Feat/Feet

Although it is a funeral and the village elders are singing with thin, high voices full of aching and mourning, the Balinese’s “upacara ngaben” celebrates the life of the deceased. The cremation tower that is waiting outside the house is covered in coloured cloth and gold leaf. The metallic chime of the Gamelan orchestra falls in line with the buzz of people. We are instructed to pray and the crowd kneels in the midst of wisps of smoke from sandalwood incense and prays to their Gods.
When they bring out my grandfather’s body to be cleansed by the priest we cry. I am numb from grief and not knowing what is happening and feel heavy from lack of sleep and humidity. I keep asking myself ‘how did I end up here?’ because I cannot remember airport queues or taxi rides. I share the same sense of unreality with my mother who is so pale she stands out even more than her usual because she’s a foreigner.
The men move the body into the cremation tower which is going to be paraded to a temple nearby. My father is solemn in the midst of the ceremony as he takes his role as the eldest son and leads the ceremony down the main street of the village. We follow my father, and the tower, held up by twenty or so men, follows the crowd. The procession moves at a frenzied pace. We half-run down a hardly-sealed road beside an escarpment of lush rice paddies on one side, and village houses on the other. A duck farmer is leading his birds out to the fields and girls with neat plaits carry each other on push bikes on the way home from school. Dogs stand dangerously close to the edge of the road but unlike me they have grown up in Bali and couldn’t care less about the traffic that passes. I understand what the Balinese mean by the word “ramai”, a word which describes a noisy, bustling place. Out here it smells like smoke and petrol, cooking food and the earthy stench of damp ground. There are raucous outbursts coming from the roosters in their bamboo cages along the footpath and women carrying baskets of food and offerings on their heads, shuffle by in their sarongs but stop to acknowledge the procession.
Hours later we watch the cremation tower burn in the temple ground. At first the embers rise and disappear into the darkening sky but soon the white ash is falling all around us and crowd diminishes until it is just my father, his siblings and their children silhouetted against a pink sunset.