When I had left Trinidad in 1950, when the little Pan American Airways System plane had taken me away, Sati was seven weeks short of her sixteenth birthday. When I next saw her and heard her voice she was nearly twenty-two, and married. Trinidad had since become almost an imaginary place for me; but she had lived all her life there, apart from short holidays abroad. She had lived through my father’s illness in 1952 and death in 1953; the political changes, the racial politics from 1956, the dangers of the street, the near-revolution and anarchy of 1970. She had also lived through the oil boom; she had known ease for many years; she could think of her life as a success.
Three days after her death, at the time she was being cremated in Trinidad, I spread her photographs in front of me on the low coffee table in the sitting room of my new house in Wiltshire. I had been intending for years to sort out these family photographs, put them in albums. There had always seemed to be time. In these photographs, while she had lived, I had not noticed her age. Now I saw that many of the photographs — her little honeymoon snapshots especially — were of a young girl with slender arms. That girl was now someone whose life had been lived; death had, painfully, touched these snapshots with youth. I looked at the pictures I had laid out and thought about Sati harder than I had ever thought about her. After thirty-five or forty minutes — the cremation going on in Trinidad, as I thought — I felt purged. I had had no rules to follow; but I felt I had done the right thing. I had concentrated on that person, that life, that unique character; I had honored the person who had lived.
Two days later I went to Trinidad. The family had wanted me to be with them. My brother had gone on the day of our sister’s cremation. He had arrived six hours after the cremation; he had asked then to be taken to the cremation site. My elder sister drove him. It was night; the pyre after six hours was still glowing. My brother walked up alone to the glow, and my sister, from the car, watched him looking at the glowing pyre.
Two weeks before, my brother had been in Delhi for Mrs. Gandhi’s cremation. In London, then, he had written a major article; now, that writing barely finished, he had come to Trinidad. Modern airplanes had made these big journeys possible; had exposed him to these deaths. In 1950, when I left Trinidad, airplane travel was still unusual. To go abroad could be to fracture one’s life: it was six years before I saw or heard members of my family again; I lost six years of their lives. There was no question, in 1953, when my father died, of my returning home. My brother it was, then aged eight, who performed and witnessed the terrible final rites of cremation. The event marked him. That death and cremation were his private wound. And now there was this cremation of his sister: still a pyre and a glow after his airplane flight from London. Soon an airplane took him back to London. And airplanes took other members of the family to other places.
I stayed on in Trinidad for the religious ceremony that took place some days later and was complementary to the cremation. Sati had not been religious; like my father, she had had no feeling for ritual. But at her death her family wished to have all the Hindu rites performed for her, to leave nothing undone.
The pundit, a big man, was late for this ceremony. He had been late for the cremation as well, I had heard. He said something now about being busy and harassed, about misreading his watch; and settled down to his duties. The materials he needed were ready for him. A shallow earth altar had been laid out on a board on the terrazzo of Sati’s veranda. To me the ritual in this setting — the suburban house and garden, the suburban street — was new and strange. My memories were old; I associated this kind of ritual with more country scenes.
The pundit in his silk tunic sat cross-legged on one side of the altar. Sati’s younger son sat facing him on the other side. Sati’s son was in jeans and jumper — and this informality of dress was also new to me. The earth rites the pundit began to perform on the veranda appeared to mimic Sati’s cremation; but these rites suggested fertility and growth rather than the returning of the body by way of fire to the earth, the elements. Sacrifice and feeding — that was the theme. Always, in Aryan scriptures, this emphasis on sacrifice!
There was a complicated physical side to the ceremony, as with so many Hindu ceremonies: knowing where on the altar to put the sacrificial flowers, knowing how to sing the verses and when, knowing how and when and where to pour various substances: the whole mechanical side of priesthood. The pundit led Sati’s son through the complications, telling him what offerings to make to the sacred fire, to say swa-ha when the offerings were placed with a downward gesture of the fingers, to say shruddha when the fingers were flicked back from the open palm to scatter the offering onto the fire.
Then the pundit began to do a little more. He became aware of the people on the veranda who were his audience and he began, while instructing Sati’s son, partly to address us in a general religious way. He told Sati’s son it was necessary for him to cool his lusts; he began to use texts and words that might have served on many other solemn occasions. Something else was new to me: the pundit was being “ecumenical” in a way he wouldn’t have been when I was a child, equating Hinduism — speculative, many-sided, with animist roots — with the revealed faiths of Christianity and Mohammedanism. Indeed the pundit said at one stage — talking indirectly to us as though we were a Trinidad public assembly and many of us were of other faiths — that the Gita was like the Koran and the Bible. It was the pundit’s way of saying that we too had a Book; it was his way, in a changed Trinidad, of defending our faith and ways.
In spite of his jeans, Sati’s son was serious. He was humble in the presence of the pundit, not a formally educated man, for whom — on another day, in another setting — he might have had little time. He seemed to be looking to the pundit for consolation, a support greater than the support of ritual. He was listening to everything the pundit said. The pundit, continuing to add moral and religious teaching to the complicated ritual he was performing with earth and flowers and flour and clarified butter and milk, said that our past lives dictated the present. Sati’s son asked in what way Sati’s past had dictated the cruelty of her death. The pundit didn’t answer. But Sati’s son, if he had been more of a Hindu, if he had more of a Hindu cast of mind, would have understood the idea of karma, and wouldn’t have asked the question. He would have yielded to the mystery of the ritual and accepted the pundit’s words as part of the ritual.
The pundit went on with the physical side of his business. That was what people looked to a pundit for; that was what they wished to see carried out as correctly as possible — this pressing together of balls of rice and then of balls of earth, this arranging of flowers and pouring of milk on heaps of this and that, this constant feeding of the sacred fire.