What We Carry Forward
I am sitting on the floor, watching the priest.
He lays out the banana leaves and begins shaping cooked rice into small mounds, each speckled with black sesame seeds. Around them are marigolds, copper vessels, offerings, flame. The arrangement slowly begins to look less like food and more like a family made visible.
The family appears before me in chronological order, generation after generation, as far back as anyone can remember. A mound for each person who has died. The most recently departed has the smallest one.
As a child, I find this fascinating.
I watch the priest’s hands move between the rice and sesame seeds. I watch the banana leaf fill with a lineage. There is something almost architectural about it. A family constructed briefly in front of me, not through photographs or a family tree, but through memory, specifically food and names.
I do not find any of it frightening. In fact, the ceremony feels quiet and reflective, unlike the louder festivals and rituals of my childhood. There is no rush to dress up, no need to perform. Its most distinguished feature is that it is not noisy. It gently guides you to look inwards.
I remember liking that. Perhaps that sounds strange for a child, but I was always curious about things that adults often avoided talking about directly. Death. God. What happens after life. Where people go. Whether they can still see us.
The ritual gave those questions somewhere to sit. It told me, without anyone explicitly saying so, that the dead were not erased simply because they were no longer physically present. They were named and remembered.
Perhaps that is why I remember the ceremony so clearly.
As I grow older, I feel increasingly humbled that these rituals were part of my childhood at all. Not every family observes them, and I realise now what a gift it was to grow up watching remembrance take such a deliberate form. We did not simply speak of the people who had died. We made space for them. We named them. We placed them within the family again. I think that is partly why I feel so compelled to write about it now — gratitude has a way of turning into preservation.
This year, the smallest mound belongs to my grandmother. That changes the image for me completely. She is no longer only the person I remember in stories, photographs, habits, and gestures. She has now entered the line of ancestors I used to watch being formed in rice.
When she died recently, one of my children asked me what happens after we die.
What is heaven?
Children ask these questions so simply. Adults are the ones who complicate them. Because suddenly I am not thinking about what I was told as a child. I am thinking about what I actually believe.
What happens after a life ends?
I have always been fascinated by that question. Our lives are finite, and yet we spend so much of them occupied by ordinary things. Work. Meals. School runs. Appointments. Laundry.
Underneath all of that sit the bigger questions.
Why are we here?
What matters?
What remains?
Perhaps ceremonies like this gave me an early language for those questions. They also gave me a way of thinking about inheritance.
Recently, I asked my father what the black til represented.
“The black sheep of the family,” he said.
I laughed.
When I read about the different meanings attached to black til, I noticed a thread running through all of them. Whether the sesame is understood as protective, purifying, nourishing, or sacred through its association with Vishnu, the intention seems to be the same: to ease the soul’s journey. To protect it from harm. To help it move forward in peace.
Perhaps that is what remembrance is trying to do too — not hold the dead back, but accompany them a little further.
Families are not made only of people we find easy to honour. There are difficult people. Estranged people. Complicated people. People whose stories are told with affection and others whose names are spoken more carefully.
And yet they belong to the lineage too. We inherit all kinds of things from those who come before us.
Some things we carry proudly. Some things we spend our lives trying to unlearn. I think that is why I write so often about inheritance. It is not only about property or jewellery or what is formally handed down.
It is in recipes made without measurements.
In the way someone makes a particular dish because that is how their mother made it.
In phrases that survive across generations.
In the languages that appear unexpectedly in our mouths when we are angry, affectionate, or tired.
It is in rituals we continue without always knowing precisely why.
It is in the way we pray, grieve, argue, feed people, show affection.
And much of it passes on without direct instruction. Children are watching us all the time. They notice how we speak to people, how we handle disappointment, how we respond when someone needs help. They absorb tone. Gesture. Repetition.
They remember what we think they have not noticed.
I think of myself as a child, watching that banana leaf fill. No one sat me down afterwards and explained what inheritance meant. No one told me that I was witnessing a family teaching itself how to remember.
But I understood something not necessarily intellectually, but something more profound. I understood that people continue and that maybe legacy is being created in those moments too. Not in grand declarations, but in repetition.
I believe there is something after death. I do not know exactly what. I grew up with ideas of rebirth, of the soul continuing, of lives beyond this one. I cannot say with certainty what happens.
But I find it difficult to believe that everything simply disappears. I believe something remains.
A soul, perhaps.
And also something more visible.
Pieces of us, carried forward by others through food, language, movement and routine.
This year, my grandmother joins the line of ancestors on the banana leaf. And I think again of the child I once was, sitting quietly and watching those rice mounds take shape. Maybe that ceremony stayed with me because it taught me something simple very early on.
A life ends.
But not everything disappears.
Something is always carried forward.
Written by Snehal Amembal
