"Obituary" by A.K. Ramanujan

OBITUARY

Father, when he passed on,

left dust

on a table full of papers,

left debts and daughters,

a bedwetting grandson

named by the toss

of a coin after him,

a house that leaned

slowly through our growing

years on a bent coconut

tree in the yard.

Being the burning type,

he burned properly

at the cremation

as before, easily

and at both ends,

left his eye coins

in the ashes that didn’t

look one bit different,

several spinal discs, rough,

some burned to coal, for sons

to pick gingerly

and throw as the priest

said, facing east

where three rivers met

near the railway station;

no longstanding headstone

with his full name and two dates

to hold in their parentheses

everything he didn’t quite

manage to do himself,

like his caesarian birth

in a brahmin ghetto

and his death by heart-

failure in the fruit market.

But someone told me

he got two lines

in an inside column

of a Madras newspaper

sold by the kilo

exactly four weeks later

to streethawkers

who sell it in turn

to the small groceries

where I buy salt,

coriander,

and jaggery

in newspaper cones

that I usually read

for fun, and lately

in the hope of finding

these obituary lines.

And he left us

a changed mother

and more than

one annual ritual.

Source of the text – Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets, edited by R. Parthasarathy.  Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976, pages 106-107.

TJB: Reused elegy. An ode to a father’s incomplete life in 3 parts: what he left behind; the handling of his remains; & his obit, as used by spice merchants.