Obituaries to my Ashes

OBITUARIES to my ASHES……….

A spring evening –Max temp 26.5 degrees, Minimum 12 degrees, relative humidity 86.5%. Spring, the English synonym to the Indian Basant. The season, when nature is at its blooming spirits……A white gowned medical practitioner just nodded with his head bowed down and remarked a very filmy ‘I’m sorry’ to the seemingly anxious neighbors hovering in the threshold of the door, which they broke open some hours back.

She was lying cradled, as if safely within her mother’s womb- stiff (or steady?), a leg gangrained and some dried froth from her mouth which had bleached a portion of the already wheatish marble floor. Other than this, no other distortions in the assumingly twenty four hour old dead body.

Well meaning neighbours as they were, ‘intending to’ love thy neighbour as much as they did to ye self, just covering up their olfactory organs, since the whole air staled , not just of her death….but of her LIFE too. Some of them murmured, she lead a mysterious life..a bizarre female !!

For these lazy afternoons, dusks and Godhulis, who sluggishly carried forward the heartbeats, debiting them from the already calculated credited ones, witnessed feelinglessly (the computer marks it as a wrong English word….I argue it’s a true feeling, Engishmen/women might be lucky enough not to encounter it!!) an end of another mortal. Census department and municipality office registers seemingly note no alteration, for there has been no hungama on the succession certificate, heirship authority….and things of similar sorts. Other than the crackling sound of the burning bones and the cheap wood, with one piece of sandalwood to keep up to her hindu origin there is not much heat to those flames of the pyre.

The sympathetic neighbors, whisper sighingly….as they prepare to depart after all the rituals have been performed ritualistically. A distant relative, though his relational pedigree couldn’t be deciphered exactly, sobbed secretively…..Choti ma as he poured the water from the kalash and threw it at his back. What was that …Choti Ma…a bonsaid motherhood, a partialisation of the completeness to femininity?

The flames were almost simmered. Some flesh of the mortal remained half-burnt, it seems….for the shamshanghat canines were awaiting for their shares of the roasted delicacy….or is it the mythological truth of the epics…the dog, the partner of the Pandavas to the heaven, carrying her also, in flesh and soul to the last abode?

…..and you thought as if it bothered me….not really. To be frank, a sadistic pleasure runs through my spine each time I see deaths in this proximity, sitting some meters away near the banks of the river turned nala. I am not a revolutionist, not an aethist, not even a terrorist or an artist. I am just a common man, very common very very common….without the strokes of R.K. Lakshman, without the tweed coat and the short lenghthed dhoti. So common that the whole trajectory of highest common factor and lowest common multiple underpins to a sheer ‘ordinary-ness’- unnoticed, undiscussed and may be unworthy too.

That’s my biggest failure of remaining to be common(refrained from being unusual). Its so heavy a tragedy of my being, my becoming and my belonging, that deaths also don’t shake me any more, since for common men like us- to be or not to be neither makes any difference to the self nor to others. This is my favorite spot, every dusk, lighting onto my favourite Gopal Beedi -the only one I can afford at 35, still unemployed (precisely unengaged in all forms), after flicking a few pennies from my sister’s purse!

Late evening I recede back home for some curses from my widower uncle followed by a dessert (or desert/desertion) of a handful of cold rice and a bit of green veggies. Dieted food indeed - for shrinking….not just in flesh but in existence too. The dog follows me right from the shamshanghat to the doorstep, as I throw away a morsel or two to him. He needs to be kept in confidence, for I am sure, when I die, the youngsters of the neighbouring Navachar Club would just throw me beyond those paddy fields, few kilometers away where the Doms stay. This dog and his brethren would then be the only resort to carry me in bits and pieces to heaven. Not that I feel very pathetic about getting torn to pieces, for, if I were born to some Zorabian or Barucha with a Parsi lineage, the corpse would have been ritualistically laid for birds to peck on it and fly off to heaven.

In all these 35 years I have never regretted for being jobless or as my uncle rebukes –a burden to his senile shoulders. Each day of the life comes and goes without bothering me. The Shamshanghat priest says I am a philosopher….I don’t have the wisdom to cross him. Life has never charmed me, death never beckoned me. I remain as a vestigial being to the system, impotent to my existence. Yet today seeing the young boy wail for his Choti ma, and walk back listlessly, a heaviness sunk in my heart. An eeriness within me, since I am not used to feel feelings. A bit of haziness on my tortoiseshell-shaped glasses. Tears moisturizing my eyes-impossible, incredible. May be I was sitting a bit too close to the smoke or am I getting myopic?

Throughout the night I sat there, listening to the chorus ‘Ram naam satya hain’ and then some mantras chanted and the body , then another yet another …laid on the pyre. Ghee, oil and camphor for no part of the self (the Ahm) to remain unburnt.

A tangible emptiness is around me and has been reproducing and replicating itself all over me, engulfing gradually, almost the way a python does to its prey- the blankness in the eyes, often blinding, the extreme feeling of meaninglessness in the mind, the tendency of normlessness in the heart, the numbness paralyzing the limbs and the barrenness of the womb- seems like hypnotizing. As I sat and started fingering the undulating marks and cracks on the soil …..I just groggily grappled with this identity. There seems to be hunger pangs all over my body and the taste-buds yet resenting. Is it just the sterility of my reproductive organs, grape-vined within the large and small intestines or is it the parochialism of the thoughts which are not resonating anymore or the societal norm of ‘law of averages’ in whose grid I knew I didn’t fit in.

Jackals have started howling far off and there is the hooting sound of the owl ….the whistle of the night-guard
(yet unable to guard The Nishi from the blinding daylight) followed by the distant sound of the diesel engine marking that its half past two. A queer lethargy holds me back from going back to my uncle’s house today. Every damp patch on the cheap white washed wall with disproportionately spread indigo seems to mock my insularity. Infact, I am elated that some more time is ‘passed off’ …though not the mumpphali marka ‘time pass’ at all. It seemed each moment staggered and stumbled beyond minutes and hours, looking backwards and flame-wards, whirlpooling my thoughts.

It was not just the time with the ticking clock, but the space in which it was clouted, knotted with impregnated feelings, which I might never deliver. The symphony went on like this, rewinding and replaying, in the same way, though the orchestra changed. Monotony and melancholy engulfed.

It has been 14 years now, since I performed the role alike to the young boy today. 14 years…. almost synonymous to a whole life, yet life imprisonment here seems, due to some erroneous calculations of the jailor, stretched beyond life, beyond death and beyond any definitive limitations. Through these years feelings have been concealed, commitments reassured to self and convictions rekindled. Yet, there has been a big pause…seems I have forgotten to exhale out after a deep breath and through the metabolism process the carbondioxde is getting continuously hoarded…making the whole body a venomous death chamber….wherein I get transformed to a stinking carcass.

The palpitations don’t seek for a reasonable reason to be on, neither can give a justified excuse…they just beat hard, relentlessly …..62 times in a minute as the report quotes, when I went for an almost finalized pre-employment medical check up. With every such systolic and diastolic move, there is all of it together…the Mukhagni, the chauth, the uthala…the pind-daan… all rites and rituals done in sequence so that the ‘soul rests in peace’ with the ‘father in heaven’.

It seems, I did it all for myself,….It feels really light to be burnt…just reduced to ashes….as if hanging in the air….no, not like that man, (who hanged himself in an old branch of the banyan few months back) hanging 6 inches above the ground but much higher…much much higher. Like that person in the colourful balloon flying about 50 feet high above the splashing, rough waves of the Arabian sea.Yes, I remember I saw it as a kid when I was in Goa with my parents and sister. The lightness when gravity of self and relations don’t hold you back anymore...

But its not all that heavenly pleasure …there is an intolerable pain as if trillions of needles are nailed in me ….. is it that my legs are cemented to the grave which seems so heavy or the dog trying to tear off my flesh from the bones……I cant define where the pain is….in my head, my legs, my ribs…where is it?? No but I am burnt…I did it myself, with my own hands….I can even see the orange pieces of wood shimmering down gradually …. My body turned to ashes….but the ashes seems like a gelatin, glued like a dirty mash. They are heavy like the particles of mercury sticking on to each other, with a slimy sluggishness to move. The particles of ashes too much fixated with the earthly body…cant just renunciate and fly in pieces to the unknown horizons, for here remains a known world, a world which conditioned the body, the soul. A world with its uncomfortable zones domesticated us ….to its evils and odds….rooted us …alike to that gangrained leg of Choti Ma – diseased yet not amputed, the body carrying it through life unto death.

Institutionalization of life towards breathlessly gate-keeping belongings, beckonings…Ha…A vicious cycle till the mouth of the earthen pot filled with ashes is also tied hard and sunk into the deep river bed- to germinate again.

Gradually I am feeling that charm…that my feeling (affective domain) faculty is not yet redundant …. feeling death with all my sensuasness. Every nerve ending seems charged with a welcome note. Death now seems to a metaphor to life…a Siamese twin…a seemingly similar self with a differing identity, a differing individuality- a unique thumbprint. It seems to be a very known domain to me , a very vernacular feeling nested in my life- yet an etiology unknown.

Every particle of ash looks like a microcosm of the life, of my transcendence. A fragmentist, a reductioninst was what I was throughout my life, numblessly addicted to life as an ongoing process – or a going on droning syndrome.

Marginalization featured my life- as an unemployed, unengaged, at the twilight of youthful vigour, solacing and shuttling in the outskirts from my uncles house to skirting around the burning ghat- living an unsettled/unmarried life, with no potency to reproduce, symbolically akin to kangarooing my body……………………………………………………………
Till I realized that marginalization was not just lack of opportunities, conscious choices or sheer apathy in realization of those choices. It could be something like me, stagnated to margins, fearfully unable to be decisive on which side am I on.- within or beyond.

As my ashes fly haphazardly in a Brownian motion liberation spills over. Suddenly I am able to see without my glasses, able to salivate without the conditioned ladle of cold rice and slip into an intellectual addictive stimulation without the Gopal Beedi.

Death, if at all I knew, thou art so beautiful, so bountiful, so blissful….would I have ever craved to live…. A wreath to my calculated breaths, an obituary to my ashes, that’s all my life, to thee I give.