Family At The Crematorium

Truth that sounds bizarre is tough to tell – the inevitable disbelief quickly smothers the initial bells of alarm.

We were at the Government crematorium. He had left simple instructions: ‘My wealth will be distributed (as per the details given in my last will) to those members of my family who attend my cremation and the feast thereafter.’

He had decided the dishes for the multi-cuisine feast and kept aside a generous amount for that meal. He had also arranged and paid for everyone’s stay and travel. I had helped him with the reservations and communication. When he confided to me about his plans, I had felt quite bemused. It seemed to be so unlike him. Maybe, it is not. But, I never asked him. He would not have told the truth.

While his simple instructions might seem commonplace, the nub of the affair is in the seemingly innocuous detail ‘my family’. Let me introduce the lot (from right to left).

His wife stood alone at the right end. Her two married kids had declined the offer – spurious honour or misplaced pride, if you ask me. Fortunately, he had drawn the line clearly under ‘my family’. He had not extended the offer to the spouses of kids or their kids. His wife speaks only Malay and she is the oldest and most attractive one in the group. I had received her at the airport and en route to the hotel, we had conversed amicably. I learnt that he had been in his mid-twenties when they met. An older determined woman, another man’s abused wife, a beautiful woman, a lonely man in his twenties in a strange land – that is how she reasoned their match. After ten years as ‘her man’, he had left without even a forwarding address, she said bitterly.

He had gone to Germany and found a new partner. She and her three kids stood next to the wife. With the crisis brewing in the Eurozone, her kids had forced her to be present, she apologetically informed me. She had come in my car to the crematorium. A short stout woman who spoke German softly – she seemed like a truly nice person, though fidgety and perpetually nervous. From our brief conversation, I gathered that she had catered willingly to his ways (male chauvinism is an accepted tradition there, I gathered) and been ‘his woman’. He had lived with her for a dozen years before he returned suddenly to his country of birth.

The youngest in the group stood next in line. She and I are natives but we have not talked to each other so far. He was nearly fifty when he met her and decided to ‘fall in love at first sight’. He had once joked to me that every man should try out that ‘fictitious plot’ once in his lifetime. If the man lives to tell the tale, it would be an interesting story, he had said. All that I know of this affair is that he did get the tempestuous start with this girl nearly three decades his junior and that it ended with an anti-climax in the unlikely hands of spirituality. After three years of that emotional roller-coaster, she had one day declared to him that she had joined a Sisterhood and that from then on, she could consider him only as a brother. They had a swift platonic separation, without acrimony, quite unlike siblings.

The last is, of course, me. I had applied for the post advertised in the Classified section - ‘a companion with a flair for languages’.  I quickly picked up Malay with a private tutor and German at the Max Mueller Centre. I realized soon that he had forgotten those languages completely – as if he had discarded the language along with the life. Some of his peeved blood relatives (they were not included in ‘my family’ as defined by his will) joked that he found his right inclination at the end. It is none of their business. I guess he wanted me to be a facilitator when the time came, to provide the links between the disjointed parts of his life, a type of communication hub.

I am not too sure if he expected me to make the others come together. I prefer to think that his sense of humour rather than any vestigial death-bed sentimentality brought us together. The languages that I learnt might go waste but forgetting is an easier task than remembering.

I think we were all waiting for the feast and after that, pick up our dues. Then, leave – without a word, without a thought, without a wish to be part of his life ever again.