VARANASI, INDIA -- The cremation of a human corpse takes three hours on the banks of the Ganges River.
In a Hindu practice that would shock the sensibilities of most Americans, grieved families from across India bring the bodies of their loved ones to be incinerated on wooden pyres in public view in the ancient holy city of Varanasi.
The ashes and bones, and any remains not consumed by the sacramental heat, are offered to the river, which is almost the color of ash itself. It is the same river best known for its bathers, who seek to cleanse their sins and awaken their spirits in the sacred water. The Ganges links traditions of death and rebirth flowing from a mythology that precedes human record.
This is an elemental part of the religious ancestry of Gov.-elect Bobby Jindal, a cornerstone of the Hindu faith embraced by his forefathers. The Ganges, and in particular the religious practices associated with it in Varanasi, offers a portrait of an immense religion little understood in the West.
As a recent visit to the ancient city shows, it is a theater of human activity that tells the larger story of a Hindu world that is both strange and fascinating to those unfamiliar with it. It is a long way, and seemingly centuries apart, from Jindal's Christian, middle-class life in suburban Kenner. Its story demonstrates how great a leap of cultures he and his parents have made.
Born from Himalayan glaciers, the Ganga, as it has been known for thousands of years, moves in steady meditation as it bends along the 2-mile crescent of the Varanasi ghats, the plazas of steep stone steps that lead down into the river.
On its 1,500-mile journey to the Bay of Bengal, the river's many sites of worship include Allahabad, where relatives of Amar Jindal, the governor-elect's father, say he bathed years ago. But nowhere is the Hindu expression of faith in the Ganges more evident on a daily basis than in Varanasi.
Bathed in history
Known in ancient times as Kashi and locally still called by its historic name, Benares, it is one of the oldest living cities in the world, dating more than 3,000 years.
People of all ages go there to bathe, and the old and frail go to die. Many believe that dying in Varanasi leads to moksha, an enlightened state that releases the human soul from otherwise endless episodes of reincarnation.
What legends compel pilgrims to attend this place, and what do they feel, see and hear on their visit? What is it like to bathe in the Ganges, at dawn when the spirit of awakening peaks?
A local guru has some of the answers. Varanasi is awash in Hindu scholars and holy men, though few as experienced as Pandit Deoki Nandan Shastri, 79, whose home could not be found without a guide through the labyrinth of narrow city corridors far from the tourist zone. Known to some as Guru-ji, he is a merchant of astrology whose activity has been slowed by age and cancer. He is an authority on the ancient Vedic texts relating Hindu cosmology.
The Ganges, he instructs, is the heavens come to Earth.
"Ganga is like the Milky Way in the sky," said Guru-ji, sitting cross-legged on a cushioned platform in his sparsely furnished living room. "Like that, Ganga was also first in the heavens, and the gods .¤.¤. they all take baths in the Ganga in the heavens."
In less smoggy times, the view of the Milky Way over the river at certain times of the year was a breathtaking sight, he said. Seven sacred stars, representing deities, swam among the burst of powdery galactic lights reflected in the water.
Released from the sky
According to a short form of the legend, a king named Sagar had 60,000 sons who stalked the travels of the potentate's free-roaming horse. Wherever the horse went, Sagar expanded his kingdom. Anyone capturing the horse would meet the wrath of the 60,000 and their army.
The god Indra became jealous of the conquests, and so sequestered the horse in the monastery of an ascetic guru who was in deep meditation. The young sons, foolishly doubting the piety of the guru, blamed him for stealing the horse. The guru broke his trance and retaliated.
"He opened his eyes and he burned, through the light of his eyes, the 60,000 sons of Sagar," Guru-ji said.
Reduced to ashes and a ghostly afterlife, the souls of the sons eventually were rescued by the devotion of one of Sagar's descendants, Bhagiratha. His centuries of devotion to Brahma convinced the supreme god to release Ganga from the heavens.
"And then the essence of the 60,000 sons, that went in Ganga waters .¤.¤. they got salvation," Guru-ji said. "This is the story of the Ganga to come upon this land."
It is little wonder, then, that Hindus still seek to bathe, cleanse their souls and find refuge for cremated ashes in the Ganges.
Preparing the pyres
Day and night, seven days a week, the banyan and sandalwood fires alight the Man Mandir Ghat, a site organized as a factory for Varanasi's cremations.
The dead are certified as such by police, then carried on bamboo stretchers to the river for a final bath. Silk dressings are removed, and they are left covered with plain cloth, white for men, red for women. Anointed with incense and a clarified butter, the body is laid on a carefully constructed pile of wood 2 to 4 feet high, and then mounds of more wood are plopped on top. The fire is lit from the "eternal flame," a humble clump of burning wood and embers nearby.
The dead person's male relatives, dressed in white and with heads shaved for the occasion, assist the cremation supervisors, or doms. Females are forbidden to stand nearby. None weep, for tears are said to bring misfortune to dead souls.
It is more than a sight for the eyes. The heat, smoke and smell collect on one's clothes and conscience. The endless rising soot has blackened the east face of the ghat's Hindu temple, which sits high like a dark lord over the scene.
Cremations are rarely for the poor. The required 360 kilograms of wood cost more than $1,400, and so it is not unusual to see bodies simply dumped over the side of a boat into the river, the cheapest method of delivering a corpse to its sanctified destination.
A short walk south is the Dasaswamedh Ghat, where a boisterous nightly ceremony livens the spirits of several hundred Western and Indian visitors watching from the steps and boats near shore. Backed by dozens of bells ringing from high poles over the ghat, singers bellow festive songs accompanied by an amplified harmonium and tabla drum. Five orange-clad Hindu priests, facing the river on stagelike piers, perform a flamboyant choreographed puja ritual with flaming bowls, peacock feathers and brooms. Sweet smells and cacophony fill the air.
Local women and children on the ghats sell lightweight bowls with candles nested by roses, jasmine and marigolds. Memorials to the dead at 50 rupees apiece, the bowls are ceremoniously launched into the river by the hundreds, forming an iridescent flotilla along the shore.
'The power to awake'
The pre-dawn hour the next day is more meditative. Well before sunrise, the bells begin to ring again, and a cantor's uplifting song resounds across the Ganges, interrupted now and then by the screech of feral monkeys who inhabit Varanasi's rooftops.
A child oarsman, Balu, delivers a passenger by boat to the Ganges' east bank, where a wide sandbar in the low-river season of December forms a vast wilderness. Here and there, black fish leap from the water, a reassuring sign that the heavily polluted river hasn't squelched all forms of life.
The sun is still below the horizon, but there is just enough light to awaken the river's colors.
"The sun has the power to awake," Guru-ji had said of the dawn. "That is a time of awakeness."
Once across, it is time for a bath. All street clothes are removed and replaced with a simple broad cloth called a lungi, a traditional Hindu garb for men that covers from the waist down. At first, the water is chilling. But after a moment wading deeper into the Ganges, the blood flow surges through the legs, and the body warms comfortably. The bottom is firm sand, not squishy muck as might be expected. The feet encounter soft, peculiar objects resting on the river bed, an unpleasant sensation.
On the east bank, there are no pestering touts. And the bank, though littered, is less filthy than the city side. A bather can escape into the moment, sensing the splash of cool water on the body, mindful of nothing but the Ganges and the human spirit.
Arising from the river and turning east to the shore, the bather is greeted by the sun breaking through the horizon's mist in round, orange glory. The sunlight, the color of a Hindu priest's robe, reflects in the shallow ripples. It is tempting but unwise to stare long at the sight.
"Varanasi is for feeling," a local resident named Ragan Panday said.
Sight sticks with you
From the boat rowing back to the west bank, the fires of Man Mandir can be seen burning in the face of the rising sun.
Brahmins, or holy men, await on the ghats to welcome the freshly bathed pilgrims. In the final phase of the morning bathing ritual, a Brahmin and pilgrim sit cross-legged facing each other, the bather looking east at the new sun. The priest speaks a mantra and leads a recitation of blessings to the bather's forefathers. The Brahmin then dips his fingers in a bowl with a mix of sandalwood paste, oils and spices the color of turmeric. Without blocking the sun from view, he rubs a spot, called a tilak, on the bather's forehead between the eyes.
The Brahmin expects payment for this service, an act perhaps more mercantile than devout. The money should be placed on the seating platform in front of him, not in his hand.
Strolling the ghats, one can see groups and individual bathers slip into the cool water and then shiver in the light breeze once back ashore. Some bathe with reverence, cupping their hands full with water and pouring it out eastward as an offering to the rising sun. Some lather themselves with soap. Others frolic as if in a swimming pool.
Strangely, the reflections of humans on the water appear to penetrate the surface, forming shadowy moving figures submersed below the bathers. Maybe it is the hazy light diffused in the scummy contents of the water, or maybe it is imagination mixed with antediluvian myth, but one might leave Varanasi haunted by the sight of souls bathing in the Ganges.
Robert Travis Scott can be reached at email@example.com or (225) 342-4197.