Varanasi

Saturday in Varanasi is obviously washing day! There were hundreds of people spread along the waterfront flogging clothes on semi immersed stones. Rows and rows of clothes lines erected to bamboo posts and all manner of styles of clothing (jeans, shirts, saris, mens wraps, etc) laid out on steps, pavement and concrete hillside, making a fabric patchwork of colour.

One of the main attractions in Varanasi is of course the ghats, where we have witnessed bathing, scrubbing (including washing bikes!), ceremonies and burning. As we walked along the kilometres of ghats, every second step is punctuated with cries from touts aging between 2 and 82, "Boat Madam? Very cheap, madam."

Our first night in Varanasi we went down to the ghats to see the spectacle which is the nightly ceremony of performance, fire and prayer, followed by the hundreds of spectators going to the waters edge to throw handfuls of colourful flowers into the ganges with their prayers.

The view from our lodge is often clouded by billows of smoke rising up from small fires burning timber and yes, bodies.
Mourning families of the dead purchase carefully weighed logs of wood from piles stacked up around the ghat. The cost depends on the type of wood used, sandalwood being the most expensive and also how much wood is needed. Which equates essentially to how big the body is - how long it will take to turn to ash. The bodies are carried in turn on wooden stretches wrapped in cloth and shrouded in the same yellow and orange flowers offered by worshippers to the sacred Ganges. It is an indescribable feeling watching a body wobble with dead weight past you, carried by a group of running, chanting men down the winding, slippery slated laneways to the ghat. The bodies are laid down, just outside the area of fires until it is their time to be immersed into the waters of the Ganges and laid onto one of over 15 fires in order to send the spirit straight to God. This is the ghat for "good people only", we are told, "criminals and sadhus" burn privately in the ghat around the corner.
We stood from a high vantage point waiting for the bodies to be brought until after 10 minutes or so, when we saw the skeletal frames of human corpses reveal themselves inside the flames. The workers prodded and tended the fires, ignited by a 2000 year old flame and sparks exploded like silent fireworks into the black smokey sky.
Beside us a woman sat rocking crying and wailing over a yellow clothed body, signifiying it was a young woman. It was that one womans sound of grief that was more affecting even than the two skeletons whos heads and torsos protruded from their fires, refusing to be burnt.
Just as life is excruciatingly public in India, so is death it seems. Unaccustomed to funeral-crashing, we turned to go as the smoke of burning corpses thickened and engulfed us, stinging our eyes for hours onwards. Our exit hastened by the intense confrontation of a man who closed in on us, asking for money for the old lady in the building opposite who was waiting to die.
We have befriended Varanasi after a challenging introduction of lying rickshaw drivers (worse than usual that is), early monsoon rains and a damp, dank room.
Our hopes are that our long trip south to Puri tonight will be the start of warmth and maybe a little less chaos...but we are in India!