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.”