Blessings for the Dead in the Oldest Living City

The heat in northeastern India crescendos in May before the monsoons of June come to quench it. The light is bleary with dust and each panting breath must be hauled into one’s lungs as though sucked through damp insulation. After a month I had not grown accustomed to the heat, or the maddening crush of people and so, when I stood at the edge of the Ganges for the first time, I felt more loneliness and dampness than awe.

The boatman eyed my red arms with an amused, sympathetic smile. At dusk people performed ceremonies along the shore with drums, smoke and elaborate costume; I wanted to understand from the safety of the water.

Halfway down river the boatman steered us up to one of the stone docking points (I wondered how all the boats hadn’t been smashed to splinters in the first storm), to let two barefoot girls in white dresses hop on, their skin the color of tree bark but smooth as lake water. They looked about nine and held my gaze, unabashed and, I thought, disinterested. One carried a basket of pink flowers, the other clutched an armful of tea candles: ‘50 rupee blessings for the dead’.

I lit three and placed them one by one on the water’s surface: one for a boy I used to know, one for a grandmother I hadn’t, and the last as a sort of placeholder, as though I could get ahead of mourning. The little burning boats twirled in our wake, and then from the side a fourth drifted into view, and beyond them dozens more. I turned to smile at the girls, already standing to disembark. Precocious industry, I thought, or possibly there was a legion of them, sedulous nymphs of the dead igniting the black water of the Ganges.

I tracked my three lights for a while before losing them among the other lonely little flickers of blessings or entreaties or apologies, all bobbing and receding into the dark.

A white hard cracking light split the sky. “Lightning?” I asked the boatman, who had turned his face up, smiling with a kindness I had missed before, “Yes. And then rain.”