The Odour of Death

The Tree 

Our living room smells of death, according to Maggie. It’s because Maggie associates the aroma of incense sticks with death. She has reasons for doing so. The only time Catholics in Kerala light incense sticks at home is when someone dies. Incense sticks keep burning incessantly near the corpse until it is taken away for funeral.

I started burning incense sticks in my living room when Maggie and I were working in Delhi. I don’t know why I started the habit. But once I did, there was no stopping. Incense sticks have continued to burn in my living room for over two decades now. But I don’t associate the smell with death. I smell serenity when I light those sticks. Maggie has learnt to tolerate the smell of my serenity.  

The branches of a mammoth tree that grew just outside my gate were cut down a few minutes back. The branches had become a potential threat to people and vehicles that passed beneath it. They had to be cut. They were younger than me though. The tree is only about 40 years old, as far as I remember. My memory is not quite reliable these days. That’s okay because it’s better to forget a lot of my past that wasn’t particularly pleasant.

There were too many occasions/situations when I longed for death in that wretched past of mine. Is that the reason why I fell in love with incense sticks when my life actually took a good turn? Delhi was quite a happy place for me. Sawan school, particularly. And that’s just where my love affair with incense sticks started for reasons that I cannot recall or decipher. Some things are beyond reason; they belong to the heart.

When the branches of the tree, whose shade extended to my front yard every morning, were chopped down the smell of incense rose in my olfactory epithelium. Or perhaps somewhere deeper in my being where it stirred thoughts of death.

John Donne was probably the poet who was most afraid of death. He wrote quite many poems on death. He was scared. He was scared that his God would throw him in hell for all his sins: “my sin’s black memory,” as he wrote in If Poisonous Minerals.

Donne was certain, however, that death was just “One short sleep” after which “we wake eternally” [Death Be Not Proud]. What he feared was Hell, not death, I guess.

I don’t believe in God and the eternity that religions speak of. Death is the end of my existence once and for all, I believe. Maybe, that’s why death fails to frighten me. I would certainly welcome it as a relief when the time for that relief comes. I wouldn’t like my branches to be cut down. I would like the entire tree of my being to be felled at once.

Now some pictures from the cutting down of my neighbourhood tree:

The man who cut down all those branches is perhaps as old as I am. He did look aged. Moreover, he couldn't speak; he was dumb. You can see him sitting perched atop the tree if you enlarge the pic. He inspired me... that I have some more heights to ascend. 

When one branch fell

It takes surprisingly little time to fell a branch however big. Technology is amazing.