A death in Haryana

The mourning and celebration of a grandmother includes songs and a funeral pyre.

By Maya Phillips

Phooli’s body, bedding and personal belongings burn for a day. The men gathered in the cold, foggy morning to witness the cremation, and left quickly after the pyre was lit.

Phooli Devi’s body, bedding and personal belongings were cremated on a Sunday morning in January. Her grandson Amit, 40, touched a flame to the straw piled around the pyre of dry dung fuel that encapsulated Phooli’s carefully prepared body, and the circle of men stepped back as black smoke filled the air.  

Within minutes, most of the gathered men left, returning to Amit’s house. Those who remained lit cigarettes and stood talking in a huddled group, and when they finished their cigarettes they returned to Amit’s house where the day had begun. 

This was the first of thirteen days Amit’s house would spend mourning and celebrating his grandmother according to Hindu practices common in their state of Haryana. Traditionally, this process should have taken place at Phooli’s eldest son’s house and he should have been the one to light her pyre — but both Amit’s father and uncle died when he was young, so as the eldest of Phooli’s three grandsons, the responsibility fell to him. 

Back at Amit’s house, the shifting group of about 20 men assembled quietly outside the front door, drinking tea and smoking an elaborate hookah, and an equally-sized group of women gathered inside the house’s courtyard, sitting down in a layered circle with older women at the center leading the group in a song. At the edge of the space, a smaller circle formed around Phooli’s daughter-in-law Sheela, placing hands on her head as she wiped her eyes with the teal scarf covering her head. Between lyrics of the large group’s song, crying and wails arose from the small group, amplified by the two-story walls of the courtyard.

The women in the large circle finished their song and rose to their feet, and most left after quietly offering their condolences to Sheela and other family members. The small group that remained made chai over a fire and mixed with their male relatives who came in from the street. Sheela and her daughter Priyanka began sharing stories of Phooli’s 90 years of life, especially recalling the difficulties Phooli had faced at the deaths of her husband and two sons, and they accredited their family’s house, land and education to Phooli.

“Whatever we have is because of her,” Sheela said. “She played a lot, loved a lot.”

“She was very particular about her diet,” Priyanka added, remembering stories her grandmother told of her youth. “She never had chai until old age.”

Phooli’s daughter-in-law Sheela is surrounded and comforted by friends and relatives. After the cremation service, men gathered outside Amit’s house while women congregated inside to sing and cry together. “Of course we are sad,” Sheela said, though the focus of the day was on celebrating Phooli’s life. | Photos by Merrina O’Malley

But in the weeks before she died, all she asked for was lassi, a drink usually made with buffalo milk and spices. She rejected chai, milk and, in her final week, even food. But when Sheela brought her lassi, Phooli would drink a single sip and say she didn’t want it. 

In the last coherent conversation Sheela had with her mother-in-law, she recalled Phooli telling her, “Stay safe, stay good, stay happy.  I don’t have a long time here.”

Then, the Phooli they had known was gone.  

Following Hindu tradition, Sheela put Gangajal — water from the holy Ganges River — into Phooli’s mouth immediately after her death late Saturday night, the first step in releasing her soul, and her body was moved from her bed to the floor to form a connection with Mother Earth. The next day, she was brought downstairs to the entrance room of Amit’s house, where she was bathed and sung over by female family members. 

Sunday morning, mourners gathered at Amit’s house. The men stood outside in the street, wrapped in shawls to keep warm and wearing either normal clothes or funeral white. Married women in brightly-colored clothes and head scarves gathered inside the courtyard, which they reached by passing through the space where Phooli’s body still lay, wrapped in a red and yellow blanket on a wooden bed. Whispers were exchanged among both groups, but the house was mostly quiet.

A funeral procession arranged itself, with the men in front carrying Phooli’s body and possessions and the women following, singing funeral songs as the group moved slowly down the street.  Just a few minutes later, they reached the cremation grounds and the women, without pausing their song, sat down on the cobblestone street far from the funeral pyre. As unmarried women are traditionally excluded from attending funerals, married women are excluded from the cremation service because it is difficult to witness. In some families, like Phooli’s, this tradition is not enforced, but none of the women present chose to follow the men. They chose tradition.

The cremation ground is a grassy field with walls on three sides and a lake on the fourth. That morning, the winter cold and the fog above the lake seemed to rush the cremation proceedings. 

The men lay Phooli’s body atop a pyre already built there, and a few volunteers ran back to Amit’s house to retrieve forgotten jugs of lighter fluid. Other men worked quietly to cover the body with more dry dung, their silence broken only by phones ringing and a few muffled conversations. 

The lighter fluid arrived, and the men doused the straw surrounding the bottom of the pyre while Amit crouched over and lit a flame in a mud pot filled with butter, clutching a large stick in his hands. He stood, threw the stick over the pyre to send his grandmother’s soul beyond her body and touched a flame to the straw. 

The pyre burned for the rest of the day.

Two days later, the family went back to the cremation grounds to gather Phooli’s remains. For most Hindus, the next step would be to bring the remains to a holy river and to perform further rituals. For Phooli’s family in the Kurukshetra district of Haryana, any local river will do because this region was the site of the Mahabharata War — a key piece of Hindu history and a place where gods died, making the land and every river holy. 

Each day of mourning, Amit’s house was open to visitors, anyone present at the funeral as well as more distant friends and relatives, and they spent those days as they spent the first: singing, remembering and sometimes crying. On the last day, they celebrated Phooli’s long life, her impact on theirs and her soul’s future.

“Of course we are sad,” Sheela said, “but she had lived almost 100 years. All her teeth were gone, but they had started to come back, like a child’s.”

Phooli was ready for her next life, but she left a legacy of love and dedication for the family she spent a lifetime caring for.