Making an Exit by Sarah Murray

Author:Sarah Murray [Murray, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429989299
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

Foreign Fields

FAR FROM HOME IN CALCUTTA

If ever Tears deservedly were Shed

If ever Grief was due to Virtue Dead

Thy Merit Martha, and thy spotless Ways

Claim Tears from all, for all allowed them praise.

So runs the first stanza of the tombstone poem of twenty-three-year-old Martha Goodlad, who died on March 21, 1789. Martha’s grave sits among the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tombs of South Park Street Cemetery, a bucolic burial ground running wild with bougainvillea, oleanders, and other flowering shrubs. With its ancient trees, rampant greenery, and elegiac tomb inscriptions, South Park Street Cemetery is the most English of resting places. Except that it’s not in England—it’s in Calcutta, the chaotic capital of the state of West Bengal, part of Bharat Ganarajya, or the Republic of India, an independent nation once ruled by Martha’s compatriots.

Among the emotional, social, legal, and familial problems death presents, the most immediate one is physical—what to do with the body. And with the “what” comes the question of “where”? If the family cemetery is nearby, then perhaps the answer is easy, for in most societies the desire to be buried at home is the strongest one. But what about those who die far from home? And for some—expatriates, immigrants, those who’ve married into another country or culture, or globetrotters like me—there’s a bigger question: where is home?

No doubt Martha Goodlad thought of India as home. After all, when she was alive, Calcutta sat on British territory. Until the administration moved its headquarters to Delhi in 1911, the city was the dazzling capital of a colossal empire stretching from Canada to Australia, taking in everything from Caribbean islands to African savannahs. British bureaucrats governed more than a fifth of the planet’s population, and in Calcutta, the Brits erected mansions, hotels, cathedrals, banks, railway stations, and courthouses that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the grandest of London’s streets. The scale of these buildings says something about the state of mind of colonial planners—they were in India for good.

A long-stay mentality governed the approach to death and burial, too. South Park Street Cemetery is filled with pyramids and obelisks, oversized Roman sarcophagi, Greek tombs, and Palladian mausoleums the size of small houses topped with all manner of cupolas, rotundas, and pediments. They were built to last for eternity—one in which the ground sheltering the bodies of the British dead would forever remain British soil.

Rudyard Kipling was disdainful of this show of sepulchral stone. “They must have been afraid of their friends rising up before the due time that they weighted them with such cruel mounds of masonry,” he wrote of the cemetery in “The City of Dreadful Night,” part of a series of 1888 articles.

Today, the mounds of masonry don’t look so cruel. Time, decay, and dappled sunlight soften hard edges and fill the place with an air of romantic melancholy. With pathways, moss-covered tombs, and marble gravestones—many shipped out from Liverpool as ballast—the South Park Street Cemetery conjures up images of that “corner of a foreign field, that is for ever England,” of Rupert Brooke’s famous First World War poem “The Soldier.

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