Ruchira

I had written up this long blog about graduation. Rohana’s graduation is next Friday, December 1, and I am approaching this event with mixed feelings. I am also approaching this event as its planner; this has entailed running among fabric shops and tailors getting graduation gowns custom-made, making sure the principal remembers to tell the parents to show up, and learning how to type in Sinhala for the graduation certificates.

But Ruchira died late Wednesday night, and my thoughts switched from high school graduation graduation to a nine-year-old boy’s funeral. In many ways, graduations and funerals are similar; they both commemorate a departure from a pre-existing environment and the entry into an unknown reality.

Ruchira is — or is it already time to use the past tense “was?” — the school cook’s son. He had Down’s Syndrome, but his identifying characteristic was an enormous belly which he displayed proudly as he strutted around the school, shirtless and wearing blue jersey shorts. His name sign outlines the curvaceous shape of his belly.

As Jenny said, he was impossible not to love, and Ruchira stole the hearts of almost every volunteer to step onto Rohana’s grounds.

Actually, he was most visible as the volunteer left for the day; he would, without fail, climb into the three-wheeler and hide there. Stubbornly repelling any attempts by other students to kick him out of the vehicle, he’d grab onto the rails, enjoying for the 50-foot ride to the school gate where one of the other kids would finally pull him out through the window.

I found out that he had died as soon as I arrived Thursday morning. Samantha, the deaf teacher, was the first one to tell me–something heart-related–and then urged me to go see the mother sitting near the infirmary. To no one’s surprise, she was weeping unconsolably and I held her hand while three photographs of Ruchira laid in a chair next to her.

So it was with this event that I attended my first Sinhalese Buddhist funeral. As I told Amanda, I was hoping when I arrived in Sri Lanka that I’d get to witness these cultural events: weddings, holidays, funerals. As tears came to my eyes holding the grieving cook’s hand, I realized that I had forgot that, in the case of funerals, somebody has to die first.

There were no classes Thursday as most of the upper-level students sat by the windows, weeping quietly and recounting the chaos of last night (Ruchira and the cook lived in the girls’ dormitory). Amila draped a white flag over a string tied above the front gates so that all passerbys could know the school was now a place of mourning.

We sat like this for hours contemplating the death of a nine-year-old boy; would the cook, who arrived four years ago with Ruchira thinking it was a match made in heaven–the school’s developmentaly disabled unit would educate the son while the mother could cook for all the children–continue to live and work at the school?

At around noon, many of the older children went downstairs to clean the main room. They swept away cobwebs from fans, mopped the white tiled floor, removed the happy framed photographs from the wall, and set up a few dozen chairs all around the edge of the room. The site of many happy occassions such as birthdays and teachers’ appreciation ceremonies would now be a viewing room. The older boys and girls told me they would stay up the entire night as sentinels for the displayed body; Jenny and I agreed to join them in their all-nighter.

The body arrived at 6:00 that evening. The boys quickly set up various decorative objects: a canopy, two large elephant tusks, some flower vases, a couple of faux-marble globes, and the railing upon which the casket would rest. The brown varnish on the coffin was not yet dry, and as the boys carried it into the room, the varnish smeared onto their shoulders as if they had been marked by grief.

Immediately, they opened the coffin. Wide open–the casket opens up on all four sides to fully reveal the body within. As is so common with funerals, the corpse didn’t look like the animated person it had been several hours ago. Most significantly, Ruchira’s enormous, signature belly was gone.

The students walked in and around the setup with hands closed together in prayer. Many of the older girls and a couple of the boys, all who, in the residential family environment they lived, had considered him like a son, dissolved into tears. The mother came in, supported by her older daughters and sons-in-laws, and cried as she kept touching her son’s head.

Then Sanjeewa told me to take photographs. “What?” I asked.

“Take photographs,” he repeated matter-of-factly.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Then you can give her the prints.”

I didn’t move until Amila told me to do the same thing, so I reluctantly walked back to the dormitory to grab my camera. When I returned, Sanjeewa pointed at Ruchira and said, “maybe this angle?”

Unbelieving my actions, I snapped a few photographs. Supun then motioned to the mother and her family to come stand by the body for the family portrait. I took two pictures–one with flash and one without–and then Amila said, “now for one of his upper body.”

I obliged. Sanjeewa said, “and tomorrow, when we walk around the body in our white uniforms, be sure to take a few then, too.”

“Are you sure it’s really okay to take pictures?” I asked, not for the last time.

“Yes.”

People came and went throughout the night. For a couple of hours, a dozen deaf people from the deaf association came in–many of them Rohana alumni–and we chatted while the older girls kept us well-supplied with milk tea and biscuits.

By midnight, everyone was gone except about seven boys, Jenny, and myself. We sat on the floor, ten feet away from Ruchira’s body, playing cards and carom. A few of them began passing out on the chairs, unable to stay awake any longer. Jenny, Priyankara, and Amila all succumbed around 3:00, and by 4:00, only Prasanna, Ruwan, and I hadn’t taken any winks.

Those two boys continued to play carom, while Pasindu and Sanjeewa woke up and sat next to me, telling jokes and generally acting out. “This is the most fun wake I’ve been to,” I thought. But whenever the mother returned (she came and went about five or six times throughout the night), we all would walk over to where she sat, holding her hands and gently rubbing her back. She kept asking Jenny and me if we had had a cup of tea yet.

And every once in a while, whenever our laughter died down, our eyes would waver over to the casket and we’d be reminded once again that somebody dear to us had died. It is strange how, given enough time, you can so easily forget about a corpse lying in the same room.

The school came back to life after 5:00 Friday morning, and at 6:30, Jenny and I walked back to our hotel to eat breakfast, shower, and sleep.

After waking up an oversleeping Jenny, we both returned at 1:30 in the afternoon. The monks arrived a hour later–one of them happens to be the school’s founder. Next time I have his name next to me, I will type it here.

The five monks sat down in chairs along one wall, while everybody else, wearing as much white as possible, sat on the floor on the opposite side. Principal Abeygunawardana, in his classic oratory manner, said much more than a few words, and one of the teachers, after my urging, quickly got up to interpret. In the middle of his interpreting, he said, “Adam, go take photos.”

I thought maybe I had nodded off for a moment and experienced a waking dream, but he said it again, so I scurried over to the other corner to take pictures of the monks and the family.

After many words, some prayers, and a ceremonial pouring of water from a teapot into a cup of tea (the symbolism of which I am not sure), everybody stood up to walk around the body, youngest first. Again urged by a few boys and the interpreting teacher, I took more photographs.

Then Pasindu (one of the graduating students) and the mother simultaneously became hysterical, and both had to be restrained from pawing all over the body. In that moment I saw the fusion of Rohana’s residential community; there aren’t students and staff living in the buildings, but ammas and thathas, akkas, ayyas, and malis, all grieving the loss of one of their own.

(In a different way, this will be repeated in the same room next Friday at graduation, as eight more people leave this family.)

The casket was closed and the boys carried it out to the van outside the gates, with younger boys quickly draping long sheets of patterned silk on the dirt road in front of the casket. Girls threw dried rice on it, and the whole school road was filled with people from start to end as we all piled onto the buses and vans.

Mr. Abeygunawardana sat next to me (actually, first it was Samantha, but upon seeing her principal approach, she quickly got out of her seat). I took this moment to show him text messages from Nerissa and David, Matthew and Maurice, Anne, and Sophie, all offering their sympathy.

“From all over the world,” I remarked.

He said it was the cycle of life; some people live for a long time and others live for a very short time. Almost like a tally, at funerals you take stock of the people who are around and those who are not around anymore. I couldn’t stop crying at that moment, as I thought about all who have gone before: Nana and Papa John, Grandpa Sam, Aunt Eadie; and all who will depart–remaining grandparents, aunts and uncles, parents, friends.

But for the school cook to lose her only son–at such a young age–messes it all up and makes it all the more shocking and grievous.

We arrived at the cemetery. Jenny and I walked side by side, aware of our noticeable presence as the only foreigners at this ceremony, and remarked on the large number of Christian crosses and tombstones we saw in what we thought was a Buddhist country–and therefore–a Buddhist cemetery. The boys carried the casket to some open-air, roofed pavilion where, much to my surprise, Ruchira was revealed once again.

A dozen boys then walked around the open casket three times, hands clapsed together in prayer again, and the mother touched her son for one last time. Yes, I have a photograph of this incredibly personal moment, taken once again at the urging of the interpreting teacher.

Then the casket was closed for a final time and carried to the crematorium just down the path, where it was quickly shoved into the oven and the fire doors closed without ceremony. We all moved out to the grass nearby, looking upward at the smokestack for any signs of Ruchira’s remains.

On cue, it started to rain (the monsoon season, which was supposed to end two weeks ago according to Indika, is still tormenting us). The teachers told us to go for the bus, so we walked down the path, eyes darting backwards at the smokestack where, after ten minutes, smoke was finally wisping out.

And we headed back to the school–no, home–silently. Almsgiving with the monks is next Wednesday (seven days after the death), and then in three months, and then every year after that, like yahrzeit.

There is now a conspicious absence in the three-wheeler every time I leave the school; there is no Ruchira climbing around the seats, fending off other boys for his rightful seat by the passenger’s side.

Sinhalese people, when faced with an unanswerable question or an undeniable fact of life, rock their heads from side to side and utter, “what to do.”

What to do?