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The Rippled Double
On the stone steps of Kedar Ghat, the ancient mud of the Ganga meets Naomi Klein’s warnings on elite bunker politics and the cold reflections of our digital doubles.
The oil in the clay diya is soot-black before it is lit. From the stone steps of Kedar Ghat, the Ganga does not look like a highway of souls; it looks like heavy, grey silk grease. I hold my phone in my left hand, its screen smudged with a trace of sandalwood paste from the evening temple visit. On the glass screen, dispatches from London and New York speak of rising tides, societal fractures, and the bunkers of the very rich.
Naomi Klein, speaking to The Guardian on September 12, 2026, remarked that "extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist." She was describing the billionaire class—those who hedge against planetary breakdown by purchasing private compounds in New Zealand or funding private launchpads. But here, on the edge of a river that has witnessed millennia of kingdoms and empires wash into grey silt, that impulse feels less like futuristic vision than like an old, recurring fever: the ancient delusion that money can buy an exit ticket from the common mud.
Our boatman, Suresh, pushes off from the wooden plank of the ghat with a bamboo pole. He has one plastic earbud in his left ear, listening to Hindi cricket commentary while checking the widening swirl of the monsoon eddy. "The current is heavy after Manikarnika," he says without looking back at me. "Put the phone inside your kurta. If it slips into the silt here, nobody dives for it."
As we drift into the main flow, I think of the conversation Klein and Astra Taylor published in the Financial Times on September 5, 2026, on what they termed "end times fascism." Their focus was not internet etiquette, but something far more structural: how contemporary political movements respond to ecological crisis not by sharing scarcity, but by constructing fortified enclaves, hardening borders, and abandoning any pretense of a common future.
I find myself mentally transposing their vocabulary onto these stone ghats—yet the comparison does not hold cleanly. Nature may not charge admission, but human society here has never been an egalitarian bath. Access to these steps, to the wooden pyres, to the sacred riverfront itself has been mapped by caste, wealth, and priestly privilege for centuries. The poor burn their dead with recycled timber at the water's edge while families with deep pockets hire high-platform pavilions and sandalwood logs. Enclave politics did not begin with Silicon Valley venture funds; it is simply acquiring cleaner glass and satellite uplinks.
Across the water, on the flat, sandy eastern bank, darkness has settled into an empty silhouette. In Doppelganger (2023), Klein analyzed the "mirror world"—that distorted online space where algorithmic rage turns political opponents into caricatures. Sitting in the middle of the river, watching my own screen illuminate my fingers, the hypocrisy of my armchair detachment becomes obvious.
Just two nights ago, I spent forty-five minutes in a vicious WhatsApp thread trading snide remarks with my maternal cousin over municipal election results in Gorakhpur. When he cited a legitimate local drainage problem, I deliberately refused to acknowledge it, pivoting instead to a biting remark about his party's state leadership. I chose the polished victory of the group chat over the awkward truth of family. I know how to perform enlightened restraint in an essay while feeding the exact factional machinery I claim to diagnose.
Near Harishchandra Ghat, the cremation fires burn day and night. Suresh rests the oars across his knees and lets the current carry us. The river carries both the ash of the wealthy and the refuse of the city without preference. If there is an argument to be made against the bunker mentality, it is not found in an abstract theory of solidarity, but in the stubborn physical fact of the water: no wall downstream stops the smoke from traveling upstream.
During the evening aarti, priests swing tiered brass lamps in rhythmic arcs. The flames multiply across the surface of the river. Each flame has a reflection, but the reflection is cold. If you reach down to touch the burning light in the water, your hand only gets wet.
Suresh dips his oars again. The water ripples, and the reflected brass flames shatter into a thousand orange fragments, instantly losing their shape.