Fire On The Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras by Radhika Iyengar

 

Fire On The Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras by Radhika Iyengar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Begins on a promising note with echoes of Cyrus Mistry's Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer. But then runs out of steam and appears as if she has just added some garnishing to her meticulously researched PhD dissertation.
Some searingly raw images

Akash picks up a bamboo stick and stabs the bone into subservience. The corpse encased with the hand-built structure of wood and straw shifts limply. Flakes of ash, disturbed by his nudge, take flight. They sting his eyes and settle on his lips. Akash cough and turns away to spit. His ashy saliva land on the ground. Splat. The afternoon suns burns his back, His mahogany skin is covered in ant-sized heat boils.

Akash has seen ‘all sorts of bodies – deformed, mutilated, broken’: corpses with smashed skulls, severed limbs, gunshot wounds, knife torn torsos with guts spilling out. He has cremated those who died by suicide, either by hanging or self-immolation.

The personal accounts of the members from the Dom community tend to wander into needless details. A more succinct narrative could have been more readable.

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