The Past is Dead

Both from teaching young Madurai children about the nuances of the English language’s usage of tenses and from my own studies in Tamil since I have been here, my awareness of Time has been even more on my mind than usual. One of the quirks I “pride myself on” is that for the past thirty years or so I have not worn a watch and that with a fairly high degree of accuracy I can tell you the time within a few minutes. However, it is not necessarily that sense or tense of Time that has been on my mind, but rather the concept of beyond Time, or Infinity.

For the seventh graders we have been reviewing the Non-Finite Verbs in specific and the concept that they can be considered non-limited action with regards to person and Time. In other words, they don’t change with respect to when the action actually occurs, and as such, they are indeed beyond Time, most noticeably the Infinitive, hence the name.

English has numerous moments of intrigue when teaching it, especially when considering the native language of those who are learning it. In this case, these students are all native Tamil speakers. When I was explaining the “perfect” past participle, they seemed to have a strong curiosity about how it functions in Time. I told them that Per-fect(io) in grammar is not the same as perfect, the adjective. Rather, it is made, through and through, done. In fact, it is semantically exactly the same as Sam-skrita, or Sanskrit, which meant the language that was “done,” or perfected. This is a quantitative, rather than qualitative sense.

I further said that the perfect could not be altered, and was done, done. They seemed to get it when I made it so definitive. Today, perhaps I may have realized why. With my Tamil tutor today we studied tenses, or kãlam. When it came to the past, the Yiranthakãlam, he told me that Yirantha means “dead.” In other words, the past is completely done and is that which cannot be altered as it is dead. When he told me that, I remembered the looks on my students’ faces when I was trying to explain the definitive nature of the perfect.

In a coincidence that seems to be too common here in India, within minutes of our discussion, I heard a solemn, solitary bell being rung at a very deliberate interval, and it appeared to be approaching. As it drew closer, I looked out to the street and saw a wooden cart with a canopy above it, passing within feet of his porch we were sitting on. The cart was covered with thousands of brilliant vermillion, golden, white and saffron-colored flowers. About the same time that I saw what was “seated” in the middle of the cart, Pandian said, “that’s a coffin cart” and I saw the corpse. It was a very small, withered old body. The procession passed by and the friends and relatives walked by in the coming twilight, silently and solemnly.

Dead. Passed. Past. Done.

I have only seen two corpses that close, the first was the embalmed body of my father several years ago, and now this one--a stranger, draped in flowers, being carted through the streets of the neighborhood in the same way that the man goes through the streets here selling ice creams or fruit.

We finished our lesson and then Pandian took me on his scooter back to Pradeep’s though we had to first travel through a carpet of the strewn flowers on the road in front of his home, the remnants of the procession. We rode back into the frenzy of the present of the bustling streets of Madurai, though having seen the petals being ground into the road, the definitiveness of Yiranthakãlam was crystal clear.