So it was an exceedingly long day—from dawn when we arrived at Manikarnika chanting, Rama nama satya hai and marched purposefully down the bank of the ghat directly to the ritual bath mikvah of the Ganges to give Ma her final dunk, until dark when Ma combusted to the last crisp, and I performed the ultimate filial rite required of me, following which I was free at last to go my way. And yet, though I know the day streamed into the night until it blurred into a day that was neither day nor night, and though my memory when I revisit it takes the form of frames unfolding in slow motion, like video replays of a sports event that bestow an aura of gravity and consequence on the smallest details—despite all that, while I lived through it, it seemed to race by, like a fleeting dream.

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.