The Deadly Truth

I have known two Yashodas in my life. I could safely presume that the first one must be known to several of you as well since she happens to be the mother of the author of Bhagavad Gita. It is unreasonable for me to expect any of you to know about the second one. The latter Yashoda, daughter of one Annamma, happened to be our house maid when I was around, say, five or six years old. What connects these two Yashodas is their relationship to stones. The first Yashoda tied her naughty child to a heavy grinding stone as a punishment. The second Yashoda, who happened to reside a stone’s throw away from us, was stone deaf. My reminiscence is about this Yashoda.

Despite her deafness, Yashoda was well liked for her sincerity. Getting praised by my uncompromising mother is surely a tall order and this maid rightfully earned her feathers. On a particularly rainy day this ever cheerful maid was just wrapping-up her daily duty of dish washing. A middle-aged man, her older brother I presume, stopped in front of our house and called her. Since she was hard of hearing, my mother nudged her towards her brother. She smilingly went out. He leaned towards her and told something – in words and signs – which she seemed to have understood immediately.

Yashoda’s face changed. She disheveled her otherwise groomed hair. She fell flat on the slush. It rained all over the poor woman. She shouted and cried, “Appa… Appa… Ayyayoo…” repeating these again and again. She became frenzied and out of control. She rolled on the streaming puddle and wailed her lungs out and started running towards her home with upraised arms. It was an absolute shock for a kid like me to see an otherwise cheerful woman undergo such a tumultuous transformation. I was a bit scared, but more shocked. What had caused her transformation? 

I learnt soon enough that her dear father had just died. 

What is death?

This was my first vivid experience of contemplating about death – just for a few minutes. A kid has much better things to do than contemplation. Confabulating now, I might have perhaps gone back to playing hide and seek soon thereafter! A child has no notion of mortality and fully lives in the present. Death happens only to someone else!

I had not yet seen a dead body though. That would happen a few years later.

In 1976, the then prime-minister imposed emergency rule in India and we had to move from the government quarters to a rented place. It was hard for a child, barely turned seven, to leave his beloved friends and move to an unfamiliar location. Well! India was ruled by emergency and the home is ruled by parents? Where does a child have his say and who would listen to what his little heart pines for! I was (and still am) somewhat of an introvert and never had the urge to convey the depth of sadness that enveloped me when we left a place where we had resided for three full years. I came as a baby of four years to the government quarters and left as a boy of seven years. 

The new residence was a rented house – a much smaller one, with even more smaller tenements behind where we lived. Altogether in that compound lived three families. My oldest brother lived in Madurai. Therefore there were five of us in this house – parents, my second elder brother who is older to me by three years and my kid brother who is younger by around four years. I was seven and you can work out the math. 

It so happened, that this house was en route to a cemetery. Like all rivers leading to ocean, deaths all over the surroundings would finally have to be consigned to flames in this cemetery. It was not unusual for us to see at least two to three dead bodies everyday being carried through the street. On the days I used to stand on the parapet wall, I could clearly see the dead body, neatly draped in a clean white cloth up to the neck, cotton wool stuffed in the nostrils, and generously garlanded. On several occasions, I had also seen dead bodies in sitting position, being carried like a king on a palanquin.

With conch shells being blown, the gong being sounded and drums being beaten, we could from afar understand that a corpse would soon be passing by, and as an innocent child, it was the only form of entertainment in my otherwise listless world bereft of my old friends. My older brother was my only friend since the younger one was yet a baby.

The passing-by scene was typical. There were always a few drunkards who would dance in frenzy – perhaps to entertain the spirit of the dead – a final farewell! One or two would walk with a basket of flowers, making a trail of flowers along the path. Reminds me of the story of Hansel and Gretel, except that in this case, the sojourn of the dead is one way – never to return!

Now, one of the two tenants had a couple of daughters. Geetha, the younger one, was as old as my older brother and her fairer sister, Latha, might have been a couple of years older than that. In my vague memory, Geetha was the perkier one and in the absence of any other form of recreation, the four of us would occasionally chat past twilight. Geetha was surely more informed that me and my older brother. For the same age, little girls are far more mature than boys. Apart from drawing the side view of the face of a parrot, we four kids had small chat on a variety of topics that might have made sense only to little children. On one such occasion Geetha vividly mentioned as to how the corpse would be laid on the pyre and how it would try to rise amid the raging conflagration. She added that the lone watchman in the middle of night, fully loaded with alcohol, would shout at the rising corpse, “How dare you, trying to rise! Now, get back flat…” So saying, he would pound the knee joint of the corpse until it falls flat. As I grew-up I understood that a corpse rising in the pyre is due to muscle contraction. By breaking the joints, the watchman ensures that it doesn’t roll-off the pyre. I never knew the science behind this strange phenomenon and so more than once I had asked the sisters, “If the corpse is rising, why not allow it to rise and walk it home?” I imagined that the corpse got back to life while the watchman wanted it to die and hence all this violence! Neither my older brother, nor Latha nor the well-informed Geetha knew the answer and I didn’t give it importance either. Twilight and darkness bring eeriness to little children and come daylight the fear vanishes. Children hate dark and I was no exception.

Even for young children, the story about death is only of curious nature until someone close enough dies. The passing-by corpses down the street were those of strangers. Therefore, our involvement in discussing the subject of life and death did not transcend beyond the faint intellectual curiosity of a few little children. We never lost our sleep nor once did ghosts haunt my dreamland! The fact that my older brother’s bed-sheet remained dry proved that ghosts didn’t dare haunt him in his dreams either, regardless of the number of corpses that we would have witnessed that day.

Experiencing the death of a near one would happen years later when I lost my paternal grandmother and then my maternal grandfather a few more years later. 

Almost losing your most beloved is a trauma in its own right. I experienced that as well. A rogue Toyota Innova driver hit and run my wife who happened to drive a scooter. With skull fracture, severe brain contusion, collar bone fracture, ruptured ear drum and several external bruises, she was rushed to the ICU and kept under life support. I was told that it would take forty eight hours for the doctors to tell one way or the other and that she was right on the edge. The fine line separating life and death is but a whisker. I was scared like hell. Luckily she not only came out alive, but also by sheer resilience and will power made a very fast recovery.

My aforementioned experiences are not unique, given the ubiquitous nature of death. Each one of you would have had similar experiences; I recall a loving relative who lost his life after being bitten by a cobra; a man with kidney failure undergoing dialysis, slowly inching towards death, with complete awareness – facing emptiness and hollow instead of vigor and energy. A particular incident that comes to my mind was a person with an exceptionally pretty wife. This man raised a Doberman so that his wife would be protected from invaders. The poor lady was destined to suffer a brain hemorrhage and died young after being bed-ridden for more than a year. An earlier incident I recall is about a young mother, of two exceptionally pretty young daughters, who was living with a hole in her heart. She knew that death was imminent – and soon enough, she died, leaving behind her husband and these two tender little children.

Several years ago, after I had completed my PhD in Newfoundland, Canada, I had decided to move near Toronto and anchor myself there until I found a job. En route, I decided to break my journey in Halifax, Nova Scotia and spend three days in a monastery some hundred or more kilometers away from Halifax, right in the middle of nowhere. This monastery was run by a Caucasian American by name Dennis. The nearest neighbors lived, each a kilometer away and nights used to be pitch dark. Dennis used to wake-up around 4:00 am daily and carry-on his spiritual sadhana. Once I asked Dennis if ever he had felt lonely. His reply was prompt and quick, “I am aware that I am alone, but have never felt lonely.” There is a big difference between being alone versus being lonely. I asked him the secret to being humble. Again his response was unequivocal, “I am constantly aware that I would die one day.” Awareness of death offers wholesomeness in life! Awareness of death plants our feet firmly to the ground and ensures that we do not get carried-away.

While he was just 16 years old, a young boy by name Venkataraman had a sudden and violent fear of death. For a lad otherwise in good health and vigor, and for kids his age being deluded by the mistaken notion of immortality, the sudden fear of Venkataraman is indeed inexplicable. Only in this case, the young boy chose to confront his fear rather than seeking workarounds. He decided to experience death – here and now. In a small eight by five room upstairs of his residence in Madurai, this lad decided to verify the facts for himself. Lying in a supine position motionless, he realized that the notion of I looms large over the temporal existence of the gross body. Awareness as we normally experience is just ephemeral since it is triggered from entities outside. What we know as death does not apply to the real “I” or awareness from the inside. Young Venkataraman discovered that the real awareness does not die with the body. With this new knowledge, nay, realization, he became Shri Ramana Maharshi.

I shall end this deathly pursuit by telling my experience about a glorious death. On February 18, 2010 – very early morning perhaps – I had a dream; a vivid one if not the so-called “lucid-dream”. My son and I were standing on the foot of a hill somewhat resembling that of Holy Arunachala, on the North side. The slope from the hill was gentle and a wide dirt road, with cream colored fine sand was abutting the foothill. My son in the dream he was around 2 years old wearing a blue color T-Shirt and Shorts. I was wearing a shirt and a eight yard dhoti. We were facing North, looking at the other side of the road. To our left were a bunch of people, shirt less and with dhotis, some ten or so, busy working on a “utsava murthi” of the Lord on a palanquin. The palanquin was on the shoulders of a few people and the rest were doing the decorations. To my right was a man of around fifty five years or so. He was short – around five feet and four inches – wearing a simple dhoti and a work cotton shirt with paled out blue check patterns. This man walked past me, right up to the palanquin and told something to the Brahmins decorating the deity. They replied to him and he turned back and stood at a distance. The decoration of the deity continued. After sometime, this man again walked-up and spoke to the same Brahmin. I never heard what transpired, but now the Brahmin accompanied the man and right in front of me, some five meters away, right in the middle of the road, created a large homa-kundam and lighted fire. Then, the Brahmin made a smaller homa-kundam a couple of meters away from me, to the left and lighted fire. So, I had a large homa-kundam in front of me and a smaller homa-kundam to my left. My son and I were simply standing, watching what was happening.

The man now sat in front of the larger homa-kundam and started singing extremely melodiously, in Tamil. Everyone now stopped doing whatever they were doing and stood a safe distance away from the man. The man was completely focused on the fire as he sat, facing east, continuing his most melodious and extremely moving devotional song. I gathered the meaning of the song as follows:

It is indeed an irony oh Lord!

To realize that, by being devoted to thee,

I am committing a grave sin;

When thou art everything, 

Who am I to be a devotee?

Why am I still holding this thought –

That I am a devotee and thee my master?

When thou art everything!

This duality is indeed killing me from within

Where from this thought in me arises?

That thyself and I are different – 

Thee the master and me the slave!

Thou art everything and I do not exist

Yet my ignorance makes me believe that I exist

Thou art everything my Lord;

Let my ego be destroyed!

The reason for this duality is my body oh Lord,

Since thee and I exist due to my ignorance and ego.

May I cease to exist and be one with thee!

Take me my Lord, take me please.

I implore and I beg.

I surrender at thy lotus feet.

Let the identity of “I” cease to exist

Let me fuse into thee

Let me dissolve into thee

Let me lose my ego

Let thy spirit pervade in me

I do not want to exist and be thou devotee

Rather I want to be inseparable from thee

Take me and make me thine;

Annihilate me; absorb me;

Digest me and dissolve me.

Move me from gross to subtle.

Kill the duality my Lord.

Let me be with thee;

Let me be in thee.

Hereon, I no longer exist!

Continuing to sing so, this man first shows his hairs on the flame with a completely composed demeanor. His hair burns. People around are transfixed and speechless. The man continues. This time he exposes his face at the flames. His face is now full of blisters. Yet not a sign of pain or sorrow! He continues to sing, albeit his voice has now weakened a bit. Now he is exposing his two hands on the flame; just as one warms his hands on a bon-fire during cold wintery days. His hands are full of blisters. Now his cloths catch fire. He has stopped singing. He lies down in a fetal position as his body is consumed completely by fire – completely composed and cheerful. All we see now is a charred body. Everyone around started chanting “Arunachala Siva.” What a glorious death! My son, who as little children like to imitate, started to show his own hair on the smaller homa-kundam. I promptly pulled him away. 

My dream thus ended!

Death is for real. Death is annihilation of our gross body. Death curtly puts an axe on all worldly transactions in a single stroke. The dead has nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It is nature’s way of mercilessly and unilaterally putting a “full-stop”. Death is non-negotiable. 

Meditate on death if you would want to live a full life.