Beginning
The box in which he brought the ashes is only as big as a shoebox. Radha takes a deep breath and looks away—and grasps my hand.
I am a little perplexed: Anil, when alive, occupied a generous portion of space; in death, his coffin was even more spacious, and it took some serious effort to carry it up and slide it into the crematorium. And now, here he is, in a shoebox—converted to stubborn blocks of impotent calcium and uneven granular dust.
Radha’s hand is surprisingly warm, soft, and even hypnotic—and right now definitely softer than her breathing. This physical gesture of hers has already paralyzed me and caused a thick silence around us.
The man with the shoe box of ashes is waiting.
I tell him to put it into the clay urn. He is a big-made youth with an earring and hair in a ponytail; tattered jeans complete his modern feel—his only fault being the evidence of chewed betel liquid in his mouth, possibly to disguise an early morning swig from a quarter bottle.
Death, ashes, alcohol, and Radha’s softest touch. I think I am still alive.
End
Exactly one week ago, an unknown caller on my mobile phone pierced the placidity of my office room—I was writing down my inaugural speech for the evening Rotary event: I am the new President of the Chapter. My first reaction to the phone call was truly presidential: serious infuriation! It was not necessarily my ego, but my productivity got really annoyed: I was raking my memory for that Shakespearean quote to end my grand acceptance speech. Who could the bloody caller be? Banks have badly-behaved sales reps calling to urge me to accept loans; and so, do supermarkets, who have endless loyalty schemes. I ignored the call. Of course, the caller did not give up. I respected the fourth attempt of the caller and said “Hello” with a patronizing attitude expecting nervy submissiveness from a call center female.
“Hi, it’s…it’s…it’s me, sorry to have bothered you…”
Even after 24 years, I could still remember her voice—and that phrase, “it’s me” is a motif, and only one person in this world can pull it off with such aesthetic beauty.
I took a deep breath—and as I exhaled, the word “Radha” flew out of my lips into the phone.
“So, you remember me—after all these years. After all what I did…”
I didn’t say anything. There was silence.
“Did you hear anything?” Radha began to probe—all her intentions are written in her speech; Radha can never hide her motives.
“Like what?” I said after a pause.
“So, you don’t know?” Radha was slightly annoyed.
“How have you been?” I asked a counter question, because I didn’t have an answer: Radha hates people who don’t give her answers.
“Anil died last night… at a party…”
“I’m sorry…”
“Sudden heart attack—just fell flat on the dance floor with a bottle of wine. Died there.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Can you stop saying ‘I’m sorry—I’m sorry’?”
Beginning
The shoe box with Anil’s ashes is a veritable mine of unruly objects. The boy with the ponytail—his name is Prasad—dips a magnet into the box. Nails plunge into the magnet as if they have had enough of humanity.
“From the wooden dead-body-box, sir…nails wasted…” he says.
“Aiyo,” I utter, simply to make Prasad happy.
“People we tell sir, cardboard dead-body-boxes to use—but people who make dead-body-boxes don’t like…”
“Hmmm…” I utter. Radha is annoyed and pinches my arm. A nasty pinch.
“Money sir… money bigger than common sense…” Prasad says via self-satisfied philosophical tones.
Prasad goes onto extract a pile of blackened nails via the magnet. A long time ago people nailed a good man to a cross, and now we heartily nail coffins—have we become civilized?
Radha stops pinching me and rubs the point where she just caused hurt.
End
I immediately drove over to Independence Square where Radha had wanted to meet me. She didn’t want me to come to her house—it was already packed with people, and she was feeling claustrophobic. “I am weak, as weak as a dew drop—I can only stand a lot of people in the house for a party, not for a death,” she told me.
It was nearly eleven in the morning, and Independence Square was sparsely crowded. I found a good parking space, took the file with my speech for the evening function, and began to walk towards the elevated platform of intricately carved rock pillars. I wanted to show Radha my speech—to seek her approval and her good luck blessings. Radha has always been someone who simply loved my achievements.
She was already there inside the rectangular structure that exuded a deep sense of history in captured space; she was casually walking along the carved pillars.
When I last saw her, Radha was fair—a skin color more in tune with Mediterranean flaxen shade than what “fair” means in Sri Lanka. She was slim and petite, and thus agile. And she looked best when she wore frocks, the ones that feature flowers in large numbers. Radha carried pure confidence and daring attitude. None of those have changed after 24 years. The only difference was that she wore sunglasses and had straightened her hair—she sported curly hair those days.
She removed her glasses and offered me a heartfelt smile; a gesture that made me forget myself. I wanted to lift her up and hug her and if not for the sign boards that reminded us that the Independence Square deserved dignified behavior I would have—actually!
Radha touched my forearm with both her hands. “Thank you for coming, I really appreciate it.”
“Deepest sympathies,” I said with a put-on voice and a mechanical reservation we use for such condolences.
She simply nodded.
We kept a small distance between us and walked the length of the building up and down. We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. The rock pillars that held the structure in place seemed to transform into polished sandalwood as we passed them; swans carved in them began to swim; symbolic flowers fluttered in the air; a bullock cart gathered momentum and the cartman began to sing a folk poem; a musician began to play her instrument; a Buddhist monk descended from his artistic frame and went on begging rounds. It was as if freedom had finally dawned upon this historic location, Independence Square, after all these years. Freedom to live, freedom to fly, freedom to sing.
Radha boldly sat down on the edges of the steps that took you to the rectangular building and gestured me to sit next to her. We stared at the mindless traffic for a while. I moved a bit closer to her, and she appreciated the gesture. Our energies blended seamlessly with no effort.
24 years have failed to erase the warmth and tenderness that had cultivated between us naturally. You could say that we, the living, have defeated death.
Beginning
Prasad keeps the magnet aside; nails seem to have run out of presence in the ashes.
Radha takes a deep breath as he begins to take granular ashes with his bare hands and pour them into the clay urn. He does it with respect, with deliberate slowness—he keeps looking at Radha; he knows that she does not appreciate this specific episode involving ashes and bones. At the same time, he is stung by her beauty—Radha in a long white frock that reaches her ankles is a sight one could not easily ignore.
As the granular crumbs hit the bottom of the clay pot, there is percussion, a soft hiss followed by thin pings—the music at the end of life.
End
I met Radha at a party for which I was not invited. I only went there to hand over a sophisticated mobile phone I found at a supermarket liquor sales outlet late at night. From the way the phone was positioned in the isolated counter, I knew someone had left it. So, I picked it up to hand it over to the manager of the supermarket. As I picked it up, the phone rang. Before the speaker could say anything, I confessed that I found the phone, introduced myself and offered to return it.
“I’m so fucking sorry—I was fucking drunk, everybody here is pissed drunk anyway,” a female voice screamed above the loud extended version of Madonna’s Holiday.
“You’re a fucking sweetheart, darling. Could you bring the phone to my house please; don’t answer any fucking calls—take a taxi, I will pay—GO FUCK YOURSELF, CAN’T YOU SEE I AM ON THE PHONE,” that last part of that speech was not directed at me.
I had finished an assignment for my second-year finals at the university and went to the supermarket to pick up an ice cream. And I sort of liked this night adventure of taking a lost mobile phone to a girl who was…you know…drunk.
I followed her instructions and went to this massive brightly lit house in the heart of Colombo 7. Everybody was saturated in a Dionysian trance, and nobody challenged me as I walked in. In fact, I walked all over the first floor of the house, the verandah, four bedrooms, a movie room, indoor garden, and the kitchen absorbing the luxury. The house has seen its share of history and has absorbed all that experience into its midst via paintings, sculpture, and furniture; it has been renovated to suit the modern times too—and done without disrupting its old-world charm. Whoever the architect was very skilled—and whoever the owner was exceptionally wealthy. I was a student of architecture, and I spent some time absorbing the aesthetics that made the house memorable.
There were beautifully dressed people screaming and dancing on a custom-made revolving dance stage; unmatching couples were kissing lustily in unseen contours of the house; restless stewards were running about with trays of elegant food; glasses broke to a rhythm; a DJ babbled non-stop while pouring one music track after another.
I didn’t know how to find the owner of the phone—I couldn’t ask her name. But I knew her voice. A voice full of woodland tones and a cascading body of water—even when she uttered expletives.
I heard her voice from within the dancing crowd as if in a dream.
“Tell that annoying DJ to shut the fuck up.”
I spotted her. Yes, gold-complexioned, curly-haired petite girl in a blue frock and a headband. I was hypnotized. She was dancing with a glass of wine in one hand.
I waited at the edge of the dance floor, like a ghost, waiting for a pause in the dance or for eye contact—nothing happened. She did see me once but ignored me and went on dancing. Around her was a group of girls who screamed more than they danced. A big-made boy filled her wine glass every now and then. Sometimes wine overflowed and fell on the dance floor. People screamed.
She saw me again. A thought seemed to form in her head—but a big-made boy took her in his arms, and they danced. The third time she looked my way, I waved the phone—she took notice.
She pushed the big-made boy away and darted towards me. In a gesture that was unscripted, she took me by the hand and dragged me upstairs to a very spacious balcony on the other side of the house. She closed the doors, thus shutting out the unbearable noise of the party.
The big-made guy whom she pushed away was Anil.
Beginning
The urn has a small mouth and a fat bottom so only the fine granular dust can go in without a fuss. Naturally, the bigger fire-proof bones begin to fuss; they refuse to fall into the urn. Prasad looks at me. He wants directions—the most obvious one!
“The big bones, take them and break them and put them in,” I tell him. Radha gets closer to me and keeps her head near my chest. Her Christine Dior Mini Miss perfume—a limited edition version—stuns my olfactive senses.
Prasad happily takes a bone that is fussy and crushes it in his palm, the bone gives in without grumbling. Like a piece of Kiri Aluwa crushed by one’s palm, the bones too crumble to white dust with no fuss. Prasad has the last laugh as he completes what death could not achieve.
Radha buries her face on my chest.
I put my arm around her and draw her close to me—like the way I did those days, when the world was ours…even though for a short while…
End
“It’s me… Radha.”
We both captured each other with our eyes, and as eye-contact grew intense I saw a tiny shaft of light exploding between us.
We spoke all night. Radha only went back to the party to give orders to the caterers and the DJ.
At dawn, her guests went to a five-star hotel breakfast buffet, leaving me and Radha in a massive house with lots of debris from an all night long revelry.
She played a record…and we danced on the quiet balcony as the sun sprayed the softest of her rays upon us. We dissolved into each other, like vanilla extracts into a cake mix; and that fragrance of the cake remained with us…
The song she played was Carpenter’s There’s a Kind of Hush.
Beginning
The clay pot is full. I offer Prasad another clay pot.
Radha suddenly speaks to me. Nobody in the family had wanted to be here to witness this event. “It is apparently traumatic someone had told them.” Radha’s voice is calm.
“They wanted to send the driver to collect the ashes; I said no!” Radha pushes her head into my chest.
“So sorry to have bothered you…brave boy…I hope your wife won’t mind…”
“Ruchi’s not coming back—she’s got a job in Australia,” I immediately cut in.
Radha remains silent.
I repeat my sentence because I want a response.
“Ruchi is…”
“She’s a fucking manipulative, money-swallowing bitch; you are better off without her…” Radha settles the issue.
I grin, and Radha tramples my feet.
End
How do you tell someone like Radha, who was brought up in a luxurious safety bubble, that I lacked the social and financial capital that made it possible for her to be so free?
Did I feel so good around Radha because our intense bond made this gulf between us invisible?
Was Radha a mythical hero in my heart who rescued me from my perceptive social inferiority?
I never took the initiative to ask her (or me!) these (apparently!) fundamental questions. My initiatives were always in a hanger and never entered a runway—never saw the daylight.
Because when we were together time-space curved up, curled up and catapulted us into another form of existence.
It’s perhaps the reason that the human sphere caught up with us; we lacked what they called ‘sensible solutions.’
Do ‘sensible solutions’ end with our ashes, or dissolve with the smoke that gushes out from the crematorium?
Or do ‘sensible solutions’ survive us, so that the living can recycle them for their specific purposes?
In a life that ends as granular substance in a shoe box, what does ‘sensible’ mean?
Beginning
Radha sat on the steps of the monument and didn’t say anything. We didn’t need to talk. She knew. I knew.
At one point she took my file with the speech and read it. At times, she smiled. And at times, she took a pen and added a word. She suggested a better quotation from Shakespeare to end it.
“We’ll so begin these rites. As we do trust they’ll end, in true delights.”
She wrote down this quote from As You Like It on my manuscript in her sensuous handwriting.
Her mobile phone kept on ringing, and she did not answer it.
Finally, she got up.
“I want you to support me at the funeral—just by being around, ok?”
She took hold of both my hands, held them to her face for a while. The security guard at the Independence Square was not amused.
Holding each other’s hands we walked back to our cars.
End
Winds are icy and unfriendly during pre-dawn hours near Bolgoda Lake. Radha’s family owns a holiday home bordering the lake, and naturally this geographical advantage plays a key role in the location to scatter ashes.
Radha walks ahead onto the pier, a beautiful wooden projection that leads to the water. I follow behind carrying the three clay pots—I hug them to my chest as if I am carrying a newborn child. The contents inside the pots make no sound. Death is an obedient child.
Radha sits down at the end of the pier and stares at the sky which is still shielding the sun…
I take the first clay pot and empty the contents into the mighty lake. The water initially resists with a blob. Some ashes swirl; some drift with the wind.
Radha doesn’t look; the sky has entranced her.
I take the second clay pot and empty it. Ashes to water. From a cot to a shoebox to a clay pot to water. Life grows.
Radha is in a deep meditation with the water.
I empty the third clay pot, this time very slowly. From a square shoe box to shapeless water—that is freedom or independence.
I break all three pots and throw the fragments into the river.
The river now seems least offended…and spurts and surges with soft rhythm. Somewhere far out, the water occasionally pirouettes like a ballet dancer as if to remind us that in a life that flows to a mediocre melody, one would also find a grand ballet.
From the dance floor to the lake, Anil is thus obliterated.
We are only held back from that primordial water by time…obliteration is the norm, and the norm is what we all tend to dodge…tragically.
The sun breaks through a cloud with endearingly beautiful colors transporting me and Radha to a dance floor and a Carpenter’s song:
“Just the two of us and nobody else in sight
There’s nobody else…
The End (Finally).
Lal Medawattegedara