We advanced past Kedar Ghat, churning onward, lugging our load through ghat after ghat, past the launderers slapping saris against the stone and stretching them out to dry as the sky began to lighten and we came to Dashashwamedha, the busiest of all the ghats. To the east, at our right, Mother Ganga was already crowded with bathers and pilgrims performing their daily puja. The silvery dark water was strewn with flower petals and flickering with candles floating in banana leaf baskets, gifts to the gods. Boats packed with tourists and guides plied up and down, stopping to bob on the water to allow the passengers to gape at the quaint rites. Along the ghat itself in front of us and to our left, streams of devotees were descending to the river to carry out their ablutions, washing their bodies with the murky water, brushing their teeth with neem twigs, gargling and spitting. Hawkers peddling snacks and souvenirs, boatmen and masseurs, drug dealers and flower sellers and silk merchants and guides already were hustling for clients—it was business as usual at dawn on the main ghat, the only remarkable intrusion was our procession of dropouts transporting physical remains of extraordinary proportions through this sacred territory rather than through the streets of the city, chanting in one voice our praises to the truth of Rama. Now our ranks already swollen by the mixed mob collected along the way grew even greater in number, increased by the curious and the sensation seekers pressing in for a good vantage point as we stopped at one of the pandit stations shaded by a bamboo umbrella, and I climbed onto the wooden platform to say a few words in memory of my mother.

This eulogy was the only feature of the familiar Western ceremony that I retained. My mother never mentioned it, so she never explicitly forbade it. I wanted to have an opportunity to say something and I knew it would not be possible to betray my woman’s naked voice when we arrived at the cremation ghat, Manikarnika. With the ancient priest sitting cross-legged on the platform under his bamboo umbrella looking up at me tolerantly through steel-framed glasses, oddly familiar like Bapu on all those rupee notes, I spoke my requiem in English, hoping it would be incomprehensible to the more fanatic members of the audience so that no one would take offense at the irregular nature of our congregation and observance, and deem it all some kind of mockery.