Part 3 - Cremations

As mentioned before, Varansi is known as one of the holiest cities in India. People go there to die, be cremated there or to bathe in the Ganges. BTW, the Ganges is so dirty, it's hard to believe that they actually drink that water and hold it so sacred. On our tour of the city, we stopped at the main cremation Ghat and learnt all about it. It's actually very interesting, but hard thing to watch. The rituals and traditions surrounding the ceremony is long and very detailed. It's far too hard (and too long to type) to explain everything properly, but I will mention some of the key points.

• 200-300 bodies are cremated at this Ghat EVERY day - 24hours a day, 365 days a year - it's always going
• Loved ones are cremated within 24 hours after dying (I didn't know this until right before I was going into the mix of families because had I know, I probably wouldn't have gone) but it makes sense, because there is no such thing as a morgue there.
• The body is prepped for cremation and one of the things they do is douse the body in water from the Ganges so that there is no odor when burning. 
• Not everyone is cremated - they have 6 rules on who can not be cremated.
• It's expensive for the family to be cremated at this Ghat - they have to pay for the wood that will be used to burn the body and of course certain woods cost more money then the others
• It takes about 3-5 hours for the body to burn
• Women aren't allowed to attend the cremation of a loved one - only men.
• In men, the chest bone doesn't burn and in women, the "hips" don't burn- they are known as the strongest part and therefore won't burn. So once the burning is over, the family member will take the hips or the chest from the fire (with long sticks) and throw them into the Ganges.
• Once the cremation is over, the family member will walk around the fire a certain amount of times and then take a pot filled with water from the Ganges and throw it over their left shoulder onto the fire and never look back.

There is soo much to say about this ceremony, but I tried to pick the key points. We went to this Ghat and learnt a lot about the ceremony and even went up to the roof where 5 fires were going. The heat from those fires is so intense - most intense heat I have ever felt. We even saw a body being carried from the street to the Ghat on a special stretchers they use for the ceremony, draped in cloths ready for cremation. I could go on and on about it, but I think you have a bit of a better idea about what we saw. Our guide wouldn't let us stay (not that we wanted to) for very long because he said, it would give you bad dreams. It's a lot for a tourists to process - being that close to something that is so foreign to us. It is definitely something
that we will never forget.

Love Melissa and Arnold