Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

by Cyrus Mistry

  The other man seemed familiar with the situation, and firmly but soothingly placated him.

  ‘Come. Don’t be afraid. Dhunjibhai will take care of everything. . .’

  So saying, he led the fat man away, holding him rather firmly by the arm. Meanwhile, the fat man seemed to have forgotten our existence, for he turned meekly, and left without even a glance in our direction. Such was our incredulity at this strange encounter, and our sense of relief at how it ended, that we burst out laughing.

  When they were out of sight, Rohinton denied that he had been afraid.

  ‘I was sure all along he wouldn’t touch us. He daren’t. Why, if I had only mentioned my father’s name, he would have started sweating some more!’

  ‘But he might not have believed you,’ I pointed out.

  ‘How not? How dare he not believe me? I would have given him my father’s phone number.’

  Not too many people had telephones in those days, except the most important.

  ‘I would have taken him home, shown him my park. If he still didn’t believe me, I would have set my dogs on him.’

  And he went on in that vein, blustering rather like the fat man who had just been taken away. Not for the first time in the course of our friendship I noticed how much store Rohinton set by status, how much pride and importance he attached to family wealth and background. I was beginning to tire of him. The truth is, after that day, I gradually distanced myself from Rohinton, and met him only once more before he left for England.

  Just as well. Thrown on my own resources, I learned to live with myself, exploring areas of Bombay that I had never seen before.

  Everywhere, the hum of activity: buildings were coming up, traffic circles were being laid out, provincial-type bazaars replaced by structured marketplaces, itinerant hawkers provided permanent stalls, trading of every kind was rampant and thriving. I travelled to every nook and corner of town on every tramway route available. Buses were more expensive, so I avoided those. And if I found I had not enough tram fare, I walked. Actually, this was by far the most exciting means of getting around, for I could stop wherever I chose, and stare all I wanted; nobody cared. Silently, I absorbed into myself all the throbbing nervous energy of a young, vernal city taking shape all around me. It made my skin tingle.

  The fat man at the docks who had challenged us—who was he? I never did find out. I presumed he was more of a loiterer than Rohinton and me put together; and perhaps not quite right in the head. But as day after day passed during those fateful eight months, I was even more surprised that I had managed to get away with my duplicity, my sham of preparing for the exams—for so many weeks and months! It was amazing that during all these days of my peregrinations about town, I was never once spotted by some distant relation or family friend and my truancy reported to my parents.

  Through most of those months—a period which I had promised my father I would devote to making my second assault on the citadel of school-leaving exams—I lived deceitfully. And all the while, don’t forget, Father was waking up half an hour earlier than usual, to recite those special prayers for my success in the approaching exams.

  Did I know what I was doing? I think I did: the task of preparing for the exams—let alone competing, or qualifying in them—seemed so completely insuperable I felt it pointless to even attempt. It was beyond me. After all, I was the acknowledged duffer of the family; besides, it was now obvious to me, dishonest and without an ounce of conscience. Here I was, cleverly weaving this web of lies to put my parents off the scent of my trickery—for their own peace of mind, too—or so I would have myself believe.

  And how did I occupy myself during those eight months? As I mentioned, I had quickly tired of Rohinton and his company. The places I visited, the things I did during that time have no special relevance to this story—to what was to come soon after: that is, the best part of my remaining life—yet, some of them have stuck, indelibly, in memory.

  December of my seventeenth year.

  It must have been December, I believe, though I’m only guessing: only six in the evening (I remember looking at the luminous dial of my watch, a navjote present from Father), and it was already dark, with relatively few people about.

  I should have been hastening homewards, but an argument with Mother that morning, in which she had threatened to curtail what she described as my ‘excessive freedoms’ made me stubbornly decide not to return home until after eight. I had been walking aimlessly, when something made me stop at the derelict shrine of a Sufi saint behind an abandoned railway siding, near the Cotton Green Station.

  At least that’s what the flower-stall man outside told me it was. He said the service was about to begin, and offered me a long string-and-flower chaddar he had been weaving, for four annas. I said I had no money.

  ‘Take it, anyway, bachche, spread it on Baba’s kabar,’ he said. ‘Baba will help you. . .with health, wealth, peace of mind. Everything will come to you if you believe in Baba’s blessings.’

  I took off my sandals at the entrance, washed my feet under the tap outside, like I saw other devotees before me doing, and ventured in. It wasn’t a very clean place—visitors washed before entering, but there was no duct for the waste water to drain away, and the white-tiled floor—it wasn’t marble, I couldn’t help notice—was smeared with patterns of mud and wetness.

  A great many people had gathered inside the cavernous, domed hall. I was directed by an acolyte to first go into the inner room, and make my offering. In a small chamber was the tomb of the Sufi Baba from the last century (whose name was mentioned to me several times that evening, but I can’t for the life of me remember it now) overlaid with dozens of floral tributes, like the one I was carrying. The service was about to begin. Then I noticed that apart from the innumerable devotees and volunteers congregated inside, on a sort of raised balcony above the main hall was a gathering of numerous women and young girls, who seemed to belong to the durgah.

  Wretchedly poor, their clothing bedraggled, they looked like they had been rescued from the streets and provided shelter at the shrine. On the other hand, there was something strange about them. Their faces seemed haunted, vacant. They stood, or sat on the floor, motionless, drained of expression, like zombies. Others, among them, however, were completely preoccupied with the enactment of recurrent, mindless gestures—acting out twitches and tics, compulsive rotations of the neck and head, contortions of the hip and torso. I hadn’t noticed this earlier, but was startled to see that many of them were actually manacled, their ankles clamped and attached to individual chains leading onto one collective ring in the wall, secured by a large padlock.

  An elderly devotee standing beside me followed my perturbed gaze, and whispered, ‘Yes, poor unfortunates. . .their minds have slipped. . .someone lays a black spell on them, and their own families don’t know what to do. So they bring them here. . .by Baba’s grace most go home cured. He resolves every kind of problem. I could tell you—if you only knew—what miracles he has worked. Oh, oh. . .shh. . .the service begins. . .’ he pointed out, immediately assuming a countenance of devout absorption.

  The first resonant murmur of taut skin drew my attention to a huge kettledrum in a corner of the hall, placed on a slightly raised pedestal; a garishly colourful cloth was tied as decoration around the enormous drum. A slow, hypnotic beat began to rumble softly, at first. Dhoom. . .da-bhoom-bhoom-dhoom. . .da-bhoom. . . da-bhoom-bhoom-dhoom. . .

  The drummer, striking the drum with long, padded knobsticks, appeared to be entering a trance of deep concentration, such were his own exaggerated movements. Slowly, the tempo increased, and he struck the drum more fiercely with every minute: layers of rhythm and resonance enveloped us. The commanding precision of his mighty booming, its irresistibly gradual and intoxicating acceleration brought life, I noticed, to the women in the balcony. Someone must have released their chains for the service, for they were on their feet now, swaying in their places, though their movements were still measured and restr
ained, as though they were only gradually rousing out of a deep stupor.

  But as the drumming grew louder and more abandoned— though still preserving the compulsive strictness of its rhythm— they were possessed by frenzy, a wild spontaneity. Shaking their limbs, rolling their heads, moving backwards and forwards with inebriated ecstasy, gyrating round and round like dervishes, straining every muscle in their bodies with a savage energy. As if they knew in the privacy of their tortured souls that this was their only means to free themselves from enslavement to the overriding beast they had been consorting with.

  When, after a passage of twenty minutes or more, the drummer, unable to drum any harder or faster, reached a prolonged crescendo that culminated in a sudden, ear-splitting halt, a great sigh of release swept through the hall. Or did I imagine it? I saw that a great many of the women had collapsed and were lying on the floor of their balcony, made insensible by their pitiless exertions.

  This was but one unusual experience I had during my explorations of the city: my discovery of a revered nineteenth century Sufi saint whose grace relieved mental suffering through the medium of orgiastic drumming and dancing. Coming as it did, so soon after my encounter with the fat man at the docks—in retrospect, probably a very disturbed fat man—the spectacle of the crazy women made a deep impression on me. But my fascination with the strange and unfamiliar took me to many other places as well, where most people would never ordinarily venture.

  As I left the durgah it was rather late. If my activities of the last eight months were found out, would my parents too conclude I was not in my right mind, that someone ‘had laid a black spell on me’, and chain me here in Sufi Baba’s durgah for treatment? Unlikely. They would probably rely on the restorative powers of my father’s Zoroastrian prayers. Though, if they thought to consult me—again, unlikely—I might feel more sanguine about dancing at sundown to those unstoppable drumbeats as a method for mending my dislocated priorities.

  But I was clever enough not to be seen hanging about those parts of town where I was likely to be spotted. I chose instead to discover seedier segments of the inner city, and its outskirts. Places where no self-respecting Parsi would care to be seen: slums, shanty towns, areas in which low life and sin and poverty flourished; dens of vice and iniquity, where gambling, boozing and whoring thrived. On the other hand, it may have been no accident given the daily overdose of morality and righteous living I was force-fed at home that I deliberately sought out these very areas and activities—if only to find out to what extent indulgence in vice was truly pleasurable, and if it really resulted in the dreadful aftermath so often predicted.

  Of course, I was too young to actively experiment with these moral quandaries. I suppose, if I had some pocket money, I might have. But, in fact, I remained always on the periphery of these goings-on, more a spectator than a participant, somewhat dazzled though, I do confess, by the riotous and undeniable vitality of wickedness. Only once, I have to admit, when I had, by chance, saved up on days of tram fare, I succumbed, following a buxom banana-seller into the stairwell of a dilapidated building where, alas, my anticipation of promised pleasure was so intense it was all over and done with in a flash; and I, wet and sticky in my underpants, was poorer right away by three rupees and five annas.

  Then again, there were other places I wandered in, where you might least expect to find the son of a Zoroastrian high priest given the horror of contamination our people are susceptible to. The Muslim burial grounds at Charni Road, Chandanwadi, the Hindu cremation field nearby, where pyres burn and smoulder at all hours of day and night, even the ruins of the burial ground for British soldiers at Land’s End, beyond the Afghan War Memorial. I spent several hours here trying to read the quaintly sentimental or eerie inscriptions on broken tombstones and defaced engravings embedded in the earth.

  Was it some prescient foreboding of my destiny that drew me to these terminal resting places? And afterwards, when I returned home to sleep in my own bed at night, I never once cleansed myself, never took the ritual bath necessary to wash off such spiritual ordure as presumably clung to me, and I carried back into my father’s fire temple. He would have been horrified, had he known of my polluting misdeeds. Even now, if there is an afterlife, and he has divined my awful secret, I’m not sure he’ll forgive me.

  At least two or three times, I remember walking through the relatively deserted afternoon streets to the Muslim cemetery at Charni Road. Bombay was never so hot in those days as it is now. It was warm, but there were always soothing and balmy breezes blowing from the sea, even when it wasn’t high tide.

  I was surprised to find several well-dressed men, both middle-aged and old, as well as the very poor and pathetic, stretched out on low cots smoking long pipes through the evening, dreamily self-absorbed. Later, one of the men in charge here told me it was afeem, or opium, they were smoking and, if I wasn’t interested in having any, I shouldn’t come there at all. He offered me a free trial smoke if I wanted one. I did, but it only made me cough and feel nauseous.

  The Hindu cremation grounds were livelier, if only for the bright fires, the crowds of mourners, the chants, the pyramids of wood kept in readiness; and, of course, the body handlers in charge of laying the corpses atop the prepared pyre. Often enough, these latter were drunk as lords.

  I went to a Parsi-run school, but I was more than familiar with certain Biblical sayings: ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’. When I think of all that went awry in my life, I wonder sometimes if those cruel twists and turns of fate were not simply meet punishment for a fatuous giggler who even in the face of the divine could never contain his asinine impulses. There’s one incident from my distant past that embarrasses me still when I think of it. This was before I met Seppy. I had just rediscovered the vast grounds of the Towers of Silence. Thrilled that such a lush arboreal kingdom could exist in the heart of the city, I spent hours on that occasion wandering alone among its gardens, orchards and copses. Before I turned to go home, I came upon a small heap of brambles, twigs and weeds, obviously swept into a corner off the walkway by some mali, and fired. A small bonfire was crackling and dancing in front of my eyes. As I stared into its radiant centre, fascinated, I felt a strong urge to pee.

  Now fire, for any Zoroastrian—even one that is consuming garbage—carries an inescapable association with the Holy Fire. There was definitely a perverse impulse behind the sudden urge. But I was young, and my bladder was healthy. After a moment’s indecision, I simply turned away and walked home.

  Whatever was wrong with me then probably remains unchanged. A part of me frivolously drawn to evil, allying willy-nilly with Ahriman’s dark legion. . .? Nonsensical thoughts, such as these, make me laugh. As an old man, I do feel remorse for my childish extravagances. But another part of me could never regard itself, or life, with such joyless earnestness.

  When I look back at that time I see now how apt it is that the graph of my life should have begun to ravel thus. Impossibly entangled in a maze of lies of my own creation, I grew increasingly fearful and restive that soon, my dishonourably appropriated freedom would be denounced, my wickedness brought to light and I, publicly shamed.

  Surprisingly, my school hadn’t communicated any concern to my parents about my unflinching absence from its extra coaching class (having concluded, perhaps, that I had given up my intention of essaying a second attempt). In this frame of mind, increasingly apprehensive about my clandestine wayfaring in the city, I decided to put an end to it. But more pertinently, these aberrant tramps became unnecessary and devoid of meaning at around this time, for I had just discovered once again, and quite by chance, that the most beautiful and, moreover, completely secluded island of peace in the entire city was located no more than ten minutes’ walk away from my own home.

  I speak of Doongerwaadi Hill, the estate of the Towers of Silence which, in those days, was largely deserted, wildly overgrown with vegetation and fruit, and to which access could be had from five or six different points of entry. As a chi
ld I was probably taken there once or twice to attend family funerals, but I had practically forgotten its existence. Nor were there any security personnel around in those days, to stop unauthorized entry. From thereon, I began to spend all my time in the sanctuary of its woods.

  Seven

  During a funeral I accompanied Mother to in this period, I caught my first glimpse of her in the far distance. Long-boned and gangly, with a shock of thick uncombed curls, a wild-looking creature about my age. . .who was she? What was she doing there all by herself in the woods?

  There was something strangely beautiful and desolate about her. Or perhaps, about the setting I spied her in. Anyway, I was completely fascinated. My pursuit of favour with Sepideh—for that was her name, I discovered later, a name deriving from Persian lore—began that very afternoon; for I went back to look for her, soon after I had seen Mother home.

  My courtship of this strange creature of the woods was almost wordless. The dense florescence we were surrounded by—this could well have been a tropical forest in some remote part of the world—only heightened our sense of naturalness, our knowledge of the intrinsic validity of what we were about. We felt happily in-apprehensive of being disturbed by the world of adults. Spontaneously, and quite fearlessly, we discovered together, the tremendous world of sexual love. And we were adult enough not to shrink from it—from the responsibility of it—from understanding, in a complete sense, that from this moment on, there was no going back.

  When I went back to Doongerwaadi that afternoon, the sun had dropped low, and the forest was filled with shadows. I spotted her almost immediately, though, reclining on the low-drooping bough of a mango tree with her eyelids shut. Sepideh looked so relaxed, at first I wondered if she was asleep. So raw, so natural lying there in the dusky half-light, I imagined I might have walked into a dream. She must have seen me at the funeral that morning, for she opened her eyes as I approached, and smiled shyly. But on that first occasion, I could not speak to her. A disembodied voice called out from afar: