Walls of Silence

by Walls Of Silence Free(Lit)

  Maybe that’s what the textbook said. “Ashish Ketan didn’t sound like someone who thought his shrine to perfection was about to fall down about his ears.”

  “He’s proud, that’s all. After all, he’s selling a business. How would you expect him to sound?”

  “Greedier, for starters,” I said.

  “Maybe he just wants to sell out to those who’ll do the best for the business, protect its franchise, look after the employees, be a good partner. Maybe his talk about a shrine to perfection isn’t just bullshit.”

  “I doubt it.”

  The heart monitor beeped again. Maybe when I raised her blood pressure, it sounded an alarm.

  “Sometimes people have good motives, you know,” she said.

  That used to be one ofmyassumptions as well. “Like for example JJ endowing a school in Bombay,” I suggested quietly. “Maybe he just did that to show what a great guy he was and get some sucker to sell him a prize stockbrokerage on the cheap. Come bonus time—if he’d lived—he pockets another ten million and the few hundred thousand he’s put into a poxy school looks like a good investment.”

  “Jesus, you’re cynical.”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  She sighed.

  “So are you,” I added.

  “I’m going to the hotel gym, sleep, then dinner with the Ketans. What are you doing?”

  “I’m going out with Raj. I may want to talk to you about it later. Can I see you then?”

  I could feel the pain coming down the line. She probably felt guilty about me, but guilt wasn’t enough; she was trying to keep her life on the rails—she’d offered to derail for me, but I’d let her stay on the tracks. It looked like she wanted to rejoin her career path and I was a dangerous detour.

  “I . . .”

  “Think about it.” I didn’t want to hear her say no to me. “Have a good evening.”

  I took a quick shower and dressed in chinos and polo shirt. Before leaving the room I placed the order-routing agreement in the safe. I was bad at remembering PIN numbers so I made do with the year of my birth.

  TWENTY-NINE

  At least it wasn’t raining, but the sky hung like waterlogged canvas over our heads, promising to split and spill later on.

  Raj and I wandered up and down a network of gravel footpaths skirting flower beds that seemed to have little by way of flora in them. Watching the dive-bombing sparrows, I wasn’t surprised; any seed would be lucky to germinate under that kind of sustained attack. So much for the Hanging Gardens.

  Had my father been here? Before he made his way to the Towers of Silence perhaps. I stared at a bench occupied by an old man humming a tuneless mantra through a mouthful of betel nut. Maybe on that very bench, Dad had reflected on where his life had taken him. From near the top of the letterhead of a great law firm to the edge of an abyss. Did he have a bottle of booze with him, a special cask-strength malt he’d managed to save for his last drink? Or was it some local hooch that washed down the pills or accompanied the self-administered chemicals that finally overpowered his already bug-infested blood?

  “The Towers of Silence are near here, aren’t they?” I asked Raj.

  Raj pointed. “Over there.”

  It was a wall of dull greenery on the horizon of the Hanging Gardens. Dad would have known the way without asking; he would have checked and prepared beforehand, he’d have drawn a line on a city plan and achieved his destination without deviation or hesitation.

  Suddenly I didn’t care what Raj thought, what anybody thought. “I want to see them, the Towers.”

  Raj seemed startled. “You cannot go inside, it is forbidden.”

  “I know. Just the outside. The steps to the entrance.”

  Raj shook his head. “It isn’t a good place.”

  “I know.”

  Raj hesitated, then shrugged. “Come. We will need to take the car.”

  On reaching a busy intersection at the foot of a steep road surrounding the Hanging Gardens, our driver hairpinned up a narrow driveway bordered by neat rockeries and plants. A quarter of a mile brought us into a parking lot with a small fountain in the middle of it.

  Raj pointed to a white building that looked like an open-fronted village hall. “That is where they hold funeral services for the dead before they are taken into the Towers of Silence—only the priests are allowed in there.”

  “This isn’t it,” I said rather impatiently.

  Raj bridled. “It is, sir. I have brought you to the Towers of Silence. Just as you asked.”

  Maybe. But it didn’t accord with the description given by Sunil Askari of where my father was found. It didn’t accord with my own vision of the place: It didn’t brood, the paint on the clapboard buildings was fresh, the flower beds neatened by the hand of man rather than nature. It was almost as if Pinelawn Cemetery had been transported to the subcontinent.

  No, this wasn’t the place.

  “There is another entrance,” Raj said with an anxious tug at his mustache.

  Into the car, back down the driveway, up the hill, around theHanging Gardens, and back down the other side: a new stretch of quiet road, lined by the millionaire apartment blocks on one side. I looked up at the other side. Dense green foliage hung over the edge of the wall, thirty maybe forty feet above me, like wild hair sprouting from the scalp of a giant.

  The wall curved away from the road and a shoulder-high parapet separated us from an area of scrub from which an unpaved track snaked somewhere beyond my line of sight. An ugly black pipeline ran alongside the parapet, dark ooze leaking from its crude rivets.

  “Behind the trees,” said Raj, pointing. “That is the start of it. It stretches for many acres.”

  I peered, trying to penetrate the wall of green. I had a sense of the huge stone cliff, but nothing was defined. It was designed to hide and confuse.

  We descended farther and met the unpaved track that ended at the roadside. No barrier; one could walk right in, it seemed.

  The car stopped and we got out.

  “Can we go in?” I asked. Whatever the response, I was going to.

  “It’s okay. It takes us to the gates. Then no farther.”

  The path went through the deserted area of scrub, short harsh grass growing through a cindery soil, the odd oily puddle. It was more of a barren lot next to an oil refinery than the outer precinct of a sacred burial ground.

  We were silent as we walked. I knew I was now on the path my father had taken. It must’ve been at night; his body was found in the early morning. Why the hell did he come here?

  Raj stopped. “Up there.” He didn’t point. There was only one way to look.

  A long flight of steps, a dual carriageway of flagstones leading up from the path into foliage, but this time I could see the top. Set into the wall was a large dirty yellow door, metal most likely, brown around its edges, like a skin graft that hadn’t taken too well.

  The steps, the door. Vision merged with reality.

  “Behind the door are the Dakhmas,” said Raj.

  “The what?”

  “ADakhmais another word for tower.”

  I’d never really thought about the place as something in its own right, only as a stage upon which my father had played out his final act. For eighty thousand Parsees, the Towers had a significance that drew nothing from a crazed man who wanted to die there.

  “There are seven Towers,” continued Raj. “Some very ancient, many hundreds of years.”

  “Towers,” I whispered. “Like crematorium chimneys.”

  Raj shook his head. “Oh, no, sir. Not like chimneys.” He seemed to be scouring his brain for an apt metaphor. “A big pan . . . no . . . vat, that is a better word. Like the ones we use to cook biryani at weddings. A stone vat of strict measurement; I do not know exactly how big: maybe one hundred feet across, perhaps more. And inside, there is a sloping floor all the way round on which the dead body is left for the vultures to eat. Then the bones fall into a central pit. There is lime in the pit so
that everything disappears. It is most hygienic.” He frowned. “Or so it is asserted. Although sometimes—and I hesitate to say this—the rich people of Malabar claim that the vultures occasionally drop pieces on their balconies.” The vulture air raids on the great and good seemed to trouble him for a moment, but then his face cleared. “But the Dakhmas were here before them and so they must accept such things, I think.”

  I followed his gaze up the steps. “The ground is made sacred by Parsi priests and only they may enter.”

  I focused on the door. It didn’t look like the threshold of something sacred, more like a prison.

  “Death is a temporary evil and should be handled by the proper officials so that it does not become permanent.”

  My eyes wouldn’t leave the door. The avenue of foliage drew them and held them. “You seem to know a lot,” I said.

  Raj was uneasy, tugging at his mustache again. “Everyone knows these things.”

  He moved a few paces sideways and stopped, staring at the ground.

  “Here,” he said. The pool of filthy water and slime just below the first step swallowed his shoes. A bubble of trapped air burped from the gloop.

  “Here what?”

  Raj avoided eye contact. “He died here. Your father.”

  I had already sensed it, but still I grew unsteady. I gripped myself and moved toward the puddle. I put my hand in its slime, rubbed it into my palm with my fingers, and wiped it off on my trousers.

  “You saw it?” I whispered.

  Raj shook his head violently. “No, no. Askari told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  Raj shuffled his feet, I could see the slime wash over his socks and the cuffs of his slightly too short suit trousers.

  I reached for his jacket. “Tell me.”

  His eyes looked so sad. “There is no need for that,” he said. “There is little to tell, but Askari will destroy me if he knows I spoke with you about your father. He does not like these things mentioned.”

  I let go and brushed him off. “I’m sorry.” I vaguely waved my arms at the surroundings. “This. My father. I’m sorry. I won’t say anything to Askari, you have my word. But I must know what you know.”

  “He had been taking many drugs, I think.”

  I knew. The morgue officials had said massive dehydration resulting from ulcerative colitus. The scrawl on the death certificate declared likewise. But Askari had drawnhisversion of events from the shocking lexicon of drug abuse prevention campaigns, building his description of my father until he was no more than a grubby test tube brimming with narcotic bile.

  “And he was very ill. Maybe delirious.”

  That was kind of Raj, excusing my father because he didn’t know what he was doing, that he hadn’t the intention lawyers insist upon before guilt can be established. Lack ofscienter,the Americans would say, nomens rea,guilty mind, the Brits would echo. And then exonerate him. “What did Askari say?”

  “That he was the devil,” Raj replied without hesitation.

  “Because he died here?”

  Raj wavered. “It is difficult. I do not wish to speak ill of him. He is your father and you honor him.”

  I didn’t honor him. For five years he had been dormant dust on the floor of my memory. But JJ’s death had broken in and . . .

  Raj gently touched my shoulder. “Maybe your father did not come here with the intention of dying.”

  “You mean it was an accident, not suicide?”

  “Your father was very angry with Askari, blamed him for many things. Wrongly, says Askari. Askari says that your father did not understand India and our way of things and that his lack of understanding drove him to foolishness: drink and drugs and the ladies. Askari tried to help him and bring him out of his foolishness.”

  There were certainly the drink and the ladies, or rather the girl. I had seen them for myself.

  “But your father would not listen and he got very depressed, would not listen to reason. He was mad with anger at Askari and wanted to hurt him. Askari believes that he died here to insult the many clients of Askari who are Parsi. He believes that your father wanted to destroy Askari & Co.”

  I looked around me at the dark cinder track, the flagstones, the tough grass, and, behind me, a gray hut.

  My foot dug hard into the slime, the ground underneath was firm. A hard place to die. Someone would have to be beyond reason to die here, beyond blame perhaps. Beyond shame. And yet hehadshamed us. He had shamed us on two continents.

  There was a flapping noise; one could almost feel the air move with the beat of something powerful.

  A vulture settled on the steps near the entrance to the Towers.

  “The vultures are still kept busy,” Raj said. “But there are not so many of them now. Some of the Dakhmas are in use, others are idle. Many Parsis simply burn their dead now. Fire is considered adequate.”

  I shivered.

  “In fact, fire is sacred to the Parsis,” Raj prattled, “they see it as an earthly infestation of Wisdom.”

  Manifestation, not infestation. But maybe infestationwasmore accurate.

  Jesus. Fire or vultures. What a choice. I remembered the cruel ridges, embankments of purple swollen around the deep wounds on my father’s naked body. And of course the pickled-onion eye hanging from its socket. But the hair had been brown and soft, still healthy,as if just washed. “My father was mutilated by vultures,” I whispered.

  Raj nodded. “I know. Askari feared that this was a sacrilege also. The vultures here are for the Parsi dead, not outsiders.”

  At the end, Dad had been on the outside of everything: me and Mum, Clay & Westminster. Himself. He had tried to gain access, one phone call to the interior, me. But I’d bolted the door. Click. Only the vultures would commune with him.

  I suddenly recalled the small brown mole on Dad’s cheek. In the morgue, I’d seen the skin all around the mole lacerated and punctured, but the mole remained intact. It was as if his distinguishing feature needed to be preserved, the medium of instant recognition, no matter what happened to the rest of him.

  “He must have been very lonely,” Raj said.

  I was numbed, couldn’t even nod.

  I wondered if my mother had stood where I was standing and, if so, what had passed through her mind. Or had the actual event been too recent, making her unthinking and numb like me? She had been alone, I supposed, so she could perhaps have drawn comfort from a leaf-rattling yell, a primal scream.

  “What had made my father so angry with Askari?” A breakfast of scam and eggs, the half-eaten file.

  Raj was cautious. “Some business, I do not know what. Your father thought it bad, Askari didn’t agree. Maybe you should not think too harshly of Askari. He did much to keep the honor of your family.”

  Honor to the outside world, maybe. But inside . . .

  I turned away from the steps and wandered over to the hut and peered through the window. I could see nothing, a room filled with blackness. I tried the door. A giant rusty padlock would deter any opportunist without a crowbar at hand.

  I felt my shoes sink into a mulch of reeds around the hut’s base.

  There was something poking out of the reeds, almost camouflaged by the base plank of the hut. It was shy, but definitely there. I went around the side and knelt to take a closer look.

  It was a cross, a crude thing made from two slats of wood nomore than a few inches long. I ran my fingers over it, the wood smooth with the constant slow shower of slime, a knot of fragile string holding it together, rotten and fragile. But in this dark eave no wind would disturb it, no casual passerby observe it. Only someone coming to the death scene of his father might notice it.

  “Are you all right, Fin?” Raj called out but stayed where he was.

  “Yes, yes, fine.”

  “What are you doing?”

  WhatwasI doing? Touching a shrine. A splintery memorial erected by my mother.

  I stood up. “Coming.”

  Raj looked worried. �
�I thought you had fallen over, collapsed maybe.”

  I wiped more slime off my hands and onto my trousers. “No, I just felt bad, needed privacy for a moment. That’s all.”

  Raj nodded sympathetically. “I never knew my father, so his loss meant little to me. For you the anguish must be terrible.”

  I hadn’t known my father either, it seemed.

  I smiled. “You’re a kind fellow, Raj.”

  Raj bowed his head bashfully.

  I took a sideways glance at the hut. My mother had laid Dad to rest here with a simple cross. Back in England, he lay in a plot in a Cotswold churchyard. There was nothing more for me to do in this place. What I should have done lay in the past, five years ago, when I’d received the phone call.

  But at the moment of death, what was in my father’s head then? Suicide or accident? A legal definition divided the two words, but here they were joined together by another word:shame.Ascienterof shame, amens reaof shame.

  My mother had honored him. With a cross. Yes, but she hadn’t known about the wood nymph.

  I turned and faced the steps up to the Towers again. A vulture slouched on the stained stone, eyeing the intruders.

  “Let’s go to Versova,” I said.

  ***

  My mother had been right. The placewasan antidote. To some extent anyway. No matter how picturesque, a beach at twilight couldn’t completely scatter the convention of demons debating noisily in my head.

  As Raj and I wandered onto a busy foreshore, trailed by a chattering caravan of small children, the sight of small boats being tended made me hanker for the noble simplicity of the effort to put food in the stomach; not for prestige or partnership, or even wealth. Just to stay alive. If one could only keep the objective stark and simple, then life might not be tainted by impurities.

  I knew that this was naïve. A Westerner’s fantasy of a pastoral idyll. The woman leaning against the blue hull of a little boat, attaching floats to a net, would give anything to have what I had, with or without the clutter that went with it.