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| I only have ordinary photos of the girl, but!... by Quétinbec 02/21/2009, 4:36pm PST | ||||
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But here is an awesome inlined photo: 
I met a guy whose job it is to bash burning bodies to bits with bamboo logs on the river Ganges. He was a young teenager 'collecting' for the poor families who were too poor to buy the proper wood. It takes 3 hours and 200kg of a special type of wood to properly incinerate a body before throwing it in the Ganges. The wood has to be special because you're trying to incinerate the body, not cook or burn it. This photo is of a bullshit back street burning station for poor people, which means cheap wood and stinking bodies! Burning flesh didn't smell like I expected it to. I expected it to have a very distinctive smell that would haunt me for the rest of my life, but instead it smelt quite familiar although I can't remember of what. Like, you'd smell it and you'd wonder what's that meaty smokey smell was, and then you'd find out and be like, "Oh, it's burning human flesh..... crazy. Let's go to the markets." Fun fact: Can you guess which two parts of the human body the kid said can't be smashed to pieces with bamboo sticks during or after incineration? A: The male rib cage and the female hip bone. There were five kinds of people they didn't burn and then throw in the ganges: Lepers (because of the stink) Snake bite victims (can't remember why) pregnant ladies (the child is innocent - rock is tied to the body and dumped in river) priests (innocent) - bodies also sunk with rocks Someone else? By the way, this is the river the Indians love to bath in if you're wondering why they stink. I went to Varanasi to see this because I thought if I saw enough hard shit, I'd stop acting like such a faggot. I was inspired by this German guy I was living with. His friend injured an ankle hiking so they went to the hospital and the German saw some shit as he was wandering around the hospital looking for the pharmacy. He went out a door which led outside and laid out in the open air were the bodies of many street kids. Some weren't covered. Some, at various stages of decomposition, where covered but the covers had blown off. He said the sight had totally changed the way he looked at the world and would be with him until the day he died. The Gypsy, too, told me how in Romania, they used to put coins on the eyes of dead people at funerals. She said when she was young, she and her sister used to hold their noses and steal into the room with the body and replace the two large coins with coins of lesser value! (She sent me an email last week saying she's getting married this year) So all these cool people had seen all the terrible shit and I had only ever seen a dead body at a distance, so I thought Varanasi would make a man out of me. I was trying to take photos of the bodies when the bamboo body smashing kid found me and said I couldn't take photos but he would give me a tour and tell me what he knew (for some money). We went to the top of a building directly above the fires. The bodies are covered with sheets. The colour of the sheets represent the sex and age of the corpse. They brought out a girl who the boy said was under 30. She was the fire closest to me. The Father shaved his head and started the fire. The rest of the family were seated a short distance from the burning body. The kid was telling me facts about burning bodies as the bodies burnt. He wanted me to go down stairs to give a donation to the 'temple', but I wanted to stay until the sheets had burnt off so I could see the face of the girl and the body melt and be traumatised and have something to remember until the day I die. After a while, the sheets around the legs burnt away and I could see the legs and feet. The feet were positioned so that one foot was on top of the other - like she was trying to stop a piss, or like a cutesy embarrassed anime girl pose. It was cute, so it was ridiculous. The back of her legs seemed a little black from the fire - but then she was Indian so who knows. I wasn't disgusted or traumatised so wondered if I had played too many computer games or was a child. The family also looked like they didn't give a shit as they watched their daughter/sister burn, so I hated them and thought there are so many fundamental unbridgeable differences betweens Indians and the west that we'll never be able to get on and I hope the Chinese invade them after a border skirmish. Other tourists would come and watch, but only for a very short time. They were all very interested but felt bad for being curious - except for one young couple. I watched for about 10 minutes and thought poorly of those who only watched for a short while. I saw similar body burning activities in Kathmandu, but at the time I didn't know what was going on. 
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