remains

He shot this from the top bunk of the 1st Class sleeper carriage on the train from Varanasi to Kolkata.

My 2nd visit of 3. His first and, probably, last.

We had watched bodies burn on the banks of the Ganges.

Mango wood withstands monsoon. $35 to contribute a corpse to the world’s oldest ongoing funeral. We didn’t start the fire, Shiva did…4,000 years ago to keep his mother warm. It’s burned continuously ever since: THE eternal flame.

Ashes to ashes in about 3 hours, save for a woman’s pelvis and a man’s sternum, the only bones that don’t disintegrate to dust.
The cows chew those.

A young, lower caste man…maybe a boy…with bandaged limbs had collapsed on a train as it pulled into the station, earning a fresh head wound. I was disappointed to realize that I was the only person present with either / both emergency medical training and / or empathy.
I only had to disperse the crowd and pour freshwater on his forehead to wake him up, thank god-I-don’t-believe-in.

Dalit kids, untouchables, wanted portraits from me. That’s what I do, but He was angry with me.

Because one of the older boys, missing his left hand, had simulated oral sex on his stump of a wrist for the camera as a joke, He pulled me into the station’s cafe, where rats scurried over our sandaled feet. He felt unsafe, he said, given that we were outnumbered…by “dangerous” children. I felt unsafe, as well: I had just seen an actual tapeworm scaling the wall of the squat stall.

There were words exchanged until there weren’t.

We weren’t married, then. I wore the ring to avoid the question and the judgment as we progressed toward the rural, repressive Northeast States where women can’t travel without a male next of kin.

His grandfather had made the ring. His mother had told me her father had done terrible things to her. The ring was, 4 years later, destroyed in Edinburgh when He threw it into traffic. I was grateful.

The train finally arrived. The porter turned the beds. I opened Raymond Carver.

His silhouette loomed over. “I love you, Flannery.”

All that remains of that love is my gaze in His lens, a bone to chew on.