Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (7 page)

Despite my staunchest resolve, I found myself unequal to the task of competing with Vispy; indeed, of applying myself to any form of concerted study.

Every time I tried to focus on reading, or cramming, I encountered an immense rock-like barrier in my head which made me wonder if I wasn’t really the dunce and fathead my family had always made me out to be. On the other hand, it was also true that left to my own resources I was pretty certain this was no infirmity—a weakness of sorts, perhaps—but what I really craved was something more robust than books. To find myself out-of-doors, unconfined by Father’s fire temple with its holy smoke, salutary fragrances and workaday miracles: to be adult, free to go out and earn money, make my way in the world. . .

By the time I was in my teens, I intensely hated the feeling of being hemmed in by the norms of temple living, of being controlled in the myriad subtle ways a family employs to augment dependence and prolong childhood. But I knew that so long as I continued to live with my parents, nothing would change, my day-to-day routine remaining as invariable as the hoarsely stentorian chanting of the priests through the morning in the prayer hall, in a language that nobody had spoken or understood for the last three thousand years.

The real disappointment, though, that irked my father was not so much my dismal performance at school as the fact that though I was already sixteen I was not even a naavar yet. This is the first test one negotiates on the road to full-fledged priesthood— being ordained a novitiate priest. Not that my father wanted either of his sons to become full-time priests like himself: he knew only too well how low his profession had slumped in our burgeoning city of commerce. There was no money in it and not much respect either. Nevertheless, in those days, every family of the priestly caste deemed it necessary and appropriate for their sons to go through at least this first stage of ritual training and initiation.

Vispy had already acquired a reasonable fluency in the scriptural passages one has to commit to memory in order to become a naavar. For most people, I suppose, this isn’t a very difficult task. In fact he had easily cleared that milestone while still in his fifth form and, since then, had been qualified and fully authorized to participate in certain of the less abstruse liturgical services.

(In those days, students matriculated in their seventh year of school. By the time
I
reached my seventh year, however, an augmented curriculum compelled the education board to move the final exam up, so that I had already been attending school for eight whole years when I failed my matric. During his final year of school, not wanting to distract him from his studies, my parents had denied Vispy permission to participate in the Mukhtaad ceremonies. Otherwise, for two consecutive years prior to that, the young naavar had donned the robes of a priest and joined in the jamboree of prayer.)

During All Soul’s Week—which with us Zoroastrians actually lasts an entire ten days preceding the New Year—Father’s small temple was virtually besieged by earnest supplicants entreating him to requisition prayers for their dear departed.

‘Impossible!
Ek minute bhi nathi
,’ Father would expostulate. ‘But how? From where will I find the time?’

The regular customers had booked their date and time weeks in advance. But every year saw an additional influx of believers who, by word of mouth, had heard stories of the fire temple’s wondrous aura of immaculate purity, where prayers were weighted with so much sincerity (and so well articulated) that they were actually known to elicit results.

At such times, Vispy, and several other young naavars like him, were summoned to perform the additional ceremonies. Then, every square foot in the marbled floor of the main hall would be crowded with frowzily-clad priests in white muslin gowns, some even younger and more diminutive than myself— and I had thought
I
was short—sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor, surrounded by trays of fruit, flowers and daraanmalido. Three sides of the rectangular room were circumscribed by long banquet tables crowded with silver or copper flower vases, each one in memory of a departed soul who, it was believed, returned during this season to partake of the incorporeal feast of prayer and food provided for by his or her family. There were also a few, small round tables holding a single vase each for those who could afford this exclusivity and didn’t want to be huddled among a rabble of souls—and, of course, dozens of glistening thuribles in the large room, one for each of the ceremonies being performed, crackling and spluttering with the strong aroma of righteousness.

By a skilful manipulation of timings, Father was able to accommodate everyone’s needs, and ceremonies in remembrance of the dead proceeded thick and fast, six, sometimes even eight, being performed simultaneously at any given hour of the morning. Before noon, though, all such ceremonies came to an end.

Lucky Vispy, how I envied him: he was allowed to retain the stipend he received for each ceremony performed, to use as he pleased. In my own case, I was not offered even a paisa in pocket money. Though my father could scarcely have afforded it had he wished to, he justified my deprivation, to himself as well as the rest of the family, as meet punishment for a rash, frivolous and undisciplined offspring.

By 8 p.m., when Father retired, if mother was not feeling too tired herself after dinner had been served, she would stretch out on the creaky easy chair with the book of liturgies open in her hand to some passage I was having difficulty with. I would sit beside her on a low stool repeating aloud after her certain verses and phrases in the hope they would stick in my memory. But every so often these strange sounds would trigger off involuntary aural associations in my mind that brought on the giggles. For instance, there was this extraordinary passage:

Mem pah geti manido

Oy-em goft, oy-em kurd, oy-em just, oy-em bud budastead
.

It probably meant something completely profound and sublime, but in the wicked recesses of my mind I heard its intrinsic meaning distinctly. Utterly far-fetched nonsense, which never should have been verbalized; yet, only as a lark, I couldn’t resist offering it to Mother as my ‘free translation’ of the passage:

If I don’t get my malido on time
,

I may just go nuts, and bite someone in the bud
!

In an instant that seemed to linger for aeons, her eyes enlarged in growing disbelief. The effort of suppressing both anger and utterance—Father already fast asleep in the next room—rendered her voice flutey and jagged with hysteria:

‘Can’t show respect to even the most sacred? What’s wrong with you? What’s to become of you, you silly oaf? Everything is funny to you! You’ll end up a complete failure, a nobody: a jokester! And, in the bargain, break your poor father’s heart. . .’

Her words echoed in my ears long after we had repaired in all sobriety to the holy text. I certainly didn’t want any harm to come to my father. Already, he endured acute flatulence and during his worst bouts, complained of chest pains.

As I had failed miserably in the final board exams, when the new academic year started, I no longer had the legitimate pretext of leaving for school every morning. At the same time, my curiosity about the world outside had increased tremendously. Luckily, my parents were officially notified about extra coaching classes that the school was providing for its eleven monumental duffers (including yours truly).

Also, to my advantage, they were more than aware of my friendship with Rohinton Kanga, whose father, Nariman, had just commenced production of bolts of cotton cloth at his new mill in Worli. Nariman Kanga’s reputation as entrepreneur extended well beyond the Bombay province. Though Kanga Mills was only one of over a hundred such enterprises that had been inaugurated in the state during the last fifty-odd years (and the third, among Kanga’s own), this mill had the distinction of being the first to be located in the Worli area. Moreover, Nariman had recently been in the news for simultaneously constructing rows of neat little back-to-back tenements not far from the mill, providing subsidized housing for his workforce that had been drawn from the native populations of Solapur and Nasik. This was considered another feather in the cap of Kanga’s numerous innovative achievements.

Given his considerable wealth, well-publicized philanthropic impulses, and unimpeachable prestige in the temporal world, Framroze and Hilla were actually proud of the fact that his son was a close friend of their own. That Rohinton, on occasion, had actually visited our quarters behind the temple, spent lazy afternoons stretched out on the easy chair playing draughts with me, or noisily sipping a Dukes’ aerated ice-cream soda, fetched post-haste by a temple boy—or sometimes by Mother herself, if no temple boy could immediately be located—from Merwaan’s, the corner Irani store.

Though my father frowned darkly at gossip he sometimes heard about Nariman Kanga’s freethinking ways and ardent nationalism, he was willing to ignore it since it was after all only hearsay. I, too, had been shrewd enough never to let on to family a piece of knowledge I was privy to: that during the sticky, summer months of Bombay, Rohinton himself—and probably, even his dad, or so my friend assured me—never wore a sudrah under his shirt: the sacred vest that every self-respecting Zoroastrian wears next to his skin: his spiritual armour.

So when I bruited the story that Rohinton was helping me prepare for my second attempt at the board exams, they were pleased, and in a smug, self-congratulatory way, never once attempted to check the veracity of my claim. The joke was that Rohinton himself had only just scraped through the finals. A plump, happy-go-lucky fellow with rolls of baby fat still cushioning his neck, forearms and cheeks, Rohinton would have shrieked with merriment had he heard I had cast him in the role of my tutor.

Those were the best moments of my youth, when I could be out in
the streets on my own.

Usually, I would escape from the temple precincts as early in the morning as I was able to, without any fixed destination in mind. More often than not—feeling, I suppose, obliged to live out the fiction I had created—I would head in the direction of Mazagaon. Rohinton had a large extended family of siblings, grandparents, cousins, servants and pets, who shared a two-storeyed, many-roomed ancestral bungalow at Mazagaon. The house, which was named
Mon Repos
, was encircled by a vast expanse of greenery, flowerbeds and moats. It seemed so enormous that I hardly ever met most of the people who, I believed, lived there. I knew that Rohinton’s brothers were much older than he, and worked in offices. I had never met them myself. As for his parents and grandparents, they were very busy people, too. I knew that his father had married twice, first a red-haired Irish woman he met during his student days in England, who gave him one son, and died rather young herself. Later, he married Rohinton’s mother, a Parsi from Karachi, who bore him three more children of whom Rohinton was the youngest.

His father’s eccentric tastes and enormous wealth were on display everywhere inside the house, in the shape of elaborate chandeliers, ornately-framed portraits of his forefathers, a grand marble stairway leading to a living room furnished with expensive Persian carpets, vases from China and a stone sarcophagus that dated back, purportedly, to Roman times. Outside, in the park, under a gazebo, stood a marble bust of Rohinton’s great-grandfather, Framji Kanga, whose adventurous trading in opium and silk during the early nineteenth century had ushered generations of the Kanga family along the path of financial plenitude.

Above all, the park boasted a small private zoo. Among the various animals, the deer and nilgai roamed unhindered, while some others—a porcupine, leopard, orangutan and an enormous python were confined to spacious individual enclosures. There were also three enormous, though gentle, hounds who were allowed to run free in the grounds. A high compound wall circumscribed the large park, heralded by an imposing wrought iron gate.

Mother would have given me two half-anna coins, just enough for my fare on the tram from Gowalia Tank to Mazagaon and back. These were terrific joyrides for me, as the tram slowly trundled through the crowded streets and bazaars of the town. But at the end of my journey to Mazagaon, I didn’t always feel like visiting the Kangas. I felt close to Rohinton, but it was obvious to me that we belonged to different worlds—and I could never feel entirely at ease under the fastidious eyes of so many bearers, stewards and watchmen.