Cemeteries

I am fascinated with burial grounds. I have spent many hours walking among grave stones in old English graveyards in Himalayan hill stations, beautifully kempt churchyards in historic European towns and spread-out American cemeteries on wild, wooded countryside. Some might consider this a morbid obsession with the dead, but to me these places are the ultimate sanctuary.

Here, I can indulge my deep-rooted and abiding curiosity about what  constitutes human life and what shapes our human condition. Every tombstone tells a story and opens a door into another world, where my mind’s eye gives form to hazy lines and fills in missing colors. My imagination molds each narrative, piecing together the clues to shape each chronicle and making up the missing segments as it pleases. The Kasauli grave of a British soldier, struck down by cholera in 1818, reminds me how far he was from home and makes me wonder how his loved ones coped with his loss in a distant land. Who chose the bible passage for his epitaph? The adjoining graves of two sibling infants transports me to a time when childbirth and infancy were so much more dangerous. I imagine the heartbreak of the young parents standing on this green hillside on what must have been a sunny summer day and no doubt the sky was a brilliant azure blue…

 

And today, a freshly placed bunch of fragrant flowers and the newly lit candle on a lovingly tended grave, along with the tender epitaph, tell the tale of a man loved much. While each of us will one day succumb to our mortality, in someone’s heart we will live on.