Ashes to ashes

Saturday came. The boys shaved each other’s heads in the garden, using soap and pink plastic razors. They laughed and whooped as they checked out their reflections, mainly to hide their devastation at losing all that careful coiffure.

The eyebrows came off as well, in accordance with tradition, leaving a bunch of ghostly aliens rubbing their heads in confusion and rushing to put on baseball caps.

We discovered the source of the Island’s persistent dandruff, after all. Big dry patches across his skull, which I rubbed tenderly with Nivea Body Intensive Milk (available at any minimart).

Good, good boys. Good sons. One of the brothers, the one who lives in Thailand, told me that just before he left to return home on New Year’s Day, his mother told him she was going to die, and begged him to shave his head and be a monk for the funeral.

Meanwhile, inside, as I let half-a-dozen women adjust my white sinh and tie a white rag in my hair, I couldn’t help thinking that a lot of it was just empty tradition, if only because no one seems to ever consider doing it any other way. And also because no one seemed to find it strange or wrong that I should be participating in something that has no connection to my culture.

We all walked, barefoot, to the temple, a long line of girls in white and boys in saffron,
holding a white rope attached to the coffin truck, which had Lao funeral music blaring through tinny speakers.

There were three cremations on that day, and as it happens, they do them all at once. There was a real festival atmosphere in the temple grounds, which were teeming with monks and nuns and hoards of relatives and friends.

[Having watched the family’s men shaving their heads and eyebrows all morning, it was easy to separate the real monks from the grieving surrogates: the bona fide monks had slightly darker heads, a three-day growth on their skulls.]

Being one of the nuns meant I had to go up to the open coffin with the rest of the family to pour coconut water on her face. By then, she had been dead for almost four days, and part of her face had turned black and yellow. Her lower lip, which in life had always exposed her lower teeth when her mouth was open, had sagged on one side, showing her gums, which had also turned yellow.

Now I can’t shake this final image whenever I think of her.

I was one of the last to go up, and the coconuts were all empty. The father, waiting to replace the lid, seemed distraught that I couldn’t perform this ritual. “Child, you have to!” he said, and someone passed me a bottle of perfume, which I sprayed on her dead face. He always calls me ‘child’.

It was all I do not to grimace at the sight of her, but it was a day of following, not thinking. Deep down, I was thinking how gruesome and barbaric it all was- forcing everyone to look at face given so completely over to death- an organic entity rotting away, like an orange left for too long on the kitchen bench.

But then, why is it that our culture feels the need to fuss over the dead, to dress them up and paint their faces to make them look they are sleeping? Surely this is just as barbaric. It's ashes to ashes, as they say- death as the great equaliser.

Then everyone climbed up to place flowers and candles around the coffin and walk all the way around it. This had to be done very fast, with a lot of shoving, because the Lao are afraid of spirits, and this must surely have been the point where her spirit was hovering, ready to be freed.

They set off the fuses one by one, a deafening whistle followed by the festive firecrackers. Once lit, the coffins up on their platforms, tall with canopies and covered with flowers, became raging infernos, forcing the crowd back from the heat.

There were individual touches: the coffin next to ours spewed out bright pink smoke. Ours had a man hurling lollies at the crowd. The third one had a massive flare at the front which, when set off, lit up the whole yard and threatened to burn down the canopy under which we were all standing.

They were all burnt down to nothing within about half and hour.

I went to the house the next day for an early dinner, and found the air had a lifted- everyone was relaxed and cheerful. The oldest sister, who has been frowning for months, laughed uproariously for several minutes at my face when she poured a load of uncooked cow’s brains into a bowl. The middle girl, the one who had cried the most, at the death, the head-shaving and cremation, emerged with freshly washed hair and painted nails, and giggled for hours on the floor with her sister. The father perched on a chair outside the house with a serene look.

On Monday, they took the ashes to be placed in a stupa at the temple. Yesterday, I went to the house at 7am to give alms to the monks, followed by a monster baci where I got more strings around my wrists than ever before- I look down at them and feel that I’m choking in white cotton. Actually, the baci was a joyous affair, with lots of laughing and people throwing rice. It was a celebration, I guess, because her spirit was free, finally. And everyone tied strings to all the family members- I got more than anyone else, which, I discovered over the weekend, was because the family has been telling everyone that I am the Island’s wife, to avoid further explanation. The big wedge of cotton around my wrists takes ages to dry, and they keep trailing on my coffee, but I’m sure as hell not taking them off.

The only foreigner for absolutely miles, and wearing a sinh, no less! There’s been too much attention on me to even consider not doing things properly. I think I’ve paid my dues for the next year- praying endlessly like a Buddhist, dressing up as a nun, watching over the dead, and spending a lot of time with bawdy old women, who sat on the floor for hours, chewing and spitting red betel nut, laughing and chopping vegetables. They have a vicious streak, I discovered, when you dare to beg off the booze and the food.

The Lao love to eat raw meat, despite doctors throughout the country warning against it. I ate so much weird stuff on Friday night that I went home and actually threw it all up. Then I was fine.

Today, a week after she died, it’s finished. The boys’ hair is already starting to grow back, and everyone will get on without their mother- that’s the beauty of a big family.