A Passage North

by Anuk Arudpragasam

The process of letting go of a person was always done in gradual stages, from what he’d seen, from the actual body to a reduced body to a symbolic body that was always kept in the house, an acknowledgment both of the difficulty of giving up the body and also of the fact that the bodies of the ones we love can never be fully renounced. And perhaps this was why the symbolic acts of feeding were so important in the mourning rituals, it occurred to him, in the pouring of rice over the mouth of the deceased and in the offering of food to the photograph of the deceased, for it wasn’t surprising that in a culture in which food and the activity of eating were so important, in a culture in which feeding was one of the primary acts of care, in which to ask whether somebody had eaten was to ask whether they were well, in which the question of whom you can eat with and whose food you can eat was a way of enforcing the boundaries between castes, that in such a culture the acts of serving and eating were also the physical processes that the bereaved found most difficult to part with, so that even after the body had stopped consuming and digesting food the bereaved continued to find solace in the act of feeding the deceased.