a life of happiness or sorrow. I might not have even liked this person had we met. But now I felt an unexplained sense of bonding, to this one. Especially because it reminded me of a friend from childhood who had hugged me one afternoon when I was shivering in the cold as rains lashed our village, soaking our frail bodies. My friend was also cold, but a flash of warmth cut through those layers of chillness. A camaraderie had warmed up the moment. Like this moment in Varanasi. People find an unusual camaraderie with death here. I saw a man lighting a cigarette from a burnt-out pyre. Did that hot bed belong to his kin? I’d never know. But I wouldn’t be surprised even if it belonged to someone he knew.

I stood near the pyre till my ‘new’ friend’s body was totally consumed, wondering why people flock to this city to see their loved ones being reduced to ashes while many others — tourists (Indians and foreigners) and locals — come to see just the burning bodies. I think I have the answer now. Death loses its glitter and sparkle in Varanasi. All the melodrama, conspiracy of rituals and religion, the sound and fury of belongingness and lack of it, the festooning of emotions — faked or fermented — that get tagged to death elsewhere in the country lose their sheen in Varanasi. Death becomes the new normal. It is plain and simple. Short and loaded. Like a haiku or a story by Munshi Premchand or Vaikom Basheer. This organic commonality attributed to the dead helps the living beat death at its own game, inside its own den. You’re not the hero, nor the villain, we tell death. You are routine. You just happen.

What happens to you in Varanasi stays with you longer than you wish. The philosophical jolt is so strong that the next time you encounter death on a street or inside a room, you muster the courage to look in its eyes and find a long-lost friend. I think that’s why these men and women go to Varanasi, despite its fake priests and yoga gurus, ugly lanes, filthy water, toxic air, menacing touts and the mad rush to burn bodies. Because everyone wants to die smiling, I guess.

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