The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  A cremation on a riverbank in India is by its very nature public, but usually the only mourners present are men. In our case, my sisters and other younger women from the family had accompanied Ma’s body. When I turned from the pyre I saw my sisters standing at the edge of the circle. I went to them and put my arms around their shoulders. The flames had risen at once and they hid Ma’s body behind an orange curtain. Soon there were fewer people standing around the pyre and the older men, my father’s friends, began to settle down on the plastic chairs at a distance of about thirty feet from the pyre. A relative put a shawl around me. Then the dom said that the fire was burning too quickly, meaning that the fire would go out before the corpse had been incinerated, so a few men from our party took down a part of the shamiana and used it as a screen against the wind.

  The fire needed to burn for three hours. Badly managed fires and, sometimes, the plain paucity of firewood—for the pyre requires at least 150 kilos of wood but often as much as 400 kilos or more—are to be blamed for the partially charred torsos flung into the Ganga. And as wood costs money—10,000 rupees in our case—the poor in particular can be insufficiently burned. The chief minister of Bihar, Jitan Ram Manjhi, a man from the formerly untouchable Musahar (or rat-eating) caste, told an audience in Patna last year that his family was so poor that when his grandfather died they just threw his body into the river.

  I asked Didi why we hadn’t taken Ma’s body to Patna’s electric crematorium, but she only said that Ma wouldn’t have wanted it. Didi didn’t need to say anything else. I could imagine my mother resisting the idea of being put in a metal tray where other bodies had been laid and pushed inside an oven where electric coils would reduce her to ashes. Her choice, superstitious and irrational as it might be, didn’t pose a problem for us. We could afford the more expensive and customary means of disposing of the dead. Nearly 300 kilos of wood had been purchased for Ma’s pyre and, in addition to that, 10 kilos of sandalwood. This was one of the many instances during those days when I recognized that we were paying for the comfort of subscribing to tradition. The electric crematorium is often the choice of the poor, costing only about 300 rupees. I learned that over 700 dead are cremated at the electric crematorium at Patna’s Bans Ghat each month, and a somewhat smaller number at the more distant Gulbi Ghat electric crematorium. These numbers are only a fraction of the 3,000 cremated on traditional pyres at Bans Ghat on average each month. This despite the fact that electric cremation is also quicker, taking only forty-five minutes, except when there is a long wait due to power cuts. There can also be other delays. Back when I was in college, the corpse of a relative of mine, a sweet old lady with a fondness for betel leaf, was taken to the Patna crematorium, but the operator there said that he would be available only after he had watched that day’s broadcast of the TV serial Ramayan. The mourners waited an extra hour.

  While we sat under the shamiana watching the fire do its work, my younger sister, Dibu, said that she had put perfume on Ma’s corpse because fragrances were something Ma liked. Dibu began to talk about how Ma used to put perfume in the new handkerchiefs that she gave away to younger female relatives who visited her. In Bihar, a Hindu woman leaving her home is given a handkerchief with a few grains of rice, a pinch of turmeric, leaves of grass, coins, and a sweet laddu. These items had also been put beside Ma on the pyre, and, I now learned, inside Ma’s mouth my sisters had placed a gold leaf. I thought of the priest telling me each time I completed a circle around the pyre that I was to put the fire into my mother’s mouth. I didn’t, or couldn’t. It wasn’t so much that I found it odd or appalling that such a custom should exist; instead, I remember being startled that no one had cared to warn me about it. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Death provided a normalizing context for everything that was being done. No act appeared outlandish, because it had a place in the tradition, each Sanskrit verse carrying an intonation of centuries of practice. And if there was any doubt about the efficacy of sacred rituals, everywhere around us banal homilies were being offered to make death appear less strange or devastating. The bhajan that had been playing on the loudspeaker all afternoon was in praise of fire. Death, you think you have defeated us, but we sing the song of burning firewood. Even though it was tuneless, and even tasteless, the song turned cremation into a somewhat celebratory act. It struck me that the music disavowed its own macabre nature and made everything acceptable. And now, as the fire burned lower and there was visibly less to burn, I saw that everyone, myself included, had momentarily returned to a sense of the ordinary. This feeling wouldn’t last more than a few hours, but at that time I felt free from the contagion of tears. I remember complaining about the loud music. Everyone had been fasting since morning, and pedas from a local confectioner were taken out of paper boxes. I took a box of pedas to our young dom, but he refused; he didn’t want anything sweet to eat. I was handed a packet of salted crackers to pass on to him. Tea was served in small plastic cups. Street dogs and goats wandered past the funeral pyres. Broken strings of marigold, fruit peels, and bits of bedding, including blankets and a pillow pulled from the fire, littered the sandy bank. One of my uncles had lost his car keys and people from our group left to look for them.

  The dom had so far used a ten-foot-long bamboo to rearrange the burning logs, but when the fire died down he poked around the burning embers with his callused fingers. I was summoned for another round of prayers and offerings to the fire. The men in my family gave directions to the dom as he scooped Ma’s remains—ash and bones, including a few vertebrae, but other small bones too, white and curiously flat—into a large earthen pot. This pot was wrapped in red cloth and later that evening hung from a high branch on the mango tree outside our house. Its contents were to be immersed in the Ganga at the holy sites upriver: Benares, Prayag, and Haridwar. This was a journey my sisters and I would undertake later in the week; but that afternoon, after the pot had been filled, the rest of the half-burned wood and ash and what might have been a part of the hipbone were flung into the river while the priest chanted prayers. Flower petals, mostly marigold, had been stuffed in polythene bags which had the names of local sari shops printed on them, and at the end everyone took part in casting handfuls of bright petals on the brown waters. I took pictures. The photograph of the yellow marigold floating on the Ganga, rather than my mother’s burning pyre, is what I put up on Facebook that evening.

  RICHARD M. LANGE

  Of Human Carnage

  FROM Catamaran

  On March 12, 2012, my girlfriend, Elizabeth, and I were driving on Costa Rica’s Inter-American Highway, the major north-south highway through the country. We were on the second-to-last day of a three-week bird-watching trip that had included most of the good birding spots in the northern two-thirds of the country. That morning we had left the cabin we’d rented on Cerro de la Muerte (the Hill of Death) and were headed to our last stop, a small hotel in Alajuela, near the Juan Santamaría International Airport, where we were scheduled to catch our return flight to California the next morning.

  As anyone who has done it will tell you, driving in Costa Rica is a challenge. Roads are narrow, most streets are unmarked, and the highways are filled with speeding big rigs. In many places, a lone sign telling you to ceda el paso (yield) is your only warning that the highway is about to narrow to a single lane for both directions. Throughout our travels, we’d seen pedestrians (including unattended children) walking the narrowest of shoulders. On some stretches there is no shoulder at all—the roadway is bounded by steep drops or weed-choked ditches. In these places, the pedestrians and bicyclists are forced, under threat of instant death, to maintain an extremely disciplined line along the very edge of the asphalt.

  Where Elizabeth and I were traveling, about halfway between Cartago and San José, the two northbound lanes are divided from the southbound lanes by a section of neighborhood. I was behind the wheel, my eyes on the road ahead as I listened for any updates from our rented SUV’s GPS system, which spoke to us in a ki
ndly female voice we had affectionately dubbed Carmen Sabetodo. The afternoon commute under way, traffic was much heavier than it had been anywhere else on our trip. Cars were traveling at about sixty miles an hour, which is pretty fast for Costa Rica, as most of the roads are too narrow and winding for such a speed. On the left sat a row of small houses, their fenceless yards coming right to the edge of the highway. On the right, a steep-sided ditch lined with concrete—essentially a mammoth rain gutter—ran alongside. Across the ditch, a treeless embankment climbed thirty or so feet.

  Well up ahead, on the right-hand edge of the asphalt, I saw a figure. It was a man, dressed in dark pants and a powder-blue shirt. In the first instant that I noticed him, I felt something was wrong, that he wasn’t just another pedestrian walking a dangerous edge of roadway. Standing on the highway side of the concrete ditch, he seemed in a particularly precarious spot. I imagined he’d slid down the embankment accidentally and, unable to climb back up, had decided the only way out of his predicament was to cross the ditch and then, if it was possible, cross the highway. And now there he stood, weighing the feasibility of the second part of his plan. He was leaning toward the moving traffic, as though seeking the right moment to dash across. As a white SUV approached he leaned back slightly, the vehicle missing him by inches. Behind the SUV was a big-rig truck. When it reached him, he dove in front of it.

  In an instant, my mind involuntarily revised its sense of what was happening. The man, it seemed, had not come to the edge of the highway by accident. He was some kind of daredevil, attempting to dive into the middle of the lane so that the truck would harmlessly pass over him, after which he would quickly scramble back into the roadside ditch before being hit by the next vehicle. I imagined a group of friends were looking on, probably from atop the embankment, and he was performing for their awe and admiration. For that fraction of a second, I was so convinced of this scenario that my brain actually formed the thought: This is dumb! You’re not going to make it! But of course the man was not a daredevil; he was committing suicide.

  When the truck’s front bumper hit him, there was an explosion of pink, his body, or some part of it, bursting like a water balloon. As the truck rolled over him, he was struck by first one set of wheels, then another, then another, causing him to careen and tumble along under the chassis. The amount of time between my first noticing him and seeing his body battered under the truck was probably two seconds, too short of an interval to put into words any of my quick succession of thoughts, but when my brain finally caught up with what was happening, I gasped, “Oh, my God!”

  Lifting my foot from the accelerator, I swerved as far to the left as I could to avoid hitting the man myself. Mindful of the heavy traffic on the road, I was trying to slow as quickly as possible, to signal to the vehicles behind me that something had happened, but not so quickly that I got rammed by an inattentive driver. My next thought was to get beyond the scene before I pulled over, to not stop until I was out of range of its gruesomeness.

  As our vehicle neared the body lying in the road, I spoke forcefully to Elizabeth: “Don’t look!” I think I even put a hand in front of her face. She immediately covered her eyes, which created a strange moment of solitude between myself and whatever I was about to see. I felt like a child who’d stumbled into some scary place—a spiderweb-filled basement or a dark cave—and realized he was going to face the terror alone.

  There seemed no possibility the man had survived, but I wanted to assess whether or not he could be helped. My eyes found his body on the asphalt. He lay on his stomach, unmoving, his feet toward the roadside ditch. For some reason I could see his back and shoulders but not his head. Getting closer, I saw that his head was gone. A few feet farther down the road lay pieces of his shattered skull.

  About a hundred yards beyond the body, the big rig was coming to a stop in the right-hand lane. I pulled in front of it and cut the engine. Hoping to spare Elizabeth any further horror, particularly the sight of the man’s headless and shattered body, I gave her another firm directive: “Stay here! Do not get out of this car!”

  Her face white with shock, she nodded.

  I climbed out and ran back up the highway toward the truck. As I reached it my dominant thought was that I did not want to see again—or see better—what I had just seen. If someone wanted me to go beyond the truck, they would have to be armed or strong enough to physically force me. Even then, if they wanted me to look again at the pieces of the man’s body, they would have to pry my eyelids open.

  When I reached the driver, he was standing in front of his vehicle, talking on his cell phone. He too, I noticed, had taken up a spot that kept his truck between himself and the gore back up the road. I speak Spanish, and initially the bits of conversation I overheard made me think he was describing the accident to the police, but it eventually became clear he was talking to someone at the company he worked for—a dispatcher or possibly his boss. His eyes were pegged open, and he spoke as though in a trance—head still, mouth opening and closing robotically. When he hung up, I started to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but my voice broke. I placed a hand on his shoulder; the hand, I noticed, was trembling. He said nothing, his eyes refusing to meet mine.

  A school bus pulled up next to us in the left lane and stopped. A dozen girls, all about fifteen, sat in the first few rows behind the driver, all in some state of shock, many crying into cell phones. Without getting out of his seat, the bus driver opened the door and gave the truck driver some simple directions: don’t move the truck, wait for the police, ask the witnesses to stay here. Despite his clear-minded directives, the bus driver was ashen, his voice rising and falling in pitch as he spoke. “Estará bien,” he said a few times. Then he drove his devastated passengers away.

  At this point I looked back down the road, making sure I’d parked my vehicle in such a way that the bus could get around it, and saw Elizabeth. She’d gotten out of the SUV and was standing on the side of the highway, shaking and crying. I ran to her.

  As I wrapped her in my arms and tried to comfort her, I noticed, across the highway, a middle-aged woman in shorts and a dark shirt who’d come out of her house to see what was happening. She waved us over. I led Elizabeth across the asphalt, and the woman, without a word, took Elizabeth by the hand and led her to a covered patio that fronted her house. I started back up the hill toward the truck but was met by a different woman, this one younger, maybe thirty or so, walking quickly toward me holding a pen and a pad of paper. She wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform, but she comported herself professionally, like a medic or a police officer. She told me I needed to give a statement, that the truck driver might be in serious legal trouble if I didn’t. Working to stay calm and speak in coherent Spanish, I told her that I would definitely give a statement, but I also explained that I was an American, that this was my last day in Costa Rica, that my girlfriend was upset and I didn’t want to keep her here any longer than I had to.

  She nodded. “Sí. Pero dame su información.”

  I carefully wrote out my name and email address, along with the name of the hotel in Alajuela where we’d be staying the night.

  “Lo vio usted?” she asked.

  “Sí. El hombre”—I didn’t know the word for “dove,” so I said “threw himself”—“se tiro en frente del camion. No fue la culpa del camionero.”

  Concurring with my version of what had happened, she nodded and went back up the road.

  At this point the son of the woman who was tending to Elizabeth emerged from the house. He was skinny, about seventeen, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, half hopping and half walking across the lawn as he struggled to fit a pair of flip-flops on his feet. “What happened?” he asked me, in Spanish.

  “A man got hit by a truck.”

  “Is he dead?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Perdio su cabeza,” I said, miming the act of lifting my head from my shoulders.

  His eyes grew wider and he to
re off up the hill, his mother yelling after him to be careful.