There was some truth to the comparison Anjum was making, Krishan knew, for he’d watched interviews where female cadres talked about how joining the Tigers had helped them escape from certain of the patriarchal tendencies of Tamil society, had read in various places about the fact that many of them had experienced one form of violence or another at the hands of men in occupying forces, that even the Black Tiger cadre who’d assassinated the Indian prime minister in 1991 had been raped as a young girl by Indian soldiers stationed in Jaffna. There was something in the authority with which Anjum spoke though that seemed to suggest more, as though she perceived herself to be more closely connected to Puhal and Dharshika than he was, as though, Krishan couldn’t help feeling, she was trying in some way to appropriate what he’d wanted to share with her of himself. The sentiment bothered him but it wasn’t without basis either, he knew, not merely because of the possibility that Dharshika and Puhal might, like her, have sought something beyond heterosexuality, but more importantly because they, like her and unlike him, had the conviction to follow a path that involved abandoning the ordinary world, the strength to cut off ties with family and society in order to devote themselves fully and absolutely to a cause. Krishan thought of how Anjum had avoided touching him in the presence of her friends, how she’d introduced him as a friend from Delhi, things she hadn’t seemed to do with any explicit intent or purpose but that had served, nevertheless, to remind him in those moments that he could not take their relationship for granted, that soon she would be moving away and that their time together would soon be coming to an end. He’d known these things already, of course, they had after all been the source of all the anxiety he’d experienced since meeting Anjum, but in a way he’d been evading these facts over the previous three weeks, he realized, in a way he’d allowed the comfort and familiarity that had developed between them to shield himself from their implications. It was this subject that Anjum was trying to broach now by likening herself to Dharshika and Puhal, Krishan realized, as he looked at the thoughtful, almost brooding expression on her face, not explicitly, since that was not Anjum’s way, but lightly and gracefully, hoping he would be perceptive enough to understand what she was doing without the heaviness of having to tell him directly. It was their last evening in Bombay and she was trying, gently, to remind him that she was different from him, that her own path in the world had already been staked out and that he would need to find his own, and it was at this moment, turning and looking out over the darkly shifting sea, that he finally felt the inevitability of their parting of ways coming home to him, a kind of sudden, silent shift taking place in the geology of his mind, a fact he responded to not with anxiety now or desperation, as he had in the past, but with the silent conviction that he too had a path ahead of him, that he too had a history and a destiny of his own. It had been at that moment, sitting beside Anjum with the ocean before them and the city of Bombay to their backs, having spent all his adulthood, almost seven years at that point, living in India, that the thought first came to him of returning to the country of his birth, of leaving behind his graduate studies and his plans of being an academic, of devoting himself to working in the northeast, a thought that had no doubt been preparing itself in his mind for some time, encouraged by his obsession with the war but also by his time with Anjum, the model she’d provided for a life governed by the vision of another world. He felt a kind of sadness come over him, not so much the sadness of separation from Anjum as the sadness of being separated from a life he’d become familiar with and comfortable in, but stronger than this sadness was the sense of possibility he suddenly felt rising through his body, the sense of possibility that came with extinction of the self and submission to higher powers, from the prospect of leaving behind all the difficulties of loving someone who couldn’t be with him and devoting himself instead to the project of a new world, a world that would give him the same sense of liberation he felt with Anjum but without the sadness and the desperation, a world that would take him away from this person he loved but would also, somehow, bring them closer.
The two of them finished their cigarettes quietly, each of them lost in their own thoughts, then resumed walking down Marine Drive, slowly and in silence. Even though nothing exactly had happened, even though their conversation about the film had been abstract and unrelated to their relationship, it was as if each of them sensed that some turning point had been reached. It was as if the logic that had begun to unfold five months ago, when their eyes first made contact, was coming finally to its end, and it was in response to this feeling, perhaps, that they held hands for the first time as they walked, clasping each other not firmly or with fullness of contact, not giving each other promises they could not keep, but loosely and tenderly, only their little fingers intertwined. It was dark now, the pavement lit by the sodium glow of the tall streetlamps on the road to their right, and stretching out to their left the water glimmered in the warm night, the city’s reflected intensities fluctuating on its surface. To their right, curving outward with the coastline into the distance ahead, high-rises rose up to form the skyline, the first of endless lines of buildings that comprised the island of Bombay, buildings that contained within their small compartments tens of millions suffering and striving people from all across the country, a condensation of human life so dense and so rich that it was impossible to believe such a place existed till one saw it with one’s own eyes. It was as though, as they walked together holding hands that night, they were being presented with a crystallization of two contradictory possibilities of liberation that existence on earth offered, the possibility, on the one hand, that one felt whenever one came across an immense number of people living in a single place, the possibility of finding among all those millions a person or people with whom one could be happy, and the possibility, on the other, that was felt whenever one looked into the endless, lightless reaches of the night sea, the possibility of liberation that was associated with oblivion, with the cutting of ties and voyaging out into the unknown. Krishan held Anjum’s hand a little more tightly, and looking at her as she looked back at him, her tall, graceful form silhouetted by the silver-yellow halo of the city behind her, she appeared to him just as she’d appeared the first day they met, just as she’d appeared that night on the train with the countryside rushing past behind her, with that combination of sadness, longing, and conviction that he would, he’d felt with certainty that moment, never forget. He continued gazing at her, at the severity of her profile and the vulnerability of her gaze, and it was as though he could feel the sight of her penetrating his eyes in real time, burning itself delicately into the film of his retinas, forming an image that would remain imprinted in the back of his eyes like a shadow or like tracing paper over everything he saw subsequently. And maybe it was for this reason, it had occurred to him at that moment, that eyesight weakened with the passing of the years, not because of old age or disease, not because of the deterioration of the cornea or the lenses or the finely tuned muscles that controlled them but because, rather, of the accumulation of a few such images over the course of one’s brief sojourn on earth, images of great beauty that pierced the eyes and superimposed themselves over everything one saw afterward, making it harder over time to see and pay attention to the outside world, though perhaps, it occurred to him now, four years later in the country of his birth, walking at the back of the procession bearing Rani’s body for cremation, Rani who’d seen so much that she had never been able to forget, perhaps he’d been naïve back then, perhaps it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see.
10
They had left the lake behind some time ago, the vegetation along the road less exuberant as t
hey moved farther from the water, merging into the dustier, browner landscapes of tangled brush and gnarled trees that had dominated the scenery from station to village. They’d been walking for maybe half an hour and he could feel the moisture trickling down his back and sides, his body beginning to feel heavier and more cumbersome despite having no part to play in shouldering the bier. Krishan knew that cremation grounds were generally located some distance outside villages, a fact that had to do with the supposed impurity of funeral rites and of those compelled to base their livelihoods upon them, but he wondered now whether the distance between village and cremation ground might also be related to the process of grieving, whether it might also be meant to give the relatives who carried the pot and bore the body a more vivid sense of the materiality of what was being lost. He continued moving at the same slow, even pace, trying to calculate how far they had come from the village, to keep track of the path they were taking so he could make his way back alone if needed, and it was some time before he made out, coming up on the right, a large plot of land bounded by crumbling gray cinder-block walls, the sprawling land inside visible through a collapsed section of wall, overrun by brush and weeds. The four drummers, still playing lightly at the head of the procession, entered the plot of land on reaching the gate, followed by the casket-bearers, and Krishan realized that it was this walled-off plot of land, hardly distinguishable from the landscape surrounding it, that functioned as the village’s cremation ground. He’d never been to a cremation ground in the northeast before, only in Colombo, where in addition to a kind of pavilion for cremations there were usually also large sections containing Muslim and Christian tombstones, physical graves that gave those sites the atmosphere of being populated. The ground they were entering now felt strangely empty in comparison, devoid of anything human, only the section near the center of the ground cleared of vegetation, the only permanent structure there a small cement platform that was level with the ground. Four thick iron bars were anchored into the rectangular platform at its corners, and it was within the confines of these iron bars that the pyre had been prepared, a number of dry, unevenly hewn pieces of wood stacked between them to a height of two or three feet. A small distance away several items had been laid out on the ground in readiness for the cremation, another small pile of wood, a dried palmyra leaf, a sack of hay, and a bottle of kerosene along with a few smaller items. The funeral director helped guide the casket to the center of the ground so the men carrying it could lower it onto the pyre, several other members of the procession joining as they let the front of the casket down and then slid the rest forward till its weight was entirely supported by the pyre. The drummers drew off to a side to continue drumming lightly, as unconcerned with the proceedings as they’d been at the funeral house, and the rest of the men in the procession gathered on one side, the closer relatives nearer to the pyre and the others farther back. Krishan watched as the director unfastened the lid of the casket and Rani’s body was revealed once more to the light of day, her face still ghostly pale, her eyes still closed, her body still laden with garlands of flowers. With the help of his assistant he began taking the garlands off Rani’s body, the still fresh flowers probably an impediment to the burning, lifting them up one by one with both hands and putting them carefully down on the ground a short distance away. Taking a large, curved, sicklelike knife the director severed the thread tying Rani’s big toes together, separated her feet from each other, then unfolded her hands and separated those too, this too presumably to aid the burning. From the small pile on the ground he began to carry pieces of wood one by one to the casket, placing them gently, almost reverentially, upon Rani’s body, the assistant helping him till her body was mostly concealed, so that looking at the casket it was hard to say whether the purpose of the additional wood was to help with the body’s burning or to shield spectators from the sight of it disintegrating under the flames, from the disturbing scene of human turning into mineral right before their eyes.
The director called to Rani’s son-in-law, who was standing a few feet away from the pyre observing the proceedings, the clay pot still on his left shoulder, and he made his way dutifully toward the head of the casket. The director gave him the torch he’d been carrying, a short stick of sandalwood that had already burned halfway down, and taking it in his right hand Rani’s son-in-law held it behind his back with the smoldering end pointing away from his body. The director took the curved knife in his hand and stood just behind the son-in-law, who, like a man about to be shaved at a barbershop, remained where he was with almost nervous stillness. Gripping the knife not by the handle but by the blade itself, the director marked a spot near the base of the clay pot and struck at it sharply with the point of the knife, making a small, precise crack in the pot out of which water began to trickle. The drummers immediately began playing louder and more intensely, and in accordance with the director’s instructions Rani’s son-in-law began walking counterclockwise around the casket, solemnly and cautiously, the pot on his left shoulder and the torch in his right hand. The director followed close behind him, using his right hand to guide the trickling water away from the casket, slapping it as it fell in a gesture whose significance Krishan didn’t quite understand. He stopped Rani’s son-in-law at the head of the casket after one circumambulation, and taking the knife in his hand tapped sharply a second time at the back of the pot, this time a little farther down, creating a second hole so that the stream of water became a little broader, wetting the path that Rani’s son-in-law now took for a second time around the body. Krishan had registered the son-in-law’s physical presence in passing at the funeral house, but he was struck by his handsomeness as he moved now in the softness of the evening light, by his dark, muscular upper body, bare except for the white thread strung across his torso, the broadness of his chest and shoulders. The entirety of his back, he noticed, was marked by scars, making his stoic, graceful bearing even more impressive as he moved, and studying them as the pot was struck a third time and he began his third revolution, Krishan wondered whether perhaps they’d been inflicted by the army after the end of the war, which would have made sense, he knew, since Rani’s son-in-law would have been in his early twenties at the time, and regardless of their affiliation with the Tigers most men that age would have been treated with suspicion. When he finished the third round the director stopped him at the head of the casket, turning him around so he was facing away from the body, then instructed him to throw down the pot and light the pyre without turning to look. Rani’s son-in-law hesitated for a moment, as though he’d developed an attachment to the pot he’d carried with him all the way from the funeral house, then threw it down in front of him and watched as it shattered with a heavy thunk upon contact with the ground, the exploded water spilling onto the dry earth before him. Still looking away from the body, he reached toward the casket uncertainly with the smoldering torch, groping till he made contact and then letting the torch fall into the pyre. The pyre remained unlit, which was of course the standard course of things, the lighting of the pyre by the male relative usually nothing more than a symbolic act, and ushering Rani’s son-in-law quickly to the other side of the casket, the director cut the thread around his torso and deposited it in the casket by Rani’s feet. He opened a small packet of camphor tablets, deposited a few of the tablets on the ground by the foot of the pyre, then handed Rani’s son-in-law a matchbox. Crouching down in front of the camphor tablets Rani’s son-in-law lit a match and set the camphor alight, then getting on his stomach and stretching out his body on the dusty earth in front of the flame, prostrated himself before Rani one last time. He stood up slowly, still taking care not to turn his face toward the body, then turned around and began walking away from the pyre, back toward the entrance of the cremation ground. There was shuffling among the men behind him, and turning Krishan saw that several of them too had begun heading for the entrance. It was some kind of defilement to watch the body burning, he knew, but he didn’t want to abandon Rani befo
re the pyre began to burn, it didn’t make sense having come all the way, and looking around, seeing that a few of the men were still standing there with hands behind their backs, no intention of leaving till the actual lighting took place, he turned his gaze back to the scene before him.
A Passage North Page 23