You wouldn't bury your dog here

The stench is the first landmark: the overpoweringly putrid stench of death and decay.

Pallavi and Sourav Chubey, a young Delhi [ Images ] couple, drove with family and select friends in the direction of the rancid odor, bearing their heart-breaking burden – one-and-a-half-year-old son Raghav, who on April 6 had died of natural causes.

They were looking to give their child, who they had just learnt to love, a final, fitting farewell.

They arrived at Bachcha Ghat, under the iron bridge across the Yamuna that leads to Shahadra, and looked around in horror and increasing despair.

Bordered on one side by a festering pool of untreated sewage, the patch of unkempt land resembled nothing so much as a garbage dump in extreme decay.

The area was dotted with little stone 'crypts' -- rough stones arranged in a loose circle, with a big stone on top of a mound in the center. Amid the filth, incongruously, lay the occasional heaps of floral offerings.

Scattered amid the flowers and the ersatz stone crypts, they saw discarded children's clothing. A young boy, not yet in his teens, wandered around collecting the discards, seemingly oblivious to the horrendous smell. He bundled up his booty, tossed it into a little boat 'parked' at the edge of the pond, and poled his way through the bubbling, festering sewage.

As the horror-struck couple turned to leave, they saw a near-naked man stumbling towards them in an advanced state of inebriation. Lurching to a stop in front of Pallavi and Sourav, who winced from the blast of alcohol-laden breath, the man asked, 'You have a child you want to bury?

'You can bury him here.'

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