Krishan had always assumed that Hindus cremated the bodies of the dead and scattered their ashes as a kind of acknowledgment of the body’s impermanence, of its vulnerability and transience, and so it was strange for him now, watching as one by one people dropped grains of rice over Rani’s mouth, to think that nevertheless the physical body played such a central role in Hindu funerals, that it was given such prominence in all the mourning rituals. It was acknowledged not just at the funeral, where the body was dressed up, caressed, and talked to by the people who came to mourn, but also in the cremation and the rituals that followed, first in the ash that was collected in the urn after the body had been burned, the urn becoming a kind of materially reduced body that was treated, even after the cremation, with all the reverence due to the original body. Even when the ash was dispersed over water thirty-one days later, when this materially reduced body that had been held on to for a month was given up, even then a kind of symbolic body was retained in the physical object of the photograph, which was garlanded and placed on a wall of the house, taken down every year during the death anniversary and prayed to and offered food, as if the image itself were capable of consumption and digestion, the photograph becoming, in other words, not so much a representation as a physical manifestation of the dead. The process of letting go of a person was always done in gradual stages, from what he’d seen, from the actual body to a reduced body to a symbolic body that was always kept in the house, an acknowledgment both of the difficulty of giving up the body and also of the fact that the bodies of the ones we love can never be fully renounced. And perhaps this was why the symbolic acts of feeding were so important in the mourning rituals, it occurred to him, in the pouring of rice over the mouth of the deceased and in the offering of food to the photograph of the deceased, for it wasn’t surprising that in a culture in which food and the activity of eating were so important, in a culture in which feeding was one of the primary acts of care, in which to ask whether somebody had eaten was to ask whether they were well, in which the question of whom you can eat with and whose food you can eat was a way of enforcing the boundaries between castes, that in such a culture the acts of serving and eating were also the physical processes that the bereaved found most difficult to part with, so that even after the body had stopped consuming and digesting food the bereaved continued to find solace in the act of feeding the deceased.
Standing there in the garden looking into the house Krishan thought of the cemeteries for fallen cadres that the Tigers had built all over the northeast, cemeteries that no longer existed and that harkened back in his mind to a time, only a few years before, when the northeast had been an entirely different place. The Tigers, though they consisted mostly of men and women who prayed in private to Hindu gods, had always buried their dead instead of cremating them, a practice inspired, Krishan had learned somewhere, by the significant population of Christian Tamils in the northeast. Cadres who died on campaigns that were successful in capturing new land were buried in new cemeteries constructed on the land they’d fallen fighting for, while the other dead were buried, symbolically if their bodies could not be recovered, in one of the several massive cemeteries already established across the north and the east. Krishan had never been to any of these cemeteries but he’d seen photographs and videos of them—vast, open spaces filled with endless rows of large horizontal stone tombs, identical except for the small engravings at their base indicating who rested there. The cemeteries, which were swept every day and kept open through the night for anyone to come and mourn their dead, were festooned on special occasions with the small red-and-yellow flags of the Tigers strung out high above the rows of tombs, and during Maaveerar Naal, the annual day for the remembrance of the war dead, masses upon masses of people would gather at these sites from all over Tiger-held territory to listen to speeches and cry over the sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters they’d lost, taking sorrowful pride in their sacrifices as they listened to Tiger songs of fearlessness and devotion blaring from loudspeakers, scenes of immeasurable pain and sadness that Krishan had never once seen in person but which were, somehow, etched into the back of his eyes. All those cemeteries, containing hundreds and thousands of dead fighters, had been razed to the ground by the army after the end of the war, their huge Chinese-made bulldozers mowing down graves indiscriminately, hardly a trace of them left anywhere in the northeast now, hardly a trace of any of those male and female cadres who’d died fighting in anonymity for a future that never materialized, not even of Rani’s eldest son, who, Krishan realized now for the first time, must also have been buried in one of those cemeteries, must also have had his remains destroyed and removed from their place of rest.
It was not just the cemeteries that had been destroyed, naturally, for all the former Tiger offices, bases, and weapons depots had been destroyed too, all their signs, posters, and statues, after which the army had begun the labor of clearing rubble from bombed sites, of extracting the land mines buried all over the northeast, of relaying shelled-out roads and train tracks. Soon the only external signs that there’d once been a separatist movement and a war were the tents in which people still lived and the scars still inscribed on their bodies, the hairless skin on what remained of people’s amputated arms and legs. The purpose of all the government’s demolition and renovation in the northeast had, of course, been to erase any memory that might spur the Tamil population back toward militarism, and in this it had been more or less successful, for one hardly heard ordinary people talking about the Tigers in the northeast now, one hardly heard anyone giving them more than a passing thought. It was strange to consider, since for decades the Tigers had been the central fact of life in the northeast, but it also made sense to a degree, for memory requires cues from the environment to operate, can function only by means of associations between things in the present and things in the past, which meant that remembering became far harder when all the cues that an environment contained were systematically removed. Without the physical objects that allowed it to operate organically, memory had to be cultivated consciously and deliberately, and how could the average person in the northeast afford to actively cultivate their memory of a world now gone when there were so many more urgent concerns, how to make ends meet, how to rebuild their homes, how to educate their children, concerns that filled up all their mental space? The truth was that eventually most people would have ceased remembering the past anyway, even if all remaining traces of the Tigers had been left untouched, for the truth was that all monuments lose their meaning and significance with the passing of time, disappearing, like the statues and memorials in Colombo dedicated to the so-called independence struggle against the British, into the vast unseen and unconsidered background of everyday life. Deliberately or not the past was always being forgotten, in all places and among all peoples, a phenomenon that had less to do with the forces that seek to erase or rewrite history than simply the nature of time, with the precedence the present always seems to have over what has come before, the precedence not of the present moment, which we never seem to have access to, but of the present situation, which is always demanding our attention, always so forceful and vivid and overwhelming that as soon as one of its elements disappears we forget it ever existed. A shirt we wore every week for several years can be thrown away and then forgotten forever the week after, a table on which we ate two meals a day for a decade can be replaced and the strangeness of the new arrangement gone within a month, and even when something vital disappears, something our lives have centered on for years, even then we move on very quickly, very quickly adjusting to the new circumstances, so that within a few months or years the new way starts to seem like the way things have always been.
Forgetting was, of course, something we ourselves chose to do on purpose sometimes, as when after the end of a painful relationship we delete all traces of it that existed in our phones, attempting to excise it from our lives, and in this sense forgetting was not so different from remembering, an impor
tant and necessary part of life, just as central as remembering when it came to establishing an identity and orienting ourselves toward the future. And yet there was a crucial distinction, Krishan knew, between the forgetting that takes place as a result of our consent, which is a forgetting we need in order to reconcile our pasts and presents, and the forgetting that is imposed on us against our own will, which is so often a way of forcing us to accept a present in which we do not want to partake. Whenever forgetting was imposed in this way it would always give rise to people who insisted stubbornly on remembering, people who resisted not only the specific erasures of the past by those in power but also the more general erosion that would anyway have been brought on by time, people who remained committed to commemorating the world taken away from them no matter what happened, sharing stories and images and songs and videos that they kept safe inside their heads and their hard drives, trying to ensure that even if all the objective evidence was taken away, even if there was no means in public spaces for the communication of such histories, that their pasts would continue to exist somewhere, somehow. Even if sharing what happened during the war was painful, even if it was easier for most people to pass over these wounds in silence, suppressing their memories of the world they’d helped construct and the violence that had destroyed it, even so people would remain who insisted on remembering, some of them activists, artists, and archivists who’d consciously chosen to do so but most of them ordinary people who had no other choice, people like Rani who, in the most basic sense, simply couldn’t accept a world without what they’d lost, people who’d lost their ability to participate in the present and were thus compelled to live out the rest of their lives in their memories and imaginations, to build in their minds, like the temple constructed by Poosal, the monuments and memorials they could not build in the world outside. Perhaps this, it occurred to Krishan as he stood there in the garden of the funeral house, was why Rani had seemed to spend so much of her time in Colombo lost in thought, not because she was sad or depressed but because she was busy constructing in her mind a place where she could be reunited with the sons she’d lost, a place she could occupy as an alternative to the world that bombarded her senses with its emptiness every single day and night.
The sound of the lamentations was more or less continuous now, rising out of the front room in waves and mingling with the drumming from the gate, the tempo and volume of which in turn had been increasing, the quicker, louder beat that announced new arrivals becoming almost indistinguishable from the beat that was rapped out in the interim. Looking up Krishan saw the funeral director come out to the veranda again, this time to say that it was the last chance to see the body, that they were about to close the casket, upon hearing which the people who’d been waiting in readiness in the veranda and the garden gave a collective stir, those in the garden moving toward the veranda, those on the veranda forming a line near the door so they could enter the house. Krishan made his way toward the house, which was more or less packed with people now, joining the haphazard line that went in through the front door. Those already inside were thronging around the body, jostling to get closer in the same way devotees jostled in temples to catch sight of the deity when the curtains were drawn, the men touching the casket with their hands, some of them crying and talking to the body but most of them stone-faced, the women stroking Rani’s face and shoulders and arms, raising their hands to the sky and beating their chests as they wailed out loud. The lamentation was reaching a peak, all the women crying in unison, their voices rising and falling so loudly and rhythmically that at moments it seemed even to eclipse the drums, whose sole function now was to provide accompaniment to their voices, to give the music of collective lamentation a beat on which it could fall back. Overwhelmed by the scene around him, so different from the staid funerals he’d witnessed in Colombo, Krishan caught sight of Rani’s daughter as he edged deeper into the sea of mourners. She was standing behind the head of the casket and no longer fully in control of herself, her feet not quite steady, supported by the two women who were standing beside her earlier, sobbing loudly as she touched her mother’s face. This was the last time she would see her mother, only men being allowed to accompany the body to the cremation ground, and goaded perhaps by this knowledge, by the intensity of the drums and the wailing of all the women, she too had begun to speak to the body, to cry and lament with the other women, though what she was saying was lost among all the other voices rising and falling in the room. Krishan still couldn’t tell how genuine most of the lamentation was but it occurred to him, as he was pushed toward the center of the room, his feet trampling and trampled by the feet of the others crowded around him, the heat of their bodies and their breathing pressing in against him, that perhaps he was wrong to think of lamentation in terms of sincerity or insincerity, that perhaps the crying and wailing and sobbing all around him was intended not as an expression of emotion but as a kind of service offered to the bereaved, a performance in some sense but a performance that, together with the drums and the rituals, was meant only to help the bereaved with their own lamentation, to ease out, like the calm rhythmic words and firm kneading hands of a midwife during a difficult birth, the tears that the bereaved so often found impossible to bring out by themselves. It was difficult after all to understand what a death meant, even for those who will be affected most vitally by the loss, it was difficult to really accept a death, to really let go of oneself and in doing so begin letting go of the other, and perhaps the custom of lamentation was meant above all to help the bereaved in this process, the friends and relatives and community of the bereaved trying to help the bereaved cry by crying themselves, even if they did not feel the same pain. Nearing the casket Krishan was seeing Rani’s body for the second time now, her powdered face, the grains of rice that had fallen from her mouth onto the white satin of the casket, her pale hands clasped together over her waist. He was unable to cry, unable to produce anything more than the welling in his eyes, but caught up in the density of people around him, in their pushing and pulling and jostling, in the wailing and lamenting and the sound of the drums, he now felt totally immersed in what was happening, a participant in this process, whatever it was, rather than a spectator, capable of feeling fully the force of what was happening, as if something inside him too was being channeled by everything around him, being called to the surface of his mind. He brought his hands together and touched Rani’s shoulder lightly, brought his hands to his eyes and blessed himself with her, touched her neck and forehead and blessed himself again, and understanding now that it was really Rani lying in front of him he stood there in front of the casket looking at her till the pushing of people behind him compelled him to move, to shuffle around the casket and make his way back out to the garden.
Outside there was an air of anticipation, the drums beating with a feverish intensity, the four drummers still standing in the same place behind the fence, immersed in the rhythm of their drumming. More and more of the people who’d gone inside the house returned outside, the funeral director calling more impatiently now for people to leave the front room as he tried to clear a space around the casket. Krishan watched as the two women supporting Rani’s daughter, who was still standing by the head of the casket, drew her back a little, as the director and his assistant carefully lifted the lid of the casket and then lowered it over the body. The two of them came out, went to the side of the house, where a bier consisting of two wooden poles was leaning against the wall, the two main poles held crosswise by several sticks that were bound by rope and covered by a patchwork of dried palm fronds. The two of them carried the bier around the side of the house and placed it on the ground a few feet in front of the veranda steps, the director trying to shout above the wails and the drums for everyone to give them space. He signaled to his assistant, who went back inside and, together with four or five other men, heaved the casket up. The director leading the way, clearing the path in front of them, they brought the casket out through the door
to the veranda, moving slowly and vigilantly, doing their best to keep the casket stable, Rani’s daughter coming out behind them together with all the women who’d been inside from the beginning, all of them beating their hands against their chests, their wailing loud and unabating. The men moved with the casket down the veranda steps and into the garden, shouting at one another over all the noise to coordinate their movements, then cautiously, almost delicately, they lowered the casket down onto the bier. Everybody in the garden crowded around this central point despite the repeated cautionings of the director, watching as the men began to secure the casket to the bier with rope. The drummers had already made their way out through the garden gate, Krishan saw, were beating their drums out on the lane, and Rani’s daughter’s husband, who was carrying a large and seemingly heavy clay pot on his right shoulder, followed them out without expression. The funeral director shouted for the people around the bier to give them space, and the casket now loaded firmly onto the bier, the men gave a count of three and heaved the bier up onto their shoulders in a single motion, two men in front, two behind, and two on each of the sides. The lamentation reached a crescendo, a chorus of mainly female voices rising up into the air, and shepherded through the garden by the director, the bier was carried in stops and starts toward the gate, the crowd following them as they went. Struggling a little at the narrow gate the men carried the bier out into the lane, the women in the crowd following them only up to the fence, raising their arms to the sky and continuing to wail, the men following the body out through the gate, forming a cortege that Krishan too joined as the body began to move away from the house. Turning back Krishan saw Rani’s daughter standing in front of the fence, no longer crying or wailing, entirely silent, chest heaving, struggling for breath it seemed as she watched them, her figure becoming smaller and more spectral as they moved farther and farther from the house, till they turned a corner and she was lost to sight. The procession continued at a slow but even pace, led in the front by Rani’s son-in-law, who carried the clay pot on his shoulder in silence, followed by the bier and the rest of the all-male procession, some of whose members dropped out as they passed their homes, the rest continuing to walk soundlessly behind the body. They made their way slowly through the village, not toward the main road where he’d gotten off the bus but farther and farther away from all links to the outside world, through narrow, winding, unpaved lanes that opened out, eventually, into a sprawling landscape of grass and brush. They scarcely seemed to advance as they walked through this vastness, making no discernible progress against the palmyra trees that stood solemnly in the distance, their tall figures turning into silhouettes as the sun began tracing the visible portion of its descent, as the afternoon moved toward its climax and the golden-yellow light began enfolding the land around them, as Rani began making her last, silent journey into the distance beyond.
A Passage North Page 20