The two old German gurus had a tearful and beautiful reunion. They utterly forgot about Marlowe and Kelly, who spent a few days meditating and enjoying the scenery, while avoiding snakes and swatting mosquitoes.

Kelly and Marlowe were walking one night after sunset.

“It’s time for me to go, Marlowe,” Kelly said quietly. “The driver was paid to go both ways, so just call that number I gave you to arrange to take the Swami back.”

“I figured,” Marlowe said, with his usual good nature. “How long ago was it that you told Swami you were going to leave?”

Kelly laughed. “At least three lifetimes ago.”

Marlowe nodded. “You’re telling me. You find what you’re looking for, Denis?”

Kelly sighed. “It’s crazy, given all we’ve seen and experienced. But no, I don’t feel like I found what I came here to find. I think it’s still out there.”

Marlowe, seldom judgmental, nodded. “I can dig that, man. You gonna say goodbye to the Swami?”

“No, I don’t think so. He knows, anyway.”

“Where you heading?” Marlowe asked.

“Back to India. Back to the road. I’ll see what arises, and see what there is to see.”

The two good friends hugged, and Kelly went back to pack his things. In the morning he was on a plane, flying to Delhi. He took to the streets again, wandering through the various cities and towns, looking for nothing, content to simply go where his feet took him. He ended up in northern India in the ancient city of Varanasi, along the river Ganges. He walked as a shaved-headed man, wearing local clothes and tanned from months in the sun. No one noticed him as he made his way humbly among them, eyes downcast, as much a part of the city as its worn cobblestones. No longer a garish tourist and obvious spiritual seeker, Kelly blended into the scenery as naturally as the street vendor or local cobbler.

Varanasi was the city where bodies were brought to be cremated, a Hindu necessity. Kelly walked through the impossibly old streets, taking in the smells and sounds of a city whose entire business, whose entire reason for being, was to handle the thousands upon thousands of corpses brought to be cremated each and every day.

The city’s cremation grounds stood on two ghats, or platforms, along the river. Harishchandra, the smaller of the two, was open for cremation to all castes and religions. The larger, Manikarnika, was reserved for Hindus. Day and night, hundreds of pyres were tended by a caste known as the Dome, who have run the ghats for centuries. The pyres were lit, it was said, with an eternal flame that emanated from Lord Shiva himself, the patron deity of Varanasi. Surrounding the cremation grounds were hospices where the old and sick awaited death. Kelly found himself drawn to the ghats, and to the river Ganges, and his footsteps brought him to a low wall near the river where he took his seat, pulling his legs into full lotus. All through the night the crematoriums worked, burning hundreds of corpses while throwing thick smoke and ash into the sky. The madness of India was all around, and he sat in that position, hardly moving, until the sun rose again. Kelly left to find food before going back down to the river, retaking his place on the wall. The smells were otherworldly — death, excrement, burning hair and flesh, the thick rot coming off the water, heavy body odor, perfumes, spices, open-air markets of frying food, auto soot.

The dead were carried to the pyres all day and all night by wailing relatives. Some corpses were refused ― those with leprosy, pregnant women, babies ― all for a myriad of complicated cultural reasons Kelly didn’t even pretend to understand. The dead were burned for the amount of time the family could afford, and for most that meant the skull and pelvis remained intact. The oldest male of the family would then stand over the burned remains of their loved one, and bring a wooden mallet down onto the skull. That noise was one Kelly never forgot: skulls fractured apart by wooden mallet.

The refused corpses were carried by their relatives down to the water, and stones tied to their limbs. They were cast into the water where it was believed the holy river would purify their karma and lead to better rebirths. Yet stones slipped off rotting bodies, and so the shore of the river had over a dozen half-eaten and partially-decayed corpses lying out in the open. Only twenty feet from Kelly were the remains of a woman. She was face-down, and a fleshy breast could be seen poking out from her torso. Both her legs had been eaten off by animals, as well as her right arm, and only the clean bones stuck out, white and straight. Inexplicably, her left arm was entirely intact, with even the fingers whole and unmolested and so plump and life-like he half expected her to make a fist at any moment. Her skin was a patchwork of gray blotches and was largely intact, probably because she had only recently washed to shore. There was no hair on her head, but her body was large and once had been matronly, he guessed. Something was strung around her torso, most likely the remnants of her clothing. Kelly watched a dog come up and grab her femur, attempting to pull her away with him. Over the course of the next hour, another five dogs came by and fought over her, each taking a small piece of the woman’s rotting body.

Kelly counted no less than 15 other human corpses or skulls strewn about. He sat all through the night, hardly moving, surrounded by death and life. As the sun came up on the second day, he saw the ritual of Puja, or prayers, as people walked out into the fetid water to make offerings. The Babas, or Indian holy men, slowly worked at gathering the human remains off the shores. They then took them to be crushed and incinerated at last, but the process was slow, and the corpses seemed to come far faster to the riverbanks than they were removed. Some part of Denis Kelly knew he should have been horrified by the scene, or darkly possessed by it, but he was strangely neutral to what he saw. He was touched by the suffering of the families weeping over their dead and moved by the dedication of the Babas, but otherwise he felt merely open, calm, and unreasonably happy, especially given the starkness, the madness, of what surrounded him.

Later that day Kelly went to eat, and as he came down the Harishchandra Ghat toward the Ganga, he took his place on the wall and sat again though the night. When the sun came up on the third day he realized that he had not yet slept. He should have been exhausted, but there was no fatigue, no tiredness, only the deep awareness of life and death as part of a sacred drama. He saw, in the new light of the day, the skulls and half-eaten corpses around him, watched the endless smoke pouring from the Ghats, and in a flash recognized something profound: for two days he had been watching the life and death in front of him not as an American, horrified at people bathing in putrid waters or at the feral dogs scavenging human remains. He wasn’t looking at things as a Buddhist, seeing the suffering and the impermanence of life, nor as a Christian seeing a battle between good and evil, nor as a traveler or even as a spectator. Kelly realized he was beyond any ideas or concepts of good or evil, or any need to explain what was arising around him. Life simply was; his need to categorize or rationalize made no difference at all in the reality of what was happening. The ghats, the suffering, the wailing of women, the dying cow, and the sea of death and bones and diseases and decay simply were, independent of Denis Kelly and inexorably bound to him at the same time. Elsewhere in India there were weddings taking place, and births, and first loves, and intercourse for the first magical time. Kelly was, he realized, no longer bound to his cultural programming, no longer bound by the need to stand in judgment of life, of others, of himself. He was free, and his purpose for coming to India clear: he was practicing what is, not an ism.

Uncrossing numb legs, he stood. With the City of Death at his back he made his way out into the cleansing air of the countryside on his way to Delhi, and was soon on a plane back to San Francisco. It was time to go home.

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