When She Was Queen (13 page)

He knew it would not be a simple matter fulfilling his last wish. And so for him I was a godsend, a witness to that wish who had known him in the past and was not unsympathetic, and who was also a mukhi, with connections. He also used the presence of me and my wife to extract grudging acquiescence from his own wife. There the matter stood when Farida and I took leave of the couple in the dingy, eerily quiet hospital room, our footsteps echoing hollowly down the long, white corridors. We both believed there was time still, for Bharwani and Yasmin to wrangle further on the issue, for his other close family members to be brought into the discussion, for him to be pressured into changing his mind. Cantankerous Bharwani, however, died suddenly the following day, bequeathing me such a predicament that it would seem as if I was caught inside a maze from which there was no exit.

Once a death reaches notice of the community organs, as somehow it does almost immediately, the funeral committee goes into high gear. Cemetery management is requested to prepare the next available site, the body is sent for ritual washing and embalming, the funeral date is set and announced; relatives in different cities in the world learn about the death within hours and arrange for services in their local mosques. This is the way it always is.

“What should I do,” Yasmin said to me over the phone from the hospital. “They have taken over, and I don’t know what to say to them….”

If I had said, Nothing, she would surely have been relieved. It is what I felt strongly inclined to say—Do
nothing, let them take over; he’s dead anyhow, it won’t make any difference to him. But it does make a difference to us, the living, how we dispose of the dead.

Does that sound right?

“What do you think you should do?” I probed her gently.

“My conscience tells me to follow his wishes, you know I promised I would. But I don’t know what’s right. I don’t want him to go to hell or some such place because of his arrogance. Is there a hell, Mukhisaheb? What exactly do we believe in?”

She had me there. I had learned as a child that hell was the name of the condition in which the human soul could not find final rest in the Universal Soul; in that case the body was simply useless and disposable baggage. I was also told of a Judgment Day, when the body would be raised, and of a heaven where you had a lot of fun, presumably with many pretty young women, and in contrast a hell where you went to burn for your sins while giant scorpions gnawed at your guts. I was inclined toward the more sublime approach to the hereafter—though who has returned from the world of the dead to describe conditions there? It seemed a safe bet simply to follow tradition, to go with the blessings and prayers of your people. But mere tradition was not enough for Karim Bharwani; he liked to make up his own mind. He had never played it safe. How were we going to send him off, and into what?

I didn’t answer her question. “Your husband has put us into a real quandary, Yasmin,” I said instead. “Give me some time to think. Perhaps we can delay the funeral by a day, let me try and arrange that.”

“His family has already started arriving, for the funeral … it’s a big family … two brothers and two sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles, and his mother. What am I going to say to them?”

“Say nothing for now.”

“I don’t know what I would have done without you, you truly are a godsend.”

Isn’t that what I was supposed to be? But I found myself confounded, I didn’t know what to do, where my duty lay.

I called up Jamal and Nanji, two other classmates from way back, to talk about “Communist” Bharwani’s death, and we reminisced some. It was the first death to strike our group from school, not counting a tragedy in grade eleven, when a friend was hit by a truck. They told me that Alidina, Kassam, Samji, and perhaps a few others would also be arriving, from out of town, for the funeral. Bharwani was lucky, so many of his former classmates would be present to pay him their respects. Would he appreciate that? We believed so.

He was always intense, always controversial. Broad shouldered and not very tall, he had a habit of tilting his head leftward as he walked. He parted his thick black hair in the middle and, even more outrageous for the time (this was high school), wore suspenders to school. He spoke English with a twang that made people laugh, for its foreign imitation, until they heard what he was saying, which always seemed profound. He was our star debater and actor. One day he brought in a four-page indictment of God, obviously culled from books of literature, and
presented the typescript to our hapless religion teacher, one Mr. Dinani, who broke into tears and called Bharwani “Lucifer,” which thrilled him ever so much. Mr. Dinani lives in Scarborough now, an insurance salesman recently awarded a plaque by his company for record sales. I lost touch with Bharwani when he went to England for university. When I saw him years later in Toronto, he seemed distant and perhaps even a bit disdainful; I gathered that my vocation as a real estate agent and my role as community worker did not meet his standards of achievement.

That night there was the usual sympathy gathering of family and friends, after services in my mosque, where I met my former classmates, six in all. Yasmin sat in the midst of the large Bharwani clan, beside her mother-in-law, a severe-looking though diminutive woman with hennaed hair furiously and silently counting her beads. Mr. Dinani too was present, and in his familiar, overwrought manner, was already in tears. But my former friends and I gathered afterwards at Jamal’s lavish house on Leslie Street and gave ourselves a great reunion party, at which we remembered old “Communist.”

Alidina, a heart surgeon in Kingston, recalled how Bharwani used to read and edit his English compositions at school. Once a small guy, fondly nicknamed “Smidgin,” Alidina was now simply broad and short, a recently divorced man turned out in an expensive suit. According to a rumour I’d heard, he had been accused by his wife, at a reconciliation hearing, of almost strangling her. His imitation of Bharwani’s arrogant manner was predictably hilarious. Nanji gave us a story the rest of us had never
heard before. Late one afternoon, after classes were long over, while he was walking along a corridor he had chanced upon Bharwani and the new chemistry teacher Mr. Sharma sitting together in a classroom at the teacher’s table; Mr. Sharma was in tears and Bharwani was patting him on the hand to comfort him. What to make of that? Bharwani with a tender heart was not an image we were familiar with.

The stories wove on, recalled after many years, inevitably embellished; the evening wore on, a good portion of the people getting progressively drunk, sentimental, louder. At these moments I always find myself adrift in my soberness. I debated briefly with myself whether to let them in on Bharwani’s last wish, but decided the moment was not quite the right one to request intelligent input from my friends. I left, taking my secret with me, though I could not help warning Jamal in somewhat mysterious fashion that I might need his legal advice on a serious matter. As I drove through Jamal’s gate, the question of the funeral seemed ever more urgent. Time was short. Wouldn’t it be better just to let things be, let the burial proceed? No one would be the wiser, but for Yasmin, Farida, and me.

Messages were waiting for me when I arrived home. In one, I had been confirmed to preside over the funeral ceremony, which according to another message had been postponed from the next day to the one following, as I had requested. There was a frantic appeal from Yasmin—Please call, any time.

“I met with my in-laws today, to discuss procedures for the funeral ceremony,” she told me when I called.

“Did you tell them of Karim’s wish?”

“I didn’t know what to say. I was waiting for your advice.”

“What do your children think?”

“I’ve told all three of them. The older ones want to meet with you.”

We agreed that I should go to meet her and the children early the next morning at her house.

The house is in an area of north Toronto called Glencedar Park, a locale so devoid of coloured faces—except for the nannies pushing strollers—as to appear foreign to the likes of me. A cul-de-sac, with access to it limited by one-way streets, the neighbourhood might remind the cynical minded of a fortress. There are not many such neighbourhoods left. I have taken clients to inspect houses in Glencedar Park, who after a single drive through it have instructed me simply to hasten out to somewhere else. Having parked my car and come out on the sidewalk, I met the curious though not unfriendly eyes of a couple of heads of households in long coats, each with a briefcase in hand and a folded paper under an arm, striding off to catch the subway on Yonge Street. I told myself this is where Bharwani had come to seek refuge from his people.

“How do you like the area?” I asked Yasmin when she opened the door.

“Very much,” she said. “We’ve had no problems. Some of the neighbours are rather nice. The others keep to themselves.”

All three children were waiting for me in the living room. The oldest, Emil, was a broad, strapping young
man, conspicuously crowned with a crop of thick black hair slicked and parted in the middle, which reminded me of his father in his youth. He was at university. The second, Zuleikha, with the slim and toned looks of her age, resembled neither parent; she was finishing high school. The third child, Iqbal, was nine and rather delicate looking. They stood up and I went and embraced each in turn. I reminded myself that this was their time of sorrow, they had lost a father, who to me was only Bharwani, from a shared past, calling upon which he had put me in a delicate spot.

I muttered some inanities in praise of their father, my arm around the shoulders of little Iqbal, beside whom I had sat down, when Emil, after a nod from his sister, went straight to the point. “Mukhisaheb,” he said, “our mother has told us about Dad’s desire to be cremated. We would like to know what you think.”

“Your father expressed that wish to me and your mother. I believe the ultimate decision is the family’s.”

“I think cremation’s the best way,” Zuleikha spoke up, sounding frivolously like an ad, which wasn’t her intent. She had evidently not had much sleep, and she had spent time crying. There was a mild look of defiance in the glare she then awarded me. I have come to believe, in the few years I’ve held communal office, that to the young people I am a little like a cop, whom they would like to come to for help but whom they also resent.

“I differ,” Emil said stiffly. “But of course Dad’s wishes matter.”

“I don’t want Dad to be burnt,” broke the quivering voice of young Iqbal beside me, and I held him tight at
the shoulders as he gave a sob. His mother, saying to him, “Come,” took him from me and out of the room.

This is a close family, I observed to myself. I thought of my own son, who had left home soon after graduating from school and was now in Calgary, never quite having looked back; and of my daughter, the same age as Zuleikha, who had grown distant from Farida and me.

“The problem is,” I told Emil and Zuleikha, “that cremating is not in our tradition—you know that. It might even be forbidden on theological grounds. The community will not allow it. And there are other family members—your father’s mother, and his brothers and sisters. They will have something to say, too.”

“But he was
our
father, we have the right to decide,” the girl said emphatically.

“What can the community do?” asked her brother.

“They can refuse the final rites to the body,” I told him.

“Does that matter?” asked Zuleikha. “It wouldn’t have mattered to Daddy. He would have refused them anyway, if he could.”

“Your mother wishes the final rites and prayers.”

Their mother brought in fresh brewed coffee and a plate of cookies. “He’ll be all right,” she told me, with a smile, referring to Iqbal. “I’m trying to explain to him that his father lives on in spirit.” She quickly averted her eyes, so expressive of the turmoil and grief beneath her surface. In a cream cardigan over a dark green dress, she reminded me of how young women used to dress back in Dar a long time ago, during the cooler hours of the day. She had been trained as a librarian, as I was
aware, and now worked in government. Ever since her call to tell me that her husband had closed his eyes for the last time while in the midst of chatting with her and Iqbal, she seemed to have kept her emotion in check.

Emil said: “Mum, what would
you
like to do, regarding Dad?”

“It sounds silly, I know, but I only want to do what is right.”

“What is right is what
he
wanted,” her daughter insisted, and tossed another glare at me. I could imagine her as Daddy’s favourite, always ready at his defence during conflicts.

“Let’s all give it a few more hours,” I told them. “The funeral is tomorrow. Meanwhile … if you wish, you could inquire about cremation procedures and costs….”

By that evening the community leadership had caught wind of Bharwani’s last wish, and I received a stream of phone calls, all intended to sound me out regarding rumours already in circulation. No, I was certain, I replied, that the family was not considering alternative funeral arrangements. The ceremony would take place tomorrow, as announced. And, yes, I had seen Karim in hospital, delivered chhanta to him, he had not been out of his mind, ranting ignorant things. Finally came the call from the very top, the chummy but very commanding voice of our Chairman. “What is there to these rumours, Shamshu—something about the deceased’s wish to be cremated. Word is that he spoke to you before he died, and that you are close to his family.” I explained to him what the situation was and told him that since I was a witness to that last wish
of the dead man, I felt somewhat obligated by it. The last remark was wilfully ambiguous, and I waited for his response. “We understand your personal predicament, Shamshu,” the Chairman answered impatiently, “but first and foremost you are a mukhi; not just a présider but a representative of God. You know what is right. Just because the deceased had deviated from the right path—that’s what I hear, he had become a communist—does that mean it is not our duty to try and save him? And it seems to me that this is the perfect opportunity, when he has fallen back into our hands. You said he let you do chhanta; that means he had a semblance of faith still left in him. Then let’s save him. Otherwise he dies without the prayers of his people to go with him.”