A boat. People didn’t do things like that but here they were settling on the seat as the boatman pushed out, a kid not that much older than Kyle himself with teeth that would never be allowed inside Cantonment yet Kyle felt jealous of him, with his boat and his river and the people all around and a life without laws or needs or duties. He sculled them through floating butter-candles - diyas, Salim explained to Kyle - past the ghat of the sadhus, all bare-ass naked and skinny as famine, and the ghat where people beat their clothes against rock washing-platforms and the ghat where the pilgrims landed, pushing each other into the water in their eagerness to touch the holy ground of Varanasi, and the ghat of the buffalos - where where? Kyle asked and Salim pointed out their nostrils and black, black-curved horns just sticking up out of the water. Kyle trailed his hand in the water and when he pulled it in it was covered in golden flower peals. He lay back on the seat and watched the marble steps flow past, and beyond them the crumbling, mould-stained waterfront buildings and beyond them the tops of the highest towers of New Varanasi and beyond them the yellow clouds, and he knew that even when he was a very old man, maybe forty or even more, he would always remember this day and the colour of this light and the sound of the water against the hull.

‘You got to see this!’ Salim shouted. The boat was heading in to shore now through the tourists and the souvenir-boats and a slick of floating flower garlands. Fires burned on the steps, the marble was blackened with trodden ashes, half-burned wood lapped at the water’s edge. There were other things among the coals: burned bones. Men stood thigh deep in the water, panning it with wide wicker baskets.

‘They’re Doms, they run the burning ghats. They’re actually untouchable but they’re very rich and powerful because they’re the only ones who can handle the funerals,’ said Salim. ‘They’re sifting the ashes for gold.’

The burning ghats. The dead place. These fires, these piles of wood and ash, were dead people, Kyle thought. This water beneath the boat was full of dead people. A funeral procession descended the steps to the river. The bearers pushed the stretcher out into the water, a man with a red cord around his shoulder poured water over the white shroud. He was very thorough and methodical about it, he gave the dead body a good washing. The river-boy touched his oars, holding his boat in position. The bearers took the body up to a big bed of wood and set the whole thing on top. A very thin man in a white robe and with a head so freshly shaved it looked pale and sick piled wood on top of it.