Skip to main content

Life in a Cemetery


One of the most vivid characters from the Bible for me is the guy who lives in a cemetery. This man hated himself so much that he went mad. Even metal chains failed to bind his madness. He yelled at everybody. He hated everybody. He hated himself so much that he wounded himself.

What went wrong with him, we don’t know. Did he slip on a banana peel and was laughed at by people? Was he insulted by a donkey that kicked him in his backside? Did he fall in love with a girl who eventually ditched him and made him feel worthless?

He probably envied those who slipped on banana peels but managed without a fall or, better, succeeded in converting their fall into a waltz or something. Maybe, he tried to waltz too and the steps never came right. The song he tried to sing may have jarred. It is even possible that people pulled out the strings of his guitar and made a handcuff for him. Life is like that. I know from experience. If you start falling, people will kick you down to accelerate the fall. But the reverse is true too, to be fair. Be a winner and they will build temples for you.

I read about the biblical masochist (as I grew up, I imagined him as a masochist rather than as a mere self-hater) as a teenager. He fascinated me right from the beginning. Maybe, there was something of him in me: a man within who loathed me. That was long ago. Now I will laugh with those people who laugh at my slips on banana peels.

It took me many years to come across another character who loved the cemetery: Anjum of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness [2017]. Like the biblical character, Anjum is an outcast too. She is a Muslim hijra – doubly outcast in current India. But, unlike her biblical counterpart, she is not a loser. She converts the cemetery into her Jannat [heaven]. That is the best she could do in a society that would have eliminated her had she not been a hijra. “Nahi yaar, mat maro, Hijron ka maarna apshagun hota hai,” one of her assaulters says. She escapes from her assaulters and takes refuge in the cemetery. She is broken. She is a ravaged, feral spectre. It takes years for her to come to terms with her destiny and convert the cemetery into her Jannat.

The Delhi municipal authorities will come in the due course of time to demolish her Jannat which is, of course, illegal. It is illegal for squatters to live in a graveyard. She tells them that she is not living there, she is dying. Life-in-death!

Who portrayed that sort of life better than T S Eliot? His classical poem about life-in-death, The Waste Land, was published exactly a hundred years ago [Dec 1922]. Eliot’s world is a kind of cemetery and we are all living in that cemetery. Quite many of us are all as broken as Anjum, if not the biblical guy.

Eliot suggests a solution from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Datta, Damyata, Dayadhvam: Magnanimity, Compassion, Self-control. Hundred years later, Eliot’s remedy remains valid. Since it has its origin in our own much-vaunted ancient civilisation, we may not have a problem about considering the solution seriously.

PS. This post is part of a series written for #WriteAPageADay. The previous post in the series: The End of the World 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r