The ghats in the evenings are a huge dhal pot of sound and smell simmering with all the scents and echoes of my life; the bells and the drums, the cymbals and pipes of the puja

I met a boy beside the Ganges. His name was Ranji and he talked to me about his city while around us the old place heaved and sighed beside the sacred river.

“I tell you the smell of burning flesh is sweet and sad. I only really noticed it when I had been away from my city for the first time. My brother and I went to get our aunt from her village when her husband died. I had never left my home before and we were away for six days. We brought Auntiji back on the bus, our faces crushed against the window like buzzing flies in a jar.

“I learnt about the hell wait; that stifling time when you are caught on the bus with no movement, the sun creating an oven, searing through the metal roof. I saw my sweat running down the aisle from my feet. Auntiji told me to jump up on the bus when it came to the terminal placey and lie across all the seats I could cover. My arms were popping out of their sockets when I bounced myself up through the window. I did squeeze in but only because I am like a willow whip. I am fifteen but you see my chest is not so wide now. I am hoping it will be bigger soon. I lay down on those burning seats and the plastic was sticking to every part of my skin as if I was made of boiled fishbone glue. Auntiji scolded me when she came to sit down for making so much noise about the small space I had saved. It was her great big legs melting across all the seats that took up the room.

“We walked down to the ghats from the centre of the city where the buses stop and that was when I noticed that I had been away from the smell that had been in my nose every day of my life; that sweet smell of death and rebirth.

“From our family place on the ghat my father can spit betel juice beyond the chai stall, the distance of six men lying end to end. This morning there was a dead calf by our place and he spat clean over it from the edge of the water without one speck touching the bloated belly. One of my aunts and Mamaji were making noises like mad chickens when he was doing it. I am sure that Mamaji is proud that he can spit so far though it would never do for her to say so.

“You see the bottle and jar woman sitting above our place. The pilgrims buy from her to take drops of Ma Ganga back to their villages. She finds her bottles from the dustbins of hotels in town. She is not so proud that she cannot root amongst the tourist filth with the pie dogs and flies. It makes her laugh that she is selling the tourists their own rubbish. We put our water in copper pots that I scour each morning in the river sand until they glow pink like the bottle and jar woman’s eyes when she has found her way to the feni shop. It makes my mother smile when her pots glow. I know that she is proud of me for this.

“My sisters’ hair is also glowing when they have been washing it in the river. It falls in glossy twists as they plait it. I am teasing them sometimes because I shout to them that they are making their hair like dark snakes, snakes that will be sliding into their cholis . One sister makes her daily dark red bindi for she is married. The other does not; she is twelve. She will marry next year when the cold season starts. Our family and that of her bridegroom-to-be are already arguing about her dowry. My father wants his daughters to be burnt on the ghats in the natural time, not by a dowry feud before they have had a chance to live and have children of their own.

“My cousin is sitting next to us. You see the short stubble on his head? That is because it is a part of our mourning for the oldest of sons to have his head shaved in reverence to a dead parent. We say that it was at his mother’s breast that he suckled so his hair is not such a great sacrifice.

“His mother was burnt last week. They took so long to travel to the city because some of the buses were too crowded for her in her state of dying. But so very many people helped them, carrying her onto the buses and giving her food and water to ease the journey. She tried to make the pilgrimage around the Panchakroshi Road. We all knew that she would not be able to walk all of the 55 kilometres to make a good strong path for her rebirth. My cousin was carrying her for most of the way and Mamaji says that her light had gone out before she reached the end of her journey. I think it does not matter if her eyes did not see, her karma finished the task. My cousin was stinking of all the dead things you can think off and he could smell the smoke on his body for three days after they had burnt his mother, even after he had scoured himself with Lifebuoy many times.

“Lifebuoy soap, the smell that I wake up to every morning. I am half-asleep when I walk down in the dawn mist and wade into the river with the holy bathers on all sides of me. The first layer of smell is the claggy blanket of shit that carries from the tip of the ghats. I close my nose to this, rolling up my lips, you see like this, right up under my nostrils, and breathing through my clenched teeth. So it is the Lifebuoy that wakes me. I take my clothes off and dive into the thick water from the end of the ghat. Mamaji thinks I am too old to dive like the small children but I will go on diving as long as I can. When I am rich and fat, when my chest is big and wide and I have children and a wife, I will not dive any more. I will stand in the water and look at my stretching belly and thank Lakshmi for my great good luck. There is a man like that who stands in the same place to wash each day. His belly has swollen to such a size with good living that he can balance a copper pot on top of it and I am telling you it is just staying there. But then he is always starting to laugh and the pot tumbles into the water. He gives a rupee to the boy who can dive down and find the pot for him first.

“When I come up from my dive I can hear the splashing from the dhobi ghat; salwars and dhotis being beaten threadbare, leaving their button and zip entrails all over the rocks. The dhobi wallahs swing the clothes in big circles each time and they leave arcs of bright drops that sparkle in the air. If I squeeze up my eyes the muscles on their backs could be snakes wriggling under a sari.

“My mother and sisters come down to wash. Mamaji and my married sister wash under their sari petticoats never showing their intimate skin. My little sister does not care. She is almost as flat as I am and she jumps up and down, naked in the water, until Mamaji shouts at her. Strange to think that next year she too will have a husband and a sari petticoat to wash under. I sometimes see the other boys and some of the men looking at her in that way that they want to own her. It makes me sad because I would like to let her be my little sister for some time more. She does not seem ready for all of this now. Maybe it is not right that a man should own a woman but Mamaji tells me that it is dangerous for me to think these things and the gods will spit at me if my thoughts turn into words.

“There are more than a hundred ghats but ours is the main ghat, the Dasashwamedh ghat where the Lord Brahma sacrificed ten horses so that Shiva could return after some time in banishment. This is where the noise is, the bustle, the beggars and the boats full of sleepy foreigners trying to see what is happening at the burning ghats before the sunrise. This is where the deals are made and marriages arranged. I wonder if Shiva sees all the money that changes hands while we purify our bodies and scrub our teeth with twigs. Perhaps that is why the water has the smell of death to punish us for making deals in this our holiest of places.

“When the sun sets and the quiet evening breeze comes off the river we leave our work in the town and return to our place on the ghat. Bobbing bunches of small boys run around like packs of pie dogs, yapping at everyone, teasing, pushing and screaming. I used to be one of them but I am thinking I am getting wiser now. Groups of people wander among the peanut sellers. Beggar children buzz around the tourists; flies settling and taking off when the tourists brush them away. Some of them pinch their baby brothers and sisters to make them cry for a few pice or a handful of rice. The bottle and jar woman’s father cut off her foot when she was a baby so that she would be able to beg and make people sad for her. But she was too proud for that and her brother made her a wooden roller to walk on so that she could go out to make her living from old bottles and jars.

“Begging is quite a trade round here; a bit of rice each day for the harijans on the steps down to the ghats makes our column of karma points longer, we are all needing to be on the credit hunt for those kinds of points. There are two stops that the lepers fight over, waving their stumps in each others’ faces. The first is the top of the steps so that they can catch the tourists on their way down when their eyes and minds are still honeyed with sleep. The second is the bottom where they prod the firangi with their mutations as they come off the river, awed by our holy rituals. That is when the tourists feel most bad and small, when the strength of our ancient spiritual consciousness cuts into them like hot sticks into ghee, making them take money from the funny banana bags they wear under their clothes. Their money is sometimes a bit wet from their foreign sweat and I have seen beggars washing it in the river to make it clean again.

“The evening is the soft time. The crowd sits and drinks chai. It seems to be the thing that we can all do together whatever our colour or religious thingy. That must make it a good thing to do. What a tiptop job that would be to make my father proud: Ranji, the chai stall holder of the Dasashwamedh ghat. The people would sit at my stall, cross-legged and take in the washing and talking of the ghats as they are drinking my chai. ‘Panch aur chai lao’ (five more teas please) would be my favourite cry. That would give me a business to make my belly stretch enough to be balancing copper pots.

“The tourists go out in boats hiding their cameras under their shirts and scarves. They all want to take pictures of Manikarnika, our main burning ghat. It was here that Shiva dug a tank, filling it with his own sweat, as he tried to find an earring that his most beautiful and willful wife Parvati had dropped in that place. It must have been a very small thing for Shiva to make so much sweat trying to find it.

“These tourists are not seeing the ghat police in the crowd who follow the bulges in their shirts and watch for the flashes from viewing boats as they pass our holiest burning place. It thrills and excites the firangi to take pictures of our Hindu bodies burning. We all watch when the boats come back and the ghat police lead away the red-faced, shouting tourists. They know they have been doing wrong because every hotel tells them not to take the pictures, but even though they know they shout very loud. It makes us laugh and we like them to see us this way.

“Four hundred bodies are burnt each day and night; two hours for each one until they are burnt down to ash to be scattered over Ma Ganga. The tourists wince when the bodies are beaten down into the flames by the burners. Sometimes the feet burn off and have to be lifted back onto the pyre. The tourists turn away and I have seen them be sick while the dry-eyed sons of the dead with their shaven heads watch the burning bodies without their faces even so much as stirring. I will light my mother and father’s pyres and the tourists will watch their deflated bodies being eaten by the flames. They will see the sparks fly up and turn the sky pink below the piggy tail curls of smoke. It will cost me four hundred rupees to buy the hardwood to burn their bodies so that the dogs will not be able to find anything left when they dig in the cold ashes. You see those fat dogs that scrounge at the burning ghats? That is because families could not afford enough wood to burn their dead down to ash so the dogs have chompy chunks to chew.

“A sadhu died last night. He will be dropped in the river with a rock to pull down his body. Fire is not allowed to consume sadhus, children and lepers or those who have died of smallpox. Sitala, the goddess of fever, must not be cremated. So those bodies ferment above our ghat and we wash and drink from the water that they rot in. Papaji says that each day I drink smallpox and leprosy but that Shiva protects me from these deaths. Each teeny tiny sip tempts my body to fight against these diseases all the time so that I am always ready and strong.

“The ghats in the evenings are a huge dhal pot of sound and smell simmering with all the scents and echoes of my life; the bells and the drums, the cymbals and pipes of the puja and the bang of the firecrackers set off by the packs of boys to scare away the bad spirits and frighten the tourists. We have been coming here all my life, and before that time too, but Mamaji still jumps when the firecrackers go off, making her stomach ripple under her choli like many butterflies hanging on a flower.

“This morning I was squatting against the wall to ease my back while I was abluting. There was a boat of Buddhist monks going past. Their robes were saffron so they were not from my country. Their heads were shaven in the same way as we shave ours to mourn. Their raw skulls shone in the sun. They pointed their cameras at me and took pictures. Why would Buddhist monks want pictures of a Hindu boy shitting on the ghats? Why would they want to see our ghats when the Buddha gave his first sermon at Sarnath outside the city, not by our ghats? The Buddhists are seeming strange sometimes to me in their flame orange robes without gods to pray to.

“My father used to fly a kite with me, the little orange square jumping and diving around the lintels and high windows. Papaji would run and laugh and hold up the kite after my poor paper bird had crashed to the ground. He has not run for a long time now. In the evenings he looks towards Manikarnika and his eyes are saying that he is closer to that place than he is to running with the dancing kite. But, he still smiles and laughs as he talks in the water and when he can spit his betel juice beyond the chai stall.

“Once I hit a Baba with my kite when it danced away from my hands as if my bird had been burnt by the sun. I ran away so fast that I thought I would fly. The Baba smiled at my father and told him that it was better for high spirits to come out than be suffocated in the soul. Now the Baba sits near us on the ghat. He smiles and his eyes are soft blue and watery. His name is Lalbaba. He talks to the firangi in their language about Calcutta, where he was raised in an orphanage, and his life on the road as a sadhu. Sometimes they give him rupees and barfi, guilty that they have homes of their own and so many dollars.

“Lalbaba is one of the few who smiles at my Auntie Biba. She does not hide under her sari petticoat when she washes. She stands in the water half-naked, her breasts like oranges dropped into wet sacking. Mamaji will not talk to her when she is like this even though she is Papaji’s sister. She thinks Auntie Biba is going mad because she washes naked and wears her hair loose. I think she is happy like Lalbaba. She smiles when Mamaji screeches at her to cover herself up and tie back her hair. I like her loose hair. It falls long down her back like the frayed curtain outside the room where I sleep. She has been shouting out strange things in her sleep in the night. I heard her words a few nights past though I have not told Mamaji what they were.

“‘I see my brother’s soul rising out from the top of his head. Samsara is calling to him and he is calling back,’ she cried though she said nothing of it during the next day.”

Three weeks later and I have found Ranji again.

“Auntie Biba was right. I have Lalbaba with me. His smile is sad today and it is making the white and yellow chalk on his face crack. You see the barber is shaving my head. It makes me sorry to see all the hair falling around my feet but his hand is very steady so I do not think that he will cut me. Lalbaba has an unstitched cloth of white for me to wear when I light Papaji’s pyre at Manikarnika ghat.

“I walked down to our place on the ghat extra-specially early before even the first of the dawn callers were clearing their throats and marking the stone with betel-stained globules. I sat and watched the chains of sodden flowers being washed against the steps. The tourists buy garlands and candle flowers on the way down to the ghats and we all set them afloat on the water so that Ma Ganga always has flowers in her hair, fresh and bright like the jasmine in my sisters’ plaits. There was one candle flower still burning, the petals shriveled around the edge of the tired flame. You may be thinking I am being crazy but I think that Papaji was in that brave flicker. I will try not to cry because the day Papaji died he came down to the ghat with me and laughed when he spat his betel juice beyond the chai stall and the bottle and jar woman clapped, smacking her hollow belly in delight.”

As I left Ranji the sun had burnt the last of the early mist off the Ganges. The morning light was diffused to a mucky orange by the pollution of the shuddering city. The river gave off her uterine odour as the heat settled over her.

(originally written for BBC Radio 4)