by Braham Singh
17
ICE
To be rewarded, do some wrong.
—The Business Mantra
For cultural reasons the morgue was the furthest, most distant corner of the Sion Hospital complex. Brahmin doctors want nothing to do with dead bodies, and require the morgue to occupy the furthest, most distant corner in all hospitals. In this particular case it meant the desolate, semi-bunker type couple of rooms adjacent to where the general staff gathered for meals. Perfect. Brahmin doctors don’t eat in hospital canteens. Their food came from home, untouched by human hands.
Two distinct queues crawled into the morgue-cum-canteen building. One was mainly family and relatives here to identify or collect a body, while the other made up of chattering hospital staff over an extended lunch break. There was no osmosis between the two. Lunchtime bonhomie and lifetime sorrow remained separated into two columns.
At a closer look though, things became more nuanced. The Friends & Family queue had pockets of gossiping Kohli fisherwomen with breasts bursting out of blouses, and nine-yard saris hitched high around thighs that could crack coconuts. The rest of Friends & Family remained lost in their grief, but with eyes fixated on those breasts, while maintaining the distance caste requires from Hindus. They shrank from the laughing fisherwomen, keeping a wide berth until arriving at the narrow entrance leading into Hades. There, they converged to mesh with all that smelly, lower caste, tits and arse.
Ernst stood with Salim Ali in Friends & Family. Tufan was a few vacant stares ahead of them. Over by the bosky compound wall, a man in white coat and stethoscope hunched over shrubbery running alongside the brickwork. There was a tremor to his surface from some heavy machinery rumbling inside, or could be something else. The stick he held quivered as if alive and he used it to poke at the shrubs and dead, brown leaves littered at his feet, rustling and scattering them with each thrust. Oblivious to the queue of sorrow and the fisherfolk titties on display, the man in white coat carried on with whatever he was doing; peering down at the leaves, then up into the compound’s jamun and mango trees. Noticing a nervous Ernst all of a sudden also look around his feet, Salim Ali asked what the fuck was up.
‘He’s catching snakes.’
Seeing Ernst, the man in white coat yelped, rotated left on the balls of his feet as if in the army, and poked at the air while approaching. Ernst reached up to rub his mole.
‘What you doing here, you bugger?’
Hearing him talk, people would automatically assume that de facto Dean, Dr. Dicky Waller was a half-baked dingo, an Anglo-Indian like Beatrice Taylor. They would be right.
~
‘How come you didn’t say you were friends with the Dean?’ is what Salim Ali wanted to know. ‘He could’ve stepped in, done something about Arjun’s body. Why are we even in queue? Heights, I tell you.’
‘De facto Dean. Not Dean. Besides, he’s at the Medical College, not the hospital. Different setup. No one listens to him over here. Or there, for that matter.’
‘How would you know? Did you try find out?’
Times like these, smile.
Salim Ali smiled back .
‘Have you noticed how you always have a good reason to do nothing?’
However calm on the surface, a sanctimonious Mallu radiates heat. Ernst used his white man prerogative to push through the queue to Tsering Tufan’s gentler aura up ahead. Also cooling in there were glowering comrades—out of place in this queue of sorrow. An oriental butterfly next to the gentle Tufan, even more so. The trade union shirts and kurtas were white like Ernst’s, in deference to the impending Hindu cremation. Ernst thought maybe they all should’ve worn black instead; most North-East Frontier tribals were Christian converts.
It didn’t matter, because the waning Tufan was in a defiant, communist-red kurta. Comrade Tufan, where it mattered. The oriental butterfly was also showing the finger to ritual standing there in her electric, copper-green silk blouse. Her sarong had broad horizontal stripes that defined tribal dress from Tibet and Bhutan, to Chiang Mai and beyond. The hair, cut and bobbed like Jacqueline Kennedy, was jet-black and seared white in broad streaks. As if something very hot had burnt paths across the top of her head. Yes, her hollow eye-sockets attested, those are third degree burns from one thing after another.
‘We haven’t been introduced,’ the butterfly said, turning around to extend a hand. No namaste. ‘I am Tobi Basar, Arjun’s mother.’ She could be in her twenties, if not for a dead son. A stubborn chin held that broad, ravaged face together. The strong and silent type. How had Salim Ali described her—something about being able to take any amount of crap and not show it.
‘Tobi teaches at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Trombay,’ Tufan said.
Tufan had mentioned earlier how she also taught Bhairavi and Salim Ali to sword dance. In happier times. He tried visualising the two women with swords and it wasn’t difficult at all. Visualising Salim Ali dance was a different matter. Behind them, the little man looked at his HMT watch, then at the serpentine queue in front and shook his head. Ernst heard Dr. Waller rattle inside.
Comrade Tufan tried to put a positive spin to things. ‘This shouldn’t take too long. The Deputy Commissioner has given his go-ahead, remember? ’
Not too reliable a weather forecast, because if you looked behind, Salim Ali was sniffing the air—a mouse sensing danger. The look on his face made you turn around, just in time to see a gorilla emerging from Hades.
No mistaking Henry Gomes: Once in Fertilisers blue and now in Sion Hospital khaki. The gorilla saw Salim Ali and squinted, then saw Ernst and brightened. A smiling Gomes brushed past Friends & Family, his gorilla gait pronounced as ever. The last time Ernst saw that smile was when he thought Gomes was going for his throat.
He considered making a dash for it.
~
‘Mr. Ernest! Is everything in order?’
The concern was touching. A complete makeover from the murderous shift-worker, to a caring hospital employee. Ernst nodded, and found himself enveloped by the Goan’s Christian compassion that went beyond him, to embrace Tsering Tufan, before dragging itself all over Tufan’s sister while pausing over her breasts.
‘Why for are you standing in line?’ Gomes asked. ‘Please do come with me. I understand Deputy Commissioner Sahib has given go-ahead to autopsy. That’s good. Very good.’
‘We must have the body released today without delay, for the last rites,’ Salim Ali said, with the perfunctory authority vested in him by an engineering degree. Gomes glanced at the IIT man. He looked bemused such a species was allowed to roam free. ‘You,’ he said.
Then, ‘I will be taking your good self straight to Assistant Coroner Sahib,’ he offered Ernst.
‘You work here too?’ Ernst asked, while being ushered past the line-up of lost souls and fisherwomen titties. Gomes smiled back.
‘Well, at least we now know where you get your medical knowledge,’ Ernst said, then wondered why in the world poke a gorilla like that again.
Salim Ali also appeared puzzled. Gomes however, refused to stoop to that level. Smiling as if Ernst had enquired about his health, he pushed on ahead to clear a path through Friends & Family .
‘What did you mean by that?’ Salim Ali asked. ‘What medical knowledge? Why? Why do I need to decipher everything you say?’
‘Stick close to me,’ Ernst advised, as Gomes looked back to smile at them. ‘Very close.’
~
It was ancient inside, dilapidated, like the rest of the newly built hospital. The asbestos roof however confirmed the canteen-cum-morgue building was part of the older military hospital structure. Now eclipsed by tired-looking concrete blocks, put together recently for the new hospital and newer medical-schooling facility.
The subterranean bunker-type room was large, more than thirty feet square and very busy, as if all of Bombay decided to collect their dead that afternoon. Gomes brought the Tufan party in, past an uneasy queue coming down the concrete stairs with rusted
iron rods sticking out at the edges waiting for a banister; some day, no rush. Once in the room, the queue rent apart with an urgency beyond mere racial prejudice, and it wasn’t just the Kohli women’s somewhat fishy smell.
And like the Lambadi gypsies, the Kohli fisherwomen couldn’t care less. They weren’t here to be admired, and surged in an explosion of female body parts towards a desk, where an elderly ward boy in khaki sat focused on the jiggling breasts. The neglected Friends & Family queue barely moved, registering none of the impatience shown by the fisher folk. From somewhere in his late sixties, the ward boy tried his best to manage the obstreperous fisherwomen. Not here to confront mortality as we all have to some day, the fisherwomen’s bustle suggested they just wanted to get on with it. Two large wicker baskets sat by the wall—perfectly round, one on top of the other, blue jute ropes attached to allow for pulling. They were large—a person could sit in one. Silver fish scales glinted from here and there on the baskets, wet from holding ice long melted.
Gomes pointed at the wicker baskets. ‘True public service. We allow them to keep their fish in the morgue’s ice-room.’
From over at the school desk, Ernst heard the venerable ward boy instruct a fisherwoman on how to avail this public service. ‘Five annas a kilo. Cash. ’
Rising from behind the ward boy’s school desk were four concrete slabs, six to seven feet long, each with a dead body, each body covered with a white bed sheet, except for one poor, naked bastard laid out on the second concrete block. On the floor around the slabs, shrouded bodies lay stacked—dragged out from cold storage to make space for fish. Someone had attempted at symmetry before going, bugger that, and piled the bodies on top of each other in woebegone heaps.
Behind the slabs, towards where Gomes pointed, was a bolted door with a thick dark-green sheen of lacquer as insulation. White streamers crept up from underneath to vapourise in the baking heat. The morgue’s ice-room to store its dead; holding baskets of pomfret instead, while bodies piled up in the heat outside. Ernst gagged. The formaldehyde was there, yes, phenol too, providing a thin veneer to the stench only India can produce. Is why the Hindus discovered before science did: the sense of smell is the brain’s only direct access to the outside world. Tobi Basar started to throw up. Salim Ali handed Ernst a lit Charminar, after having sucked on the roasted tobacco as if inhaling from an oxygen mask while the aeroplane goes down. Tufan supported his sister’s forehead with his palm and she retched right there on to the floor until only dry heaves were left.
‘I hate this country,’ she said.
A semi-distinguished looking rake of a man in white coat and stethoscope leaned against the cool, green door, taking deep puffs. A police sub-inspector who wasn’t Johnny Walker for a change, but who was fast asleep, had his chair tipped against the ice-room’s wall—at minimum ten degrees cooler than the rest of the room. There were no microphones, recording, or photographic equipment around. On the other hand, no electricity either, or anywhere to wash and scrub up. A layer of dirt covered the floor, otherwise strewn with rags and burnt incense-sticks. Cobwebs swung from the ceiling.
Ernst remembered the one other time he visited a morgue: at the Jüdische Krankenhaus in Berlin over a school study trip. They had spotless stainless steel sinks, tape recorders for preserving commentary, and Leica cameras. In all fairness though, that’s comparing Bombay in Nineteen Sixty-Four to Nineteen Thirty-Two Berlin. Ernst staggered over to the outer wall that reached just under six feet, and tried for air through an opening laced with chicken wire. Looking out, you had a worm-eye view of the compound—the two snaking queues, and the adjacent canteen from where the wooden signage beckoned: RICE PLATE IS READY. If you leaned further on tiptoes to try for more air, your feet touched something decomposing against the wall.
Ernst leapt back with a yell and not just because he had stepped on a limbless torso burst out of a length of saffron cloth binding it. A blackened hipbone stuck out through a blanket of flies, while a small but diligent rat worked on the body. Unevenly cooked, the torso had bloat, recklessly bursting through its binding wherever it could in swathes of fleshy dark blue. Its smell went with the colour scheme. Ernst recognised the headless Sikh last seen at the sulphur burner. The head with the bullet hole however, was no longer there to keep it company. The rat having fled, he nudged the torso to straighten it back to how it had been, and then a bit harder until somewhat aligned with the wall below the chicken wire. A brass button lay where the torso had slumped and Ernst picked it up. Ernst knew a Webley .38 slug from his time with the Tommies at Purandhar Fort; even one flattened somewhat after ricocheting inside a Sardar’s rib cage, and misshapen further from excessive heat. Sure, Exhibit A with the bullet hole through its forehead was missing, but the .38 slug suggested DCP Jahagirdar liked to go dhishoom more than once, as the little shitter of an eyewitness had shown aiming at Salim Ali by the sulphur burner. Jahagirdar himself had fired three times at Ernst when playing cowboy with a cocked finger that evening outside Sion Hospital—twice at Ernst’s torso and one to the head. DCP Jahagirdar wasn’t just a thorough man. He was a creature of habit.
Ernst’s yelp had succeeded in waking up the police sub-inspector. The policeman nudged the man in white coat. All this while the fisherwomen kept it moving, oiled with singular purpose; an army of amazons collecting fish stored overnight and rushing it to the Dadar and Crawford wholesale markets. Working alongside, khaki ward boys carried shrouded bodies back inside the emptying ice-room before they rotted any further.
A fisherwoman in a nine-yard sari came up to the septuagenarian ward boy manning the desk. He presented a clipboard to her as if it was the Constitution of India. They went into a huddle while the ward boy pointed out this and that, pretending to guide her through the paperwork. She produced a wad of money out of nowhere and forked it over, saying something coarse in Marathi. The ward boy pocketed the bribe with finesse.
Ernst elbowed Salim Ali.
‘See? That’s how it’s done. Learn something.’
Salim Ali saw the Government servant pocket money to illegally store fish in the Government morgue. He saw the dead bodies rotting in the heat. He saw Gomes keeping tally. There was so much anguish on his face that Tufan came up to hold him. Salim Ali burst into tears.
‘It’s okay,’ Tsering Tufan said to his distraught comrade. ‘It’s okay. Arjun’s at peace now.’
Ernst didn’t have the heart to tell him that Salim Ali wasn’t sobbing over Arjun. That he was crying over India.
18
Friends & Family
They bathe, then pray,
Put the chandan mark along with the cap,
And then they seat a whore on their lap.
—Vijay Tendulkar ’s Ghashiram Kotwal
The semi-distinguished white coat approached the naked body on the second concrete slab and stood there, looking bored and very Brahmin. Venky Iyer came to mind. A woman in a white sari materialised to join the white coat, along with a sweeper carrying a flat wooden box and a bucket of water. He laid the wooden box on the floor and opened it to reveal a clutter of surgical instruments. A ball of catgut rolled out to the floor.
‘Assistant Coroner Sahib,’ Gomes said. ‘He’s getting ready for post-mortem duties. Real, medical Sherlock Holmes, I tell you, no question.’
There was a hiccup in the room as it paused to pay respects, and then back to business. Gomes snapped off something in Marathi to the ward boy selling illegal cold storage space. The Assistant Coroner’s team continued readying for the autopsy, unmindful of the commerce underway. The fisherwomen paid up one by one. They then proceeded to remove their fish baskets from the morgue’s ice-room while the ward boys dragged back the rightful occupants, swaddled in white sheets.
~
The Assistant Coroner produced an empty Brylcreem jar, a packet of salt, a pair of rubber gloves and an elongated package of incense-sticks. He handed all that over to the woman in the white sari. She handed it all to the sweeper. He lit the incense-st
icks and stuck them around the floor, mindful not to get in the way of the fish being removed from storage. A blast of chilled air came in their wake through the open, green door. Meanwhile, khaki ward boys lined the shrouded bodies on the floor, one by one. The burnt and bound Sardar by the wall—headless, limbless, and helpless—looked even more forlorn in the same room amidst these so much more dignified corpses, properly shrouded and with limbs and heads intact; their final sacrifice being to save baskets of fish from rotting. Ernst fingered the .38 slug in his pocket.
Friends & Family stood by, watching their dead line-up. Who belonged to whom? With no one bothered about them, there was ample time to read the writing on the wall—in English, Hindi and Marathi: OUR AIM IS TO EASE YOUR SUFFERING.
Handing over the gloves to the sweeper, Assistant Coroner Sahib was ready to commence with post-mortem duties. He ordered all lay personnel to leave. ‘Only family and relatives of deceased allowed.’ There was another hiccup around the room and a respectful pause, before everyone ignored him and went back to what they were doing. The sweeper had the rubber gloves on and made a wide sweep with his scalpel to where the Brahmin Assistant Coroner pointed. The Assistant Coroner then pointed out other body parts, careful not to touch anything low caste. The sweeper then took tissue samples so professionally, one had to stop and stare. The autopsy was being performed without the doctor even touching the body.
While everyone watched the proceedings, Henry Gomes watched Tobi Basar.
Made of stone, she stared at this unknown boy on the slab, maybe thinking of her Arjun coming up next to be sliced by a lower caste sweeper, directed by an upper caste doctor. Ernst wondered where Arjun was; under which shroud. Eenie, Meenie, Minee…
The sweeper coughed and spat on the floor. He was done, leaving behind a long cut from the base of the cadaver’s neck to the pubic area, and another on the scalp from ear-to-ear within the hairline. A strip of cloth had been threaded through the wounds like a shoelace. Ernst wanted to protest the shoddy workmanship, but how was everything else in India, including him, any different?