Pyre.
FROM Granta.
My mother died in Patna on January 7, 2014. We cremated her two days later on the banks of the Ganga at Konhara Ghat near Patna, more than 150 miles downriver from the burning ghats of Benares, where Hindus have cremated their dead since at least the middle of the first millennium BCE. I took notes. During the long fourteen-hour flight to India I dealt with my sorrow by writing in my notebook a brief obituary for a Hindi newspaper that Ma read each morning. I was paying tribute. But once I had arrived in Patna, my reasons for note-taking became more complicated. Grief makes you a stranger to yourself, and I was struck by this person that I saw pierced with loss. I was taking notes so that I could remember who I was in those days following my mother"s death.
A Hindu cremation is usually held on the day of the death. In Ma"s case, there was an inevitable delay. She had wanted me to be the one who lit her funeral pyre, but I live in New York; I had boarded a direct flight to Delhi and then taken another plane to Patna. It was evening on the next day by the time I reached there. My family had tried to spare me from distress and hadn"t told me that Ma had already died; but, unknown to them, before I left home I"d received a message on Facebook from a distant relative offering condolences. A large crowd stood in the dark outside our house and no one moved or spoke when I arrived. In the parlorlike s.p.a.ce on the ground floor of our house, my father sat on a sofa with other males whom I didn"t immediately recognize. I touched my father"s feet and he said something about my luck in getting a quick connecting flight from Delhi. I stepped further inside. My two sisters were sitting on a mattress next to a metal box, their faces looking swollen; I embraced them, and when I did that the other women in the room, seated on chairs pushed against the wall, began to wail.
A white sheet and strings of marigolds covered the rectangular box, but at its foot the renting company had painted in large letters in Hindi: EST. 1967 PHONE 2219692. At first I thought the aluminum box was connected to an electrical outlet, but later I found out that the box had s.p.a.ce along its sides that had been packed with ice. A square gla.s.s window on its cover allowed a view of Ma"s face. Her head was resting on a thin yellow pillow with a red flower print. Bits of cotton had been stuffed into her nostrils.
An older cousin took me to another room and told me that the cremation would be held the next morning. I was asked if I wanted to get my head shaved at the ghat just before the ceremony or if I"d prefer to visit a barber"s in the morning and be spared the sting of the winter cold. I chose the latter. There could be no cooking fire in the house till the body had been cremated, and a simple vegetarian meal was brought from a relative"s house. When most of the visitors had left for the night, my elder sister, whom I call Didi, said that the casket needed to be filled with fresh ice. A widowed aunt remarked that we should remove any jewelry from Ma because otherwise the doms at the burning ghat, the men from the supposedly untouchable caste who built the pyre and were the custodians of the whole ceremony, would simply s.n.a.t.c.h it away. They didn"t care, she said, and would just tear the flesh to rip off the gold. It was their right.
Ma"s nose stud came off easily enough, but the earrings were a problem. Her white hair was wrapped around the stud; using a pair of scissors, I cut the hair, but the earrings seemed stuck to the skin. My younger sister struggled with one of them and I with the other. I didn"t succeed, and someone else had to complete the task. At one point I found myself saying it was better to use surgical scissors right then so that we didn"t have to watch Ma"s ears torn by other hands. Didi said of the doms, using an English term borrowed from her medical books, "For them, it is just a cadaver." I was unsettled but understood that the doms were also reflecting an understanding that was drawn from deep within Hinduism: once the spirit has departed from the body, what remains is mere matter, no different from the log of wood on which it is placed. There was maybe a lesson in this for us, that we discard our squeamishness about death, but I felt a great tenderness as I looked down at my mother in that metal box. I caressed her cheeks. They felt cold to the touch, and slightly moist, as if even in death she had kept up her habit of applying lotion. A thin line of red fluid, like betel juice, glistened between her lips.
Having touched Ma"s body, I also felt I should wash my hands. I went up to her room. Over the past couple of hours there had been the comfort of shared tears, but now I was alone for the first time. In the room where I had last seen my mother alive and quite well, only a few months earlier, her walking stick was leaning against the wall. Her saris, whose smell would have been familiar to me, hung in the cupboard. Next to the bed were the two pairs of her white sneakers equipped with Velcro straps for her arthritic hands. Standing in front of the bathroom sink, it occurred to me that the bar of Pears soap in the blue plastic dish was the one that Ma had put there just before she died. My first notes in Patna were about these items, which appeared to me like memorials that I knew would soon disappear.
My sisters and I slept that night on mattresses spread on the floor around the aluminum box. On waking up after perhaps four hours of sleep, I saw that my younger sister was awake, sitting quietly with her back to the wall, looking vacant and sad. Under the light of a bulb near a side door, visible through the gla.s.s, stood a man with a scarf wrapped around his head. It took me a minute to recognize him. He was from our ancestral village in Champaran and had been a servant in our house in Patna when I was a boy. He had traveled through the night with fresh bamboo that would be used to make the bier on which, according to custom, Ma"s body would be carried out of the house and put on the funeral pyre.
When the sun came out after an hour, the rosebushes in the garden were only half visible through the fog, and the fog was still there on the water when we arrived at the river around noon.
That morning, while my sisters were washing Ma"s body in preparation for the funeral, my father and I went to get our heads shaved. Papa asked the barber the name of his village; it turned out that the barber"s village and ours were in the same district. My father knew a politician from the barber"s village. The radio was playing Hindi songs. Zulfein teri itni ghani, dekh ke inko, yeh sochta hoon . . . Maula mere Maula mere. The barber was a small, dark man with a limp. He was extremely polite to my father, listening quietly while he talked about inflation and the changes in the economy. At one point my father said that when he started life in Patna, he could buy a chicken for ten rupees and that now it would be difficult to get an egg for that amount.
I listened to what my father was saying with a rising sense of annoyance. I thought he was being pedantic when I wanted him to be sad-but why exactly? So that I could write down fragments of sentences in a little notebook? I began to see that Papa too was finding comfort by writing his own story of loss. There can be so much pathos in accounting. All the dumb confusion and wild fear of our lives rearranged in tidy rows in a ledger. One set of figures to indicate birth, and another set for death: the concerted attempt to repress the accidents and the pain of the period in between. Entire lives and accompanying histories of loss reduced to neat numbers. My father, with his phenomenal memory, was doing what he knew how to do best. He was saying to everyone in the room that everything had changed but the past was still connected to the present, if only through a narrative about changes in the price of eggs and chicken.
Ma"s body had been taken out of the aluminum box by the time Papa and I returned home. Her fingernails and toenails were painted red. She was now draped in a pink Banarasi organza sari and a burgundy shawl with tiny silver bells and a shiny gold pattern of leaves. There were bright new bangles on her arm. Minutes before we left for the burning ghat, my father was brought into the room where Ma"s adorned body lay on a stretcher on the floor. He was asked to put orange sindoor in the parting of Ma"s hair, repeating the act he had performed on the day he married her. Papa was sobbing by now, but he was asked to repeat the gesture thrice. Then all the women in the family, many of them weeping loudly, took turns rubbing the auspicious powder in Ma"s hair.
When we were in the car, driving to the Ganga for the cremation, Didi said that my mother was lucky. At her death, Ma had been dressed up in new clothes. Papa had put sindoor on her head, signifying that they were getting married again. Ma was going out as a bride. Had my father died first, none of this would have happened. If Ma were still living, sindoor would have been wiped away from her head. She would be expected to wear white. The women from the family who were now wailing would still be wailing, but if Ma were the widow, these women would have had the task of breaking all the bangles on her wrist before Papa"s corpse was taken out of the house.
As I listened to my sister, I understood that even in the midst of profound grief it was necessary to find comfort. One needed solace. It was possible to hold despair at bay by imagining broken bangles and the destiny that my mother had escaped. I would have found the sight of my mother"s bare arms unbearable.
I left India nearly three decades ago, and would see my mother for only a few days each year during my visits to Patna. Over the past ten or fifteen years, her health had been declining. She suffered from arthritis and the medicines she took for it had side effects, and sometimes my phone rang with news that she"d fallen asleep in the bathroom or had a seizure on the morning after she had fasted during a festival. I knew that one day the news would be worse and I would be asked to come to Patna. I was fifty years old and had never before attended a funeral. I didn"t know what was more surprising, that some of the rituals were new to me or that they were exactly as I had imagined. That my mother"s corpse had been dressed as a bride was new and disconcerting, and I"d have preferred a plainer look; on the other hand, the body placed on the bamboo bier, its canopy covered with an orange sheet of cotton, was a familiar daily sight on the streets of my childhood. In my notebook that night I noted that my contribution to the funeral had been limited to lighting my mother"s funeral pyre. In more ways than one, the rituals of death had reminded me that I was an outsider. There were five hundred people at the shraadh dinner. I only knew a few of them. I wouldn"t have known how to make arrangements for the food or the priests. Likewise for the shamiana, the community hall where the dinner was held, the notice in the newspapers about the shraadh, even the chairs on which the visitors sat.
There is a remarkable short story by A.K. Ramanujan called "Annayya"s Anthropology" in which the Kannada protagonist, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, makes a terrible discovery while looking at a book in the library. The book is by an American anthropologist whose fieldwork had been done in India; the pictures in the book from Annayya"s hometown appear familiar to him. One of the photographs ill.u.s.trates a Hindu cremation, and Annayya recognizes in the crowd a cousin who owns a photography studio. This is a picture that appears to have been taken in Annayya"s own home in Mysore. The cousin, whose name is Sundararaya, is mentioned in the book"s foreword. When Annayya looks more carefully at the corpse in the photograph, he sees that it is his father on the pyre. Ramanujan was making a point about the discipline of anthropology, about the ironies of our self-discoveries in the mirror of Western knowledge, but the story tugs at the immigrant"s dread that distance will prevent his fulfillment of filial duty.
I had been luckier than Annayya. I had been able to speak to Didi in Patna when Ma was taken to a hospital on the night she died. On WhatsApp, on my phone, a text came from my sister later in the evening, a.s.suring me that Ma was doing better. Then came the call about my flight timings. While the use of social media also meant that I got the news of my mother"s death from a near stranger on Facebook, it was also true that technology and modern travel had made it quite easy for me to arrive in Patna in less than twenty hours to cremate my mother. During the prayer ceremonies a priest told me that the reason Hindu customs dictated a mourning period of thirteen days was that it used to take time for all the relatives to be informed and for them to travel to the home of the deceased. But this, he said, putting his hand on his ear, is the age of the mobile phone.
At the ghat, the smoke from the funeral fires mixed with the lingering fog of the winter afternoon. An advance party organized by a cousin"s husband had pitched a small shamiana on the bank and arranged a few red plastic chairs next to it. Above the din, a tuneless bhajan played on a loudspeaker. In the crowd, I was led first in one direction and then another. My movements were restrained because of what I was wearing; according to custom, my body was wrapped in two pieces of unst.i.tched cotton. My freshly shaven head was bare. I saw that Ma"s body had already been put on the pyre. There was such a press of strangers, many of them beggars and curious children, that I had to ask people loudly to move back. Ma lay on heavy logs and a bed of straw, but the priest directed me to pile thinner firewood over the rest of the body. Other family members joined me, adding sticks in the shape of a tent over the corpse.
Ma"s face had been left bare. Now the priest told me to put five pieces of sandalwood near my mother"s mouth. Some of the sindoor that had been put in Ma"s hair had scattered and lodged in her eyebrows and on her eyelids. The dom who would give me the fire had an X-shaped plaster stuck on his right cheek. He had a dark face and his eyes were bloodshot. His head was wrapped in a brown-and-blue m.u.f.fler to protect him from the cold; he wore jeans and a thin black jacket and he had about him an air of insouciance that would have bothered my mother, but I liked him. His presence was somehow rea.s.suring, or real, because he was outside the circle of our grief and yet the main doer. He was solemn, but he certainly wasn"t sober; his very casualness brought a quotidian touch to the scene, and he accentuated this by haggling about his payment. A maternal uncle"s son stood behind me, repeating for my benefit the priest"s instructions-this cousin of mine, a few years older than I, had cremated his son recently. The boy had pa.s.sed away after his liver stopped working, the result of an allergic reaction to medicines that have reportedly been banned outside India. The priest told me to sprinkle gangajal again-the endless act of purification with what is in reality polluted water-before the dom lit a bundle of tall straw for me. Three circles around the pyre. Then followed the ritual that is called mukhaagni. I understood suddenly why the priest had given me the five pieces of sandalwood, the size of small Snickers bars, to put near my mother"s mouth. In that moment, while performing mukhaagni inadequately, inefficiently, even badly, in my grief and bewilderment, the thought pa.s.sed through my mind: Is this why my mother had wanted me present at her death? Mukhaagni-in Sanskrit, mukha is "mouth" and agni is "fire"-means in practice that the male who is closest to the deceased, often the son, sometimes the father, and in some cases, I imagine, the husband, puts fire into the mouth of the person on the pyre.
A cremation on a riverbank in India is by its very nature public, but usually the only mourners present are men. In our case, my sisters and other younger women from the family had accompanied Ma"s body. When I turned from the pyre I saw my sisters standing at the edge of the circle. I went to them and put my arms around their shoulders. The flames had risen at once and they hid Ma"s body behind an orange curtain. Soon there were fewer people standing around the pyre and the older men, my father"s friends, began to settle down on the plastic chairs at a distance of about thirty feet from the pyre. A relative put a shawl around me. Then the dom said that the fire was burning too quickly, meaning that the fire would go out before the corpse had been incinerated, so a few men from our party took down a part of the shamiana and used it as a screen against the wind.
The fire needed to burn for three hours. Badly managed fires and, sometimes, the plain paucity of firewood-for the pyre requires at least 150 kilos of wood but often as much as 400 kilos or more-are to be blamed for the partially charred torsos flung into the Ganga. And as wood costs money-10,000 rupees in our case-the poor in particular can be insufficiently burned. The chief minister of Bihar, Jitan Ram Manjhi, a man from the formerly untouchable Musahar (or rat-eating) caste, told an audience in Patna last year that his family was so poor that when his grandfather died they just threw his body into the river.
I asked Didi why we hadn"t taken Ma"s body to Patna"s electric crematorium, but she only said that Ma wouldn"t have wanted it. Didi didn"t need to say anything else. I could imagine my mother resisting the idea of being put in a metal tray where other bodies had been laid and pushed inside an oven where electric coils would reduce her to ashes. Her choice, superst.i.tious and irrational as it might be, didn"t pose a problem for us. We could afford the more expensive and customary means of disposing of the dead. Nearly 300 kilos of wood had been purchased for Ma"s pyre and, in addition to that, 10 kilos of sandalwood. This was one of the many instances during those days when I recognized that we were paying for the comfort of subscribing to tradition. The electric crematorium is often the choice of the poor, costing only about 300 rupees. I learned that over 700 dead are cremated at the electric crematorium at Patna"s Bans Ghat each month, and a somewhat smaller number at the more distant Gulbi Ghat electric crematorium. These numbers are only a fraction of the 3,000 cremated on traditional pyres at Bans Ghat on average each month. This despite the fact that electric cremation is also quicker, taking only forty-five minutes, except when there is a long wait due to power cuts. There can also be other delays. Back when I was in college, the corpse of a relative of mine, a sweet old lady with a fondness for betel leaf, was taken to the Patna crematorium, but the operator there said that he would be available only after he had watched that day"s broadcast of the TV serial Ramayan. The mourners waited an extra hour.
While we sat under the shamiana watching the fire do its work, my younger sister, Dibu, said that she had put perfume on Ma"s corpse because fragrances were something Ma liked. Dibu began to talk about how Ma used to put perfume in the new handkerchiefs that she gave away to younger female relatives who visited her. In Bihar, a Hindu woman leaving her home is given a handkerchief with a few grains of rice, a pinch of turmeric, leaves of gra.s.s, coins, and a sweet laddu. These items had also been put beside Ma on the pyre, and, I now learned, inside Ma"s mouth my sisters had placed a gold leaf. I thought of the priest telling me each time I completed a circle around the pyre that I was to put the fire into my mother"s mouth. I didn"t, or couldn"t. It wasn"t so much that I found it odd or appalling that such a custom should exist; instead, I remember being startled that no one had cared to warn me about it. But perhaps I shouldn"t have been. Death provided a normalizing context for everything that was being done. No act appeared outlandish, because it had a place in the tradition, each Sanskrit verse carrying an intonation of centuries of practice. And if there was any doubt about the efficacy of sacred rituals, everywhere around us ba.n.a.l homilies were being offered to make death appear less strange or devastating. The bhajan that had been playing on the loudspeaker all afternoon was in praise of fire. Death, you think you have defeated us, but we sing the song of burning firewood. Even though it was tuneless, and even tasteless, the song turned cremation into a somewhat celebratory act. It struck me that the music disavowed its own macabre nature and made everything acceptable. And now, as the fire burned lower and there was visibly less to burn, I saw that everyone, myself included, had momentarily returned to a sense of the ordinary. This feeling wouldn"t last more than a few hours, but at that time I felt free from the contagion of tears. I remember complaining about the loud music. Everyone had been fasting since morning, and pedas from a local confectioner were taken out of paper boxes. I took a box of pedas to our young dom, but he refused; he didn"t want anything sweet to eat. I was handed a packet of salted crackers to pa.s.s on to him. Tea was served in small plastic cups. Street dogs and goats wandered past the funeral pyres. Broken strings of marigold, fruit peels, and bits of bedding, including blankets and a pillow pulled from the fire, littered the sandy bank. One of my uncles had lost his car keys and people from our group left to look for them.
The dom had so far used a ten-foot-long bamboo to rearrange the burning logs, but when the fire died down he poked around the burning embers with his callused fingers. I was summoned for another round of prayers and offerings to the fire. The men in my family gave directions to the dom as he scooped Ma"s remains-ash and bones, including a few vertebrae, but other small bones too, white and curiously flat-into a large earthen pot. This pot was wrapped in red cloth and later that evening hung from a high branch on the mango tree outside our house. Its contents were to be immersed in the Ganga at the holy sites upriver: Benares, Prayag, and Haridwar. This was a journey my sisters and I would undertake later in the week; but that afternoon, after the pot had been filled, the rest of the half-burned wood and ash and what might have been a part of the hipbone were flung into the river while the priest chanted prayers. Flower petals, mostly marigold, had been stuffed in polythene bags which had the names of local sari shops printed on them, and at the end everyone took part in casting handfuls of bright petals on the brown waters. I took pictures. The photograph of the yellow marigold floating on the Ganga, rather than my mother"s burning pyre, is what I put up on Facebook that evening.
RICHARD M. LANGE.
Of Human Carnage.
FROM Catamaran.
On March 12, 2012, my girlfriend, Elizabeth, and I were driving on Costa Rica"s Inter-American Highway, the major north-south highway through the country. We were on the second-to-last day of a three-week bird-watching trip that had included most of the good birding spots in the northern two-thirds of the country. That morning we had left the cabin we"d rented on Cerro de la Muerte (the Hill of Death) and were headed to our last stop, a small hotel in Alajuela, near the Juan Santamara International Airport, where we were scheduled to catch our return flight to California the next morning.
As anyone who has done it will tell you, driving in Costa Rica is a challenge. Roads are narrow, most streets are unmarked, and the highways are filled with speeding big rigs. In many places, a lone sign telling you to ceda el paso (yield) is your only warning that the highway is about to narrow to a single lane for both directions. Throughout our travels, we"d seen pedestrians (including unattended children) walking the narrowest of shoulders. On some stretches there is no shoulder at all-the roadway is bounded by steep drops or weed-choked ditches. In these places, the pedestrians and bicyclists are forced, under threat of instant death, to maintain an extremely disciplined line along the very edge of the asphalt.
Where Elizabeth and I were traveling, about halfway between Cartago and San Jose, the two northbound lanes are divided from the southbound lanes by a section of neighborhood. I was behind the wheel, my eyes on the road ahead as I listened for any updates from our rented SUV"s GPS system, which spoke to us in a kindly female voice we had affectionately dubbed Carmen Sabetodo. The afternoon commute under way, traffic was much heavier than it had been anywhere else on our trip. Cars were traveling at about sixty miles an hour, which is pretty fast for Costa Rica, as most of the roads are too narrow and winding for such a speed. On the left sat a row of small houses, their fenceless yards coming right to the edge of the highway. On the right, a steep-sided ditch lined with concrete-essentially a mammoth rain gutter-ran alongside. Across the ditch, a treeless embankment climbed thirty or so feet.
Well up ahead, on the right-hand edge of the asphalt, I saw a figure. It was a man, dressed in dark pants and a powder-blue shirt. In the first instant that I noticed him, I felt something was wrong, that he wasn"t just another pedestrian walking a dangerous edge of roadway. Standing on the highway side of the concrete ditch, he seemed in a particularly precarious spot. I imagined he"d slid down the embankment accidentally and, unable to climb back up, had decided the only way out of his predicament was to cross the ditch and then, if it was possible, cross the highway. And now there he stood, weighing the feasibility of the second part of his plan. He was leaning toward the moving traffic, as though seeking the right moment to dash across. As a white SUV approached he leaned back slightly, the vehicle missing him by inches. Behind the SUV was a big-rig truck. When it reached him, he dove in front of it.
In an instant, my mind involuntarily revised its sense of what was happening. The man, it seemed, had not come to the edge of the highway by accident. He was some kind of daredevil, attempting to dive into the middle of the lane so that the truck would harmlessly pa.s.s over him, after which he would quickly scramble back into the roadside ditch before being hit by the next vehicle. I imagined a group of friends were looking on, probably from atop the embankment, and he was performing for their awe and admiration. For that fraction of a second, I was so convinced of this scenario that my brain actually formed the thought: This is dumb! You"re not going to make it! But of course the man was not a daredevil; he was committing suicide.
When the truck"s front b.u.mper hit him, there was an explosion of pink, his body, or some part of it, bursting like a water balloon. As the truck rolled over him, he was struck by first one set of wheels, then another, then another, causing him to careen and tumble along under the cha.s.sis. The amount of time between my first noticing him and seeing his body battered under the truck was probably two seconds, too short of an interval to put into words any of my quick succession of thoughts, but when my brain finally caught up with what was happening, I gasped, "Oh, my G.o.d!"
Lifting my foot from the accelerator, I swerved as far to the left as I could to avoid hitting the man myself. Mindful of the heavy traffic on the road, I was trying to slow as quickly as possible, to signal to the vehicles behind me that something had happened, but not so quickly that I got rammed by an inattentive driver. My next thought was to get beyond the scene before I pulled over, to not stop until I was out of range of its gruesomeness.
As our vehicle neared the body lying in the road, I spoke forcefully to Elizabeth: "Don"t look!" I think I even put a hand in front of her face. She immediately covered her eyes, which created a strange moment of solitude between myself and whatever I was about to see. I felt like a child who"d stumbled into some scary place-a spiderweb-filled bas.e.m.e.nt or a dark cave-and realized he was going to face the terror alone.
There seemed no possibility the man had survived, but I wanted to a.s.sess whether or not he could be helped. My eyes found his body on the asphalt. He lay on his stomach, unmoving, his feet toward the roadside ditch. For some reason I could see his back and shoulders but not his head. Getting closer, I saw that his head was gone. A few feet farther down the road lay pieces of his shattered skull.
About a hundred yards beyond the body, the big rig was coming to a stop in the right-hand lane. I pulled in front of it and cut the engine. Hoping to spare Elizabeth any further horror, particularly the sight of the man"s headless and shattered body, I gave her another firm directive: "Stay here! Do not get out of this car!"
Her face white with shock, she nodded.
I climbed out and ran back up the highway toward the truck. As I reached it my dominant thought was that I did not want to see again-or see better-what I had just seen. If someone wanted me to go beyond the truck, they would have to be armed or strong enough to physically force me. Even then, if they wanted me to look again at the pieces of the man"s body, they would have to pry my eyelids open.
When I reached the driver, he was standing in front of his vehicle, talking on his cell phone. He too, I noticed, had taken up a spot that kept his truck between himself and the gore back up the road. I speak Spanish, and initially the bits of conversation I overheard made me think he was describing the accident to the police, but it eventually became clear he was talking to someone at the company he worked for-a dispatcher or possibly his boss. His eyes were pegged open, and he spoke as though in a trance-head still, mouth opening and closing robotically. When he hung up, I started to tell him it wasn"t his fault, but my voice broke. I placed a hand on his shoulder; the hand, I noticed, was trembling. He said nothing, his eyes refusing to meet mine.
A school bus pulled up next to us in the left lane and stopped. A dozen girls, all about fifteen, sat in the first few rows behind the driver, all in some state of shock, many crying into cell phones. Without getting out of his seat, the bus driver opened the door and gave the truck driver some simple directions: don"t move the truck, wait for the police, ask the witnesses to stay here. Despite his clear-minded directives, the bus driver was ashen, his voice rising and falling in pitch as he spoke. "Estar bien," he said a few times. Then he drove his devastated pa.s.sengers away.
At this point I looked back down the road, making sure I"d parked my vehicle in such a way that the bus could get around it, and saw Elizabeth. She"d gotten out of the SUV and was standing on the side of the highway, shaking and crying. I ran to her.
As I wrapped her in my arms and tried to comfort her, I noticed, across the highway, a middle-aged woman in shorts and a dark shirt who"d come out of her house to see what was happening. She waved us over. I led Elizabeth across the asphalt, and the woman, without a word, took Elizabeth by the hand and led her to a covered patio that fronted her house. I started back up the hill toward the truck but was met by a different woman, this one younger, maybe thirty or so, walking quickly toward me holding a pen and a pad of paper. She wasn"t wearing any kind of uniform, but she comported herself professionally, like a medic or a police officer. She told me I needed to give a statement, that the truck driver might be in serious legal trouble if I didn"t. Working to stay calm and speak in coherent Spanish, I told her that I would definitely give a statement, but I also explained that I was an American, that this was my last day in Costa Rica, that my girlfriend was upset and I didn"t want to keep her here any longer than I had to.
She nodded. "S. Pero dame su informacin."
I carefully wrote out my name and email address, along with the name of the hotel in Alajuela where we"d be staying the night.
"Lo vio usted?" she asked.
"S. El hombre"-I didn"t know the word for "dove," so I said "threw himself"-"se tiro en frente del camion. No fue la culpa del camionero."
Concurring with my version of what had happened, she nodded and went back up the road.
At this point the son of the woman who was tending to Elizabeth emerged from the house. He was skinny, about seventeen, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, half hopping and half walking across the lawn as he struggled to fit a pair of flip-flops on his feet. "What happened?" he asked me, in Spanish.
"A man got hit by a truck."
"Is he dead?"
I nodded.
"Are you sure?"
"Perdio su cabeza," I said, miming the act of lifting my head from my shoulders.
His eyes grew wider and he tore off up the hill, his mother yelling after him to be careful.
Stepping onto the patio to check on Elizabeth, I saw she"d been given a seat at a table and was taking sips from a gla.s.s of water. I patted her back and stroked her shoulder.
"Que lstima," the mother said to me.
A minute later the son came running back, his eyes wide and face pale. His expression unequivocally conveyed the same message my brain had been shouting since I"d exited the SUV: DO NOT GO PAST THE TRUCK! "Ohhh," he shuddered. "Es malo." Taking his cue from the woman who"d come down the road, he found a pencil and a piece of paper and handed them to me. I again wrote out my information.
When I finished, the mother pointed to the SUV. "Is that your car?"
The SUV, I now remembered, was still parked in the right-hand lane of the highway. Its windows were open and Elizabeth"s and my suitcases (which contained all of our credit cards, our pa.s.sports, and most of our remaining cash) were sitting in plain view on the back seat. Before getting out and running up the road toward the truck, I"d had the thought that Elizabeth might need to move the SUV to make way for emergency vehicles, so I"d left the keys in the ignition. The backup of traffic behind the accident included taxis, buses, and other pa.s.senger-carrying vehicles that wouldn"t be going anywhere for a long time, and dozens of people had decided to get out and make their way on foot. In groups of two and three, they were streaming down the highway. The mother had noticed a couple of young men standing at the open windows of the SUV, peering inside.
At this point I made a decision that I"m not proud of. I knew the right thing was to stay and wait for the police, to give an official statement and convey, in person, my conviction that the dead man had dived in front of the truck on purpose. But my stress overruled my sense of duty. The truck driver, by way of the competent woman with the notepad, had my information, and now so did the mother and her son. If anybody wanted to reach me, they could. But I wasn"t hanging around any longer.
"Let"s go," I said to Elizabeth.
The mother appeared to sympathize. She nodded and helped me get Elizabeth to her feet.
I walked Elizabeth back across the highway to the SUV, our approach sending the two suspicious men on their way. I put Elizabeth into the pa.s.senger seat and then hustled around to the driver"s side and climbed in. Taking a deep breath, I started the engine and carefully-very, very carefully-drove away.
For weeks after the events in Costa Rica, Elizabeth had little appet.i.te, suffered nightmares, and struggled to enjoy anything. At random unguarded moments she broke into tears. Before our trip, she had spent months completing applications to grad school-gathering letters of recommendation, slaving over her statement of purpose, devoting hundreds and hundreds of hours to studying for the general and subject-specific GRE tests-but now the whole enterprise seemed rather meaningless to her.
My own symptoms were similar but worse. Previous to the accident, my sensitivity to violence on TV or in movies was about average-I"d never been one for cartoonish horror-flick splatter, but neither was I much bothered by the "realistic" violence in films like The G.o.dfather or No Country for Old Men. Following the accident, however, I was deeply disturbed by just about any violence. One night, on a sketch-comedy show on TV, a mannequin dressed as one of the characters was tossed into the street and run over by a car. I nearly vomited, turned off the TV, and left the room.
I was also hounded by a pervasive sense of fear. I couldn"t help thinking it could have been my vehicle the man selected and repeatedly imagined making eye contact with him as his head dropped below the horizon of the SUV"s hood. As bad as my trauma was at having simply witnessed his death, I couldn"t imagine the pain of having been the agent of it. I was sure that on some future road I would kill someone. Aside from never getting behind the wheel again, there didn"t seem to be anything I could do about this. (My fear ramped up considerably when, a few days after Elizabeth and I arrived back in California, a distraught man killed himself by jumping into traffic during the morning commute on Highway 1, less than a mile from where we live.) But my deepest and most unrelenting symptom was a profound obsession with death itself. Before Costa Rica I had not spent much time thinking about it, but afterward I not only replayed and dwelled on the images I"d seen out there on the tropically heated asphalt, I thought about death throughout history-particularly gruesome, violent death. I imagined the accidents and calamities that must have struck ancient humans trying to bring down mastodons and rhinos with rocks and spears. I pictured hunters and gatherers being taken by tigers, wolves, and other apex predators. My mental re-creations spared no details: razor-sharp teeth and claws shredding flesh, powerful jaws crushing bone, people crying out in agony, their mouths filling with blood.
I thought too of the violence that humans have perpetrated (and continue to perpetrate) against other humans. Lines from Homer that I"d read years before kept running through my mind: "Agamemnon stabbed straight at his face as he came on in fury with the sharp spear . . . [and] the spearhead pa.s.sed through this and the bone, and the inward brain was all spattered forth."1 As an avid reader of history, I knew that from ancient times through the Dark and Middle Ages and on up to the modern era, just about every civilization has condoned, under some circ.u.mstance or another, the savaging of human bodies. The Romans fed slaves to lions. Nordic peoples broke open rib cages so lungs and other vital organs could be removed while the victims were still alive. European Christians put heretics on Catherine wheels and beat them to death with clubs. Muslims buried people up to their necks and pummeled them with rocks until their skulls were lumps of bone and meat. Here in the modern civilized West we killed people by shooting them, hanging them, or sizzling their lungs with poison gas. In addition to these "intimate" kinds of death, we killed each other by the thousands and millions during periods of ma.s.s slaughter. The American Civil War: 600,000 killed; World War I: 16 million killed; World War II: 60 million killed.2 I thought about the genocides in Rwanda and Serbia, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, and the lesser-known but no less gruesome battles in places often neglected by the Western media: Eritrea, Chad, Congo. The attendant human savagery of these conflicts-the pain and blood and suffering, the raw carnage-suddenly weighed on me as never before.
It also occurred to me that for as long as humans have been suffering gruesome deaths, other humans have been witnessing them. (Indeed, the ancient and medieval killing rituals I mention above were usually witnessed by large crowds, with audience members often encouraged to take part in the savagery.) During prehistoric times, it doesn"t seem likely that anyone lived a natural life without being present while some member of his tribe, clan, or family was mauled by a bear or eaten by a puma-or speared or bludgeoned or thrown from a cliff. Shifting to more recent history, I wondered what it must have been like to survive Columbine, to have been one of the firefighters who on September 11 witnessed bodies impacting the ground from eighty-six floors above. Or to have seen friends and fellow soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. It did not surprise me to learn that, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 20 percent of the soldiers who"ve returned from fighting in those countries are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.3 Other statistics are even more telling: though Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans make up far less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 20 percent of its suicides.4 In 2010, on average, twenty-two veterans committed suicide every day.5 In the last century, human beings have gotten used to some very traumatic things. We routinely scream across the surface of the earth at 75 miles an hour or hurtle through the sky 35,000 feet above it. Some of us even jump out of airplanes or off cliffs and plummet toward the earth at terminal velocity-for fun! But shooting someone and watching them die, or witnessing someone getting shot (or hung or stoned to death or decapitated)-things that cause us no physical harm-can be so emotionally painful as to be totally debilitating and sometimes, as the Veterans Affairs stats make heartbreakingly clear, unbearable. If in a few dozen years we can get used to high-speed driving and jet travel, why, after tens of thousands of years, are we still traumatized by seeing people"s limbs ripped from their bodies? It seems an absurd question to ask, but following the events in Costa Rica, I needed to answer it.
Clearly the answer is not because, as a species, we"re revolted by the sight of exposed muscle tissue and bone. If we were, every meat counter across the globe would be shut down and we"d all be strict vegetarians. Not only are meat counters still in abundance, here in the United States we have a system, via the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for grading the quality and attractiveness of animal carnage. And even the vegetarians among us-even those who claim to be "revolted" or "disgusted" by the sight of meat-usually manage to walk past displays of beheaded chickens or hanging gutted pigs without fainting or breaking into tears. Nor is carnage traumatic simply because when people are ripped apart they die. Death itself is not necessarily traumatic. Sometimes, when someone is suffering and that suffering cannot be alleviated, it"s actually a mercy. We literally pray for it to come. If someone dies after living into her nineties or beyond, we sigh and say, Well, she had a good life.
But when the exposed muscle and bone involved is human muscle and bone, and the resulting death is seen as premature and cruel-and what violent death is not premature and cruel?-witnessing it is a different experience entirely.
Of course the trauma of inflicting or witnessing carnage is related to our love of human life, to the recognition that we too can suffer such a fate, that we are fragile in the same ways. But why is it that when we read about such a death in the newspaper, or hear about it on the radio or TV, even in great detail, it"s not as traumatic as actually seeing it? (Why, for example, was I not plunged into morbidity after reading Homer back in college?) Consider the difference, emotionally speaking, between coming upon a dead body and watching someone die. Perhaps you"ve never experienced either. If so, consider the difference between coming across a dead animal, a dog or cat on the side of the road, say, and seeing a dog or cat get hit by a car. The former is sad, possibly even depressing; it will likely affect your mood for a few minutes, maybe a few hours. But the latter is horrifying, likely to stay with you for days, if not weeks or months.
Consider another aspect of death. We all have dead loved ones, but unless their deaths were recent or tragic, most of us are not particularly troubled by this. (In other words, if your Aunt Sally died in 1983, you"re probably over it by now.) But when someone we love is in the process of dying-is fighting cancer, say, or is in surgery following a serious accident-we are generally in terrible shape: stressed, crying, lashing out. (Our "loved" ones, after all, are not only the recipients of love, they are the providers of it.) It seems few of us fear being dead but, to a greater or lesser extent, we all fear dying.
My own experiences are a case in point. Prior to the horror on the Inter-American Highway, I"d seen four other bodies that had succ.u.mbed to fatal violence, each the victim of a vehicle crash. At the age of nine, I was riding in the back seat of the family car heading south on I-5 in San Diego when we came upon two motorcyclists lying dead in the middle lanes, their bikes (and helmets) in the roadway nearby. At twenty-six, I was driving home from work late one night when, a hundred yards ahead of me, a drunk driver lost control of his car and flew off the highway into some trees. The impact of the crash cleaved his skull in two. In my late thirties, a friend and I were traveling on U.S. Route 50, southeast of Great Basin National Park, when we came upon a lone motorcyclist who"d lost control of his bike and ridden straight into a road cut.
Each of these events had been gut-wrenching. (Indeed, the drunk-driving death was nearly as gruesome as the one in Costa Rica: arriving at the crumpled car, I"d reached through the shattered driver"s-side window and touched the dead man"s shoulder before registering that the spot of lighter color at the top of his head was his exposed brain.) But none of these deaths stayed with me for long; I was rather morose for a day or two afterward but didn"t miss any work or sleep. At no point did I shed tears.
Why? The biggest difference between these deaths and the death in Costa Rica was that I never saw any of these people alive. Even though I only saw the victim in Costa Rica for, at most, two seconds before he made his fateful dive, it was enough to register him as a living, breathing human being. The way he stood at the side of the highway-slightly crouched, his posture full of intent-and the particular way he dove-feebly, like an exhausted traveler flopping onto a hotel bed-said something about him. From the simple circ.u.mstances of the scene, I knew he was a man who had the fort.i.tude to stand by the highway and calculate the right moment to carry out his terrible plan. The spot he"d chosen for his death told me something as well: he"d kept himself on the side of the highway away from the houses, a place where he"d be less likely to be stopped. He didn"t hang himself or take pills or slit his wrists, methods that would leave his body more or less intact. Instead, he put himself in front of a moving truck, ensuring that his body would be brutally crushed. This carried a message of self-hatred. Even more revealing: he made someone else kill him. He caused an innocent person to experience the pain and trauma of destroying another human being-in one of the most gruesome ways imaginable. And he did so at a location and time that ensured a high number of witnesses. This was an expression of rage.
So the trauma of witnessing his death was, at least in part, a.s.sociated with witnessing the transition, with seeing a life-whole, animated, vibrant-become broken, still, hopeless. Of seeing someone with the potential to love and feel loved lose the potential to do either.
But it was also due to something else: intentionality. Those other bodies I"d seen were the victims of accidents. They"d wanted to live, but luck (or bad judgment) had conspired against them. The man on the Inter-American Highway had chosen to turn his body into carnage. Intentionality, I realized, was the deepest horror of Columbine and 9/11-and Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Jonestown and . . . the list goes on. Accidents happen. But when someone makes the decision to toss life-delicate, precious, the source of love-aside like a piece of trash, the horror cuts us to the bone.
When Elizabeth and I reached our hotel in Alajuela, we walked into the reception area and gave our names to the man at the desk. In a barely audible voice I told him about the accident, that the police might be calling to speak with us.
Nodding, he handed me a piece of paper where he"d written some names and phone numbers. The truck driver had already called. So had the police. They all wanted Elizabeth and me to drive back to the scene and give a statement.
This was not going to happen. It had taken us ninety minutes to get to the hotel from the accident scene. All through San Jose, traffic had been a mess. When we"d reached Alajuela, the main road through town was under construction, so we, along with the rest of the late-afternoon commuters, had been detoured onto side streets, which were clogged. We"d progressed one or two car lengths at a time, moving slower than the pedestrians on the sidewalks. This invited people to walk through the lanes of traffic and cut between our SUV and the cars in front of us. Normally this is fairly innocuous behavior-anyone who"s navigated a jammed parking lot following a concert or sporting event has done it. People who live in New York or other big cities p.r.o.ne to gridlock do it every day. But having seen what we"d seen, it struck us as reckless and terrifying. Each time someone had walked in front of the SUV, I"d pressed harder on the brake pedal. Eventually my leg had cramped.
"No," I said. "We can"t. We can talk to them on the phone. If the police want to come here, we"re happy to answer any questions they might have. But we"re not getting back on the road."
The desk clerk registered how serious I was and nodded. "I"ll call the driver back." The driver didn"t pick up, so the clerk left a message. I told the clerk I would sit in the lobby until the driver returned the call-I"d already left the driver hanging once, and I was determined not to do it again. I suggested that Elizabeth take the key and go find the room, but she didn"t want to separate. Neither did I. We took each other"s hand and sat down to wait.
The clerk had someone bring us gla.s.ses of water. Knowing that our reservations had been booked by Aratinga Tours, a company that caters to bird-watchers, he tried to take our minds off the situation by asking what birds we"d seen on our trip. We did our best to respond, but our hearts were not in it.
After twenty minutes, the driver called back. To avoid any confusion that might be caused by my less-than-perfect Spanish, I asked the clerk to translate. But the driver was only calling to tell me that my statement was no longer needed. Other witnesses had come forward to say what Elizabeth and I would have said, that the driver had done nothing wrong. A few people who lived in the houses adjacent to the highway had also come forward. Apparently they"d seen the suicidal man standing on the side of the road for some time before he"d made his fatal decision. They said it appeared he"d been "timing cars," waiting for the right vehicle and the right moment to make his move.
Taking the phone, I said to the driver what I"d tried to say when we"d both been standing in front of his truck, that I was sorry for what had happened to him, that he shouldn"t blame himself for the man"s death. In a quiet, pensive voice, he said, "S. Gracias."
The call finished, the clerk again tried to cheer us up. "Okay, now you can relax," he said. "Enjoy the hotel. The grounds are filled with many beautiful birds."
Following his earlier tone-deaf attempts at idle chitchat, his advice made me want to snap at him. Had he not heard the tremble in the truck driver"s voice? Could he not understand what we"d all just been through?
Months later, as my morbid fascination with death finally began to fade, I realized some obvious things: We"re not going to stop dying in horrible accidents or intentionally killing each other anytime soon. Nor are we going to stop witnessing such events. Carnage is here to stay. Since the dawn of time, we"ve been accommodating it. It circ.u.mscribes every aspect of our lives. Indeed, the very reason we organize ourselves into families, tribes, clans, and nations-the reason we create things like the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the reason we wear helmets and buckle our seatbelts and lock our doors at night-is to avoid becoming carnage. The clerk was not discounting the horror of it. He was just reminding us that the point is-has always been-to go on living.
Notes.
1. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 237.
2. The number of casualties in these conflicts vary somewhat by source, but the numbers here, which include civilian deaths, represent a general consensus.