On the Ganges by George Black

Author:George Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

THE SPECTACLE OF WOOD

Sometimes, Pinku said, as the mourners wait for the flame to be lit and debate the purpose and meaning of life, you may hear a song by the sixteenth-century poet-saint Kabir.

Dekh tamasha lakri ka

Jite lakri

Marte lakri

Kabir is subject to endless subtleties of translation, but in essence this meant:

Behold the spectacle of wood

Wood when you are alive

Wood when you die

As the afternoon faded into dusk at Manikarnika, a group of men built the largest and most elaborate pyre I’d seen all day, right at the water’s edge, stacking a latticework of whole logs that were almost a foot in diameter and topping it with greenery and sandalwood. It was a display of piety and also a show of the family’s wealth. For reasons both spiritual, worldly, and downright venal, everyone involved in the business of death on the cremation grounds has a reason to burn as much wood as they can.

But I wanted to know where all the wood came from, now that India’s Supreme Court had upheld a law that prohibited, with only a few exceptions, the cutting of any tree in an effort to conserve the country’s vanishing forests. That at least was the theory.

* * *

We headed out on S-5, the state highway south of Varanasi. At the entrance to one small village, someone had strung a rope across the road. Some men were sitting around watching boys playing cricket in a dried-up irrigation canal. One of them wandered over and stuck his palm through the window of the car. The driver gave him ten rupees. The man slung a garland of marigolds over the steering wheel.

“What was that all about?” I asked Pinku.

“Oh, this village has some kind of local demigod. He’s supposed to be very twisted and … what is the word in English? Short-tempered? So you have to give a donation to his temple.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else he might make your car crash.”

Thirty miles on, past the nondescript town of Ahraura, we pulled over at a chai stall. To the west of the road a small, pretty river meandered through scrubby woodland splashed with crimson blooms of Java cassia. To the east was a wildlife sanctuary where the forest was denser and there were said to be pythons and gharials—fish-eating crocodiles—as well as various rare species of deer and antelope.

We hiked upstream. The river was low and bony in the blistering heat, and it was easy to hop from one side to the other across the flat shelves of exposed bedrock. Eventually the scrub gave way to thicker forest, and after half an hour or so, the trail ended abruptly at a deep horseshoe-shaped pool. Trees grew out of the sheer, layered rock face that encircled the pool, and half a dozen bridal-veil falls dropped sixty or seventy feet into the pale green water. I stood under the cloud of spray to cool off by the roofless ruins of a hermit’s hut. It was a place of great serenity, and it was easy to see why a renunciant would come here to find refuge from the turmoil of the world.

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