Death! Burning! Celebration!

Do you happen to know how long it takes to fully cremate a human body?

Forget those high-efficiency furnaces they use for the ritual at home. I'm talking old school; campfire-style, with logs and a lit torch.

The answer is around 4 hours. Didn't know that? Neither did I, until I alighted in Varanasi. But then, it's fair to say I was ignorant of many things before setting foot in the place.

Varanasi is India in a microcosm; it's as if someone took the entire country, put it in a blender and poured the contents out in the centre of town, allowing the perfumed mush to flow into every nook and cranny like lava gushing from a sputtering volcano. Nearly every memory I've made in India seemed to stalk me in Varanasi, where all the different castes, cultures, smells and noises of an entire subcontinent swirl around with the force of a strong gale.

Varanasi has been one of India's most sacred places since before time had a meaning. It is here where you can stand on the banks of the Ganga (Ganges), the sacred river that is said to flow directly from the Lord Shiva's hair. For the Hindu faithful, the city is an ashram, a pilgrimmage site where you can purify your sins with a bath in the holy waters or burn your deceased relatives, the latter being a process which expedites the souls of the dead into the next life. This can be seen at any of the 50-some ghats (stairs leading down from a temple to a landing on the river's edge) which constitute Varanasi's waterfront.

I wasted no time in seeing what I'd come to see. My hotel was a stone's throw from the Hanumann ghat, one of a pair of principal burning sites. I spent an afternoon watching, transfixed in silent reverence, as the traditional cremation ceremonies took place right in front of me: bodies, wrapped in white muslin and sheathed in gold foil, are carried from the temple steps to the river bank by members of one of India's lowest castes. The corpse is given one final cleansing dip in the black waters before being placed in a wood lattice on the shore, and the pile is sprinkled with ghee (clarified butter), before a man with a torch circumambulates the pyre five times, then lights the fire just under the human head. The male relatives of the dearly departed will then linger until the fire is finally extinguished and only ash remains. The females are banished from attending the site, though their absense is perhaps made up for by the many attendant goats, cows, stray dogs, buffaloes and peacocks.

A walk through Varanasi's labrynth of alleyways is nothing short of a sensory overload. There isn't much room and so everyone - rickshah wallahs, tea merchants, hippie tourists, beggars, motorcyclists, sadhus, school children, army officials, fat women in their saris and many, many more - are condensed into a massive human blob that pulsates back and forth as people fight to get to where they are going. The streets are flanked with an infinite number of shops, some large and glitzy, others so tiny that they are nothing more than miniature hovels etched out under the stairway to a temple, where an Indian man might sit still as a buddha with his legs crossed, selling packages of betel nut and bidis (Indian tobacco wrapped in a leaf). Once in a while an aggressive bull will come charging down the lane, stirring the people into a frenzy as they scurry into any available hiding place. Those who can't seek refuge in a shop threshold get caught in the tidal flow of human bodies that empties into the adjacent square in front of the bull's advances, much like the Ganges crashing through the Sunderbans river delta on its way to the Bay of Bengal.

Each evening at 7PM, a puja is held at the main ghat. Light is offered to the Goddess Lakshmi by seven young priests who wave smoking urns and peacock feathers in concentric circles from raised platforms near the water. Brahmins ring their bells, drums drum and beggars pick their way through the throng of onlookers. It is a golden opportunity for the street urchins of Varanasi, inasmuch as the Hindus believe that giving alms while in the presence of their pantheon of Gods will bring good karma.

After witnessing a puja one evening, myself and two friends purchased offerings for the Goddess Ganga and placed them into her flowing waters. Our little cups of lotus flower and lit candles floated away, joining a colony of other identical little boats that had been released by the hands of others, until suddenly the whole river seemed to light up like a starry night. Sitting on the stairs shortly thereafter, an old man dressed in orange rags approached us.

"Good evening", he said as if it took all his strength to speak, "I think I'll just sit right here."

"No problem, Sir," I replied as I watched him set down his cane.

"Oh yes. Good good. Very nice. Thank you," he said. Then a pause before he continued. "Seventy-two. I am SEV-EN-TY TWO!" He smiled as he uttered these words, as if by dissociating and extending the syllables he would make his age seem all the more venerable. I grinned inwardly as I realized he reminded me of my Grandfather Floyd, whose slow-but-sure movements and compassionate voice made him radiate a form of wisdom and altruism that only seems to have manifested itself in people of past generations.

I feel as though at this point I must step out of the realm of the poetic and lay down a serious fact: the Ganges is the most disgusting body of water that I have ever seen (or smelled) in my life. If you ask me, it should not be celebrated as a sacred source of purifying water, but instead reviled as evidence of what happens to nature when no environmental laws are in place to protect it. A spider's web of metal pipes carry raw sewage from Varanasi's myriad sidestreets directly to the river bank. Garbage, ranging from old underwear to glass bottles to drowned rats gets caught in eddies in the river's centre, forming an island of refuse that sometimes climbes to several feet in height. I even saw a dead body floating by, bloated and snow-white from a few days' saturation. And meanwhile, you have Hindus swimming and washing their clothes in there. Ick.

In careful retrospect, I'd say that Varanasi was a perfect departure point for my exodus from India. Everything that had happened to me happened again, and everything I'd seen I was able to see once more. But leaving a place is never easy, whether due to a forlorn desire to remain just a bit longer, or perhaps in my case because I nearly missed my train. I'd booked a berth on the 6PM express to Kolkata, and at 5PM I descended the steps of my hotel and into the streets in search of a rickshaw. This is not a taxing process - usually 500 of them will find you. However, as bad luck would have it, India's head of state was due to arrive in Varanasi the next day, and the police had cleared all rickshaws, taxis and bicycles from a 5km radius around the ghats in order to accomodate the Presidental motorcade. Pack on my back, I had to run for nearly 40 minutes in order to find public transport, an ordeal that nearly pushed me to the brink of exhaustion. The ironic thing was that I made the discovery while in the throes of my trial; I realized, at one point, that I was walking on a road in India that was completely devoid of noise: there were no trucks with diesel engines, no cabs with honking horns, no touts with angry voices and no cows with their mournful moos. I had left India altogether... or, more metaphorically, I'd entered into the eye of the Indian hurricane. It was amazing to have a few minutes of silence for a change. More amazing? The fact that I missed the clamour.

Did you hear that India? That's right. I will miss you. You, with your fanatical touts and your ferral livestock and your lack of adequate plumbing. Despite the fact that you turned me into a moster, I will be back, and next time I'll be prepared for whatever you have to throw my way. Oh yeah. I'll come at you like a spider monkey.

In the meantime, I have escaped to Southeast Asia, and in a few days I'll be arriving in Bali for a little sunshine, lollypops and surfing all the time (and everything is wonderful when... you leave In-dia).