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Wonders before dawn around Mehrauli
PEOPLE HURRYING along the road and making for a cemetery at Mehrauli in Delhi at 4 a.m. You wonder who they are, specially in these times when terrorists seem to be at large, and follow them in the early morning chill, hesitant but determined to find out. Soon others join them and you are forced to fall back.
The cemetery gate opens with a creak that sends the shivers down your spine. Tombstones greet the eye. In the darkness they do make a morbid scene. An owl flies to a nearby tree, a night-jar calls and two big rats scurry for dear life.
A priest appears, adding to the weird scene. Some shrouded figures join him. They all light candles and enter the cemetery in a procession. The mystery begins to clear up now. These people belong to the Church of North India and have come to attend the pre-dawn Easter service. It is held in a graveyard.But why in a graveyard of all places and at this unearthly hour? Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was early on the third day after his crucifixion that he rose again. Mary Magdalene and another woman were among the first to reach the burial site where Christ had been laid in a newly-hewn grave by his secret disciple Nicodemus.
Well, to keep up tradition, the Church at Mehrauli holds a candlelight procession every year. A hundred-odd people take part in the ritual. After a round of the graveyard they go to St. John's Church for the rest of the service.
This place of worship is a novel one, in-cooperating in its building the triple design of a temple, mosque and church. It is not far from the Yogmaya Mandir and close enough to the shrine of Qutubuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, both landmarks of Delhi.
An unusual way, no doubt, of celebrating Easter, the festival of spring and hope. But with wider participation could it become just as popular as Phool Walon Ki Sair. Not really for the two are far apart. Even so let's visit another graveyard many kilometres away.
Trains chug along but the departed sleep on in the War Cemetery near Brar Square in Delhi. As one walks into this memorial for those who died in the Eastern theatre during World War-II, one sees rows and rows of well-maintained graves which bring home the enormity of the devastation that the long struggle against Nazism and Fascism brought about in the 1940s.
One treads softly here wondering at the destiny of those who came from distant corners to face the might of Hitler and his allies. Young men who lie away, from native soil, whose relatives and friends waited for them in vain after the midnight knock of the Army despatch rider. The light hurriedly switched on or a lantern trimmed to read the message "Regret to inform you -- Thomas or Mansfield or Jones or John or Smith or any other -- reported missing in action'' The sobbing in the inside room where the mother or sister or wife vent her grief on the fateful message whose arrival had been dreaded every day. The father and brother manfully trying to hold back their tears to comfort the women. And far way the missing soldier wounded or dead on the battlefield or held captive in some high-security POW camp.
One walks among these tombstones with numbers on them, maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which helps in the identification of the dear departed, sometimes visited by war widows from the West. They come to shed tears and place roses, thinking in silence of the happy moments spent years ago. The whispered promises, the wedding in church or chapel, the confetti in the hair, the congratulations and the honeymoon, the stolen kisses by the river bank, in the park or in the hotel room, a brief interlude of married life and then the separation. The letters that helped to soothe taut nerves and finally the bombshell in the shape of the short terse message. And after that only the hope that refused to die until the final message which put at rest all speculation.
This cemetery by the railway track, a stone's throw from Naraina village, came up at a time when the village was not the throbbing centre of activity it has become. It was a desolate spot but now there are buildings all around, and enclosed in between is God's Acre where sleep the brave.
They are remembered every November, soldiers who fought an idea to nominate the world -- the Nazi idea which took shape in the form of Hitler's war machinery -- and was eventually defeated at the cost of the supreme sacrifice by millions of people. To these unsung heroes one pays homage during a hurried visit which is contemplated at length in moments when things deeper than the cares of everyday life engage one's attention, like the three graves that quaked in Paharganj one All Souls' Day.
One gets to know a lot from the epitaphs, though there's one in the cemetery which says : "I hate you''. Just these three words puzzle the reader who wonders what hate the departed had for the visitor. Was it an expression of frustration at having to left the world while the luckier ones were still around? Or was it meant for someone in the family -- a faithless wife, disobedient children or oppressive relatives? Or was it just something to draw attention to the grave? Like the epitaph on Shakespeare's grave: "Good friend for Jesus's sake forbear/ To move the bones interred here/ Blessed be he who spares these bones/ But cursed be he who moves my bones.'' I quote from memory, though the Bard could hardly have written such lines. Maybe they were the poetic tribute of a sexton worried about the preservation of the grave.
In the Lothian Road Cemetery, near the Kashmere Gate GPO, is the grave of a merchant who buried four wives but the fifth did for him, says the epitaph. But there are other epitaphs which commemorate European families which served in India for generations. La Touche and Thornhill are two examples. An eccentric Lt-Col. W.R. Pogson, is buried on a hillside not in Delhi but in Varanasi as he wished to rest within the sound of bugles. Nearby was a grove where young buglers used to come for bugle practice everyday. Some even go there now, thinking Pogson's spirit would help them perfect their bugling.
Well in Mehrauli, one doesn't get to read tombstones early on Easter morning because everything is dark and hush-hush at that hour. The priest intones the prayers and the faithful follow suit with the wish that the dead would arise like Christ when the Trumpet sounds on the last day.
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