Metaphor in a time of heartbreak: Writer Tishani Doshi on the constraints of language

Orpheus in Madras

I’m trying to remember the last time I saw a dead body. Not the bodies that are unfolding daily on our screens, being killed elsewhere on a scale that is terrifying. Not genocidal death, but singular death. Death next door, in the flesh, so to speak.

It was April 2023. A friend’s aunt had suffered a long illness and it was with some relief and sadness that a few of us gathered at the local crematorium, where the body was brought first to an outdoor hall in the presence of a statue of Kal Bhairav and his faithful dog Shvan, and later, wheeled through a corridor where several real-life dogs sprawled on the floor, lazily biting the fur off their paws. Then we were ushered into a chamber where the jaws of a giant oven opened to receive the body. The priest uttered a prayer for this final journey, and as we threw flower petals upon the steel contraption holding the body, it slid into the mouth of nothingness like a tongue, emerging seconds later with the body vanished.

I remember coming out of the crematorium dazed by that final choreography. Unlike a burial or a traditional cremation, where the body undergoes a...

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