Ira Mana Me-Sethe Hey

Burning of Big Mother of a guy

whose name starts with D.

The party is ongoing. Bodies

non-stop.

The funeral pyre district is alive,

commercially and all.

D does not mind.

I'm in Varanasi. On my way here, in the train, I ran into fairies again.

Fairies are transvestites, ousted by Indian culture, in a way. So they've naturally found a way back in. Exploiting a loophole of religious belief, they walk around, in groups of two or more (dressed eccentrically with lots of make-up), extorting merchants, and people in general. Excluded by society, they've taken on the role of people with mystical powers capable of cursing you if you don't give them money. And, when neither sympathy for their situation nor fear of the gods suffices to induce the target to cough up some dough, they expose themselves.

On the train, a fairy in wild-caveman attire ambushes the fifty-something man sitting more or less placidly in front of me. The caveman takes a large chicken drumstick bone hanging loosely from a string around his neck, sucks on it, pulls it out of his mouth with a pop, invites the guy now pinned against his seat to suck it, sticks his cloth-held package in the guy's face, suggests substituting the bone with his dick, ruffles the man's hair and the latter pays up. I'm next.

And I panic. He looks at me, nods as if to say, you know what's coming, and I clench my fists loosely, raising them and say, 'I will knock you out.'

In turn he freezes, this unnecessary threat places him in a difficult situation, for if he backs off he loses face. So I unclench my right hand and point to the window behind him adding, 'Out the window.'

You see how everyone in India is on the same page – upper castes, lower castes, outcasts. The man who got extorted rapidly lets the transvestite know he's gotten what he needs and the latter disappears in a flash. I feel ashamed. India has worked its magic again.

'Ira Mana Me-Sethe Hey' is a poorly vulgarized approximation of what the processions carrying colorfully-veiled deceased chant, as they run downhill, through streets, to the riverbank where they proceed to ceremonial cleansing, before the body is carried back up onto a pyre and lit.