We burn our dead in a chaotic and cacophonous cremation area on the banks of the Ganges, next to a temple of Shiva, full of wandering goats and wailing relatives of dead people, where you choose wooden pyres or the electric crematorium, depending on how much money you want to and can spend. We went for the electric version for my father.
I was about to go to bed after making sure that all the doors were locked and the window shutters were down in our 100-year-old and beautiful rented house in Watertown, Massachusetts, when the phone rang. There was no wind blowing that night. Our neighbour’s Doberman was barking at spirits that only he could see. Everything else was completely still, holding its breath in anticipation.
In retrospect, I know that American planes started bombing Iraq right about the time I picked up the phone. My sister was calling from Singapore about a massive black spot the doctors had detected on my father’s chest x-ray. He had lung cancer. We opted to fly him back to India to be admitted in a hospital in Kolkata that my cousin, a well-known cardiologist, worked in, rather than treat him in Singapore.
ADVERTISEMENT
As Baghdad was pounded by American bombers, as the water of the Tigris was taking on a deeper shade of red, the tumour inside my father’s lung was getting ready to explode and put an end to his rather sad and for the most part unwanted existence. The tumour ruptured in his lung within 10 days of my sister’s phone call to me. I flew United from Logan to Mumbai and took a Jet Airlines flight to Kolkata.
Father and his problems
I was numb, surprised at my lack of strong emotional response, when I walked into the hospital room and saw my father on the ventilator. His eyes were closed, his face had salt and pepper stubble that was 10 days old, and his body was half-covered in cheap linen that had multiple dark stains on it. I remember wondering how many times one must wash a bedsheet before one gets the stench of death out of it. How many times did the nurses face death before they developed the insensitivity that they displayed? My father was lying on an iron cot with rusted joints that creaked mildly as I sat on it and held my father’s feet. Even with a massive and ruptured tumour in his lung, he looked calm and peaceful for a change. The doctor-in-charge had a long, circuitous conversation with me about removing the ventilator and how it was my decision to make. It took me a while to realise that they were telling me that my father had crossed the point of no return.
ADVERTISEMENT
My father was an intelligent, sensitive and caring man with a big heart full of love for my mother, my sister and me. He was also a tormented soul who did not know when or how to manage his own emotional outbursts. Occasionally, he would transform into an angry, bitter and violent man who would ride at the edge of his senses. Every time he threw a tantrum, he pushed us, the people who he cared about the most, farther and farther away from him while a sane part of him probably watched helplessly. He ended up alienating all his close friends and his family to the point that he had nobody to talk to when he came back to being himself.
As my sister and I grew up, somehow came to terms with our childhood scars and started our own regular lives, father and his problems became less of an issue and more of an annoyance and a deep source of embarrassment. In some deep and buried corner of our hearts, my sister, mother and I wanted the problem to go away. When they took the ventilator away, my father was three months’ shy of turning 60. An early exit indeed.
Uncle R, my father’s younger brother, was very close to him and the only one in the family who did not lose sympathy for him ever. Uncle R was the crisis man of the family, always present at the time of trouble, ready to lend a helping hand at the most difficult times, and never losing it himself in the process; at least not until that day when we cremated father, one of the few days in my life that I can recall minute by minute.
Don’t look back
I had to touch my father’s face with a lighted wooden stick as a symbolic gesture of getting the fire started. The body was then placed in a tray and drawn into the dark red fire tinged with yellow that looked like the classic ‘inferno’ to me. The fire of hell that slowly consumed him from inside finally decided to release him. After an hour, I went down to the chamber below the electric crematorium, collected the ashes, turned around and came up without looking back. You are not supposed to look back; it sends a wrong signal to the spirit; it tends to linger around, lost and unsure.
When somebody close passes away, it is a tradition in our family to get together and sing the favourite songs of the deceased. We want to celebrate the joy of the release and not mourn death but I have realised over time that it is also one of the most heartbreaking rituals that we make ourselves go through.
That night, Uncle R sat down with grim determination, started playing a song, one of my father’s favourites, on the harmonium, that tiny organ-like instrument with its soft and sweet tone, and started to sing. He choked on the second line of the song, attempted to clear his throat, and launched again. Sitting in the next room, I thought of my father: the wasted, lonely life of a good man under a devastating curse. Uncle R’s voice broke again, rather violently, and he got up and left the room. The music dissolved all the carefully cultivated training we had brought to bear on our emotions, as we allowed our grief to come out as tears.
The writer designs big data systems to earn money, writes to make sense, and runs with his imaginary dog to receive unconditional love.