Extinctions: Of life, death and funeral band

There are things on this subcontinent — rituals, objects, gestures — that have existed for centuries but are now vulnerable, dying, at the edge of our lives. Extinctions catches them in movement, as they fade, as they set. It looks at them variously, through factual observation, or historical gaze, or a prose poem paying tribute. These are individual memories merged with the memories of a civilisation. Sometimes the two become one. The attempt is not only to look back but also to consider where we are. And so, ‘Extinctions’ creates an encounter that lights up both the long enduring and the new. Following the ridge of regrets, fate, thoughts that came too late, a future appears, even of the past. Untamed, animate, time becomes many, and landscapes continue to be formed, not naming themselves yet, not conscious of being an island or a continent. On the blackened iron scales in the marketplace, a thousand years equals today.

The following are the excerpts from the book Extinctions:

 Funeral

A few times a year, in the late morning or afternoon, the funeral brass band comes down the street. They accompany the coffin and the bereaved, who all walk slowly till the entrance of the small church at the street’s end. The first notes can be heard before the small group of people turn the corner and into the street. Then gradually the band can be seen, often leading the procession. They play the trumpet, the French horn, the saxophone, the clarinet, the trombone. They are dressed in worn black suits and ties. The walk from the corner of the street to the church is slow paced, allowing everyone to feel the music, its rise and fall. They play Amazing Grace, or Showers of Blessing, or When the Saints Go Marching In. Sometimes a mourner sings along softly. For the homes on the street where they are from different religions, it is death passing by in music, something they don’t have in their own rituals.

The origins of the funeral bands, like many other things in the subcontinent, have vanished under layers of invasions, mergings, sudden-turns. The brass band in India most probably emerged from British military bands. Over time they began to play at Indian weddings in the north and at important government events. And in the western part of the country, among the Catholic people, at their funerals.

The leader of the band is a trumpet player who has played at thousands of funerals. Once, he gets a note from a young man who books his band a month in advance. A month later the young man kills himself. He leaves a note saying he wants this brass band at his funeral.

Funeral bands have gradually become more infrequent, playing only at the funerals of the less privileged, those from the Catholic villages inside the bylanes of Bombay. The more sophisticated and urbane choose more solemn, quiet funerals.

The leader says that sometimes as his band is walking down the street in a procession, someone comes up and says, ‘When I die, play for me.’

Spring

The body can be gathered and bent forward at a slight tilt, offering a glass of water to quench the thirst of someone it respects. At times, only the head and shoulders may bend downward, hand on the heart, to thank someone for that which lies a great distance beyond language. The street has received both of these gestures. But this is a different time. The slender, elongated light of winter disappears, suddenly. The light turns muscular, overcomes earlier restrictions. The koel arrives, heralding so much more than spring, stirring hopes that can be realised only through the most untiring grit and determination.

The body turns inside out now, and the most noxious things are set free. They rise into the air, not from the desire for flight but through the force of despair. The air is thick with bird and song. Spring has brought birds from wherever they have been all year, and the memory of hill and plain and forest in their call expands the space the street occupies. When the body tears, some things spill and split like vicious seeds. Others, which already have their own stunted life, drag themselves over the asphalt, cripples whose legs end at the stumps of knees, holding a broken stone wall for support, hunchbacks who will never see the sky above.

They crawl and drag themselves past the seller of berries and raw mangoes who no longer stands in the light and has moved to the shade, on the opposite side of the street. His wooden cart is an ancient discovery but when he raises his left arm and runs a hand through his hair, a watch gleams in the light. His knowledge of time is not as ancient as his need. It is the one who stands watching whose knowledge of time is old, almost geological. Children eat the berries sprinkled with black salt, tart and pungent on the tongue. Those things in the body that have not emerged onto the street are still inside, things smashed many times and held together by spittle, uncertain glue. Evening will come later now, after the schoolchildren have eaten their berries and gone home, but it will come. The falling light will cover over narratives turned the wrong way around, of desire after fulfilment, of the closure of what has not even begun. It will bring the knowledge that every life turns, somewhat like the universe, but coming into the light only according to its own season.

The birds do not return to their trees. They skim the flames that someone has already lit in the grotto without ever burning their wings. Inside the house a luminous soul fights the darkening patina of need. There is utter silence as this need searches for a new moral sense with which to look at itself. The search will begin here, but go far afield, through people and places in other continents.

A tree falls and breaks the top of a stone wall. The sound is an explosion whose echoes go deep into the corners of the rooms, into dishes and bookshelves. The fishtail palm has broken exactly at one of the chalk-white rings on its tall trunk which marked its destiny. It flowered from the top, the flowers small green balls, hanging together in enormous bunches. Only one level flowered at a time, over the years. After twenty years perhaps, the lowest level flowered, and that meant the tree was nearing its end. The trunk will be cut in two for channelling water, the fibres will be used for fishing lines, and the base made into a huge bucket for lifting water from river or well.

The street is like a flame in a windless place.

The book ‘Extinctions’ is written by Sharmistha Mohanty (published by Context).

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