by Nillu Nasser
Akash didn’t want to talk. “I need a piss.” The public lavatories provided not only a place to relieve himself, but privacy that was in scarce supply on the streets.
“I’ll come with you.”
Tariq followed him inside the ramshackle building, which housed a row of cubicles, each with little more than a hole in the floor wedged in between partitions the colour of cooked egg-whites. Akash entered a stall and squatted to empty himself. The floor breadth measured little over half a metre. Claustrophobia closed in on him, equalled by his relief to be hidden away from prying eyes.
The unwelcome familiarity of this place hung like a lead balloon in his belly. He had used these toilets, time and again. Over the years it had become a habit to use public toilets where they were available, though many of the homeless people he knew defecated openly on the streets of the city. What did hygiene matter for men who had nothing? Still, it had become habit for Akash not to relieve himself near where they slept. The streets of Bombay were already full of dangers and irritants. Adding the stench of bodily fluids to their hard-won sanctuary for the night would be idiotic.
Outside, Tariq waited, supportive, demanding. Akash longed to be alone with his thoughts for longer than the few minutes the lavatory afforded him, but Tariq had been ever present since his return, sensing Akash’s vulnerability. Tariq’s feet drummed impatiently, his socked ankles visible underneath the cubicle door, together with the worn laced-up shoes he had scavenged from a dumpster.
Akash sighed and hoisted up his trousers over dirty underpants which made a mockery of him. He smelt Soraya’s perfume behind him and spun around, ridiculing himself as he did it. He sucked in his breath to see a shadow there. He didn’t know if it represented a figment of his imagination. If he looked closer, he could make out a withered womanly shape that he felt sure was Soraya, nothing like the vibrant woman she had been, but her all the same. He blinked, but the shadow remained there, not uttering a word. Its presence both comforted and terrified him. He sensed rather than witnessed a smile that did not reach its eyes, a midriff unblemished by the pools of blood he kept expecting to bloom, yellowed skin. He reached out to touch it, trembling, but his fingers slid through, with just the tiniest hint of resistance.
Knuckles rapped on the door and Soraya faded into nothing. “Hurry up, yaar. We can’t leave our stuff out there unattended for too long.”
A clamp squeezed around Akash’s lungs. He considered taking off Arjun’s shirt, wrapping a sleeve around his neck like a tourniquet, and pulling. Would he have the strength to complete the act before Tariq entered? How forlorn he would look, a man partially unclothed, found dead on the filthy floor of the public lavatories. With his bladder now empty, at least he would not wet himself. Or he could find a piece of glass on the beach and take his life under the canvas of the open sky. Am I even brave enough to take my life? Jaya, help me. It surprised him how his subconscious had injected Jaya in his thoughts. As if her name were a prayer forever engraved on his soul.
This time a fist thumped the door. Akash jumped.
“Coming.”
He stepped out of the cubicle, easing past Tariq, and looked behind him. His heartbeat heightened. He half expected Soraya to still be there but the cubicle stood empty. Akash needed time away from Tariq’s searching questions. He did not have any answers. Answers had been escaping through the porous net of his brain all his life.
He gave his hands a cursory wash at the greying ceramic basins and surveyed his blood-shot eyes in the cracked mirror. His mind boomeranged between three axes. Soraya was gone; Arjun hated him; Jaya lived. The most important question remained: did he want to die or did he want to fight for his family? He swept wet fingers through his thinning hair and wiped the remainder of the moisture on his trouser legs. Tariq caught his eyes in the mirror.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
Chapter 32
Arjun sat slumped in the corner of the ghusl room adjoining the mosque. A funeral attendant waited silently by the door, affording the grieving son some privacy. Sweat ran down Arjun’s back despite the air conditioning keeping the room cool to minimise the disintegration of the corpses laid out here. He touched his forehead to a marble counter, enjoying the cold against his skin. Outside the sanctuary, rickshaw engines whirred and horns beeped as Bombay heaved to life. With his eyes shut, the temptation to expel the last few weeks from his memory overwhelmed him. In sleep, his mother’s face haunted him, calling out words he could not understand. Arjun had considered drinking alcohol to reach oblivion, but there would be time for that later. He would not miss this chance to say goodbye.
A relentless ticking reminded him of the passage of time. Arjun opened his eyes and straightened his back. He shuddered as he took in the sight of his mother lying lifeless on the cold steel table. His vision focussed slowly on the clock above the doorway and the solemn attendant standing beneath it. The clock’s hands hovered at just before eight in the morning. Panic gripped him and he edged closer to his mother, anxious about the imminent arrival of a group of women to wash her body and prepare it for her last rites. Four days had passed since her death, the need for an autopsy superseding her right to burial.
The slight delay both distressed and comforted Arjun. Since his mother’s death, the grains of time had alternately frozen and poured relentlessly through the hourglass. While their faith demanded she be buried immediately, he wanted longer with her. Too soon they would take away her body. He had so much to tell her, so much to ask. He was not prepared to commit her body to the earth just yet.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you, Maa.” He motioned to the room with its marble and steel cladding, and the large wash basins lining the walls. “I hope this is what you wanted.”
He smiled wryly, recognising the irony of being beholden to Muslim traditions when his mother scarcely practiced the faith. He knew she had found the social norms at the masjid alienating for single, unmarried mothers. A two-by-two culture pervaded. More than this, Arjun suspected the fierce independence of his mother clashed with the patriarchal society she found there. As a boy, he had rarely set foot inside a mosque; even less as an adult. Still, there had been times when he’d been taken ill in his childhood, that he remembered his mother muttering a prayer under her breath, an instinctive reversion to God whilst under stress. He’d thought hard about what form her final passage should take. In the absence of instructions to the contrary, he decided to proceed in the same mould as the funerals for his grandparents.
It had only ever been the two of them since he was a young boy. Though they had lived under the same roof as her parents until he was five, there had been no question that Arjun belonged to her alone. Even when he married Muna, his mother’s hold on him persisted, fortified by their shared experiences and confidences. No one competed with that.
“What will I do without you?” His voice cracked. The attendant moved into an annex just out of sight, trying hard to be invisible. “How can I stem this anger towards him? Is it true what the inspector said? Why didn’t you tell me?” A serene smile lifted the corners of her mouth where she lay. He searched her face for answers, but her closed eyes rendered it impossible for him to know what she had been thinking. All her wisdom was lost to him. He raised his hands to the heavens feeling clumsy, the movement alien to him. Above him, a fan whirred around a light fitting. “Ya Allah, help my mother wherever she is.”
The previous week, Arjun had attended prayers and asked the Imam about what awaited his mother.
The older man stroked his wiry beard and peered through his glasses at Arjun with kindly eyes. His hair underneath the skull cap looked oily. “She said her Shahada when she passed?”
Arjun frowned.
“Verily we belong to Allah and truly to Him shall we return?” said the Imam.
“I don’t know.”
“No matter. Don’t worry. Your mother will await Judgement, and then surely go to Heaven with the righteous.”
“I meant what will happen during her burial rites?”
“Oh, of course. Sit down, son.” They sat, the Imam cross-legged, with his shirt dress stretched across his knees, and Arjun next to him, keenly aware of the dirt he had missed on his feet when washing before coming into the prayer hall.
“There are no women in your family to assist with the washing of the body?”
“My wife is Hindu. Our daughter is not yet six months old.”
“I see.” The Imam fidgeted. “Well, we have three ladies, well-practiced, who will tend to your mother gently. She will be brought from the mortuary to the ghusl room here at the masjid on the morning of the funeral. When the ladies arrive, they will wash her three times and wrap her in fresh sheets. The shrouding will be secured with rope. The ladies will pray as they work. There is no gossip.” He paused. “There are no injuries on her face?”
Arjun flinched. “No.”
The Imam leant forward and touched his leg. “I am sorry to ask. At the end of the ceremony, the outer sheet will be moved aside for the mourners to see the deceased one last time. The ladies will place the body—”
“—my mother.”
“Yes, they will place your mother on a woven board.”
“I remember from my grandparents’ funerals.”
“Good. When the ladies are finished, you and the men will bring her into the courtyard for the ceremony. I will lead the prayers.”
The fan overhead caused ripples in the stagnant air and played with the edges of the sheet covering his mother. The movement caught Arjun’s eye and jolted him back into the present.
“They’ll be here any moment, Maa.” He placed his hand on hers. Even through the sheet that separated them, her fingers felt stiff, the skin leathery. How often had she massaged cream into her fingers in life? She’d been vain, and though she kept her nails short, he hadn’t known a day when they had not been adorned by colour. Underneath the white cotton sheet, his mother’s toenails were coral pink. Soon, she would be bare apart from the three large sheets which would be used to cocoon her. There would be no wax in her short, grey hair. The ghusl ladies would wash it with a shampoo that was not her own. They would try to manoeuvre her hands into prayer pose.
A sad smile drifted across Arjun’s lips. His mother would be amused by that, he was sure.
The attendant coughed suddenly at his shoulder, uncomfortable. Arjun had convinced him to allow him some time alone with the body, but now he must go. “Sir, it’s time.”
Arjun took a long look at his mother and kissed her forehead. His feet moved of their own accord away from her, though he pivoted before he reached the exit for one last look at her. Three women, large in stature, filed wordlessly past him. It was improper for him to sit with his mother before she had been washed, but the women showed no judgement. The last one turned to him with a look of sympathy, before ushering him out of the room and quietly shutting the door behind him. Arjun passed through a long corridor until he found himself on the noisy street, worlds apart from the still of the ghusl room inside.
Soon, it would be time for the final goodbye.
The sun shone high above their heads, its beams shrouding the funeral in a haze, obscuring the blue veins on the smooth marble of the mosque’s facade. Two minarets stretched skywards and disappeared behind a bank of clouds. Arjun’s eyes smarted against the light. Before him, on a woven board atop a beige and green rug, rested his mother, shrouded in white sheets. A lump settled in his throat. His eyes lingered on her stomach area, where the knife had torn her flesh, and then moved to her face. The ghusl ladies had wrapped her head in cloth, covering her ears but leaving the rest of her features visible. Her face had sunk, despite the efforts to preserve her body during the wait for the autopsy.
They stood facing Mecca in the courtyard of the masjid.
“I will now recite Salat Al-Janazah,” said the Imam, raising his hands in supplication.
Arjun did not understand the funeral prayer, though the rhythms of the Arabic soothed him. As the Imam prayed, sweat pooled in the small of his back underneath the white tunic that hung to his knees. The high collar constricted his throat and his legs felt sticky underneath the cotton drawstring trousers. Though many of the men at his side and behind him were strangers, Arjun felt the strength of the communal prayer. At first he emulated their gestures, but as the prayer wore on, he rocked where he stood, his eyes trained on his mother’s face.
Finally, the Imam finished and gestured to two men nearby. They drew the sheet over her head, an action that anonymised her, though he still recognised the lines of her slight frame beneath the sheets. Is that the last touch you will feel, Maa? his mind called out to her. A hand settled on Arjun’s shoulder and squeezed. He turned to nod at a stocky man he recollected as a customer from the restaurant. The Imam chanted, and the men joined in, a chorus of voices praying for his mother.
“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is His messenger. Verily to Him we return.”
The congregation surged forward as the chanting grew louder, carrying Arjun with them. Dozens of strangers surrounded his mother where she lay, and bent as one to pick up the board. He stood at her head, at the place reserved for the chief mourner. As his hands touched the wooden handles, his sadness crashed like a wave on a forlorn beach. I’m not ready. They lifted the body effortlessly. Arjun trembled. He placed his arm underneath the slat and linked to another mourner’s shoulder, then trained his eyes on the ground ahead.
They carried his mother through the gates, led by the Imam, making their way to the burial ground a few hundred metres away, a queue of mourners following behind. Behind them loomed the bronze dome of the masjid. He caught sight of Muna weeping towards the edge of the crowd, scarcely visible under her headscarf, one of only a few women in attendance. The strength of Muna’s mourning for his mother had surprised him. I love you, he thought, unsure about whether he meant Muna or his mother. He feared he might drop his hold on the body and fought to still the sobs that tore at him.
“She loved you too, Maa.” She couldn’t hear him even though his head was only a hair’s breadth from her ear.
They traversed the streets, kicking up dust as they went. Nearby Hindu revellers partook in Holi, oblivious to the small funeral procession. Street vendors manned stalls selling packets of colour on the sidewalks. Strangers and neighbours alike, dressed in white, launched colour bombs at each other, leaving puffs of rainbow-coloured powder dispersed in the air. Just ahead, the Imam raised his hands in a vain attempt to ease the excitement of the merry-makers and retain the solemnity of the burial ceremony. Children with stained faces ran by with water pistols, ignoring him, shrieking with glee.
Loneliness wrapped itself around Arjun. He saw his mother’s face everywhere. An unassuming tourist in a Nirvana t-shirt and cut-off shorts crossed the street in front of them, taking pictures of the festival all the while. A packet of colour hit the man in the ear. Azure dust hung in the air and rained down on them as they passed.
“Life stops for nobody,” said the mourner behind him.
Chapter 33
After the initial rush to inform Jaya of Akash, her family clammed up. Her father even turned off the television set, his constant companion, presumably to spare Jaya from any more hurt. Outwardly, Jaya pretended to be unruffled. She fought to confine her emotions under her scarred skin. Only Ruhi guessed what churned beneath the surface.
After her decades-long search for her missing husband, her need for closure, and the kernel of love for him that still existed after all this time, Jaya burned to uncover every microscopic detail about his life over the period they’d been separated, and the crime he was said to have committed. It wouldn’t do to search for information at home. She wouldn’t give her mother the satisfaction. Instead, she bought newspapers to carry with her to work, used the old television box kept in the make-up room at Tara to scour the channels for a mention of her lost husband, or better yet, a glimpse of him. How could it be, after all this t
ime, she was still invested in what happened to Akash? Each moment of her search sent her pulse racing.
The initial arrest over, the news channels did not rerun the footage of Akash. Quietly buried in the mid-section of The Hindu, she found a report declaring the investigation completed and Soraya’s death a suicide. Jaya closed her eyes and offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Krishna. Akash lived, and he was innocent—of that crime at least.
Akash loved the city during Holi. The Holika bonfire, the drums, the dancing, the joy, they lifted him above the mundane, connecting him to the community around him. Then came the explosion of colour in parks and in front of temples, when rainbow powder fell all around, and balloons and pistols brimmed with coloured water. Social barriers disappeared for that day as the gods conspired to lasso friend and foe, young and old together, irrespective of faith. Even the homeless were offered Holi sweets, saccharine flavours bursting in mouths accustomed to less vibrant morsels.
Traditionally, Holi was the festival of spring, a chance to frolic and mend broken relationships. As if Akash needed a greater reason to dwell on his mistakes with Jaya and Arjun. The last thing he wanted was to hit the streets as he and Tariq usually would, mingling amongst the merrymakers, showing off their best dance moves.
“You’ve not washed in days, yaar. It’s time to stop moping. Come on. Get down to the beach,” said Tariq, throwing Akash a towel, disregarding how the sodden mess would rub on as much dirt as the water washed away. “I’ll go and get us some food. I helped out Janghir Saheb the other day.” He pulled some scrunched rupees from his pocket. “This will come in handy. We’ll have a feast to celebrate Holi.” He shook his clothes off and twisted to address Akash, sprawled on the floor on a blanket. “He was asking about you, you know.”
“Who was?”
“Janghir Saheb. He has a couple of jobs, but he needs the both of us. He always trusted you more than me anyway.”