Death, Reimagined
Sonu Sabir
The short journey to the mosque would begin soon. The copper sky would soon fade into dusk. The weather was moist, from the recent rains. There were crowds of people in the front yard and inside the house. People had come to pay their respects, even from far, travelling five or six hours, on short notice. I got into the small ambulance van, in the backside, where the deceased was placed. The driver of the van was a young guy. I didn’t know how the others were going, maybe cars, maybe they would walk. It was about one and a half kilometres from our house. It was after a downhill road, somewhat steep from the main road. It was immediately after the Judgemukku junction.
The van moved on. It glided down the road after the junction. It went ahead to pass a few more curves, until it entered through the back gate of the mosque, into the graveyard. Some people came and lifted the body from the vehicle. Preparations were taking place for the funeral prayer. People were doing the ablutions in the wash area; I followed suit as well. After some time, people started lining up in rows for the prayer, inside the building. I took position in one of the back rows. I couldn’t remember the last time I performed the namaz. Many years ago, more than half a decade perhaps. I had forgotten the verses to be recited during it. There was some commotion suddenly around me. I felt some pats on my back, whispers and glances from people in front of me. I was signalled to join the first row and someone put a skullcap on my head. It was as if I was being padded up as an opening batsman chasing a huge total. I conformed to the expectation of the crowd, of the society, to perform a son’s role at the demise of the father. Unlike my father, I did not have the resolve and convictions to decline such a summoning. I had never seen him pray or utter the word ‘god’ in my whole life. I have attended many Muslim funerals with him during my childhood. He would go to the mosque compound with the crowd, wait outside the mosque building till the prayers ended. Then he would move to the graveyard to witness the burial along with others. I remember my paternal grandmother’s funeral. I was ten years old then. I was with my father in the mosque compound, when a relative, who also was his senior in school, came to him and asked him to join the prayer. He placed his hand on my father’s shoulder and sternly demanded that he come along. My father refused and said smilingly, ‘No, I didn’t go in during my father’s time as well’. My paternal grandfather had passed away five years before that.
‘People still complain about that’, the relative said.
‘Who complained?’
‘You know, people…’
The few minutes of the relative’s sincere effort to take my father to the prayer was fruitless. My father stuck to his guns, with humility and a kind smile.
Twenty-four years ago, when I was eight years old and my sister was thirteen, I remember my mother had arranged a home tutor for our religious education, against my father’s wishes. He had always turned his face away when the topic came, but he did not object to it vehemently. A lanky young man, with a goatee, always dressed in white shirt and mundu, a white skull cap on his head, began visiting us two or three days a week. He must have been in his mid-twenties. In the living room showcase of our house, there was a set of miniature sculptures depicting men and women in Indian classical dance poses. They were almost nude, adorned only with thin garments in places. The set was a gift to my father from someone. They were grey in colour and slightly glossy. One of the first demands of the tutor was to have them removed from there, saying it was not Islamic to have such semi-nude sculptures. ‘Islam is against idols’ he had said. My father without going into an argument had them moved to one of the other rooms, hidden from visitors’ views.
Those days, there were many stray dogs in our neighbourhood. There was this light-brown dog, a pariah breed, sturdy and always energetic in its habitual meanderings. One day, I saw that its eye was bloody and swollen, a disfigured lump protruding out. It looked gruesome, even for a kid like me, who was scared of dogs. In a day or two, I realised that everyone in my family and people in the neighbourhood had noticed this dog. It had become a talking subject. Some said that it could be a disease, and others said something might have attacked the dog. A few days later, during a lesson with the tutor, he mentioned about dogs being disgusting creatures and one should loathe them, that one should not touch them or go anywhere near them.
‘There are many stray dogs in this area, I don’t spare any when I get a chance. Recently I threw a shard of rock at a dog and hit it right in its eye’, saying this, he let out a triumphant chuckle.
My sister and I exchanged silent puzzled glances.
Another day, my classmate and friend in second grade at school, who was coincidentally home tutored by the same man, came up to me and asked, ‘Does he lock the door of the room during the lessons?’
‘No, why? The door stays open. Does he lock your room door?’
‘Yeah, he tells my parents I’m not being attentive and then locks the door from inside. Hmm… Can you ask him something for me?’
‘What?’
‘Tell him that you heard that he sticks his thing at me from behind,’ he said.
I did not understand what he was trying to say, so I shied away.
‘I will buy you a chocolate bar’.
‘For real?’
‘Yes, I promise.’
‘Swear on your mother’s life.’
‘Yes, I swear on my mother’s life.’
The offer of a chocolate bar was extremely tempting, but I got cold feet. I was too shy to say that out to the tutor with my sister sitting right there. Even though I didn’t understand it, it sounded so gross. My friend was thoroughly disappointed in me.
Another day, the tutor’s lesson was going on in a room of our house. He was speaking animatedly with hand gestures. His gesturing hand scraped a notebook kept on the study table. The notebook fell and a small calendar-card with Jesus Christ’s picture on it fell out of the pages. The card was now lying next to the notebook on the floor. The tutor looked in terror at the Jesus in the picture with a halo, in a yellow and orange robe, white-complexioned, with golden hair.
‘Whose is this?’ he said.
My sister said blushingly that it was hers. She said she had gotten it from her school (Christian Management), last Christmas.
‘All religions except Islam are fake. For instance, take Christianity, Jesus was a charlatan who fooled people into believing his stories,' he said with a smirk.
I was impressed by this and thought myself to be lucky, to be in the true religion and felt pity for the other unlucky misled friends of mine. Some days later, I told a Christian boy in the neighbourhood, ‘Jesus was a fraudster who tricked people. There is not one bit of truth in Christianity.’
The boy argued with me gently but later complained to his mother, who called me up a few days later to their front yard while I was coming back from school. She severely scolded and warned me to never repeat what I did. They did not inform my parents, but another man in the neighbourhood did. He was my father’s colleague, a direct witness to my controversial talk with the other boy. The man overheard us from his flat when we were chatting in the corridor. My father took the decision to stop the religious lessons after that, telling my mother that, ‘I think they have learnt enough already.’ On the whole, the tutoring went on only for about two to three months.
I never learnt to perform the Namaz until I was twelve years old, as there was no occasion before that made me feel I needed to learn it. There were a few times that I was in a Namaz performing crowd, like an Eid-day or a funeral. But I just did what the people nearby did, and nobody had a problem. Then, when I was twelve years old, I joined this new school. I myself told my parents I wanted to go to that school, as one of the friends had joined that school a year before. The school I was going to until then was not so good; it was a small school with shabby infrastructure. This new school, my friend had told me, was great. I trusted his word, and there, it was the first day in school, when I found that this was a Muslim majority school run by a Muslim management. It was not evident from the name of the school. Maybe my parents knew it. The school I was in before was run by a Christian Management. There was a Muslim prayer room in the new school, where the boys used to go after lunch. I told a few boys that I didn't know how to do the Namaz.
They were shocked and looked at me with grave concern, ‘What do you mean, aren’t you a Muslim?’.
I said, ‘Yes, but my father is a Physics professor. I don’t think he believes in religion.’ Perplexed, the boys looked at me with a tinge of pity. I came to know in the later days that they thought my father was some kind of a monster who challenged their religion. I felt that this was perhaps not true, because I knew that other boys’ fathers beat them up for mischief, while my father never laid hands on me, and was the most gentle person I knew. Some of the boys in that school did not even watch the Sunday evening movie that came on tv. On a Monday morning, when I asked them if they liked the movie on tv the previous day, a boy replied, ‘I want to go to heaven and enjoy life there. Not here.’ I heard such an uttering for the first time in life and I laughed, but the other boys didn’t. One of them said, ‘I do watch movies, but yeah, I know it is prohibited.’
*
A week after the funeral I was out on an errand. While returning to my car from a store, I heard someone call my name. I looked and saw the guy, in a linen shirt and Mundu, thin dark beard on a contrasting fair-complexioned face, a small round face with dark black irises. It was Safwan; we used to play football together a long long time ago.
‘It’s been a long time. How have you been?’
‘I was there at the mosque last week,’ Safwan said.
‘Oh, you were?’
‘Do you remember Mr Jaffer? Who talked with the mosque management regarding the burial?’
‘Yes, yes, I do, he did the … help.’
‘He is my father.’
‘Oh, okay ... I didn't know that.’
‘It is really necessary to join the mosque; it is a good thing. You saw how things happened. At such times, we need the community’s support,’ he spoke softly.
I nodded and smiled ‘Yeah.’
It brought back the events of the day. My father’s close friend Mr Janardhanan had told me that he spoke with Mr Jaffer, who was socially and politically active in the neighbourhood.
He had said, ‘I spoke to Jaffer. I told him ‘Jaffer, you have to make them agree, there is no other way, you have to do it, please!. Arranging the funeral in his village five hours away is going to be very difficult.’
‘But, uncle, isn’t there a court-ruling that says mosques cannot deny burials for someone from the community?’, I said.
‘I’m not sure. The mosque management told me that no-membership is a problem. That’s why I spoke to Jaffer. He spoke to them and they agreed.’
After saying goodbye to Safwan, on my way back home, I was thinking how the burial was a small victory for the members of the mosque. That a man who lived his whole life as a rationalist was at their mercy once dead. A year before, when I married a woman outside the religion, he was the only one in the family who supported me. Perhaps my father did not care what ‘they’ did to his body once he was dead.
A whim came over me. I don’t want ‘my death’ to be that way. I don’t want to give the heads of any religion a small victory when I die. So, a few days later I posted on my social media profiles the following note -
I wish to be cremated at a public crematorium after I pass away.
This is not because I consider cremation to be better than burial.
It is just a personal choice.
I do not wish for any religious rites/rituals to be associated with the event.
Soon my mobile phone was buzzing frequently with calls from my mother and other relatives. This became another instance in my life when people asked me the same question, ‘Have you gone crazy?’
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