Vikram Masson

​After the Funeral

There weren’t many in the funeral home. The hall smelled like jasmine and looked like a chapel. You were done up in a red sari - your skin rouged to hide the pallor of your long sickness. Your son, my cousin, sat on the floor with the Brahmin in the shadow of your oak casket, repeating, as best he could, the mantras. He tried not to well up, I noticed, and once told me at times like this you had to be strong. We all drank coffee and looked on solemnly. Your sister burst into tears.

After, we drove to the suburbs to your son’s house, where held a lunch. I partook of the ancestral dishes, one of garlic cloves doused in tamarind and sesame oil. “These are old recipes,” you said. I started. “Why are you here?” “To help,” you said.

And you carried soft drinks to your children and your friends, but they did not notice you, lost as they were in memories of you. You sat quietly by your disconsolate sister, still spinning with grief. You dusted the Commander’s old medals from the war, then took your hand to his photo and kissed your fingers. You once said you were endlessly drifting long after he died. “Why here and not there,” I wondered. She looked so beautiful, my aunt – her spine straight, her pallor overwhelmed by a radiant red – the blood coursing through her.
 
**
 
Varanasi

After a drink at Prinseps, I decided it was time. I clutched the small bag of father’s remains, his flaky white remnants clouding the plastic. We lumbered in my guide’s van along the narrow, ancient roads. It was a dark, cloud-covered afternoon, but soon the sun bore itself onto the shanties and hordes of pilgrims. “How long have I searched,” I thought.

We disembarked and took a winding gulley – past sadhus begging for alms, fly-ridden tea stalls, and makeshift temples to the goddess, the flare of bright waving lamps erupting through doorways. We waded through the pilgrims, past old women clutching sticks. “They have come to die,” my guide said. We reached the hot still point, reeking of camphor and flames. And there I saw the Manikarnika ghat alive with corpses resting on pyres.

Manikarnika ghat, the granter of moksha, its eternal flames tended by Dalits. I felt the flames summon me, the hot stench of crackling flesh, the Ganges murmuring in the distance, Shiva skipping between charred bones.
 
**
 
At the Psych Ward

Really, I was in love with an insane woman, and you were never going to approve. What, with my disappearances for days, finally coming home reeking of reefer and whisky, I cannot blame you for what you did.

You took me to hakims, pandits and one long-fingered priest, but despite hopeful talks amid wafting censers, nothing worked. So you got me on lithium and put me in the psych ward.

I wore a loose-fitting gown that billowed in the airy hallways. I enjoyed talking to the nurses who called me “sweetie,” who wheeled over my meals - turkey meat loaf or chicken with powdered mash potatoes, always with apple juice in plastic containers with foil lids.

Sometimes I would hear screams, moans, and a cacophony of restless voices from across the hall. “Maybe they live in a different world,” my roommate claimed, who never heard anything.

They let those of us who required no physical restraints to play three-card poker in the evenings. One day, I burst into song because I missed my father. “You sing like Bing Crosby,” one of them said. I blushed as my father is a man who loves old singers.

From the one window I could see the sky painting itself a dusky red while the byroad filled with cars. Oh, the burden of their monotonous low hum, their squawking horns.
 
**
 
Cavafy Indica

I discovered him by chance, after reading one of his poems dangling from a notice board in the university hostel.  Titled “Days of 1905,” it limned a forbidden love.  The students hung it as a provocation.  “An imitation,” I thought, but the turn of phrase in a punchy Indian English, the varied meter, the subtle enjambment, the setting in a parlor at the port of Aden, where bodies lurked, hungry for love, made me long for more. Perhaps now I could go home having discovered something.

I made discreet enquiries and learned that he lived in a small flat in the old Jewish quarter, in the shadow of Magen David Synagogue.  He eyed me from behind his rusting metal door and reluctantly let me enter.  He had thick glasses, a pencil mustache, and white, close-cropped hair.  Along the wall, he kept old books no one reads in India anymore -- Keats and Tennyson, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and Johnson’s Rasselas. He brought tea, reeking of cardamom and asked, “what is poetry, after all?” as he unclasped a blue folder with a sheaf of typewritten poems. 
 
I spent the afternoon reading -- of palace intrigues among the Kanishkas, of the philosophical glories of the Satavahana Empire, of the port of Muziris with swelling mounds of black pepper along the shore, of the colonies in Sri Vijaya shadowed with imposing figures of Siva, and also of boys, so many boys, lolling in the tropical overgrowth, glimpsed shirtless as the wheat stalks swayed in the monsoon wind.  “Extraordinary,” I said. “May I submit a few to small journals?”  “Why?” he asked.  “I ache to bring something new to the world,” I said.  He clasped the folder and handed them to me.  Outside, the first monsoon rumbled in the Arabian sea.  I unclasped the folder triumphantly as I looked for a rickshaw, and to my horror the poems were fading, the whole sheaf turning blank. One page folded into a bird and took flight, fluttering hopelessly as the rain grew thick. 
 
**
 
The Dream
​
And there he lay, hooked to the pulsing monitor that blurted warnings with beeps. The riverine flow of protein wended through the nasogastric tube into his gut. There would be no more joy in food. What’s more, he hadn’t been awake for days, and she, frail herself, sat on the fraying hospital chair, her knees bunched against her chest, weeping, clutching at her prayer beads. 
How it all ends, I thought, a summation of blood, urine, and wasted limbs… what of the man, all his accomplishments? That night at home I slept on a couch and saw his mother, my grandmother, in a dream. She was young and beautiful, draped in a white sari. She stood before me as if posing for a portrait. An auriferous glow framed itself around her. There were other women in the dream’s distance -- giggling softly at each other, cavorting in a rush of hibiscus and peepal trees – but the set only served as an enhancement of her singular beauty. What joy, I thought, as she transmuted from flesh (flesh I swore I could touch, its suppleness and heat) to portrait, fixed forever in the prime of her life: resplendent, eternal.
 
**
 
Vikram Masson writes at the intersection of faith, identity and culture. His work has been featured in TriQuarterly, The Denver Quarterly, Glass, Juked, and Rust + Moth. His chapbook, A Scattering of Voices, is published by Kelsay Books.