Night-time. Cale and I walk the ghats. The night is my favourite time, the ghats are quiet and we can play music and marvel in peace at the high palace walls and temples that line the river (in the daytime we are continually interviewed and harangued for ‘selfies´).

The night always ends at the burning ghats – the one place in the city that never sleeps. People do not stop dying at night, and in India this is where most Hindus hope to arrive for their final corporal rites, to be reduced to ash and dissolved in the river they consider a Goddess. A corpse arrives every 5 minutes covered in saffron cloth, is dipped in the holy water and then pasted with Ghee (clarified butter) and mounted atop a large stack of firewood. Some dry reeds are then lit by a family member from a fire inside the temple, said to have been burning continually for 3 thousand years (a priest smears its ash on my forehead). This ‘eternal flame’ is then used to light the pyre. The cloth burns off and the melting corpse slowly emerges.  Five or six bodies burn at a time in proximity. And in this deeply unfamiliar scene, one sense is very familiar – smell. It is the smell of a common barbecue.

Many are, congregated, some cremating relatives, other just seem to be hanging out, enjoying some heat and company in the mid-winter night. There are chai vendors and snacks. Some family members film disintegrating relatives on their phones, which seems to me appalling, but I am clearly the only one who thinks that way. Indeed, nothing seems anyway appalling to anything but my conditioning.  The only tabu it seems, are tears. People are “passing over”, a natural and inevitable human process. Moksha, liberation from the body, is now possible, a thing to be celebrated. There is nothing funereal in the atmosphere, rather there is kindness and open exchange.  “For man, last thing to burn is the sternum” Nirmal, a Varanassi resident, tells me matter of factly, “For woman it is the hips”. A baba smeared with ash of the dead sits in an elevated spot above a pyre, smokes a chillum loaded with hashish without cease, he claims to transcend the fear of death. A very stoned western girl sits beside him, she is gone gone, gone, someone should tell her Daddy.

Day time.

Cale and I had arranged to meet at the Harischandra burning Ghat, before crossing the Ganges together. It was a point of reference, a place we both knew well, so why not meet there? As we catch up, kites fly overhead, controlled from adjacent rooftops. 20 yards away the boys are playing football. The ghats provide some open and flat place in an otherwise extremely densely packed city. The game is animated, World Cup inspired. Bollywood music drifts from a nearby window.  Cale and my conversation is interrupted by the fire attendant, who asks us to help him out. Most unusual is the natural manner in which he asks. It is a genuine request. Perhaps he was just tired, all day pushing round heavy logs and corpses and we looked like two fit men, idly watching as he labours, burning multiple bodies on multiple fires, continually re-arranging the heavy firewood under pressure to reduce them entirely to ash (the only time we saw someone angry was when a fire went out leaving bits of limbs uncremated). The request to help with burning the bodies is unexpected and leaves us feeling confused and outside our comfort zones. Instead of helping, we get up to find ourselves an oarsman. As we do so there is a big cheer from the boys – a goal has been scored.

The rowing boat sets off from the riverside where density of life is almost beyond comparison, where families live in ancient rooms the size of a large cupboard, the alleyways are so narrow and deep that the sun never enters. Ten minutes to row across the river and we disembark in an empty wilderness. Sand stretches to the fuzzy horizon. We have crossed over, space is endless, it seems metaphoric. Daytrippers are taking a camel safari. A herd of Buffalo driven by a quiet youth come for bathing