AT ABOUT 7.15 PM ON 17 NOVEMBER 2013, a small airplane practising night-time takeoffs and landings crashed outside Spring, a town just north of Houston, USA. Both the plane’s occupants—a flight instructor and a student pilot—were fatally injured. Shortly afterward, Revanth Kumar Angadi, who lives about 250 kilometres away in Austin, got a call from his family in India. They told him his twenty-three-year-old cousin, who had recently joined flight school, had died in the crash. “I was their only contact,” Angadi recalled.
Angadi began calling funeral homes in Houston to arrange for the body to be sent back to his family, but none were able to help. “They hadn’t sent a body to India before,” he said over the phone in December. Angadi contacted the Telugu Association of North America, which suggested he get in touch with the Hindu Funeral Home in New Brunswick, almost 3,000 kilometres away.
The Hindu Funeral Home, which caters exclusively to the Indian-American Hindu community, is one of an increasing number of US funeral homes serving Hindu needs. There is no shortage of demand for their services—Indian-Americans in the US, most of them Hindu, total 2.8 million, and are one of the country’s fastest growing immigrant populations. Barbara Kemmis, the executive director of the Cremation Association of North America, which represents more than 1,500 members of the funeral industry, told me that such homes exist mostly in areas with large Indian communities. “Most are not owned or operated by Hindus, but [Hindu] traditions are still honoured,” Kemmis said.
The morning after Angadi’s call, Gregory Young, the Hindu Funeral Home’s co-owner and funeral director, found a Texas funeral home to sort out the local paperwork and send the body to his specialised facility in New Brunswick, which has approval from the US Transportation Security Administration to prepare bodies for international shipment. Working from a small office off a corridor lined with images of Hindu gods, Young and his two assistants also arranged the necessary paperwork—a process streamlined by strong contacts with the Indian consulate in New York City and Air India courtesy of the company’s other owner, Peter Kothari, a prominent Indian-American community leader with a long-established travel business. Within four days, the body had been shipped to Hyderabad, where Angadi’s family received it.
Young is a sixty-seven-year-old, fifth-generation funeral director who is neither Hindu nor Indian-American. Sitting in his office on a December afternoon, he explained why he had partnered with Kothari to establish the home twelve years ago. “In terms of a market, if you’re a funeral director, you look at the demographics,” he said. According to the 2010 US Census, the Indian-American population in central New Jersey’s Middlesex County, where Young works, had doubled to 104,705 over the preceding decade, making it one of the country’s largest concentrations of Indian-Americans. “And as they’re able to,” Young continued, “they bring over the rest of the family. So, the demographics are such that there is a tremendous population here of the parents.” He smiled and added, “We’ve just grown and grown and grown.” His company’s annual funeral count now stands at over three hundred, and last year it shipped fifty bodies back to India. This year Young expects to ship over a hundred.
Other funeral homes also benefitted from spotting the niche early on. John Carmon, a sixty-six-year-old who now owns nine homes around Hartford in the state of Connecticut, told me over the phone that when he renovated his main facility, in the town of Windsor, in 1988, he attached a crematorium to the chapel so that Hindu families could cremate their dead immediately after a ceremony. Today, Carmon’s homes conduct over fifty Hindu funerals every year. “We are willing to understand not just with our heads but also with our hearts,” he said. Though Connecticut law requires that bodies not be cremated until at least forty-eight hours after the time of death, Carmon often secures waivers on religious grounds to allow Hindu families to conduct funerals earlier. His homes can also live-stream services over the internet for family and friends outside the US.
Kothari told me that before funeral homes such as his opened, few homes could meet Hindu cultural requirements, and cremation was relatively expensive. Today, the standard “package” for a Hindu funeral on the US east coast costs only about $1,000, though services with a puja and a public viewing before cremation can cost up to $2,500. In comparison, the National Funeral Directors Association estimated the median cost of a US funeral in 2012 at $7,045. Kothari said he was not in the business for profit. “We need somebody for Hindu funerals, for our needs, for our community,” he said. “People are going to die anyway … so where are they going to go?”