Uttar Pradesh

No state on my map carried more freight than Uttar Pradesh. Two hundred and forty million people, a population that would rank among the largest countries on Earth if the state seceded from the atlas, and a concentration of India's imagination so dense it distorts the compass: the Taj Mahal, the Ganga at her most worshipped, Rama's Ayodhya, Krishna's Mathura, the Buddha's first sermon, the Nawabs' Lucknow, and at Prayagraj, every twelve years, the Kumbh Mela, the largest gathering of human beings our species has ever managed for any purpose whatsoever. I had been circling this state for months the way you circle a difficult chapter in a syllabus. The train from the south crossed the Ganga on a long iron bridge at dusk, the water below already carrying its first evening lamps, and I gave up circling.

There was also a private reason, which I had not written on any list. I had been to Varanasi once before, at six, and remember almost none of it. My nannamma, my father’s mother, had died that spring, and my parents took her ashes north the way families from our coast have always taken them: by train, in a small pot wrapped in cloth, with a child brought along because there was nobody to leave him with. I remember the pot. I remember being told not to touch it and touching it anyway, and finding it ordinary, and slightly warm from the compartment. I remember my father lifting me at the ghat so I could see over the shoulders of the men. I do not remember the river at all.