Sacred and Profane

At the cremation ghat of Kankhal, on the outskirts of the pilgrimage town of Haridwar, an old woman's body was burning. Her name was Ambika Chaurey, and she had died that morning. She was 82. After the body was cleaned, her male relatives loaded it onto a garishly painted flatbed truck and drove four hours from the city of Meerut in the state of Uttar Pradesh. They arrived at Kankhal in the late afternoon. Some of the men carried armloads of firewood that they had bought from one of the small shops that lined the narrow lane to the ghat. Two other pyres were already burning bright; several more were smoldering mounds of ash.

The priest was a surprisingly young man of no more than 30, with a three-day stubble, hair that was heavily oiled, and a bright splotch of vermilion, the tilak, on his forehead. He said that it took about three hours for a body to burn, but much longer before the bones and ashes had cooled sufficiently to be consigned to the Ganga.

The body was adorned like a bride and garlanded with flowers. A wooden frame formed a kind of canopy, decorated with yellow, red, and blue plastic ornaments that resembled small balloons. Two of the men removed this now and threw it in the river, where it drifted away in the brisk current. The eldest son knelt and kissed his mother's feet. Then he struck a couple of matches and tossed them on the pyre. There was a whomp of orange flame, and I noticed, as the burning branches fell in on the body, that he had not removed the old lady's glasses.

A second priest had set to work on one of the other pyres, shoveling bones and ashes into the river. The moment of dignity curdled as the burned remains joined the flotsam of plastic bags, garlands of orange marigolds, food wrappers, chunks of Styrofoam, and a dark ebb of raw sewage. The great mass of filth would gather volume as it drifted downriver. By the time the Ganga has passed through Varanasi, the holiest of all Indian cities, the fecal coliform bacteria count is between one million and two million parts per 100 milliliters. The safe level for bathing is 500. And taking a dip in the Ganga is the ambition of every Hindu.

Particles of black ash were drifting toward us now from Ambika Chaurey's funeral pyre, settling on our skin and clothing. "You'd better go down to the river and wash before you leave," the young priest said.