The scrapbook

I arrived in the dark city in the middle of the night after an exhausting bus ride from the border of Nepal and India.
As I prepared to pay the Tuk tuk driver I saw a convoy of men holding a simple gurney and shouting the names of gods into the warm night. I clung to a wall with questioning eyes when I heard the Tuk tuk driver say indifferently, "They're going to the burning ghat". Apparently, they burn bodies around the clock in Varanasi.

The next morning my curiosity led me through the maze of Varanasi towards the burning ghat. A simple walk through the narrow alleys turned out to be a demanding experience that required my full attention. One must always be alert not to bump into a cow, not to step in cow feces, not to hit the tens of Babas sitting at the sides of the alleys, not to lose focus when beggars and children follow.

When I arrived at the burning ghat I was struck by the heat and the smoke that enveloped my body. I looked around and noticed I was the only woman there. I began to wonder if women are even allowed to enter when I saw an elderly woman sitting on the stairs sobbing. I passed through anonymous burning bodies trying to avoid the pieces of them that flew towards me in the wind.
With calm ambivalence I walked through the threatening giant burning logs and the huge weights designed to estimate how much wood is needed to burn each body. Wrapped bodies carried on simple bamboo stretchers continued to arrive.

Though disquieted, for some reason I couldn't leave the burning ghat. I looked to see if the elderly woman was still there and saw she had disappeared. Now it was only me, a single woman among efficient men, burning the bodies with sealed faces that reveal no emotion. Some of them stared at me and finally one approached me. I asked him why there were no women in the burning ghat. He told me that women are not allowed inside because they are soft, they cry, and the burning ghat is not a place for crying because one has to be grateful to be burned on the sacred Ganges River. I thought about the crying woman who disappeared as I watched the gray Ganges receiving human ashes poured from long orange cloth.

Varanasi grabs you with its elegant domes covered with dust alongside colored peeling roof tops beneath an eternal soot cloud. The street children, the women wearing colorful saris, the men who cover their faces in color and the woman who cried for her loved one in the place you are not allowed to shed tears for the dead, all of them, even without knowing, are carriers of the mystical silence of the Ganges, the secret of the city which shook me to the core and left invisible marks on my skin.