A Life Apart

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There was a queue for electric furnaces at Kalighat crematorium on the eleventh of October. Ritwik did not know how long he had to wait before one became available.

‘You have to wait, like everyone else. No corpse is privileged over the other. You can’t hurry death, do you understand?’ he was told by one of the furnace attendants, as if he had asked to jump the queue when all he had wanted to know was how long it would take. He reasoned he would much rather a longer wait for he did not want to go through that bristling panoply of rituals before the sliding rails carried his mother’s body into the heart of fire, in full, cleansing view of everyone. When the moment arrived, he knew he had been dreading it with a cold, randomly clutching-and-unclutching grip in his bowels. His mother’s body had been laid out on a criss-cross frame of cheap wood that formed a ramshackle stretcher, secured to it with rough coir ropes and covered with a white, coarse sheet; her head had been left exposed. It nodded and lolled like a floppy doll’s as the stretcher was placed in front of one of the three furnaces that would ultimately devour her.

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