Colour
White are the starched robes of the priests, white the fluttering masks as they pray in perfect cadence, one voice high pitched, the other low, a bass counterpoint. White are the stiff new cotton sheets that hide all but the beloved face, white the ancient marble slabs on which lies the body. White are the scarves that cover the women’s heads, white the clothes the mourners wear. White are the uniforms of the pall bearers, startling against their dark faces.
White too is the silence. Weeping and wailing are frowned upon, even when the body is heartbreakingly small. There is solace in the calm, a feeling that in the midst of sorrow, all is well with the world. The prayers melt into the white, there is a sense of floating away on the familiarly incomprehensible sounds, floating out of that hall with its soot stained walls and high rafters.
White. Colour plays a secondary role here in this quiet forest but there is colour. The grief keeps it at bay but it is all around. Lift your eyes and see.
The dog is brown of face, with beetling black eyebrows, full of life and vigour. He is brought in to check the veracity of death, twice over. I believe this dog has never barked in his life, for to do so would literally startle the life out of at least some of the onlookers. He is disinterested today, as he has been disinterested in this arcane ritual every day of his adult life. He spends his days curled up on the uncomfortable wrought iron or cement benches on the verandah of the little funeral houses, dotted around the dense green park. He is a quiet sleeper, silent even in his dreams.
The kingfishers are bright, against a deep green sky – the canopy of trees in this little forest in the middle of the city. I watch a pair perched on a tree through the bars of the window just above where the body lies. The birds are still as life through most of the ceremony. Just as the pall bearers stir from their somnolence, the birds dart to the ground and return with prey wriggling in their razor beaks. This is fecund, fertile ground, flush with life even though it harbours the dead. Higher up the slope, the peacocks dance, flaunting their haunting cries and flamboyant colours – Death is only a frequent but fleeting visitor to their stomping grounds.
There are no larger hibiscus than those that grow in this serene funeral ground. Dish sized and slightly leached of colour, as if their giant petals cannot draw enough red from their veins. It is fitting, isn’t it, in this white place? The stones of the hillside are black and wet, rivulets running down their cheeks. Against these, the ferns are obscene in their flourishing, giving no quarter to death – here is life, they declare, let Death take notice. There is always life. A black and white cat sits neatly on an outcrop, tail fastidiously tucked out of reach of the dripping leaves, eyes unblinking and gold. She is a hunter, her stillness belaying the moment when she unfurls and become Death for an unwary mouse or squirrel. The circle of life snaps shut.
Once, her wilder cousins lived and hunted these grounds, slipping through the shadows. Are they still here, marooned by the skyscrapers looming above these sacred grounds? Or did they escape in good time, before they found themselves strangers in a strange land? Their wilderness is cut off from any escape routes, an island in the midst of a cement sea. The once pristine forest, alive and aloof, now shows signs of decay. The rust red, the brick brown, the cement grey, these colours are new and brash. They stand out, a stark counterpoint to the ancient shades that have learnt to blend and flow and disappear into each other.
But for now, there is still this: the silent white. The wet black. The green of life, the red of death, the blue of sky. The colours, their sounds and silences, are a sigh of rest, a laying down of old griefs and new guilts. This forest is alive. It has defeated death. It is solace and solitude. This non-believer will not lay to rest in its upper grounds but at the end of life, the atoms, free and wilful, adventure-bound, may find their way back to rest for a while in its green embrace.