At a crematorium this year I was passing time with a group of people. Some were from a university, some where from the neighbourhood of the deceased. We were flipping through the diary of a student. As the custom says, during this period we should not leave him alone in the funeral pyre, but remain at the hall until the last journey of the body was over. There were some pictures taken before, or downloaded from the Facebook that were framed and decorated with white ribbons by of the mom of a friend of the student who died. It was a very windy and cold day. We were sitting on tatamis in a cosy waiting room. In the midst of all, my mind went off...life is a patchwork of millions of photographs, more of memories for the others, than of my self.
May be the photographs speak more of me.
the fallen leaves of the neighbourhood trees kept trailing along with the wind, or the whizzing of a sudden car, or crunched beneath the joggers to be dust and scattered. Then some rainy days washed off all these memories.
There was am American Translator with us along with two other teachers from the department. He was standing with me in the City Hall before a small ceremonial service was offered to him. Let is say, he was Mr Michael. I asked him how long he had been working at the International Centre of the University. He informed that eights years have passed when he came here and he enjoyed talking to the international students. He also told me that the city is small and not many locations for social gatherings as the university is far away from the centre of the city. Therefore, in the mountainous land, sometimes life me seen isolated. New students feel lonely, and that is why, they should gather in different events and programmes to communicate and to grow up.
I was thinking about the parents of the student; how they would accept this crude reality. They sent their only son to a distant country with all the money they perhaps saved for their old days, they have a dream that after four years he would get a job there and would take care of them. Their son would go back to them smiling with a happy face, touching their feet and bubbling how wonderful was the new country and his new life. The mother would be concerned about his long hair that would be dangling over the shoulder, she would wonder how his son had been cooking his food all these days who had never poured water in his glass to drink.
We were served green tea in Japanese cups. The sliding wooded doors were closed again. We came back to life. It would take 1 hour and 45 minutes or more. But the hall would announce time again and mention when the the relatives should come to collect the bones and ashes......continue
