Burying the dead is often an experience in itself. Not many find themselves quite ready for It
GOD knows this is serious. A crow taught Cain to bury Abel, so the Biblical narration goes, by digging a hole in the earth. From then on it has been so. Some prefer cremation. There are merits and demerits. In India, the very poor cannot afford the costly logs and partly charred bodies end up floating in the Ganges. Then the EPA objects to pollution from the smoke of burning wet wood and flesh. The river water becomes in turn unpotable. Push-button crematoria are springing up to solve this problem. Its plus point is that one no longer needs to turnover the soil and the spadework can be saved for other purposes. Burial however is still globally the method of the majority.
I visited the Arlington cemetery in Washington- a vast green lawn dotted with small white headstones arranged in rows. It looks more like a golf course with its plains, green highs and lows . The whole area is mowed regularly and the smell of freshly cut grass lingers in the air. A road winds through it with tourist buses plying through it - stopping at landmarks as JFK’s grave lit by an eternal flame. It seemed so scenic and beautiful that I was ready to exit that instant provided they interred me there. But the terms of doing so were not easy. I had to be an American who had been killed in Viet Nam or Korea or the Gulf. As I avoid conflicts and have no particular liking for the grape’ shot, I turned the offer down thanking them all the same. The price was too high.
I used to take a short cut to the SITE area through ‘Mewa Shah,’ the oldest graveyard of Karachi. Slums surround it. The young ones could be seen bathing out of a bucket on the concrete tombs. Others played cards whilst sitting on a grave under the shadow of a tree. Little urchins played hide and seek behind the headstones. This was a noisy graveyard which didn’t appear to have anything grave about it.
Our burial sites are crammed. In any of the city’s graveyards, at least a dozen or so burials are taking place at any hour of the day and night. Once during a dark wintry night, while attending a funeral, I lost my way, took the wrong turning and got mixed up with another procession. I ended up praying for the entirely wrong person. I hope God will forgive me for the unintended error.
Some communities are better organised. We buried our office secretary who used to live alone. Her community immediately took possession of her remains. Their point of departure, although far away from the city, had excellent arrangements and everything went like a breeze. Christian burials are also very well planned. The body is laid out for visitation and then at the appointed hour it is carried in a hearse. For most Karachiites for whom even making arrangements for tea for two people is a task, a funeral becomes a major undertaking.
A friend tells me that in DHA, the yard is so overcrowded that in future they would only allow members in. Technically and legally, a member loses his membership and privileges after kicking the bucket. Even in a country where the law means, ‘reach,’ ‘approach,’ ‘connections,’ and ‘power,’ one cannot put any more pressure on our lordships. So, non-members would die ‘Defence-less.’
I recently attended a burial.The deceased was a member of the DHA, but had a family plot at the other end of the metropolis. We arrived at his residence at 8 PM. Someone said that the burial would be postponed till the next day at a more convenient hour. The advice sounded reasonable and I was about to appreciate the suggestion when another man of a religious bent decided that it had to be that very night. So we sat and talked till we ran out of topics. There is only so much that can be discussed about death and even about quasi-democracy, the democratized-military and of the conversion in power from a uniform into pinstripe. With a heavy tongue and even heavier eyelids, by about 11 o’clock, I went out for a long walk inviting curious looks from the security guards posted outside the houses. Quite a few blew their whistles warning others about the suspicious character abroad. By midnight, the ‘bus’ had arrived. The usual smoke-belching hauler except that it had two doors right behind the driver at an inconvenient height so that only a very tall person could manoeuvre into it. The short person would just have to pole-vault himself in. The doors are used to push the casket in where it is laid across. The bus advertises on both sides the name of the firm and its phone number for future use of services. I jotted the address and the phone numbers just in case.
On arrival at the destined spot, one boy told us in a barely audible whisper, that we should beware of pick- pockets. We marvelled at the thieves keeping busy at these late hours -it was already AM. A few kept one of their hands pressed to their sides or to their breast pocket depending on their wallet’s location. With one arm thus employed, we could hardly ‘give shoulder’ to the deceased. The sturdy and brawny carried the coffin. But were oppressed by the sheer weight of the casket; carrying it over the concrete structures built haphazardly, defying all the laws of geometry, and plain common sense -an up hill task. Our woes were further compounded when we found that all the marble works had their foundations a good two yards above the ground level. The tombstones were so high as to be visible from the moon on a clear cloudless night. I suspect that the graves had been built one upon the other. Two mourners slipped. One fell and sprained his ankle. He sat right there, viewing the proceedings from a distance. The more pious amongst us zigzagged and walked sideways to avoid stepping on the dead but soon got browbeaten by the futility of it all. Negotiating through the confusion of graves was like doing the hurdle and steeplechase combined. Finally a number of us squatted or stood on the graves while others perched themselves on the ‘children’s’ headstones, while we deposited the body at its place of rest.
Coming down to the terra firma was not easy either. We helped ourselves descend in the same way that we had hauled each other up to the platform earlier. We patted each other on the back for a job well done, raising clouds of dust and throwing at least one lamenter into fits of asthmatic attack.
Upon arrival at the residence of the departed, I found a number of ladies, with moist cheeks, their mascara running, flitting around with large dishes of chicken pulao. Eating at that irregular hour, under the melancholy funereal circumstance , accompanied by the occasional moan, seemed surrealistic. As if it were a scene from a Salvador Dali. It put me off and I rushed home to have a nice cup of hot black coffee. It had been a long night!
