On a burning ghat

There's a certain inexplicable something about 'The Burning Ghats' in Varanasi. Two days ago, I happened to witness such a place. The cremation ground was weighing with dead bodies, pyres and ashes. Around 6-7 pyres were set aflame and the fire was consuming them with an infernal joy.

Chunks of burnt wood were dropping from the pyre and the fire burnt deliriously. Clouds of smoke forming in the atmosphere as if the spirits of the dead danced madly on the tunes of an unsung cosmic rhythm.

People shoveled the ashes to clear the ground to prepare it for the next pyre. I witnessed a strange continuity something like-chapters were read, books then discarded and new books brought. The cycle went on. A virtuous cycle!
... There wasn't a sign of melancholy anywhere, no grimace. I saw faces flooded in tears but that wasn't saddening.

I couldn't take my eyes off the burning pyres. I saw a mad dance of destruction...a destruction that harbingers a new beginning....'creative destruction' , that may be put as.

There were heaps of ashes and I wondered how could one differentiate between charred wood and charred flesh. Both looked identical. There wasn't a stench of burning flesh anywhere. On the contrary, it smelled of nothing. Death has no smell. The fire purifies the enveloping ambience. It gulps the stench, the diseases and the impurities.

I saw people emptying pitchers containing ashes in the Ganges. I saw the ashes flowing with the air , getting immersed in water as if the ash now formed a part of the cosmos. The body, thus , never leaves the earth. It still sustains on Earth as a particle or more fundamentally, an atom. It becomes a part of the biosphere.
I can't say where the spirit goes. May be, it sets anew to finish its Karmic cycle or may be it merges with the Eternity. I don't quite know. Nobody knows, in fact.

Those few minutes on the cremation ground instilled in me a virtuous, a pious truth that Death isn't a stop. Its a stoppage where life takes a momentary halt to begin its caravan again.