Leela

I saw them so recently, the three surviving brothers, their smiles, the shapes of their profiles. They are old, but they are young, young in their smiling. The oldest brother walks me up the stairs and says, can you sit on the floor, and when I say yes, we sit cross legged on the bedroom floor and go through the suitcases that my father left when he died. Here we are, an old man and younger one, on the site of that patch of land in what was called Madras where the family lived in an old building that was demolished so that the present one could rise, four-storeyed, many-balconied in its place.

How is it that the dead do not die all at once – that the deceased is also alive in our memories, but also in that forgetting which leaves a gap in our remembering, a loss irrecuperable and necessary if the dead one is not to be forgotten; a necessary forgetting, and one intertwined with memory, accompanying it? I remember by way of them, the three brothers, but also in the others – in their sons, in their daughters, and in the sons and daughters of the dead sisters and the dead brothers. By way of them – by way of their faces and their smiles, above all their smiles. But I also forget – if forgetting is the name for that hole in memory by which the memory of the dead is to be kept alive.

Irrecuperable loss. Mourning without cease – henceforward that will also be part of what I am. But are you not there, too, dead one? Are you not there, witness, the one who watches in me? Are you not there – dead one who survives in me; alterity of the dead? When I think of you, the other that is the you in me also thinks. He watches, the other in me, the dead one. I am alive, this is true, but with me I also bear the dead. Alive – but with me, the dead one, who keeps watch within me.

When I asked myself that night – when the question was asked in me as I crossed the Byker bridge – I knew what you would have wanted: a cool head, a practical mind. And so it was. Strange hours passed. I went to collect my bike, and then to meet R.M. at the station. It was already late – I had left a party when I heard, then I heard. Back here in the flat I made R.M. something to eat. The next day, we woke early and biked to the station and then down south and biked across London and then the train to the west and we biked from the station to the house. A cool head, a practical mind.

And now? It is as though I have been tuned to perform the most solemn raga. As though I was the instrument itself – or rather, the raga, as it denotes a framework that is not to be played, but played within. So is my loss what attunes my living. A steady sadness that accompanies everything; I can only play on these notes, not others; this is the raga that I live.

What is nihilism? Forgetting which does not live, which is not of the gap which resists the other’s incorporation. What is it, nihilism? The destruction of memory, the destruction of that propitious forgetting by which the dead bring themselves to us and live in us. Do not forget that forgetting. But what choice is there? It already keeps watch; already it is there, on the brothers’ faces and on the faces of their sons and daughter and the other sons and daughters. And wasn’t it there, too, in Madras, which is now called Chennai? We were there. A week ago, we were there.

On Chennai beach, the tsunami struck. 800 died that morning. But there are still people on the beach, that night as we walk along it, still sellers of shells and snacks; still a few out wading in the water. A few hundreds yards of sand to the sea. The bay of Bengal, which stretches along the east coast of India. My cousin speaks: not far from here is where they carried what remained of his body, my father. Carried out, ashes and remnants of bone, into the water. And he speaks, my cousin, of the thirteen days after death, and of the rituals that will endure the soul of the departed reaches the other shore. So, I am sure, did it reach there. Above us, the wide night – some stars are visible. Rishis, says my cousin. They are Rishis of our family; they watch over us. As he, too will watch over us. But I know, then, that he watches, too, within me.

Watches, and what do I see in this city? My cousin stroll downs to the beach some lunchtimes, he says. It is his Chennai, this city; he is happy here – it has everything, he tells us as we walk back to the car from the beach. Everything; it is all here. He had picked up my father from the airport; he seemed fine then, some trouble walking, but he was safely delivered to the flat in which he would say. But then … the details are known to us. But we are told again, and in my cousin’s voice, they acquire a new significance. He was there, my cousin; he speaks, simply and directly, of what happened. He was there, and we relive it through him as we drive through Chennai.

Oblivion: unto that were you delivered, ashes lowered into the Bay of Bengal. To be scattered in water, that was your wish. Why that, water? Why the vastness of the ocean? Along the coast, driving to Mahabs, we see crosses, markers of the Christian dead of the tsunami. Thousands died, all along the coast. The Indians asked for no foreign aid. Asked for no aid, but provided of themselves, and we see the thatched resettlement villages on the long drive. Thousands dead! So many dead! All the dead taken by the sea whose great crashing waves we see at the Shore Temple at Mahabs. How fierce those waves, from the Bay of Bengal.

The brothers carried the body into the ocean. Carried it out into the same sea from which the tsunami came. Catastrophe, benediction, brought by the same waves. And the sea is all of life, and death – it is the cosmos that rolls in and away in the waves on the sand, just as it is the cosmos we see above the orange glare of the streetlights of Chennai. It plays, the cosmos, we know that. It is a divine sport – lila, it is called, or leela (the spelling of my sister’s name). The divine sport, which can also be capricious, cruel. But it is the matrix of all things; from that, all things are given and all things return.

Given, yes, but as they are given, can you not detect the great departing wave, the darkness which sinks back through all things? Does it not leave its trace thus, in all the things, the trucks and rickshaws, the new construction sites and advertising hoardings of new Chennai? Departing – but also, too, coming forward, reaching us by way of things – by way of their play in the granite statuette from Mahabs my sister and brother in law bargained for, and in the CDs which I bought in Chennai and Delhi. Given – but also in the smiles, the brothers’ smiles, and in the play of resemblance between us all. The cloud-shaped nose, the dimpled mouth – don’t these, too, witness the play of leela?

The Bay of Bengal is a name for all oceans, and the oceans for the cosmos, and that for the giving-witholding of leela, by which we live and we will die.