The twisting dance of life and death

 

A moment in a town’s crematorium. Rows of cremation spaces under an open shed. A couple of pyres still burning; one breathing its last. Time ashen, smoldering, carrying funereal stillness. Grief-soaked, tremulous air hanging low like impenetrable fog.

Some pyres gone cold. The powdered remains of bones still slightly visible among the ashes. The ash ready to collect unshed tears. The air heavy with a deadly finality.

The smoldering wood lets out a crackling sound from one of the burning pyres. It sounds like time’s fabric is cracked with farewells and separations.

A discarded hospital body bag lying nearby. Blood spattered on it. Maybe it was an accident victim. Fleas on the blood; buzzing on the painful shadows of endings and farewells. A very discomfiting sight. Smoke going up, leaving hope and tears behind.

In a nearby unplastered wall, a sadabahar flower high up in the wall, sprouting from a crack among the bricks. Life invincible. A flower on its crown. Beautifully bejeweled. A purple bloom. Resilient. Unwithered. A wildflower in the cracked stone. A silent fleeting witness to the endings and beginnings, renewals rather. A breath-born luminal mortal. A butterfly-light lone flower’s endurance in the pyre-lit domain of death. The insistence of life through the stony cracks in death’s fortress.

And a butterfly on the flower in the garden of death with its ashen rows of mortality. The butterfly stitching color and beauty from the grotesque black and white of grief. A flowery pause in the long sentence of death. A flowery comma.

Fleas on the dead man’s blood; a butterfly on the brave flower’s proud head. Life and death; death and life.

Death: sandily crumbling life. Life: meritorious, meteoric defiance by the will to live.

But life still prevails with its baby-step maneuvers as death goes elephantly lumbering.