Is this how the dead feel?

A view of the room in which Robert Burn died in Dumfries, Scotland by Anonymous

On January 2016, I received a phone call in one of the coldest evenings of Bangalore. For a person to grow up in one of the country’s hottest regions like Ahmedabad, the cold winds of Bengaluru could make his feet and palms freeze to a degree of numbness. I picked the call up, the way anyone answers a phone when it starts to ring, not thinking that they have a choice.

Let me describe to you the circumstances of my occupancy. I was a paying guest in one of the high-end PGs in Tavarekere. In Bangalore, the PG system is unique. Hostel system is modeled as PGs, where businessmen acquire ownership of a building to rent each room out to any of the fifteen thousand students that Christ University embodies. Typically, the Reddy clan can be observed to be the custodians of these PGs. If you go to Tavarekere and ask any of the shopkeepers of the whereabouts of Padmini PG, they will point you towards it with a smile on their faces. After all, those who stay there are the reason for their flourishing business. The building must have been made as a standalone 2bhk apartment residence. However, Reddy bhaiya had managed to cover a portion of the hall with plastic walls and morph it into another room which could contain three people. Surprisingly, the hall was still big enough to be considered one. Apart from this makeshift room, there were two bedrooms which could hold 2-3 students each. There were four such apartments on the floor, and ours was one which was perhaps the most harmonious. Karan Chahar, from BBA and Bilal who was a PU student, were the occupants of the main bedroom; while Deepak Suresh from BCom and two other guys from MBA occupied the other bedroom. I, Adarsh Kurian and Arihant Jain were the captives of the third, makeshift room. I should make it clear that it wasn’t half as bad. The room was bigger than the other rooms in the apartment and came with an attached bathroom which was converted from a small balcony. There was enough space to occupy - a large double wardrobe, a small wardrobe for the third roommate, three medium sized single beds, three small desks and most importantly, three full grown adults. For the one year that we spent in the room, we never fought and managed to mind our own business, most of the times. However, Adarsh and I grew to be close friends, so when I finally hung up the phone, he could see that my life had changed forever.

I picked up the call, and it was my mother at the other end of the phone. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I was talking to Shakuntala Dey. The Shakuntala Dey that others knew – her friends, her distant relatives, complete strangers. She spoke in a low, grim and clear tone, which was beginning to cause a considerable amount of conflict and discomfort already. The words she pronounced then, have now faded away from my memory, but the echo still ricochets somewhere at the back of my mind. She started sobbing, and quickly passed on the phone to my father, who I knew by now, was an emotional man. Holding himself, and his voice together, he gave me clear instructions and details about the flight that I needed to catch which was scheduled for departure at 3 am that night. That has been the only night, in the three years of him calling me daily, that he hung up without saying goodnight. Adarsh Kurian looked at me staring into space, and asked if I was alright. My reply made him cry as if I had somehow possessed him. “My grandmother is dead,” I said and continued staring into the space between the tiles of the floor.

My grandmother was suffering. That’s how our family remembers her. Our family of me and my parents, my aunt and uncle, and their seven-year-old son. And of course, my grandfather who had spent each day of the five years that his wife had spent suffering from paralysis. I don’t remember clearly what her voice sounded like, except for the familiar tone in which she called me “Gopal.” The memories that I had of her 13 years ago are the only ones that I seem to be able to recall anymore. It is not entirely clear what is it that I was looking for when I was sifting through these imprints in my mind. Perhaps what I was searching for a strong desire to break down crying, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe I should’ve thought about everything she had to go through for five years, like the undignified ways of life that she had to endure – the inability to control excrement, or tears, when someone else had to clean it up. Or perhaps the insignificance of her life – failure to move her feet, or arms; just the mere neck that was too weak and lulled towards the sides most of the time, the trembling lips that could utter only one Bengali phrase that could have meant a million things, the eyes that could look around in a sense of desperation, devoid of hope, and sometimes, the occasional smile which was far too precious to us than any luxury that we could afford in our lives. My family convinced themselves that my grandmother was suffering, and I was no different.

I must have reached Kolkata airport at around 5 am, and my parent’s flight was scheduled for arrival half an hour later. When they finally did arrive, everything seemed a heavier. The air thickened and I had to breathe harder. We did not say anything to each other, just quietly boarded the taxi and headed towards the direction of my aunt’s house. Shoes were sprayed outside her house, the door was kept ajar, and this was not a private affair. White kurtas floated across the house - Sad, white and plain kurtas symbolizing the end of life, silently flooded the house. My aunt’s howling was heard right from outside the door and was soon joined by my father’s. My mother disappeared into one of the rooms of the apartment. I stood at the entrance of the room, mimicking my grandmother who lay nonchalantly on the bed, covered in white, cotton in her nostrils and marigold over her mouth. The fragrant jasmine incense burned in the room. My aunt was taken out of the chamber and sat down on the sofa in the hall. She hugged me and wailed, and I felt sorry.

My father needed me more than ever, as if he had grown ten years older in the last twenty-four hours. I saw him that noon, he had shaved his head and wrapped his torso with a white piece of cloth. I presume that my father is an agnostic because we seem to share a similar belief when it comes to gods and rituals. But today there was no time to lose. The arrangements were to be made for the rituals as people started pouring in. A funeral car service was called, which arranged for a hearse van to take the dead body to the crematorium. I sat with my grandfather alongside the driver in the vehicle. I gripped his hand tightly; the old man needed support. He stared quietly out the window as tears trickled down his cheeks. Behind the van, we could hear chants of “Bolo Hari,” a tradition that is upheld when a dead body is being taken to a burning ghat. I had only seen burning ghats in films and television. Needless to say, it was completely different from what I encountered. I would suppose exclusive burning ghats are expensive, as advertisements of premium pyre wood hung over the lampposts of the streets. There were rows of stalls selling flowers by the street side. The vendors yawped, trying to catch our attention. The street was crammed with people – sitting, standing, walking, wandering and praying.

There is something called an electric crematorium. I have never seen a conveyor belt, but if there were a conveyor belt for the dead, this was one. You had to get the dead registered and wait in a long queue of people waiting for their turn. It was a mass wedding hall for the dead, with rows of furnaces replacing priests. The dead body would slowly get dragged into the retort by the electric belt to meet its ultimate fate. The body is incinerated at a temperature ranging from 1400 to 1800 degree Fahrenheit reducing it to ashes and fragments of bones. It was an industry of death, pain, and liberation. The walls of the hall were so saturated with the screams of pain that they chose to let the cries ring till they ebbed out of the door. My father sat on the ashy floor beside his mother and caressed her stern forehead. As the queue got smaller, the frequency of my father’s break down increased. I witnessed this from a distance, with my mother standing next to me. Finally, our time had come. That was the last time I saw my grandmother, as she slowly crawled towards the steel doors of the human oven. Within half an hour, my father was holding the urn. The crematorium faced Hooghly River, where my father took the holy dip and dispersed the ashes. Ganga would carry my grandmother to liberation, towards moksha. It would come at a price, of course. The Ganges is already known to be one of the most polluted rivers in India.

My family sat down empty stomached near a tea stall, and silently chewed on biscuits and drank tea without sipping or slurping. That was our first meal of the day. My phone vibrated again. It was Veda. I had missed every phone call throughout the day, and I did not feel like picking this one up either, and I wondered – Is this how the dead feel when God knocks on your window, all white light, and black wings, and you just had to answer, the way anyone answers a phone when it starts to ring, not thinking you have a choice?