'Ochre'

We walked along the dark narrow path towards the main road. I can't remember the time now, but it was chosen by my elder uncles and aunts - and how can a certain funeral event ever be auspicious?. A procession of family and close relations : our second last tribute (it was the eve of the casket burial) where we were to burn paper mimics of objects that represented wealth, prosperity and status.

I guess due to the fact that i was a kid, tears never escaped me that night. It was all bewildering and dark : the rituals of a Malaysian Buddhist family. As we walked to the junction of the main road, where i guess the rest of the world was dead-sleeping - i noticed how the street lights gave everyone the same monotone colour : ochre. When i look back at it now, it's sort of symbolic - how everyone is different (with our personalities and physical traits) and yet, the same (in this situation : death) overshadows, marks, claims us.

When we arrived at a certain spot of the road, the priest held out a small golden urn - chiming it with a small metal rod, singing his prayer with zest and volume - incense was burned and distributed amongst us. I held it blankly, looking upwards at my mother who was holding me by the shoulders. As the objects of the ritual were arranged properly at the heart of the chosen place, we began slowly to form a circle around it.

Then some words were uttered by the priest, and everyone planted their sticks of incense methodologically, one by one on the paper and bamboo constructed castle which towered over us - the place where my grandmother would live in her afterlife, after we burned it. It was what i believed then, anyway.

Each of us resumed the formation after that and we held hands. And by some cue through the words of the priest, which seemed awfully frightening through the eyes of a kid - everyone began to cry, lament and mourn. Physically manifesting what the night was about : grief over the lost of a loved one.

It was then he started to put his cigarette lighter at the base of the paper castle.

In the cries, tears and words, as all the offerings caught fire - the air slowly circled into a magnificent spiral - upwords and growing. By then we, on the outside were also moving - like a prayer wheel - sending our messages, sending our emotions, sending her off.

When the fire was too strong, we broke our form and stood far from the site, then after a while, the priest asked us to return to the house. We walked quietly back again, into the darkness of the path where we came, leaving the ashes and everything else which was ochre under those street lights.

( _")

For grandma.