Obituary by A K Ramanujan | Malayalam Summary | Vidya Education

00:00 Intro 01:27 Summary 03:48 Stanza One and Two 08:33 Stanza Three and Four 12:20 Stanza Five and Six 15:44 Stanza Seven and Eight 18:57 Themes 20:35 Structure and Form 22:07 Literary Devices 23:37 A K Ramanujan's Biography Obituary by A K Ramanujan This well-known A.k. Ramanujan poem depicts a son’s reaction to his father’s death. The piece takes the reader through a variety of images that relate to where and how the father died as well as what has changed now that he’s gone. Lines like: “And he left us / a changed mother / and more than / one annual ritual” help convey the speaker’s experience in ‘Obituary’ in clear language. "Father, when he passed on, left dust on a table of papers, left debts and daughters, a bedwetting grandson named by the toss of a coin after him, a house that leaned slowly through our growing years on a bent coconut tree in the yard. Being the burning type, he burned properly at the cremation as before, easily and at both ends, left his eye coins in the ashes that didn't look one bit different, several spinal discs, rough, some burned to coal, for sons to pick gingerly and throw as the priest said, facing east where three rivers met near the railway station; no longstanding headstone with his full name and two dates to holdin their parentheses everything he didn't quite manage to do himself, like his caesarian birth in a brahmin ghetto and his death by heart- failure in the fruit market. But someone told me he got two lines in an inside column of a Madras newspaper sold by the kilo exactly four weeks later to streethawkers who sell it in turn to the small groceries where I buy salt, coriander, and jaggery in newspaper cones that I usually read for fun, and lately in the hope of finding these obituary lines. And he left us a changed mother and more than one annual ritual."