You know that bit
in Jaws, when the head falls out of the bottom of a boat?

Nearly twenty years ago, I went to Varanasi on the Ganges. A quaint place, almost Venetian in some of its aspects, old, ornate buildings on the shore line, slowly slipping into history.

It's a revered place. People go there to die/cram for their finals, and having your ashes scattered in the river (preferably once dead) is like a turbo boost through your karmic (q.v.) cycles, allowing you to enter nirvana (if Buddist) that little bit quicker, without all that tiresome birth-life-prove yourself-aha-still-shit-as-you-were-death karmic bondage.

It's expensive to get burnt there - wood, balms, oils, unguents, poultices etc, not to mention the yards of crepe.

Poorer people reckon it's still better to get yourself in that there river than not, prior immolation notwithstanding.

So there are fair few bodies just tipped into the murky waters, bobbing, bloated, full of gas, eyes pecked out by buzzards. The water is so muddy that the long snouted dolphins which inhabit it have opaque, redundant eyes.

Occasionally you'd see a fin break the surface, occasionally a corpse would flip and flounce melodramatically, steered by unseen jaws.

We took a small punt out at sunset, and after five minutes or so, our boat got stuck on corpse. Face down (so a man I presume), naked and bloated, it got wedged under the hull.

The boat owner casually shoved an oar in its back, pushed it down and away, then turned to us with a 'don't you hate it when that happens' look...
(Countryslicker, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 10:42, 2 replies)

I believe you mean
Hindu, not Buddhist.

Good story though.
(Abby_Normal Abby Normal, Thu 28 Feb 2008, 15:12, closed)

alot of the time they do try to burn the corpses
unfortuantly they can't afford the vast amounts of wood/coal it takes, so they just get a bit singed on the edges.

You knwo some people bathe in the Holy Ganges, and some people drink the water....yum....
(misskitty reeks of sex and turpentine; laudanum afternoons, Sat 1 Mar 2008, 2:56, closed)