... Kafoor...

This had to be the first time I heard the word, but the speaker spoke of it as if it were table salt. I was told it looks like table salt or glassy, ground limestone. But the speaker is eighty-seven years old and her chemistry is rather basic.

The context is not very interesting but relevant for this scrap of writing.

“Munjhli apa said when you bury me, bury me with one hundred kilograms of kafoor,” Daddi was telling Mama. “Now think about it, she died so suddenly, it took hours to get hold of that amount of kafoor. What’s the point of such a will?”

I don’t know who Munjhli Apa was but may her soul rest now. She died a few generations, raised to the power of a few more generations before I was born. Her will consisted of nothing but of a burial with one hundred kilograms of Kafoor – a white, powdery substance sold near graveyards, added to the grave during burial. Daddi claims it is supposed to keep the body “fresh” for sometime.

I am not sure how this indigenous method of body preservation differs from the knowledge of ancient, advanced Egyptian chemistry. But the concept is worth a wonder - - - the concept of wanting to make the body live, even when you are medically dead.


Death is either poetic, apparently too distant to be real, or just heavy.

And then, the science of chemistry, for the art of body preservation.


Why would one want to keep their body alive, when dead?
Well, why wouldn’t one… after all the things this body demands, it should sound only just to ask it to reciprocate.


Immortality is a yearning we cannot deny.


Even at the weakest moments, when we wish we had never existed, we still want that suffering to become permanent somewhere, in a depersonalized fashion. Earlier men scratched caves with pictures of mammoths… “we were here”… we smile when we discover two letters scrapped by ambitious lovers on tree trunks… “X and Y were here” And those few letters and images tell stories of synapses and civilizations – ‘please know this, we were here’. Journals, art-work, music… they are not just sublimated derivatives of libidinal energy … they are an attempt to be remembered.

One string pulled resonates forever, sound energy converted into other forms of energy… it doesn’t die.



Kafoor is not just a white powder.
It’s a metaphor for that promise to live on, in any desperate form… God, they come in such beautiful forms, sometimes.


Like signed books, with long-drawn-out signatures…
Marked pages, ear-marked pages…


Is there anyone who wants to disappear, unnoticed… without a mark, without a grain of kafoor? Even the likes of Kafka, who wanted their works burnt after death? Did he really want to do that…? Leave without a trace…? Silent, unspoken martyrdom sounds so virtuous, it almost hurts – but does someone really aspire for that? According to sociobiologists, many species are pre-programmed like that: they will sacrifice themselves to warn their race against danger. But even that suicide is a form of preservation… the preservation of your specie.


…Kafoor…


Children… why is it discomforting to think of them as parasites – something they are, basically? By-products of a biological motive? No… that’s not all...what they are. They will carry you inside them, in their genes, in the color of their eyes, the voice, and perhaps even (God forbid, in my case, at least) your ambition …

You will live … somehow… through them.



What is Heaven…? It is not just a lure of vibrant goblets, silk and wide-eyed maidens; it’s a Promise of infinity. Sufistic annihilation of the self… to merge the self with the Self… not annihilation, then, is it? It’s all about becoming the part of the Origin, a forever-al Origin… a forever-al, non-created, non-ending Being…

… Kafoor…


Rhodes Scholarship…
Ganga Ram Hospital…
Taj Mehal…
Pyramids…


Don’t worry, Munjhli Apa, you’re not the only one.
Others have been less discrete...

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