The afterlife path

At a Glance

• Central figures: A newly dead Toda man, his wife who performs the final keening, and the palol (dairy priest) who knows the path; the god On, keeper of the land of the dead, and the sacred buffalo who carries the dead man across.
• Setting: The Nilgiri hills of Tamil Nadu, in the Toda pastoral tradition; the journey runs from a mund (Toda hamlet) on the plateau through the Wenlock Downs and into the land On keeps beyond the western edge of the hills.
• The turn: The dead man’s spirit must cross a river of milk that has no ford, and only a buffalo that knew him in life can carry him over.
• The outcome: The buffalo recognizes its keeper and wades across; the dead man enters the afterlife, where he will tend cattle on green pastures that mirror the Nilgiris.
• The legacy: The Toda funeral practice of sacrificing a buffalo at the second funeral ceremony and reciting the names of every place the dead person walked in life - so the spirit will know the path.

The body was already cold when the women began the keening. They stood outside the mund, the low barrel-vaulted hut where the man had lived and milked and slept, and they named him. Not once. Again and again, his name, the name of his father, the name of his mother’s clan, the name of the buffalo he had tended since it was a calf. The palol stood apart, near the dairy temple where no woman could enter. He held a staff of bamboo. He was not weeping. He had work to do.

A Toda man does not simply die and vanish. He goes somewhere. The somewhere has a route, and the route has stations, and each station has a name that must be spoken aloud or the dead man’s spirit will wander blind across the Nilgiri plateau, unable to find its way down.

The Naming of Places

The palol began at the mund itself. He spoke the name of the hamlet. He spoke the name of the hill behind it, the name of the stream below it, the name of the shola - the dense patch of stunted forest in the fold of the hill - where the man had walked his buffalo in the early mornings. He spoke the name of the next mund over, the one where the man’s wife had been born. He spoke the name of the dairy there, and the name of the sacred buffalo pen.

He moved west. Each place he named was a step on the path the dead man’s spirit would follow. The Wenlock Downs, the rolling grassland where the wind comes hard and flat from the southwest. The particular rock where herdsmen sheltered during monsoon. The particular stream crossing where buffalo balked in the rainy season and had to be coaxed with singing.

The women listened. Some of them knew these places; some did not. The naming was not for them. It was for the man who lay wrapped in his funeral cloth, whose spirit had already begun to pull loose from the body the way mist pulls loose from grass at sunrise.

The Two Funerals

The Toda do not bury their dead at the first ceremony. The body is kept. A green funeral comes first - the kedu - where the clan gathers, where the face of the dead is shown one last time. The crying is loud. The hair of the dead man is cut and saved.

Days later, sometimes weeks, comes the dry funeral. The body is burned. This is when the buffalo dies.

They brought the buffalo to the burning ground. It was the one whose name the women had spoken - the one the dead man had raised, the one he had milked in the poh, the sacred dairy. The animal knew the ground. It had grazed here. Now the men held it and killed it, quickly, with a blow. Its body would be burned alongside the man’s. Its spirit would go where his spirit was going.

Without the buffalo, the dead man could not cross.

The River of Milk

The path the palol had named led west and down, past the last mund, past the last shola, past the edge of the plateau where the Nilgiris fall away into the plains. But the dead man’s spirit did not descend into the plains. It went somewhere else - sideways, or underneath, or through a door in the landscape that the living cannot see.

There was a river. It was white. The Toda say it is a river of milk, which makes sense for a people whose entire sacred life runs through the dairy. The river had no bridge, no ford, no stepping stones. It ran wide and quiet and there was no way across on foot.

The dead man stood on the bank. He had walked the path the palol named. He had passed each station. He had come to the river and he could go no further.

Then the buffalo came up behind him. Its spirit, freed from the burning ground, had followed the same path. It stood beside him and it knew him. That was the thing that mattered - that the buffalo knew him, recognized his hand, his voice, his smell. A strange buffalo would not carry him. Only one that had been his.

He climbed onto the buffalo’s back. The animal waded in. The milk came up to its belly, its shoulders. The dead man held on. They crossed.

On’s Pastures

On the far side, the god On was waiting. On is not a god of punishment or judgment. He keeps the land of the dead the way a headman keeps a village - he is there, he maintains order, the pastures are his concern. The land the dead man entered looked like the Nilgiris. Green hills, rolling grass, shola in the folds, mist in the mornings. Buffalo grazed in herds. Other dead Toda were there, tending cattle, milking in dairies that mirrored the sacred dairies of the living.

The dead man took his place among them. He would tend buffalo here as he had tended them in life. The work did not change. The hills did not change. What changed was that he would not return.

What the Living Keep

Back on the plateau, the fire burned down. The palol finished his recitation. The women stopped keening. The ashes of the man and the ashes of the buffalo were collected together.

The hair that had been cut at the kedu was kept by the family. The staff the palol carried was set aside. The dairy where the dead man had served was ritually closed for a period - how long depended on his standing and his clan. No milk was drawn from it. The sacred buffaloes stood in the pen and waited.

After the period ended, the dairy reopened. A new keeper took the dead man’s place. The buffaloes were milked again. Life on the mund continued as it had, except that one man was gone from it and one buffalo was gone from the herd.

The path the palol had named would be named again at the next death, and the next. Each time the same stations, the same stream crossings, the same rocks and sholas. The landscape held the route. The living walked it every day without knowing they were walking the road their dead would follow. The Nilgiris were both home and passage, and every hill the cattle climbed was a hill the dead would climb again, going west, toward the river that ran white and quiet in a place the living could not reach.