The poem
Obituary was written by A.K. Ramanujan. An obituary is usually a tribute to the person who has
passed away, featuring the high points of his life. Such is not the case in this poem. Written
in first person, the son is the narrator of the poem.
Seeming quite
disgruntled with his father, the son points out all of the things his father left undone. His
bills were unpaid, and he left unmarried daughters. His grandson, a bed wetter, was named after
the grandfather, but improperly. The house in which the narrator grew up leaned against a tree.
Apparently, the father had a hot temper which may be part of the son's unhappiness:
Being the burning type,
he
burned properly
at the cremation€¦
When the
father was cremated, coins were placed on the bodys eyes. In
keeping with the Hindu custom of swift cremation, bodies are cremated within
24. After the cremation, the sons dug through the ashes to find hot
coals to throw in an eastward fashion into the river.
The
father would have no headstone with the dates of his birth and death. To the son, the dates are
parentheses encapsulating the time of the fathers life. From his birth to his death, the son
feels that his father did many things incorrectly or incompletely:
like his caesarean birth
in a Brahmin ghetto
and his death by
heart-
failure in the fruit market€¦
He hears
that his fathers obituary took two lines in a local newspaper four weeks after his cremation.
The son often bought sugar cane placed in one of these newspapers shaped like a cone. In the
beginning, the son says that he looks for the paper for fun, and then he says he would like to
have the obituary.
in newspaper cones
that I
usually read
for fun, and lately
in the hope of
finding
these obituary lines.
Since the narrator
is the oldest son, he will be responsible for any ancient rituals
that the culture requires. There is little mourning when a Hindu
dies because they believe that once a person is born he or she never dies. Often
there is little crying. The son does not show any strong feelings for the fathers death which
may be due to the Hindu custom or his irritation with his father.
Now,
everything is different. Understandably, the mother is changed; her husband has died. Despite
the displeasure with his father voiced by the narrator, he still respectfully wants to have
the paper with the fathers obituary.
