straddlingspaces

Dhai Kiri Kiri

Thick pipes of smoke would come slithering across the greying street, twist and turn around your frame and threaten to torch to ashes your garden of polychrome delights with a flourish of its forked tongue. Swargadwar, or “the Gateway to Heaven” squatting at the south west corner of Puri, the temple town of Orissa, stretched out a blindfold at me with two gaunt arms. As the coarse black cloth gripped me by the neck and plunged my head into the vortex of sheer blackness, the pipes of smoke enlivened my sense of smell with a sudden bellow. I groped for familiarity in a space whose voluminous attire I was expected to shred down to manageable generalisations such that forging a travel narrative about it would privilege me with the stamp of the ‘omniscient observer’. Now I was stranded with the smoke pipes tightening around me, piercing my nostrils. Masala chai I smelt. Yes! The abrupt entry of cartwheeling cloves, black peppercorns and bruised ginger upon the stage! Is that kara dosa with its muted smell of fresh coconut interrupted by the onslaught of dry red chillies? The smoke curled up at the very entry to my nose. It stayed there purring contentedly, belching rhythmically. Swargadwar pushed me through its clutter of feet and shoulders, of empty coconut shells that could be tackled all the way to an imagined goalpost, of half-eaten half-forsaken vadas that got bulldozed into fine perishable carpets. Yet, something of the smoke constricted me still. It was the heady scent of street food interspersed by the overwhelming smell of that something which echoed a distant, now severed camaraderie. As the blindfold slid off my eyes, I found myself straining to make sense of the extreme comicality served on a polished banana leaf before me. I stood on the street, like the hundreds who stood, crouched or sauntered through it. I stood as the confident defendant of Life, ignorant of the supreme challengers closing in on me. While the sea mobilised its army of white shirts, the Swargadwar crematorium, from which the area has derived its name, oiled its logs of wood in maniacal anticipation. The smell had been that of death. It felt no shame in cuddling up to the sizzling aroma of well-fried onions. It wove the frayed ends of its fabric into the delightful assurances of resurrection- food. The crematorium itself remained painted in tar-like blackness; an absent presence that taps whimsically from time to time for attention with a crackle of fresh flesh, the droning chant of impatient prayers, the shudder of rosary beads rubbed between the fingers or perhaps, the orgasmic mooing of a cow overfed on marigold wreaths. “Dhai kiri kiri” cried the rickshaw-pullers, meaning “move fast”. Life negotiated its way through the doom of oblivion hurrying it on from both sides of the road. The petrifying normalcy of devouring life and death in one breath and in one hungry bite confounds me still.