In These Rivers About Two Hundred Millions Of People Daily Cleanse
Themselves From The Tropical Perspiration And Dirt.
The corpses
of those who are not worth burning are thrown in the same rivers,
and their number is great, because it includes all Shudras, pariahs,
and various other outcasts, as well as Brahman children under three
years of age.
Only rich and high-born people are buried pompously. It is for
them that the sandal-wood fires are lit after sunset; it is for
them that mantrams are chanted, and for them that the gods are
invoked. But Shudras must not listen on any account to the divine
words dictated at the beginning of the world by the four Rishis
to Veda Vyasa, the great theologian of Aryavarta. No fires for them,
no prayers. As during his life a Shudra never approaches a temple
nearer than seven steps, so even after death he cannot be put on
the same level with the "twice-born."
Brightly burn the fires, extending like a fiery serpent along the
river. The dark outlines of strange, wildly-fantastical figures
silently move amongst the flames. Sometimes they raise their arms
towards the sky, as if in a prayer, sometimes they add fuel to the
fires and poke them with long iron pitchforks. The dying flames
rise high, creeping and dancing, sputtering with melted human fat
and shooting towards the sky whole showers of golden sparks, which
are instantly lost in the clouds of black smoke.
This on the right side of the river. Let us now see what is going
on on the left. In the early hours of the morning, when the red
fires, the black clouds of miasmas, and the thin figures of the
fakirs grow dim and vanish little by little, when the smell of
burned flesh is blown away by the fresh wind which rises at the
approach of the dawn, when, in a word, the right side of the river
with its ghotas plunges into stillness and silence, to be reawakened
when the evening comes, processions of a different kind appear on
the left bank. We see groups of Hindu men and women in sad, silent
trains. They approach the river quietly. They do not cry, and
have no rituals to perform. We see two men carrying something
long and thin, wrapped in an old red rug. Holding it by the head
and feet they swing it into the dirty, yellowish waves of the river.
The shock is so violent that the red rug flies open and we behold
the face of a young woman tinged with dark green, who quickly
disappears in the river. Further on another group; an old man
and two young women. One of them, a little girl of ten, small,
thin, hardly fully developed, sobs bitterly. She is the mother
of a stillborn child, whose body is to be thrown in the river.
Her weak voice monotonously resounds over the shore, and her
trembling hands are not strong enough to lift the poor little
corpse that is more like a tiny brown kitten than a human being.
The old man tries to console her, and, taking the body in his own
hands, enters the water and throws it right in the middle.
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