Back to the cemetery

With Halloween within ear shot, and this whole talk about ghouls, geeps and ghosties, I’d like to brush up a little bit on the boarding platform to the graveyard i.e., the funeral. Which when you look at in perspective, is plays a vital role in the whole ‘I am dead and should have passed on to the afterlife but I am still here trying to scare your undies into a knot’ thing. 

Here in Sri Lanka, we've got several ways of making our last trip depending (mostly) on our religion, beliefs and all around bearings. There’s method a)  where we ‘go up in fiery blaze and have our ash collected in a jar and then there’s  b) where we ‘lie calmly under the earth for all eternity’.

A) Going up in a fiery blaze

B) Lying peacefully under cemetery shrubbery

To me, funerals are a messy affair. Firstly, there’s that whole thing of someone being dead, that usually bugs most folk but I, in particular get completely unhinged by the entire function. It had to be thanks to that one time in my early teen years (usually when most events leave a sort of scarring affect) that the unhinging effects of a funeral had left its emotional toll on me.

I don’t even remember the particulars but from what I recall, it had not been the most normal-est of funeral experiences for yours truly. Upon arriving at the three storied parlor, we made our way towards the coffin with glum expressions and solemn head noddings only to find that the body was not of the relation we thought had passed but of some random person who happened to have their funeral on the same day. ~awkward~ is what anybody would think but that’s not all.

Tragedy number two strikes on the same day even after we managed to locate the funeral we were supposed to be at, when I close in on the coffin to  pay my last respects. Apparently, one is supposed to stand next to the coffin and remember the good ol’ days and memories of the individual and send telepathic good vibes to the person or some such. Instead I involuntarily decide to trip on the carpet and tumble head over heels onto the coffin of afore mentioned dead individual. I didn’t fall in completely, but my upper torso was inside the coffin with above *cough* person. An aunty in the vicinity, who had seen my unintentional dive into the coffin, fished me out from the scruff of my neck.

Imagine trying your level best to eternally rest in peace and then having me fall on you in your death bed. Not the most pleasant of thoughts, trust me.

Getting back to the cemetery story. One thing we would all like to know from the curator at a cemetery is, that have they in fact, ever experienced any form of supernatural, unworldly entity during their time at the cemetery? Which is what I asked curator at the Dehiwala Public Cemetery. Sorry to have to disappoint you folks, but apparently that’s a negative. 

During his entire career as a cemetery keeper, not once in all his eleven years has he ever seen anything that opposes the theory that a graveyard holds nothing but lifeless corpses. Nope, nothing, nul, niche.  Not so much as a visage of an old granny walking amidst the graves looking for her missing cat. Folk who work there make up stories about giant black dogs, fog shadows and silhouettes of white sarongs of course. Which are pretty cool too, cuz everybody thinks it’s true coming out of the horse’s mouth, but  unfortunately for us, they are all made up. (There is an in-house dog at the cemetery too and perhaps she triggered the dog ghost idea. This doggie had followed her master to his final place of rest and never left.)

However there had been an incident that involved a late night culprit throwing stones that had occurred just the night before. Beggars and drug addicts sometimes take shelter inside the cemetery premises. The drug addicts are of course not welcome by the police who raid the cemetery to catch them.

The following descriptions might be a wee little disturbing for the faint of heart. And even to the newly deceased. Feelings of being violated may be felt. Nonetheless, it is all true.

At a cemetery during a funeral, you see the entire coffin disappear under a mound of earth right? Again, sorry to disappoint you but it is not the case. After a few days of every-grieving-one going home, the coffin is dug out again and the body is removed of its polythene wrapping for ease of decomposition. Under all the neat cloths you see worn by a dead body is a sheet of polythene that helps the lifeless body look pretty and rigid and keep the juices from not dripping everywhere during an open casket funeral. This sheet has to come off  if the body is to successfully decompose. The dudes at the cemetery (bless their brave souls and limbs) gotta dig it up, remove the polythene off the dead body, burn the polythene and put it back in. The wood rots away eventually and the body returns to where it belongs.

All this digging and burying also shifts everything underneath. Meaning, after some time the tomb stone you visit to put flowers or stand silently by probably has someone else’s dearly beloved underneath it. (Again, sorry to disappoint you. This is turning out to be an article of one disappointment after the other but come to think of it, what’s not disappointing about death, huh? Above is where we are taught the philosophical idea to ‘let go’ at least after one’s passing of physical beings comes in, but that’s a story for another time)

For the newly past tensed folk, there is also the threat of your ash being stolen after your body is burnt to a crisp for hooniyan purposes. Pirith pan is splashed over the ashes to prevent nasty relatives, annoyed siblings, or budale-not-written-to-me spouses from stealing your ash and cursing the smithereens out of your poor unfortunate soul which doesn’t even have the luxury or the peace of mind even after death. The cemetery makes certain that it does not happen. Only pre-informed well-wishers of the deceased get to take a jar of ashes home. So if any and all of the above mentioned three types comes sneaking in the dead of night to steal your ash offa the pit, sorryma thama, but blessed ashes will not do the trick.

Cremation happens unless in special cases such as court/criminal cases where the cemetery is by law prohibited from doing anything to the body, sometimes for decades until the court case is over so that if the body’s cause of death or whatever, needs to be reexamined and autopsied for new evidence etc, they can do so with only natural decomposition to tackle.

The curator was also kind enough to rid me of my fear of having eaten Mac Donald just before entering the cemetery. It is popular myth that one must not eat oily food or meat before entering the gates of the graves but the curator shrugged it off and admits to having fried chicken with lunch on that particular day itself. He as a principal doesn’t eat pork or beef  so I guess he wouldn’t know for certain if the myth is fact. The laborers however, gorge on whatever meat they please even inside the cemetery where their quarters are at.

Strolling down the endless rows of tomb stones, here are some things I learnt.

Cemetery 101

·         There is no such map or order of burial in the five and half acre land that is home to more than thousands of bodies since its inception in 1930 . To bury a body in the cemetery one must make a payment to the Municipal Council; Rs 510 if the individual is a resident inside the municipal boarders and Rs 2040 if not. For the dara saya or stack of wood for burning they charge something like Rs 3000.

·         In the days of yore, people were allowed to allocated and buy off plots of land for family burials paying only Rs 60 for the deed (that’s right, sixty rupees, we can’t even buy a potted plant, let alone an entire place for our lifeless bodies to rest) which is still valid by the way. (bit like eternal cemetery monopoly, me thinks). But now of course, people can’t buy land for personal burials from the cemetery (unless they buy it off someone else who already has dibs on cemetery plots. Funeral plots come with price tags of about four laks a plot i.e. a 6 by 5 feet area, mind you)

·         A body is not kept in the cemetery for more than one and a half years it seems (unless in special cases where they are asked not to lay a finger on it) but are moved to make room for the incoming residents. (They make special markings on that type of graves so that they don’t disturb it too much.)

·         To store ash jars at the cemetery there is a ‘wall of ash’ so to speak, arranged in three horizontal rows stacked one above the other where one can keep a picture of the deceased and the jar of ash. Each compartment going up for prices ranging from Rs 25,000, 35,000 and 45,000 onwards. People usually just take pictures of the picture and the jar stacked neatly next to all its new tenant buddies apparently. (Facebook cover pictures, anyone?)

'wall of ash'

A statue of a war veteran next to the wall of ash

With that being said, let me conclude my findings of the visit to the cemetery by sincerely apologizing for any dampening of hearts and feelings by any way of the lightheartedness of this article. I do not wish to disrespect anyone, living or dead, in any way. Just bracing us living folk by laying the facts in a simple, less depressing menu for easy digestion. After all, we’re talking death here. Might as well add a bit of cheeriness to the whole no-longer-living thing. 

Till next week, cheerios! Have hauntingly boooootiful week ahead!.

Far left corner is the cremation area

See the man bent over a pit? 

digging of graves 

That foot visible on the right edge is an actual foot of a living person. i.e. a laborer who was digging the earth. But in reality, they do unearth parts of dead people.  

A resident crow. I thought it looked quite ominous since crows are the messengers of the undead or some such. 

   

Flowers grown on top of tombs. I thought that was kinda cute. and thoughtful.
At least they planted some sort of tree. 

That there is not paranormal fog. It is but the smoke of a burning coffin.

A scary looking dead tree

The new vs the old. - The neighborhood around the cemetery consists of modern buildings with people who don't  much mind sharing scenaries with a cemetery.