Lakhmi Das is dead. Nobody quite knows how, though it is clear that it happened after a fight with his older brother, Sri Chand. Lakhmi had returned after a hunt the evening before, and while he was skinning and cutting up the doe, two fetuses were found inside its belly. Seeing this, Sri Chand attacked Lakhmi Das and a raging fist-to-fist fight ensued that ended when Sri Chand’s followers broke the two apart. In the verbal battle that followed the physical one, Sri Chand swore that Lakhmi would have to give an accounting of his actions to God, that he would be found wanting and be condemned to the deepest, darkest hell. Lakhmi Das retorted that God himself created animals of prey. Impetuous as he was, he said he would give his accounting right there and then. He grabbed his son, Dharam Chand, mounted his horse, and spurred it toward the jungle outside Kartarpur where he hunted. Sri Chand, whose prophetic powers saw what was going through his brother’s mind, shouted:
“Don’t you dare end our clan!”
People who saw the incident swore that Sri Chand’s arm lengthened and extended as if it were made of some fictile, rubbery material, and with it, he intercepted the galloping horse and plucked Dharam out of his brother’s embrace. He wanted Nanak’s lineage to continue through generations and millennia to come. He himself, being celibate, would have no progeny.
Lakhmi Chand’s horse later returned to the dera, riderless. The men have been searching everywhere for him and the horse for two days without telling the family. Though no body has been recovered, they agreed the family must be informed.
The women of the family and the Sikh community at large are devastated by the event. Baba Nanak weeps; Nanaki cries, grieves, and acknowledges her sense of relief that the death her soul had anticipated was not Nanak’s, though she is wise enough to know that all such relief is temporary; Mata Sulakhni and Lakhmi’s wife, Dhanvanti, wail, howl, and are inconsolable. Sri Chand leaves the dera and is not seen again for many years.
Some say Lakhmi Das drowned or killed himself in some other way; others, more inclined to fantasy, say he flew to heaven on the horse and then sent it back because it was not the horse’s time to die yet.
What makes it difficult for everyone is that sudden deaths are all the harder for being unexpected. Moreover, there is no body to say goodbye to, no customary rituals to lay the dead to rest and allow the living to have some closure by channeling their grief into prescribed practicalities.
Expected deaths follow an ordered sequence: right before death the person is carried from the bed to the floor, already prepared with a paste of dung and grass, their feet turned toward the north to ensure he or she doesn’t become a ghost; the body is bathed, often with curd; ghee is applied to the body, hair, and poured into the cavities of the mouth, nose, ears, as a sign of respect and love, and to make the burning easier and quicker so that, in Kabir’s words, “The hair burns like a bale of hay, and bones like a bundle of logs”; the corpse is clothed in the best outfit, placed on a bier, and covered with a shroud; widows and children touch the feet; the ceremony of deeva batti130 is then performed: dough, shaped into a lamp, is filled with ghee, a cotton wick placed in it and lit near the head or on the right palm of the deceased to illumine his/her journey to the other world; professional female mourners come to the house, lamenting, beating their breasts, wailing loudly, giving voice to the grief that family members are unable in their shock and grief to express; relatives and members of the community visit, sit around the body, offer condolences to family members and keep them company in their hour of need; others go into the jungle to collect wood to make a pyre for the cremation; women cook meals for the visitors who come from out of town; Hindu men shave their heads; widows take off all their jewelry, break their bangles, remove all makeup, never to wear them again; their lives, even if they don’t commit sati,131 are over; a widow is a nonentity without a husband; the nain, the maid, combs and ties the hair of the widow and people give her much-welcome money because she is not to have a source of income from now on and must be entirely dependent upon family members and relatives. If a married woman dies, she is adorned with jewelry, nose ring, bangles, and the parting in her hair is colored vermilion as a sign of her good fortune in not surviving her husband. An old man’s death is cause for celebration. His shroud is bright red and his bier, shaped like a boat, is decorated in gold and red ribbons; his body is then escorted to the sounds of drums, stringed instruments, gongs, and conch calls to the cremation grounds. Flower petals, coins, dry fruits, and other edibles are thrown over the body that the poor await eagerly to collect.
The corpse is then carried out of the house, feet first—contrary to head first from the womb—to the cremation ground on the shoulders of four close relatives and placed on the already prepared pyre. More wood is then piled on top of the deceased. A family member, generally the oldest son, breaks an earthenware jar full of water to symbolize that the form has broken and shapeless water returned to the soil. Usually the eldest son sets fire to the wood logs, starting at the head, clockwise, reciting prayers. Midway through the burning he lifts a club and breaks the deceased’s skull, the thickest, hardest part of the body, to facilitate its disintegration into ash.
On the way back, mourners bathe at a pond or well, wash their clothes, wear new ones as a gesture of purification from death; then they sit on the ground and pluck a blade of grass. The priest chants and instructs the gathering to break the blade of grass into two and throw it behind them over their shoulders to sever their ties with the dead one. Of course, this ritual never serves its purpose, for the dead continue to live with the living in one form or another.
After the body is charred to ash, the bones are collected from the pile of ash in a ceremony called phool chugna, meaning “picking flowers.” The bones are washed in milk, placed in a bag or an earthenware jar and consigned to a river, always to a river, that brings, takes away, and brings again.
A feast follows, and many more ceremonies and rituals are performed to ensure the deceased a good afterlife. Food, grains, sugar are given away in charity in the hope they will reach the loved one; a cow is given away so that the dead man can clutch its tail and cross the wide river to the other shore. Brahmin priests, who receive the cow, assure the family that the cow will perform this important function for the dead man and also feed him milk in the afterlife.
Though Baba Nanak forbade sati and discouraged the many rituals of death and the elaborate ceremonies that often put poor people into debt, they persisted in using rituals to placate their conscience and the inevitable regrets and guilt of the grieving.
In Lakhmi’s case, they could do nothing and were left with a vacuum that was hard to fill.
When the kirtan sessions resumed upon Baba’s insistence a few days later, he sang many songs about death: “We, bubbles of breath, live for the briefest moment; we do not know the time or place of our departure. O Nanak, serve the Deathless One to whom our soul and breath belong.”
His music and words soothed the community and evoked reflection and wonder in many: Who knows where we come from, materializing out of invisibility, sound out of silence, living out our seemingly solid, bounded existences, then returning to the folds of that Mystery beyond our comprehension, beyond gender and categories, beyond the bounds of space and time, at once infinite and finite, invisible and palpable, unbound and bound, beyond and within the life that surrounds and inhabits us, like air; the Mystery none has named, no eyes seen, no tongue uttered, no hand touched, but glimpsed briefly, ever so briefly, when Death opens its Door, humbling us in our knowledge that we do not, and may never know, though we have felt it beating in our hearts as the unfathomable sea upon the shores of our consciousness.
Mata Sulakhni and Dhanvanti, Lakhmi Das’s wife, cloister themselves in their sorrow. People spend long hours sitting by Baba and Bebe Nanaki, finding their presence consoling. Bebe Nanaki talks about grief as a gift from the Beloved. The death of someone close to us opens Death’s Door and allows us a glimpse beyond. People tell their own stories of remarkable coincidences and dreams following a death. Nanaki explains how dreams are a different dimension in which connections with the dead can be made. Death, she says, always wrenches from their hinges the doors of the heart, confronts us with our mortality, and allows us to see and experience life from the vantage point of mystery.
People who are convinced Lakhmi Das has committed suicide want to know whether it is a sin to do so. Nanaki says everything that happens, everything we are helpless in the face of, is hukum; that we must accept it fully and not judge people for what their destiny makes them do.
She also explains that those who believe he rode off into heaven are happier and calmer than those who make reason the measure of their knowledge. Bhai Buddha asks Bebe Nanaki the difference between the two.
Sometimes, Bebe Nanaki explains, when “reality” becomes too much for us to bear, the universe gives us ways of thinking that are just as true as “reality”; that there is a Reality, accessed through the Imagination, that is so vast it contains both reality and fantasy. This whole world is Akaal Purukh’s imagination and fantasy, Vishnu’s dream, she says. She recalls Baba’s image of how all of creation flows from one fantastical Word written by Akaal Purukh. From the womb of that primeval Word, rivers, mountains, trees, earth, soil, sky, water, people, creatures, flowers, plants, insects appeared. We too are utterances, words, vibrations emanating from His Mouth, she says. The world is a vibration, a wave, a breath, a sound given a body, form, and shape that returns to the original Vibration when it dematerializes.
Bebe Nanaki goes on to say that those who cannot bear “reality” must find refuge in the arms of Winged Imagination, that God-given Truth, Mother, who lives beyond the reach of constricting reason shackled to the senses, and feeds balm from her teats to the torn and bleeding heart. The imagination transforms blood into roses, and the bones of the dead into flowers. Even literally, she says, bones and ashes make good fertilizer for plants, and one way or another, we return, because God’s energy is deathless. Who, she asks, in their right mind would not step beyond the mind—not denying its harsh imperatives—but choosing this other, more beautiful way to think and live? It is hardly the coward’s way; much courage, especially from those who live through their brains, is required to enter here, she says. The simple peasant who believes in miracles knows more than all our knowing. Miracles, in all their literality, she adds, speak of those Truths that lie beyond plodding, ponderous reason.
So, dear readers, let us follow the fantasists’ footsteps, knowing the realities and rituals surrounding the diseased, yet choose consciously to see reality in another light, in the suffused flame of myth. Here, people fly up to heaven on horses and leave no residue behind, except flowers. Death comes for all, even for our prophets and heroes, and flesh, clothed in which we enter the realm of matter, must be shed like a garment specific to this dimension.
Nanaki’s words are uttered on the threshold of a wave of deaths that pass through Kartarpur following Lakhmi Das’s death. They prepare the listeners and gift them a path to prefer as they are swept up and out in it. Every death affects everyone that comes into contact with it because, as Nanaki says, we exist in a fabric and a web we share with everyone else, and with every death a part of us dies. With every death, she says, we must turn again and again toward the Deathless One in whom we exist and never perish.
All year it was fall in Kartarpur. It was time for lives, like leaves, to shed, float down the currents of air to the soil from which they sprang. It was all part of sehaj, the natural order of things, though the human, so removed from this order, mourns and weeps. We inherit weeping and mourning from the moment of the Great Spirit’s incarnation into flesh—the vessel that contains the uncontainable Spirit which laps at the shores of our boundaries and in the very nuclei of our cells—till death, spirit’s summons, finally frees us from the cage we call the body.
Many we have not even heard of in this narrative, having played their parts in the Drama of Life, moved into the wings where the River waited without ever ceasing its flow, to carry them away—who knows where? Even Baba, always humble enough to know he did not know, admitted in a song: Some are cremated, some buried, some eaten by dogs, some thrown into rivers, O Nanak, it is not known, where they go and into what they merge.
Daulatan Masi, on a night of thunder and lightning found the energy within her frail body to leave the house and stumble toward the dera with a single intent: to die in Guru Nanak’s arms. Guru Nanak, too, sensing her urgent need, went out in the pouring rain to meet her halfway, his arms spread wide. She walked into them, and with a beatific smile on her face, exhaled her last breath. Clasped in his loving embrace, she returned home to the infinite spaces that a kiss of the awakened one’s lotus feet had transported her to before her time; she died in a dream and never returned to that which most of us call “reality,” her soul returning to those vast, boundless spaces that her mortal frame and sanity could barely bear.
Since we are on the topic of death, we might also mention the deaths of Nanak’s parents, who perished long before this: Mata Tripta died in her son’s embrace; Mehta Kallu died a contented man who, having given up his small expectations of life, had an inkling of the invaluable gift he had been given in Nanak; unlike mortal kings who become but a word, a footnote, or a name in history books, his son would live forever, and he along with him.
It is time now for Mardana, who had given death the slip so many times during his adventures with Nanak, to die.
130. Lamp and wick.
131. The practice of women burning themselves along with their dead spouses, a custom absolutely forbidden by Guru Nanak.