A Life Apart (3 page)

Ritwik stood up to leave with his back turned to the bed. He couldn’t bear to look at the bloodless face of his mother already asleep – or was it comatose? – on the regulation
pillows but the need to twist the knife proved too strong. He turned around and a careless calculation, done god knows when, hiding and waiting until this moment for the ruthless ambush, tripped up
his entire being: she had been four years older than he was now when she had given birth to him. He gripped the metal rail at the end of her bed and swallowed. When had his own span of life, one he
had thought so small that it could be counted, almost totally, on the digits of one outstretched hand, become so large that half his mother’s could be circumscribed within it? Half a
lifetime, a midpoint reached with his birth: how could time be calibrated with such erratic abandon?

That night he slept in the flat of Aritra’s college friend, Sujoy. It was a convenient distance from the hospital and near-strangers offered both anonymity and a hiatus from the pinning
focus of searchers looking for information, signs of grief, points of breakage. He was tired but did not want to be subjected to the ruthless time between switching off the light and the tricky
oblivion of sleep, so he forced his attention on his Edward Lear.

He didn’t know what woke him up in the middle of the night. His mouth was dry, his throat a sore, raspy burn. Did she wake up as well, in an alien, clinical bed, her mind alert and ranging
over things with the dreamlike clarity that colours such hours? Was she afraid? Did she think she was going to die? What did it feel like? Did she call out for him, her strangled cry bounding and
rebounding off the insulated dark walls, or faintly leaking and petering out in the lowly lit corridors? Did she think of his father’s death or her own?

The next morning, the inevitability of going to the hospital gave him a sense of doom that seemed to drag and dredge inside him. There were people there already, his friends from college, and
Aritra’s, who had offered to do the early morning shift. It was like a vigil, he thought, as he went to shoulder his time. Something in the shadows of Arpit’s face while he crossed the
main hall already told him. Certain floating pieces of signs and sense, unconnected until now, suddenly came together in a confirmed design, a design he had always known would be, must be, as Arpit
said in his infinitely rehearsed ‘thus you break the bad news’ voice that his mother had ‘expired’ in the early hours of the morning.

‘Expired,’ Ritwik thought, ‘what an improbable word to use.’ He nodded almost imperceptibly, acknowledging the news. Inside him was a breathless hollow, at once spiky and
porous, awl-and-threaded through with the fibres of his very soul it seemed; it could have accommodated entire other worlds, other times.

Giving Arpit and others the slip, he went up to his mother’s hospital eyrie, perched so safe and high above the torrent of the city, to see what she looked like in death. He wanted to be
alone, at least for this first view of his dead mother. A pale face in all its waxy coldness, lips with the pallor of ash, eyes shut: it could have been a deeply sleeping face that rested against
the pillows. How could they be so sure that all the beating, breathing, painful life had left that face? He thought he was going to reach out his hand and touch it but couldn’t bring himself
to move even an inch.

And here the gratuitous tyranny of memory seized him by the balls and no place, no time was safe, and he was a mere nothing to that event he had never, never thought about, never remembered,
till now it was everything. He is four years old, and he and his mother board a hand-pulled rickshaw in Park Circus, on a road adjacent to the west side of the big circus green. Even now he feels
that momentary precariousness of his position in the slightly scary rickshaw, as if he is about to fall backwards as the puller lifts up the front of the vehicle and the world tilts around him.
Suddenly in front of them, in the middle air, there is a whole colony of blue and water-green dragonflies, circling and hovering in their staccato way, sometimes still in the air with just a
vibration of wings, a static thrumming, and then off again with a jerky move.
Ma, Ma, look, look, dragonflies! What a lot of them! What are they doing there? Why aren’t they landing on
something?
That suspension of a large swarm a cause of wonder and his mother with an explanation for a small child:
They have just been born, up in the heavens, and have been sent down to
earth right now
, as if heaven were up above behind the canopy of the blue sky, the dragonflies shimmering their papery net-wings, a dazzling whirr in the clear light, having just pierced the
blue screen above in their birth and descent. The little boy is delighted at the miracle and his eyes widen with wonder and happiness as his mother smiles and smiles at this benediction of air.

At Kalighat, he was struck by the place’s newly found familiarity; it was becoming a dangerously regular haunt, almost known, almost comfortable. There were three or four
tea shacks with corrugated tin sheds opposite the main entrance to the crematorium. They looked so fragile, with their rows of smudged glass jars which contained gaudily coloured biscuits, the open
coal fire with the huge kettle for boiling tea, milk and sugar together, and the long, leaning columns of terracotta drinking cups. The bit of the road along the shanties was a little drain of
these discarded and broken cups, of muddy washing-up water and the red stains of paan spittle.

Eleven days ago he had been here for his father’s cremation. It appeared to be a type of puerile radicalism now, the way he thought he had scored points in refusing to perform the last
rites for his father. In denying the honourable duties that bound the male firstborn in a Hindu family – although his family was that only in a diluted, anodyne way – he thought he had
taken a socially meaningful step. This was compounded, although Ritwik could take no credit for it, by his mother’s decision to do the necessary rituals. Untraditionally so, because Hindu
tradition gave no place to women to atone for the sins of the deceased and see off his soul. If anyone had thought it odd or deviatory, this business of the last rites being performed by the dead
man’s widow instead of his surviving sons, they had not said so. On top of that, both he and Aritra had refused to go through
ashauch
, the ritual eleven-day mourning, a period of
defilement, culminating in the
sraddha
ceremony, where the soul of the dead was finally unmoored from all its earthly ties and sent on its way to purgatory or another birth or whatever.

Just recalling what his uncles had gone through when their mother had died made him furious with the punishing nature of it all: sleeping on hay and straw with bricks for headrests, no shaving
or cutting of hair, no meals after sundown, a mind-boggling assortment of dietary rules . . . And then there was the final ceremony that ended it all: all hair was shorn off and shaved, including
chest and armpit hair (although not pubic hair), the endless abracadabra with the phoney priest, pour this on fire pour that on fire, make seven or nine or three portions of that sickly mess of
rice and bananas and ghee and place it there and there and there while chanting the names of your male ancestors (no one could go beyond a generation, or two at the most), the obligatory
mass-feeding of relatives, neighbours, friends, the poor . . .
Cock cock cock
he’d spat out
I’m damned if I’m doing any of this when my time comes
. But this death
was different. This time Ritwik was going to do what was expected of him. If there really was a soul after all, which needed to be released, he didn’t want to take any chances with his
mother’s.

There was no question of opting for the traditional open wooden pyre, so uninsulated, so barbaric to Ritwik’s mind. In those blank hours between registering the corpse for cremation in an
electric furnace and the little ritual before it actually happened, Ritwik noticed disparate patches of people strewn around the crematorium. Death sometimes made survivors gregarious. He was
surprised that there were so few inconsolable people; he had expected far more than the occasional ones, from whom he glanced away. Every haggard face there looked dry, as if deprived of some
essential sap which loss had wrung out of them drop by drop, leaving only dark shadows and a desiccation around the mouth, the unkemptness of dusty hair, the crushed, limp dullness of the stale
clothes; Ritwik wondered if he looked like them as well.

The billow and swell of support and advice around Ritwik and Aritra grew. It seemed that virtually half of Aritra’s college had come over to stand by him in this hour of need. Information
rained down on him, thick and merciless, like a choking Old Testament plague – the time it would take for the corpse to be completely burnt once it entered the furnace; how the ramp
automatically rose to advance and lower the ‘body’ inside; how the gates of the furnace came down to cover the process from human view; the list of things he had to do before and after
the cremation. Now that he had to perform all these himself, he was fascinated by the structures and codes of this little world of the business and commerce and rituals of death. It was an
alternative world, so inescapably under his own yet so unknown until he had to educate himself in its rules. Who would have thought that such knowledge had to be bought with so much fire, fire that
would send his mother somewhere upwards and ascending still, in dispersing, intermittent clouds of elementary particles, so that if he breathed in he could fill his chest with tiny fragments of her
being and hold this transubstantiation locked inside his distending lungs.

In Hindu belief, the navel is indestructible, left behind in the furnace as the whole body is converted to a fistful of ash. The last act of the cremation was the retrieval of
this undestroyed navel from the maws of the furnace. There was a short walk to the Ganga, which ran right behind the crematorium, to set the ‘navel’ afloat (or whatever lump of rock or
charcoal the
panda
, the crematorium tout, had handed you) following the guidelines of yet another priest or hanger-on hoping for a few rupees.

Aritra’s face was flushed, as if one of the walls of the furnace that held their mother’s corpse had suddenly slid from its fixed position and the contained fire had licked and
blazed too close to the boy’s face. A purification, an extinguishing. The dark of his pupils seemed to have welled and inked out in circles under his eyes. He made Ritwik a generous offer,
‘Look, if you don’t feel up to it, I can do this last bit.’

‘No, it’s all right; I’ve done it so far, let me see it to the end.’ He paused for a second, then added, ‘Besides, I’m the elder son . . .’ his voice
trailed off to make space for the excuse.

The
panda
s, who ferreted through the ashes with long sticks after the body was fully incinerated, handed him what passed for his mother’s navel in a flimsy earthen bowl. They had
heaped it with ash and cinder out of an odd sense of decorum. There was a small procession – he, Aritra, Tabbu, a couple of Aritra’s friends, Pratik-mama, and a few others – to
the dark slurry of putrefying matter which was the Ganga, the holy river, not running but stagnant and stench-bound behind the crematorium. On the way, he was seized by an urge to root through the
ashes and earth in the little bowl in his hands (surprisingly heavy) and see if it really contained his mother’s rubbery navel and the stump of her umbilical cord untouched by fire.

They reached the slopes of the bank and as he was asked to step closer, almost into that seething shit, he was once again overcome by nausea, afraid that any physical contact with the river
would cause some repulsive illness. He stepped forward a few inches, gingerly, steeling himself to disobey any orders to stand ankle-deep in it. There were emaciated dogs moving around the place,
materializing in and out of the thick darkness everywhere, sniffing for, he supposed, human limbs and charred flesh. He tried to take his mind off the marauding creatures and perform all that was
asked of him. From the slums on the other side of the river, random feathers of Hindi film songs kept getting blown in with the intermittent breeze:
Slowly, slowly we must increase our love, O
magician, who has cast a spell on my virgin heart
. The weak electric bulbs, dotted here and there among the huts, looked like static tapers.

The brothers flinched when the priest sprinkled everyone with holy water from the river: for a few moments they were acutely conscious of the exact spots on their bodies where the contaminated
water had landed. They must remember to wash with Dettol when they returned home. Ritwik was asked to set the ‘navel’ afloat. But there wasn’t very much water in the river and
instead of floating away, as it was picturesquely supposed to do, towards salvation on the other side, the bowl landed with the squelching splash of a hard object hitting clay.

Here, all ends and begins.

M
iss Gilby finally succeeds in uniting the name of the man who has written to her with a face and a context. She picks up the coarse handmade
paper, with its elegant and educated copperplate in royal blue, from her desk. The red shellac is impressed with the seal of the zamindar of Nawabgunj. Or so she supposes. She reads the letter
again.