I Read His Favorite Poem at the Crematorium
The lines he loved held steadier than any of ours.
Nobody tells you that a crematorium has acoustics. I found out with a poem in my shaking hands and forty relatives waiting for me to speak.
My grandfather died on a Thursday, at ninety, mid-argument with the television news, which is exactly how he would have scripted it. He had been a station master, a chess cheat, and the only man in our family who owned poetry books he had actually read. Everyone else's shelves were decoration. His were ruined: spines cracked, corners soft as cloth, tea rings on the covers like the Olympic logo drawn by a drunk.
The family asked me to speak at the funeral because I was "the writer." This is what families do. They find the one relative who once won a school elocution prize and they hand that person the impossible, the way you hand the tallest cousin everything on the top shelf.
I tried to write a eulogy for two nights. I want to be honest about how badly it went. Everything I produced sounded like a job reference for a dead man. "He was dedicated. He was punctual." He was a station master; of course he was punctual. Trains ran through his blood on schedule. But grief had taken all my nouns and left me with adjectives, and adjectives cannot carry a coffin.
At two in the morning on the second night, I gave up and went to his room, just to sit in his chair, which still smelled of him: Lifebuoy soap and old newsprint and the clove he kept in his cheek like a secret. His copy of Tagore's Gitanjali was on the side table where it always was, under his reading glasses, which were folded on top of it the way glasses are folded by a man who fully intends to come back.
The book opened itself to Verse 96. Books that are loved enough learn to do this. The binding simply gives up resisting the reader's favourite page.
"When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable."
He had underlined it in pencil... Then, at some later date, in blue ink. Then, later still, in the red pen he stole from my school geometry box in 2003, a theft he denied until his final Thursday. Three underlinings, three different decades of the same man saying yes... this... still this.
I stopped trying to write.
I would read him his poem instead.
The Reading
A crematorium in north India in June is not designed for literature. It is heat and marble and the specific echo of a place where everyone whispers. The pandit finished the mantras. My uncles had spoken, brief and broken. Then it was my turn, and I stood up with the ruined Gitanjali and no plan except Verse 96.
My voice went in the first line.
Just gone, cracked open like a dropped clay cup. Forty faces looked at me, and I looked at the pencil underline, the ink underline, the stolen red pen, and I did something I cannot fully explain: I stopped trying to perform the poem and simply leaned on it.
And the poem held.
That is the thing I most want to say to anyone searching, the way I once searched, for a funeral poem to read: you are not choosing decoration. You are choosing a load-bearing wall. Our own words that day were wet cardboard. His poem was seasoned timber, cut a century ago by a man who had also watched people he loved turn to smoke, and it took my whole weight and the weight of forty relatives and did not so much as creak.
A eulogy asks you to be strong. A poem only asks you to be present, and carries the strength part itself.
Halfway through, I heard my grandmother's voice join mine. She was reciting from memory, half a beat ahead of me, because of course she knew it, she had heard him mutter it for sixty years, at railway platforms and hospital beds and once, she told me later, on the night their first child was born, whispered to a sleeping infant as a kind of welcome and a kind of warning: what you will see here is unsurpassable.
By the last line, six people were saying it.
The poem had stopped being read and started being ratified.
What the Book Knew
Weeks later, the family divided his things with the gentle greed of grief. I asked only for the Gitanjali. Going through it properly for the first time, I found his marginalia, and the marginalia rearranged my understanding of the man.
Next to the poems about God, nothing. Next to the poems about death, nothing. But next to every poem about waiting, and Tagore has many, the station master had written dates. Just dates, in his railway-precise hand. One of them, beside a verse about a traveller delayed on the road, said 14.8.1947. He would have been eleven, standing on a platform in a Punjab about to be cut in half, waiting, I later learned from my grandmother, for a train carrying his father that took nine days to arrive... and arrived wrong.
He never told us that story with his own words.
He told it with a date in a margin next to another man's poem. Some griefs can only be spoken through borrowed lines, which is, I think, why he loved Verse 96 with three separate pens: it said the unsurpassable thing he could not.
I wrote about him eventually. It took eight months before I could write about the grief instead of around it, and the poem that finally came was about his folded reading glasses, still waiting on the side table like a small dog that does not know. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest mostly so that a stranger somewhere would have to read his name. It did not win... He would have called the judges fools and then cheated me at chess to cheer me up.
The ritual, though, did not end at the crematorium. Every year on his birthday, my grandmother lights a single candle in his room, turns off the tube light, and has me read Verse 96 by the small flame, because she says electric light is for reading timetables and fire is for reading poems. The candle throws the shadow of the book against his wall, huge, twice the size of the window, and for four minutes every June my grandfather's favourite poem is the largest thing in the house.
Last year she asked me to underline the verse a fourth time, on his behalf. "He would want the record kept current," she said, and handed me a green pen, and her hand was steady, and mine was not, and the poem, as always, held.
What I have seen is unsurpassable. Three pens said it, then four.
Someday, I suppose, five. The line is patient. It has learned from the best of us how to wait.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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