Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

- Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

Rishikesh, India.

Dhakad^[1] was dead. Dead, you know. Dead as a dodo. Or, as he might have said it: de-dead as a dodo. Till the end, he had that slight stutter before his d’s, that stutter that changed my life. Strange, he stuttered only in English, never in the vernacular. No stuttering now. Dead as yesterday. Dead as dreams.

Crackling good cremation, I thought, there on the far bank of the mother of all rivers, looking through the flames up the gorge, framed by the foothills, at the father of all mountains, the snow on the peaks burnished red by the setting sun. Perfect photo op, except I hadn’t brought along my pocket Nikon, and it isn’t that anyone would want pictorial proof that Dhakad had actually been consigned to his Creator.

I stood for a while by the burning pyre after the pundit had anointed Dhakad’s forehead with ghee and reciting from the Vedas touched the mouth with the holy flame and simultaneously the doms^[2] set alight the sandalwood bier at the cardinal points with a yell loud enough to wake the dead, perhaps just to make sure: “Ram nam satya hai”^[3].

The shout, the suddenness with which the flames shot up and around and engulfed the body, the intensity of the heat jolted me. This wasn’t the sanitized version of cremation that I had seen in the States: the coffin slips gently into the unseen maws of the electric furnace, a button is pushed and the dear departed is instantly incinerated. The bereaved hear or see nothing. This was the real thing. India constantly assails all your senses anyway. The flames, the heat, the incense of sandalwood mixed with the smells of burning ghee and flesh, the hissing, sputtering, cracking of wood and bone, ash and cinders and whatever else floating down onto my face, head, arms, even my tongue was definitely India assailing away. I felt my friend passing on.

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I paid the pundit and the pallbearers. There had been only the six of us. No ex-Presidents, no Sheikhs, no wheeler dealers, no whores, mistresses, ex-wives, no other friends, no family. The doms had already lit up their bidis, or did I just get a whiff of ganja – who would begrudge them? The burning-ghat was otherwise deserted, even the yapping pie-dogs were gone. Ours had been the only funeral that evening. The priest told me I didn’t have to stay, he would chant the final mantras as they took care of committing the remains to the bosom of the holy mother Ganga. The fire was still going as I left.

Later, I stood for a while on the Lakshmanjhula footbridge (seen in all those photographs of Rishikesh advertising the restorative power of this ashram or that yoga center) high above the Ganges, thinking of the last time I was with the living Dhakad. It was in Connecticut.

“Take my body to Rishikesh, yar. Everything is arranged.” Why not Delhi, which was where he was from, or Benares, the holiest of holies – both of which would have been more convenient for me than this trek to the foothills? “Too much pollution, man. Delhi’s been polluted by the Mussulmaans^[4] for centuries and those priests in Benares are all pimps. Rishikesh is clean. It’s near the source.” Was he just babbling because of the drugs? He had always been cynical and a bit muddled about all religions, but I had never known him to harbor any particularly anti-Muslim feelings. If anything, Hindu priests as pimps was more his line. Yet here he was, requesting a full-dress funeral by the banks of the Ganges and waxing metaphysical about the source. The river as Lamb of God washing away all sins and performing some kind of Karmic transubstantiation? Come on, you’re not going to die, I had said. “No, no. It’s all arranged. Have them burn me in Rishikesh.” So here I was on the Lakshmanjhula bridge.

The light was fading fast now, as it does here in the high valley at the foot of the Himalayas. I could hear the rushing torrent below, but the water was dark now and hard to tell apart from the shore. There was no moon. I looked out toward the burning-ghat, it was all in shadow, except for a single flickering point of light far away. And then that too died out.

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I hadn’t noticed the old man who was standing a slight distance away from me. He came up closer. Some kind of beggar, I thought. “American, huh?” he asked in school Hindi, not in the local hill dialect. Well, passport-wise, yes, but how could he tell? I was dressed in clothing customary for the occasion – simple white cotton kurta pajama – clothes which were now impure but would be recycled by the pundit after my ritual purification tomorrow.

“I can always tell by the shoes, sir” he said, with that side-to-side head shake peculiar to the subcontinent. Indeed I was wearing loafers – virtually everyone else there was barefoot or wore open-toed sandals – perhaps too fastidious a protection from the uncertain muck underfoot at the ghats. But the shoes were Italian, not American.

“Well, you won’t need those shoes to get to Heaven,” he continued. “And when you come back, you’ll be barefoot anyway.” Somewhat mystical, but quite well put; I actually understood him. Heaven – swarga – was not the eschatological end point for him; it was an intermediate, albeit pleasant, rest stop in the cycle of birth and rebirth till one achieved moksha and became one with the Ultimate Reality. I nodded and started to move away.

“So, are you waiting to see the river flow backwards?” he asked. Come again? “Yes, yes, once a year the current goes completely opposite. It is Ganga Mata returning home and reuniting with Siva Maharaj. It is a most auspicious day to die, to have your ashes cast into the river. It is borne back to the source, to the beginning of time, to Brahma, and you are liberated from the endless cycle.”

“When does this remarkable phenomenon take place?” I asked.

“On Sivaratri^[5], sir” he replied.

“And when is that?”

“Why, tonight, sir, tonight. Tonight is Sivaratri.”

I wonder if the bugger Dhakad knew the story. I wonder if he had been counting on it. I gave the old man some rupees and walked back to the ashram where I was staying the night.

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Notes:

[1] Dhakad: Hindi: large, great. As a nickname, equivalent to Jumbo.

[2] Dom: (pronounced “dome”). Caste of funeral attendants, traditionally considered outcaste or “untouchable”.

[3] Ram nam satya hai: God (Rama) is Truth.

[4] Mussulmaan: Muslim, in most North Indian languages such as Urdu, Hindi, Bengali etc.