When Sharda Devi realized she only had a few days left to live, it didn’t go down particularly well. Her son Mukesh Tiwari was preparing a ceremony involving a holy cow in their village in the impoverished state of Bihar, in India’s north-west, when she began yelling at him, irritated by the fact that this wasn’t how she had been planning to spend her last days on Earth. Devi wanted to die on her own terms, namely in the most important Hindu pilgrimage city of Varanasi in northern India where Hindus have gone to be cremated next to the holy river Ganges for thousands of years. This ritual embo…