Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (22 page)

‘Perhaps. Or we could have found some way of. . .Vera might have been able to talk to Shapoor, break it gently. . . I’m quite sure that Limbuwala received a call from Buchia. I know it in my bones. . .I could kill that bastard. . .’

He said it very quietly, without a trace of anger, but I could see that he meant it.

A crueller twist to Vera’s story was that for quite a while, she had no reference letter, no certificate of endorsement putting on record her four years of sterling service to Messrs Gagrat, Limbuwala and Co. It would have been difficult for Vera to find a new job on the basis of her previous experience without such a certificate. Luckily, within two months, Limbuwala decided to launch his own firm. Then Rusi Gagrat, a very decent sort by all accounts, sent a message to Vera to come and see him at his office and provided her with the generous testimony she so sorely needed.

For some reason he did not offer her old job back, perhaps not wanting to cause offence to his former partner. Subsequently, with a reference from Gagrat, Vera found another well-paid job, this time with the patent lawyers Hathangadi and Golikeri. She has since become quite indispensable to that firm.

But now that I have related Buchia’s story to my notional readers—no one else knows about it, and I intend to keep it that way—I shouldn’t leave out mention of the fact that it wasn’t all odious or unpleasant. Nor was I completely unmoved by his embracing and fondling and kissing. Strangely, I felt, after a very long time, human again; living again, grateful to Buchia that he saw me as more than just some cadaverous, unclean thing whose very breath it was undesirable to commingle with.

Later that evening, I thought of my unyieldingly rigid father whose mind, so trussed up in the twists and turns of religious ideology, had severed ties, forsworn the love he had once felt for me and never wanted to set eyes on me again. Who did not even send me a message when Mother lay dying in great suffering in the General Ward of the Tata Memorial! If it were not for Vispy’s dropping in to give me the news, I would have had the shock of seeing her pain-wracked, shrivelled corpse carried in on a stretcher. But even Vispy’s communication was just a token thing, and came too late. I rushed to the hospital that very evening but by then she wasn’t conscious. Heavily drugged with morphine, she had slipped into a coma which she never came out of. Nor did she ever learn that I was at her bedside at the end, longing for a flicker of her eyelids, a single moment of recognition.

(iii)

All through childhood my father doted on me, and I on him. Mother was much closer to Vispy than to me, or so I believed.

Maybe I was wrong, for when I got married to Sepideh, she was the only one from the groom’s side who thought it right to be present (of course, Vispy came along, too).

Framroze, my father, claimed to be much too busy to be able to take the morning off and did not attend. Though I knew, without anything having to be said, he was simply boycotting the wedding, protesting what he had described to my face as my “everlasting imbecility”!

My marriage to Sepideh, recorded in a unique register of corpse bearer weddings maintained by the Parsi Punchayet, was officiated over by the head priest of the fire temple in the Towers of Silence complex, where I’d had my training as nussesalar. These weddings, of course, never boasted a large retinue of guests, except for other corpse bearers, and sometimes, very rarely, a family member or two. My mother and Vispy were present at the ceremony, representing the groom’s side. From the bride’s side, there was only Temoorus, her father, who also signed as witness.

In the evening of the same day, there was a small celebration, in the casuarina grove, where some chairs had been put out. Other corpse bearers attended, and made merry on a small cache of three rum bottles paid for and provided by Temoo. Even Buchia made a brief appearance, though he wouldn’t drink. That was Seppy’s dowry—three bottles of Hercules Triple X Rum, which we all shared.

Not that my mother’s decision to be present derived from any feeling of acceptance of my marriage to Sepideh, or any desire to celebrate it. In fact, until it became amply clear that I was leaving my homestead—renouncing, by choice, my birthplace, my family, my origins, to become a social outcast—she resorted to all forms of hysteria, blackmail, threats, even bribery and inducement to get me to change my mind.

In the end, she relented, witnessed the wedding, and even gave a pair of gold bangles that had belonged to her mother as a wedding gift to her daughter-in-law. In that sense, I had always found her less dogmatic than my father, more human. A part of the reason for her decision to attend the wedding may have also been to act differently and independently from her husband, who, she felt, was too swollen with the religious authority invested in him by priesthood and who attempted to control her life and actions as well. Later, when our child was born, she came and stayed with us for a few days. Even later, when Seppy died, she was by my side for the next three days. She tried to persuade me then to resign, and come back home with Farida. But I knew from the way she proposed this it was her own idea, which didn’t have the approval of my father.

When she returned home after staying with me, I know she would have had to undergo an excessive number of purification rituals at the behest of my father, without which he would have been unwilling to readmit her into his temple.

In that sense, though I loved Father very much, and she loved Vispy more than either of us—or so I imagined—in the end I knew my mother had acted in a more humane manner than he. Perhaps at the bottom of it all, there was some fundamental unhappiness in their relationship, that ‘selfishness’ on my father’s part which she had imputed; and all those rules and strictures he made it incumbent on her to uphold, his means of controlling her. During all those years, though, that we were living together as a family, I don’t remember ever seeing her so deeply unhappy. Yet the unimaginable pain and suffering the uterine cancer put her through make me wonder how profoundly neglected her sense of hurt really was.

Vispy, partly to justify his own failure to inform me in good time of her illness, told me that her physician, Dr Variava, had termed it a ‘galloping cancer’ which consumed many of her vital organs within barely a month of its detection.

‘Everything happened so quickly. Here we were rushing from pillar to post, from agiari to Tata Memorial and back, getting her meals prepared, taking them to hospital. . .though she had almost completely stopped eating. . .and here Papa and I were also tied up with saying prayers and managing the fire temple’s affairs. . . You have no idea what kind of a hectic few weeks we had; and then just when the doctor gave us some hope that she might be going into remission, and she seemed indeed to be feeling better, Papa said to me, “First thing we should do now is inform Phiroze. . .” Just then the doctor found that the cancer had spread to her brain as well, and there was no hope. . . It all happened so quickly. . .’

After her funeral, when all the other mourners had left, we spent some time together as a family, Father, Vispy and myself, seated in the pavilion, chatting. Temoo had sent a special chair for me from the storehouse, so that I could sit with them without polluting the benches meant for the public. Most of the conversation was about how terrible her anguish had been, all that suffering suddenly heaped on her. . .

‘
Aapre thi to jovay bhi nahi
! ’ said Father. ‘So painful, so painful. . .it was impossible for a normal person to witness.
Bichari ne chootkaro mulyo
, that’s the way I look at it. There
is
no other way. . .’

‘Towards the end,’ said Vispy, ‘they would keep her drugged almost twenty-four hours a day. To ease her suffering, her agony. . .’

I remember thinking, while Father was waxing eloquent about her pain and suffering: perhaps there was some love he felt for her, after all.

But as they were getting ready to leave, and we were enveloped by a deeply shared sorrow as well as, I suppose, some sense of relief, my father spoke again. And this time he said:

‘You know, your mother never believed in strictly following the prescribed customs of our religion. Even when she was younger, and she would go into her monthly cycle, she wouldn’t accept quarantine. She would leave the menstruating room at will, wander around the house, touch anything and everything, until I had to shout at her to go back inside. . .

‘Even when your child was born, even when your wife died, I told her: don’t live there in the khandhia’s quarters, just meet Phiroze if you want to, have a bath and come home. But she was just too stubborn, Hilla, always, about not following these traditional practices. . . You see, this is what can happen. Cancer is a modern disease, and it comes from neglecting ancient truths. . .’

Still horrified and deeply disturbed by the accounts of my mother’s intense suffering, I hardly heard what my father was saying. I was thinking to myself, is there no justice in the world? Why, on what account, did my mother have to suffer so much? What were her crimes?

But as they drove out the gates of the Towers of Silence in a taxi they had found waiting just inside the compound and waved goodbye to me, I was astonished that my father could have been so unbelievably tasteless and ugly in saying what he had just said: I suppose it took me a few moments simply to register what he had been on about, and only after the taxi melted into the stream of traffic at the Kemps Corner junction did I feel an enormous rage welling up inside me. . .

Wickedly unjust, thoroughly muddled, preposterous—these adjectives hovered imprecisely in my head, aimed not merely at qualifying my father’s cherished beliefs about the world, but the world itself: our universe, and the lot of its hapless denizens. If there
is
a god who is responsible for all the profusion of life and locomotion in the universe, then surely that being has arrived at an advanced stage of senility, I declare, or one of cynical and extreme indifference.

(iv)

My curiosity fuelled by Vera’s reference to her father’s hard times in childhood, I couldn’t resist asking him about it one afternoon when we were alone.

‘I don’t like to remind myself of that phase of my life,’ he said. ‘I lost both my parents in quick succession to the cholera epidemic of 1908. I was only ten years old then, my little sister, Soona, only seven. . .’

Instead of looking after his children, as he had promised Rustom’s father on his deathbed he would, his uncle, Savak, turned them out of the house within six months of the father’s death. Pretending offence and outrage at some imagined slight or injury inflicted by young Rustom on his wife and infant baby, he was vehement and ruthless. At the time his wife was pregnant again; the truth, Rustom said, was that they wanted the flat exclusively for their own family.

For some months, Rustom lived and slept in the streets with his sister, Soona, who didn’t survive the ordeal; she developed a high fever and a stomach infection that despite her brother’s frantic efforts couldn’t be treated in time.

‘I swore to avenge my sister’s death, fantasizing all kinds of terrible ways in which to kill Savak, but finally could do nothing. I had no one to help me bring him to justice. But there
was
a neighbour in the building who knew of my plight, and of Savak’s villainy. He took me to see a lawyer friend he had, who actually filed a writ petition in the Small Causes Court, paying for all costs himself. But it was dismissed—you see I had no papers at all to prove my father’s ownership of the flat, nor even my own birth certificate to prove I was my father’s son. Savak had destroyed everything, and fabricated his own documents. . . Finally, I went back to Darvish Petigara. . .’

‘Petigara. . .?’

‘The man whose place Buchia took when he retired. . .I had already met him before at the time of Soona’s death. Out of pity, he offered me a job. I accepted, of course, with a sense of relief. By then I was very tired. . .all my anger, my fantasies of a triumphant vengeance, fizzled out once I began handling corpses. . . Like everyone else, you see, I was an egoist. I used to believe too much in myself. But this job makes you aware that all that self-importance is nothing but illusion. What is a man in the end, Phiroze, but the powder of a few dried bones. . .?’

(v)

‘Just think about it,’ persisted Cawas, taking a large swig from his glass of rum and soda. It was the hour of our regular booze-up.

Incidentally, the so-called strictures against drinking at Doongerwaadi seemed definitely to have lapsed. Nobody cared anymore whether we drank or not. The only deciding factor became the availability of funds. Fali, always willing to initiate a collection drive, complained that that afternoon’s contributions were so insignificant we’d have to be content with just one bottle between the eight of us. All present on Rustom’s terrace, listening to Cawas hold forth, had contributed for the raw concoction we were sipping.

‘A father will not touch his son’s dead body. A son will not touch his own dead father. . . So much repugnance about death? So much disgust for corpses—and even before any stench or rotting has started?’

‘Where did you buy this booze, Bomi?’ asked Fali indignantly. ‘Seems to me definitely adulterated—with some potion that inspires the most boring of sermons!’

‘
Bakaro
and
Bakwaas
: Sellers of fine liquors. . .’ said Bomi, taking his cue from Fali, and everyone laughed.

‘No, no. I’m serious,’ said Cowsi. ‘See. When it comes to disposal of the corpse, our religion is so sensible. We don’t pollute the earth by burying, nor the air, by cremating. . .everything’s so nice in our religion—must be the finest in the world: we are not asked to fast, avoid liquor, or congregate on Sundays for prayer. A happy normal life is all we are asked to lead—earn money, eat your meat, drink, enjoy. . . Only this one thing is so strange. . .’

‘
Pun bol ni, bawa, bol ni
, just what is it you find so strange? Such a long preamble, but we still haven’t a clue. . .’

‘Let Cowsi speak at his own pace,’ protested Rustom. ‘None of you youngsters know the meaning of patience.’