Life and Death in India

Unlike the U.S. where one rarely encounters death on a personal basis, and if one does, then we discuss it for the next 3 months or even a year later, one encounters death all the time as soon as one moves to India. Both life and death! Indian cities and the countryside teem with life – in the cities its people, in the countryside its insects, in the towns and villages its flies, in the monsoons it’s the grasses and shrubs – but always there is a bursting forth of life. Impossible to maintain any semblance of restraint – life just pours out, just like in a tropical jungle.

A lot of children are born, there is a great deal of activity and crowding, and people also die more often. Not just the old – the young die of road accidents, sickness and weird diseases with even weirder symptoms – even the doctors have no clue what happened, or sometimes they just keep mum because the disease is so obscure it makes no sense telling the parents or relatives. Busses fall into ravines every year on the treacherous roads to pilgrimage places like Badrinath, Kedarnath and Gangotri. In the West, among the NRI community, people are shaken up by a single death. I remember when a friend’s wife died of cancer. We were all shook up – knew her so well, our families had met on and off. Here in India, people sail into your lives and sail out – sometimes they sail out because someone died an unexpected death. People are philosophical about it – they know life must go on, and do whatever they can to quickly encourage the nearest and dearest to forget and move on. Its fate – it’s a remerging of the spirits, the individual spirit with the Brahman. In the west the loss is personal – much harder to accept death. One revisits the sickness – could anything have been done to prevent death?

Since I have returned to India, I have closely witnessed two deaths. One was a friend’s father. I saw my friend’s father succumb to his illness, saw the grieving of the family, and their acceptance of death as something that ends our relationships with this world for ever for each one of us. It is a natural progression. I went to the crematorium and saw the last rites. During the next 24 hours we all feel the vacuum left by a person we have seen so recently. The vacuum is felt longer by the close family and even longer by the spouse, perhaps forever. And then life resumes – if you have ever seen a pride of lions attack a huge herd of wildbeest or deer – there is panic, then mourning, and then life resumes for the wildebeests, as if nothing had really happened, as the lions gather for their meal. I also saw my bright, bubbly 18-year old niece succumb to disease in less than a month. It will take my cousin and her husband, a long time to overcome their grief at the loss of their only child. They will probably dive deeply into a religious life – that might bring some solace and understanding, or they might become very active with social work and they might gain comfort from helping others. But they never question the existence of a fair and just God!

In India, it’s the person’s destiny.