Elegy is an Old Women’s Business

Elegy is an Old Women’s Business

Modern life is fleeting phantom. It vanishes from our sight in the blink of our eyes.  It can be further defined with the word “instant”. Instant in a sense that it demands everything at ready hand. It cannot go to raw material and processes it into the fine product for the consumer. What that left to the user is the processed material and with that processed material farther cooking needs to be done for the taste. Theuser of the product needs to over-process it once again. Hence, twice is the process.  

In this context the sense of satisfaction may not be possible. Only when the product is materialized from its rawness to the fine product we could treat it with gladness. Happy are those ages when they used an object for generations. Modern life disregards the value of the material and its utility. With this view in mind one could envisions death as an object in its material status. Marriage, birth, and festivals have their own jubilant mood. Death also has its impact over the gathering not in the sense of tragic loss but in the philosophical contemplation over life. The preacher in the Ecclesiastics says, “it is better to go to a house of mourning Than to go to a house of feasting, Because that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart” (Ecc. 7:2). Modern life does not have time to spent two days to think about it. When it fleets, it takes away the sense of philosophical contemplation as a phantom.

Within a day gap, a life disappears from our sight. Man who is seemingly lethargic and slow is no more. Even we do not know whether that man ever existed in our surrounding. Jaundice ends his life. In two days’ vacation and return to our home had made it a great surprise that there are no trace of someone who lived in our surrounding. Not even one word exchanged between us. But he was so lively with us in his seemingly lethargic walk in the each and every early morning.

Now fear haunts us that how could the news of the dead stopped to reach us without the messenger of it. When dogs start howling at midnight fear haunts us and gives the sense that the messenger of death is wandering the street. The old phenomenon is routine in its function. I mean dogs' howling before death. But modern people are insensitive towards eeriness of dogs howling. Only his mother carries the age old lamentation of the deceased.

 Still the old woman is mourning even after the rituals. We were passing through the passage but no one is there to inform it. And still she is mourning in continuing her day today routine. For her it will continue whenever the remembrance of her son visits her. But for the modern life and its people even death does not have an effect to shake their indifference. Faces are stony. When I look at them they show their stony face that they are not affected by it.

Still there is the dialogue between me and the old woman. She may not be audible in this dialogue but she does converse with me whenever I look at her. Her mourning is the reply for my visit. It has the resonance in it. It reminds me the house of the dead. But modern life and its people are in the readymade life. Death is also treated like an instant object/occurrence. Those who are accustomed to the old age surely know the howling of dogs bring shudder. When life comes to an end old women sit in circle gathered together and holds their hands tightly for the dirge. Dirge will creates an impact that the life is precious and the recounting of the person’s life in the dirge moves the listener not to think of the ephemeral life but continuation of life. But alone she sings the dirge for the loss of her son.