Visiting Punjab.

I’m glad I have a friend who doesn’t understand the concept of a ‘dholki’. It was fun, sitting amongst women of different ages as they sang passionately to the beat of the dholak. They sang songs of sorrow and they controlled their laughter as they sang songs with vulgar lyrics. For those forty-five or so minutes they left their kids with under-aged babysitters, stopped noticing how low the neckline of the neighbor’s daughter was, forgot how their husbands hated their cooking, let go of the demeanor their mothers-in-law expected of them and ignored the too-young-pregnant daughter sulking on the sofa. But that’s what usually happens when you marry your daughters off before they even finish college. I doubt she will be able to continue studying now. I was so very jealous that I didn’t know the lyrics to these songs that seemed to free these women. Even the bride’s eighty-three year old grandmother clapped happily and sang along in her crackled voice.

So I explained to this friend that a ‘dholki’ is a slight function where the bride’s close friends and family gather to sing and dance.

Oh yes, they danced. It didn’t seem like I shared blood with these women by the stiff way in which I moved my hips so I was demoted to the role of a DJ. I was sitting a few feet away from the rug that was now a dance-floor to the younger women, but to them I was miles off. They yelled at the top of their lungs to me to pause, play, rewind and switch music as they choreographed very ordinary dance steps and congratulated themselves over them. I started feeling kind of nauseous. Maybe it because of that argument I had with my best friend the night before. I remembered within a few songs that my bitterness was directed at him more than these women who did not think I danced well and these women who yelled at their seven-year-old servants for not being able to handle their over-weight and stubborn brats. I guess it was directed at my best friend and the lack of consideration these women had for my eardrums. They moved around to the beats of various Indian songs laughing, giggling and skilfully. I envied them a little.

‘What is a Mehndi then?’ he asked me.

‘’Picked his bones in whispers’’

This line is lovely when taken out of context. Not in context mind you. The stark realization of the utter meaninglessness of life Eliot brings about me is not all that lovely. The lapses of meaninglessness anyway; but out of context death by water seems so very gentle and kind. Whispers. Whispers may be the most lovely (not loveliest) form of verbal communication. Whispers to me at this point in my life are not panicked or fearful. They are secretive and warm; exchanges between lovers containing words that make no sense to others. If they do make sense, they do not make the right sense. Hence they are not spoken but whispered.

Perhaps the water could pick the flesh off your bones in minuscule portions, so slight that you do not notice their absence. Maybe the pain can come in such gentle portions that you do not notice its presence. Perhaps death can be masked by the sound of small-river waves (very unlike sea-waves) crashing against fishing boats or even each other during a certain kind of wind. Maybe the variances in the wind and thus the sound of the water can distract you as your body transitions into a corpse.

 And what of you entering the river the right amount of hours before a full moon?  And not just any full moon, the especially eerie full moon that has a tinge of yellow. I do not know how long it takes the river to erode a human body, but wouldn’t it be so beautiful if your body surfaced just as the moon shone completely? Oh how it would wash out the paleness on the few remaining morsels of your flesh, your teeth exposed into an ill-placed grin (due to the gentility with which the river picked your bones), turn the raw reds and purples into mere lilacs and soft pinks. 

For the record the line is from T.S. Eliot's Waste Land.