C3 (2/2)

To prevent any accidents, I once again put Second Uncle back in his cage.

Before I left, my aunt said she would get me something to eat, something simple to eat first.

I think it's true that I'm a bit hungry, so I'll just take a bite or two.

When it came, I knew it was just a bowl of yogurt.

However, I find it hard to accept that there was cumin in the yogurt...

My aunt said that she put cumin in the yogurt to increase the shelf life.

I said okay, in order to respect her work results, I drank a bowl of cumin yogurt, belly half full left.

The address that Samit gave me was at the ”Yamna River”. According to the location, it should be by the sea, so I didn't know what he was doing there.

After searching for four hours, he finally found a place.

But when I arrived at this place, I was stunned by what I saw.

This was a seaside place. On the banks of the Yarmna River, there was a small plot of land. The ground was littered with black gauze and dirty feces. From time to time, a stench would drift over.

There were four people on the shore, two middle-aged men and a middle-aged woman. Beside them stood another old man who was wearing something similar to a priest's attire. He was holding a book and reading something.

And the fourth person, I recognized with a glance, was precisely the Samit I was looking for. At this moment, he was bent over, messing with something by the river, and as his line of sight was obstructed by him, he wasn't able to see anything clearly.

When I got there, I was surprised to see that there was a funeral going on here!

In front of Samit was a wooden frame, and on the wooden frame lay a four or five-year-old child, whose body was covered with a white cloth.

The child's eyes were closed, his dark yellow skin revealed a hint of paleness, while the two middle-aged men and women beside him were wiping away their tears.

Seeing me come, Samit nodded, telling me to wait.

To tell the truth, I've never seen a dead person in my life, and I'm especially afraid of funerals. If I knew earlier, I wouldn't have come looking for him.

Since he was already here, he could only sit on the beach and didn't dare to look in that direction.

However, the more afraid he was of something that he didn't dare to look at, the more he couldn't help but want to look at it.

Samit placed some unknown strange things on the child's body, then took out a piece of yellow paper and placed it under the child's head.

After doing all this, he signaled the middle-aged man and woman to come over. The two then kneeled on the ground and bowed. Samit placed the wooden shelf into the water and pushed it away.

The middle-aged couple should be the parents of the dead child. Right now, they were crying even harder than before.

It didn't take long for the wooden frame carrying the child to float away with the sea.

Samit stood up and gasped for breath, as if he had been relieved from a heavy burden.

I approached him and asked him what he was doing.

Samit's answer made me shiver all over.

This, he said, was Delhi's most famous baby cemetery!

Then he explained to me that it was a Hindu tradition that babies under the age of six should not be cremated but buried in water. Today, the tradition has attracted considerable opposition from Indians, and a court has specifically ordered an end to the practice, but to no avail.

He said that the man with the book was ”Naval,” a well-known local imam whose job it was to preside over the burial of infants by water. He had worked here for ten years, putting the remains of three or four children every day into the dirty waters of the Yarmna River or burying them there. The Yamna is India and one of the dirtiest rivers in the world.

By then, the middle-aged man and woman had already left. The imam walked over to see me without saying a word, then took out a few rupees and passed them to Samit.

Without question, this business was definitely recommended by Samit, and then the imam would give him some good fees.

I didn't want to understand too much about the water burial. After all, it had nothing to do with me.

Hearing the end, Samit's brows knitted even tighter.

Finally, I took out my phone and showed him the picture I took of the Second Uncle.

After Samit finished reading, his face revealed a look of disbelief, and he stared blankly for a while before swearing in English, Damn, why didn't you say so earlier? Your Second Uncle is in big trouble!