Word: pyre
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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President Daniel arap Moi ignited the 20-ft. tower of ivory, which had been erected in a clearing overlooking the Athi Plains in Nairobi's game park. The pyre was a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of elephants slaughtered in Africa by poachers over the past ten years, and a symbol of Kenya's avowed resolve to end poaching and the global ivory trade that threatens the elephant with extinction. In just the past decade the population of Kenya's herd has plummeted from 65,000 to about 17,000. Had Kenya sold the store of tusks, many hacked...
...violence of the night culminates in the older brother's dreamlike murder of the man he first thought to be his father and in the two brother's building of a live funeral pyre for their mother, who abandoned them, and her live-in lover. The two watch the blaze in wonderment from a backyard ditch, as children see a Christmas tree light up and an insect burn in the glare of a magnifying glass...
...ancient Hindu rite of suttee, requiring a woman to immolate herself on the funeral pyre of her husband, was abolished in British India in 1829. But early this month, when her young husband died suddenly of gastroenteritis, Roop Kanwar, 18, a bride of just eight months, declared her intention to revive the grim custom. By that afternoon thousands of people had gathered to witness her immolation. After taking a ritual bath, the woman dressed once more in her bright red bridal finery. Sitting atop the funeral pyre with her husband's corpse, his head on her lap, she asked...
...site. But to some people, Kanwar had become a goddess. Pilgrims thronged to the village of Deorala, 47 miles northeast of Jaipur, to pay homage. Last week hundreds of thousands of people converged on the site for ceremonies marking the end of the 13-day mourning period. The pyre, which had been kept smoldering with ghee (clarified butter) and coconuts, was decorated with a flower-bedecked silk canopy. Kanwar's four brothers spread a stole embroidered with gold thread over the pyre. As Brahman priests chanted mantras, the stole was burned. The pyre was then extinguished with holy water from...
Despite the high-court ban on the ceremony, police, fearful of provoking a riot, did not interfere. They did, however, arrest Pushpendra Singh, the youth who lit the pyre, and four other in-laws, charging them with murder. The maximum penalty: life in prison. Authorities were investigating whether the bride's in-laws, who by tradition would have been required to care for her the rest of her life, had pressured her into the act. Kanwar's father, saying he believed that she acted under "divine orders," took consolation from the fact that his daughter had become a devi (goddess...