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Travelling in India is a great way to see lots of dead bodies. You don’t even have to go out of your way. The first we saw were the bodies of two women laid out at the side of the road; they looked peaceful enough, and we took their sighting in our stride.
By the time we arrived in Varanasi, or Benares, we’d seen at least half a dozen. Varanasi is a great place if not to die, then to be cremated. And where better for your funeral pyre than on the ghats on the banks of the River Ganges?
We witnessed the burning ghat where bodies wrapped in colourful pieces of cloth are burned on wood pyres, a man with his head wrapped in a cloth to protect him from the heat often whacking the bodies to help them burn. This was fascinating to us.
Our friend Jeff woke us up one morning telling us he’d been down to the burning ghat in the middle of the night. Apparently, formalities are dispensed with as the bodies of those without loved ones to pay for colourful cloth and a decent pile of wood are heaped into a pile and burned together. Jeff was quite excited as he told us this.
My favourite dead body was one from Varanasi, and it even beats the body of a man who had just been murdered who I saw in Bangalore several years later. The murdered man was lying on his back with a bullet hole in his forehead with a handsome puddle of black-looking blood seeping slowly across the road. A group of Indian men stood mutely over his obviously still warm corpse, waiting for the arrival of the powers that were. I gazed down upon this dreadful nighttime scene from the fourth floor balcony of my hotel room in fascinated awe.
I saw my favourite dead body within an hour of arriving in Varanasi for the first time. We arrived early in the morning and took an auto rickshaw from the station to the centre of town in search of somewhere to stay. On the way we spotted a Bhang Shop. Bhang is a derivative of marijuana and is sold legally in some Indian States. We asked the rickshaw driver to pull over, and then made him wait as we ordered and then gulped down two Bhang Lassi drinks each. We were young and enthusiastic, so we bought several Bhang Cookies too which we gleefully ate back in the rickshaw.
Within thirty minutes we had got ourselves a room and were staggering along the ghats as the drug started to take effect. The feeling was pretty much the same as eating a Special Brownie. Along the river was the usual Indian mayhem: people bathing, hawkers selling all kinds of goods and offering services, kids playing, and boats were everywhere on the filthy water.
Then we saw a dog with its head inside something that was bobbing up against the step at the water’s edge. The dog’s head kept disappearing and reappearing from what it was apparently eating. Upon closer inspection, the dog was poking his head into the chest cavity of human corpse.
“Jeff,” I said, incredulously, “Tell me I’m seeing this right. That is a dog eating a headless human body that is in a river less than twenty yards from where people are having their daily wash?”
“That’s what I’m seeing,” he replied, ecstatically.
Jeff’s a little weird like that.
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