5000 Year Old Fire

The city of Varanasi is one of the holiest cities in India. The Sacred Ganges river, locally known as the Ganga River, flows right along the city's edge and the river's western banks are lined with concrete stepped known as "ghats". It's here on these ghats that Varanasi's residence live out their lives, everything from bathing to washing clothes to offering up floating prayer candles to cremating their dead.
There's a ghat called the Manikarnika Burning ghat which is Varanasi's main spot for cremation and since dying here is believed to offer liberation from the life cycle, there are alot of cremations that take place. I spent a few hours at the Manikarnika Burning ghat one afternoon and watched this process taking place.
An Indian man who worked as a fire tender in the cremations took a break from his work (for a fee of course) to offer up some insight into what was going on. The Manikarnika Burning ghat is divided up into about 5 different levels decending from the street to the river. At the very top of the ghat is a stone pavillion that has a fire burning in it. The fire is said to be 5000 years old, meaning it has been burning continually and fed for 5000 years. This seems doubtful to me since the origins of the city of Varanasi are only 3,400 years old. But even so, it's probably still a pretty old fire. The ancient fire is used to light all the cremation pyres that take place there at the ghat. There were about a dozen or more going at once the day I was there. Needless to say it was hot and smoky. So smoky that it was hard to keep my eyes open at times.
When the deceased person arrives at the ghat, they are being carried by family members, usually male family members, on a stretcher and are wrapped in a sheet and covered with flowers. The only way to get to the ghat is to snake your way through a labyrinth of alleyways that make up that part of the city. The alleyways aren't wide enough for cars so the bodies are by being carried by hand. There are so many cremations that take place here that on the day I was there, bodies were arriving every 10 minutes or so.
The body is taken down the steps of the ghat to the Ganga River, where it is fully dipped in the water then taken back out and set to rest at the water's edge. Then a family member takes 5 handfulls of river water and pours it on the mouth of the deceased as if to offer 5 drinks of the holy water. Now I hate to be the one to say that the Ganges River is polluted but if the deceased wasn't dead already, 5 drinks of that water would certainly finish the job.
The color of the sheet that is covering the deceased has significance. White if you are man, orange for a woman, red for a young girl, etc. Your caste is important here as well. It determines what level of the ghat you can be cremated on. On the uppermost tier is the highest caste, the Brahmins. Down by the water's edge, on the dirt, are the Untouchables, one of Hinduisms lowest castes.
The type of wood you are cremated on tells of your financial standings. If you are being cremated on Bodhi wood, you are poor. If on Sandlewood, wealthy. I say this because your family has to pay for the wood you are cremated on and Sandlewood is more expensive. There are barges full of wood just off shore and the edges of the ghat are piled high with it. The men who work there, the fire tenders, weigh out the wood and charge by the kilo, then they carry it down to your respective level, stack it up and help you get the body onto it. There's a certain amount of wood required to burn a body depending on the body's size and the fire tenders seem to be knowlegable enough to know how much.
Once the body is put on top of the wood pile, a few more pieces are stacked on top. Then a family member, usually the oldest son if both parents are gone, takes a bundle of straw up to the ancient fire and lights the bundle. They then carry the burning bundle down to the stack of wood with the body on it and circle it 5 times, setting bits of it on fire at a time. Eventually the whole stack catches and it's a giant bonfire. Standing amoungst the 12 or so fires that day, some of which were only a few feet away, I really didn't smell anything but burning wood. Now that being said, a day later I would go further up the river to a much smaller, poorer burning ghat where people were using less than half of the wood that they were using at Manikarnika Burning ghat, which means that the fire wasn't that big. This thing stunk like a really bad barbecue. I'm talking about one of those barbecue places you find in Brunswick, Georgia, right near FLETC. It was foul. Lesson learned is, more wood, bigger fire, less smell.
But back at Manikarnika Burning ghat, it was just smoke and fire. Now it may not smell bad but visually it can be quite shocking. As the cremation goes on and the sheet and flowers burn away, you can see the body charring and burning. At certain points the fire tenders, using a long wooden pole, beat the charred body to break it up in order to make it burn more thoroughly. It can be pretty gruesome. The fire tender told me that there are certain ways that people die that does not allow them to be cremated. They are if the deceased is a baby, a pregnant woman, a person with Leprocy, a person with smallpox or a person killed by being bitten by a cobra. I never found out why. Those persons have rocks tied to them and are thrown directly into the river where they sink right to the bottom. Otherwise, once the cremation is complete, the ashes are doused with holy water from the river and then the ashes are put into the Ganges.
The government, in an attempt to reduce smoke and pollution in Varanasi built a giant, electric crematorium right by the river's edge. But due to shortages in power and frequent power outages, I never saw it being used. I would imagine some of the Hindus would think that it wasn't authentic to use the electric one, though supposedly it is much cheaper.
The fire tender told me it takes about 3 or so hours to completely cremate a body. Women's pelvic bones, he said, took the longest to burn.