Conversations by the moonlight

“They say the soul feels bad if there’s anyone crying near the cremating body…”

I overheard two young girls in a conversation as I stood in the terrace overlooking the Bagmati river while Dai and I waited for the evening aarati at Pashupati.

Dai and I rarely go out together. Truth be told, we don’t really get to spend much time together. With our weird timings of college and work, we rarely see each other. And also, mostly because him and I like to keep to ourselves, we are rarely in company of others. And yet, today here we were- in a chilly afternoon, miles away from home, surrounded by one too many people watching the sky change its colors.

“Why do we have to stay here and look at this?” Dai whispered out loud as he eyed the family in the riverside busy performing the final rituals of one of their family members. Dai insisted he couldn’t watch all of that. “I am getting all teary eyed. They are all crying,” he said. “If you don’t cry here looking at that, what will you cry about?” I elbowed him. Both of turning back our gaze at the crowd around us.

A moment or two later I wipe out the corners of eyes on my jacket sleeve and look to the other side of the river.

We had waited for the aarati to begin for almost an hour now. We told mum to go sit somewhere close by in case her legs got too tired later on. Dad had already gone out. “I have seen the aarati before,” he’d said.

Dai and I watched in silence as the family below cried in remembrance of the one they’d lost. “In loving memory of…” I suddenly remembered the obituary section in the newspaper. Maybe they’d put up an obituary too. Maybe not. The prelude to the aarati was packed in a box filled with the smoke, the smell of the burning pyre wrapped tightly by the ribbons that echoed with the wails and cries of families, dripping with the tear drops of close family members, friends and even onlookers like Dai and me.

~ ~ ~

“If you can place a coin on the roof there, they say it’s a good omen…”

Dai overhead two people say this and saw them attempt throwing the coins. “Do you want to try that and see how lucky you are?” Dai asked me teasingly knowing all too well I wouldn’t do it and also that I didn’t have a coin.

A coin clanged against the tin roof on the shrine below and rolled down elsewhere, a guy tsked at his own attempt and walked by. And just as Dai and I looked down, we a saw a little child climbing on the tin roof to collect the coins that seem to have accumulated by many failed attempts.

“I think I have now lost interest in all of this,” Dai stated after some minutes. I got confused and asked him what he meant. “The aarati. I have lost interest in it now. I think. The moon is the only thing that I want to keep looking at,” he said.

"You and me both, Dai. You and me both," I said to myself as we both stood under the moonlight waiting...