Death

The sky was red the night my grandfather died.

It was a hot end-summer day, rather uncharacteristically so. It had been raining the few days before that. And it was nearly seven in the evening when Anita, the nurse who had been looking after him for the last few months came up to my mother teary-eyed.

“Dadababu aar nei didi (He is no more)”, she murmured. She didn’t talk much, a rather priceless quality for her vocation.

My aunt broke down. Anita shuffled out of the room.

Run up the stairs. Run down them. Run up them again. Get caught in the middle. “Ok kid, I'll give you a toffee , or maybe even two , JUST TELL ME WHERE YOU KEPT MY GODDAM RAZOR!!!”

Speckles of shaving foam all over my face. Signs of a regular shave badly interrupted.

Mission Accomplished.

It was nearly eleven by the time all formalities were done with. A hearse waited in front of my house. The house was full by then, relatives and friends crowding in every room. The sickly sweet smell of rajnigandhas filled the air even as a few of the more religious minded muttered prayers under their breath. The shrunken body of my grandfather lay in the middle of the bed. His eyes were closed, a couple of tulsi leaves on them.

For a moment there, as I blankly stared at him, I suddenly felt a twinge of sorrow for the tulsi tree. It was a fledgling plant, just a handful of twigs planted about a month ago. Funny how the mind remembers.

“I planted this tree when I first built this house. And now its roots are damaging the basement roof. So, I’m cutting it down. Which part of it don’t you get?”

“Cutting a tulsi tree is years of bad luck, you stubborn old man!!!”

“I’ll take my chances.”

This was not the first time I had visited the burning ghats. Even as the car neared the burning ghats, the traditional khai thrown on the road by other funeral cars served as a morbid bread crumb trail to the location. A mammoth building on the shores of the Ganga, these ghats are the proud resting place (as the signboards claimed), of Rabindranath Tagore. How getting burnt at a place and then getting your ashes thrown into the river can make that particular place your resting place is something I have wondered ever since I read that sign for the first time. I remember wondering about it again that day.

Dadu used to say that he was out on the Kolkata roads the day Rabindranath had died. There had been mass hysteria as the body of the great man had been carried through the crowded Kolkata streets with millions throttling to touch him. “I got to touch him”, he would recount later, with an obvious pride in his voice, “I lost a shoe in the process, but I touched him.”

Even in the dead of the night, the ghats remain a rather busy place. We reached there at around midnight, only to find it bustling with death (or was it life ?). Every five minutes a truck loaded with mourners and the deceased would descend upon the ghats with their cries of “Bolo Hori, Hori Bol” renting the night sky. Or sometimes, it would be a much quieter lot, shaking their heads in the midst of thick cigarette fumes at the solitary tea shop. We soon found ourselves in a queue for the electrical furnace Number 4 (“Fast or slow?” “Huh?” “Electric or wooden?” “Umm... Electric…”).

“Cummon Kid, Buck up!!! Hurry up!!!”

“It’s not even 6 dadu…”

“Damn right it’s not 6. The Shop opens at 6. You want to stand behind that hag from next door?”

“I honestly don’t care dadu…”

“Well, I do. And I say we run. Cummon now…”

It was a long serpentine queue in front of the furnace. People smoking, talking, crying. Blank faces, happy faces, sad faces. Interspersed with the sleeping dead. Peaceful in their last 4’X7’ space on earth. It can be rather odd starting at dead faces. Contorted in agony of their last moments, or at calm with a lifetime spent. It’s all there.

And also the goats.

Three goats in a village.

Strolling majestically amongst the living and the dead in the ghat.

Tied to three trees in a row.

Feeding on the abundant stale flowers and leaves strewn about the corpses.

A six year old child feeding them a handful of dried leaves.

One of the braver ones start munching on the garland on one of the lesser guarded corpses.

An old man with prickly tiny white hair walks towards them with a huge scimitar in his hands.

It keeps at it, moving from the torso to near the face.

A small spectre-like crowd gathers as the ancient scimitar goes up and comes down with an unearthly swish. The child moves back a step, a streak of red dots on his face.

I couldn’t see the mouth of the goat anymore. Hidden behind the face and the mass of flowers about it, I could but vaguely see what it was that it was chewing on.

The old man is stringing them up, making a mala of the three still bleeding heads as the writhing bodies are carried off by the crowd. They will come in handy in the marriage feast.

I could see it now. The flowers have mostly been cleared up by its appetite. It’s biting at the ear now.

He stands up with a grim smile on his face and the monstrous mala in his hands. He walks towards the child, a thinner red-trail following his path, a path tad different from the much thicker blood red ones leading to the kitchen.

A trail of blood appears at the ear. Sickly red, reluctant to move, but I could see it nonetheless.

Laughing, he throws it around my neck. And tells me to run along, the marriage can’t start without the nitbor.

A summon for the next in line cuts through the slumbering 3 AM air, soon followed by howls of realisation. Other aggrieved sleepy mourners sit up to see what is happening. Or just find a better spot to live through the night.

I grimaced.

“Bolo Hori, Hori Bol.”

The Book Thief - A Review

‘He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It's his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.’

It is not too rare when we find Death as a character of a story. The Hooded One, the Angel of the Night with his stereotypical scythe. However, of all the images that a characterization of Death might bring to mind, we can hardly imagine any of them saying something like this.

"I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's."

Welcome to the world of The Book Thief, Markus Zusak’s masterpiece about the life of a German child, Liesel Meminger, in turbulent WW-II Munich. Liesel is effectively an orphan. She never knew her father, her mother disappears after delivering her to her new foster parents, and her younger brother died on the train to Molching where the foster parents live. Death first encounters nine-year-old Liesel when her brother dies, and hangs around long enough to watch her steal her first book, The Gravedigger's Handbook, left lying in the snow by her brother's grave. And so begins an illustrious career of book thieving from as varied places as Nazi book burnings and the Mayor’s wife’s library, wherever books are to be found.

In the midst of these dangerous times, Liesel’s foster father hides a Jewish fist-fighter, Max Vandenburg, in his basement, and their lives are both opened up and closed down at the same time. He's the son of a friend of Hans from the first world war, the man who taught him the accordian. Hans had promised to help Max's mother if she ever needed it. Max and Liesel become close friends, and he writes an absolutely beautiful story for her, called The Standover Man. It's the story of Max, growing up and coming to Liesel's home, and it's painted over white-painted pages of Mein Kampf, which you can see through the paint.

"Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day. That was the business of hiding a Jew."

The book is hauntingly beautiful, both in terms of the story and the style of story telling. The terrifying ultimate doom that a war brings is beautifully portrayed through the melodramatic pronouncements of the end at the very beginning. The eventuality of Death and destruction that the War brings is painted in vivid colours. Zusak also creates some amazing characters, Death being perhaps the best of them. Death is stripped off the morbidity that surrounds his standard portrayal and given a human look. He is someone with feelings, lonely, strangely attracted to children, gentle with the souls entrusted to him. He is an eternal observer of the human race, haunted by its follies and weighed down by the lost memories of forgotten mortals. Liesel is very real, a child living a child's life of soccer in the street, stolen pleasures, sudden passions and a full heart. All the while bombs drop, maimed veterans hang themselves, Gestapo take children away and a delirious skeletal Jew fist-fights with the Fuhrer of the German people. The foul mouthed Rosa Huberman, and the kind silver-eyed accordion-playing Hans Huberman (Liesel’s foster parents) instill many a light moment into the story, just as their love for each other, Liesel and Max can make one teary-eyed. In one of the most moving parts of the story, Rosa Huberman goes to asleep every night after Hans leaves for war sitting upright with his accordion strapped to her.

My personal favorite character in the book would however, have to be Rudy Steiner. A 9 year old deemed insane by most for his worshipful admiration of the black athlete Jesse Owens, Rudy creates some of the most intense, poignant yet innocent parts of the story. Liesel’s best friend and fellow book thief, Rudy’s naiveté, kindness, his glorious athletic feats, his intense need for a success to redeem himself in his own eyes and his unfaltering love for Liesel is sure to take you back to your own childhood.

‘In years to come, he would be a giver of bread, not a stealer - proof again of the contradictory human being. So much good, so much evil. Just add water.’


The book is definitely not a light read. At times, it can even border on the morbid. The little peeks into the future provided by Death fill every page with the predominant fear of the eventual. Only a writer of Zusak’s genius can make it work, painting the vivid landscape of a past tainted by the blood of millions through the eyes of the innocent and the eternal at the same time. This is a book about the power of language and words, and the love and respect they inspire. Perhaps it is just as fitting that Zusak uses his talent to bring to life this passion in the story and also in the reader.

With this book, Zusak has proved himself to be a master lyricist of the written word. His haunting, profound, almost poetic description of the lives in a small town stays like a lilting symphony of words in your mind and lifts your spirits. All-in-all, a Must Read.