A metropolis for the dead and buried

By M H Ahssan

I am afraid it's going to be a rather grave column this time. Literally. It all started merrily enough at a dinner in London in a charming flat nudging Hampstead Heath. And then the conversation, fuelled by the wonderful wine from the Dordogne region of France, unexpectedly took a strange turn.

From nostalgic midsummer reveries about holidays together talk turned to the ashes of maharajas having been buried in the pastoral environs of Surrey. Apparently, ashes weren't quite welcome in regular burial grounds in Great Britain in the 19th century. It was perhaps because of the Indians that ashes were first given a home here.

At which point I sat up, all ears -- which maharajas and why were they being cremated there I wondered. Were there any chhatris? Margaret Miles, our friend from Dordogne, volunteered to take us to this city of the dead, inhabited by nearly 300,000 of those who had passed on. The Brookwood Cemetery, spanning over 400 acres, was built in the mid-19th century to take the overflow from London.

My friends thought it a bit macabre that I wasplanning to visit a cemetery in rural England. It wasn't as if I had to pay my respects to anybody from amongst the dearly departed. But, dear reader, I was actually thinking of you. Rather, of the surreal facts that I could write about.

Imagine: this was the largest burial ground in the world when it was opened in 1854 by the London Necropolis Company. (What a name, metropolis for the dead? The company had its own private railway, with "funeral trains" that brought the coffins from its private station just outside Waterloo to its cemetery near Woking.

There was even a class system at work in the afterlife, with first, second or third class coffin tickets available. The two cemetery stations even had bars with notices stating (no doubt without a hint of irony): "Spirits served here". Not surprisingly, the place has inspired a couple of novels. I can imagine the late Evelyn Waugh going to town on this.

Alas, I did not find any of our late Royals here. I seriously doubt their "presence" here.But the densely populated necropolis with imposing avenues of redwoods, Chilean pines and wild flowers here and there is the final resting ground for innumerable desis and subcontinentals. It is said to house the oldest Muslim cemetery in this country.

Death mirrors life here. Especially in its distinctions and divisions: there are separate grounds for Sunnis, Ahmadiyyas, Ismailis, and Bohra Muslims. Brookwood Cemetery's ocean of graves is certainly eclectic, including as it does pauper burial areas, the WWI American Cemetery, the grave of the master of the household of Queen Victoria, King Edward, the martyr and the painter John Singer Sargent, not to speak of Turkish Air Force pilots who died in alien skies during the Second World War.

However, one of the most moving and aesthetically eloquent enclosures -- amongst the best kept -- is the Zoroastrian Burial Grounds. It contains the graves and memorials of Zoroastrians, a large number of them Parsis from Bombay. The mausoleums of the Tata family, the Wadias and the Jehangirs are beautiful and moving, as is the statuary, particularly of Parsi women.

You have to tread softly in this vast city of the silent. However, the words inscribed on some of the mausoleums cry out loud -- to be remembered by the living passing by. Particularly heart-tugging are the words of Nowrosjee Nashir Wadia who asks posterity sitting "beside winter fires to reverently remember his name"... while he lies there alone in the dark. He also asks posterity to "offer to our disembodied spirit the fragrance of flowers and fruit..." during summer. And, of course, reverently remember his name.

There is a lot of loneliness out there, in this city of the dead.