The Best American Essays 2016 (26 page)

I had been luckier than Annayya. I had been able to speak to Didi in Patna when Ma was taken to a hospital on the night she died. On WhatsApp, on my phone, a text came from my sister later in the evening, assuring me that Ma was doing better. Then came the call about my flight timings. While the use of social media also meant that I got the news of my mother’s death from a near stranger on Facebook, it was also true that technology and modern travel had made it quite easy for me to arrive in Patna in less than twenty hours to cremate my mother. During the prayer ceremonies a priest told me that the reason Hindu customs dictated a mourning period of thirteen days was that it used to take time for all the relatives to be informed and for them to travel to the home of the deceased. But this, he said, putting his hand on his ear, is the age of the mobile phone.

At the ghat, the smoke from the funeral fires mixed with the lingering fog of the winter afternoon. An advance party organized by a cousin’s husband had pitched a small
shamiana
on the bank and arranged a few red plastic chairs next to it. Above the din, a tuneless
bhajan
played on a loudspeaker. In the crowd, I was led first in one direction and then another. My movements were restrained because of what I was wearing; according to custom, my body was wrapped in two pieces of unstitched cotton. My freshly shaven head was bare. I saw that Ma’s body had already been put on the pyre. There was such a press of strangers, many of them beggars and curious children, that I had to ask people loudly to move back. Ma lay on heavy logs and a bed of straw, but the priest directed me to pile thinner firewood over the rest of the body. Other family members joined me, adding sticks in the shape of a tent over the corpse.

Ma’s face had been left bare. Now the priest told me to put five pieces of sandalwood near my mother’s mouth. Some of the
sindoor
that had been put in Ma’s hair had scattered and lodged in her eyebrows and on her eyelids. The dom who would give me the fire had an X-shaped plaster stuck on his right cheek. He had a dark face and his eyes were bloodshot. His head was wrapped in a brown-and-blue muffler to protect him from the cold; he wore jeans and a thin black jacket and he had about him an air of insouciance that would have bothered my mother, but I liked him. His presence was somehow reassuring, or real, because he was outside the circle of our grief and yet the main doer. He was solemn, but he certainly wasn’t sober; his very casualness brought a quotidian touch to the scene, and he accentuated this by haggling about his payment. A maternal uncle’s son stood behind me, repeating for my benefit the priest’s instructions—this cousin of mine, a few years older than I, had cremated his son recently. The boy had passed away after his liver stopped working, the result of an allergic reaction to medicines that have reportedly been banned outside India. The priest told me to sprinkle
gangajal
again—the endless act of purification with what is in reality polluted water—before the dom lit a bundle of tall straw for me. Three circles around the pyre. Then followed the ritual that is called
mukhaagni
. I understood suddenly why the priest had given me the five pieces of sandalwood, the size of small Snickers bars, to put near my mother’s mouth. In that moment, while performing
mukhaagni
inadequately, inefficiently, even badly, in my grief and bewilderment, the thought passed through my mind: Is this why my mother had wanted me present at her death?
Mukhaagni
—in Sanskrit,
mukha
is “mouth” and
agni
is “fire”—means in practice that the male who is closest to the deceased, often the son, sometimes the father, and in some cases, I imagine, the husband, puts fire into the mouth of the person on the pyre.

A cremation on a riverbank in India is by its very nature public, but usually the only mourners present are men. In our case, my sisters and other younger women from the family had accompanied Ma’s body. When I turned from the pyre I saw my sisters standing at the edge of the circle. I went to them and put my arms around their shoulders. The flames had risen at once and they hid Ma’s body behind an orange curtain. Soon there were fewer people standing around the pyre and the older men, my father’s friends, began to settle down on the plastic chairs at a distance of about thirty feet from the pyre. A relative put a shawl around me. Then the dom said that the fire was burning too quickly, meaning that the fire would go out before the corpse had been incinerated, so a few men from our party took down a part of the
shamiana
and used it as a screen against the wind.

The fire needed to burn for three hours. Badly managed fires and, sometimes, the plain paucity of firewood—for the pyre requires at least 150 kilos of wood but often as much as 400 kilos or more—are to be blamed for the partially charred torsos flung into the Ganga. And as wood costs money—10,000 rupees in our case—the poor in particular can be insufficiently burned. The chief minister of Bihar, Jitan Ram Manjhi, a man from the formerly untouchable Musahar (or rat-eating) caste, told an audience in Patna last year that his family was so poor that when his grandfather died they just threw his body into the river.

I asked Didi why we hadn’t taken Ma’s body to Patna’s electric crematorium, but she only said that Ma wouldn’t have wanted it. Didi didn’t need to say anything else. I could imagine my mother resisting the idea of being put in a metal tray where other bodies had been laid and pushed inside an oven where electric coils would reduce her to ashes. Her choice, superstitious and irrational as it might be, didn’t pose a problem for us. We could afford the more expensive and customary means of disposing of the dead. Nearly 300 kilos of wood had been purchased for Ma’s pyre and, in addition to that, 10 kilos of sandalwood. This was one of the many instances during those days when I recognized that we were paying for the comfort of subscribing to tradition. The electric crematorium is often the choice of the poor, costing only about 300 rupees. I learned that over 700 dead are cremated at the electric crematorium at Patna’s Bans Ghat each month, and a somewhat smaller number at the more distant Gulbi Ghat electric crematorium. These numbers are only a fraction of the 3,000 cremated on traditional pyres at Bans Ghat on average each month. This despite the fact that electric cremation is also quicker, taking only forty-five minutes, except when there is a long wait due to power cuts. There can also be other delays. Back when I was in college, the corpse of a relative of mine, a sweet old lady with a fondness for betel leaf, was taken to the Patna crematorium, but the operator there said that he would be available only after he had watched that day’s broadcast of the TV serial
Ramayan
. The mourners waited an extra hour.

While we sat under the
shamiana
watching the fire do its work, my younger sister, Dibu, said that she had put perfume on Ma’s corpse because fragrances were something Ma liked. Dibu began to talk about how Ma used to put perfume in the new handkerchiefs that she gave away to younger female relatives who visited her. In Bihar, a Hindu woman leaving her home is given a handkerchief with a few grains of rice, a pinch of turmeric, leaves of grass, coins, and a sweet
laddu
. These items had also been put beside Ma on the pyre, and, I now learned, inside Ma’s mouth my sisters had placed a gold leaf. I thought of the priest telling me each time I completed a circle around the pyre that I was to put the fire into my mother’s mouth. I didn’t, or couldn’t. It wasn’t so much that I found it odd or appalling that such a custom should exist; instead, I remember being startled that no one had cared to warn me about it. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Death provided a normalizing context for everything that was being done. No act appeared outlandish, because it had a place in the tradition, each Sanskrit verse carrying an intonation of centuries of practice. And if there was any doubt about the efficacy of sacred rituals, everywhere around us banal homilies were being offered to make death appear less strange or devastating. The
bhajan
that had been playing on the loudspeaker all afternoon was in praise of fire.
Death, you think you have defeated us, but we sing the song of burning firewood
. Even though it was tuneless, and even tasteless, the song turned cremation into a somewhat celebratory act. It struck me that the music disavowed its own macabre nature and made everything acceptable. And now, as the fire burned lower and there was visibly less to burn, I saw that everyone, myself included, had momentarily returned to a sense of the ordinary. This feeling wouldn’t last more than a few hours, but at that time I felt free from the contagion of tears. I remember complaining about the loud music. Everyone had been fasting since morning, and
pedas
from a local confectioner were taken out of paper boxes. I took a box of
pedas
to our young dom, but he refused; he didn’t want anything sweet to eat. I was handed a packet of salted crackers to pass on to him. Tea was served in small plastic cups. Street dogs and goats wandered past the funeral pyres. Broken strings of marigold, fruit peels, and bits of bedding, including blankets and a pillow pulled from the fire, littered the sandy bank. One of my uncles had lost his car keys and people from our group left to look for them.

The dom had so far used a ten-foot-long bamboo to rearrange the burning logs, but when the fire died down he poked around the burning embers with his callused fingers. I was summoned for another round of prayers and offerings to the fire. The men in my family gave directions to the dom as he scooped Ma’s remains—ash and bones, including a few vertebrae, but other small bones too, white and curiously flat—into a large earthen pot. This pot was wrapped in red cloth and later that evening hung from a high branch on the mango tree outside our house. Its contents were to be immersed in the Ganga at the holy sites upriver: Benares, Prayag, and Haridwar. This was a journey my sisters and I would undertake later in the week; but that afternoon, after the pot had been filled, the rest of the half-burned wood and ash and what might have been a part of the hipbone were flung into the river while the priest chanted prayers. Flower petals, mostly marigold, had been stuffed in polythene bags which had the names of local sari shops printed on them, and at the end everyone took part in casting handfuls of bright petals on the brown waters. I took pictures. The photograph of the yellow marigold floating on the Ganga, rather than my mother’s burning pyre, is what I put up on Facebook that evening.

RICHARD M. LANGE

Of Human Carnage

FROM
Catamaran

O
N
M
ARCH 12, 2012
, my girlfriend, Elizabeth, and I were driving on Costa Rica’s Inter-American Highway, the major north-south highway through the country. We were on the second-to-last day of a three-week bird-watching trip that had included most of the good birding spots in the northern two-thirds of the country. That morning we had left the cabin we’d rented on Cerro de la Muerte (the Hill of Death) and were headed to our last stop, a small hotel in Alajuela, near the Juan Santamaría International Airport, where we were scheduled to catch our return flight to California the next morning.

As anyone who has done it will tell you, driving in Costa Rica is a challenge. Roads are narrow, most streets are unmarked, and the highways are filled with speeding big rigs. In many places, a lone sign telling you to
ceda el paso
(yield) is your only warning that the highway is about to narrow to a single lane for
both
directions. Throughout our travels, we’d seen pedestrians (including unattended children) walking the narrowest of shoulders. On some stretches there is no shoulder at all—the roadway is bounded by steep drops or weed-choked ditches. In these places, the pedestrians and bicyclists are forced, under threat of instant death, to maintain an extremely disciplined line along the very edge of the asphalt.

Where Elizabeth and I were traveling, about halfway between Cartago and San José, the two northbound lanes are divided from the southbound lanes by a section of neighborhood. I was behind the wheel, my eyes on the road ahead as I listened for any updates from our rented SUV’s GPS system, which spoke to us in a kindly female voice we had affectionately dubbed Carmen Sabetodo. The afternoon commute under way, traffic was much heavier than it had been anywhere else on our trip. Cars were traveling at about sixty miles an hour, which is pretty fast for Costa Rica, as most of the roads are too narrow and winding for such a speed. On the left sat a row of small houses, their fenceless yards coming right to the edge of the highway. On the right, a steep-sided ditch lined with concrete—essentially a mammoth rain gutter—ran alongside. Across the ditch, a treeless embankment climbed thirty or so feet.

Well up ahead, on the right-hand edge of the asphalt, I saw a figure. It was a man, dressed in dark pants and a powder-blue shirt. In the first instant that I noticed him, I felt something was wrong, that he wasn’t just another pedestrian walking a dangerous edge of roadway. Standing on the highway side of the concrete ditch, he seemed in a particularly precarious spot. I imagined he’d slid down the embankment accidentally and, unable to climb back up, had decided the only way out of his predicament was to cross the ditch and then, if it was possible, cross the highway. And now there he stood, weighing the feasibility of the second part of his plan. He was leaning toward the moving traffic, as though seeking the right moment to dash across. As a white SUV approached he leaned back slightly, the vehicle missing him by inches. Behind the SUV was a big-rig truck. When it reached him, he dove in front of it.

In an instant, my mind involuntarily revised its sense of what was happening. The man, it seemed, had not come to the edge of the highway by accident. He was some kind of daredevil, attempting to dive into the middle of the lane so that the truck would harmlessly pass over him, after which he would quickly scramble back into the roadside ditch before being hit by the next vehicle. I imagined a group of friends were looking on, probably from atop the embankment, and he was performing for their awe and admiration. For that fraction of a second, I was so convinced of this scenario that my brain actually formed the thought:
This is dumb! You’re not going to make it!
But of course the man was not a daredevil; he was committing suicide.