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 Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

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
44 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

The Circus called Politics

Illustration by ChatGPT I have/had many students whose parents are teachers in schools run or aided by the government. These teachers don’t send their own children to their own schools where education is free. They send their children to private schools like the one where I’ve been working. They pay huge fees to teach their children in schools where teachers are paid half of or less than their salaries. This is one of the many ironies about the Kerala society. An article in yesterday’s The Hindu [ A deeper meaning of declining school enrolment ] takes an insightful look at some of the glaring social issues in Kerala’s educational system. One such issue is the rapidly declining student enrolment in government and aided schools in the state. The private schools in the state, on the other hand, are getting more students. People don’t want to send their children to the schools run by the government systems. The chief reason is that the medium of instruction is Malayalam. The second ...
6 comments
Read more