Throughout, I felt Ma’s hovering presence, as if she were checking out the scene from wherever she was, doubtless horrified at the attention garnered by the remains attributed to her, especially at the terminus of Manikarnika. The sequined and spangled spectacle of her eunuch bearers had been enough to turn all heads during the processional, but at the cremation ghat itself, the sacred space where nothing is sacred, where all pretension and artifice are stripped away, and everything is transparent and on view, the action truly stopped at the sight of the massive husk itself that my mother had shed. The Dom Sonderkommandos standing knee-deep in the sooty water sifting with sieves of mesh and screening for gold teeth and jewels that might have been deposited with the ashes, froze in their labors to stare at the body as it was lowered for its last dip. The emaciated haulers in ragged lungis and shredded T-shirts unloading the boats, trudging up the hill to add to the great woodpiles stacked behind the ghat, paused with the burden of logs pressing down on their heads at the landing platform where Ma’s double had been laid out to dry, gaping with dropped jaws and blackened toothless gums. The regulars and hangers-on and loafers and prowlers speculated and bantered at the novelty of this imposing specimen. It couldn’t be an elephant as it was forbidden to cremate a beast on this holy ground, so it could only be a man of enormous wealth, a maharajah or a prince, an eminent personage who, though he could doubtless afford the purest ghee to fuel his own cremation, might even derive some perverse postmortem satisfaction from saving a few rupees by recycling all that built-in fat.

Converging from all sides, they formed a merry parade behind the main attraction as it was moved on its bamboo stretcher from its drying rack to its next station at the ghat, and set down on the ground beside the capacious altar of sandalwood constructed for it by the Doms. Cows and goats squeezed through the crowd in anticipation of a grand feast as the cords were untied and the appetizers and salads of beribboned cloth and flower garlands cast off; dogs pressed in to sniff out the territory, chewing on bones dredged from the scummy water. With a great communal intake of breath and a deep grunt, the Doms joined hands to heave the body wrapped in the thin sack of its shroud onto the bed of the pyre, which partially sank under its weight, collapsing the lattice-like gaps between the pieces of wood expertly arranged for the flow of oxygen to feed the flames. There it rested on top of the altar, served up, its pathetic mortal shape fully on view for all to see. The staggering mound of its torso rose behind its feet, which were pointed in the general direction of Mother Ganga as if about to soon set out. The Doms went to work piling the sandalwood on the peak of the belly, the logs sliding down its slope one after another, to the jolly amusement of the bystanders, until at last an artful meshing was devised, and the body was entirely encased in kindling, leaving only the knob of the hooded head exposed at the other end of its soaring bell curve.