I followed intuition in and out of the dark streets, past little candles flickering in shrines and openings where men were whispering sacred syllables. I fumbled my way through the pitch-black, in the labyrinth of narrow passageways, and another corpse came by, two women in their finest silk saris sludging barefoot through soft mud towards the holy waters. I pressed myself against a wall, and a whisper of mortality brushed me. Every now and then, another group of chanters surged past, a dead body under a golden shroud on the bamboo stretcher that they carried towards the river. Cows were padding ceaselessly down the clogged, dung-splattered lane.
A boy was seated on the ground, behind a pair of scales. As I passed into the little alleyways behind the flames, I arrived at a warren of tiny streets, in which a shrunken candle burned in the dark of a bare earth cavern. How much of this was I dreaming? How much was I under a "foreign influence", if only of jet lag and displacement? Figures came towards me out of the mist, smeared in ash from head to toe, bearing the three-pronged trident of the holy city's patron, Shiva, "Ender of Time". There was chanting in the distance, a shaking of bells, a furious drumming in the distance, and in the infernal no-light of the New Year dusk, I could make out almost nothing but orange blazes, far off, by the river. A nearly naked figure with dusty, matted dreadlocks down to his waist was poking at a charred head with a bamboo pole. Groups of men, scarves wrapped around their heads, eyes blazing in the half-light, were gathered, barefoot, around the flames, edging closer. There were fires, six, seven of them, rising through the winter fog.
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