I smelled you before I saw you, at the crack of dawn. The same stale stink of country liquor that I’d smelled on the rickshaw-puller the day before, when he showed me around this 2500-year-old city.

In the hour when I saw you, the water of the Ganges behind us was turning tangerine with the rising sun. Its hue matched the flames licking the pyres of the dead at the ancient cremation ground of Manikarnika ghat, where I stood. Little balls of fire flew across the air as the cremation ground workers poked at the pieces of burning wood. Sometimes they turned the parts of the bodies that were resistant to burning. Waves of wails from grieving families spiralled in the air. A sense of doom clutched me. There was something grotesque about the mechanics of the end of life. 

It was then that I smelled you. You trailed the smell like an apparition, emerging from behind the smoke of a pyre and stepping down a few stairs of the ghat. Your eyes, swiped with darkness underneath them, were aglow with the fiery reflection. The smoke from burning wood, sandalwood incense and camphor around us made me cough.

‘Where are you going, madam? Do you need help?’ you rasped as you studied me. Your skin was unlined, and your mouth stained with the red of beetle nut leaves. If the place had been deserted, I would have run away. But a motley mix of grieving families, stray locals, and tourists like me surrounded us, a safety net. 

I shook my head and kept walking, pretending to know where I was going. It wasn’t hard. Everywhere in my field of sight, spires of sandstone temples, stair-embankments and ornate houses clung to each other. I could throw a stone in any direction, and it would fall on a tourist sight. I’d seen the blazing fire of the Manikarnika ghat in the north, from a distance while floating on the Ganges the night before. The boatman had told me the legend of the embankment. Goddess Parvati had lost her earrings – mani karnika- at the ghat, which led to the naming of it, he said. Among Hindus, the place was considered sacred for cremating the dead. I could not take my eyes off the sculpted spires of the temples behind the ghat. So today I woke at daybreak, walked past several other ghats on the riverfront and climbed up the stairs of Manikarnika from the river.

I ignored your calls. A rhythmic chant summoned me. It came from a small, soot-blackened temple on my right. A few other men joined you. You all took small steps towards me, encroaching on the safe distance I would have liked to keep. 

‘Where are you going, madam?’ one of them asked.

‘To the Shamshan Baba temple?’ another one followed.

At first, I thought you and your buddies were trying to sell me something: tours, boat rides, taxi services. But no one gave a sales pitch. My heart quickened with unease. I looked around, sizing up the situation. My long, flowy dress and backpack were easy giveaways that I was a tourist. A solo Indian woman, not a foreigner. A rare enough breed here to draw attention. Or harassment. I couldn’t tell which one it was heading towards. A few white tourists sipped tea at a stall nearby, not heckled by anyone. I envied their peace. I caught you watching me watch the tourists. When your buddies started hurling questions at me again, you turned towards them and waved your arms upwards.

‘Chalo chalo, come on, let’s go have tea,’ you suggested to them. They listened to you.

I did not grace you with a thank you or even a glance. Instead, I tucked a sigh of relief in my chest and ducked inside the small temple where chants and the chiming of bells were starting to intensify.

The first thing that caught my eye upon entering the centuries-old temple was the mural of the fierce, naked form of goddess Kali, with her flowing dark hair. A representation of unbounded womanhood in Hinduism. The goddess’s orb-like eyes dripped with rebellion and anger. 

Smoke from jasmine-scented incense curled upwards towards the cool, dark ceiling. The priest was in the middle of the rituals, holding a few blood-red hibiscus in his hands. I joined a few locals on the cold stone floor and closed my eyes to meditate. The priest’s fingers on my forehead jolted me out of my stupor. He was smearing my forehead with ash, as is customary in some temples. Later, I discovered that the ashes came from the cremation ground, and were considered sacred; a reminder of the finality of death.

When I stepped out of the temple, you were sitting on the open veranda of the adjacent building – a commune of some kind. The sun was halfway up in the sky, and you seemed content soaking it. You called out to me as soon as you saw me.

‘How was your meditation, madam ji?’

The back of my neck felt hot, but I held my tongue. In a country where thousands of women’s faces were burnt with acid every year by men for saying ‘no’ to something, every move had to be calculated, every risk weighed. Furtively, I scanned the place. Banking on the safety of people around us, I took a step towards you.

‘Why are you here? Are you following me?’

Your eyes darkened before the corners of your mouth drooped. 

‘I stay here all day. This is my work,’ you pointed to the burning pyres in the cremation ground. I noticed the gamcha – a piece of wipe-all cloth twisted and tied around your waist like all the other men who were loading wood on the pyres.

I gulped and rearranged my feelings a little. You still didn’t need to call out to me after I emerged from the temple. You grabbed my moment of hesitation and pointed to a small pile of burning wood in a blackened iron pot near you with your index finger. The dark dirt under your fingernails looked permanent.

‘All pyres are lit from here. The wood pieces have been replaced regularly. Such that the heap has been continuously burning for centuries. It is called the site of eternal fire. It is believed that one achieves salvation if their pyre is lit from here,’ you said. Your enthusiasm to show me around looked genuine. 

I paused to take it all in. I had heard some Hindus came to Varanasi to die, owing to the belief that by doing so, the cycle of birth, death and suffering would come to an end. There were special wait-for-death houses that rented out rooms to the ailing and old so they could live their last days in this city.  Though only Hindus came to die here, the concept of rebirth and intended mukti - salvation, extended to Buddhists and Jains as well. Gautama Buddha’s teachings talked about this cycle as samsara, and even today, in predominantly Buddhist societies, it is common to consciously think about death and breaking free of the wheel of mortality. 

The eternal fire blazed before my eyes.

‘You seem to know a lot about this place,’ I said as a twisted smile escaped my lips.

Laughter broke across your sun-beaten face.

‘Death brings most people here, but we Dom people are born here. We have been working on cremation grounds for generations,’ you said. 

You mentioned your caste. Dom people. Still considered untouchable by many. My mind was flooded with archaic stories and recent documentaries underlined with the agony of this bottom-rung social order. A community forced to bear the weight of fire and ashes of the dead for generations. 

Childhood memories flashed in my mind. Every year, I crossed the same Ganges with my mother, some 650 kilometres downstream in West Bengal, to reach my grandparents’ place. By the river, the Dom families lived right next to the cremation grounds. Naked children with bulging bellies and ashes smudged on their faces chased the mud-sodden pigs that they reared. Holding on to my mother’s arm, I envied their freedom to roam without care for school and homework. Only later did I realise that it was not by choice.

But now, in the sacred banks of Varanasi, I wanted to know how you grew up. If you went to school. If your teachers asked you what you wanted to become when you grew up.  In a place so wired with root-rotted hierarchy in the name of tradition, I could guess the answers. But hoped to hear otherwise. The hammer of complex realities tied my lips with the shame of privilege. I couldn’t ask you anything.

Your piercing gaze was fixed on me. ‘I like it here,’ you said to me as if to soothe an aching child. Despite the stench of alcohol, your words and movements had no trace of intoxication. Did drink make the constant company of death less oppressive? 

You asked where I came from, and nodded your head in approval at the sound of Bangalore. You wanted to know everything about my city. Was there a river there? What was my profession? Did most people live in high-rises? Your eyes sparkled with imagination, and the reels of the city you’d watched on your phone. I tried to answer your questions as best as I could. You gulped down my answers with rapt attention, interrupting with probing questions. Your curiosity was infectious. It started to dawn on me why you wanted to chat. I was your window to another world, beyond your immediate existence. Just like you were, to me.

‘Do you want to meet the priest who does the last rites?’ you asked.

‘Sure,’ I said.

You and the priest took me to an empty open-air podium nearby, which was used for cremation when there were too many bodies to burn at the ghat. You and the priest described how, after the cremation was done, a few locals would gather, scavenging and claiming the too-tight gold and silver rings that the family members of the deceased had left on the bodies. The precious things that fire couldn’t consume. I wondered if you had claimed a few of those treasures. You complained about the rising cost of wood, about how electric furnace cremation was slowly replacing the traditional way. I swallowed my urge to bring up sustainability and the urgency to save our planet. A worry rose in me - what would you do if you lost your job to modernisation? I dismissed the thought. Varanasi was too set in its ways for something like that to happen any time soon. 

From our vantage point, our gaze met the family members of the deceased performing the last rites of their loved ones, grief and resignation writ large on their faces. The end of fragile lives. Or maybe not. I only knew what I didn’t know, and the present moment was all I had. I glanced at my watch. Time to leave.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked you.

‘Ask for Young Dom when you are here next,’ you said, wistfully smiling at me. You did not want to give me your real name, the same way I didn’t give you mine minutes ago. Our eyes locked for a brief moment with this clarity. A recognition. I waved and stepped out in the warm sun, promising myself to return someday, hoping that you’d still be around.