Bharat. My father’s name is synonymous with India’s traditional name, which in turn comes from one of India’s earliest kings. It’s a good name for him; he was kingly in his own way. Even as as a tumor ravaged his brain, he maintained his dignity and loving nature. In the hospital in Houston, a nurse asked him when his birthday was to test cognition. He immediately replied,”September 15, 1954.” Although that’s my mother’s birthday, it tells you what was important to him.
It’s harshly ironic to me that I am doing my father’s death ceremony in my mother country. It’s five in the morning here at the shore of the Ganges River, and the water numbs my bare feet as I immerse them. My feet turn pale, and my blue veins resemble rivers in a white desert.
My brother, Kunal, is suffering the same. The Sanskrit mantras barely squeeze through his chattering teeth. As soon as the puja is over, we escape the icy water and limp to the car. As we near the parking lot, the insulated serenity of the riverbank gives way to a line of street stalls. Most of the vendors sleep beneath their stalls on sleeping bags, sharing mutual fires to fight the cold. They sell everything from jewelry to shirts, rosaries to hot tea.
Kunal and I stop at a tea stand. The tea scalds my tongue, but I don’t care. The stream of fire travels down my throat and to chest, where my heart pumps the heat through my chilled veins. It’s a temporary relief, and I’m tempted to thaw my frozen feet with the boiling beverage.
About 100 feet to my right, I notice an elderly man standing with his feet in the river. The man is terribly thin, and his clothes resemble rags, but as he stands erect facing the rising sun with clasped hands, he resembles a saint. With no warning, he dives into the water. My brother and I simultaneously cringe as the man rises to the surface. Although the man is hyperventilating from the cold, he acts as if he’s in a hot-tub. He runs his hands through his hair and sings devotional songs through his halting breaths. If serenity was person, it would be that man.
Kunal. My brother’s name means lotus. When I imagine a lotus, I think of something thin and tenuous. That wasn’t my brother. He was more like a solid oak, but his ashes don’t retain those qualities. They curve and bend with the ripples and eddies of a small river in the city of Gondal in west India.
The same priest who performed by grandfather’s ash ceremony does it for my brother. He’s old and has a bad leg, so he uses a red scooter to get around. However, his laugh is of someone much younger, and he guns his old scooter like it’s a Harley. When I look at the priest, I’m reminded of the man my brother and I saw bathing in the Ganges three years ago. The priest and that man share a longevity that I’ve never seen.
I’m not speaking of longevity in the sense of life-span. I’m talking about the endurance of vitality. The children of “Bharat Mata”, or “Mother India”, as we are so fond of saying, display that same energy. My father brought it over with him to America, and it took him through many surgeries, economic depressions, and racial persecutions. And then he handed that hardiness off to Kunal and I.
India fosters that sense of bravery, that need to fight for one’s goals. Now that my father and brother are gone, it’s my turn to carry the torch forward. One day my children will return to India, for my final rites, and they will find something new. They will find an energy, an almost spiritual need to keep fighting through adversity. Maybe it’s something in the air.
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