Kakar - A Book of memory: confessions and reflections

2 February 2009
Goa

T he trick to get through the cremation and the rest of the day without breaking down, I told myself, was to keep my attention resolutely focused on my fathers corpse and what was happening to it. Closing all windows and doors to any rush of images from the past.

Dry-eyed, I watched the two men in the living room of our Jaipur house, stripped of all familiarity by death, prepare the bamboo bier and cover it with straw, my ears deaf to the murmured chanting of the priest, the scratchy music from a record of devotional songs playing on a record player in the corner of the room and the wailing of women outside the door. I watched the barber shave my fathers head, a prelude to the ritual washing of the body in which I was supposed to assist. As the priest handed me a moist piece of cloth, I kept saying to myself, though not in these now well-chosen words, Remember, it is a corpse, dead flesh, not the father you revered and adored. Separate the observer from the actor who is sponging the body. And yet, I could not help but recoil from my first contact with his ice-cold flesh. My eyes, with a will of their own, refused to be averted from his genitals, the mighty paternal phallus now shrivelled and flopping against a faintly blue thigh.

After the sponging was complete, the body wrapped in a coarse white cloth, I helped to tie it down securely with thick jute strings so it wouldnt shift or slide off when the bier was carried to the municipal hearse parked outside on the road. The sun was high by the time the hearse, followed by the Ambassador and Fiat cars crammed full with mourners, reached the cremation ground at the foot of Moti Doongri, the fort built at the beginning of the twentieth century by the rulers of Jaipur for pleasure, for love, not war.

My memory becomes stubborn as I try to visualize the cremation. It would rather serve up images of the palace fort, perched on the rocky outcrop of the Aravallis, looming high above the cremation ground, scattered orange and purple bougainvillea peeping through its delicate crenulations. I wonder whether the pleasure of romantic trysts in Moti Doongri was heightened by the daily demonstration of the bodys impermanence in the ground below. I am also aware that this thought is but memorys ruse to deflect me from excruciating visual images of the cremation.

The hard part was to walk around the pyre with a flaming bundle of dry grass, light the fire near the head and then hasten the consummation by pouring ladles of ghee on the burning pyre. Even after the passage of twenty-eight years I find it difficult to summon the last image: the breaking open of his skull with a long pole by one of the cremation-ground helpers when the body was but half burnt to let the soul escape. My fathers soul. The soul of a man who did not believe in the existence of one. An agnostic who loved life and was impatient with the religious rites that mark its going, but understood that they were only meant to hammer the utter irrevocability of death into the obdurate hearts of those who were left behind.

I was back home, with my sister, my grandmother, my mothers sisters Kamla and Prem, my fathers three sisters and his two surviving brothers, sitting on the freshly washed floor of our living room stripped of all furniture, when the tears came in a rush. They streamed down my face, vainly trying to fill the abyss that had opened up in my soul.