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