Obituary - A. K. Ramanujan (Summary)

Obituary - A. K. Ramanujan

A. K. Ramanujan’s poem “Obituary” is a reminiscence of his father’s life and death in a brahmin ghetto. The opening lines of the poem enumerate the list of things that his father had left behind as legacy. He left an old table heaped with old, dusty newspaper along with debts, daughters and a bedwetting grandson. The poets carps that his father had left them behind despite his trials and tribulations of his entire life. In India daughters are considered to be a burden, not greater than debts. They are being entrusted to their surviving  sons with responsibility of ‘marrying them off’ with adequate dowry to suit to their status. Then the poet talks about the grandson whose name was chosen with a toss of a coin and who had incorrigible habit of bedwetting. All these highlight that the poet’s father had left behind nothing but memories in the form of debris.   

Added to the legacy a dilapidated house that leant on a coconut tree through their growing years was also left. This nondescript old house symbolises the deterioration in their quality of life. Further, it may also signify that the family had to live a life of depending on others as the way the house leant on the coconut tree. The poet utters that his father being ‘the burning type’ burnt properly on the pyre of cremation. He burned….

                                         at the cremation

                                         as before, easily

                                         and at both ends,

His eyes appeared as coins in his funeral pyre. They appear as coin-like in their metallic stare. The poet indicated that perhaps his father’s eyes were greedy for money. After the cremation he left some half-burnt spinal discs. The priest advised the poet to pick them ‘gingerly’ to immerse them at Triveni, where three holy rivers confluence as per the Hindu rites. No head stone was erected at his tomb bearing the dates of his birth and death. He is doomed to be incapable that even his birth was a caesarean reveals that he even put any effort for his own birth. His death also came easily to him in the form of heart failure at the fruit market. 

All he gained in his life is worth mentioning that he managed to get two lines of obituary printed somewhere in the columns of a newspaper published from Madras. The poet hoped to come across these lines of obituary of his late father in the process where the old newspaper might have sold to street hawker, who  in turn sold it to a grocer from whom the poet occasionally bought provisions. The poet states earlier that he used to read for his fancy from those pices of newspaper in which groceries like salt and jaggery are wrapped in cones. Thus, the poet attempts to discover some meaning of his father’s life in his poem ‘Obituary’.   

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