The divine comedy

Pandit: Get some gobar.
Me: Gobar?
Pandit: Gobar.

Up until this point in my life, nobody has asked me to find, collect, and move an animal waste product from one place to another. My life isn’t particularly exceptional, so I would guess that’s a shared experience between you and I. I wanted to ask the pandit a lot more questions, but the atmosphere didn’t seem to agree with the idea.

Did it need to be new or would old work? What consistency is desired, runny or solid? Most importantly, how much?

Without any context as to why, what type, and how much cow poop I was required to present, I put on a pair of my mother’s hair dying gloves and went out. Normally, finding dung in India is not a problem, the problem usually is avoiding it. However, on this fine day in December, I could not find any gobar near my home.

As I circled unsuccessfully farther and farther away from the gate, I noticed a cow turning in the corner of our street. Our eyes met, the cow went through a loading screen, and then she started walking towards me. This is fairly typical, cows are cool and we all feed them often. What the cow didn’t realize was that I was not interested in the start of its digestive process, I was interested in the end.

As the animal approached me, I weighed my options. How exactly am I going to get my hands on the steaming pile of undigested goodness that’s currently inside a living organism? Is it possible to scare a cow into an involuntary bowel movement? Based on my numerous experiences hurtling towards cows in automobiles at double digits speeds, that did not seem likely.

The cow was now within touching distance, and I hadn’t come up with any other ideas. I picked up a stone and gestured as if I was going to throw it at her. Imagine me going through the entire arm movement of throwing a stone. She did not even blink. There we were, standing a few feet apart, neither of us getting what we wanted from the other.

A relative shouted at me from a distance, they had found some gobar, I needed to come back. It was the Kriya Karam ceremony for my mother.

The pandit asked me to add some water to the dung in a container, then mash it all together, and rub the paste on the ground. I did, it was quite an unpleasant experience, you feel the texture between your fingers as the smell overpowers your brain. Pandits, like all religious authorities, expect you to obey without question. I was angry, and weirded out, but it was no use making a scene.

At least I had been trained well for being weirded out over the last few days.

I missed my mother’s funeral. I was in Germany when she died, and even after pulling off the miracle of reaching Delhi within 20 hours of her passing away, in Covid times, I was late by about 2 hours. There were no flights to Chandigarh in the morning, I don’t know why. There were no trains either. I considered renting a motorcycle from Delhi and riding it all the way home to get there sooner, but one funeral was enough.

As we sat in the taxi to home, I kept getting calls from relatives asking me to get to the funeral sooner. I wanted to point out to them that just because my mother had died did not mean that the rules of physics stopped applying to vehicles I was traveling in. I also wanted to remind them that teleportation hadn’t yet been invented. But I did not.

My mother had been suffering from cancer since the last 6 years, I was prepared for the end. What I was not prepared for was the comedy and the frustration of what came afterwards. In hindsight, it was good that I missed the funeral, setting fire to what used to be a person I loved may have pushed me over the edge.

I do not know why we do this to ourselves. I knew there would be some religious stuff to get through after death, but I did not realize that there would be nothing but religious stuff for the next 2 weeks. When a loved one dies, I think the natural reaction is to sit down, talk about them, and remember the good times. Instead, we end up running from one religious ceremony to another like a pinball. It’s sad, and stupid.

One of the most interesting, and the most idiotic results of this culture, is Garud Puran. When we first went to the pandit to arrange for things, he kept insisting that we organize a Garud Puran reading, because everyone does. Both me and my dad were absolutely sure we wanted none of that.

Imagine that your mother is dead, and there’s a dude sitting in your home, telling you about the different ways souls get tortured after death. And you’ll never guess how that torture and pain and suffering can be stopped, by giving stuff to religious authorities around you, wink wink nudge nudge. Yes the Garud Puran contains other stuff too, but this obvious blackmail attempt is all that I’ve ever paid attention to.

We arranged for a simple Gita reading, and while I sat there I thought about what to do with my body after death. Burial seems weird, you’re just there, a few feet underground. Donating your body to science seems like the best bet, but what if the anatomy student dissecting your body fails the exam? Cremation starts out well, there’s little left of you after the fire, but the things we do afterwards take all the fun away.

The morning after I reached home, we went to the cremation ground. I was told that the ceremony is called “Picking Flowers”. You go to the now burnt out pyre, and with your bare hands pick out any fragments of bone left over from the still hot ashes. It is a surreal experience, you see the general shape of what used to be a body, but once you’re through it all you get nothing more than about half a kg of bone splinters. It is fascinating that the fires burn so hot, it is humbling that the human body is so fragile, it is grisly that you find yourself holding what used to be a part of your mother’s knee.

These bone splinters are then taken to Haridwar, where you first search and hunt for your specific pandit in the maze around the ghat, it’s like the worst kind of treasure hunt imaginable. Once found, the pandit makes you sit by the Ganges, takes out the bones, and puts them in your hands once more. This was a week after her death, for the first time it hit me that she was no more, I did not have the time until this moment to process that information.

I sat by the cow dung smeared floor, the pandits kept telling me to do the very important task of moving a piece of cloth from my left to the right shoulder at random times. The Kriya Karam ceremony is also quite interesting, in the weird sense. The pandit keeps referring to your dead relative as a ghost spirit, and that it’ll take them 12 months or something to reach the end. Only once he, the all powerful pandit, refers to them as not a ghost spirit, are they at peace. I do not know if they believe in their own lies, their overconfidence seems to indicate that they do.

The most interesting part of the ceremony however, was when the pandit poured a liquid on my palm and then immediately started shouting at me to drink it quickly. I did not think much of it, liquid on palm stuff is quite common in any temple, but the urgency that the pandit show did make me a bit suspicious. My suspicions came true the moment the liquid touched my lips. It was Gowmutra, cow urine.

In case anyone has any doubts about it, please take my word, Gowmutra tastes bad. If you’ve ever been near a cowshed, imagine that smell, but inside you, inside your nose, your mouth, your throat. I felt it move down my esophagus and into the stomach, the stuff is vile enough to spawn taste buds where they aren’t supposed to exist.

I do not understand the fascination we have with cow waste. Sure cows are awesome, they give milk and meat and leather, and are pretty chill, and cow dung is genuinely useful as a fuel and even a building material. But there’s a slight difference between “cows are awesome”, and “cows are awesome I will not only drink their urine but also make other unsuspecting individuals who never asked to drink their urine drink their urine”.

Perhaps these traditions exist so that you have no time to grieve, and don’t get too sad when you lose a loved one. Perhaps they exist because of some other important socio-economic role that I can’t seem to fathom. Based on my experience, all I can say is that at some point we will have to stop doing stuff just because the people before us did that stuff. Call to ancient wisdom is generally not a great strategy.

More than anything else, I would like to have more control over some of the most important events of my life. My “Punjabi” wedding was a disaster, 2 weeks of torture. Death turned out to be the same, 2 weeks of anger. I would like to do things that I want to do, not be forced into doing things by strangers and distant relatives. There’s little hope that my wish will come true, but one thing is for sure, one way or another, I will not allow my death to become this sad spectacle of pandit flexing.

This piece was originally posted on Team-BHP in January 2022, but was removed by the mods.