I rode there the hard way, up the road in truck-and-bus traffic, before freaking out and stopping at a bus stop to reconsider. I discovered on the way home that on the far side there's a footpath all the way.
But I got there, and the cemetery was its peaceful self. A huge eagle was circling, many birds and insects singing in the late afternoon sun. Hot, as always, but on a bicycle you catch a beautiful wind. Lemony light, the sky all innocent. Parrots, and the bird that sounds like a creaking hinge, and the bird that sounds like a grief-struck farmer whistling a long-lost dog. The graves fall out in tight, higgledy-piggledy rows over many acres, concrete and tiled. There are few walking paths between them and very few live people to walk them. I see a couple of distant clusters of umbrellas over families who crouch and groom. One family wander out of the jungle carrying stems of jackfruit, back to a black car where a middle-aged woman waits, looking hot and tearful in her black dress.
I ride past the "Lawn Cemetery Section", with grassed plots for deaths from 2008 onwards. The plots are either extremely dishevelled or supremely trim, tiered in earth with miniature hedges squared around the plaques. A couple of guys cruise the aisles wielding whipper-snippers. Each of the well-tended graves sports a little advertisement for a grooming company - 'Ah Hock' or some other name and the phone numbers, in Chinese and English, all on a spiked tag like those that tell the prices of cakes in the supermarket.
I stopped to take a photo of the "Exhumed Remains Section", and the beautifully realist sculpted face on a nearby headstone. I hear a quiet voice approaching behind me - 'Excuse me miss, excuse me miss...'. Three men are shuffling along the road, two Indians in their thirties or forties, and one older Chinese guy, the one who is calling to me. They all look a little bit beaten. He has an imploring smile. "Even the dead cannot rest here!" he says, then asks where I'm from.
We walk and talk for a while, about the 30 year exhumation rule, how this is one of the last cemeteries. How there are so few places here to be peaceful like this - in the city it never stops. I comment that the taxi drivers don't like to come out here. 'No, it's too quiet,' he says. 'They don't want to get caught.' I say I've heard they are scared of ghosts out here and he laughs a little, says that taxi drivers come in good, bad and ugly, like everyone else.
He and his friends have come from a half-way house at the back of the cemetery. He's a gambler, a taxi driver. His friends are alcoholics. His life was fine, he says, he was going along fine and happy with life before the casino open. But now - it's bad for taxi drivers because they have too much time. His daughter made him come here - either that or split up the family. He's been in the half-way for three months now. He's not ready to leave because he feels a calling. The bible study, discipline, prayer. He's a Catholic, but the house volunteers are Methodists. They garden, and every afternoon at 4.30 they go for a walk.
He has longish, soft white hair and a small, soft face, at once lively and tired, acquiescent. He tells me about the Parsi cemetery and the Jewish cemetery along the road and we walk there. He's curious about the text outside the gate and is hoping I can read Yiddish, or that I have a friend who does, maybe... The sign says in English that the text is to be read if you have not entered a cemetery in a month. As we look at it together, unable to read further than the first instruction, I see a long grey feather fall from a tree.
"...who fashioned you in justice, nourished and sustained you in justice, and caused you to die in justice."
That text seems first flat and meaningless, and then like a wormhole into a different dimensionality. A world where everything is complete, all events the completion of a perfect balance.
He said they'd told him this morning in bible study that one of the angels was missing, and perhaps I was his angel. I wonder if he saw the feather too. We said goodbye and I rode out past the stall selling flowers, and half a dozen white cattle egrets, picking their way through an open plot.
But I got there, and the cemetery was its peaceful self. A huge eagle was circling, many birds and insects singing in the late afternoon sun. Hot, as always, but on a bicycle you catch a beautiful wind. Lemony light, the sky all innocent. Parrots, and the bird that sounds like a creaking hinge, and the bird that sounds like a grief-struck farmer whistling a long-lost dog. The graves fall out in tight, higgledy-piggledy rows over many acres, concrete and tiled. There are few walking paths between them and very few live people to walk them. I see a couple of distant clusters of umbrellas over families who crouch and groom. One family wander out of the jungle carrying stems of jackfruit, back to a black car where a middle-aged woman waits, looking hot and tearful in her black dress.
I ride past the "Lawn Cemetery Section", with grassed plots for deaths from 2008 onwards. The plots are either extremely dishevelled or supremely trim, tiered in earth with miniature hedges squared around the plaques. A couple of guys cruise the aisles wielding whipper-snippers. Each of the well-tended graves sports a little advertisement for a grooming company - 'Ah Hock' or some other name and the phone numbers, in Chinese and English, all on a spiked tag like those that tell the prices of cakes in the supermarket.
I stopped to take a photo of the "Exhumed Remains Section", and the beautifully realist sculpted face on a nearby headstone. I hear a quiet voice approaching behind me - 'Excuse me miss, excuse me miss...'. Three men are shuffling along the road, two Indians in their thirties or forties, and one older Chinese guy, the one who is calling to me. They all look a little bit beaten. He has an imploring smile. "Even the dead cannot rest here!" he says, then asks where I'm from.
We walk and talk for a while, about the 30 year exhumation rule, how this is one of the last cemeteries. How there are so few places here to be peaceful like this - in the city it never stops. I comment that the taxi drivers don't like to come out here. 'No, it's too quiet,' he says. 'They don't want to get caught.' I say I've heard they are scared of ghosts out here and he laughs a little, says that taxi drivers come in good, bad and ugly, like everyone else.
He and his friends have come from a half-way house at the back of the cemetery. He's a gambler, a taxi driver. His friends are alcoholics. His life was fine, he says, he was going along fine and happy with life before the casino open. But now - it's bad for taxi drivers because they have too much time. His daughter made him come here - either that or split up the family. He's been in the half-way for three months now. He's not ready to leave because he feels a calling. The bible study, discipline, prayer. He's a Catholic, but the house volunteers are Methodists. They garden, and every afternoon at 4.30 they go for a walk.
He has longish, soft white hair and a small, soft face, at once lively and tired, acquiescent. He tells me about the Parsi cemetery and the Jewish cemetery along the road and we walk there. He's curious about the text outside the gate and is hoping I can read Yiddish, or that I have a friend who does, maybe... The sign says in English that the text is to be read if you have not entered a cemetery in a month. As we look at it together, unable to read further than the first instruction, I see a long grey feather fall from a tree.
Now I learn from the internet that the prayer is 'the blessing of asher yatzar eschem badin': http://www.jewish-funeral-guide.com/tradition/blessing-jewish-cemetery.htm
"...who fashioned you in justice, nourished and sustained you in justice, and caused you to die in justice."
That text seems first flat and meaningless, and then like a wormhole into a different dimensionality. A world where everything is complete, all events the completion of a perfect balance.
He said they'd told him this morning in bible study that one of the angels was missing, and perhaps I was his angel. I wonder if he saw the feather too. We said goodbye and I rode out past the stall selling flowers, and half a dozen white cattle egrets, picking their way through an open plot.
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