For the living and the dead

My first real encounter with death was when the Principal of my school, Mr.Neelagandan passed away. I couldn’t have been older than 16 or 17 at the most. I still don’t remember what prompted me to go to his funeral. To me, he was the crisp and formidable looking man at school who spoke with a soft assertiveness and clear diction. He liked me, because I spoke with similar articulation and we discussed the books we were reading. He liked me enough to make me Head Girl.

The only time I let him down was when a certain teacher complained to him that a) I had a boyfriend, b) he wasn’t a top-ranking student and c) I was sitting in between his legs at a little juice shop, arms intertwined and laughing audaciously in full view of conservative Mylapore.
Aforementioned ma’am became my sworn enemy after that — the first and possibly only teacher I truly hated.

My boyfriend and I had to call our parents to school and endure half an hour in Neelagandan sir’s office with the teacher ranting about how we were throwing our future’s away. Me, especially, with my shiny Head Girl badge pinned to my chest and tears flowing freely down my face as the soft voice of my Principal told me he was disappointed in me.

I don’t know why but I expected him to be the perfect father at the time and not a school Principal. I wanted him to tell all the nosy teacher’s to mind their business and let us be and not make out young love to be something vulgar. But he had to be a Principal and I had to be a board-year-student with high aspirations and my boyfriend and I had to love in secret for the whole year that we could have been in a soaring Mani Ratnam romance.

I didn’t ask Neelagandan sir what books he was reading after that and was determined to give him withering cold shoulders everytime I passed him in the hallway.

So all that being the case, I don’t know why I went to his funeral.

I had absolutely no thought or feeling as I climbed the stairs to his home — my mind a complete blank. I walked into the open house and saw his shrivelled body on display in the middle of the living room in an ice box — and felt all the air disappear from my lungs. I shivered, I couldn’t blink, and before I knew it I was sobbing.

I didn’t know what death looked like, till then. The only other death in the family I had known was my uncle who passed away before I was even 10, and all I remember of his funeral was my older cousin sister falling on his body and crying loudly — my mother pushed me out of the scene almost immediately. All the adults spoke in thick, hushed voices and I just stared, asking no questions because everything seemed surreal and scary.

Neelagandan sir’s body seemed to have shrunk. His skin, withered. You could only see his face, the rest of him was covered with garlands that were too heavy and too gaudy. I thought he would have preferred books around him. The house was thick with smoke and tears and I could not stand for a minute longer. My boyfriend had come with me and was the first hand on the small of my back as I broke and the only real thing that guided me out of that house when my brain was in a daze.

“I never asked him what the last book he read was”, I sobbed desperately into my boyfriend’s shirt and he, as always, unquestioningly wrapped me in his safe arms.

Since then I have known five significant deaths. My cats; Baasha, Mogambo, Tinkerbell and Basanti. And my achamma, my grandmother.

I don’t know why people say it gets easier with time. The mechanisations of death become more routine and familiar, they say. I’m still waiting for that to be true. What I learn and experience after every encounter with death has lead to evolution, certainly. As a dear heart poignantly pointed out, “It’s easier to be graceful about life because of art. That’s the only truth I know.”
It is also easier to be graceful about death, because of art.

Today I went to the painfully beautiful St.George’s Cathedral for my friend’s mothers funeral. Mimi, I used to call her — which is what my friend’s son called his grandmother and it did not occur to me to call her any differently.

I hadn’t seen any of them in nearly four years, or possibly longer. Life took us along different paths and we were all justifiably busy and grappling with curveballs and celebrations.

But the minute I entered that church and saw her body and saw my friend dressed in white, shrunken in knowing loss just like her mother was shrunken in death — I was crying.

Death is a release — both for the dead and the living.

But no amount of living can ever prepare you for the actual vision, the sight of death.

Birds took flight inside the cathedral as the pastor was reading verses from the Bible about living beyond death. I shuddered when I saw men using a power tool to actually nail her coffin shut before lowering it into the ground — a coming alive of an all-too-familiar proverbial reference. I will always remember how it felt to hold gravel in my palm and gently toss it onto the closed coffin where it landed and skirted away into the soil.

We held hands, we hugged, we sobbed into necks and kissed whatever parts of faces we could reach — the sun made way for rain clouds, and it was over.

On my way back home, I stopped at the local flower vendor and picked out some roses to place in a vase at home, below the framed picture of Jesus I still had — a remnant from my marriage. “A couple of yellows and a red, maybe.”

For Mimi.

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After a lot of creative lamenting, Arjun Mohan and I have decided to hold ourselves accountable for writing everyday. We take turns giving each other a prompt, and we have 24 hours to write using it. This is #4

Today’s prompts have been used in the story in bold.