Government Nouns: Crematorium

 A sad and drunk bone-breaker clung to the half ajar iron gates of the Nesappakkam Hindu Crematorium with a bloodshot stare at the unrelenting sun. It is still hour 5 of his shift and he has already realigned four stiff cadavers in various states of rigor mortis - three shriveled and decaying octogenarians, but one child. They all broke like peanut brittle like his heart like the bottle of sour and sun-hot beer that shattered in a fizz, as a fifth body rolled in.

The "Amarar Oorthi" - Vehicle for the Immortal was a modified elongated auto-rickshaw, long enough to fit a 6 foot coffin on ice, and up to three mourners. The next dead, a small old woman, draped in a cotton dhothi looked smaller, as she bobbed and rocked, in unchanging sleep, her eyes and jaws shut, and her nostrils stuffed with cotton wool, doused in cheap cologne. Cold to touch, made colder by the ice underneath. 

The vehicle and ice and she rocked as gears shifted and turned through the gates to a red-taped office. The secretary walks out, as forms are filled and filed for who gets what and when and why and how. 

"Cremation is free" - dangles a sign in size 50 font outside his office, as he dangles his left hand under his iron table with chipped Formica. 

"That's for the machine, not the men", he adds, counting a handful of soggy gray Gandhi notes. ₹10,000.

Several things came loose and free that afternoon - bone-breaker labor, symbolic twigs on fire, souls.

Post-mortem gaseous flames weren't one of them, as advertised.