Obitury Summery

OBITURY

by A K Ramanujan

 

SUMMARY

The speaker in the poem (who is the poet himself) gives us an account of certain happenings connected with the death of his father. When the father died, he left behind him a dusty table full of papers and some debts to be paid. He also left behind him a number of daughters and an infant grandson who had been named after him by the toss of a coin. Furthermore, he left behind him a house which leaned on a coconut tree growing in the compound, while the coconut tree itself was a leaning one and not growing straight upwards.

 When the father was cremated, the fire easily burnt his body. In the ashes his sons found several bits of metal which they picked up carefully in order to throw them into the water at the meeting point of three rivers (Three rivers Traven at Allahabad - the Gang, the Yamuna, and the invisible Saraswati). They had been directed to do so by the priest performing the various ceremonies. However, the sons did not erect any permanent memorial to the dead man who had made his appearance in this world through a Caesarean operation in a congested Brahmin locality and who had died of heart failure in the local fruit market.

 The speaker (poet himself) says that he had come to know that his father had got a brief obituary notice published in Madras - newspaper through someone to inform people about the death. The speaker expected to come across these lines in the newspapers four weeks later when the newspaper would be sold along with other junk to some street OBITUARY hawker. The street hawker would then sell it to small grocery shops where the speaker bought salt, coriander and jiggery. These were wrapped up by the shopkeeper in newspaper sheets or put into small bags made of old newspapers. Finally, the speaker says that his father's death had produced a profound effect upon his mother. His mother is now a completely changed woman. Moreover, the death of his father had also now made it necessary for the survivors to perform several rituals in the course of every year.