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The sun is coming up on another day in the North Indian city of Varanasi, and already the cremation grounds along the Ganges River are alive with activity. Boats weighed down by heavy hardwood pull up to the Manikarnika Ghat, the oldest of the cremation grounds in this ancient city. Laborers hoist massive logs onto their heads and carry them up the steps along the riverbank into cramped alleyways, where they are chopped into manageable five-foot lengths and stacked as high as houses. Members of the nearby community of Delits, or "untouchables," who take care of this cremation ground assemble logs into open-air pyres. There are no female mourners at this all-male ritual. ("No woman, no cry," a local explains.) But cows and dogs mill about. So do pilgrims and tourists, who gawk at this ritual of transforming wood and bone into ashes and returning both to the waters from which all life comes and to which all life returns. In Rome, another ancient pilgrimage city, not much religion takes place in the open air. Roman Catholicism seems oddly hidden away. Except for the pope, no one offers to bless you. Not so in Varanasi, where holy men offer to dot your forehead with sandalwood paste, marking your body as belonging to the divine. Death is public, too. In fact, the city itself offers a living rebuke to those who would deny the fact of death or pretty it up. Family members carry corpses on bamboo ladders, headfirst, covered in colored cloth and garlanded like gods, through the twists and turns of Varanasi's impossibly labyrinthine streets, past wood sellers andchai vendors, past boys flying kites and men playing cards, down to the sacred Ganges, through the sunlit smoke of this Varanasi day. "Ram naam satya hai," chant the mourners as they dodge auto rickshaw drivers on their way to the cremation grounds: "Truth is the name of God."