On Death and Petty Minds Commandeering It
I was a 26-year-old teacher in a Kashmiri English medium school just before 9/11 in 2001, in Srinagar when a 14-year-old grade ninth boy asked me who would bury me when I died. The discussion had been about critical thinking and how religious myths, folklore, and superstitions couldn’t be taken as revealed scriptures and how metaphorical stories were not to be taken literally. I was perplexed to answer the boy then, but over the decades since then, I have often placed this question at the centre of the social context of a society not inclined to read, introspect, reason, reflect or think. Today I have an answer for that boy - the world was so big, Mother Earth is so kind, there are enough humans with goodwill to not let ideological differences come in between decency and values; I have grown mature enough to arrange my funeral arrangements as per my humanistic and secular wishes.
This shows how much tribal affiliations, the fear of what people will think, the status of the individual and respect for the family after death too, govern the Muslim mind which is discouraged to ask questions. Since then I have seen families, extended relations, peers, acquaintances, friends, and colleagues, driven in life mostly by this one factor — show. It automatically means focusing on the material and consumerism reigning supreme in elite and middle-class households with an “image” to maintain. Never mind the bulldozing of individual rights, sensibilities, creativity, originality or innovation. Everyone is copying everyone else.
It took some time to understand cancelling out other Muslims from Islamic heritage, if they did not conform to the stereotype of believing Muslims was known as takfirism and the Salafi / Wahabbi schools of puritanical Islam had developed this phenomenon among South Asian Muslims particularly, the most close-minded to change, reform and revisionism. Now that Tarek Fatah, Canadian writer, broadcaster, and political activist, born in Pakistan but calling himself an Indian has died, I see the same takfirism displayed across social media and real life. That people were actually advocating for not giving him a burial in Muslim graveyards showed how much the close-minded Muslims wanted control over death too, crossing all civilised behaviour and thought.
It didn’t matter that Islamists were all against his criticism of radical political Islam and how elite Muslims had hijacked the Prophet’s message and allowed the mullahs their tyrannical reign; the disappointment was seeing articulate, rational, critical-thinking Muslims also berate him for his stand in solidarity with Jews and Hindus. Tarek always stood against the disinformation and anti-Semitic and anti-Hindu networks and their campaigns and this was labelled as turning a “Saffron” bigot by those very rational Muslims who proclaimed getting Islam away from the hands of extremists, radicals and Islamists.
It was always amusing for me since childhood to see the hold that Muslim households try over their members’ lives — their dress, their diet, their habits, even their thoughts, their influences and what they read or don’t. This obsession for control over every minute of our lives especially the girls and women is something very few people outside the fold of Islam understand though they do see it all their lives. Political correctness made it impossible for non-Muslims to intervene when this need for control crossed into crime and violation of human rights such as honour killings. Eventually, apologia, the alliance of Left-Liberals with Islamists choked whatever space could be created to call out this obsession for control and the term Islamophobia was invented to shut down any well-meaning criticism by Muslims themselves too.
Death is not new to my generation, having seen it on the streets of Srinagar in our teens and youth in the three-decade-long proxy war by Pakistan, using our Kashmiri men and child soldiers to wage war against the Indian Army. As time ran out for our parents and unfortunate early deaths occurred of young men and women through the traumatic effects of the proxy war, death became something to look forward to and prepare with the knowledge of the inevitable. It was in fact fulfilling to live life as if every single moment was the last. It made me grounded in the present, forgiving the past, not worrying about a future I couldn’t control but thoroughly living in the moment, creating beautiful experiences with my only child.
Death is not far from my mind, happy in the thought that the sun will rise and set after I am gone, that the trees will be green, the rivers will flow in their melody, that the birds will sing, and the flowers will bloom, that animals will keep flourishing in their habitats, and the greatest show on earth (nature) will keep going on even as my cells turn to ashes or dust, back to the materials the stars are made of. It doesn’t matter if I burn on a pyre or am buried or donated to science, what matters is if in death I will be able to help another human being with whatever can be salvaged from my body. The boy who had laughingly asked me the question in 2001, along with the grins, smug expressions and smiles of his peers will hopefully hear of my death and know that I didn’t worry about heaven or hell or what happens to me after I draw my last breath.
For the sake of sanitation, the body will have to be disposed of, my child has instructions on how, and as far as my understanding of science goes, that is it — there is nothing beyond. No one ever came back from the dead to narrate his or her experiences. The cases of near-death experiences which I have been following since I could read haven’t given any conclusive proof of all that every religious scripture in the world guarantees, though it has been close to a half-century. We don’t really know what happens to the consciousness, though in our self-grandiosity and ego we would love to believe in life after death and reincarnation. I have willed my mind to believe in spirits, only to see Arshid one more time, but try as I may, even though through dreams, some uncanny instances and unexplained coincidences, my being hasn’t been convinced of his lingering soul, watching over us.
All those people who dismissed me all my life and often foretold I wouldn’t amount to much or gain acceptance forgot the vastness of the world, the diversity that exists among humans and how acceptable nature and the Earth is. Everyone finds their place, and everyone is accepted by the trees, the seeds, the rivers, the seas, and even the skies. No one is judged and discarded like the concept of heaven and hell has ingrained itself in the minds of people convinced of a day of judgement and how our actions will be gauged. Till the last breath, every single being has the earth, just six feet of it to stand or lay on. After death, it doesn’t matter, though enough people will come together to pick up the body and dispose it off according to what the individual wished or followed — Dharmic, Abrahamic, scientific, agnostic or atheist rituals. The Covid pandemic was evidence of this in India where people came together to give dignity to the dead, irrespective of class, creed and caste, even though the vulture activists used the funeral pyre pictures for their anti-India agenda.
The pettiness of people thinking they control death, or for that matter lives, destinies, luck, and time, only magnifies their understanding of life and death, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, even God or gods, Goddesses, Being, Infinity, the Universe, etc. I can only conclude — people forget everyone’s destination is the same irrespective of how they lived their lives and who they believed in or didn’t believe in. Death is the only permanence, the only common thing to all species — mammals, flora, fauna, tissues, cells, materials, etc. To think of deciding on death, or opining about it can only be the ignorance of an inflated ego and mind.
