Making an Exit

by Sarah Murray

  So, leaving Sam with the crossword, I headed across the lawn toward the crematorium office. There, I met Ian Price, a man with a warm smile, an affable manner, and “Bereavement Service Manager” written on his calling card. He told me a cremation service would be starting in half an hour but, in the meantime, he’d happily show me the place, and led me into the chapel.

  It’s a simple municipal interior. Built in the 1930s, it has cream walls, plain wooden benches, and a blue-gray carpet. Decoration is minimal—just a couple of brass chandeliers and, hanging above the altar, a baroque-style painting of some religious figures amid swirling clouds.

  Of course, that’s more than an altar. Behind it are two wooden doors through which the coffin slides on its way into the furnace. After whatever type of service a family requests (Fa, of course, had none), the blue curtains framing the altar close. There’s no sliding or burning until everyone has left.

  It could hardly be further removed from the theater of Balinese funerals. There, everything takes place in public, usually on a stage. Even at non-royal cremations, dozens gather around the pyre, shouting with joy as they watch the body burn and the flames releasing its soul into the heavens. Yet here, friends and family are sheltered from viewing the fire. In the cremations of Europe and the United States, the ultimate ceremony of death is often a solitary one.

  Still, perhaps in the West we’re starting to get a little more creative. Ian Price told me he was starting to see families personalizing cremation ceremonies, with photographs of the deceased projected onto screens, as well as coffins painted or collaged with images from their lives. More wicker caskets were turning up, too, some of them quite elegant, with ribbons or flowers woven through them. Slowly, it seems, some of the fanfare that traditionally surrounded death is being revived, along with the artistry we once put into dignifying our departed. As with elegiac laments, doleful mourning music, and exquisitely decorated Mogul tombs, beauty helps bring us though our most broken moments.

  I felt rather sad that we hadn’t arranged for a wicker coffin to take Fa to his cremation. He’d clearly considered the idea, as I knew from a folder I’d found in his filing cabinet labeled: “How to End It!” The folder contained a collection of brochures from companies supplying caskets made of wicker, willow, and seagrass. Maybe a willow coffin woven through with flowers would have been a good way to send him off. Or perhaps we should have put him in a huge wood and bamboo bull covered in gold leaf and mirrors, with bulging eyes, flared nostrils, decorative necklaces, and a fabulous golden mane.

  * * *

  In the Indian city of Varanasi, cremation ceremonies have little of the pageantry accompanying the Balinese versions. But for Hindus, who make up more than 80 percent of India’s population, reaching this sacred site is the most significant of life’s moments. Varanasi (once known as Benares) is where every Hindu would like to die. The River Ganges, India’s holiest waterway, is the destination for a constant stream of corpses. Some belong to people who managed to reach the city while alive. Others pay to be shipped there for cremation. More often, the cremation has already taken place and the family brings the ashes to scatter into the Ganges. But however they reach it, Hindus believe the holy river has the power to release them from the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, allowing them to achieve moksha, or enlightenment.

  After visiting Varanasi, Mark Twain wrote: “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” Looking at the Manikarnika Ghat, or Burning Ghat, the biggest of Varanasi’s cremation sites, you can see what he means. Looming over the proceedings are three blackened domes surmounting the temple that houses the “eternal flame” used to light each new pyre. Day and night on the sloping riverbank, small fires burn as if in the aftermath of some medieval battle. Dark smoke thickens the air. Cows amble about. Wild dogs howl as fresh corpses arrive on bamboo stretchers wrapped in white winding-sheets.

  Underfoot is cremation’s detritus—shards of wood, the remains of biers, faded marigolds, and shreds of the brightly colored silk shrouds draped over the body before it’s laid onto the pyre. Sandalwood fumes fill the air, competing for attention with the pungent odor of cow dung.

  Most ominous is the gloomy hospice overlooking the ghat. This is home to those who’ve come to die in Varanasi. Inside are some of India’s poorest people. They’ve often traveled to the city ahead of their death since they’ll have no family or funds to bring their bodies here after they’ve died. Some are even forced to beg for money to buy wood for their pyre. Those who can’t afford a sufficient supply will have their partially burned bodies launched out into the Ganges.

  In the narrow streets behind the ghat, huge piles of that precious wood are crammed into every available corner. Logs and branches gathered from villages around Varanasi arrive here by river barge and are stacked up against the outer walls of small temples and stuffed down side alleys. Wood is everywhere, but it’s never around for long: it takes six or seven hundred pounds to burn a corpse so the piles are constantly diminishing and being replenished. Huge green metal weighing scales are on hand to verify that customers have bought the correct amount.

  Nearby are other funerary traders—tiny shops packed with sandalwood (to mask the smell of burning corpses) and packets of incense. In open-air hair salons, barbers equipped with little more than a razor, a bar of soap, and a tin bowl of water shave the heads of fathers, sons, and brothers in a mark of respect for the dead.

  Doms—caretakers who handle the corpses at cremation grounds—attend the fires, shuffling around like the downtrodden characters from a Dickensian workhouse scene, adding more logs to the pyres when necessary. Inserting bamboo poles under the knees of their charges, they pull the legs in toward the fire’s blazing heart to ensure the whole body is immolated. With the same poles, they poke at the skulls, which pop and hiss as they crack. The workaday atmosphere and the irreverence with which the dead bodies are treated seem brutal. But their actions are all rooted in Hindu beliefs—cracking the skull allows the spirit to escape from the corpse.

  The Doms are efficient workers. Hundreds of bodies are cremated daily on the Burning Ghats. Yet there are no industrial retorts here, no temperature-controlled burners. What’s more, the bodies are doused in the Ganges before the cremation, an act that while spiritually meaningful seems to make no sense when what you’re trying to do is immolate a human corpse (which already consists largely of water).

  From the maze of tiny alleys behind the waterfront, bodies arrive on bamboo stretchers with the regularity found in factory production lines. Fires burn around the clock. It may be an intensely spiritual moment for the individuals being cremated, but the Doms’ work on an industrial scale, achieving a “throughput” that would impress American crematory managers.

  As they heave around logs and poke at the fires, the Doms look more like blacksmiths than undertakers. It’s easy to forget that corpse disposal is the job of work being completed here. That’s until you see the unmistakable sign of death in Varanasi—a couple of bare feet sticking out through the red-hot logs.

  * * *

  It’s the morning of the Pelebon, and it’s clearly going to be a huge event. Local newspapers are predicting that tens of thousands of people will converge on Ubud, so I rise early to get a head start on the crowds. The road leading from my hotel to the palace is lined with smaller cows (these ones are roughly life-sized) and bright red winged lions. They are the sarcophagi for the remains of some of the sixty-eight citizens that will go up in flames today, and although more modest in size, they’re every bit as decorative as the regal versions. Even if you’re not a royal, in Bali you get to go out in style.

  Outside the palace, large teams of men in purple T-shirts are ready for their day’s work—conveying the bulls, dragon, staircases, and towers from the palace to the cremation ground. Their task won’t be easy. Hundreds of men will carry these fantastically heavy ceremonial objects, working
in teams in a slow relay.

  By midmorning, hundreds of people line the street. I feel a little sad. I know this is the last of the magic. And as visitors pour into town, it’s getting hard to move through the crowd. I’m worried that before too long, it will be impossible to get near enough to see the cremation itself—the event I’ve come all this way for. So two hours ahead of time, I walk down to the cremation ground and secure a place on top of a wall looking directly across to the cremation platform, a raised stage with a high temple-style canvas roof above. Soon the ground below is full of people and I’m wondering how on earth they’re going to get those towers and bulls in through the throng.

  It’s a long, uncomfortable wait, and there’s a false start when people start cheering at what turns out to be the arrival of an ambulance. Happily, soon after, the first bull rounds the corner into the cremation ground to uproarious cheers from the crowd. Beneath it, the purple T-shirt crews are putting everything into their work, and enjoying every moment. Guided by a team leader with a megaphone, they maneuver both bulls up onto the cremation platform using nothing but bamboo rollers and wooden levers. It’s touch and go, so each successful move of the bulls, even by a few inches, draws elated cries.

  Eventually the two beasts take up their final position beneath the tented roof, with the dragon in between them. The badés have also arrived, as well as the bamboo bridges. Looking at this huge platform, with the two vast bulls on top of it, the giant towers behind, and the dragon in the middle—knowing that any minute, it’s all going to go up in flames—I’m thinking that this is surely a rather dangerous endeavor. A couple of fire engines are parked behind me, but they’re modest in size and not tremendously reassuring.

  Now the bodies, inside decorative temporary coffins, are brought down from the cremation towers. Villagers and relatives arrive with offerings on their heads, which they place at the bulls’ feet. Meanwhile, men wielding knives slice open the backs of the bulls so that the ceremonial beasts can take delivery of their charges.

  The sight of the bodies as they’re lifted from the coffins is strangely moving. The corpses are heavy and fleshy. And in their simple white shrouds, they seem touchingly modest compared to what’s surrounding them. Suddenly amid all this beautiful artifice, here are two real bodies—human beings, like you and me.

  On the ground, the priests show up for a last prayer. With the corpses inside, the bulls’ backs are repositioned and each is lavished with silk drapes and other offerings, while men pack dried grass around at hoof level. Darkness is drawing in and the crowd has fallen silent. The only sound is the ching of a bell as the head priest administers to the two corpses.

  Then, adhering to the Hindu tradition, Tjokorda Raka Kerthyasa, younger half-brother of Agung Suyasa, sets light to the dried grass at the bulls’ feet. For a few seconds, flames flicker feebly. But soon the fire starts to move with tremendous speed. First, it rips up the bulls’ golden beads, giving them spectacular flaming necklaces. Moments later, a thick stream of smoke is pouring out of the mouth of the biggest bull. Now the dragon is aflame. It burns quickly, with a sad tinkle of bells as its tail falls off.

  I realize my fears of an uncontrolled inferno were unfounded. Several men move in toward the platform wielding hoses with which they direct powerful jets of water at its base to prevent the fire from spreading (so that’s what the fire engines were for). Above them, the bulls are fantastic black silhouettes amid a raging conflagration. Shrieks go up from the crowd as the biggest wobbles. Flames are coming out of its eyes and mouth. More cries go up as its head falls to the ground with a crash. The smaller bull’s head is ablaze, too. One of its ears falls off. The dragon has been reduced to a two-dimensional snake-shaped piece of wooden board.

  Astonishingly, it takes just half an hour for everything to burn—thirty minutes in which to destroy the fantastical creatures, the great pagoda towers, the gold paper, silk fabrics, glass beads, and bamboo frames.

  Gradually the crowd disperses and I climb down from the wall to stand in front of the crematory bonfire. There, I can see the bodies. With their sarcophagi incinerated, the simple iron frames on which they’re suspended are now visible. Though blackened by smoke and deformed by fire, the corpses are still intact. Their tenacity in the face of such a patently destructive force seems to speak of the astonishing force that is a human life. “Organic matter,” I realize, is not that easy to dispose of.

  After about an hour it becomes clear that the only things left burning are the two cadavers. I can see their heads and can’t help wondering if this is what my father would have looked like, had I been able to look inside his cremation chamber. Perhaps, one day, that’s what I’ll look like, too. I try not to think about this too much.

  Then something unexpected happens. Two members of the purple T-shirt crew arrive with huge burners to direct a fat jet of yellow-white flame at each of the corpses. Every so often, like the Doms of Varanasi, they prod the bodies roughly with bamboo poles to make sure they’re at the center of the fire. The huge industrial burners and the brusque, irreverent manner with which the men stab their sticks into the remains of royal princes come as a shock after the courtly pageantry of everything that’s gone before.

  But it’s all part of the process; part of the cycle of life. Fire has destroyed the corporeal containers of the royal souls. Tomorrow, another of the five elements—water—will play its part, when the remains are scattered into the sea. With the souls now well on their way to achieving moksha, the bodies are simply empty vessels with no further use—objects that, as Covarrubias put it, are “to be got rid of, about which there is no hysteria.” This, at least, is something on which my father and the Balinese would have agreed.

  3

  Startling Stillness

  DEATH ON DISPLAY IN SICILY

  In a northern suburb of Palermo, Sicily, amid 1960s apartment blocks, car mechanics’ workshops, and a lingerie store called Mutandina Sexy Duck is a small, plain building in the style of a Greek temple. Attached to a church, it has an unassuming door with a sign above reading: INGRESSO CATACOMB. Entry costs one and a half euros, paid at a wooden desk manned by a monk in a brown habit with a rope belt. The ticket allows you entry to a crypt. It’s just below street level, so the conversations of passersby on the pavement above are clearly audible. Down in the crypt, however, no one is talking. Down here is something altogether different—more than eight thousand mummified figures, fully dressed and in a disquieting state of decay.

  This is the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. Most of its occupants hang in rows in shallow niches on twenty-foot-high walls rising to vaulted ceilings. Others lie in ranks on horizontal shelves below them. Collectively, they make up one of the world’s most macabre collections of corpses.

  While the first arrival—the body of Brother Silvestro da Gubbio—was in 1599, most of the dead here took up residence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The last one to be left in the crypt was two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo, who died in 1920. So the fascination here is not with antiquity. No, what’s really strange is seeing at close quarters corpses that are fully dressed—gentlemen in frock coats, ladies in lace-lined skirts, uniformed military officers, and monks in the same sorts of robes worn by the man who sold me my entrance ticket.

  It’s not my first close encounter with mummies. That took place in 1986 in a dingy cave in the Tarim Basin of the Takla Makan, a forbidding tract of desert in China’s far northwest province of Xinjiang (Takla Makan translates as “place of no return”). I was on a sightseeing tour with a group of fellow backpackers and at one point we were herded into a shallow cave with no explanation from the guide as to what was inside. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I found myself looking at a wizened body lying on a stone bier.

  Our guide pronounced the mummy to be from the Tang dynasty, China’s rulers from the seventh to the tenth centuries, but something wasn’t quite right about this assessment—the leathered features didn’t look Chinese at all. With high cheek
bones and long noses, the face seemed distinctly European.

  Since then, scores of what are now known to be Caucasian cadavers have been unearthed from the shifting sands of the Takla Makan. For the Chinese, the discovery in the late 1970s of these “foreign” mummies proved awkward, revealing previously unknown connections between West and East and providing a potential rallying point for the region’s Muslims, some of whom want to be free from Beijing’s control.

  What interested me, however, was the chance to look an ancient corpse in the face. It was of a woman, and her body—dressed in shreds of dusty, decayed clothing—was brown, shriveled, and impossibly thin (“Turn her sideways, mark her absent,” a friend’s father would have said). Tiny hands emerged from the sleeves of her disintegrating robe, while her legs were skinny sticks that seemed insufficient to have ever supported even her emaciated frame. Time had painted her skin a deep rust color, leaving her looking as if charred by some terrible fire.

  Still, remnants of the features she’d possessed in life survived. In the dim light, I could make out eyelashes, teeth, fingernails, hair, leathery skin, and even the lines on the palms of her hands. She was more than an engraving on a tombstone or a name in a history book—she had a physical presence, one whose shape and form (albeit dried out and shrunken) resembled the one she’d occupied while alive.

  Yet time had left her looking far from peaceful. Her open mouth and empty eye sockets gave her a look of extreme suffering. She seemed to be howling. It’s the kind of facial expression scholars suggest may have inspired The Scream, Edvard Munch’s famous painting of 1893 (he made several versions), since several years before Munch finished the work, an ancient Incan mummy from the Andes appeared at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, a show he could well have attended.

  I wanted to stay longer, to scrutinize her features and speculate about the kind of life she’d led. But the guide hustled us out of the cave and into the bright sunshine again, ready for the next stop on our desert tour—a lunch of watermelon and kebabs that, as it turned out, gave me food poisoning so severe that, twenty-four hours later, my shrunken body, dehydrated skin, and gaunt face looked alarmingly similar to the corpse I’d seen in that cave.