AN ATOL FEATURE Death and life on the Ganges
By Bryan Pearson
Eyes ochre-red from acrid smoke and face awash with soot-blackened sweat,
Santosh Kumar Mallick carefully maneuvers the already-charred corpse into the
heart of the funeral pyre, piles on more logs and throws on a bucket of ghee.
"My body feels like it is burning. I always feel as if I am burning," he gasps,
standing back as the flames crackle high into the Kolkata sky and the
sickly-sweet smell of burning human flesh drifts with the tide up the Ganges.
The body, of an 82-year-old man who died of pneumonia, had earlier been placed
by family members onto the pyre of
sandalwood logs which, after rituals performed by a Hindu priest, had been lit
by the newly-tonsured eldest male relative.
Since then it has been up to Santosh - who gets paid 30 rupees (about half a
dollar) for every body he burns - to tend to the fire and carry out the
cremation in accordance with Hindu traditions.
After about two hours, it is time to perform the most sensitive operation of
the long, demanding ritual.
"I dare not mess this up; the family would never forgive me," he says as he
uses two wooden paddles to poke carefully through the heat and retrieve the
remnants of the body - by now only the skull, rib case and part of the pelvis -
and rebuild the fire around them.
At age 23 years having already cremated around 2,000 bodies, Santosh handles
the grim and delicate task with ease and the grieving relatives murmur their
approval.
When he began this work, at age 15, he would occasionally lose control of the
cadaver and it would sprawl sickeningly across the concrete in front of
horrified relatives.
But these days it is no longer the fear of not doing the job properly that
worries him. It is the state of his health.
"I have breathing problems and heart problems," says the slightly-built but
surprisingly strong Santosh, dressed in long blue shirt, blackened shorts and
slip-slops as he bustles from fire to fire at Nimtala, the main burning ghat
(broad flight of steps) that leads down to the banks of the Ganges as it flows
sluggishly through the teeming Indian city of Kolkata before entering the Bay
of Bengal.
"I breathe in too much smoke. I feel troubled in my body. When I sneeze or
cough the phlegm is black," he says.
Sometimes the emotion, too, gets to him.
"When I see the families crying I remember the day my own father died," he says
softly before his words are drowned out by devotees in an adjoining
red-bricked, flower-strewn temple who break into chanting and begin ringing
bells as part of their praise of Lord Shiva.
"It is as if those I see weeping are my brothers and sisters," explains Santosh
above the sudden clamor.
While he is resigned to doing this arduous work for the rest of what is likely
to be a rather short life, he vows his newborn son, Rissi, will have a brighter
future. "I have no choice because I am not educated but Rissi will not do this
job. That is certain," Santosh says with a sudden surge of determination.
A mere 12 days old, the tiny Rissi, lying cozily in his mother's arms under a
makeshift tent erected on the roof of a nearby municipal building overpopulated
with the families of those who stoke cremation fires, would not know of course
that his father burns bodies for a living.
Nor for that matter that he has had the misfortune of being born into India's
lowest and most despised caste, the Doms.
It is due to this twist of fate that he too, despite his dad's determined vow
amid the fire and smoke on this humid Kolkata day, will very likely end up
stoking white-hot fires and inhaling throat-searing smoke while reducing the
newly dead to little more than a few shovel-fulls of ashes to be heaved into
the Ganges by teary family members.
"I want my son to go to school, to learn, to get to university. I want him to
be an engineer or a doctor," says Santosh, pausing from his toils for a
cigarette - as if his parchment-brittle lungs haven't already this day breathed
in more than their fair quota of smoke.
"I want him to lead a respectable life," he insists.
The odds however are overwhelmingly stacked, like the pricey sandalwood logs on
the funeral pyre, against little Rissi.
For now he spends his little life mostly sleeping and from time to time,
stretching his tiny arms and bawling for food while his 21-year-old mother Rina
clucks and caresses and cradles her firstborn.
Inevitably, however, he too will one day stand amid the fires of Nimatala
vowing a better future for his own children. Just as Santosh did, just as
Santosh's father Mohinda did before him, and just as Santosh's grandfather
"Baba" did even before him.
Like all those trapped at the lower ends of India's social stratification
system and who are inevitably shunned by society despite caste-based
discrimination being outlawed by the Indian constitution of 1950, the
overriding desire, naturally, is to be upwardly mobile.
For Doms in particular, however, the chances of climbing up the rickety social
ladder are remote.
For one thing, Doms touch human corpses and are therefore regarded as "unclean"
by other Hindus. Even though the term is banned and those once-called
"untouchables" are now known as Dalits, the sentiment among many Hindus remains
unchanged.
"I admire what they do and am pleased they are there to do this job but I would
never shake hands with a Dom," says 24-year-old Deshik Dutta, down at Nimtala
for the cremation of his grandmother. "The work they do is noble. If I was
asked to do it I could not. They are India's real untouchables."
Also counting against the Doms at Nimatala is the fact that the work they do on
sweltering days in ultra-humid Kolkata is so demanding that they have little
energy or time left for pursuing much more than sleeping and eating and raising
too-large families.
Inevitably, many turn to drink and, due to the daily heat of the fires, the
relentless reality of death, the choking smoke and their hard living
conditions, suffer poor health. Equally inevitably many die young - some, like
Santosh's grandfather, even in their early thirties.
Santosh's father lived a little longer than his own father did and despite
drinking heavily managed to send his son to school.
The adventure was only brief, however, and when Mohinda died suddenly at age
45, Santosh, then just 15, left his studies and joined the ragtag band of about
50 men and boys at Nimtala whose job it is to light the fires and perform the
elaborate Hindu funeral pyre rituals.
Most of those tending the fires and adjoining electric ovens - funeral pyres
due to the exorbitant cost of the wood are mainly the preserve of the rich -
suffer some ailment or other, usually of the lungs.
They live roughly, crammed with other families, ducks, chickens, dogs and cats
in the municipal building or on its roof.
"We are VIPs - Very Ignored People," laments Sunil Kumar Mallick, who, backed
by a father who between tending the fires has set himself up as something of a
Hindu guru at Nimtala, has made a courageous bid to escape the Dom
never-go-round.
Unlike many children who grow up amid the smoke of the burning ghat, Sunil now
aged 29, managed to complete his high school education and even more unlikely,
land a job as a journalist on a Kolkata weekly.
He also joined a local drama group and is doing his best to shed the
"untouchable" image that has cloaked him from birth.
But, he acknowledges, he is forced to return from time to time to the ghat to
shoulder his burden of burning bodies - not only to make extra money but
because, he says, this has been the tradition of his caste for centuries.
"It is the sacred duty of the Doms to burn bodies," says the dapper bachelor
with ready smile and neatly clipped moustache he hopes will attract a woman
from outside his caste as his wife - a rarity for those whose constant reality
is endless processions of men clad in white arriving with bodies laid out on
ceremonial stretchers and bedecked with flowers.
Santosh, Sunil's cousin, also sees the job as being mainly spiritual.
"The Hindu scriptures say that when the body is burnt the soul gets freedom and
salvation. I give men salvation every time I light the fire," says Santosh.
His working environment is grim - surrounded by soot-blackened buildings and a
series of small towers, the ghat with its almost constantly burning fires
conjures up images of Dante's inferno.
The site is always busy if not crowded by relatives dressed in the white of
mourning then due to the constant visits by holy men, Tantrics who come to
consume human flesh during elaborate rituals around fires at night, and Hindu
devotees who wander down to the ghat after offering prayers at the nearby
temples, or after taking a ritual bath in the Ganges.
On those rare occasions when there are no bodies and no fires and no people
around, Santosh and his friends hang about the ghat to socialize, play cricket
and, under the direction of Sunil's father the guru, learn the art of
meditation and the lessons of the sacred Hindu scriptures.
With a baking hot Bedouin-style rooftop tent his only respite, Santosh also
spends his "down time" either inside the cooler temples dotted along the
riverside or simply walking next to the Ganges with Rina and little Rissi.
He also likes to sing and he and Sunil from time to time join voices at one of
the nearby bathing ghats, filling the smoky sunset with tremulous voices that
alas are slowly being basted by the extreme heats of their daily existences.
Santosh admits that like his father and grandfather, he turns to the bottle
from time to time. "But only occasionally. I don't want to be like other Doms
and drink too much and die too young," he says, slicking back his long black
hair.
Party time! Santosh and Rina a few nights later are to celebrate the birth of
Rissi. Drummers arrive and begin making music. Women clad in bright saris swirl
around and around in a darkened hall which boasts more soot than paint on the
walls.
Rice and dhal are being prepared on a fire in one corner of the hall by a
jovial chef named Rajan who explains that he caters for all functions and
celebrations at Nimatala.
Men and young boys arrive. The women sit down and the males begin their own
dancing - jagged and haphazard compared to the smooth, rhythmic colorful
efforts of the women.
Rissi and Rina, the stars of the show, however, never arrive. No explanation is
given. Arguments break out. Guests hurry upstairs to eat. The drummers play on
and themselves begin dancing in a bid to get the guests back on to the dance
floor.
Santosh looks troubled and spends time arguing with others. No one explains
what the problem is. People start leaving. The expected time of joy and
celebration has become a sad and hollow gathering of teenage boys trying to
outperform each other with outrageous dance steps.
The drum troupe goes home. Santosh apologizes and he too goes home. Another
cousin, Mukesh, just 15, sits dejected and silent in a corner.
Mukesh like other Doms had been looking forward to this celebration - an
occasion to drown the harshness of daily life beneath a wild pounding river of
dancing, feasting, flirting and loving. For a while.
Mukesh clearly has long grown used to disillusionment. Selected by his brothers
as the potential savior, he was sent to school from a young age while they paid
his fees from their work at the fires.
It was he who would become literate, become educated, find a good job and help
the family rise out of the swamp. Mukesh was to be the one they would boast
about. Someone who would give them a smidgeon of hope.
But an under-average student, he has cast off the unwanted role of saviour and
now spends his days pretending to go to school but in fact hanging out with
friends, watching Bollywood movies on crackly black and white television sets
or listening to latest Hindi hits on CD players.
He admits out of earshot of his brothers that he is unlikely to graduate from
school and will inevitably end up stoking the fires alongside Santosh.
Sunil, the journalist and actor, had for a while offered some hope. Talk was
that he would emerge as Nimtala's Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar - the Dalit lawyer
who rose through the ranks to help pen the Indian constitution.
But he freely acknowledges that he was never ever going to attain those sorts
of giddy heights, nor even outwit the burning ghat once and for all.
Right now his journalism job is rather tentative and his involvement in
theatre, although enthusiastic, is confined to bit parts. He has risen but
nowhere near high enough.
He admits too that he is unlikely to find a wife outside of the Doms - "who
wants to marry someone who burns bodies?" - and that at most he can hope is to
follow the path of his father, known as Guruji, and become a teacher of
scriptures.
"I admit I don't know where it will lead to," he says of his attempt to escape
the burning fires along with the haunting memories of being taunted as an
"untouchable" by his classmates.
"I am after all a Dom and there is discrimination against the Doms."
But every birth in this fractious community - it is riven with political
divisions - offers new hope, no matter how teeny.
Rina, sitting amid a group of women weaving the bamboo baskets for which the
Doms are well known, cradles her son. She, like her husband, harbors high
ambitions for the little boy.
Rina, with her orange-and-white dotted headscarf, her bright-yellow sari, her
high cheekbones, soft round face, light skin and understated beauty, her long
fingers and her disarming smile could easily have made it big in the world of
glamour or in Bollywood - had she been born into a different caste, a different
world, a different reality.
But she is a Dom and can't hope to escape the crass judgments of her
compatriots.
For now she seems quite content to murmur lovingly to Rissi - the boy with the
high forehead and button nose on whose still miniscule shoulders rest the heady
ambitions of his downtrodden family.
Bryan Pearson is a veteran journalist who has worked extensively in
Africa, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan as well as throughout the Middle East,
including long stretches in Iraq. He is currently Chief Editor, Middle East
English Service, Agence France-Presse.
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