Obituary

By A.K. Ramanujan

Father, when he passed on,  left dust  on a table of papers,  left debts and daughters,  a bedwetting grandson  named by the toss  of a coin after him,   

a house that leaned  slowly through our growing  years on a bent coconut  tree in the yard.  Being the burning type,  he burned properly  at the cremation   

as before, easily  and at both ends,  left his eye coins  in the ashes that didn't  look one bit different,  several spinal discs, rough,  some burned to coal, for sons   

to pick gingerly  and throw as the priest  said, facing east  where three rivers met  near the railway station;  no longstanding headstone  with his full name and two dates     

to holdin their parentheses  everything he didn't quite  manage to do himself,  like his caesarian birth  in a brahmin ghetto  and his death by heart-  failure in the fruit market.   

But someone told me  he got two lines  in an inside column  of a Madras newspaper  sold by the kilo  exactly four weeks later  to streethawkers   

who sell it in turn  to the small groceries  where I buy salt,  coriander,  and jaggery  in newspaper cones  that I usually read   

for fun, and lately  in the hope of finding  these obituary lines.  And he left us  a changed mother  and more than   one annual ritual.