A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

  In the center of the room, elevated on a kind of low table or cot, was an open wooden casket overlaid with plastic lamination on its surfaces, and standing around the casket were a number of people, mainly women, some of them looking into the casket and whimpering or crying, a few quietly reciting hymns from small booklets they held in their hands, verses most likely from the Sivapurānam. Seated a little away on the floor in front of one of the walls was a priest, an array of fruit, coconuts, lamps, and other items spread out on banana leaves in front of him, and sitting cross-legged opposite him was a broad, muscular man of about thirty, wearing a white sarong and a white thread tied diagonally across his otherwise naked torso. The man was conducting the rites for the deceased, which meant, Krishan guessed, that he was Rani’s son-in-law, the husband of Rani’s daughter, the responsibility of performing the rites generally falling on a son-in-law if the deceased didn’t have any sons. Krishan scanned the room for Rani’s daughter, and his gaze soon came to rest on a woman whom several other people in the room were watching too, a woman in her mid- to late twenties standing by the head of the casket, her arms supported by a couple of older women as if they were worried she might faint. She had Rani’s dark complexion but didn’t quite resemble her on first glance, her build much less substantial, her face rounder and softer. She wasn’t crying so much as out of breath, it seemed, her eyes not quite focused, as if she wasn’t able to see clearly, and it was only when he noticed the two young girls holding on to her dress and looking somewhat lost, the only children present in the room, that Krishan realized the two girls must be Rani’s granddaughters, that the woman they were holding must be Rani’s daughter. Not knowing how to approach her Krishan remained at the threshold, wondering what to say, studying Rani’s daughter till the older woman beside her noticed him standing there and gestured him toward them. He went up and introduced himself, looking first at the older woman and then at Rani’s daughter, trying to diminish his stature and summon a look of grief on his face. This was the moment he’d feared most since learning about the death two days before, the moment Rani’s relatives finally came face-to-face with him, looks of silent accusation on their faces, but registering who he was Rani’s daughter only smiled sadly and welcomed him, her voice soft and plaintive, very different from how it had been on the phone. So you managed to make it, she said looking straight at him, you managed to find the house. I’m glad you were able to come. Turning to the two women she was standing next to she explained who he was, that it was at his house that her mother had been staying in Colombo, that it was his grandmother her mother had been looking after. Krishan looked at the women with an uncertain smile, searching their faces for any sign of resentment, for any sign that they, if not Rani’s daughter, might hold him responsible for what had happened, but they too simply looked at him knowingly and warmly, as if to them he was merely one more mourner at the funeral, not the object of any ill will.

  The older woman motioned him toward the casket, which he’d carefully avoided looking at till then, and drawing closer to it, slightly hesitant about looking directly at Rani, the first things Krishan noticed were the two oversize garlands draped over her chest, the way the plain white sari she was wearing blended in with the white satin interior of the casket. Her strangely pale, almost white hands were patiently folded over her waist, and her equally pale, unadorned feet were tied together by a thread that linked her two big toes. Taking in these details Krishan allowed himself to get a little closer, glancing at last toward the head of the casket at Rani’s face, at the hair combed neatly back, at the eyes closed, the lips slightly pursed, the skin just as strangely pale as her hands and feet, coated, he realized, with several layers of talcum powder. Her face was expressionless, or rather wearing an expression that didn’t seem exactly coherent, certainly not consonant with the mournful faces around her, and standing there with his hands by his sides Krishan was not sure what exactly he should be feeling or what exactly he should do. He was somehow moved, but he didn’t feel any sadness or tears rising to his eyes, only a softer, tenderer version of the alienation he’d felt upon hearing the news two days before. Even if he no longer had difficulty remembering who Rani was and what she was like, even if he could remember all her mannerisms, her gruff but warm way of speaking, the sadness and longing she always carried with her, he struggled to connect the image of Rani in his mind with the body now lying in front of him, which seemed, with its ghostlike face, hands, and feet, with the unfamiliar white sari and strangely formal posture, to belong to someone he didn’t know. He heard at that moment, coming from behind him, the sound of a woman wailing, and turning around saw that an older couple had entered the room. The woman held Rani’s daughter’s hands in her own for a moment, then pulled her hands away and began striking them against her temples, crying out that she could not believe Rani was gone, that first it had been her sons, then her husband, and now Rani herself. She repeated these statements rhythmically and without break, becoming even more strident as she left Rani’s daughter and approached the casket, causing some of the women who were already standing beside it to begin crying louder themselves.

  Krishan watched the scene for a while, surprised by the pitch of the woman’s emotion, especially since Rani’s daughter herself was so subdued, and decided that the woman must have been a close relative or perhaps an intimate friend. Turning to look at Rani’s daughter, seeing that for a moment nobody was paying attention to her, he took from his shirt pocket the envelope his grandmother had given him and went up to her, leaning forward as he told her, almost in a whisper, that his grandmother had asked him to give it to her in order to help with the funeral expenses. Rani’s daughter looked a little surprised, even though his mother had told her about the money the day before, then nodded her head in acknowledgment as she took the envelope. Looking away she hesitated for a second, then turning back and meeting his eyes she spoke to him again. My mother felt very close to your grandmother. She enjoyed staying in Colombo a lot, and would always talk about your family when she came back for visits. I don’t know why she ever decided to leave, I kept telling her that she should go back, that that was what the doctor had said was best, but she was so stubborn about remaining here. She didn’t want to stay in Colombo anymore, and she didn’t want to go back to the hospital for treatment either. She said that the only thing she wanted was to stay at home with her granddaughters, that she didn’t want to miss them growing up. My mother loved my two girls so much, even more than she loved her youngest son, I’m glad she was able to spend some time with them at least before she left us behind. Rani’s daughter paused upon saying this, reflecting on what she’d said in the distinctive manner the bereaved sometimes have when talking to other people, appearing on the surface to be engaging in conversation when all the while speaking only to themselves. Krishan nodded and tried to smile, glanced at the girls who were now standing next to the priest and their father, observing the men with a mixture of interest and confusion. He was unsure what to say and waited to see whether Rani’s daughter would say more, but smiling with an air of finality she turned and went into the adjacent room to put the envelope away. He waited there a little longer, hoping they might continue speaking when she returned, but by the time she did another family had entered the room and begun giving their condolences. Seeing no point to remaining inside, Krishan looked once more at the casket, touched his hands to its base, then slipped out to the garden and looked for an uncrowded place to stand, somewhere he could watch the proceedings unobserved and reflect on what he’d seen and heard.

  He’d believed till then that he would be able to learn what happened to Rani by attending the funeral, that merely by studying her daughter’s face he would be able to ascertain the nature of Rani’s death, but seeing her daughter in person at last it was evident to him that his expectations had been misplaced, and not only because the constant stream of people coming in to give their condolences made conversation impossible. He’d expected, fo
r some reason, to be able to obtain some kind of decisive affirmation or refutation of his suspicions, but the moment he heard Rani’s daughter talking he realized that no unambiguous verdict was possible, that even if he waited till the funeral was over to talk to her the subject of suicide would never come up explicitly, that he would be left in the end with only his own interpretations of whatever she told him. He’d been relieved by the warmth and openness with which she’d received him, so different from the distant, mechanical tone of her voice on the phone, and he’d been relieved too by what she’d said about Rani’s feelings toward Appamma, which meant his fears that Rani resented their life together in Colombo were unfounded, that she hadn’t left because she disliked staying with them but for other, more significant reasons. She had said she wanted to spend time with her granddaughters, and this was no doubt true, but he got the sense from Rani’s daughter’s account that Rani had left more because she wanted to escape her mind and her mental condition than anything else, that she’d left in the same way that so many of those who are chronically depressed move from one place to another or back and forth between different places, hoping that a change of environment will make things better, though at the end of the day they were compelled to take their minds with them wherever they went, like movable, invisible prisons in which they were trapped. He’d been struck, too, by the palpable tone of regret in Rani’s daughter’s voice, as if her mother’s decision to leave Colombo and stop therapy had led to the worsening of her condition and perhaps ultimately to her demise, as if her mother’s depression and her death were connected in some significant way. This more than anything else made him wonder whether his suspicions about suicide might be right, but there was a good chance he was reading too much into the way Rani’s daughter had spoken, he told himself, for there was often a certain kind of regret in the way the bereaved talked about how the people they’d lost had died, as if they believed that the death would not have come about if some small detail had been different, as if they believed that not only the more specific death but also the more general phenomenon of dying itself could have been avoided. There was an openness or vulnerability in Rani’s daughter’s bearing that felt incompatible with the possibility that Rani had committed suicide, for if she really did believe or suspect that her mother had killed herself she would have been a lot more guarded, he felt, would have spoken less freely about her mother, not only out of shame but out of fear that someone might guess what happened. Even if there had been concrete signs that Rani had killed herself it was clear her daughter was oblivious to them, that either she hadn’t noticed the signs or, more likely, if there were such signs, that she’d intentionally averted her eyes from them. There was no sense, after all, in pursuing the possibility that her mother had committed suicide unless the facts were undeniable, and since there was no concrete evidence that this was the case, it was probably just easier to assume it had been an accident and leave the matter at that. In a way Krishan was grateful to be able to stop there, to learn that he would not be able to find out anything more, that he could let the issue go with the relative likelihood that Rani hadn’t ended her own life. Even on the off chance that it had been suicide, he told himself, it was clear from what Rani’s daughter had said that his family couldn’t have been responsible, that they’d done their best to help her and that what she’d done to herself, if indeed she’d done anything, was the result of far more subterranean forces inside her, forces that had their genesis outside their lives.

  Looking up from the patch of ground he was staring at Krishan saw that the crowd in the garden was getting larger, the buzz of low voices around him louder now and more sustained. New arrivals were continually trickling in, acknowledging the various people they saw as they walked toward the house, everyone knowing everyone, it seemed, which was in a sense what defined village life, the total absence of anonymity, nobody a stranger to anyone, even if not everyone was friends. Entering the house the new arrivals all went straight to Rani’s daughter to give her their condolences, the women crying loudly and dramatically as they took her hands and then breaking out into loud waves of lamentation as they approached the casket, beating their chests, raising their hands up to the sky, speaking to Rani’s dead body as if she were still alive. Coming back out to the veranda, wiping their tears away with their hands or their sleeves, a few of these women seemed to undergo a remarkable transformation, as if having left the presence of the body and the bereaved they were immediately able to regain the composure they’d lost while inside. Krishan had often heard his mother, who’d grown up in Jaffna and had always resented village life, disparaging the lamentations she claimed could be heard at every village funeral, not the lamentation of the bereaved, whose grief was of course usually sincere, but the lamentation of everybody else, the people who were much less affected by the death and who sometimes didn’t even really know the deceased, people who, according to his mother, would come to the funeral whistling a tune or telling jokes, who would break out into histrionics in front of the body and then afterward, when no one was watching, go on with their lives as though nothing had happened. It was all just acting, his mother had said contemptuously of such women, a performance they put on to show everyone else how close they’d been to the deceased. It wasn’t just the people who came to the funeral either, she went on, at some funerals the family of the deceased themselves hired people for the purpose of lamenting, just like they hired drummers and a priest, in order to show everyone how important their relative had been, how loved they were and how missed they would be. It had been hard for Krishan to actually understand what his mother meant at the time, never having been to a village funeral at that point, and because his mother was generally suspicious of emotion, preferring to cry in private if she had to cry at all, he’d dismissed what she said as simply another example of her general cynicism regarding the expression of emotion. Listening now to the crying and wailing of the new arrivals though, not all of whom could have been close relatives or friends, observing how coming back out to the veranda they returned so quickly to a state of equilibrium, he couldn’t help wondering whether perhaps his mother had been right, especially since the only woman who didn’t seem to be shedding any tears was Rani’s daughter herself, the one person who should have been more affected than anybody else. Despite being in a state of visible distress and vulnerability Rani’s daughter was not, Krishan could tell, completely beside herself like many of the other women were or were pretending to be, perhaps because she was too exhausted to really feel grief, because she was still processing everything that had happened, perhaps because there was no natural correspondence between the moments conventionally prescribed for grief and what the bereaved actually feels.

  The man directing the funeral, a middle-aged man with a slight limp who was casually dressed in trousers and shirt, came out to the veranda and began calling out to everyone assembled in the garden, shouting that everybody who wanted to put rice into the deceased’s mouth should come forward. Several people on the veranda and a few in the garden stood up and went into the house, filling up the already crowded front room, and Krishan too took a few steps forward, not to go inside but to get a better view of what was happening. He watched as one by one the close relatives and friends of the family went up to the casket, took a small handful of dry rice, and let the grains fall gently from their palms over Rani’s mouth, an act whose meaning or significance he had never been quite able to understand. All he could think about as he watched was the irony of Rani being accorded the full set of funeral rituals, she who’d mentioned on more than one occasion during her time in Colombo how much she wished, instead of having to leave her youngest son by the side of the road for the flies, she’d been able to give him a proper funeral. She’d been unable to do not just the funeral, Krishan knew, but also any of the other ceremonies, certainly not the kaadaatru, which was supposed to come the day after the cremation, when the ashes were picked up from the cremation ground and taken home. In
terned inside army camps, she probably hadn’t been able to do the function that was supposed to take place on the fifth or seventh day after the cremation, the ettuchelavu, as it was called, when all the deceased’s favorite foods were offered up symbolically to a garlanded photograph, and not having any of her son’s ashes she wouldn’t have been able to conduct the anthiyetti either, the ceremony in which the ashes were scattered into a river or a tank or the ocean, probably the most significant of all the post-cremation rituals. The only ceremony she’d been able to perform was the annual death anniversary, the thuvasam, for which neither the body nor the ashes were necessary, only a photograph, a garland, and a priest. Rani had done the thuvasam for both her sons every year since leaving the camps, and in the previous two years she’d used the money she earned looking after Appamma to organize them with great lavishness, inviting everybody in the village and leaving Colombo more than a week in advance to undertake preparations. They’d been watching the news one evening in Appamma’s room, Krishan remembered, listening to a report about a monthslong protest in a small village organized by the aged mothers of disappeared Tamil men, the women demanding that the government investigate the tens of thousands of Tamil people who’d vanished without a trace during the war and immediately afterward. They wanted some kind of verdict on their disappeared sons, husbands, and brothers so they could finally have a measure of peace, one of the women was telling the reporter, so that they could conclusively learn what had happened to the people they loved. Rani had turned to him after the segment was over and told him, shaking her head, that she was grateful for having seen her dead sons’ bodies, for having managed to hold the younger one in her arms for a few seconds, that she didn’t know what she would have done had either of them suddenly gone missing one day, had she been forced to live in uncertainty about whether they were alive or dead. When you didn’t see and hold the body of a dead child you couldn’t understand that they were gone, she told him, and unlike her the relatives of people who’d gone missing were forced as a result to live their lives in a kind of suspended state, unable to accept that their sons or husbands or brothers were dead, knowing there was a chance they might be alive in some unnamed cell somewhere, though at the same time they were hesitant to give this possibility too much credence, afraid to believe in it given how many unmarked graves they knew were scattered around the north and east.