Meeting Mother Ganga

The holy river of the Ganges (Ganga), India's national river, winds through what is considered to be India's holiest and oldest city: Varanasi.

Hundreds of pilgrims come to bathe on its banks every day, which is thought to absolve all sins. Others come to burn their dead as is the wish of every Hindu that their remains enter the river, meaning they will take a straight path to Nirvana and be liberated from the cycle of birth and death (reincarnation).

I was confronted with this reality before I'd even reached my hotel. While negotiating my bags though the tangled streets of the old city, large groups of men appeared out of no where, processing their dead to the river on a elaborately decorated stretchers.

The next morning at dawn, we took a small wooden boat down the river to witness the Ganga in its best light. We sailed along the side of the ghats (endless series of steps leading down to the water, divided into different groups), past the day's first pilgrims, the holy men engaged in a cocophany of chanting and morning puja and the dhobi-wallahs - the laundry people - who slap the wet cloth with gusto on stones at the water's edge.

The pilgrims and locals were performing a series of tasks including bathing, yoga and cleaning their teeth - with nothing more than their finger and the water Mother Ganga provides them.

Seeing the river in the pale, morning light did help me to understand its spiritual appeal and significance, but I certainly had no future plans to brush my teeth in it! Sadly, praised initiatives to clean up the holy waterway seemed to have fallen astray as we saw noxious, filthy water being incessantly pumped into it - just metres from large groups of bathing pilgrims.

Of equal concern are the 'burning ghats'. There are two of these in Varanasi where millions of people gather every year to cremate their loved ones, with up to 300 ceremonies per day. They appear to operate in a physical and financial tiering system, still based on 'lower', 'middle' and 'upper' caste boundaries. The ghats are scattered with huge stacks of wood and the family of the deceased, according to their means, buys one of the many funeral packages. These include a certain quantity of wood based on the weight of the body (sandalwood is considered the best wood, and is naturally the most expensive) and other ritualistic paraphernalia including ghee (clarified butter).

After being dipped in the river, the body is placed on the pyre. The priest and family perform holy rituals, ghee is poured on and the pyre is set alight as the men of the family watch on. Women are not allowed at the ceremony as sorrow and tears are thought to obstruct the deceased's ascension to nirvana, and widows have been known to throw themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres as it is thought to grant them sainthood.

A few hours later, the ashes and bits of bones (rather grimly, the chest bone of a man and the hips of a woman don't burn) are gathered by the eldest son or senior male of the family and consigned to the waters, where 'untouchables' (a group from the lower castes feared by many) dredge up the ash and mud, hoping for a gold tooth or nose ring that has survived the fire.

Not everyone is cremated in this way though. Children under 5, lepers, sadhus (Hindu monks), pregnant women, and cobra bite victims are offered directly to the river.

Despite witnessing this up close, I was coerced into joining the pilgrims the following morning and taking a fully-clothed dip in the Ganga. I felt very uneasy about not being able to even see my hand a few centimetres below the surface, let alone the bottom, in the murky water. The river bed was uneven and sharp (I imagined from human bones) under my gingerly placed feet, so I preferred to swim than stand and was relieved to hop in the shower shortly afterwards.

Meeting Mother Ganga is not something I'll forget in a hurry and after a few days I began to appreciate its mysticism - bones, bodies and all!