Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (32 page)

I hadn’t prayed for any miracle. I hadn’t prayed at all in ages. Don’t get me wrong. I know from all those years I spent in childhood with my father that faith is a peculiar pool.

The longer the human soul swims in that pool of faith, soaking in the effulgence of its own dreams and longings, the more its need for rationality recedes, its very preoccupation with reality. Excuses are made for every frustration or impediment that doesn’t quite merge into the perfect blueprint of miraculous resolution already etched into one’s hopes and prayers: thus, there’s never any scope for disappointment. The person becomes blind to everything but the bewitchment of his own beliefs.

I was well aware of this, and wary of it too. But in this, my own case, I hadn’t been expecting anything. I didn’t even fully believe in the earrings, as a matter of fact; that they weren’t merely a figment of Temoo’s grouse-laden past. Yet, when I found them, it was not by chance or through diligent searching. It was not I who unearthed them but a force outside of me that momentarily transfigured my consciousness and guided me to them. Can you blame me for seeing it like that?

The quickening of my senses which seized me in those few minutes when I was possessed by a spirit of foreknowledge, while Vispy puzzled over what I was up to; when combined with the indelible memory of the dream I had soon after Father died, in which Seppy assured me that the dead were not dead at all, but still alive, make me feverish with excitement.

Or do you think old age is catching up with me after all? That I have merely succumbed to the bewitchment of my dreams? I don’t care what you believe. I know she is still out there waiting for me.

That I will meet her again. . .

Author’s Note

In 1991, I was commissioned to write a proposal for a Channel 4 documentary on corpse bearers in the Parsi community of Bombay. The film was never made, but one story I heard in the course of my research on this small, segregated caste stayed with me.

It was about a middle-class Parsi dock worker of the last century, who married a khandhia’s daughter. He was in love with her, and gave up his job and his former social life to begin work as a corpse bearer. He took this step on the insistence of the girl’s father who had his own reasons for exacting vendetta on the dock worker’s family.

The person who told me this story, Aspi Cooper, was son to this improbable marriage. Improbable, because no one in his right mind would voluntarily accept the vicious stigmas that attached to the profession of corpse bearer in those days (albeit less pernicious possibly, than what ‘untouchables’ of mainstream Hindu society still face). Once a khandhia himself, Aspi found a way to ameliorate himself from this condition of social backwardness; at the time I met him, he was a successful racecourse bookmaker. The protagonist of the story, however, the former dock worker, was his late father, Mehli.

In 1942, while still a young man, Mehli Cooper organized and led an unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated strike of khandhias. He was promptly suspended and the strike fizzled out in a day or two. When later reinstated, according to his son, he became entirely submissive and quiescent, thus eking out the next forty-odd years of his life as a khandhia at the Towers of Silence.

Though I believe this story to be historical fact, there is no mention of the strike in the annals of the Parsi Punchayet; nor could Aspi, who was very young at the time, provide me any details of it. Such descriptions of the circumstances and course of the strike provided in the novel are purely fictional; as also many of my descriptions of the topography and layout of the Towers of Silence, which to this day remains out of bounds for all except Zoroastrians.

Landing on the west coast of India in the eighth century CE, after fleeing from successive Muslim invasions of their homeland, Persia, the Parsis of Bombay later prospered under the colonial rule of the British. Until recently, they had successfully preserved most of their religious traditions and customs. In recent years, however the community itself and its miniscule population have been on the decline.

As a mark of my respect for a man I never met, I would wish this novel to be an offering to the memory of Mehli Cooper. I also want to thank my late father’s dear friend, Mr Adi Doctor, for giving me his valuable time and scholarly explanation of the traditional Zoroastrian system for disposing of the dead. For such doctrinal inaccuracies or misrepresentations as may have crept in—the reader should remember this is essentially a novel, a work of fiction—I alone am responsible.

Cyrus Mistry

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