Amma has moved to an Apartment !


September 27th 2009 will remain a day when I felt 'orphaned'.....for my Amma died that day. September 29th will be remain for ever a day to reflect over 'internment'. I had never been at the demise and Christian burial of any of my dear ones. Not my grand parents nor my father. They were buried six feet deep by the time I could arrive home, from my place of work. Bereavement, therefore meant to me that, I missed the departed dear ones and just went about wondering at the phenomenon of death as an event that made people just vanish from sight without a trace.

Amma 'moved on' rather differently. She arrived home from a hospital a hundred kilometers away in a refrigerated glass-top casket in the dark and rainy early morning of 29th September, before any one in the
village of Eraviperur was awake. She wore a 'Kasavu' sari and her head was hooded by gold brocaded sari ‘pallu’. She looked smaller than what she looked to me all her life. For nearly forty years ( ever since I left home in search of a career ), she received me at my ancestral house when I returned home year after year, with cries of joy and complaining about my arriving later than she expected. That day I did the ‘receiving’, and she was silent. And I wept.

But such arrival in casket and dressed in ‘saaree’ are not unusual. What was unusual ( for me) was the way she got interned. No six feet grave was dug, and no wet soggy soil was dumped on her body. From home to Church and from there, after prayers by a Bishop assisted by a few Priests she went to the Cemetery on our shoulders and entered her new abode.....the top left 'cabin' of the 'Shankara-Mangalam' family Vault. Volt-Number-ONE. She being the sixth occupant of the same vault. She has eight other neighbours, (vaults), in the 10 feet tall multi-storied building.

The vault's shutter was closed, by her two sons, in the presence of close family members and priests. And Amma is there sleeping just as I have seen her in her room in my ancestral home. Except that this time she is a bit over-dressed for bed-time.

This time she slept through during Christmas. First time in my life, she did that.

Today is 1st of January 2010.....and I know I can go and open the shutter and see my Amma, touch her, if I really wanted to. She will not be smiling as usual, but she will be there all the same. That is not what I could say if she were buried six feet deep in a grave.

The spirit and life-force that drove Amma, I never saw any way from the day I was born to her at her age of 20. All I saw, loved, hugged, laughed-with, ate-with, wrote letters to, talked on phone with, travelled on holidays to, and maintained my invisible umbilical cord with, for sixty years, was HER BODY. And that is still there !! No
Wonder, in the long past, bodies were preserved and kept.

I really do not know if 'spirits' continue to exist after death or 'soul' goes to heaven, or to "The Mansions" that Christ said existed. But for me Amma meant her physical form, especially her smiling face and caring hands. I am here in flesh, because she existed in flesh.

And now I live, and often saying to myself: "Amma is there in her room I can go and see her any time I want ". That is comforting for me. I will see what happens to Soul , when I become a spirit. I hope I get a vault near hers, as there are nine of them, which get occupied in turn. We will then talk about small things and laugh big time till our sides ache; like old times, till she she says usual, “ stop it son, I am going breathless with laughter”........... My Amma has moved in to an apartment.