Have you seen a corpse? No. Not one of a beloved grandmother who was past Ninety, one who will still be missed. Before you consign her dear, familiar body to the hungry flames, waiting, waiting for all of us, you watch as she lay on the floor, covered by a new piece of cloth. Never fat, after her middle age, she had lost a lot of weight in the hospital where she had spent more than her last Hundred days.
There was a lamp by her head. Wicks were lit in coconut halves and placed all around her. A helpful person, often seen at many funerals, asked if he should spray the area with pungent cologne. No thank you. Grandmother was always meticulously clean. She had eaten only after her morning abulutions, bath and prayers. She died at dawn on a Sunday.
Sanatana Dharma prescribed that dead bodies should not be kept overnight and never unattended. Grandmother had cleverly bypassed the often seen recent norm, where bodies were kept in ice cold mobile mortuary coffins, waiting for children to arrive from distant countries. Half a century or so ago, someone, a distant relative, a priest, a prominent members of soceity would have done the death rituals . The concerned person, very often a son would arrive later on. They would make a “body” out of grass and light the funeral pyre once more, with all the required rites.
Grandmother was cremated by Three o’ clock in the afternoon. But in the interval of time in between, the smoke from the tiny flames around her, made it look as if she were still breathing. But that was just hope, love and an optical illusion. With tears, prayers and a billion memories, there was no more grandmother. No long, long hair, no skin softened by regular use of oil and besan powder. No crisply starched mundu. No fund of stories. No boiling Horlicks at midnight as she made a cup for her mother, with her own hands. That was death. Painful. But unavoidable at her age, especially.
Then there are the other corpses. Those are very different ones. The cause of death is not old age or a pandemic. It is not an extensively mobile and cunning serial-killer at work. Like good detectives, let us examine the bodies.
First of all, the body count. Many. Too many. They do not make it to the census because they are not part of the soceity that we are familiar with, at least by hearsay. Incidentally, they are not soldiers, trained and paid to kill. They are not even terrorists in the conventional sense of the term, where people use fear and death, either to market their philosophy, increase the number of their tribes, to mop up the billion Riyadh profit making narcotics industry, their simple and deadly marketing strategy being introducing school kids to drugs in chocolates and sweets, who, graduate to being criminals and carriers, just to get their daily “fix” of a high, until their wasted souls join their wasted bodies, or kill as a service to their misrepresented Divinities.
These are people who are born because their parents are often underage girls who expose their thighs and sleep on the streets, their address marked by the dust or the fibres on their clothes, they live in till it is ripped away by time or the spurt of growth of their bodies. The fathers are random. The head of the begging ring, a chauffeur out after a very late night out with his boss and his wife, being driven home after a champagne dinner. It could be another beggar with sores and an unquenched lust. It could be another street boy, learning about real love from his lady love, a vagrant in our eyes.
They breed. Under the arching bridges of the city with potted plants, planted vertically to increase the air quality of the metros. They breed in violent encounters where the girl is aware only of fetid breath into her face, weight on her and pain between her legs. They breed in tender embraces which would not look amiss in a rom-com film, with dreamy music.
They give birth. The girls show their pregnancy when their stomachs
protrude in a shape different from distended starvation bellies, when there is visible movement on the tightening skin on their tummies. They scream, matching the screams of the women they call “didi” or elder sister, who have given birth at the same grand old age of Fourteen. They feel a universe being ripped out of their body. A frail, grown foetus lands on the thin sheet on the ground which is their birthing bed.
Their breasts are just growing out of their body. Their nipples are not properly distended. Yet a ferocious instinct takes over. The child mother hugs her child to her and the infant feeds and feeds.
Children in big houses, with large gardens and miniature dogs as pets, get their food, supplements, medication and vaccination. Yet, they are prone to colic, anaemia and respiratory distress. Despite grandmothers’ sage advice, these kids are rushed to the paediatricians, once a month.
The children of the street thrive. They drink from monsoon puddles on the road. Forage from food wastes dumped two nights ago. No doctors. Not even a number on governmental statistics!
Let’s go back to the corpses, piling up, remember? They are killed by Death riding the skies. Death has a sound. It is the long whine of a missile, both triumphant and tragic at the same time. It is the sudden impact on the ground. The atmosphere has always protected this Earth from
meteors. But these projectiles do not leave the air clinging on the surface of the earth. It zooms through.
Clever people who have the capacity to use Science for the betterment of human beings have laboriously created these killer machines. Technology is at their fingertips. The commands of their political masters ring in their ears. Ready. Aim. Shoot.
Political leaders who have smothered their women by law. Political megalomaniacs who think the very Sun should follow their diktat rather than their solar orbits.
The super Gods. So powerful. Unquestioned. Unquestionable.
Look, look well at the dead bodies. Blood splattered on the ground. It mixes with the smell of the smoke and the debris, loses its tangy iron smell. But iron has its methods of leaving traces. When spilt, the blood was red, fresh, vital. It dries and becomes brown. History may or may not record this. But Nature does.
There is a whole ten inch leg, with the shoe still attached to it. The shoe looks beige and worn. No sock on the foot. It couldhave belonged to a boy or a girl. One cannot make out from the shoe.
Death is making another one sing. This is a girl. Her pigtails are intact. Not her chest. Air is leaking through her battered lungs. She is not scared. She is beyond it. Was this a gory swan song?
Yet another one yells. Yells for his mother who is buried deep in the debris, but who can hear her son’s cries. She cries, shouts. She will be dead when they unearth her a few days later.
Then there is a pile of what was originally a group of human beings. Torn purdahs. It looks like a grotesque show of gymnastics. Legs were heads should be. Backs bent beyond ninety degrees. Chunks of flesh like a random rangoli on the floor.
Blood, no longer a viscous liquid, red on them and on the ground.
These people never existed. Then how can they die?
This suited the political leaders. They were masters of the suddenly halted destiny of the fallen. So what? Did they not have divinely sanctioned rights, one way or the other? They were almost Gods. Yes.
But they could not give life even at an earthworm, let alone a human being.
Did it really matter from where civilizations grew? Historical arguements. Fights. How were they helping us now? What mattered was the here and now. But only for those who tolerated, forget about active caring.
But listen to the speeches, the words shouted, spouted from self righteous podiums. The political masters of our collective destiny mean all that they say. Don’t they?
* Thiruvathira Tirunal Lakshmi Bayi was born XII Princess of the erstwhile state of Travancore
