Lockdown Diary / Fragmented notes from the 21st or 22nd day?

In the small towns of the desert, children make houses of sand in the evening. Before going home, they smash those houses of sand with their feet and say, “I created, I destroyed.”

In the last rites of most Hindu people, a close family member of the deceased has to take a bamboo stave and break the skull of the dead body already burning in the funeral pyre. It is called Kapala Kriya. What burns before you is nothing but body and so you must destroy it with your own hands.

At the end of puja, the worshipped idols made of clay (that took months to be sculpted) must be immersed into water. They must dissolve into nothing.

There are no graves, no epigraphs, no cemeteries to be visited years after the death. The dead cannot take space from the living. The dead must be forgotten.

The gods’ task doesn’t end with creation alone. What gods created, gods must destroy.

Even the ashes of the burnt body cannot be kept in urns. They, too, must be immersed into water. Your bones will not be found centuries later.

In my last love letter to this mortal world, I will write, “Break my skull, my love, and light a cheap cigarette from the smouldering ashes of my pyre.”