Ways of Dying

On the day he died, my friend Dr. J’s uncle had stepped out of his village home in Kerala for a crap. He felt the warm, tender caresses of a fine morning turd beginning to slither its way out of his innards – and then he felt no more. An enormous jackfruit fell from the tree that shaded his labours, smack bang on to the top of his head. And that was that.

At the funeral, I have no doubt, they had a lot to talk about.

Bar the odd hurricane – and even Beloved Leader cannot be counted on to be incompetent all of the time – the death of a Jesustani is for the most part a placid affair. Some, to be sure, are shot dead by demented juveniles or run over by drunks, but this, in terms of its conversational value, is much the same as departing this world laid out on a hospital bed. We Hindustanis, by contrast, die deaths of infinite variety: we are splattered on the sidewalk by Blue Line buses; eaten by leopards; knocked off motorcycles by runaway pigs; murdered by criminal tribes who rob only on full moon nights and defecate over the bodies of their victims. Even our diseases – Japanese Encephalitis or Leprosy or Cerebral Tuberculosis – have wide and colourful arrays of symptoms adequate to satisfy the most jaded of mourners.

And so, to compensate for the utter lifelessness of the manner of their death, the Jesustanis are getting to work on the means used to dispose of their mortal remains.

One method which is spreading like wildfire is advertised as offering the opportunity to be reborn as a flower. A less delicate way of putting it, of course, is that your body is turned into dung. Invented by a Swedish biologist named Susanne Wiigh, who learned early in her life that the Jesustani will pay almost anything for something that is both European-designed and of no practical use whatsoever, the method in essence consists of immersing corpses in a liquid nitrogen bath. At -200 degrees centigrade, the body turns brittle. A mechanical vibrator then breaks it into a pink-beige powder, which relatives scatter amongst the shrubbery. “For me”, Ms. Wiigh told The Washington Post last year, “its really romantic. It smells good. It feels like gold”.

Which makes you wonder just what Ms. Wiigh gets up to on Lyr, the romantic island resort on which she lives.

Only cutting-edge cremations, of course, end with dear old Uncle K. being dumped amidst the dahlias to be peed on by George the Cat or Emma the Dog. In Georgia, Florida and Texas, you can for a mere matter of $ 1,950 arrange to have yourself interred in a plot of land in a manner that is completely eco-friendly. Instead of a normal coffin (which would have set you back some $ 5,650) you have your body packaged in a biodegradable container – known to desis as a cardboard box – and carted off to the nearest bit of vacant forest. It all seems fairly romantic until it gets slushy, because then the box melts away and the congealed body starts to drip into the neighbourhood aquifers. If you’re smart, of course, you’ll do the dirty in a suitably distant city and even if you can’t, well, $ 3,700 will pay for enough single malt for you not to ever have to drink water again.

Even the manifest risks of ecological burials, though, haven’t been able to stop the flood of customers lining up to be disposed off in a planet-friendly way. Some places in Canada, or so I’m told by my mostly-addled informant, are demanding that the bio-degradable casket be further encased in a concrete cave, which begs the question of why anyone would indulge in this kind of silliness in the first place. Why not just burn the damn bodies, you might ask? Well, that would be a simple, sensible answer and for that very reason tens of thousands of Jesustanis have been protesting against cremations. Despite a mass of evidence to the contrary – Mary Roach, the author of that mind-boggling masterpiece Stiff, asserts that the pollution caused by an average crematorium isn’t that different from what is emitted from a restaurant grill – protests against crematoria have been mounting across Jesustan.

Is there an alternative?

Indianapolis-based Waste Reduction Inc. has a solution: a machine that might be described as a tissue digester. It uses giant pressure cookers to execute a process known as alkaline hydrolysis, which has been shown to liquefy a 700 kilogram cow into 35 kilograms of bone remnants and 1500 litres of a solution of water, sugar and fat within eight hours. The bones can easily be turned into dust; the solution into fertiliser or soap. Unlike traditional methods used to dispose of corpses, which can leave behind the Prions which cause dangerous conditions like Mad Cow Disease, Scrapie and Chronic Wasting Disease, tissue digestion generates products which are completely sterile. Problem is, no one seems to have thought of using alkaline hydrolysis on human corpses – although there is more than a little evidence that dead people are of greater danger to the health of humankind than dead cows.

It doesn’t take much to see just how much at variance all this is with our own attitudes to the transition to the next life: we bury our dead, burn them, leave them to rot on the streets, feed them to crocodiles or, where inconvenient ex-girlfriends are involved, stick them into the nearest tandoor. All this, though, is the consequence of mere necessity. Even in those parts of des where peculiar means are used to get rid of the dead – the Tibetans, for example, grind up corpses into keema which is fed to the local vultures – it is an act of desperation, in this case a reaction to the unfortunate habit corpses have of refusing to decay at high altitudes. And so we might laugh at the Jesustanis, and mock them. In fact, the truth is that great empires have always understood the value of life and reflected that in the ways in which they handle their dead. The Egyptians embalmed bodies; the ancient Babylonians and Persians stuck them into jars of honey and wax. We can build all the nuclear bombs and long-range missiles we like, but we will never be King until someone sets up a tissue digester in Greater Kailash II and we can mournfully watch Mrs. Khanna dissolve inside it.