The Colony that we stayed in was the residential facility
for the employees of the company my father worked in. If there was ever a place
better than Heaven on Earth, at least in that decade or so of my childhood that
we lived there, it was there in that colony. We, the children of those days, were indeed
blessed with the best of all that the rest of Indian parents would have wanted
for their children.
At various times, we had neighbours from different
nationalities- the Japanese, Italians, Spanish, Swiss, the Americans and the
British. Those that had brought along their children, they studied with us in
our school. Once the various plants of the company were commissioned, these
other nationals went away and we had a new neighbour, a family that had – not at all surprising at
that time- known ours for perhaps five generations in the past.
The patriarch of this family, a retired teacher and a dignified old man in his late eighties
was a sight to behold: short statured but ramrod straight posture, bushy white
moustache, circle rimmed glasses, black Gandhi Cap, a walking stick in hand,
wearing starched white dhoti under a white kurta on top and balck leather
mojaris. He was quite amiable and I warmed upto him over the next few weeks. He told me he was personally familiar with my grandfather’s father since he
and my great grandfather were neighbours back in our home town! For some reason
I was awe struck by this man and fancied a liking for him. The sight of him stirred
deep feelings of shared intergenerational bonds.
After a few months, the old gentleman fell ill and died. I must have been about
ten years of age then and I recollect being very sad on hearing of this. My
father took leave of absence to assist in the preparations for the
funeral. And then out of the blue he
asked me to accompany the funeral procession to the crematorium located outside
the colony in an inaccessible and forlorn location. My mother protested against
this decision, but father insisted. While I do not recollect the exact words of
the exchange that my parents had about it, I remembering overhearing something
to the effect that it would help in my training.
“Goddammit” was not a part of my vocabulary then but the sense
of it certainly was. What kind of training was he talking about?
In any case I did accompany the funeral procession. I asked my
father a lot of questions and some of them were answered, like why the logs
were being arranged on the pyre as if in a geometric design. And then a severe concern came upon me: what
if the grandpa’s body still had some life left hidden in him somewhere- wouldn’t
he feel the burning pain of the fire of the funeral? Was it sure he had really
died- for he looked so fresh- as if he was just sleeping quietly.
After a while of questioning I – being the only pre-teen in
a crowd of men of my father’s age-fell silent and passed the remaining time at
the crematorium lost in thoughts. As I look back now I
wonder what thoughts I must have thought at that tender age. On
the way back home there were even more questions and fewer answers. I passed the next couple
of days in a demure mood.
While questions about death lingered on in my mind for quite a few days the most persistent of
all was the question, what, if any, was the training that my father referred to,
in attending a funeral? It was not the question per se that was disturbing but
the concept of death as an aid to training that continued to ruffle me.
In a twist of serendipity, over the next few
days, our history teacher took up a chapter on Siddhartha Gautam. In our text
book was mentioned
the young Siddhartha’s first exposure to
the fact of suffering in life-sickness and then old age leading to death. I distinctly recollect the feeling I had as I read that
chapter- it felt that seeing a death was a familiar experience but I could not
decide what to make of it, except that it had made me very sad for some time.
Only much later did I realize that on that day at the
crematorium, I had had my first emphatic experience of what the Buddha called the first of
the Four Noble Truths.
Suffice it to say, the training continues!
No comments:
Post a Comment