Our uncle passed away recently after a protracted illness. The best medical brains attending on him, strangely, left the cancer undiagnosed in spite of sundry tests conducted through the three-year length of the disease, till a month before he breathed his last. Uncle’s brain stayed razor-sharp right till the end, he wondered aloud at the latest news delivered to him that the cancer had spread to almost the whole system. The words of a shocked man after the medical miles traversed and lakhs of rupees coughed up in the process: “no use crying over spilt milk now”.
His agony in the world of the living continued as he came to witness (in his new form) the other vultures that flew in to complete the circuit, so to say. The priest who conducted the last rites was inept, muttering that he had missed his calling in the States, where he’d have earned thousands of dollars in the same vocation, all the while raking in the current assignment thousands of rupees (tax-free).
There was bedlam at the crematorium, the new bed sheet and dhoti drawn over the corpse disappeared in a jiffy. God save the other bodies surrounded by grieving near and dear ones, priests et al lining up the queue to the oven. The “Stop Thief Stop Thief” episode in Dickens’ Oliver Twist fitted the bill here.
To raise the corpse onto the platform facing the burning oven, we faced unabashed demands at rates touching `1000 per lifting hand. Travails did not end there but resurfaced at the beach when uncle’s only son (who had flown in the previous night from abroad—he’d returned to his work station just four days ago, after spending a fortnight at his ailing father’s bedside—was a bundle of nerves, naturally in a state of daze) went tearfully to immerse the ashes in the sea. But he was stopped in his tracks by a battery of fishermen looking to make a fast buck with their proposals to take the ashes farther into the sea. In the melee that ensued, my cousin toppled over, life endangered by the engulfing waves, was yanked out in the nick of time by one or two of us who had stayed with him—all other relatives of whom there had been a sizeable number bidding adieu at the residence. There were other places in the vast stretch of beach, free of such menace, where the task could have been performed but the taxi driver with a mind all his own stoutly refused to take his car but to this particular spot (of trouble).
A relative’s vehicle that had been at our disposal and could be driven to a place we chose was suddenly decommissioned post-crematorium stop, being a new machine, under some superstition that a vehicle still on one of its maiden runs best not ferry ashes lest the car’s envisaged joy rides get jinxed.
Moral of the story. When do we, the inheritors of one of the greatest civilisations on earth, get to live and die in a vulture-free society?