Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (30 page)

‘Hatred was in my heart, Phiroze. . . The desire to avenge Rudabeh had consumed me. . . But I had no idea that my daughter would fall so completely in love with you, or you with her. . .I never thought that you would marry her, and renounce the world. . .’

‘But that’s what you asked of me. . . That was the condition you made. . .’

‘Yes, yes, I know. . .but I never thought you would actually agree. That your parents would permit you to follow such a course.’

‘They didn’t have a choice. . . Well, while it lasted we were very happy, Seppy and me. I certainly don’t think you need to ask my forgiveness. I’m sure she doesn’t either.’

‘But it didn’t last very long. . . That’s my point. My intention was evil. . .to harm Framroze. . . Instead, it was I who was punished, and my Sepideh taken from me so young. . .I miss her so much, Phiroze. . .I miss her. . .’

Once again, the tears rolled, streaking his pitted brown cheeks with a film of gloss. I had not understood yet what he was on about. I waited patiently for him to come to the point, but my mind had wandered back to the days and weeks that followed Seppy’s sudden demise. . .

I was devastated and, I have no doubt, Temoo was, too. But even more unbearable and frightening to witness was the enormity of Farida’s pain; my poor three-year-old cried inconsolably every night after her mother’s passing; and her tears wouldn’t cease until they were snuffed out by sheer exhaustion, or crushed under masses of accumulated sleep.

Initially, a panic-stricken concern for finding ways to distract the child from her overwhelming grief bonded us: two adults, relatively inexperienced in the ways of parenting, we urgently sought means to help her cope. But independently of our efforts, Farida displayed a gracious willingness to not dwell on sorrow and, as if to compensate herself, grew exceedingly attached to her grandpa.

We needed each other, Temoo and I—I, more than he. I had to keep working, and was often away from home for long hours, while he kept my daughter company. A smug awareness of this imbalance in our respective compulsions gradually became evident. It took the form of a sublime indifference on his part towards my own disquiet, which I had expressed on numerous occasions: that between us we might end up spoiling the little princess at the centre of our lives if we indulged her every whim.

At this time, Temoo was still drinking. The rowdiness of his younger days, which I’d heard something about while Seppy was still around, would erupt, suddenly, late in the night and, within moments, his outpourings of grief turn abusive. But, such imprecation and insult as were spewed out during these nocturnal displays of rancour were not directed so much at me as at my father, who Temoo claimed had ‘robbed and ruined’ his family. Somewhat incoherently, his ranting ran on late into the night; long after I had stopped listening, after I realized it was impossible to tell whether he was mourning his recently deceased daughter, Sepideh, or her long-departed mother, Rudabeh, for whose tragic end Temoo squarely placed the blame on Framroze’s head.

During one such particularly rowdy and rage-filled spectacle one night, Farida woke up. Aghast at seeing her usually kind and affectionate grandpa in the wild state he was in, she burst into tears. To his credit, I should say, after that traumatic night, which must have been harrowing for Temoo, too, he gave up drinking. Yet his tearful incoherence on this occasion brought back to mind those drunken tirades. I had almost switched off listening when I realized he was saying something quite different.

‘Your father is a good man, I’ll admit it. . .a saintly man, in fact. He will outlive me, of course. I have but a few days left. That’s why I’m speaking to you. . .’ His tone of voice, too, had dropped to a hoarse whisper. ‘Ask your father for the ruby earrings. . .
Ask
him.’

My face must have expressed total incomprehension. I had never heard Seppy mention any such earrings before.

‘They were Rudabeh’s earrings, from her father’s time. Framroze kept them when she moved out of his home. At first he said it was for safekeeping. . . Later, he denied it. Completely. Denied having any memory of them. He didn’t give them back. . . It’s not fair, is it? Not fair at all. . . Now at least, they should come down to Farida. . . Framroze may be a good man, I won’t deny it, but how can he do such a thing?’

I nodded agreement, but even now my face must have shown disinterest. I could not see myself visiting Father one evening to ask for some chimerical earrings that had belonged to long dead Rudabeh. But Temoo emphasized once more, with much seriousness and urgency:

‘They are real rubies. . .large ones. . .in a beautiful gold setting. . .’ For a brief moment, I thought I saw his dull eyes glint. ‘Should be worth a lot of money. Lots and lots of it. . . They must go to Farida now. . . Tell him that was my last wish, tell him that’s what I said before I died.’

In those days I often heard about Vispy, that he had been seen loitering around the Towers complex in the evenings, but to what purpose or pleasure I had no clue. Then one night, I surprised him alone in the cottage of a dead young woman whose body Dollamai had just washed and laid out in preparation for the morning’s funeral. The light in the room was off, but the glow of the oil lamp and the dying embers of the afarghan revealing.

He was on the floor near the corpse, and the sheet covering the dead woman was in disarray. He moved away very quickly and stood up when I opened the door and switched on the light.

‘Vispy! What’re you doing here?’

He looked sheepish. My heart sank. I had come to the funeral cottage only to retrieve a bottle of sanctified bull’s urine which Dollamai told me she had forgotten there by mistake.

‘Well, I was just passing through, you see. . .I thought. . .I was just. . .’ His voice sounded thin and unsure of itself. ‘No, it isn’t what you’re thinking, Phiroze. . .’ he said, running his hand over imaginary beads of sweat on his forehead.

‘What am I thinking?’

My voice sounded rather more aggressive than I would have liked it to. I stared at him for one long moment, then looked away. . .but in the very next, I felt quite ashamed, for he went on to explain, sounding perfectly sincere.

‘You see, I knew this lady. . .I had met her several times. . . Ask Vera if you don’t believe me; it was she who introduced us. . . If Shernawaz had lived, I had planned to propose to her. To marry her. . .’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Vispy. . .I’m so sorry. . . Then you’ll be at the funeral tomorrow?’

‘Yes, of course, yes,’ Vispy said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

And he left quickly, looking very relieved. Obviously, that wasn’t sufficient reason to doubt what he was telling me. Yet the gratitude he felt in that moment—for letting him off the hook?— made me wonder. Could prolonged sexual deprivation drive a man to such extremes? Again, I was ashamed to be thinking such thoughts about my own brother.

A few months later, when Father died, Vispy did me a return favour. Involuntarily, my mind once again connected it with the night on which I had surprised him in the funeral cottage. Perhaps it is entirely twisted of
me
to think of it that way. But this favour, if I can call it that, bestowed on Farida, gave her a significant advantage.

Father was eighty-six when he died, still in good health, and able to manage his personal needs and chores without assistance. Though he remained, as it were, titular head priest of the Soonamai Ichchaporia Agiari, a few years before he died, I believe, a couple of relatively junior priests had significantly relieved him of his administrative duties there.

As a child, I had been very close to Father. Later the rift between us widened, and for a while I felt we had become adversaries. In spite of that, his death came as a great emotional shock to me. Initially, when Vispy informed me of his passing, over the telephone, it was as if, despite his advanced age, I could feel only disbelief. As though in the deepest recesses of my mind, I had wished him to live, and actually
believed
he would, forever.

It was after midnight when Vispy called. The watchman summoned me to Buchia’s office, now occupied by his successor, a slightly younger man called Rutnagar, to take the call. In the meantime, though, Vispy had already been speaking to Rutnagar, notifying him about Framroze’s death, and arranging for the hearse to be sent early in the morning. The funeral was planned for 4 p.m., the next afternoon, and Vispy told me when I took the phone, that he had already telephoned the offices of
Jam-eJamshed
and
Bombay Samachar
just in time for the announcement to appear in the morning’s newspapers.

‘You
will
officiate as nussesalar at Papa’s funeral, won’t you?’ he asked me on the phone, rather persuasively. I hesitated for a moment, and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps Father had left written instructions asking for any other nussesalar to observe the rites except his apostate son; and Vispy was deliberately concealing this stricture from me out of the kindness of his heart.

‘Do you think it is what he would have wanted?’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Vispy, ‘no question about it. That goes without saying.’

I listened silently for any hint of unease beneath his ardour; then, after a moment, said:

‘In that case, I’d be happy to. . .’

Most of that night, for some reason, I couldn’t sleep a wink. My mind remained awake, disturbingly animated by memories of my father, my mother and my childhood with Vispy.

At 6.30 a.m., when it was time to leave for the fire temple, I regretfully got out of bed, and then woke up Farida from a deep slumber, whispering to her that she should try to take the afternoon off from work, so as to be able to come home by 4 p.m.—if she didn’t want to miss her grandfather’s funeral.

Everything went according to schedule. There was a huge turnout of mourners for my father—well-to-do admirers of his seniority and moral authority, a couple of priests from the temple, some Punchayet trustees as well, but by and large, and in very significant numbers, the simple folk who visited his fire temple every morning. They filled the funeral cottage and pavilion to overflowing. Myself, I remained slightly numb and dispassionate through the day. My poor sleep during the previous night must have added to my sense of disorientation.

Only after I had lent a shoulder to three colleagues and carried Framroze up the hill, depositing him on the topmost step of one of the Towers; only after I had turned my back on him, and whipped the sheet off his naked corpulent body, clapping my hands loudly three times—which was the signal to let mourners gathered in the small temple garden know that the consecrated body of my father had been offered to the vultures to devour, that they should commence their prayers for the effortless transmission of his soul; only after all that was over and done with, and the mourners had left, and a deep silence had descended once again on the Towers, only then did the floodgates of my grief open, and I cried bitterly for my father whom I would never see again.

That night, I had a strange dream that remains as vivid today as it was on the night I dreamt it, so many years ago. You see, my father died in 1966. And the remarkable thing about this dream lies in its significantly prophetic nature. For in those days, vultures were still very much around. With preternatural instinct, these common Indian scavengers would populate every branch of every tree in the Towers of Silence complex until their greedy, motionless, black-brown-white presence loomed everywhere, stark and brooding—just about thirty minutes before the scheduled hour of a funeral. When I had that dream, no one in their wildest fancy could have guessed that vultures in India were on their way to extinction.

In the dream, I was walking through some kind of narrow sluice or gutter. There wasn’t much water here, only a kind of viscous, transparent fluid, and a great many dead bodies— decomposed, half-eaten, some only bone with shreds of torn flesh sticking to them. . .I was wading through this ghoulish tumult of the dead searching frantically for something or someone: my dead wife, or at least for her gold bangles, which I was convinced in my dream I had forgotten to slip off her arms when I had carried her up to the Towers so many years ago. Now that I suddenly recalled this oversight, I got into a state of panic; yet, I was hopeful of still being able to find the bangles. No, I couldn’t: instead it was Seppy’s corpse I found, remarkably well-preserved amidst all the horrific rotting and decomposition! I noticed at once that her arms were thin and bare. The gold bangles my mother had given her at our wedding were nowhere to be seen. Then Seppy opened her eyes and smiled at me, warmly. I became aware—I couldn’t help notice—that the whole area around us was illumined by a strange, unearthly glow emanating from her ears—from a pair of exquisite, gold earrings studded with brilliant rubies.