To the Stray in Varanasi
Perhaps it was unavoidable for your death to be a mere sideshow in a city where death is ubiquitous. Die in Varanasi, and you’ll never come back—that’s what the believers say. It’s a place where people go to be cremated by the shores of the Ganga, the prodigious river that seeps down from the Himalayas out into the Bay of Bengal, purifying all that it submerges. Death in Varanasi confers a special karmic cleansing on a person tired of the protracted cycle of birth and death—it offers them a way off the ride, to a state called moksha.
I went to Varanasi specifically to see death. If you ever came to my country, you’d understand how death was, for me, a leaden figure obscured from view like a virgin behind a black screen, as though modesty and shame were its chief concerns. To catch a glimpse of it was to exploit an oversight. I was driven by the kind of anxious curiosity that makes you check under the bed at night before turning the lights out, that draws your eye into the mangled particulars of roadkill.
What I really wanted was to be like you: someone who’d seen the whole act, many times through. I loved life—at that time, it was the freedom of backpacking, the giddiness of possibility, the spice that burned my insides. I wanted to live as many lives as I could. I dreaded the idea of an ending, of letting go—which is why I wanted to see death up close. You ate death for breakfast, lapping it up from puddles and breathing it in with the bonfire smoke as you watched countless bodies burn with a yawn, a stretch, and a back-leg scratch behind the ear. I wanted the same kind of acceptance, and to understand why a release from repeated lives was something to be desired.
The day we met, I stepped through the narrow streets with my arms folded against the tide of people. As I emerged by the Ganga, I was pushed into a small procession headed out towards Manikarnika, the spot on the riverbank where the business of cremation was in full swing. Down at the ghat—the steps leading into the river—five or six fires were already burning. Blackened cremation workers swept ashes into small mounds, and onlookers sat or stood in groups all around. I joined them on a wall above the ghat. One man’s body on a stretcher was wrapped so tightly in cloth that I could read the details of his outline: thin but rounded at the belly. I could see the top of his shaved head, dull grey in color and rough with stubble. At first, I was uneasy and afraid to look, but the corpses kept coming. Every few minutes, a new body would be hoisted down the steps of the ghat. Laid out on stretchers and tightly swaddled, their complete stillness began to reassure me.
The cloth had fallen back from one woman’s head and I could see her face. It contained an absence with little charge. For a moment, I felt like I was getting a grip on something important—the dead appeared serene.
A new procession approached. This time, the mourners were shouldering a body much smaller than the ones before. They came out onto the steps that descended to the river, winding their way down between piles of logs. It was a child, maybe even a toddler, covered with colorful fabrics, wrapped up like a gift. The people around me fell quiet.
That was the moment I spotted you. You were lying at the top of the steps that led down to the burning ghat and the procession had to shift to the side to avoid you. You were on your side, and your body was convulsing in waves of spasms. They averted their eyes. Your whines tore through the silence.
“In that moment, I felt fortunate to be human. We help ourselves, I thought, by making mothers of rivers and legends of creation. We’ve made something that eases the passage.”
I got down off the wall and walked towards you. As if fighting demonic possession, you were clawing and spitting profanities, foam spewing from your mouth. It was a white, viscous kind of foam that stuck to your face and picked up the dirt as you rolled onto your back and from side to side. What was it? Epilepsy? Rabies? Whatever the matter, you were unwanted and intolerable. The people there were about to burn the body of a child; they didn’t want to keep looking over at you. They had enough horror on their hands.
I wanted to look away, too. It was awful, the frenzy that was eating you and the fight you gave against it. It was one thing, I realized, to show up after death, tracing its quiet footprints in the newly fallen ashes; it’s something else to be in the ring with it, right up close as it wrests life out onto the ropes.
A group of strays—your pack? your family?—lounged nearby. Some reclined on their sides, mangy fur over skinny ribcages rising and falling, others lay with their bellies on the warm concrete, their heads resting on their front paws, their eyelids blinking the flies away. They seemed to know the rite intimately and were waiting patiently, witnessing.
Every so often, your convulsions would subside and I felt tangible relief until you started up again. With each lull, I took a few steps towards you. I was worried you might lash out at me, but I also wanted to be near you. I willed your death to hurry up and finish the job, to stop the wailing that must have been anathema to the mourners. No thoughts of moksha for you; all that came out of you was the primordial struggle of a drowning fly or a hunted wildebeest. It was life doing the one thing life does—fighting viciously for perpetuation.
In that moment, I felt fortunate to be human. We help ourselves, I thought, by making mothers of rivers and legends of creation. We’ve made something that eases the passage.
The child’s body was laid down on the pyre. A teenage boy approached with a torch and waved it under the platform. The fire jumped up quickly and within minutes, the pyre was ablaze. The flames were strong and resolute, so bright they obscured the body inside. The child’s family looked on.
You had been quiet for several minutes. I chanced a few more paces in your direction until I was close enough to see into your eyes, wet, still animated with a nameless force. A perfect miniature image of the pyre burned in them. Suddenly, they rolled around to look at me. For a moment, I held the touch of your consciousness. Life is unmistakable, I thought. Always, it recognizes itself. Death—as violent as it was—was not the annihilator, but the transformer.
Minutes later, you had that same benign stillness of the rest of Varanasi’s dead. Your eyes turned opaque and your body was spent.
The other dogs showed no surprise. They got up slowly, one by one, like a dazed audience blinking back out into the light. They stretched, looked around, then drifted off, their noses mining the ground for a trail away from the smoke.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vanessa Able is the author of Never Mind the Bullocks: One Girl’s 10,000 Km Adventure Around India in the World’s Cheapest Car. She was the editor-in-chief of Time Out Istanbul and went on to be a freelance contributor for The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler, as well as an associate editor at Esquire Latinoamérica in Mexico City. Vanessa is the founder and editor of The Dewdrop.
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Header photo by Srivatsan