Eleven days ago he had been here for his father’s cremation. It appeared to be a type of puerile radicalism now, the way he thought he had scored points in refusing to perform the last rites for his father. In denying the honourable duties that bound the male firstborn in a Hindu family — although his family was that only in a diluted, anodyne way — he thought he had taken a socially meaningful step. This was compounded, although Ritwik could take no credit for it, by his mother’s decision to do the necessary rituals. Untraditionally so, because Hindu tradition gave no place to women to atone for the sins of the deceased and see off his soul. If anyone had thought it odd or deviatory, this business of the last rites being performed by the dead man’s widow instead of his surviving sons, they had not said so. On top of that, both he and Aritra had refused to go through ashauch, the ritual eleven-day mourning, a period of defilement, culminating in the sraddha ceremony, where the soul of the dead was finally unmoored from all its earthly ties and sent on its way to purgatory or another birth or whatever.
Just recalling what his uncles had gone through when their mother had died made him furious with the punishing nature of it alclass="underline" sleeping on hay and straw with bricks for headrests, no shaving or cutting of hair, no meals after sundown, a mind-boggling assortment of dietary rules. . And then there was the final ceremony that ended it alclass="underline" all hair was shorn off and shaved, including chest and armpit hair (although not pubic hair), the endless abracadabra with the phoney priest, pour this on fire pour that on fire, make seven or nine or three portions of that sickly mess of rice and bananas and ghee and place it there and there and there while chanting the names of your male ancestors (no one could go beyond a generation, or two at the most), the obligatory mass-feeding of relatives, neighbours, friends, the poor. . Cock cock cock he’d spat out I’m damned if I’m doing any of this when my time comes. But this death was different. This time Ritwik was going to do what was expected of him. If there really was a soul after all, which needed to be released, he didn’t want to take any chances with his mother’s.
There was no question of opting for the traditional open wooden pyre, so uninsulated, so barbaric to Ritwik’s mind. In those blank hours between registering the corpse for cremation in an electric furnace and the little ritual before it actually happened, Ritwik noticed disparate patches of people strewn around the crematorium. Death sometimes made survivors gregarious. He was surprised that there were so few inconsolable people; he had expected far more than the occasional ones, from whom he glanced away. Every haggard face there looked dry, as if deprived of some essential sap which loss had wrung out of them drop by drop, leaving only dark shadows and a desiccation around the mouth, the unkemptness of dusty hair, the crushed, limp dullness of the stale clothes; Ritwik wondered if he looked like them as well.
The billow and swell of support and advice around Ritwik and Aritra grew. It seemed that virtually half of Aritra’s college had come over to stand by him in this hour of need. Information rained down on him, thick and merciless, like a choking Old Testament plague — the time it would take for the corpse to be completely burnt once it entered the furnace; how the ramp automatically rose to advance and lower the ‘body’ inside; how the gates of the furnace came down to cover the process from human view; the list of things he had to do before and after the cremation. Now that he had to perform all these himself, he was fascinated by the structures and codes of this little world of the business and commerce and rituals of death. It was an alternative world, so inescapably under his own yet so unknown until he had to educate himself in its rules. Who would have thought that such knowledge had to be bought with so much fire, fire that would send his mother somewhere upwards and ascending still, in dispersing, intermittent clouds of elementary particles, so that if he breathed in he could fill his chest with tiny fragments of her being and hold this transubstantiation locked inside his distending lungs.
In Hindu belief, the navel is indestructible, left behind in the furnace as the whole body is converted to a fistful of ash. The last act of the cremation was the retrieval of this undestroyed navel from the maws of the furnace. There was a short walk to the Ganga, which ran right behind the crematorium, to set the ‘navel’ afloat (or whatever lump of rock or charcoal the panda, the crematorium tout, had handed you) following the guidelines of yet another priest or hanger-on hoping for a few rupees.
Aritra’s face was flushed, as if one of the walls of the furnace that held their mother’s corpse had suddenly slid from its fixed position and the contained fire had licked and blazed too close to the boy’s face. A purification, an extinguishing. The dark of his pupils seemed to have welled and inked out in circles under his eyes. He made Ritwik a generous offer, ‘Look, if you don’t feel up to it, I can do this last bit.’
‘No, it’s all right; I’ve done it so far, let me see it to the end.’ He paused for a second, then added, ‘Besides, I’m the elder son. .’ his voice trailed off to make space for the excuse.
The pandas, who ferreted through the ashes with long sticks after the body was fully incinerated, handed him what passed for his mother’s navel in a flimsy earthen bowl. They had heaped it with ash and cinder out of an odd sense of decorum. There was a small procession — he, Aritra, Tabbu, a couple of Aritra’s friends, Pratik-mama, and a few others — to the dark slurry of putrefying matter which was the Ganga, the holy river, not running but stagnant and stench-bound behind the crematorium. On the way, he was seized by an urge to root through the ashes and earth in the little bowl in his hands (surprisingly heavy) and see if it really contained his mother’s rubbery navel and the stump of her umbilical cord untouched by fire.
They reached the slopes of the bank and as he was asked to step closer, almost into that seething shit, he was once again overcome by nausea, afraid that any physical contact with the river would cause some repulsive illness. He stepped forward a few inches, gingerly, steeling himself to disobey any orders to stand ankle-deep in it. There were emaciated dogs moving around the place, materializing in and out of the thick darkness everywhere, sniffing for, he supposed, human limbs and charred flesh. He tried to take his mind off the marauding creatures and perform all that was asked of him. From the slums on the other side of the river, random feathers of Hindi film songs kept getting blown in with the intermittent breeze: Slowly, slowly we must increase our love, O magician, who has cast a spell on my virgin heart. The weak electric bulbs, dotted here and there among the huts, looked like static tapers.
The brothers flinched when the priest sprinkled everyone with holy water from the river: for a few moments they were acutely conscious of the exact spots on their bodies where the contaminated water had landed. They must remember to wash with Dettol when they returned home. Ritwik was asked to set the ‘navel’ afloat. But there wasn’t very much water in the river and instead of floating away, as it was picturesquely supposed to do, towards salvation on the other side, the bowl landed with the squelching splash of a hard object hitting clay.
Here, all ends and begins.
PART ONE