In the driveway along the house were tables with tea-time treats so symmetrically straight-lined that they looked as if they were pieces on a minimalist chess board. Perfect squares of “Grandma’s Carrot Cake” were accompanied by miniature Croque Monsieur and delicious Tomato Tartlets. In the garden, there was a pristine white table cloth with perfectly paired bottles of white and red wine. There were lots of arrangements of white lilies and tuberose in the house. It was possible to believe that these were developed internally. The family’s invitation offered more than a hint that this would not be a traditional memorial. “To bid farewell… her way” were its opening lines. Indeed, apart from a few photographs taken from the walls of the house, the only suggestion that someone had died was the dining table where Rajnigandha’s triumphal arch stood. Her daughter said the family was guided by her mother’s wishes: “She loved flowers, she loved people. This house was also part of her identity.” While Aunt Indu had visited the Golden Temple in Amritsar and the shrine of a Sufi saint near Gulmarg annually for most of her adult life, she was not keen on pundits and rituals.
The monument was more clearly about living the life well than others like it, but such informality is part of a trend that is becoming more widespread in metropolitan India, of beautiful traditional quarters in their own way and Substituting or supplementing the enjoyments. About a decade ago, Ona, the daughter of a close friend of mine who died of cancer, barely in her twenties at the time, decreed that everyone attending her mother’s chauth should wear bright colours. My friend worked in a garment firm and loved colorful clothes. Fully understood the request. A few years ago after much tears and sadness at the cremation of a close friend of my mother’s at Banganga Crematorium in Mumbai, her irrepressible middle daughter led us in a rousing chant of the African American spiritual When the Saints Go Marchin’.
Renowned therapist Julia Samuel, author of the book Grief Works, recommends a type of memory box where a person’s letters and other mementos are stored as a kind of toolkit to come back to again and again. . It is one way of dealing with the intermittent waves of grief after the loss of a loved one. By extension, what better way to remember them than with such a joyous send-off?
Even in India, a deeply religious country where more than two-thirds say they visit a place of worship monthly and 60% say they pray daily, according to a 2020 Pew survey, a small minority are millennials. Breaking from old conventions in memory of the passing away of loved ones. In contrast, in the UK, where the majority of the population is not religious, people are asking priests to do the job solely and instead engaging professional celebrants for funerals and weddings.
A similar stay in India is unimaginable. Yet, as the rites of the past fall out with the way we live today, many people are rethinking how we remember the dead. American author Susan Sontag famously wrote that “Illness is the night side of life… Everyone holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick.” Being with sad people
Last month, craftswoman Laila Tyabji posted a eulogy on Facebook for her eldest brother Hindal, who died suddenly just hours after a family celebration, it was a beautiful meditation on how younger siblings can care for their older brothers. And what do they do with the sisters? Her Facebook post recounts how Hindal had reacted decades earlier to a friend of her mother’s insistence that Tyabji not walk alone to the club library as a teenager, warning that she might be molested . Hindal burst into laughter. ‘What nonsense,’ he said. ‘If anyone tries to do anything, he has to kneel in the balls.’ Soft-spoken, he was also insightful, witty and sensible.” An unorthodox aunt in Kottayam had a disagreement with the local priest this month over whether a cousin’s ashes could be buried in the churchyard where the cousin’s parents were. Burial. The priest’s initial response was ‘no’ as there were too many complicated reasons to go into it. Better understanding came when the higher authorities in the church weighed in, but my Aunt Rafia has just added a condition that he be cremated and that his ashes be buried in the church cemetery rather than on the estate’s sprawling vegetable garden.
My aunt and I were talking on January 31st, my older brother and I went out to our parents’ graves; Tuesday would have been my mother’s 90th birthday. An agnostic as far back as I can remember, I am reverent of the Chinese practice of cleaning tombs. I hurriedly scanned the black marble tomb until the inscription glistened in the dim sunlight. My brothers and I took our tribute from a quote from his writing desk, often attributed to Rudyard Kipling: “God could not be everywhere so he made mothers.” Himself chose this epitaph.
Rahul Jacob is a columnist for Mint and former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times.
catch all business News, market news, today’s fresh news events and breaking news Update on Live Mint. download mint news app To get daily market updates.