Cremation
by Swapna Kishore
You check the body, sign the register, fill the columns: the name of the deceased, your name, relationship, address. Your husband, cousins, uncles, heave the body on a stretcher, take it to the hearse. It drives off. You follow in your car, piled high with marigolds, roses, jasmines. The smell is too sweet; you roll down the window.
In the room you cleared last night, your husband and cousins arrange the body on the cold floor. You insert incense sticks in the back of a stone tortoise, light them. Your husband drapes a white cloth, freshly purchased, over the body while a cousin stuffs cotton wads in its nostrils. "So that flies don't enter," he tells you.
The face is all you can see now, neither sad nor happy, just a face with flaccid muscles, unrecognizable though you have known it all your life. You busy yourself with the flowers.
Wearing your loose, off-white shirt and salwar, your only somber clothes, you stand near the door, hands folded, ready for visitors who want to pay their last respects.
Men and women troop in. Most offer kind words. Some silently fold their hands. A few pat you. A woman clasps your hands and murmurs something; you vaguely recognize her though her face seemed to sag today and there is a catch in her voice. You thank her.
At the cremation ground, everyone bustles, organizes. It is your first time here; you stare at the rectangular layout, the cement slabs, some with bodies still burning, others with ashes and lumps that could be coal, or maybe not.
"They cheat even the dead," a cousin mumbles. "Trying to sell green wood, indeed." He looks at you. "Green wood doesn't burn. Even by morning, the body would..."
"A woman can't do this rite," you hear a priest say.
"He wanted her to do it," your uncle whispers. A hand is held out, currency rustles.
Burning log in hand, you walk around the bier, poking the piled wood with it. Small fires splutter, die out. The priests, the professionals take over and get the flames roaring. The face is lost behind smoke and tall licks of red and yellow. Ash flies in the air, fills your lungs. You cough. Break the skull, a priest says, handing you a stick. You tap lightly on the bier, where the head must be. They tell you it is a formality.
Simple, really.
You return home with the relatives. Cousins and uncles leave, promising they'll come tomorrow for the remaining rites. For now, it is just you and your husband. He mops the room with something that smells of pine and hospitals. You slump against the wall, trying to remember all those faces, those words. That woman who squeezed your hands — who was she? A junior colleague of your father — but her name? When all this is over, you must sit down with your father, ask him...
Something hard, unyielding grips and squeezes your body. You rush to the washbasin. Gray, viscous liquid, small lumps of food you never ate burn their way out.
"You okay?" Your husband is behind you, patting your back.
You lean against him. "My father's dead," you whisper.
Swapna Kishore is a software consultant living in Bangalore, India, with her family. She has been writing technical books and course material for many years, and now also writes short stories and essays. She has been published online and in print.