Children of the Pyre follows the lives of a group of about ten Indian children. Born into the lowest caste in the holy city of Varanasi, they make their way in the world (and a little money for their parents on a good day) gathering shrouds from bodies brought to the Ganges riverside to be burned. India-born filmmaker Rajesh S. Jala spends the better part of the film interviewing these children in the place that they work; in alarming proximity to the blazing fires that take people out of this life.

Jala’s production is modest in a way that seems only appropriate to the subject matter; the camerawork is not astounding, nor is the music extraordinary. See this film if the content interests you, because though that is all it has to offer, it is offered in abundance. He questions the children (all boys) in their own language, and they respond with their trust, confessing private thoughts about rich people, girls, scary dreams, their friends, rivals, vices.

Yogi, a younger one, says he is constantly dreaming about ghosts. In one story he tells, someone hits a corpse on the pyre with a stick, causing its torso to sit up with the arms extended. The men in charge of the burning all become terrified and run away, until a brave one hits it again, and the demon falls supine once more. There is a touch of magic realism in how densely we see myth, magic and reality to be intertwined on the burning ghats. “We dream of this cremation ground”, Yogi says. This is their reality. And Jala is unafraid to show us this grisly world, where children are forced to act like adults.

Ravi tells us about his girlfriend, Archana, who succumbed to an illness. In a poignant turn of events, he has to see her body being burned on the very cremation ground he works on. We later see him taking a bong hit. “Why do you smoke marijuana?” Jala asks, and Ravi breaks into a fit of light giggles. “It’s a hard job”. When Jala chides him for his unhealthy habit, Ravi retorts cynically, “if you care so much, send me 5000 rupees as dole and I won’t even peek at this wretched place”. At this, the filmmaker is speechless.

Towards the end, we see footage of the boisterous Navratra festival, with packed streets and loud music booming onto an ’80s-style-coloured dance floor in Varanasi. One of the pyre boys climbs up onto the stage and dances with a sari-clad woman, cheered on by the crowd, animated by the frenzy of the evening. For a brief moment, the boy seems unburderned by caste, by responsibility, but in a poignant motion, the camera pans down to see the continually burning fires of bodies less than 50 meters away.

Children of the Pyre is full of this unsettling lucidity about death and poverty – the children know that once this experiment in stardom ends, they may be fated to spend their lives in miserable, grinding poverty, and return to being invisible. But that won’t stop them putting on a show. Their fires burn on.

3.5/5 stars