may Varanasi, the ancient city that the British called Benares, is the strangest place I've ever been, and yet at the same time, everything is simple. If there is any place in which one perceives that life and death are but consecutive segments of the same continuous line is this.
first thing we do upon arrival is peek into the Ganges. Just dusk when we reached the Dasaswamedh Ghat, one of the main stairs leading down to the river. " Young Brahmins perform the Ganga Aarti, a struggle between the fire. They do more than twenty centuries in the same place, facing the Ganges, like the priests who are reincarnated in other bodies since time immemorial. Mark Twain said that this city was older than history itself.
I suddenly feel lonely in a crowd. The noise I get muted. Slowly descended the steps into the Ganges milky presence is revealed to me in the dark.
following days we walked one and forth between the ghats, as if we were looking for something. But the reality is that here in Varanasi, there is nothing hidden. Everything is visible and the mystery is both its simplicity. To say that the Ganges, Ganga and here they call it, is a character in the city is too short. The Ganges is a rather wet and dense ubiquitous all over the city.
Again and again we dilute the main street traffic. Its density is difficult to understand for a Westerner. The pedestrian is not an individual walking, rather it is a particle that can only go with the flow. Like the Ganges, here collective is a stream that carries all the individual. Alvaro says Enterría in India by within the traffic here is a metaphor for the whole country always seems on the verge of collapse, and always manages to move forward.
Each evening we see several funeral processions. Carry the corpse on a stretcher, barely covered by a simple shroud. His way to warn the people away, we advance rapidly and quickly lost through the narrow streets Manikarnika way, the cremation ghat. Manikarnika
ghat is a large, very dark at night and dirtier than others. In some parts, is a real quagmire. But what makes it special is that is the main city crematorium. Here are burned a couple hundred bodies a day. All the dead of the city, except those who can not afford the wood (which will go to the electric crematorium) or the bodies that are considered pure (infants, shadús or holy men, pregnant women, etc).
In Manikarnika, the hustle is constant. There are over fifty pyres, so you can take a look at the different stages of the process. Nor have to wait long to get a new body and was on fire. The ritual is simple, fairly mundane. The family, with some appearance of disgust, they sit around the body.
An impromptu guide explains that sandalwood is the best wood for cremations. This explains why Manikarnika not smell like a chicken restaurant. On the contrary. The bodies are consumed, leaving the smell of incense heavy and greasy. It takes two hundred kilos of sandalwood to burn a body. The process takes about eight hours and the body is reduced to ashes.
In Varanasi, the city that the British called Varanasi, death is something very simple. The overwhelming ornamentation Judeo-Christian, the Mozart Requiem and Death in Venice of Thomas Mann, sound here affected, exaggerated. Here everything is simple. There is no mystery to those of sandalwood logs stacked along the Ganges, hoping for each of us.
(Brief Glossary: \u200b\u200b ghats are the stairs leading down to the river, the bids , religious ceremonies. The video is the Ganga Aarti in Dasaswamedh Ghat, The photo bath at dawn in the same place).
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