Funeral


Here the rituals of death are elaborate- a thirteen- day period of hard abstinence- you can’t comb your hair or sleep in bed or wear stitched clothes. Family, neighbors, friends keep coming in and going, and all the time is spent in talking about the dead. The wife and the mother weep uncontrollably, faint intermittently, and are consoled by other weeping women. The men make the funeral arrangements- firewood, incense, white sheet to cover the dead from head to toe, so that the decay doesn’t show.
There is a buzz in the house and the children run about happy to see their cousins suddenly home. Even a somnambulant home, which has only always followed a well-beaten schedule, comes alive when there is a death. The rituals of the everyday are broken, the faceless, nameless woman of the house is suddenly given a lot of attention. In between the weeping you notice how she looks around her to see who has come to visit. Her tears go dry in a few hours but she must weep. She has lost her husband, the father of her young children. But she glows today as on her wedding day.
This is the last that she will be the centre of anything.

The crowd thins from next day onwards. People have to get back to work, children have school, board exams, maids to attend to.

The end of the period of abstinence is marked by a feast on the thirteenth day. The photograph of the dead is ceremoniously garlanded, and house is now ready to slip back into its old schedule. The woman does the same things as before- sans vermillion, sans some glass bangles. She looks at her wedding photographs when she is alone or when a sister comes visiting some months later.

The garland will not be changed after some time and the photograph will gather dust. Later the living will be much older than the dead. Then there will be forgetting.

Finally, the mourning will be over.



Always.