The internet is where we live now. With QR codes in Indian cemeteries, it’s also where we go when we die

“Most buy them for grandparents, parents and elderly relatives. A few,” Xavier says, “don’t wait for death.” A woman in her twenties bought a plaque to bury her dead relationship. Stranger still are those who purchase and edit their own memorial profiles while most of life is still ahead. They worry no one else will do it for them. Which raises too many questions: how can one feel alive while already rehearsing their own memorial? Will Indian cemeteries become Instagrammable spots? Will grief soon be another feed to scroll while eating toast or walking to the bus?

In the days after my father died, I kept wishing I still had my old phone. It had his voice, stacked between calls from courier workers and spam offers. I could have pressed play and believed he had just put down the paper, drained his third cup of tea and called, as he always did, once my mother and sister left for school. Where does a voice go once it’s deleted anyway? I imagine it orbiting cyberspace. If you think of it, the internet is a kind of cemetery. The dead drift across clouds, apps, notes, playlists and drives. But who gets to roam these archives and decide how they should be remembered?

Earlier this year, I spoke to Jeet Thayil about his novel Elsewhereans, which traces his parents’ lives and threads in portions his mother had been reluctant for him to document. What does it mean to be the keeper of one’s family story? To trespass memories? Is there a kind of love that reveals itself through disobedience? Thayil answered, not neatly, not fully, that for him what mattered was that in telling their story, he’d stretched his parents’ lives just a little farther. In the other most talked about book this year, Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy too memorialised her mother as both her shelter and her storm.

The rows of graves stretch in quiet geometry, punctuated by small metallic markers linking life and memory.