Rambling

Last year on this day I went to a memorial at the American Consulate. A number of people spoke. At the end an American poet, who happened to be visiting, recited two poems: Billy Collins' The Names; and Adam Zagejewski's Try to Praise the Mutilated World. What a wonderful title! It hardly mattered what followed, after a title like that.

This year the Consulate is showing a video presentation by Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times: "Searching for the roots of 9/11." I think I'll give that one a miss.

When I looked in my journal to find the names of the poems, I saw that last year at this time I was reading Travels With a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. I had written down this passage:

Ibn Khaldun wrote that a dead man 'sees the persons who attend the burial and hears what they say, and he hears the tapping of their shoes when they forsake him'.

Which reminds me of Punjabi folk songs. They usually sound cheerful, with a driving beat, even when the words are gloomy. One of the recurring themes has the singer, dead, complaining about the fickleness of his lover: "Here I am, in my grave for only a week, and there she goes with another man!"

There are a number of English and American folk ballads which narrate stories from the grave, aren't there? Though I can't name any - I should get down my ancient and dusty Dover paperbacks of Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads and take a look.

That reminds me: There are two memorials / tombs of politicians on Chennai's Marina Beach. The older one is that of C. N. Annadurai, the newer that of M. G. Ramachandran, who died in 1987. Someone had told me a long time ago that she never visited Annadurai's grave, because the knowledge that his body was present there was frightening to her - she was afraid that his ghost might also be present. I was very surprised, because she was not one of the poor masses (I feel somewhat guilty making such a distinction, but it's so true here -- there's such an enormous divide between the elites and the poor -- how else to say it?). But then I wondered why Annadurai was buried instead of cremated, the standard Hindu practise. (There are, of course, Christian and Muslim cemeteries here.)

And two days ago I read a picture caption in Bollywood Dreams. The picture shows a (poor) man pressing his ear to a black stone slab strewn with flower petals:

The memorial stone of M.G. Ramachandran, a great actor and politician from the state of Tamil Nadu. His devotees believe that if you are lucky you might hear his voice at his memorial site...

So, I rambled all over the place, and still managed to get back to Chennai.