Deadly Mores

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Deadly Mores

It was the first death I was witness to, willy-nilly. Early 1950s.

Four of us siblings (between 5 and 12) were invited to our cousin’s village for a rollicking holiday. Instead of a roaring welcome, we were greeted by a deathly silence. An old woman of the family was apparently in her last moments. She was laid on a raised stone ‘theen’ in the Hall common enough those days. And was ringed by half a dozen of her close relatives. We kids struggled to peep.

Her eldest son was holding a brass tumbler of ‘tusli-water’ and dropping small gentle sips into her lowly-moaning throat. The ordeal continued and her throes were sad to watch. Suddenly one of her daughters took away the brass tumbler, went inside, and in a few minutes, brought it back.

With the next sip, the old lady was released from her agony and passed into peace. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief; and we kids were bundled into a rickshaw and shunted to a neighbor’s village where all of us picnicked for days on end.

Much later I came to know the secret ‘therapy’: The lady who took away the tumbler, it seems, dropped a silver rupee coin into the water, shook the tumbler, picked the coin back and returned the tumbler to the son. The silvered-sip did the trick. The coin perhaps was cremated along with the old lady. Apparently the old lady was much attached to her silver.

Another very fair and thin and comely old widow I saw those days was always sitting on the stone ‘theen’ abutting their rented house and was rolling beads of prayer. I never saw her enter the house and was very curious.

Recently my mother told me that the interest on the ‘property’ left to her by her childless husband was just enough for one meal a day; and she used to insist that she eat only at night before she returned to her ‘theen’. And the reason why she didn’t enter the house except for ablutions and food was that it was a rented house and a lot of trouble would be there for the household if she happened to pass away at an ‘inauspicious’ moment.

My good wealthy bachelor friend well-known for his humor sold his house in the heart of the town and shifted to a bungalow he specially built near the Cremation Ground.

I asked him why.

He smiled and replied: ‘Just a gentle push’…..