To Live and Die in Kolkata

Behind my guest house is a small, dead ended alley. It forms a kind of courtyard that is surrounded by a few living quarters and shops. The shops are mainly laundry shops where the hotels and guest houses bring their guests laundry and the people in the courtyard wash them in buckets of cold water. After wringing out the laundry, they hang it on lines across the courtyard and then fold it up when it's dry and deliver it back to the hotels.
During the day I can peek out my bathroom window and see the people washing and folding clothes. They are all talking to each other in Bengali and I get the feeling that they are a large extended family back there. To me, Bengali can be a harsh language and it always seems like everyone is yelling at each other, even though they are just folding clothes. I've noticed this with the ladies at the orphanage too. Adults, children and grandparents are all back there folding clothes and yelling at each other. Now whether this is true and there is non-stop domestic squabbling going on or just good old family communication, I'll never know.
The thing I do know is that most of the people back there will spend their entire lives back there or at least in this neighborhood. They were born here, will work here and will die here never having traveled far from Kolkata.
The other night I heard some chanting going on from the courtyard and decided to take a look. To gaze out the small bathroom window I have to turn a bucket upside down and stand on it in order to peer out. When I looked out, I saw the entire courtyard family standing in the courtyard chanting as an old woman, who had passed away, was carried on a small stretcher from one of the houses. She was dressed in white and covered with brilliantly colored, small flowers. Her pall bearers carried her across the courtyard and put her into the back of a small pickup truck that had a glass box covering it. Glass on all four sides and a glass roof. And off she went to be cremated in that glass truck. In that glass truck for all to see. Not hidden from sight in a casket or a hearse like she was afraid of death, or maybe it's us who are afraid. No make up, no embalming fluid, just a white sheet and some flowers.
The week before I would go to Nimtala Burning Ghat on the Hooghlie River. A ghat is a place in the riverside that has a concrete ramp down into the water. Ghats have many purposes here in India. They are used as boat launches and as entry points where the locals bathe in the sacred waters. They are also used as places where cremations take place and those ghats are called "burning ghats". Makes sense, right? So from what I saw at the Nimtala Burning Ghat, this is probably what happened to the old woman from the courtyard that night: She was driven to a burning ghat, there are several in Kolkata and carried to a concrete walled off area at the top of the ghat. There she would have been laid upon a large pile of wood which would be lit on fire and she would be cremated with her family and friends standing by. It wouldn't smell like burning flesh (how many of us even know what that smells like?) It wouldn't smell like meat cooking. It wouldn't smell disgusting. It wouldn't smell like anything but fire and smoke.
After the fire had burned most of the way down, the men would line up on the concrete ramp of the ghat and form a "fireman's line" from the water to the fire. They would then start passing small clay jugs of sacred water from the river to the pyre and they'd pour it on the fire until it was out. Once the fire was out, the ashes would be swept up and carried to the river where they would be cast onto the water, carried away by the slow current.
After watching this I realized that I had only seen one cemetery in Kolkata, there may be more, but not many. The one I saw was an old British Colonial Christian cemetery with massive tombstones and mausoleums (Hindu and Buddhists cremate). Each giant structure with one British citizen who had died here, during the colonial period, away from home, hoping to be memorialized forever. Many of the stones were now faded and covered with moss.
When the old woman's ashes finally soaked into the Hooghlie River her life was commemorated in the memories of her family and friends. She didn't need a tombstone. Maybe because she knew she was coming back. Or finally leaving this life cycle for Nirvana.