The Dead Body
Manindra Gupta (Trans. Abu Hossain) The fable of the Brahmin and the Brahmani used to be an amalgamation of the mythical and the folk. The duo lives in that hutment right at the yonder corner of the village. The Brahmin, a simple guy, partly a simpleton even. The Brahmani, a termagant—a long life of travail and tribulation has made her utterly irritable at the fag end. The story could take different turns once you reach this juncture. For instance, he discovers a pot full of mohurs, guarded by the yaksha, among the ruins in the jungle, or impresses the lord of the land with his witticism and makes a fortune, or gets swindled by a conman, suffers harsh words from the Brahmani and chooses exile. This story of the twosome is actually our story—mine and my friends’. We get swindled everyday and our predicament worsens. As long as we were working, we were fishes secure within our respective shoals. A retired life is one of needless, sundry humiliation. How and where our fulsome sons and daughters spend their time, what drives their lives, I am rather unsure. Internationally acclaimed pundits doing the circuit or surefooted asocial danseuses adept at social dos—whatever their trade be—they have traversed a long way from us indeed. We oldies are vulnerable like the groping Brahmin couple of the tale. We queue up at the bus-stop, hear someone holler ‘get up, do get up.’ Soon the bus waves past, an anomalous bell ringing. We are left standing. An odd shove here, a thrust there in the crowd, (we hope to parry, but invariably fail) easily leaves us cold, downbeat, fallen. I recall the visage of old, weary Dhritarashtra, at the conclusion of the battle at Kurukshetra, returning with blooms and supplicating water—hungry, weak with fasting, trembling, superannuated, rapidly losing interest with living. Soon he enters the entrails of the forest with Gandhari, Kunti and Sanjay. And a fierce forest fire engulfs them. Sanjay entreats the old king to flee. The feeble king replies that he would rather scorch himself up. It is ideal to give up ones life to water, wind, fire and fasting. You may take leave Sanjay. King Bimbisara died of fasting too. I have noticed unwell creatures, nearing death, hunt down a quiet spot—quit food and await stilly until death arrives. Possibly their being wishes to touch some primordial pulse before departing for good. The threesome in Mahabharata also sat motionless. Modern death is a messy, troublesome affair. Face to face with death one realizes how perilous our circumstances are. These days there are hardly any treatment options at home. And nursing homes are veritable leeches. And then at the threshold of his last breath, the patient is pushed into a ventilator: artificial respiration initiates. Four or five days in that state, stark pale with death long ago, the nursing home declares the patient to be brain dead. The dead body and a bill of few lakhs are easily handed out. In the name of wellness and treatment, partial dead-bodies thus enter the chain of transaction. And a complete and spectacular disrespect for the dead starts right there. On one hand, the abhorrent antarjali-jatra, on the other, this horrendous ventilation: is there no simpler, more natural route for the patient on the death roll? Howsoever agreeably we lead our lives, in death we proceed towards the grandeur of the infinite and the unseen. These last couple of hours, at their very moment of disappearance, let not the dead suffer contempt from those who stay back. I would not have been so garrulous but for a jolt that I received the other day. I had gone to the samshan-ghaat, in solidarity, to witness the last rites of a neighboring friend. The gentleman, his wife, his kids—the whole family is illustrious, scholarly and free-minded. Probably the luster of scholarship had dried up the humidity of their bereavement. In every civic, popular or natural society, the disposal of the dead merits some procedural aspects. Various as the formalities are, one basic thread binds them: that we do not consider the dead to be gone, vanished, non-existent. The idea is to see that a modicum of love and benediction guide us even as we dispose off a body who had been possibly a fellow traveler with the living for so long and so richly. And to wonder and consider the remains before it surpasses touch and feel. The Eskimos of North Pole are an ancient lot. How do they resolve this conundrum of the wobbly, unsure old age? Once the old man realizes that he is unable to hunt, is dependent on his kinsman for food, the lumbering weight of life is getting better of him—he gets holds of a catamaran, and one evening quietly ventures on to the sea. Night in front, the ocean wide, below 30 degree Celsius the temperature. But he won’t return. What would happen to him, his body, his existence? The community is there by the sea-shore to bid him adieu. There are all kinds of traversing that final expanse: sometimes with such communal approval, at times alone and fasting—awaiting passage, and who knows, may be denying certain treatments even in the midst of mortal pain. There is a breed of sanyasis whose mortal remains are left to be eaten by the creatures of the wild. The whole of the Tower the Silence precisely hinges on such an understanding of the relationship of the living and the dead. Some practitioners are given water-burial, so that they enter the food chain via fishes and other aquatic creatures only to re-emerge materially. There is nothing demeaning about returning this earthly body back to the earth. Now, the usual rites are either internment or cremation. Two kinds of mentality work behind these differing procedures. Burial implies that he is around, his existence being mysterious now and he has left secretly to live elsewhere. The pyre suggests his unencumberdness, his transparency, the voyaging out: one can