'I wanted to burn my son's body'

ON the surface it is a traditional British funeral scene. There is a hearse, mourners in black suits and a wooden coffin being carried into the crematorium. Then there is a blending of two cultures, East meets West.

The coffin is open, revealing a young man clothed in white, his features peaceful. The mourners standing over him are throwing in flowers, crying and hugging one another. When the time comes for the cremation there is only enough room 'downstairs' for six people.

"It's painful enough, watching your son... then it just goes in with a clunk. It's so mechanical, like a laundrette" says Dr Anand, who is giving a running commentary of the video footage we are watching. "There's no feeling, no spirituality, and in Hinduism the cremation process is the most important thing."

The video camera cuts out and reopens to reveal the banks of the River Ganges, in India. Dr Anand's middle son, Prasoon, 28, can be seen in rolled up jeans, washing his hands and feet.

"He is washing his hands to purify himself so we have that sense of ritual," he explains.

Later, we see Prasoon emptying his brother Sharad's ashes into the Ganges and, with his father, giving out food to the poor. Carrying out these rituals in India, says Dr Anand, is how they brought some spirituality to the way in which they said goodbye to Sharad. What Dr Anand would have liked more than anything was to have burned his son's body on an open air funeral pyre, the Hindu way, only a few miles from his home in Gosforth, Newcastle.

Sharad took his own life on September 23 last year. He had shown no sign of mental illness before leaving to teach English in Spain, but returned dishevelled and depressed. His family thought he was recovering, but one day heard the devastating news that he had leapt to his death from the Tyne Bridge, in Newcastle.

The following day, Dr Anand went to see his son in the morgue and began thinking about the funeral service.

"I wanted to bring him home," he says. "I didn't want to leave him lying there on a slab of ice. Nobody said to me would you like to bring him home?."

"We had a coffin - why couldn't we just have had cloth? Then we had a black hearse and black clothing which is considered ominous in India, our widows wear white for purity".

As he thought about his son's funeral, the Newastle-based Anglo Asian Friendship Society, of which Dr Anand is secretary, began mooting the idea of holding open air funeral pyres, which have been illegal since 1930, for Hindus and Sikhs.

Spurred on by the Pakistani government allowing open air funerals for Hindus, the AAFS - a charity with 2,000 members - wrote to Newcastle City Council, asking if they could hold the first pyre about five to six miles out of Newcastle city centre.

In India, if someone dies they are cremated within six to seven hours in a ceremony whose origins stretch back 4,000 years. In Hinduism it is known as antyeshti, meaning the last rites, and is seen as essential for the process of reincarnation, otherwise the soul will roam on earth as a ghost.

The ritual begins when the body is brought home for washing before being wrapped in white cloth. Prayers are said continuously and the body is carried to the cremation ground on a bamboo stretcher.

Wood is piled up before the body is placed on the pyre. A lamp is lit at the head to bring peace, then more wood is placed on top of the body. In the mouth, mourners put tulsi, like the basil leaf and considered to be the most pure food, and a few drops of Ganges water, considered to be the most pure water.

A male relative will then carry an earthen pot full of Ganges water three times around the pyre in a clockwise direction before dropping it behind him, signifying the soul being released from the body. Then, the pyre is lit at the four corners.

"It's believed that the soul has gone but the habits of that person hang around the body for ten days and that's why we cremate the body so there's no question of the soul hankering," says Dr Anand. "For Christians fire is a punishment, witches were burned at the stake, hell is full of fire, but for Hindus it is something pure and we are saying please accept this and take it back into energy."

He says that having gone to India with Prasoon, he feels "OK" about his son's "mechanical" English funeral. But the experience has made him determined to campaign for open air pyres in the North-East.

"The council doesn't understand that it is central to our beliefs," he says. "We don't want to hold it in the middle of St James' Park, so you can throw on chestnuts and baked potatoes. We want it away from people's homes, we don't want to offend anyone."

But it is easy to see how some people may be offended. He acknowledges that women in India are generally kept away from the pyres because it is thought they might not be able to stand "bits of eyeballs bursting" and the like. One imagines there might also be a smell.

"It doesn't smell because the fire is so fierce, you can't go within ten feet of it," he insists. "We also throw ghee (clarified butter) into the fire and put on sandalwood and camphor which has a beautiful smell. I've never had the stench of cooking like bacon. It would be open, but it would be surrounded by trees - although you might see some barbecue smoke sometimes."

If his terminology appears a little black humoured, it is probably because he doesn't feel embarrassed or prudish talking about death, unlike the English. "If you don't laugh, you cry anyway,' he says.

If they were to get permission for a pyre he says they would burn the bodies in an ecological way, using the Mokshda System, a company which has pioneered a form of metal trough in India to lay the body on which cuts the amount of wood used by 60 per cent. The burning process would take less than two hours, meaning they could carry out 15 cremations in three days. They would remove any mercury, such as fillings in teeth, first.

"It would be like taking a pace-maker out," he adds. "The big toes are tied together also, so the legs don't fall apart."

Some may argue that they should take their bodies back to India to burn, as many Hindus already do, but Dr Anand replies simply: "My home is here and my heart is here - why should I take it to India?"

He says they may need to build a cover over the site, to block out any rain. But that they would also charge considerably less than most funeral directors, around £500 compared with an average £2,000 for a burial, or £1,200 for a cremation in Britain.

A decision over siting pyres near Newcastle is expected to be made by councillors in mid April. But the AAFS says it will take its plea to Europe to be heard under the 1988 Human Rights Act if necessary.

Open fires are central to Hindu worship, they argue, and much as Hindu prayers or weddings do not take place in front of gas or electric fires, they don't believe their cremations should be by gas, in a "rushed, production line atmosphere" without any ritual whatsoever.

"The very fact that Hindus are tolerant people who do not assert themselves should speak volumes about their strength of feeling," says Dr Anand.

"That's why we want to say, 'look, we really want to do this and we want to do it properly'. All we want to do is say goodbye in keeping with our traditions."