The Burial by Jane Mary Joseph

The Burial

Jane Mary Joseph

The pallbearers lowered the casket into the ground …

With him they buried not just a Body, but a Culture itself. He was the last of the generation in the family, a Herbalist who had, in the prime of his life, restored to health many a person and cured them of ailments rendered irremediable by those the locals revered as the English doctors.

He had not a formal education in the field, he deemed it pointless as it was an Art, not a Science and Art came naturally, not with effort. It was what one would call a family legacy, traced back to four generations ago.

His clientèle came from far and wide to palliate their ailments with concoctions, the ingredients of which were known to him alone. Myth had it that if a Herbalist revealed the elements of his potions, they ceased to be fruitful.

Grandpa’s highbrow children were never convinced to uphold the Art. The dying, feeble call of Tradition was drained by the sound of the prevailing, forceful voice of White-collar jobs. The contempt and mockery of the young folks failed to deter him, he unabatedly kept alive the practice till the onset of senility.

Countless childhood tales of his grandchildren took form in the space that once preserved bottles of magical mixtures, but is now a storeroom of all things redundant. His Art met its Death with his dotage, only to be recalled when a child opens a dusty bottle in the corner, emanating a foul smell.