Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

by Cyrus Mistry

A Parsi funeral must be concluded before sunset. In Parsi-populated areas there was certainly no call for vocal histrionics. The sight of four burly men in white muslins, shouldering a corpse on a bier and walking as fast as they could was self-explanatory: the public knew where we were headed, and why in such a hurry. People made way for us long before we approached. Jungoo, the erstwhile driver of the defunct hearse, was walking a little ahead of us, holding on tight to the excitable Moti’s leash. It was he, really, who should have been clearing a path for us, admonishing pedestrians that a corpse was on its way. But, that very morning, he had complained of a sore throat; as always, Rustom was happy to take on the part of crier, boastfully revelling in the reverberations of his own deep voice.

  ‘Make way! Make way for the corpse. . .’

  Nobody quite remembers how the custom of showing a corpse to a dog began, but it’s probably as old as ancient Persia itself. Before modern medicine reserved that right for itself, it was canines that were believed to have an uncanny ability to sniff out the slightest flicker of vitality persisting in a body presumed dead. Hence, not once, but thrice in the course of the funerary ceremonies my Moti is brought before the corpse. Invariably though, after no more than a moment’s hesitation, she wrinkles her snout and looks away.

  By the time we reached Opera House, obstructions in our route had increased manifold: all manner of traffic, crowds of people on foot, bullock carts, stray cows, taxis, public trams rattling past, and every now and then, a chauffeur-driven private sedan honking obstreperously. The voices of street hawkers rang in our ears through several long stretches during our journey.

  ‘Fresh leafy vegetables. . .fresh methi, sua, maat. . .’

  ‘Bombeel. . .taaji, safed bombeel!’

  ‘Langraa. . .langraa. . .dasheree. Juicy, sweet dasheree. . .’

  Given the fierceness with which the sun was beating down, it was unlikely that either the leafies or the Bombay duck had retained any of their proclaimed freshness. The mangoes looked quite luscious, though. It was already a quarter to four, and I was terribly thirsty.

  ‘Shall we take the short cut through Khareghat Colony?’ asked Jungoo.

  ‘Hardly much shorter,’ snapped Rusi. ‘And taking those steep rocky shelves with a corpse’ll slow us down even more.’

  Clearly, he was peeved, for not once had Jungoo offered to relieve him of his load. Not a corpse bearer himself, Jungoo was no stranger to nusso either; his own elder brother had been shouldering corpses for years. And Jungoo would have known just how difficult it is for the same person to yell for gangway while carrying the weight of a corpse and bier.

  Having made it up to Kemps Corner and almost into the gates of the funeral grounds, something happened to me which I can’t quite account for, even after all these years. It’s never happened before, or since.

  Fatigue, dehydration and exhaustion—all that, yes, but something else, too: for I went under at the very junction where one road bifurcates to Forjett Hill—towards the small fire temple where I grew up. Even on a normal day, if in the course of my work I happen to casually pass by the lane that leads to my father’s temple, the emotions that surge in me can be quite disordering. This time, however, I simply passed out.

  Not in an instant, as with the flick of a switch, but rather gradually. . .my legs turning to jelly and folding in, even as I heard clearly the agitated voices of my fellow-shoulderers.

  ‘Oh my God, watch out!’

  ‘What’re you doing, ghair chodiya! The bier! Hold on!’

  ‘Help, someone. . .Elchi’s collapsed.’

  As I crumpled to the ground—all this was reported to me only later—the corpse slid off the bier and turned turtle, causing a great uproar and commotion among passers-by. For me, the only odd impression which I still retain is that it wasn’t a gradual tunnelling into darkness; rather, I felt overwhelmed by the intense, dazzling heat of an inferno—a fierce, blinding white light—that drew me to it relentlessly and then, at the very last moment when I felt I should be consumed by it, repelled me violently: plunging me into complete darkness.

  And all through this vertiginous delirium, but one bleak and sorrowful awareness held me in thrall: the white marbled spotlessness of the fire temple where I had spent some of the happiest years of my life, and the all-pervading presence in it of my father, its head priest, who, in the last many years, had refused to speak to me, or even set eyes on me. When I came to, minutes later, I felt immense bereavement. All that immaculate purity and holiness was out of bounds for me. Everything I had once held dear was lost, and forever, I had become a pariah. . .

  Four

  My earliest memories are aural: a burst of startling thunder, the thrumming of torrential rain. Early evening, but already rather dark, a storm is raging outside.

  Father has just woken up from his afternoon nap. While Mother puts the kettle on for his tea, he carries me in his arms, strolling idly, but at the same time gripping me with what seems like excessive caution. He carries me through the cool, shadowy back rooms of the temple, and into the dry, thatched arbour of the open-air well. When he stops by the well to peer in, Father clutches me even more tightly. I squirm in his arms, lean forward and drink in a glimpse of its deep, dark emptiness.

  Another thunderclap and he moves away from the well. But I want to stay on: I twist my body in his fixed grasp, turning towards the sight we are walking away from.

  ‘What is it you want, Phiroze?’ asks Father. ‘All those sparkling jewels?’

  All around the well are dozens of small tables with rows and rows of oil lamps, neatly arranged in tiny glasses. Most of the wicks are lit, their flames dancing in the draughty anteroom.

  This is deemed a holy well. There could be hundreds or thousands of lamps here—the light-and-fog halo of each dazzled my infant eyes, merging all into a magical chiaroscuro.

  Each oil lamp lit by a devotee, I later learned, represented an offering of thanksgiving, or a prayer of supplication, towards the cost of which, he or she was meant to slip a one paisa copper coin into the black slot of a large metal box placed on a table nearby. At the end of every month, Father would open this box with the large key suspended from the nail above it. When I was old enough, he enlisted my help in counting the total offerings. All of it, I was told, went to charity.

  But right now, Father isn’t interested in lingering by the sparkling lights around the well. Plodding along lazily in his soft velvet slippers, he carries me into the cool marble-tiled main hall, where huge framed portraits of Zarathustra and all the saints brood on the periphery of the sanctum sanctorum.

  Standing outside this dark chamber with its enormous gleaming fire vase, he whispers in my ear:

  ‘Look Phiroze, look there,’ directing my gaze at an enfeebled but still penetrating fire, ‘Khodaiji. . .’

  After he has had his tea and said his prayers, I know that Father will enter this chamber, clean the excess ash and extinguished embers, stoke the fire and feed it with sandalwood and frankincense. Then, when it’s blazing again, he’ll pull the rope several times, softly ringing the bell suspended from the high ceiling.

  But before any of this can happen, the silence of the temple is suddenly shattered by an unholy clatter. So deep, perhaps, is my father’s own absorption in the palpating symbol of God he has just pointed out to me—or perhaps so bemused after the nap he hasn’t completely woken up from—that he jumps out of his skin at the loud report. The reverberating crash runs on for a while before dinning to a slow halt and I, too, experience the prickle of my father’s momentary gooseflesh. I cling tighter, sinking deeper into the comforting largeness of his body. But Father has had a real start, and his voice cracks with anger and alarm as he yells in a wild and intemperate manner:

  ‘Eh Mehernosh! Bomi! Mackie! Who’s there? Who’s on duty? Making such a racket at sunset? Any sense? Show yourselves!’

  But no one appears, and Father decides to ignore this non-compliance.

  ‘Wash all those platters cle
an. I insist—every one of them again. And wipe them thoroughly with a clean cloth. I tell you, is there any sense in this? And at this, the hour of lighting lamps?!’ he mutters, as we head back towards his after-nap cup of tea.

  Father is still trembling with anger, such has been the shock for him of that sudden clatter of silver trays on marble floor. But collecting himself, he whispers to me, almost conspiratorially,

  ‘Clumsy oafs. Unless I yell at them, they’ll never learn.’

  I can tell he is trying to repair the nervous trauma he was afraid he might have caused by yelling so violently in my ear. For that one moment, he forgot he was carrying a very small boy in his arms.

  All through childhood, I don’t remember ever being afraid of Father. If I think back, childhood was a piously happy time that flowered under his protective shelter and gentle authority. An awkwardly built, lumbering man he was powerful in most ways, but always very kind and considerate. I remember his boisterous laughter ringing through the tranquil temple in the evening, when he was amused by something I said or did, or some harmless prank played by Vispy and me, or our shenanigans with one of the pets. But that laughter was to dry up even before Mother died.

  Somehow, over time, it congealed into a grim religiosity, a credulously ‘scientific’ approach to spirituality. Of course, I also remember innumerable occasions when my mother complained of his selfishness, but I never really learnt what exactly she meant by that.

  Years later, when I was a grown boy, the distance between my father and me widened. Still later, it became a breach, impossible to ford. The playful whimsicality was all gone, scorched by an unbending sense of propriety and piety. I was to learn then, that his anger could be frighteningly implacable, merciless. But I am moving ahead too fast. . .

  When my father was appointed head priest of the small fire temple on Forjett Hill Road, only my elder brother, Vispy, had been born. Just when my parents had resignedly accepted that God had no more children in store for them, my mother discovered to her delight that she was pregnant again.

  The great joy of this occurrence was enhanced by their belief that this second child, conceived nine whole years after the first, and so soon after they had moved into the residential quarters of the temple, could not but be a blessing bestowed on them by the departed and saintly Eruch Kookadaroo, the previous head priest of the temple. While he was still incumbent, Eruchsah always had a great fondness for my father; from his sickbed, he prevailed upon the temple trustees to offer him the post. When I was born, a few months later, on what turned out to be a highly auspicious day of the Zoroastrian calendar, my father read much meaning in my advent into this world. Though Framroze kept his presumptions to himself, and may have shared them on occasion only with my mother, the truth was that in his daydreams he was nurturing great hopes for me, for what I would grow up to become one day.

  Small in size and of inconspicuous location my father’s temple may have been, but it was nonetheless venerable for its antiquity, and touching for the loyalty of its devotees, some of whom visited it faithfully every single day of the year.

  As I grew up, I never stopped hearing stories of the long lineage of spiritual masters associated with the temple, powerfully endowed priests whose generous blessings flowed to all who prayed before its holy fire. How else could one explain countless, legendary accounts of the miraculous restitution to the righteous of what was always theirs, of near-fatal illnesses vanquished and glowing health regained, of the miscarriage of innumerable wicked schemes which the innocent found themselves inveigled into, eventually emerging triumphant—in short, of the assured fulfilment of every earnest prayer beseeched for on bended knees at the doorway of the temple’s sanctum sanctorum. For seventeen years, this temple was my beloved home, and stories of the miracles of faith my oxygen.

  By the time I was born, Vispy was already a school-going child attending a reputed English-medium institution near Flora Fountain. He was a bright boy. His performance at school gave no cause for complaint to his teachers; moreover, increasingly, it became reason for praise and prizes. When I was enrolled in the same institution, Vispy had already reached his penultimate year at school. Given the vast age difference between us, it was natural that we had little in common by way of shared pastimes, or even a strong fraternal bond.

  However, of the few activities which we sometimes jointly participated in, none gave us so much mirthful pleasure as feeding the family pets. As I grew in years and Vispy became busier with his school studies, I insisted—and mother acquiesced, albeit uneasily—on taking over this responsibility single-handedly.

  Hilla, my mother, always had a soft spot for animals: to care for those dumb creatures who never complained about their personal woes seemed to her a worthy, ennobling activity. Over the years, she had accumulated a small menagerie of pets, housing them in the temple’s small backyard: a goat, who gave us milk every morning, a dourly enigmatic tortoise who could stride about with astonishing celerity when he wished to, two frisky adopted strays who loved to render him inactive by knocking him onto his shell (for no apparent reason), and an African grey parrot, Hormaz, who had belonged to Hilla’s father before her, and was estimated to be at least eighty years of age.

  At various times she also tried rearing rabbits, squirrels and hens, though somehow, the latter were always very short-lived. The brief melancholy occasioned by the death of one of these minor pets (and its subsequent burial in the backyard), was a recurrent and heart-sinking motif that sounded like the temple bell through my childhood, and one of the few intense emotions I regularly shared with Mother.

  Alone among the pets, the parrot’s favoured status allowed him space within our cramped living quarters, where a tall wooden stool served as pedestal for his impressive brass cage. Most of the time, however, Hormaz loathed being caged. He preferred to flap around our two rooms, or sat perched atop the dome of his cage, from where he would fix a sharply hooked gaze on the mundane preoccupations of humans. Only at dusk, when it was his bedtime, would he quietly strut back into the barred enclosure and, without warning, commence an outraged squawking to remind Hilla of the hour, that it was time to cloak his cage with the patched and musty blanket reserved for this purpose, without which, apparently, Hormaz couldn’t find it in him to fall sleep.

  Framroze’s own bedtime wasn’t much later, though he was less impatient, and needed no more than a light supper to go out like a light. By 8 p.m. he was snoring loudly. The others stayed up until later. Sometimes, Vispy had homework to complete, and Hilla, her household chores. But the entire family was always considerate about not disturbing the exhausted high priest’s sleep. They knew he had set his alarm at forty-five minutes past midnight, so that at one o’clock in the morning, for the fifth and last time before daybreak, he would rise and re-enter the temple’s marble sanctum sanctorum to sweep up the excess embers and ash from the big fire vase, feed the fire with sandal and fan it back to life; then finally, at that desolate hour, ring several times the sonorous brass bell that hung from the ceiling inside the tiny square chamber.

  Having thus marked the division of the day into the last of its five segments, Framroze would return to bed; that is, until 4.30 a.m., when he got up again to perform his ablutions, mumble his prayers and resonantly chime in the new morning. Shortly after, Hilla got up and began preparing the leavened breads, the sticky brown sweet with nuts and raisins which children love, the doughnuts, boiled eggs and crisply fried paapri. All of this was placed alongside fruits and a few buds of white flowers in trays of German silver, to make up the offerings which would be sanctified during a clutch of prayer services that began as early as 6 a.m. but concluded just before noon.

  Framroze’s rubbery, porpoise-like frame was always to be seen lumbering hurriedly through the cool, tranquil inner halls of the Zoroastrian temple; that is, when he wasn’t seated cross-legged on the floor, taking part in some prayer service himself. His odd hours of waking and sleeping may have partly explained his perpetual
air of dopiness, though even this was probably an inaccurate perception. In fact, he was a very busy man, attending politely not only to those who came to his temple to requisition prayers for their deceased, but also arranging for other freelance priests to fulfil some of these commissions at pre-arranged hours.

  Moreover, he had to maintain a small notebook, in which he carefully noted the names of the deceased persons and all their relatives and ancestors whose names must be mentioned in the course of the recitation. He had to remember to give these names on a slip of paper to the officiating priest (or his junior partner) who would be performing the recitation. Often, subsequent to a flurry of ceremonies held during the first month after the occurrence of death, most relatives made it a point to have these and diverse other ceremonies repeated every month on the same day, sometimes for as many as twelve years.

  So there was a large amount of paperwork involved in all this for Framroze—recording, scheduling, billing. Each ceremony cost the deceased relatives a certain modest, but specific amount. Only a portion of this amount went to the officiating priest. The rest of it covered the costs of various oblational offerings that were consecrated by the sonorous recitation of ancient Avestan hymns. Then, neatly packaged in paper parcels, the blessed fruit and bread were shared among the relatives of the family that had requisitioned the ceremony.

  Besides all that, of course, someone had to take responsibility for ensuring a regular supply of fresh flowers and fruits for the services, and other comestibles for the resident priest’s family. Fortunately, there were florists and fruit and vegetable vendors who stopped by in the evenings, when the temple was at its most serene. Ardesar, my father’s assistant, himself a junior priest, or even Hilla, usually managed to secure bulk bargains for these products, and fix a date for the next delivery.

  Often, Framroze had very little time for Hilla. I suppose this is what she must have meant by his selfishness. Days would pass without his enquiring after Vispy’s progress at school, and it was Hilla who held the fort, as it were, ensuring that a fresh school uniform was washed and ironed every day, that his homework was completed the evening before and his dry lunch ready and packed in his tiffin box every morning; that the family’s meals were cooked after Vispy left for school, that our tiny quarters were always spotlessly clean.