On the eighth day Ramalingam did some more work, setting up a feast for Grace on a banana leaf, with a rice meal, chicken, fruits, sweets and a New Yorker on the side; items of which I list elsewhere, and of which of course we all partook of as prasādam. I turned off the flash on the camera because it was giving bad pictures (batteries low) and got visual effects reflecting the real warmth and glow of the scene in her bedroom as members of our household turn the light around Mum’s shrine now lowered on a stool for the camphor and incense.
I also wanted to show how involved the dogs are, in a way, in the whole thing.
After this eighth day ritual (no other name for it) we sat around discussing what was to come on the sixteenth day and the seventeenth day when we make a big meal for everyone, the annā dānam.
I like the fact that Sneha is hanging around and goofing for the camera on Grace’s bed amidst the serious proceedings of the adults discussing samskāra.
What impresses me is that in Indian culture we have not internalized or Freudianized consciousness or persons, outside is in, and, for the most part, in is also outside; that is, you act out the ancient ways and of course you have your personal emotions, or soiriutual orientation, but you do not have to be pious or as Grace would say, po-faced, but all these things we do somehow channel emotion and feeling back into the aesthetic soil of soul, I don’t know, somehow.
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