3AM & Three Hours to Burn a Body

3AM
Delhi, India

We are coming back to the hotel, full of curries our friends’ servants made. The camber of the moon appears, disappears—a white cutout in the smog. We stop at a streetlight. Out of the smoky night come the children—the brown iris of their eyes like saucers. They have emerged from their roadside tents to knock on the windows of the ambassador car. Our driver, Sharma, says, “So poor … so many so poor,” and the children knock harder and put their hands to their mouths, miming hunger. I am afraid they may break the glass. My friend says she wishes she had a lollipop. Sharma says “Work is worship.” The light turns green, the weak smiles of the children fall, and we leave them behind—ghosts of fog, still miming their hunger. Sharma looks in his rearview mirror asks, “What is it that we can do, Ma’m? What can we do?”

Three Hours to Burn a Body
Varanasi, India

We have come to watch the bodies burn,
our guide shoos away beggars and children,
selling shells of light and orange marigolds—

An offering for Mother Ganga. The murky river
sways with candles, a thousand dawn-lit stars.
The sky’s stars hidden by a canvas of clouds.

Untouchables travel barefoot down sandy stairs,
carrying another gold-clad body on their shoulders.
They chant, and the families follow their dead.

I watch them tend the “eternal flame,” watch
the living to avoid the dead. The guide says,
“This one almost finished,” points to a pyre.

A flame twists from the ghost of an eye.
“Three hours,” he says, “to burn a body.”
Legs hot from flame, ash rains onto my hair.

“Good luck,” he points to the ash, “Very good luck,
indeed…Come,” he leads us to a concrete building.
A creased, toothless woman holds out her hand.

A wrinkled breast sags from the sari. She tucks it back
without apology. The guide tells us, “She needs money
for her pyre. Good karma for you.” We hand her 500 rupees,

She hides it in her sari, lies back onto the straw mat,
the cold concrete floor. The boatman waits. We row
down the river. Dawn prayers echo from a mosque.

A dying cow moans from the river’s bank.
White branches of smoke rise from each black smudge
in the sand, disappear into the white horizon.

Children run above, along the rooftops.
Fires below create hot wind, lifting
colorful kites and children’s laughter to flight.

by Suzanne Roberts

Suzanne Roberts is the author of Shameless, Nothing to You, and Plotting Temporality (forthcoming from Red Hen Press). She teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College in California. Ms. Roberts has never smoked a cigarette, but she has been in enough smoky cities to make up for it.

Visit Suzanne Robert's website