When someone passes away, while the method of the last rite varies for each religion, most of them have the person being carried by 4 people. Whenever the thought of death crosses my mind, I think of a movie called “Aa Naluguru” that I watched in Telugu. It has a track that runs throughout the movie with different lyrics capturing a different emotion around life and death
There are some lines from those songs written by Chaitanya Prasad that have always stayed with me
Maranamanedhi khayamani (A person dying is for sure)
migilenu keerthi khayamani (his fame staying after him is sure)
Nee baruvu nee paruvu mosedhi…… (his weight and his dignity are borne by)
Aa naluguru… Aa naluguru… (Those four... Those four...)
Aa naluguru… Aa naluguru… (Those four... Those four...)
Naluguru nedu padhuguriga (Those four are now tens)
padhuguru velu vandhaluga (Those tens are now hundreds and thousands)
Nee venake anucharulai nadichaaru… (They walked like disciples behind you)
While I heard this and it felt thought provoking, I never felt the true weight of these words until I went to the funeral of Wendell Rodricks some years ago. I was fortunate to have been on the receiving side of his warmth for a small time when we were trying to collaborate with him for an event. Unfortunately he passed away before it came to life. I went to his last rites in a small village at a Chapel in Goa. What I saw is when those words in the song fully came to bear for me. That chapel and that village were flocked with people who had come to say their goodbyes, not just from across Goa but people who weren’t his relatives traveling from Delhi and Mumbai just for this
I keep wondering how the meaning of death will keep changing for people particularly in cities and even more with nuclear families as the encounter with death and the emotions around it keep getting pushed to a later stage in life. What the delayed encounter does to us as a society is one question. What it does to us when death arrives suddenly, in some calamity, with no time pushed back at all, is another. Both are still to be seen.