May we continue to always dance between the impersonal and the precious.
Photo: The Merry Cemetery by Amrita Sher-Gil
I begin the new year at the graveyard.
This is a strange admission, and I am certain, in some cultures, taboo, to begin what is supposed to be new with death and decay. But the 1st of January is a marker of the Gregorian calendar, which is, simply put, the white calendar. And really, I’m not white, so does it even matter?
The graveyard, to me, is perhaps the real beginning of time, even though most would consider it the end. It is the beginning because it is the marker of the end. If there is no end, I suppose, there is no beginning. This is a cyclical thought, I am aware.
On the 1st of January each year, my parents, P, and I usually spend the early hours of the morning tomb-sweeping. This year, the sky is overcast, but the birds are enthralled with excitement. There are crows, pigeons, quails, sparrows, a native creature of the graveyard with cerulean blue wings, and another with perfect, jewelled russet feathers. A family of parrots fly around our heads as we carry the banana leaves, the agarpathi, the sambrani, the murruku, the sweets, the fruits, the malligai maalai, the uthuri poo, the roja poo - bags and bags that my parents had meticulously assembled the night before.
These birds sit watching us, waiting, I suppose, for us to leave so that they can feast on the namkeen and fruits we leave at the graves.
There are six graves we tend to on the 1st of January. One is not really a grave per se, but an offering to all the dead in the cemetery - an honouring of all the lives that lived, some to their full time, some unbearably short. My mother does the set-up for this on her own, bending and standing, laying everything out on the giant banana leaf from her garden, looking up at the milky sun obscured by clouds, muttering her prayers. I laugh to myself because I can see where I get this otherworldly madness from: my mother who can raise plants from the dead, and her mother before her, who could talk to animals.
The older I get, the more I realise that to move forward in time, I have to keep looking back, keep unravelling the thread that has crossed generations.
