Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

by Cyrus Mistry

  ‘But I say, aren’t you getting a bit carried away here, Cawas?’ Bomi pursued the discussion as if there had been no interruption at all.

  ‘Why? You don’t believe what I’m saying is true?’

  ‘Don’t believe everything he says. . .’ muttered Fali grumpily, sitting down again. ‘I’m not really hungry, I’ll eat just a bit, anyway. . .’

  But once he started chomping, Fali couldn’t stop until the plate was empty.

  ‘Well, no one can deny it,’ said Bomi. ‘But there’s another side to it, too, isn’t there?’

  ‘At least you could have saved a ganthia or two for the rest of us! Khaadhro!’Jungoo kidded Fali.

  ‘Don’t make too much noise, bawa,’ said Aimai. ‘Please. . .I’m off to sleep. Rustom, Vera isn’t back yet.’

  ‘She told us, didn’t she, before going out—she’ll be late tonight?’

  ‘Then there’s no need to worry, I suppose. Goodnight boys.’ A chorus of murmurs bade Aimai good night.

  ‘Has to be up at four o’clock tomorrow to wash the corpse that just came in. She and Dollamai are supposed to do it,’ explained Rustom.

  ‘Oh yes, I heard,’ said Bomi. ‘A fairly young woman got knocked over by a train, while crossing the tracks at an unmanned level crossing. . .’

  ‘My mother is eighty-two. I’ve told her to stop doing this work. But she won’t listen. She says washing the dead gives solace and meaning to her life. . . Oh, then she’ll sniffle and sob to herself quietly, whole morning. The grief of the bereaved affects her deeply. . .’

  ‘Poor Aimai, such a kind heart!’ said Cawas. ‘But washing up a train accident won’t be child’s play. . .’

  ‘Sure it won’t,’ agreed Bomi. ‘And to think they still don’t pay our women anything for this service. . .’

  ‘Except that hundred-rupee bonus, once a year at Pateti,’ said Khushro.

  ‘Oh yes, once a year. Or if the relatives choose to tip them. . . Let our union register with the Labour Tribunal, then we’ll take up all these issues, one by one,’ said Rustom.

  Excepting me, I doubt if anyone present was aware of the story of Vera’s dismissal from her office. For Rusi at least this discussion, about the horror we hold corpses in, was hardly a theoretical one.

  ‘What other side were you thinking of, Bomi?’ asked Cawas, picking up the conversation again where it had been diverted.

  ‘Other side. . .? Oh yes. . . Just that people are so disturbed by death, so shocked, they can’t accept it. There are those who will cling to their departed. . .’

  ‘Why, of course,’ said Jungoo. ‘Nobody’s saying we are such monsters that have no feelings. . .’

  ‘That’s just the point I’m making. Hardly a week ago,’ Bomi continued, ‘Bujji and I met this young man, thirty-five or so, a bachelor, who had probably been living with his mother all his life. Just couldn’t accept it. Weeping bitterly like a little suckling, squeezing, embracing, touching every part of her—’

  ‘It’s these—all these priests—’ Jungoo started to say, but Bomi wouldn’t be interrupted.

  ‘He wouldn’t let us leave with her body. Just a little longer, just a little longer, he kept blubbering. Then when we said we absolutely had to go, he actually wanted to lie on the bier beside her and ride in the hearse. . . Luckily, an elderly neighbour of his intervened, and yelled at him, “Stop this nonsense, Percy. Get a hold of yourself. Mama is gone. She’s never coming back. . . Get that into your head!” Only after a severe dressing-down, which continued for a few minutes, the son seemed to return to reality. Then the neighbour joined his hands and said to us, “You gentlemen, please leave. . .”’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you another story,’ said Khushro, unexpectedly, after a pause in the conversation. Relatively young and new to our company, Khushro had been shyly sipping his glass in a corner, not saying much. His story actually made us all relax and laugh, everyone, including Fali. Just the previous day, he told us, Khushro had been with Fardoonji and Farokh to Dhobhi Talao, to pick up what turned out to be a very obese dead woman.

  ‘Fardoonji, as you know, is an old man, without much strength left in his body,’ said Khushro. ‘When we saw her size, we were definitely alarmed. Even assuming we could lift her up, would she fit on the bier? We gazed at her and scratched our heads. . . No, I’m not exaggerating. She was huge, this woman, a giant. You were telling us, Bomi, of this boy who wanted to lie down on the bier next to his mother. This one looked like even on her own she wouldn’t fit; she would need two biers tied together side by side! “What shall we do now?” Farokh whispered to me. First thing we did, of course, was to call Jungoo out from where he was hiding in the driver’s cabin.’

  ‘I was alarmed, too,’ said Jungoo, vouching for the woman’s size. ‘Somehow, huffing and puffing like coolies, we moved her onto the bier.’

  ‘Spilling off its sides she was, too,’ interjected Farokh.

  ‘The next part was more difficult—lifting the woman and the bier onto the floor of the hearse. . .’

  ‘The funny thing about it all,’ explained Khushro, ‘was that through all this, the husband and two grown-up sons merely stood by disinterested, not offering to lend a hand, and moreover acting very casual, as though they considered it all in the day’s work for us professionals. Behnchoad, Farokh and Jungoo and me, our balls nearly fell off, but somehow we managed to lift the bier and push her into the hearse.

  ‘Then the husband visibly relaxed. He sidled up to me and said in a tearful whisper, “Carry her gently, please, I beg you. . . Like a flower. . .”

  ‘Then, shamefacedly, like a man indulging in a private, dirty act, he slipped me two tens. . .’

  ‘Two tens? For carrying a grand piano?’ exclaimed Bomi. ‘You should have thrown them in his face!’

  Khushro said, to all of us who had been following his story:

  ‘I was too breathless, too exhausted even to think of anything to say. . .nor did I feel the need to retort. But as we drove off, a perfect answer popped into my head. And I regretted not being more quick-witted. I wanted to lean out of the moving hearse, and yell at the top of my voice:

  “Like a flower, bawaji? Who? That she-elephant. . .? For her you’ll need a crane!”’

  I like Khushro. He seems a genuinely decent sort.

  (vi)

  Another member of our corps who interests me a great deal is young Kobaad. Only eighteen when he started work at the Towers, that is, about the age I was when I first met Sepideh, he should be at least twenty-five now.

  I knew Kobaad had come from some place outside Bombay— Nargol or Dahanu or Bharuch or Bhiwandi, one of those Parsi settlements in Gujarat—I forget which. While he was still a child, his father, a small trader, moved to Bombay with his wife and five children. He had shifted to the city to try and improve his business prospects.

  It was a miscalculation. While he had been making a living of sorts in the small town in Gujarat, several things went wrong for him when he moved here. He could not establish himself, and found living expenses too high. Finally, he was reduced to becoming an itinerant vendor: needles and threads, twine, thimbles, knitting prongs, hair brushes and plastic combs, glass baubles, trinkets and other such trifles; these were the objects he carried in a large, shiny tin trunk from door to door. He spent most of his day marching through various housing colonies of the congested inner city, calling out in a cracked and quavering voice that shrieked audibly above the din of traffic:

  ‘Nikhiya-bur-rush. . .sooeee. . . Bangles and beads, thimbles and thread, all sizes of stainless steel needles. . .’

  One day, while walking through crowded Kalbadevi peddling his wares, he was gored and trampled upon by a mad bull which may have been dazzled by the light of the hard sun reflected in his shiny tin box. The box, too, containing his treasure trove, was trampled upon and crushed. The totally unexpected death of his father was a great blow to the poor mother and the little ones.

  Kobaad, being the eldest, it fell upon h
im to drop out of school and start working. But the mother wanted him to find employment anywhere, so long as it was not within the weltering chaos of a city that had already claimed her husband.

  The horror and pity of their recent bereavement, the feeling of intense piety it had inspired in her, the great natural beauty and peace she experienced and imbibed during the three-day funeral obsequies at Doongerwaadi made her decide to seek a job for Kobaad that would rarely, if ever, take her son outside the boundaries of this safe haven; where, apart from everything else, the Punchayet would provide rudimentary residential quarters for the whole family. Her efforts bore fruit, and Kobaad was appointed corpse bearer.

  But more than anyone else in his family, I do believe it was young Kobaad who was most deeply affected by his father’s sudden death. For nearly three months after the latter’s bizarre accident, Kobaad seemed preoccupied, continuously in a state of distracted dreaminess, other-worldliness—call it what you will— as though it was he, rather than his father, who had crossed over into the shadowy unknown. You could see he was grieving terribly.

  Then after three months had passed, late one night I heard the plaintive sounds of a harmonium. I knew that Kobaad owned one, but had never heard him play it. He was playing softly now, hesitantly, without pumping the bellows too hard, searching out a plaintive tune. Three nights later, I heard him singing that same melancholic tune, along with lyrics he had put to it. The song was in Gujarati, set to a jaunty rhythm. It was very moving nevertheless; especially if one spared a moment to think of the events in Kobaad’s own life that had prompted such a sad and obsessive investigation into the heart of impermanence.

  I will try to give a rough translation of what I remember of that unforgettable song:

  Foolish to make plans:

  O how foolish

  To dream, presume, aspire. . .

  Every calculation you so painstakingly undertook

  Is flawed. The numbers simply refuse to add up

  To anything but nought. . .

  Time flashes past you. A

  Man’s life is as enduring

  As a lit matchstick, and just as

  Brittle.

  Oh yes, I’ve said it once,

  But I’ll

  Say it again:

  ’Tis foolish to make plans,

  To dream, presume, aspire. . .

  You know nothing turns out quite the way

  You had hoped.

  Nothing,

  Oh, nothing ever does.

  I have rendered the gist of the song into English from memory. I may have dropped a line or two, perhaps even a whole verse. But as to its circular melody, the hauntingly resonant chords, I have no way of evoking their beauty. . . Saddening, and painful to consider what will become of Kobaad’s considerable talent in the years to come.

  Keepers of the Unclean. . .? Is that how posterity will label this sketchy log? Future generations won’t be interested in it at all, I’m certain; nor is there any likelihood of its ever coming to public attention.

  Still, as I dip my stylus in a pot of Waterman’s royal blue ink, and continue to scratch upon the leftover blanks of my eviscerated notebooks, the irony doesn’t escape me. As much as I hated those eight years of schooling, they gave me the tools to keep myself occupied through the bleakness of my declining years. . .

  As a rule, I can’t bear to read any of this. Yet when I do turn the pages back, reread it in snatches, I wonder if I haven’t compromised the veracity of my narrative with too much grimness. Maybe an unmistakable deficit of humour as well?

  I must point out: rubbing shoulders with the dead at odd hours of day and night doesn’t necessarily make us more gloomy, dour or over-serious about life. The truth is, like everybody else we corpse bearers, too, behave with the smug breeziness of immortals—convinced that death cannot strike us down in the conceivable future.

  Make no mistake—my own narrative may be responsible for this erroneous impression—but much of the time our lives were anything but dull, dreary and repetitious. Despite routine, there was always room for excitement, passion and a frenzied tomfoolery.

  Twelve

  The end of World War II saw a spurt in building activity in Bombay. As land prices escalated, the vast wild acres of the Towers of Silence attracted several encroachment attempts.

  Almost all of this land had accrued to the Parsi Punchayet over the years, in bits and pieces as well as larger tracts, through the generosity of its wealthy donors. In those early days none of the big builders and land sharks, who would later jointly destroy the charm and beauty of Bombay with their unbridled greed and frantic building, were active yet. Meanwhile, the Punchayet had an encroachment case pending in the High Court against a pair of Muslim brothers called Jameel and Ijaaz Sheikh. These were small fry.

  The Sheikhs had owned, since their father’s time, an adjacent plot on the Teen Batti side, on which stood a shop selling brass and copper vessels. Now the father was dead, and the sons had extended its rightful boundaries by about twenty feet into our grounds, setting up there a makeshift hut made of bamboo, planks of wood and thatch. Here they had installed a desk and two chairs, with a painted signboard outside reading—if you please—Real Estate!

  On information provided by the Punchayet’s officers, their law firm, Craigie, Lynch and Dubash had served them a notice for trespassing. Eviction proceedings should have started right away, and that’s what the law firm strongly advised, but even in those days, the Punchayet was completely embroiled in a finicky delegation of authority. While they dawdled over procedure, the Sheikh brothers got an ex parte stay order from the court, claiming the disputed land had been paid for by their father, and had been in the family for the past twenty years.

  Now it so happened that one morning when Buchia and Edul were measuring the boundaries of the said segment in order to have it fenced, they were rather rudely asked by the elder Sheikh brother to leave, since they were trespassing!

  Buchia was furious, and would have assaulted the man there and then, had Edul not intervened and restrained him. That afternoon Buchia organized a posse of about ten young and spirited corpse bearers, asking them to report to him at sundown; he said he had a plan that would show the encroachers their place.

  I wasn’t among those picked for this punitive mission. But, after dark, under Buchia’s direction the boys, casually dressed in their sudrahs and shorts, created mayhem at the disputed site, ripping up the wood-thatch-and-bamboo cabin, smashing the table and chairs, pulling down the signboard advertising real estate and breaking it in two. Fali was bent on putting a match to the debris they left behind, but Buchia categorically warned him against indulging his pyromaniacal instincts; at which a disappointed Fali muttered to the other boys under his breath as they walked away, just loudly enough for Buchia to hear:

  ‘Saalo bailo!’

  When I heard accounts of what fun they had had vandalizing the illegal structure, teasing and roughing up the lackey appointed by the Sheikhs to guard the place at night, I almost wished I had volunteered for the job and shared in their collective discharge of pent-up frustrations. But reprisal was swift, for the brothers made a police complaint. The very next afternoon the Deputy Commissioner of Police, a Mr Ignatius Strickham accompanied by three constables and a police van, entered the secluded premises of the Towers of Silence. Strickham himself rode in on horseback.

  (i)

  Now this was rather unusual, I should point out. Strickham was obviously new to India, and his job. Perhaps he was trying to impress and intimidate the locals with the added stature the horse gave him. But under the Places of Worship Act first enacted by the East India Company, for more than a hundred years the diverse religious communities of India had been assured the privilege of maintaining the sanctity of their places of worship. Moreover, the small corps of mounted police which had existed in eighteenth century Bombay had been disbanded long ago. I heard later that Strickham was a horse-lover who maintained his own private stable of h
orses.

  As became evident, this arrogant and possibly corrupt officer was entirely out of tune with the times. For the year I speak of was, I think, 1945, or ’46: the War was over, the British were engaged in talks with Indian leaders to find a face-saving and ostensibly fair formula under which to withdraw and return to its own people ‘the jewel of the British empire’, which they had zealously guarded for so long.

  ‘You there. . .! Yes, you, I am speaking to you!’

  Concisely insolent in manner, but with an underlying nastiness to his voice the middle-aged Englishman, I’m told, cantered all the way up the hill to where the fire temple broods with its flame kept alive through all hours of day and night.

  ‘Do you know where I can find the manager. . .? Here! I say, do you speak English? I said do you know where I can find the manager?’

  Clean-shaven but for a thick moustache that showed flecks of grey, dressed in white flannels and wearing a pith helmet, the deputy commissioner, whom none of us knew to be a high police official, persisted in thus rudely demanding information from two old priests who had emerged from within and stood frozen at the temple’s entrance. Somewhat taken aback to see this ill-tempered, red-faced apparition within a restricted space of the Towers, they pointed mutely in the direction of Buchia’s office, upon which the policeman yanked the horse’s reins fiercely and spurred it on. All who saw this unlikely figure on a brown sorrel, bounding over hedges and galloping down quiet pathways, were stunned; especially to hear him yelling at the top of his voice:

  ‘Where the hell is that bloody manager?’

  When the policeman finally located his office, Buchia happened to have stepped out on his rounds; but it didn’t take Strickham long to find and accost him.