by Cyrus Mistry
‘Your father is a good man, I’ll admit it. . .a saintly man, in fact. He will outlive me, of course. I have but a few days left. That’s why I’m speaking to you. . .’ His tone of voice, too, had dropped to a hoarse whisper. ‘Ask your father for the ruby earrings. . . Ask him.’
My face must have expressed total incomprehension. I had never heard Seppy mention any such earrings before.
‘They were Rudabeh’s earrings, from her father’s time. Framroze kept them when she moved out of his home. At first he said it was for safekeeping. . . Later, he denied it. Completely. Denied having any memory of them. He didn’t give them back. . . It’s not fair, is it? Not fair at all. . . Now at least, they should come down to Farida. . . Framroze may be a good man, I won’t deny it, but how can he do such a thing?’
I nodded agreement, but even now my face must have shown disinterest. I could not see myself visiting Father one evening to ask for some chimerical earrings that had belonged to long dead Rudabeh. But Temoo emphasized once more, with much seriousness and urgency:
‘They are real rubies. . .large ones. . .in a beautiful gold setting. . .’ For a brief moment, I thought I saw his dull eyes glint. ‘Should be worth a lot of money. Lots and lots of it. . . They must go to Farida now. . . Tell him that was my last wish, tell him that’s what I said before I died.’
In those days I often heard about Vispy, that he had been seen loitering around the Towers complex in the evenings, but to what purpose or pleasure I had no clue. Then one night, I surprised him alone in the cottage of a dead young woman whose body Dollamai had just washed and laid out in preparation for the morning’s funeral. The light in the room was off, but the glow of the oil lamp and the dying embers of the afarghan revealing.
He was on the floor near the corpse, and the sheet covering the dead woman was in disarray. He moved away very quickly and stood up when I opened the door and switched on the light.
‘Vispy! What’re you doing here?’
He looked sheepish. My heart sank. I had come to the funeral cottage only to retrieve a bottle of sanctified bull’s urine which Dollamai told me she had forgotten there by mistake.
‘Well, I was just passing through, you see. . .I thought. . .I was just. . .’ His voice sounded thin and unsure of itself. ‘No, it isn’t what you’re thinking, Phiroze. . .’ he said, running his hand over imaginary beads of sweat on his forehead.
‘What am I thinking?’
My voice sounded rather more aggressive than I would have liked it to. I stared at him for one long moment, then looked away. . .but in the very next, I felt quite ashamed, for he went on to explain, sounding perfectly sincere.
‘You see, I knew this lady. . .I had met her several times. . . Ask Vera if you don’t believe me; it was she who introduced us. . . If Shernawaz had lived, I had planned to propose to her. To marry her. . .’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Vispy. . .I’m so sorry. . . Then you’ll be at the funeral tomorrow?’
‘Yes, of course, yes,’ Vispy said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
And he left quickly, looking very relieved. Obviously, that wasn’t sufficient reason to doubt what he was telling me. Yet the gratitude he felt in that moment—for letting him off the hook?— made me wonder. Could prolonged sexual deprivation drive a man to such extremes? Again, I was ashamed to be thinking such thoughts about my own brother.
A few months later, when Father died, Vispy did me a return favour. Involuntarily, my mind once again connected it with the night on which I had surprised him in the funeral cottage. Perhaps it is entirely twisted of me to think of it that way. But this favour, if I can call it that, bestowed on Farida, gave her a significant advantage.
Father was eighty-six when he died, still in good health, and able to manage his personal needs and chores without assistance. Though he remained, as it were, titular head priest of the Soonamai Ichchaporia Agiari, a few years before he died, I believe, a couple of relatively junior priests had significantly relieved him of his administrative duties there.
As a child, I had been very close to Father. Later the rift between us widened, and for a while I felt we had become adversaries. In spite of that, his death came as a great emotional shock to me. Initially, when Vispy informed me of his passing, over the telephone, it was as if, despite his advanced age, I could feel only disbelief. As though in the deepest recesses of my mind, I had wished him to live, and actually believed he would, forever.
It was after midnight when Vispy called. The watchman summoned me to Buchia’s office, now occupied by his successor, a slightly younger man called Rutnagar, to take the call. In the meantime, though, Vispy had already been speaking to Rutnagar, notifying him about Framroze’s death, and arranging for the hearse to be sent early in the morning. The funeral was planned for 4 p.m., the next afternoon, and Vispy told me when I took the phone, that he had already telephoned the offices of Jam-eJamshed and Bombay Samachar just in time for the announcement to appear in the morning’s newspapers.
‘You will officiate as nussesalar at Papa’s funeral, won’t you?’ he asked me on the phone, rather persuasively. I hesitated for a moment, and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps Father had left written instructions asking for any other nussesalar to observe the rites except his apostate son; and Vispy was deliberately concealing this stricture from me out of the kindness of his heart.
‘Do you think it is what he would have wanted?’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Vispy, ‘no question about it. That goes without saying.’
I listened silently for any hint of unease beneath his ardour; then, after a moment, said:
‘In that case, I’d be happy to. . .’
Most of that night, for some reason, I couldn’t sleep a wink. My mind remained awake, disturbingly animated by memories of my father, my mother and my childhood with Vispy.
At 6.30 a.m., when it was time to leave for the fire temple, I regretfully got out of bed, and then woke up Farida from a deep slumber, whispering to her that she should try to take the afternoon off from work, so as to be able to come home by 4 p.m.—if she didn’t want to miss her grandfather’s funeral.
Everything went according to schedule. There was a huge turnout of mourners for my father—well-to-do admirers of his seniority and moral authority, a couple of priests from the temple, some Punchayet trustees as well, but by and large, and in very significant numbers, the simple folk who visited his fire temple every morning. They filled the funeral cottage and pavilion to overflowing. Myself, I remained slightly numb and dispassionate through the day. My poor sleep during the previous night must have added to my sense of disorientation.
Only after I had lent a shoulder to three colleagues and carried Framroze up the hill, depositing him on the topmost step of one of the Towers; only after I had turned my back on him, and whipped the sheet off his naked corpulent body, clapping my hands loudly three times—which was the signal to let mourners gathered in the small temple garden know that the consecrated body of my father had been offered to the vultures to devour, that they should commence their prayers for the effortless transmission of his soul; only after all that was over and done with, and the mourners had left, and a deep silence had descended once again on the Towers, only then did the floodgates of my grief open, and I cried bitterly for my father whom I would never see again.
That night, I had a strange dream that remains as vivid today as it was on the night I dreamt it, so many years ago. You see, my father died in 1966. And the remarkable thing about this dream lies in its significantly prophetic nature. For in those days, vultures were still very much around. With preternatural instinct, these common Indian scavengers would populate every branch of every tree in the Towers of Silence complex until their greedy, motionless, black-brown-white presence loomed everywhere, stark and brooding—just about thirty minutes before the scheduled hour of a funeral. When I had that dream, no one in their wildest fancy could have guessed that vultures in India were on their w
ay to extinction.
In the dream, I was walking through some kind of narrow sluice or gutter. There wasn’t much water here, only a kind of viscous, transparent fluid, and a great many dead bodies— decomposed, half-eaten, some only bone with shreds of torn flesh sticking to them. . .I was wading through this ghoulish tumult of the dead searching frantically for something or someone: my dead wife, or at least for her gold bangles, which I was convinced in my dream I had forgotten to slip off her arms when I had carried her up to the Towers so many years ago. Now that I suddenly recalled this oversight, I got into a state of panic; yet, I was hopeful of still being able to find the bangles. No, I couldn’t: instead it was Seppy’s corpse I found, remarkably well-preserved amidst all the horrific rotting and decomposition! I noticed at once that her arms were thin and bare. The gold bangles my mother had given her at our wedding were nowhere to be seen. Then Seppy opened her eyes and smiled at me, warmly. I became aware—I couldn’t help notice—that the whole area around us was illumined by a strange, unearthly glow emanating from her ears—from a pair of exquisite, gold earrings studded with brilliant rubies.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Seppy said to me, and repeated, ‘don’t be afraid. . . We are all alive—every single one of us—in one form or other. . .yes. . . We are still alive. . .!’
I found her statement most bewildering, for in my dream I was jostling through dead bodies, stepping over them. But I felt immediately comforted, warm and happy. For a moment, I surfaced from this bizarre dream closer to the periphery of wakefulness, and remembered in my stupefaction, that on at least two occasions after Seppy died, I had pawned those bangles—to pay for some school requirement of Farida’s—and later redeemed them; finally, I had sold them outright to the same pawnbroker at Grant Road. How silly of me to forget about it, and worry!
Having thus reassured myself as to what had become of my mother’s bangles, I sank back into a deeply refreshing sleep.
Endgame
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that an amateur ornithologist in Bombay observed a steep decline in the population of vultures.
He was immediately denounced by Zoroastrian orthodoxy as an agent provocateur set up by the reformist faction to bring disrepute to an ancient system of corpse disposal that was immaculate in its efficiency, hygienic and, moreover, ecologically sound. Vested interests were behind such propaganda, they claimed, intent on fomenting dissatisfaction with the ancient system to replace it with such offensive alternatives as stinky, polluting crematoria. These vested interests actually had their eyes on the vast commercial potential of the valuable real estate of the Towers of Silence, which was held in trust for the community by the Parsi Punchayet.
By the mid-nineties, the issue had become a talking point in the small community of Bombay Parsis, especially as there was a visible reduction in flocks of vultures that congregated at the Towers whenever there was a funeral. There was an incident as well, in which a middle-aged Parsi woman, who had recently lost her own mother, entered the restricted space of one of the Towers and took photographs of half-eaten corpses in an advanced state of decomposition. The photographs, published by a Parsi tabloid, immediately caused a great furore.
They are fake, most Parsis claimed, shocked by the temerity of the woman. It’s so easy in this day and age of computers to execute such visual tricks, they said. We are not fooled. Besides, the rays of the sun, above all, are powerful enough to destroy any residual corruption—vultures or no vultures. The trustees, moreover, had installed three powerful magnifying lenses high atop skyscrapers around the Towers to catch the rays of the sun and aim them directly onto the steps of the Towers where bodies were exposed to the birds. Khurshed Nagirashni, the heavenly spirit of solar fusion, will do her cleansing work, they said, not to worry.
But on this point, I myself remain sceptical. With pollution and smog growing thicker by the day in Bombay, besides four months of cloudy, monsoon skies, how can the sun’s purifying power actually pulverize entire corpses, if there are no vultures left to aid it? Meanwhile, security has been heavily beefed up at the Towers, especially around its restricted areas, to prevent a recurrence of any such unauthorized intrusion. The culpable watchmen who allowed this outrage to take place have been duly sacked.
What is the truth, you ask? I confess I don’t myself know.
I am eighty years old now. My father, as I mentioned earlier, lived to eighty-six, hale and hearty until the end. But I am crippled by severe arthritis; and very painful, if intermittent, sciatica. I fear that my youthful excesses with alcohol—they continued until fairly recently, to be honest—are taking their toll. It’s months since I walked up to the Towers. I am hardly able to leave my quarters now. Once again, the trustees have been kind, and they continue to let me reside here in semi-retirement. I suppose they realize, too—or Rutnagar may have been consulted on the matter—I won’t be around for much longer anyway.
This may be my last entry. My commitment to keeping these notes is wearing thin. Even clutching a ballpoint pen and scribbling have become rather painful activities, you see. My sense of the chronology of events, too, has become rather muddled: I often find myself confused as to the correct sequence of historical events. I suppose it just doesn’t matter enough to me—which came first: the chicken or the egg!
For years, demographers have been giving warning of the dwindling numbers among Parsis. All that sound and fury, and contentious dialectic on the issue—with the usual stridency of disagreement between reformist and orthodox camps—about whether or not to permit conversion of non-Parsis into the community has remained unresolved. It’s a sad irony, I suppose, though pretty amusing as well: vultures have become extinct, even before Parsis could. A core element of our communal identity, a distinguishing feature of our ancient creed is lost. Three thousand years or more of a preciously revered tradition is at end because of a certain drug much used in veterinary compounds, which causes kidney failure in vultures that consume animal carcasses packed with it.
My quarters are just too far from the Towers for any stench of half-eaten rotting corpses to waft my way in the evening breeze. I can’t go up there to verify the claims made by some of the more raucous reformists. Perhaps I don’t want to find out.
But before I finally give up on these notes, there is something very much more important I need to set the record straight on: this account would remain incomplete if I didn’t. All these years I have regretted having no contact at all with Sepideh. A number of times in my notebooks I have remarked on the persistent frustration of my desire to sense her presence, see signs of her surviving spirit, find reason to believe she is somewhere out there, that I will communicate with her again, if not in life, then after my own death. Well, just a few days after my father died, almost thirty years ago, something remarkable happened that gave me reason for hope. In fact, though I’m old and ill, and probably won’t live long, it has given a whole new perspective to my sense of being alive; filled me with child-like anticipation for the near future. I don’t fear death any more, even look forward to its claiming me soon.
But why, you may ask, if it was so significant did I wait thirty years to put it down on paper? I have often asked myself the very question. . .
It took me that long, I suppose, to come to grips with what flies so completely in the face of rationality: to accept that there must be dimensions of being which coexist along with the one we yoke our precious credos of reason and logic to.
Only a few days after my father died, Vispy was given notice by the temple authorities to vacate the premises, and move Father’s personal effects out. A new head priest had been appointed, one Ervad Dhanjishaa Colabawalla, who would be occupying the quarters soon, the letter said, once they were cleansed and a certain purifying ceremony for new beginnings performed.
It was May, the height of a particularly hot summer. Vispy asked me if I would like to come and help him decide what to retain of Papa’s things and what to dispose of. Luckily for him, he had recent
ly found an apartment, fairly close to his workplace in Parel, that he could rent. I hesitated, but somehow knew it was important for me to go. This was in 1966, many years ago. I didn’t feel so physically crippled then as I do now, and I was glad for the chance to revisit the place I had grown up in, though I didn’t expect to be allowed to roam about freely. The main temple area, of course, was out of bounds for me, but as far as my movements within the back quarters themselves went, no objections were raised. I didn’t know why I had come, but something drew me. Just memories, a desire to imbibe for one last time the air he had breathed, the objects he had touched, the mustiness and fragrance of my long-vanished past?
Vispy had already packed his own things in a suitcase. There was almost nothing here that didn’t belong to the temple. Beds, a couple of simple wooden cupboards, a writing bureau. I looked through the manuscripts in the cabinet of ancient liturgy that my father had prized so much, which he had inherited from his predecessor Dastoorji Kookadaaroo. Strictly speaking, I suppose, I could have argued that these were his personal property. But I had no use for them, and Colabawalla would find them more interesting, probably. In the final analysis, I suppose they were temple property. Besides, how was I going to remove a dozen bulky volumes from the premises without eyebrows being raised and questions asked?
Vispy offered me a folding pen-holder attached to an inkstand, which stood on the writing bureau. I wiped the dust off its long plastic platform with my fingers, touching it gently, caressing it. In that moment something happened. I became completely detached from my immediate surroundings. I could barely hear Vispy’s voice; he was saying something to me.
‘Take it, Phiroze, please. You should have something that belonged to Papa. . .’