Making an Exit

by Sarah Murray

  * * *

  Tjokorda Gde Agung Suyasa was born in 1941. He died aged sixty-seven. He had two wives, six children, twelve grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. His body won’t go alone to the funeral pyre. Greatly respected in the community, he was head of the Ubud royal family and was a national advisor on cultural and religious matters.

  He’ll be cremated with Tjokorda Gede Raka, another member of the Ubud royal family and once a senior official in the Bali police force. Gede Raka died a week before his cousin. A third royal Ubud personage, Desak Raka, will join them. Born in 1917, she was cremated soon after her death in December 2007. On July 15, she’ll be represented by a symbolic effigy—an idealized representation of her body—and given a full cremation ceremony, too.

  On the day of the Pelebon, the remains of sixty-eight Ubud citizens will also go up in flames (although for some, as for Desak Raka, the effigy will be the only thing on the pyre). These sixty-eight citizens have until now been lying in the ground. Several years earlier, their families buried them without coffins in simple graves and waited for an auspicious date on which to cremate their remains. Agung Suyasa’s death has provided that date, for being cremated at the same time as royalty is extremely propitious.

  When the time comes for the cremation, the families will go to the cemetery to exhume the bones. They’ll pick off the dirt, cleanse them, wrap them carefully in cloth, and take them home, treating the bones with the reverence with which they’d carried the actual corpse. Once at home, they’ll reenact the death, standing around and sighing all over again, as if their relative’s breath were weakening for the first time, hanging their heads as he or she fades from the world. Then, as they would with a recently deceased person, they’ll ceremoniously wash the fleshless bones and, using tiny combs, softly brush at nonexistent hair.

  For nobles it’s slightly different—the body of Agung Suyasa was never buried; instead he was embalmed and has been lying in state. But first, as all Balinese do, the family visited a medium to ask him for his last wishes (he wanted to be cremated with his cousin). Then relatives carried out the cleansing of body, washing it gently and rubbing it with sandalwood paste. At that point, anyone overcome by grief would have left the room, adhering to the principle that runs through all Bali’s funeral rites. For by the time the cremation comes around, the most visible emotion is joy and excitement.

  Yet the truth is, maintaining a separation between the happiness that Balinese tradition demands and the grief that surrounds loss is not always easy. Anthropologist Linda Connor noticed this at a ritual body washing she attended in Bali in 1990. With about sixty friends, relatives, and neighbors standing around in a courtyard to watch the corpse being unwrapped and washed, the scene was one of extreme distress, with many people weeping or choking back tears. “After five to ten minutes of the initial washing and rubbing down with fragrant sandalwood paste, some of the mourners around the corpse appeared to become overwhelmed by the situation,” she writes. “They fell swaying to the back of the ranks in what appeared to be a faint.”

  Halfway through the ceremony, attention shifted from the body itself (Connor says it looked “ghastly” with its blistered face and bloated form) to the effigy on the corpse’s chest. The effigy signifies the rebirth of the soul, so it must be made of materials that symbolize renewal and revitalization. Mirrors form the eyes, so they are clear and sparkling, iron nails stand in for strong teeth, and fragrant flower buds become the nostrils.

  The creation of this effigy had a striking effect. “Although the women who fainted had not come back, those who stayed were no longer sobbing openly, and the expressions on their faces were more composed,” writes Connor. The second-eldest daughter took the leading role in putting together the effigy. “And she became visibly more serene as the ceremony neared completion.”

  In Bali, disconnecting the dead from the living is a long, elaborate process, often stretching across years, from the initial (and temporary) burial, to the exhumation of the bones, the cleansing ritual, the creation of the effigies, and the cremation itself, a ceremony designed to break the material bond between the soul and its body. It’s something you see at work in many traditions, from the year-long process of Jewish mourning to the rites of Orthodox Christians, who hold prayers on the third, ninth, and fortieth days after the funeral; then on the third, sixth, and ninth months; and thereafter annually. Like lamentations and funeral marches, these practices have a distinct rhythm, one whose pace slows over time. With schedules set for mourning, rote and routine ease us from intense grief to fond remembrance.

  In Bali, the five elements from which Balinese believe humans are made—earth, fire, water, ether, and air—come together in death to return the body to the universe, and to regenerate the soul. It’s called Panca Maha Bhuta—the energy of nature. Each new rite brings the soul of the deceased just that bit closer to this new life. It’s like matriculation and graduation only without the exams. And for those left behind, familiar customs guide the bereaved through their mourning. Like a play with many acts, death in Bali unfolds gradually, until in the end, as a brilliant fiery conflagration sends the soul up to heaven through swirling smoke and showers of sparks, grief is transformed into joy.

  * * *

  I wake at 5 A.M. on my first morning in Bali. I’m in time-zone hell, having made an unholy jet-bound leap across the globe from New York. There’s no chance of getting back to sleep, so I throw on some clothes and head out of the hotel to have a look around Ubud.

  In the soft morning light, it soon becomes clear that the charms of this place more than match the reveries of the travel brochures. The town clusters around a small palace, the Puri Saren Agung, which will be the central nervous system for the cremation. Behind the main thoroughfare are enchanting leafy streets and beyond lie emerald rice paddies. Brilliant green and glistening under the pale morning sun, the stalks of rice push their slender, spiked leaves through small lakes of glassy water in a collective expression of energy and renewal.

  As I dive down narrow alleys, villagers in floral sarongs and embroidered shirts are starting their day on bicycles and by foot. Religious statues, too, are stylishly dressed, wrapped in black-and-white gingham fabric with gold sashes. They flank carved stone entrance gates to homes that look like small temples. Behind the enclosure walls of each house, clusters of tiny, eccentric-looking towers support oversized roofs of thick thatch topped with metal crowns. These are shrines representing the cosmic Mount Meru. Bali is often called the “island of a thousand temples,” a claim I can now see isn’t so far-fetched.

  Miraculously, my jet lag seems to have faded. With the scent of frangipani in my nostrils and tropical birdsong filling my ears, I’m smitten by the place—and perilously close to composing some of the purple prose I read in those travel brochures. And that’s even before I’ve encountered the giant cow.

  Growing up in a rural part of England dominated by dairy farming, cows were an important part of my childhood. Cows, I was always told, see things at three times their actual size, turning humans into towering monsters. Well, here in Ubud, I finally understand how they feel. Approaching the royal palace, I find myself face-to-face with the biggest cow I’ve ever seen. It’s absolutely huge—it must be at least fifteen feet high.

  I walk over to inspect it. Standing erect in a defiant posture, its hoofs planted firmly onto an ornate plinth, the cow is made of paper, wood, and bamboo, and is painted black, with muscles and other anatomical details picked out in red and gold. It has bulging eyes and flared nostrils. Its horns are gilded, its gold mane sparkles with tiny mirrors and pieces of colored glass, and strings of gold beads hang around its neck. When I reach its hind legs I catch sight of a large red appendage. Okay—so it’s not a cow. It’s a bull.

  But, whether it’s a bull or a cow (in fact, in Balinese tradition, bulls are used for men, cows for women), this magnificent creature will—with the assistance of a giant ceremonial pyre—be what takes the spirit of Agung Suyasa on
his journey to the next life.

  But why has a bull, however ornately decorated, been chosen as the form for a ceremonial cremation sarcophagus? The answer lies in Bali’s curious religious history. Surrounded by Indonesia, which has the world’s largest population of Muslims, Bali is a religious anomaly—its dominant faith is Hinduism. Quite how or why Bali, which lies thousands of miles away from the Indian subcontinent, became “Indianized,” as scholars put it, remains a mystery.

  Some direct contact existed between India and Bali from the first century AD. Then, in the ninth century, Indian traders came to the Indonesian archipelago. The real impetus behind the spread of Hinduism came when the kings and nobles from the neighboring Hindu Majapahit kingdom of East Java (the main island of the Indonesian archipelago) fled to Bali, escaping the fourteenth-century Islamic conquest of the region. As Islamic rulers took over the rest of the archipelago, the Majapahit kingdom declined. Somehow Bali’s Hindu culture remained intact.

  Anyone familiar with Indian Hinduism would find the Balinese version quite different. This is partly because elements of Bali’s early animist beliefs still make their presence felt in the island’s culture, as do some Buddhist ideas. Yet the two branches of the religion have much in common. Both follow the Hindu caste system (although in Bali, the social divisions are far less complicated than in India).

  Another important shared belief is that the cow is the most sacred of animals. Meanwhile, the Balinese also adopted the Indian Hindu custom of cremating the dead. What could be better, then, than to combine the two traditions by cremating the dead inside a cow?

  * * *

  In the West, the practicalities of modern cremation are unromantic. There are no bull or cow effigies dripping with decorative necklaces. Instead, jewelry is removed from the corpse, as are pacemakers, which can explode during incineration. Using a motorized trolley, the coffin is loaded, or “charged,” in the industry jargon, into the cremation chamber (known as a “retort”). There, a series of computer-controlled burners bring the temperature up to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. To get things going, a column of flame is directed at the chest cavity, the part of the body containing the most fat, and so the part that burns most quickly, making it the human equivalent of kindling.

  With the body fat acting as an efficient fuel, the bones soon dehydrate as the organic constituents become charred. When the char oxidizes away, the bones calcinate, shrink, and fracture. As the internal moisture turns to steam, the bone can also flake off.

  After roughly two hours, the intense heat will have consumed the “organic matter” (a description for which, it turns out, my father and the funeral industry share a fondness), leaving just the bone fragments. For heavier bodies made up of larger amounts of fatty tissue, a longer burn is required (another hour per hundred pounds) at lower temperatures, since fatty bodies generate more heat than leaner ones, causing the cremation chamber to generate smoke, reducing its efficiency.

  What’s left at the end is put into a cremulator—a rotating drum like a small spin drier with heavy steel balls rolling around in it—which crushes the remains into fine particles leaving no recognizable bone pieces.

  It’s an industrial process, conducted beneath fluorescent lighting in stainless steel chambers with equipment managed by computer chips. The most involvement family members get is, in crematoria with this facility, a view through small glass windows through which they can watch their relative disappear into the cremation chamber.

  Sometimes faint echoes of traditional rituals make their way into the process. In adherence to the Hindu funeral rite—in which the oldest son or brother lights the pyre—Indian families often request to be allowed to press the button that ignites the burner.

  Considerable advances have been made in cremator technology in recent years. The brochures and Web sites of companies that manufacture them show pictures of sinister-looking steel boxes with names like the “Millennium II,” the “Newton,” or the “Joule” (named for a unit of energy). Cremator makers cheerfully boast about dramatic reductions in fuel usage, space-saving designs, environmental integrity, and significant increases in the “throughput” of their machines.

  And, of course, greater “throughput” means lower prices. In the United States, a cremation can cost as little as a fifth of the price of a traditional funeral with a burial. Customers who choose cremation no longer need to purchase caskets costing thousands of dollars. Even if they want an open casket funeral, rental options feature coffins that come in two parts—a decorative one that can be reused and a simple lined combustible box that slides out of the back of the main casket and is cremated along with the body.

  The growing popularity of lower-priced cremations has created something of a challenge for the American funeral industry—how to stem the erosion of its profit margins. As a result, the industry is coming up with some inventive new cremation-related products and services.

  Many hearses, for instance, now have a special fitting in which to secure urns (the industry term is an “urn enclave”). With “adjustable bier pins” accommodating different sizes and shapes, urn enclaves flip up from the floor of the hearse and are neatly stowed again when the vehicle needs to carry a coffin. And if using a hearse to transport a pot of ashes seems like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, the Pennsylvania-based Tombstone Hearse Company will carry your urn in a scaled-down Victorian-style hearse drawn by a motorcycle.

  Nor do the innovations stop at transportation. Even the act of scattering can be motorized these days. A company in Meridian, Idaho, called Release Urns has devised what inventor Scotty Crandlemire, in a promotional video, explains is a “new revenue producing tool.” It’s a box funeral directors can lease to their clients. It comes in a variety of finishes with a small round hole in one side (it looks rather like a birdhouse). On reaching the edge of the lake, mountaintop, or whatever spot designated for the scattering, friends or relatives simply press a button and, with the aid of a motorized device inside the box, the ashes come spurting out of the hole, making the dispersal, says Crandlemire, “an awe-inspiring, reverent event each and every time.”

  * * *

  The royal palace in Ubud is where most of the preparations for the Pelebon are taking place so, on my first morning in Bali, I head over there to see what’s going on. It’s early and in the main courtyard of the palace, something’s clearly about to happen. Dozens of men dressed in the traditional combination of a sarong, a shirt, and udeng (a small patterned turban) are waiting expectantly. Suddenly, on the dot of 8 A.M., they all stand up and start work on a collection of ambitious-looking structures, sawing up bamboo stems, fastening them together or splitting them into long strips, and weaving them into various shapes.

  The objects they’re constructing are two badés, giant pagoda-shaped towers made of wood and bamboo that will transport Agung Suyasa and Gede Raka to the cremation grounds on July 15. Tapered toward the top, these towers represent the Balinese concepts of earth, body, and soul, with the uppermost section representing the heavens and a wide turtle-shaped base symbolizing the earth, the foundation on which the world rests.

  The more tapering roofs in your tower (the number is always odd) the higher your social status. So for these two royal corpses, the badés will soar heavenward, each with nine floors, rising to more than ninety feet. On the journey to the cremation pyre, the bodies travel in an open platform between the towers and the turtle.

  Weighing more than ten tons, each structure will take scores of men to carry on the journey from the home (in this case, the palace) to the cremation ground. They’ll also have to heave over two more structures—high bamboo bridges that, rather like aircraft boarding staircases, will be used to bring the bodies down from their towers to be placed in their bull sarcophagi (Balinese funerals require a lot of heavy lifting, it seems).

  Progress on the badés is moving fast. Workers are busy affixing a large demon head with bulging eyes and pointed fangs to the front of one (having plent
y of demons on your badé helps frighten off evil spirits). And both towers are already lavished with gold leaf, colorful paper, and mirror decorations. Eventually they’ll each have huge symbolic wings. For now, these are lying on the ground, but when finished they’ll be lashed to the sides of the towers so that, like the appendages of gargantuan phoenixes, they can carry the royal souls upward to paradise—to their glorious beginning.

  As funeral hearses go, these are pretty impressive. And as I gaze up at this collection of enormous and dazzling structures—all crawling with workers busy hammering pieces of bamboo together, securing them with rattan strips, and fastening decorations to the surface—I can’t help thinking of the phrases Fa used in his final instructions: “swift and practical,” with “no formalities, or ceremonial baggage.”

  Well, it’s hard to see how you could get more “ceremonial baggage” into a cremation than what’s outside this Balinese palace. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was putting on an opera or a play, not a funeral. Gamelan players constantly hone their skills as if rehearsing for a concert. Processions of women bearing offerings on their heads look like a chorus arriving. And foreign dignitaries showing up at the palace in national costume could just as easily be actors about to go on stage.

  Every day, more decorations appear, more monsters and demons are unveiled. Often, it’s as if adornments have grown without human intervention—black, gold, and purple fabric will overnight have wrapped itself around a pillar. Mythical creatures emerge from behind bamboo scaffolding with no sign of how they were made. Newly cut banana-leaf fronds appear on balustrades in the afternoons, and each morning small offerings are pinned onto every column inside the palace. It’s like a game of Spot the Difference. Something’s always been added while you looked away.

  It’s all enchanting and exotic. Yet to my amazement, I’m beginning to feel part of this whole event. I know my way around the complex of buildings and private pavilions that make up the royal palace. Monitoring the progress of the preparations has become a sort of duty. Strange ceremonial structures are becoming familiar friends.