A tryst with unknown

Introduction
“Well…aa…I think…actually…” Never heard my bother-in-law mincing words before. “Your dad passed away few minutes ago and you should fly home”. He blurted out.
My Friday evening had been like most, before that one phone call, which would etch it into my memory forever.
Work had been keeping me busy. Looking at the orange tinge in the sky, I was forecasting that the next couple of weeks were going to be great. At work, my team will be wrapping up a major phase in our project, the client will be highly content, and we will all be appreciated. I will be on one of the calls soaking up some adulation when my phone ran breaking my reverie. It was my sister at the other end.
“Why don’t you ever pick up the phone”? my sister yelled.
I paused. I don’t always carry my phone with me, but this was not the time to get into an argument over phone etiquette.
“Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”. I asked. Dusk had started settling in.
“It can’t”. She took a deep breath.
“Dad had been sick for the last two days since he got that covid booster shot. Mom had to rush him to the hospital. You would know if you called home”. She said with a mix of sarcasm and annoyance.
“Call home and stay close to the phone”. She ordered with a tone of authority that elder siblings have.
“Ok, I will”. I managed to get those two words out before she ended the call. I caught myself with a muffled voice. Guilt seeped in.
Tomorrow, when I call, I will ask my dad about all his post retirement community activities, I said to myself. The guilt waned away a bit.
My phone rang again interrupting my thoughts. Seeing my brother-in-law’s name on the screen, I picked up the phone.
“Were you asleep already?” Not much of a small talker, he asked.
“Not really”. I responded.
There was a long pause. I was wondering why he would call me this late into the night but wasn’t going to ask.
“Aaa…..your Dad isn’t doing fine”, he murmured.
“Yes, I heard” I said, being mindful of my tone. Some families have space between brothers-in-law akin to an elephant in a room.
“Well…aa…I think…actually…” Never heard my bother-in-law mincing words before. “Your dad passed away few minutes ago and you should fly home”. He blurted out.
That tomorrow will never arrive.

A Long night
I put the phone down. What did I just hear? How is this even possible? A million thoughts were racing through my head. I walked to the kitchen sink to grab a glass of water from the faucet but did not take a sip. I went to the bathroom to relieve myself but stood there for a few minutes without doing anything. My mind lost its fulcrum and swinging all over the place. I turned on the TV so I could hear some human noises. I switched it off but then silence was no better. A second felt like an hour and a minute like a day. I glanced at my phone to see a few more missed calls. A few numbers from my cousins and relatives and a few that I did not realize but weren’t spam either. They are probably calling me for the first time. I did not return any of the calls. What are they going to say to me? How was I supposed to respond back? The few conversations that I have every day are always well thought out. At work, the conversation is always about specifics. Outside work, the conversations are about making dinner or weekend plans or about upcoming vacations. During the day, every word that I speak and every task that I do is in familiar territory. I am a creature of habit, and this was going to be a long night.
Unknown
Twenty-four hours have passed since that phone call and the conversation kept playing in my head. My flight had landed in the wee hours of the following Monday morning. Looking out the window of my cab, I see lush green paddy fields, milk vendors balancing their crates and shining vats reflecting from the sunlight, hanging on both sides of their two wheelers. I lowered the window down only to smell the air reek of cow dung doused in urine. Unlike most of my trips, wherein I would get ecstatic as my hometown gets closer, I am feeling my stomach churn. My palms are sweating and the Irani Chai sold on the roadside stalls does not look enticing. Was I secretly hoping the ride would last forever?
Growing up, my parents rarely chided me for anything. As with most children of our age, there were some basic house rules like keeping good grades and returning before dark. If there were not too many transgressions, I was fine. I abided by the rules because it was easier that way. My parent’s home was located more than half-a-mile away from the nearest market center. There was a swamp on the way back home where the lane gets narrower. Most of the lots were empty on either side of the street, no streetlights all along and with thorny bushes spread rampantly. So, when times I returned late on a cloudy day, I could smell the musk of the stagnant cold water and feel the chill from the cool breeze. Walking alone, I would hear frogs croaking and street dogs barking a few feet away. But I never hesitated from taking that solitary stroll. I cannot remember being afraid of anything.
The ride had to inevitably end, and I was at the gate, fiddling with the handle to open it. The bolt which had always been skewed sideways was only adding to my anxiety and I secretly hoped the gate would never let me in. My palms were sweating profusely and the hair from my follicles stood upright. My voice had been crippled as if a monster was sitting in my throat and locked it down. My entire body had static and the marrow in my bones was frozen. Holding onto my luggage so my fingers wouldn’t fidget, I was taking one step at a time walking through the verandah into the living room. My neighbor’s maid who was hanging the clothes dry on the terrace, paused and I could sense her gaze on me. Nothing in my life until now had prepared me for anything like this.
How would I walk into a home knowing the walls would echo the boisterous laugh of a man, but the man would be no where to be found. The voice which would fondly call me as “kakki” has been muted forever.
One summer in ninth grade, when I must have been twelve or thirteen, I was playing badminton with my sister in my neighbor’s front yard, when the shuttle cock fell over the terrace. While climbing the terrace to retrieve it, I tripped over a piece of steel that was protruding from the unfinished concrete and fell flat on some gravel. The corner of my forehead burst open barely missing my right eye. Hearing me cry, my dad rushed over and picked me up in his arms to take me inside and I healed in less than a week. I cannot remember the last time I was there for him when he was sick. He fell sick after getting a booster shot and I did not bother finding out. I was tasting warm blood in my mouth from memories of that injury thirty years ago.
How would I face my mom who had just lost her husband of fifty years? The man she chose at the age of twenty. The man from whom she couldn’t take her eyes off when she first saw him in his services uniform. The man whom she came to know as always being kind and generous. The man for whom she defined all conventional norms of the sixty’s decade when most marriages were arranged. The man with whom she who would bicker and quarrel fiercely and at the same time cook and feed tenderly. The man with whom she stood by, through thick and thin all these years and never left a single day. The man who was fit as a fiddle and running errands the day before. Like a hawk that scoops a chick away, that man vanished in the split of a second.

The gate finally flung open and so did all my pent-up emotions. My heavy feet which were dragging up until that moment, lightened up and ran towards my mom. She took me into her arms and began to cry. This fear, I realized, the most dreadful emotion in my life, had come to pass.
I stood there at the hospital morgue staring at him lying flat in a freezer. He is smiling back with his serene face. He looked a bit puffed up as if he just gobbled down a dozen of his favorite sweetmeats. I can feel his spirit floating in the air as if saying things are fine.
The staff person on duty looked at me looking at my dad, howled: “aren’t you here to take him home”?
One of my cousins who was with me responded, “Yes”.
All four of my cousins who came along with me, jumped in, moved him from the freezer and unto the van, in which were going to take him home. I noticed, they left the insulated box behind and transferred him onto a regular crate. The driver of the van turned the engine on and was shifting gears before I even had a chance to protest. This was a pre-cursor to how things were going to unfold.
We were home in about thirty minutes, and I had a sense there was going to be a lot of activity for the next couple of hours. The same set of cousins now moved him from the van and let him rest in our living room. “You can’t let his feet face east”, said a voice in the back. No, it’s the front of the house, said another. They squabbled a bit and finally agreed to move him around and laid him facing North. A lamp was lit and placed on his head-side. An aunt of mine came over and pushed the lamp a feet away announcing that was the exact spot it needs to be. Neighbors, residents of the local colony, former co-workers, aunts and uncles living nearby, people were coming in to pay their last respects. I hugged a few of them feeling the sweat on their backs and smelling the flowers they brought in. The crowd was splattered a bit with the women seated around my mom in circles while men stood in files of two in the front-yard. A bare-chested man with his pigtail protruding from his cranium and a shaved scalp walked in. He was wearing a saffron dhoti with pleats tucked into his lower back and a cloth bag hanging sideways on his shoulder. His forehead was smeared with lines of tilak and ash. “The priest has arrived” announced someone into thin air. He emptied the contents out of his bag and walked towards me. Chewing his betel nut, he asked a rhetorical question, “Are you the son”? He started tying a palm twig onto my pinky finger without bothering for my affirmation. For the next few minutes, he would recite some mantra and sprinkle some holy water around. Folks around me were looking at him in awe like a shaman performing voodoo and believed he was the facilitator in sending my dad to heaven and drive the evil spirits away. I was looking at him like an illusionist who had a specific repertoire for each event.
I thought this would go on for a bit when he abruptly announced, “we are ready to go”. My dad was then moved onto a chair, was made to sit upright with help from folks holding his arms, trunk and head steady. Two huge steel vats of water were emptied on him giving him one last shower while I was hoping the deluge would wake him up. I turned around to see two helpers putting together a scaffolding frame of one level, made of bamboo and the cross joints tightened with knots made of coconut leaves. He was then made to lie on the scaffold horizontally. Four men gathered around the scaffold and lifted it like a palanquin and placed him on the back of a truck. I stepped onto the truck perfunctorily and followed. I turned around to see if my sister was climbing onto the truck when I noticed all the women were standing a file, further away. It then occurred to me that women don’t go to cremation yards. We reached a yard where pyres were spread like podiums and every third one was engulfed in flames.
As the scaffold was lowered from the truck, and men carrying it were headed to the pyre, “lower the frame” ordered the priest. He then looked at me and asked, “What do you address your father as”? “Dad”, I replied in auto mode without having the disposition to understand the question. “Holler into your father's ear by saying Dad three times”, he continued. I moved closer to his ear and called him thrice. That one last ritual did not wake him from his eternal slumber. All the men at the yard were now resigned to move him onto the last step.

The dais was an elevated concrete platform with couple of steps to climb. There were left over ashes that were hot and cinders of coal still burning fresh from a cremation few hours ago. One of the helpers took a broom and swept some away. The priest then climbed onto the dais, sprinkled some of his water and recited a mantra. I was asked to place three firewood logs at the marked spot. Rest of the task was quickly taken away from me and a bed of logs, three feet high were placed. The men then lifted the scaffold on which my dad was resting and placed him along with the frame on the pyre. The priest then filled a clay pot full of water and asked me to carry it on my head and simultaneously circumambulate the pyre three times. While I was doing my ritual one step at a time, he poked a hole in the clay pot with a pebble and the waterspout was marking the perimeter wet. Once the pot was drained empty, I was asked to let it go and just let the pot crash into pieces on the ground. The priest then ignited the torch and handed it over to me. He then commanded: “Light the pyre but once it is lit, walk away and do not look back”. I continued obeying the instructions and walked away but my head couldn’t resist from angling a bit and I saw the log-bed on the pyre. It lit up slowly at his feet but quickly spread across and the whole pyre was engulfed in flames. I could feel my Dad’s hair, skin and internal organs getting incinerated. His physical body was being reduced to ashes while his soul was being released and rising through the flames. One last pass through a scorching hell on earth before being ushered to the heavens.

I returned home after the cremation, staying in disbelief if things were unfolding the way they were. As I approached the gate, I was quickly intercepted by my uncles. A bucket of water with a tumbler was placed at the gate. Standing there, I took a shower with my funeral clothes on, as asked and changed into a fresh dhoti. I was cleansed from all the funeral activities. Maybe there was some meaning into these if I looked deeper. Maybe the shaman knew the directions to heaven and spoke the language of Gods. I discarded the funeral clothes and kicked them away. I opened the gate and did not fiddle with the bolt anymore. As I entered the home, I realized there was nothing to avoid and I was ready to process one emotion at a time.