During our first tour of Gujarat, which my wife and I undertook in 2018, travelling on inter-city buses.  We stopped at Porbandar, a port on the southern coast of Saurashtra. This Gujarati seaport, which is not on many foreign tourists’ itineraries, is the birthplace of MK (‘Mahatma’) Gandhi. During our stay, we visited the house in which the great man was born.

We spent four days in Porbandar, which gave us plenty of time to wander around.  One afternoon, after reducing the amount of baggage we were carrying, we visited a place, where we received a strange invitation …

After the two uncomfortable bus journeys that we had made so far, we decided to reduce the amount of baggage we were carrying by sending one of our suitcases to Bangalore, where we were going to spend the last few days of our sojourn in India. We had already discussed sending it with the owner of a dispatch company in the lounge of the Hotel Natraj, where we were staying. He met us after we returned from Subhas Nagar (a fishing harbour) and escorted us with our suitcase to his small office, which was nearby. The price for sending our twelve-kilogramme suitcase was very reasonable. We learned that the case would be going by lorry to Bombay and then from there to Bangalore by train. We were told to leave the case unlocked so that, should it be necessary, the railway officials in Bombay would be able to examine its contents. We watched our case being sown into a huge sack, and then kept our fingers crossed. For the record, our case arrived perfectly intact in Bangalore five days later.

After dispatching our case, we returned to the Lords Eco Inn near the beach for refreshment. Then, while the sun started dropping towards the western horizon, we walked back along the seafront to the temple, which we had passed on our way to the seaside on our first afternoon in Porbandar. We pushed past the cattle outside it and entered. Some men were sitting around chatting. A couple of cats darted about the temple’s courtyard. The orange glow of the setting sun reflected off the white-painted tapering shikharas which pointed up to the cloudless blue sky.

We wandered through the open gateway of a walled compound across the road from the temple. The internal surfaces of the boundary walls are decorated with colourfully painted murals depicting deities and scenes from the Hindu scriptures. Models of very human-looking figures with monkeys’ faces perch at intervals along the walls above the murals. The walls enclose some buildings, long sheds.

The central, and most important looking, of these buildings was painted white and provided with glassless windows. Through one of the windows, we could see flames flickering. We realised that we had walked into a crematorium compound. An official came up to us, and confirmed our suspicions. Then, as if inviting us to dinner or for a drink in a pub, he asked us whether we would like to watch a cremation. Only in India can an offer like that be made so casually, because as Jon and Rumer Godden wrote in their book “Two under the Indian Sun”:

“We knew, without being told, that in India death was as casual as life, part of every day.” 

We declined the invitation.

If you enjoyed this or found it interesting, you can read more about our first trip to Gujarat in “TRAVELS THROUGH GUJARAT, DAMAN, AND DIU”, available from Amazon. The extract above is from the book, but modified slightly.