Holy Burning Pyre Bodies!

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lovingpenfull
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Holy Burning Pyre Bodies!

Post by lovingpenfull » November 1st, 2005, 8:30 am

That Holiest of Holies, the river Ganges, flows and gurgles and spits from up the Himalaya on down into the planes and it turns to salt at the mouth where it meets the Bay of Bengal. In the process it defines the eastern most boundry of a holy city called Varanasi, or Barenes, or Kashi. Where these two, the city and the river, meet, is an ultra sacred place, and many a devout coolie makes a pilgramage from whatever reach to bathe in the Great Mother. My view of it all is of course a bit less mystified and starry eyed, as I am a rational, scientific Westerner: it's damned flithy that river, and there's no cause to bath in it, unless you want to contract Hepatitus or Typhoid. One of the tenets of Hinduism is that the dead be burned, and what better place than just there on the river bank, they reason. I was walking along the river one day, having a look at all the ghats, places along the river where huge sets of stone steps descend into the river, and came across one with huge stacks of wood fuel piled generously around, forming a maze of walkways in between them. It turned out this was one of the cremation ghats where dead bodies are burned upon log pyres. Many were just piles of smoking ash as far as I could see, but a few had just started and I watched a body, draped in cloth, begin to burn. I was up above on the roof of one of the many castle-like hospices that are there to house the dying, and listened to this Indian explain the situation to me. Hindus, as well as Buddhists,
believe in Karma, the cycle of reincarnation, and what they seek is liberation from this process of death and rebirth. The Hindus call it Moshka, not having to be reborn, and it is thought that if you die
in the Ganges, or are burnt on those pyres, you attain
Moshka, gratis. So those that are about to die, the sick or elderly, sit and wait in the water, or if they have money they stay in these hospices, until they die. Their bodies are then washed clean of their Karma, so it's thought, and they are burned, if the family can afford the wood. So, there are a lot of people that are fanatically bent on ending up a corpse in this river or burned on its bank. In addition to that, there are some people that cannot be burned, and must be sunk into the river: those that have died by cobra bite, pregnant women, those with leprosy or small pox, small children and Sadus, holy people. Also, according to this man I was talking to, often the buttocks and the chest don't completely
burn, and so they find their way into the river too. So, bodies often are bobbing around in the river, a bit like, as in Greene's analogy, a meat stew at times. I had yet to see any bodies in the water, until this morning. There it was, all bloated with dark patches all over it, just floating there and nobody paying any attention to it. I followed it a ways, and it came pretty close to the shore, and I got a close look at it. While this man was explaining the process to me when I was at the cremation ghat the other day, I watched the families make beds of kindling and logs and then wash the body of the loved one in the river and then carry it over to the pyre on a bamboo stretcher and set it on fire, and couldn't help compair it to our way of dealing with cadavers in the West. Our way is surely a bit more creepy and bizarre. I couldn't stay very long for the ash and smoke that day, all the burning stinging my eyes and I could hardly get fresh air, even there above it all on the roof of that place. There were so many fires it seemed like I was right next to it all, pulling in drag after drag of people smoke. A few days after that I was walking along and came across another one of these cremation ghats, a smaller one, and saw up close a pile of red, charring logs with a leg sticking out of it, the skin bubbling and sizzling, a cloth over it drawing up taught from the heat. It all ends up in the river and everybody, the living, bath in it. At this point, and further upstream as well, the Ganges is septic, with hundreds of sewers discharging into it every minute. In fact, I read somewhere, there are some 1.5 million particles of some micro units of measurement of feces per liter of river water, the safe amount for bathing being less than 500! And these people wash their teeth in this water, indeed they do so as a religous rite. The old section of the city, the foriegner slum, is right there near the river, and is a tangle of narrow, dirty streets in which one often slips in cow shit and is hard put to see the sun for it is all a network of alleyways so tight as to see only noon sun. There are trickles of foriegners, many Japanese and Koreans, Isrealis, as well as those from other nations. We have our nice cozy restaurants and cafes aimed at our dollars or Euros or Sterling, and they serve to our tastes and well all act like Hemmingway in 20's Paris, or at least it once kind of seemed that way. Several tour folk are here to learn sitar or tabla and it is all quite merry and nice, gothic and morbid, and I just don't know when I'm a goin' leave it. Cheap enought, I'll be here a while.
I am looking for a home for my thoughts.

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Zlatko Waterman
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Post by Zlatko Waterman » November 1st, 2005, 10:34 am

A sharp, spattered and spontaneous carpet of description.

I enjoyed many details, particularly the ones about the sun showing only at noon down the steep corridors of buildings and the slipping in cow shit.

The eagerness to be gathered into the holy water is well sketched here.


--Z

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Lightning Rod
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Post by Lightning Rod » November 1st, 2005, 2:32 pm

lovey,

You paint a startling picture here. I almost have the stink in my nose.

I'm curious. How do you access the internet? Do you have a laptop or do you rely on local computers?

This kind of report is exactly why we created this board. Thank you for being our eyes on the world. You know that you have had me stitched to your shirt tail in trips to the Carribean and Central America and mid-west USA and now Asia and India. I should pay you. :lol:
"These words don't make me a poet, these Eyes make me a poet."

The Poet's Eye

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lovingpenfull
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Post by lovingpenfull » November 1st, 2005, 11:56 pm

You two fellers is fillin a body with so much praise, my head's fit to bust. Thanks, it is good to be apprieciated; I am glad I've this space here to put all these thoughts down, for that LRod, you and yourn ought to be paid. There are several banks of ancient computers with slow connection here and there, in the restuarants, and seeing's how I'm jest as idle as candle wax in a lightining storm, I spend some of my day tapping away at these keys. I am a bit lonely over all, actually, and if it warn't for the cozy spells in these cafes and restuarants, I wouldn't know what to do, aside from river side gore. Trying to find me a gal, so many of them, just got to swoon 'em. Make all checks payable to Kumiko House Pension, or just invest it for me
I am looking for a home for my thoughts.

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