The Indonesian villagers who live with their dead
Funeral rites on Sumba Island are so costly it can take years to finance them. In the meantime, corpses take pride of place anywhere from the kitchen to the living room
Umbu Mbora’s house in Lewa village in East Sumba, a regency in Indonesia’s Sumba Island, looks like a typical local house – hay-roofed, wooden-walled and largely unfurnished. What may shock foreign eyes, however, is that it hosts two of Mbora’s unburied, dead relatives.
The remains belong to Mbora’s cousin and stepsister, who died in 2010 and 2008. The first coffin is kept inside a small, dark room just next to the kitchen, the second is in the living room.
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Both coffins look clean enough; they are well-covered with ornate Sumbanese fabric. While outsiders might be spooked by the presence of dead bodies inside the house, Mbora and his family are quite composed about it, shaking off any concerns about having lived with decomposing remains the past decade or so. “There’s nothing unusual about having them in my house. I was close to them when they were still alive,” says Rambu Herlina, Mbora’s wife. “I see them as just sleeping in the room. Whenever I clean the rooms during New Year or Christmas, I lay out bethel for her or cigarettes for him. I also ask permission every time I enter … telling them that I am coming in to sweep the room.”
They do not smell bad, either, for corpses. The key is to put layers of quality fabrics, tobacco leaves and calcium underneath the bodies. With these layers, the remains could be “good” for years, Mbora says.
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This rite, while similar to customs in Toraja in Sulawesi island, is quite unlike rituals in the rest of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country. In Islam, a person must be buried as soon as possible after death. On Sumba Island, just an hour’s flight from the resort island of Bali, it is common to keep the remains of dead relatives inside the house for years and even decades in some cases, until the family can afford an appropriate send-off to the afterlife.