The priest attending cross-legged uncoiled like a cobra and levitated unexpectedly. “Ah, it is Mama-ji,” he said. “I knew I recognized her. So the end of life has arrived for her. Yes, she is gone, but she has not yet come. She is poised now in a very dangerous place. It is a very delicate moment.” He raised his index finger significantly and placed a red tikka on my forehead. “Go at once, the gate to moksha is soon closing.”

We sped northward in a blur through the remaining ghats—Man Mandir, Meer, and so on. The sun rose on the eastern flank of Mother Ganga, and we arrived at Manikarnika.

There’s something about ritual, especially death ritual that sucks you in like a sealed train and carries you along to the end of the line, you need to accept that you’re in it for the ride. Not that I went like a sheep to the slaughter, not that I didn’t in some measure resist. It took so long for that great mass, allegedly my mother, to burn completely, that at a certain point, well beyond the three hours allotted for the incineration of an average body, the Doms began to hassle me to conclude the ceremony and vacate the cremation grounds. No way I was going to just follow orders, and not out of any personal elitism either—certainly not because the Doms are untouchables, predestined to sink their hands into the pollution of death—I trust that by now you know me well enough to give me more credit than that. No, it was because I knew they intended to wrap up Ma’s case the minute I turned my back and left—sweep up the ashes along with the big chunks of meat and body parts that had not yet been deconstructed, and toss the whole lot into the river to be ravaged by the dogs, ogled by tourists in their boats, pounded by oars like a schnitzel, devoured by snapping turtles and strange sea monsters. The assembly line had to be kept rolling, and Ma was clogging up the works. The Doms may belong to a defiled caste but they are also reputed to have prospered garishly. Death is big business, Varanasi, the mother lode.