India Moves On

Sometimes it's hard to move on, to leave behind an experience or people you loved. When we return to our lives we feel a sense of emptiness due to the space that was once occupied by those feelings or thoughts. At home this is a natural reaction, to miss something you had and find it hard to replace those feelings. In India this is not the case.

This point struck home for me when I was standing on the edge of the burning ghat in Varanasi and watching the picture in front of me. There were three or four fires cremating bodies, with groups of family members standing around watching in silence. Other families were carrying down their relatives and bathing them in the river. When it became obvious that there was no space, the pallbearers simply abandoned the body on the muddy river bank and went off to chat to the other bystanders while they waited for a spot on open up. Fifty meters to the right, a cow was meandering around by the water, snorting and defecating and trying to find food. Near the cow a man was bathing himself, next to him a woman praying, next to her a woman washing her family's clothes. On the concrete ghat roughly one hundred meters from the cremations, a small group of children were playing cricket, the ball bouncing around and splashing into the river regularly. They shouted excitedly, shopkeepers yelled at potential customers, a man cut wood for the next cremation and a starving baby was wailing. The whole scene was shrouded in a thick cloud of smoke and smelt of ash.

India moves on. From the family members of waiting bodies to shop keepers, cows, the kids we meet at organisations such as ASHA or out at Don Bosco in Kolkata, who by next week will probably never think of us again, even though they have had such a massive impact on us. People bathe where the ashes of people are spread. Even we have to move on. It would be easy for us to dwell on every square inch of this nation but we simply don't have the time. India moves on, but I doubt we ever will.

Gus