Now and After

My father-in-law passed away early in the week. It was a time of grief and mourning.

Again.

Just last year, I had lost my father after a couple of weeks of hospitalisation. It felt terribly inappropriate to admit that there was a sense of familiarity with navigating the emotional terrain.

And nothing prepares you for the silence that follows. It is deafening. Grief unrelenting.

As tradition required, there would be a reading of the Garuda Purana every afternoon over the next few days by a priest.

The Garuda Purana is one of the eighteen canonical Puranas in Hinduism, setting out a definitive map for the journey the soul takes in its afterlife. It describes, in vivid detail, the various degrees of punishment meted out to the soul across twenty-eight realms of hell. Scorpions, blistering heat, freezing cold, the messengers of Lord Yama arriving to take you away.

But before any of that, before judgment, there is a river to be crossed: the Vaitarani, filled with pus, blood, and gore. The soul cannot reach the far bank on its own merit.

It needs to be given passage, dependent on one's deeds in life and the dana, ritual gifts, made on their behalf after death.

I was in equal parts fascinated and frightened. It did not make for easy listening. A part of me wanted to get up and bolt for the door. Sheer determination kept me glued to my seat.

And I was staring blankly at the landscape ahead. I found my mind drifting, disembodied, floating over clouds and houses.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I landed on Dante. And Virgil, Acheron, Charon ferrying the newly dead across inky black water into the underworld proper, before any of the nine concentric circles even begin. Dante inherited the river from a poet six centuries dead, who inherited it from a mythology older still. And here it was again, an ocean and a civilisation away, doing the same work. Not a coincidence, nothing planned. Just two traditions, unconnected at the root, both deciding independently that death isn't a door. It's a crossing.

I thought, too, of the Egyptians, who never read either text and got there anyway: Thoth recording the verdict while Anubis weighs the heart against a single feather, the soul that fails devoured on the spot. Three traditions, three continents, and I suspect if I kept looking, I'd find more.

Different rivers, different scribes, different punishments, but the same grim motifs underneath. Arrived at independently by people who never read each other.

Death, in all of them, is not the final chapter. It's a crossing, and there is someone on the other side with your file already open, awaiting your arrival.

I was stupefied at the convergence, echoes from different lands, carved out across time. What's actually waiting on the other side, none of us knows. And yet every tradition I'd found imagined the same thing waiting there anyway: a ledger keeper, a sentencing, a judgment day by another name. Does that say more about us than about death itself?

But I find myself asking a different question now: is there any culture, anywhere, that pictured death as simple finality, no ledger, no realm to answer for? I couldn't think of one.

That was strange enough to sit with. What unsettled me more came after the river, in both texts. Chitragupta, Yama's book-keeper, keeps a ledger, but not just of what you did. What you said. What you only thought and never said aloud.

Dante's underworld runs on a different logic, contrapasso, sin mirrored back as its own punishment: the lustful battered by winds they once gave themselves up to, the gluttonous mired in the filth of their own excess. Exact, but narrower. Dante damns you for what you did.

The Purana damns you for what you merely carried in your head and never spoke.

I noticed the gap, and then I noticed why it unsettled me. I wasn't only listening to a description of cosmic bookkeeping. I was guilt-torn myself. Being told it was already on the record made the guilt spread like a shadow dissolving at its corners until it became the dark.

I thought about my father's last few months. The evenings I didn't spend with him because there was always some work that needed to be done, and the things about life, gratitude and forgiveness I kept meaning to tell him but never did.

If Chitragupta was real, that omission was already written down before I ever thought to confess it. I wasn't being told a story about judgment happening to someone else.

I was being handed a mirror.

As the second day ended with the recital of shlokas from the Bhagavad Gita, I looked up at the evening sky, my heart full of gratitude for the time I had spent with those I had lost, and a prayer on my lips for their safe journey and everlasting peace.

And that's perhaps the harder question to sit with, quietly, days after the priest has gone: whether I'd have done anything differently in those last few months if no one, not Chitragupta, not any god, had been keeping score.

I'd like to think so.

I'm not entirely sure, though.