Celebrating Death

Next week was Shivratri, a festival most awaited by pilgrims and nagas from across the country and Nepal’s neighbours. I entered the Pashupatinath gate and saw nagas everywhere. On the steps, temple walls, across the hill; they were here already! Naga sadhus sit naked with their body and face covered in ash, smoking marijuana and chanting prayers. Not that marijuana is legal here, but this is the festival of the God who took to marijuana to save the world. I walked down the steps towards the main temple looking at the nagas, trying very hard to not look at the groin area.
A naga caught my eye, and I couldn’t help but look him in the eye. His face covered with ash, dreadlocked hair pulled up and tied, eyes deep and dark, giving a sudden cold feeling, but as though it was giving a message. He kept murmuring and when I got closer, he reached out his leafy-broom to bless me, stretched out his donation pot asking me to add some money in the name of the Goddess he sat for. In that spur of moment, I just stared back blank-faced, not knowing what to do.
I had only heard much about the funeral that takes place at the river steps of the temple; today I saw it for the first time, and suddenly felt like I was in a different time of the past. Arya ghat is a burning ghat behind this revered temple, a ghat where the Hindus in the Kathmandu valley consider it very holy to burn the deceased. I came to a wall where many others were sitting in the sun, some with umbrellas, looking at dead bodies being brought and burnt. As I stood I saw three funeral pyres; one smoking flames which had just finished burning a dead body; the second with wood being laid for another body and another with a piece of yellow cloth, ready for the body that lay on the floor. Relatives stood a little further away crying whilst a family member and a priest started with the rites.
Each day dead bodies are brought to be burnt at the riverside, and locals on the other side of the river gaze at the proceedings- a daily affair of goodbyes. Locals simply watch; no sorrow, no expressions. Further down the river, people from the Save Bagmati River Campaign were at their cleaning activity.
All this is extraordinary but as a Hindu myself, I would perhaps prefer a close family funeral instead. On my way out, I see an ambulance with an old woman breathing faintly inside an oxygen mask. She’s awaited by her family to breathe her last and bid her adieu at the holy river.

Today, I looked at Death differently.