Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (28 page)

‘See,’ said Buchia. ‘Just look at the scoundrel! Paid to stay awake, but already adrift in the land of Nod. Anyone who had a mind to could easily enter, steal a corpse, and walk away with it. . .’ It was meant to be a sort of self-deprecating joke, for that’s exactly what he and his cronies were up to. But nobody laughed. Instead, Fali asked in all seriousness:

‘Now who would want to steal a corpse? Death has already robbed him of everything he ever owned. Why pillage a pauper?’

Nobody had an answer to that philosophical aside either. Then Shiavux intoned with the sanctimonious propriety of a school’s head-boy:

‘Please understand: we’re not stealing a corpse; no, actually we’re only relocating it. And that, too, for a very good cause: to protect the purity of our religion and race.’

If he had expected their leader, Buchia, to applaud his sentiments, he must have been disappointed, for Buchia only frowned, then growled at Shiavux:

‘Okay, okay, then. Less said the better. . .’

Meanwhile Homiar, who had stepped out to open the gate for the hearse, shut it again and climbed back in.

‘Snoring away like an ox,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t have woken up if I had kicked the chair out from under him. . .’

‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ said Buchia. ‘Try to think straight, boys. One witness is all it’ll take to identify the lot of us tomorrow, when the shit hits the fan. . .’

Then they were off to Sewree. Streets deserted, not even a stray dog in sight. Poor people who might normally have been sleeping in the open on the pavements had found shelter under the awnings of shop fronts, or in the forecourts of residential buildings. It was the 23
^rd
of December. The boys in the back were glad to be huddled together, despite having an icy corpse in their midst. Jungoo was the only one who had come prepared for the chill, wearing a long-sleeved pullover. Buchia wore a thick linen vest whose deacon-like choker protruded from under the collar of his shirt. Occasionally at junctions and turnings, he gave directions to Jungoo, who wasn’t as confident as he was, of the shortest route to Sewree.

There was something else that was bothering Buchia. In the prelude to the withdrawal of British forces from independent India, the partitioning of Bengal and the Punjab had become inevitable, and already reports of serious communal violence were coming in from these parts of the country. Bombay, as yet, hadn’t experienced anything comparable, nor would it even in later weeks and months when migration, dispossession and violent death afflicted more than a million people on the subcontinent. But travelling so late at night with a raffish, disorderly bunch of young men crammed in the back of a hearse made Buchia nervous.

‘Just in case we are stopped by a military or police patrol,’ he told his co-conspirators, ‘let me speak, and stick to my story: we are only routinely transporting a corpse from the home of a bereaved family in Wadala to the Towers of Silence.’

‘Yet moving in the wrong direction?’ pointed out Fali. ‘We’re heading
away
from the Towers, aren’t we? And what an odd time of night to be transporting a corpse, don’t you think?’

‘Well, let’s just hope they don’t notice it,’ said Buchia irritably, peeved by Fali’s quibbling.

But Fali was in an expansive mood. Sighing to himself, thinking about God-knows-what, he muttered philosophically:

‘Many a slip between the cup and the lip. . .’

In the crystalline silence of the night, Buchia heard him, and got angrier.

‘For your sake, I certainly hope there hasn’t been. I mean, any slip between the bottle and your lips. . .Fali! I can tell you’ve been drinking.’

‘No, saheb, not at all. Not a drop, I swear. Not a drop of alcohol has passed these lips in the last. . .what, forty hours? Smell my mouth,’ Fali protested, thrusting his face at Buchia who was in the front seat. Buchia recoiled.

‘Smells of Colgate,’ Buchia said, disgusted.

‘Always remember to brush my teeth after dinner,’ said Fali smugly.

But nothing untoward happened. At no checkpoint were they stopped, nor did they see any military patrol. The night remained uneventful and icy as the deserted streets they were driving through until their vehicle came to a grinding halt outside the imposing cement archway of the Sewree cemetery.

‘Honk twice, and flash your headlights three times,’ Buchia instructed Jungoo, who did as he was told.

It was a pre-arranged signal, in response to which one gate of the cemetery swung open with an awful creaking, and a very short, bearded man appeared. Buchia got out of the hearse to meet him. The man had an enormous head. He was wearing baggy shorts and a sleeveless vest, but didn’t seem to feel the cold. Though dwarf-like in stature, the bearded man’s broad shoulders and thickset neck were intensely thonged by muscle; moreover, his large, extraordinary head was full of the oddest bumps, bulges and indentations; not unlike his hirsute, stumpy legs. He must have been younger than Buchia, though not by very much: his hair, too, had receded entirely and what was left of it was tied in a straggly pigtail at the back. On his vast and amazing forehead sat a huge carbuncle that shone by the light of the moon, red and inflamed.

For a few minutes, he and Buchia stood there, arguing. The caretaker, or whoever he was seemed to hold his ground, persistently shaking his head in refusal. Then Buchia extracted a wad of notes from his hip-pocket reluctantly, counted it, and handed them over to him. The other man counted the notes again. Presently Buchia climbed back into the hearse beside Jungoo. The bearded caretaker walked ahead and, very slowly behind him, the hearse followed.

I had visited the Sewree cemetery during the days of my peregrinations in the city, at least once, if not twice. I remember it as a pleasant enough place, vast and undulating, with paved footpaths, masses of furrowed earth, trees, shrubs and gravestones. Buchia must have been in touch with the caretaker the previous evening, for the latter led the way, with the hearse crawling behind him, until he raised his hand for it to halt. He had led them to a freshly dug open grave which was to become Joseph Kanga’s resting place.

Beyond a point, there was no access for the van, so the body had to be physically carried out to its grave. However, before that could happen, an unanticipated problem arose, bringing Buchia and the caretaker nearly to blows.

‘Where’s the coffin, man?’ the caretaker yelled in alarm when he saw Joseph’s corpse being carried out of the hearse on an open bier. ‘How can you bury a body without a coffin!’

‘We don’t use coffins,’ said Buchia. ‘We feed them to vultures. Everyone has different systems, you see.’

‘Then you should have followed your own!’ the caretaker snapped at Buchia, rudely. ‘Why bring him here? Can you see any vultures here?’

‘But Gomes,’ that was the first time the others heard him address the caretaker by name. Realizing that he hadn’t taken into account a crucial requirement, Buchia continued to argue, ‘We’ll cover him in mud. The earth will be his coffin!’

‘I cannot allow that,’ insisted Gomes, who seemed more than equal to Buchia in stubbornness.

‘What!’ exclaimed Buchia, both annoyed and aghast. ‘Where will I find a coffin at this time of night?’

‘I cannot allow a body to be buried directly in the soil,’ repeated the caretaker stiffly. ‘It’s just not done—it’s an outrage for you to even think that’s possible!’

‘But how does it help to put him in a box? Anyway the box will rot, and worms will get at him.’

‘Stray dogs, hyenas, bandicoots would dig him up before that, if he’s not in a coffin. You have to put a body in a coffin. Or take it back! A rule’s a rule,’ the caretaker was emphatic and obdurate. ‘Otherwise, take him back to your Towers, why don’t you, and feed him to the birds. . . This is a Christian cemetery.’

It was a contest in aggressive obstinacy that Buchia sensed he was losing. Moreover, his nasal falsetto compared unfavourably with the other’s deep and resonant voice which lent him authority.

‘Well,’ said Buchia at last, ‘don’t you have any old coffin lying around?’

The caretaker shook his head.

‘The old ones are all underground with decaying skeletons in them. I do have a new one, which I was getting ready. I can let you have it if you want. But it’ll cost you eight hundred rupees.’

‘Eight hundred—’ Buchia was shocked. ‘That’s highway robbery! You see, now?’ Buchia appealed to his band of corpse bearers. ‘You see what this is all about? He wants to rob me! I’ve already given you two thousand!’

‘That’s for the use of the plot of land, for digging the grave and bending every rule for you. This is for the coffin. I’ll return nineteen hundred if you decide not to bury him here. . . One hundred I keep for digging the grave. . .’

Buchia had five young men behind him, but the caretaker was not intimidated in the slightest by their presence. He stood there rooted, fiercely refusing to budge, and Buchia glared at him.

It was then that Fali spoke, in the tone of a courteous and wise mediator:

‘Please sir, do not mind me if I make a suggestion. . .’

The caretaker turned to look at him. Buchia stared at him suspiciously as well, almost certain now that Fali had ignored his cautionary warning about not tippling. But he
looked
sober; and Buchia was secretly glad for any help he could get in finding a way out of this impasse.

‘Sir, this gentleman—the deceased—is a respectable Christian, and we want him to have a proper Christian burial. But he has no money, and no family to provide for his coffin. If you would only allow us, my friends and I can knock together a coffin in no time. Some scraps of wood, a box of nails, a hammer. . .’

The caretaker looked incredulous as he heard Fali’s inventory of his requirements. Meanwhile, Farokh whispered something urgently to Fali in Gujarati, and Fali replied in English,

‘Why, it’s only a box. We could easily—’

Now the caretaker interrupted, speaking harshly and contemptuously.

‘Don’t want you buggers messing around my workshop. . .I can see how respectable you-all are, holding a funeral at two in the morning.’

‘There were complications. . . You must believe us. The deceased is a sad, unfortunate person who has already suffered a great deal. . . Let us not make things more unpleasant for him—’ said Fali.

But Buchia cut him short. Presumably tired and exasperated, he had decided it was time to take matters in hand and adopt the one tactic he found most effective in such situations: that is, to show rage. Or perhaps he did genuinely take offence:

‘Who’re you calling buggers, eh?’ suddenly raising his voice, he shrieked. ‘You bloody pimp! You swollen-headed greedy pig of a Gomes! You’ve been leading me on from yesterday. Haggling, haggling. . . Every chance you get you want to squeeze out some more. You’re taking advantage of our difficulty. Even now at the last minute—I know what I’ll do. Give me back my money. Give me back my money! We’ll go find some other burial plot.’

‘You can have your money back at the gate,’ said the caretaker. ‘On your way out. First load the corpse back into the van.’

‘What!’ yelled Buchia, now really annoyed at being crossed. ‘I want it now, you understand? Then we’ll put the corpse back in. Right now! Hand it over, shorty!’

‘At the gate, I said. On your way out.’

‘When I say now, I mean NOW!’ screamed Buchia, like a madman, and lunged murderously at the caretaker.

Despite the brightness of the night, Buchia hadn’t noticed that the man he was attacking was standing in front of a freshly dug pit. The big-headed dwarf nimbly stepped aside at the very last moment, and Buchia would surely have crashed into Joseph Kanga’s intended grave but for a reflex split-second parrying on his part. Instead, he fell hard, sideways, against a stone; and while doing so, managed to grab the caretaker’s arm and pull him down as well. The latter wasn’t hurt, though. He quickly got back on his feet and dusted himself, while louring at the man sprawled at his feet in pure disgust.

But Buchia must have been in intense pain, for he started weeping. Not very loudly, he tried to suppress his sobs, yet he was loud enough for everyone to see that something had gone terribly wrong.

‘Be brave, sir, don’t cry,’ Fali consoled him. ‘At least you didn’t fall into the grave. Then we would have had to bury you here only. . .with or without a coffin!’

But Buchia was in no mood for jokes. He wouldn’t even let the boys help him up. From the way he held himself, and gradually manipulated himself on to his haunches, it seemed like he had broken a bone, possibly his left collarbone. The pain must have been agonizing, but Buchia kept his presence of mind. Putting his right hand in his pocket he pulled out a bunch of notes and gave them to Farokh.

‘Count out eight hundred rupees and give them to him. Let’s finish what we came here to do.’

Next morning, when the mourners started arriving for Joseph’s funeral, and his body was missing, all hell broke loose. Buchia, whose injury had not been attended to all night, was trembling, and delirious with pain and fever. Many of the senior-most trustees including Aloo Pastakia, Tehmton Anklesaria, and the Punchayet’s Chief Executive, Burzhin Hirjibehdin, had decided to attend the funeral as a mark of respect and courtesy to Nariman Kanga. Coyaji was there, too.