We're back in India, a return which, after last time, I'd almost been dreading. Doing it was fortunately less bad than thinking about it, and, perhaps because Chris and I were prepared for it, India feels somehow less intimidating the second time around. This is good, because the place we've landed in is the epicentre of Indian-ness.

For Hindus, who after all make up nearly 90% of India's total population, this is Kashi, the City of Light, arguably the holiest city of all and a centre for the study of Sanskrit, the language and literature of ancient India. The sacred River Ganges cuts an arc through the labrynthine streets of the old city, and where the city meets the river are the ghats, a series of stepped quays that run the length of the city's waterfront. Here, dreadlocked, saffron-robed sadhus - itinerant Hindu holy men - meditate by the riverside or preach to the faithful. At one of several dhobi (laundry) ghats, we heard the flopping sound of clothes being beaten against large flat rocks by the riverside - even having your clothes washed in the Ganges earns merit. Not long after nightfall, hundreds of oil lamps in tiny boats are released into the Ganges, each one representing a prayer to be carried downstream. Most of the ghats, though, are bathing ghats, where devout Hindus wash, or, like one man I saw, clean their teeth, in the filthy water. Because this river may be India's holiest, but it's also the world's most polluted, and its waters carry rubbish, industrial pollutants, raw sewage and human remains to the Indian Ocean.

Hindus believe that to be cremated on the banks of the holy Ganges ensures release from the cycle of life and death, and devout Hindus come here to die. In most countries, such a private and personal ritual as cremation would be performed behind closed doors, but in India concepts like privacy and personal space have no meaning and death is a fact of life. The burning ghat, like everywhere else in India, hums with activity: men constantly carry wood up from boats moored along the ghat to huge stacks at the top, or bring flaming torches from the sacred flame which, according to legend, has burned for seven thousand years, while mourners stand and watch one of ten or fifteen funeral pyres burn. Every few minutes another body is brought here, carried shoulder-high on a bamboo stretcher. This macabre bonfire night runs twenty-four hours a day, and between two and three hundred corpses are cremated here every day. Nothing is hidden from the casual observer: a charred, half-burned hand or foot sticking out of a fire is so commonplace that the Indians here seem to ignore it. At the pyre closest to us, the shroud had slipped off part of the face and we could clearly see the dead man's nose, mouth and beard. It's easy to become overwhelmed by macabre fascination for what goes on here, even as we saw the tears in the eyes of the chief mourner at the nearest pyre as he carried the flame around the pyre three times before thrusting it into the wood, that these were all living beings, loved by somebody, as little as a few hours before. In the end, unfortunately, we stood too close and lingered too long for our voyeuristic presence to be tolerated and we were told to leave the ghat. Bad karma all round.

There's less than a week to go now before we leave Asia and fly back to London. Tomorrow night we'll take the train to Agra - I'll try to write again when I get there.