Such a Long Journey

by Rohinton Mistry

  He was trying now to maintain some semblance of order amidst the stacks of offerings. No sooner did one set of devotees depart than others arrived, and never empty-handed. He saw Gustad watching. He shook his head wearily, but it was obvious he was enjoying the hectic pace, the role of shrine custodian. His carefree peregrinations had definitely passed into the realm of memory. ‘Victory in Bangladesh is making me work overtime.’

  ‘Very good, very good,’ said Gustad absently. Dilnavaz’s gibe about the blackout paper was buzzing inside his head, worrying him like the flies and mosquitoes of old. By and by, however, the wall’s fragrances wrapped their rich veils over him and made him forget.

  For the next few days, newspapers continued to analyse the war. There were accounts of crucial battles, and moving stories of how Bangladeshis had cheered the arrival of the first Indian troops in Dacca. Gustad read whichever paper he could borrow in the canteen. And Dilnavaz, as she had been doing for the past few months since Mr Rabadi’s bonfire, glanced over Miss Kutpitia’s copy of the Jam-E-Jamshed each morning. Particularly the pydust notices. It would be inexcusable, she felt, if they were to miss the funeral of some relative, however distant.

  *

  The lunch-hour had ended, the canteen was empty except for the boy cleaning tables and Gustad reading the newspaper. He wanted to finish the last little bit. There was a detailed description of the surrender ceremony, with the text of the instrument of surrender included. Like everyone else, Gustad had begun to feel the glow of national pride. Every day, he read every page, column by column, which was fortunate, or he would have missed an item that appeared inside, in an obscure corner.

  It was barely an inch of column space. And when he read it, the glow of national pride dropped from him like a wet raincoat. He did not turn the page after that.

  The boy approached with his damp rag. ‘Seth, table please.’

  Clutching the newspaper, Gustad raised his outstretched arms in the air mechanically, while the boy gave the table a quick wet swipe. The forearms thudded down. Gustad did not notice the boy watching curiously, or the dampness creeping through his sleeves.

  He sat staring at the paragraph, reading it over and over, the small paragraph which stated that Mr J. Bilimoria, a former officer with RAW, had died of a heart attack while serving his four-year prison sentence in New Delhi.

  He removed the page from the newspaper and folded it small to fit his pocket.

  TWENTY-ONE

  i

  Dr Paymaster’s dispensary, like everything else in the vicinity, was closed. Not even the House of Cages was open for business. The day of the morcha had arrived.

  The people of the neighbourhood were ready for the march to the municipal ward office, to voice their protests against overflowing sewers, broken water-pipes, pot-holed pavements, rodent invasions, bribe-extracting public servants, uncollected hills of garbage, open manholes, shattered street lights – in short, against the general decay and corruption of cogs that turned the wheels of city life. Their petitions and letters of complaint had been ignored long enough. Now the officials would have to reck the rod of the janata.

  All manner of vendors and tradespeople, who had nothing in common except a common enemy, were waiting to march. There were mechanics and shopkeepers, indefatigable restaurant waiters, swaggering tyre retreaders, hunch-shouldered radio repairers, bow-legged tailors, shifty transistors-for-vasectomies salesmen, cross-eyed chemists, sallow cinema ushers, hoarse-voiced lottery-ticket sellers, squat clothiers, accommodating women from the House of Cages. Hundreds and thousands gathered, eager to march, arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder, to alleviate the miseries of the neighbourhood.

  Even Dr Paymaster and Peerbhoy Paanwalla enlisted. They had been reluctant at first, especially Dr Paymaster. He tried to temper the zeal and soothe the passions by attempting to explain the larger picture. He pointed out that municipal corruption was only a microcosmic manifestation of the greed, dishonesty, and moral turpitude that flourished at the country’s centre. He described meticulously how, from the very top, whence all power flowed, there also dripped the pus of putrefaction, infecting every stratum of society below.

  But Dr Paymaster’s friends and neighbours looked at him blankly, which led him to suspect that perhaps his vision of villainy and baseness in New Delhi was too abstract. He tried again: imagine, he said, that our beloved country is a patient with gangrene at an advanced stage. Dressing the wound or sprinkling rose-water over it to hide the stink of rotting tissue is useless. Fine words and promises will not cure the patient. The decaying part must be excised. You see, the municipal corruption is merely the bad smell, which will disappear as soon as the gangrenous government at the centre is removed.

  True, they said, but we cannot hold our breath for ever, we have to do something about the stink. How long to wait for the amputation? We have to get on with our lives, our noses cannot remain permanently plugged. Once again their fervid exuberance bubbled forth, and Dr Paymaster and Peerbhoy relented, overpowered by the contagion of enthusiasm. Their friends, neighbours and customers convinced them of the valuable contribution they would make by leading the morcha. Their great ages, Dr Paymaster’s revered occupation, Peerbhoy’s chubby, swami-like demeanour, would all go a long way to bestow respectability upon the morcha.

  Naturally, Dr Paymaster was to wear his white coat and stethoscope while carrying his black bag; thus, onlookers and the authorities could recognize at once how distinguished a profession was at the helm. Similarly, Peerbhoy would walk in nothing more and nothing less than his paan-selling attire: bare-chested, a low-slung loongi round his waist, so his august all-seeing navel, his venerable wrinkled dugs, and his massive forehead, furrowed with a thousand lines of wisdom, could inspire awe and esteem in bystanders.

  The morcha directors, greatly impressed by Dr Paymaster’s and Peerbhoy Paanwalla’s examples, decreed that all participants should wear work clothes and display their work implements. The mechanics would don their hole-infested vests and grease-stained pants while carrying spanners, wrenches, ratchets, and tyre irons. Lottery-ticket vendors agreed to walk with their cardboard displays of lottery tickets slung from their necks; barbers would wield hair clippers, combs, and scissors; and so on.

  In addition, four handcarts were loaded with huge barrels containing: oozing, slimy samples of sludge and filth from overflowing gutters; crumbling concrete, sand, and mortar from disintegrating pavements; examples of fetid, putrefying matter from the garbage hills; and stacks of mange-eaten rodent specimens, some dead, others barely alive. The barrels were to be emptied in the lobby of the municipal office building.

  For several days, everyone had been busy making banners and placards. Slogans were rehearsed and the police informed of the morcha’s route, so necessary traffic arrangements could be made. The morcha would start near the House of Cages and take two hours to reach the municipal offices, where a gherao was to be conducted. All entrances and exits would be blocked by the marchers in the spirit of non-violence, and remain blocked until the neighbourhood’s demands were met.

  *

  Dr Paymaster opened his black bag to empty it. After all, it was only a morcha prop, and would be lighter to carry. Then he gazed for a moment at the carefully arranged contents. Not once since starting out in practice had his bag been without its multitude of vials, syringes, scalpels, lancets, and the trusty sphygmomanometer. He changed his mind and let everything stay.

  He clipped on his stethoscope, locked the door to the office, and, with his faithful old compounder by his side, stepped out. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, he thought, wondering what follies and wisdoms were to be enacted this day, what new farces he was to witness with his tired old eyes.

  The waiting crowd applauded as the two emerged. Too late now for regrets, thought Dr Paymaster. He acknowledged the cheers with a half-hearted wave. Peerbhoy, resplendent in his brightest and best loongi – maroon, with green and yellow vertical stripes – was already at the head
of the column. Dr Paymaster took his place beside him. The compounder walked behind.

  ii

  After filling the water drums and buying milk, Dilnavaz opened Miss Kutpitia’s Jam-E-Jamshed to the middle page and scanned the pydust section for death announcements. Her usual sense of anxiety gave way to relief as she came to the end of the list without encountering any familiar names.

  Then she glanced at the Stop Press section on the first page, the little box that usually appeared blank; there was something in it. Puzzled, she read that the funeral of J. Bilimoria would be held this morning. There was no further information. With Miss Kutpitia’s permission she borrowed the paper to show Gustad.

  He was also puzzled: ‘Who could have brought the body from Delhi?’ Jimmy had no relatives that they knew about. Who had made the arrangements at the Tower of Silence?

  They agreed it was probably someone else with the same name, and did not discuss it further, which relieved Gustad. What use was it to get emotional all over again? When he had brought the page home that day from office, it was all he could do to calm her and stop her crying.

  ‘But what if it is our Jimmy?’ said Dilnavaz after a while.

  The uncertainty became oppressive. The only thing was to go to Doongerwadi, decided Gustad. ‘If it is our Jimmy, and I miss the funeral, it would be unforgivable.’ And if it was someone else, that would be all right too, there was no sin in attending a stranger’s funeral.

  So he set off to the Tower of Silence, thinking – second time in less than thirty days. And two friends gone. He looked up. Like old Cavasji, he felt like protesting, raging against the sky, but went his way in silence.

  *

  Later, after the prayers were over and he descended the hill, he was still wondering who had arranged and paid for the death ceremonies. He felt grateful to whoever it was; something had been put right; and now Jimmy was conveyed safely beyond the reach of his tormentors.

  To think I almost did not come. Would have been no one in Jimmy’s bungalee. To watch the fire, listen to his prayers. And to offer sandalwood, sprinkle loban in the afargan. Powder bursting into fragrant flames. Like shining from shook foil. Frankincense and myrrh, and sandalwood glowing red. Colour of the rising sun. And Jimmy’s face through the thin white smoke. In Delhi he was … but strange how death. On the marble platform, looking again like our Khodadad Building Major. And the final walk up the hill. So many for Dinshawji … the gravel path, a great ovation. But I alone for Jimmy. And the gravel spoke softly, like friends in a room.

  By the time Gustad came down from the Tower, the dustoorjis were nowhere to be seen. He hoped the registration clerk at the office would know who had arranged the funeral.

  *

  The man at the desk was not pleased with Gustad’s intrusion. Questions had become the bane of his life, and he looked up suspiciously, his nervous eyes darting around the room. As far as he was concerned, Jimmy Bilimoria’s funeral was over and done with. He was tired of people coming to him, especially relatives of the deceased, with their strange requests.

  The two women last week, for instance. So short, and slightly built, reminded him of little sparrows, the way they walked and moved their heads. But turned out to be tough as hawks. ‘We forgot to remove a diamond ring from Grandmama’s finger,’ they said. ‘Can you please shoo off the vultures for a few minutes? So we can go inside the Tower and get it back?’

  What was he to say to such people? How to deal with two loose screws? He explained that before the nassasalers left the Tower they removed all clothing, every single article, as laid down in the Vendidad. So even if the ring was overlooked in the prayer bungalee, it would have been found in the Tower.

  But the women told him to hurry before the priceless diamond ring wound up in a vulture’s belly. Money was not the question, it was the sentimental value. ‘We have no faith in the work of illiterate cretins like nassasalers,’ they said, ignoring his reminders that laity were forbidden inside the Tower. Eventually, the clerk had to plead for help from the high priest who led the two away for further discussion, nodding his owl-wise head sagely in response to their arguments.

  If this was the only problem besetting the clerk, he might have endured without turning embittered and suspicious. But, of late, luxury high-rises proliferating around Doongerwadi’s green acres had blighted his life.

  ‘Your vultures!’ the tenants complained. ‘Control your vultures! Throwing rubbish on our balconies!’ They claimed that the sated birds, flying out from the Tower after gorging themselves, invariably snatched a final bite to savour later. And if the tidbits were lost in mid-flight, they landed on the exclusive balconies. This, said the indignant tenants, was absolutely intolerable, considering the sky-high prices they had been charged for their de luxe flats.

  Of course, no one had proved conclusively that the morsels from the skies were human flesh. But before long, relatives of various deceased parties heard about the skyscraper scandal. They protested that they were not paying funeral fees to have their dear departed ones anatomized and strewn piecemeal on posh balconies. The bereaved insisted that the Punchayet do something about it. ‘Train the vultures properly,’ they said, ‘or import more vultures, so all flesh can be consumed in the well. We don’t want a surplus which can be carried off and lost in impure, profane places.’

  Meanwhile, the debate was also raging between the reformists and the orthodox. These two camps had a history of battling lustily in newspaper columns, in letters to the editor, in community meetings – any forum where they were welcome. For a while they had engaged in rhetorical combat over the chemical analysis of nirang. Then there had been the vibration theory of Avesta prayers. When the vulture controversy erupted, the orthodox and reformists heartily joined the fray, delighted to sink their teeth into something after long inactivity.

  The orthodox defence was the age-old wisdom that it was a pure method, defiling none of God’s good creations: earth, water, air, and fire. Every scientist, local or foreign, who had taken the trouble to examine the procedure, using modern hygienic standards, sang its praises. But the reformists, who favoured cremation, insisted that the way of the ancients was unsuitable for the twentieth century. Such a ghoulish system, they said, ill became a community with a progressive reputation and a forward-thinking attitude.

  The orthodox camp (or vulturists, as their opponents called them) countered that reformists had their own ax to grind in legitimizing cremation – they had relatives in foreign lands without access to Towers of Silence. Moreover, the controversy was a massive fraud cooked up by those who owned shares in crematoria, they charged: the chunks of meat were dropped on balconies from single-engined aeroplanes piloted by shady individuals on the reformist payroll.

  Everyone (including a few orthodox backbenchers) agreed this was a bit far-fetched. Surely, they said, someone in the buildings would have seen or heard an aeroplane making a low run to deliver its payload. (Gliders were not even considered in the argument.)

  But the vulturists produced written guarantees from world-famous ornithologists stating that vultures, as a species, were unable to fly after a heavy meal or if their talons and beaks were loaded. The beleaguered clerk greeted the experts’ pronouncements with relief. Though not one given to controversy, he at once seized on the document to make photocopies for high-rise tenants who came to complain.

  But none were satisfied. Aeroplanes were not involved, that much was certain. However, if the ornithologists were right, they demanded, could the clerk tell them the origins of the balcony meat? If not human, what was it supposed to be? Beef? Mutton? Were they to believe that goaswallas had suddenly become airborne, plying their trade in the skies, flying over the city with their butcher knives and cleavers? Were they riding their bicycles among the clouds, making deliveries through balconies instead of back doors?

  The poor clerk no longer had any answers. He heard reproach and censure unceasingly in the speech of his fellow men, blame and reprimand even where non
e was intended.

  To Gustad’s simple question about Jimmy Bilimoria, he pounded the desk, his bloodshot eye blinking furiously: ‘Tell? Tell what? You think this is the information bureau?’

  Later, when he thought about it, Gustad was surprised he had not retaliated. Allowed a runt like that to speak to me thus. I grow old.

  Taken aback, he wearily tried again. ‘I just thought you might know who made the pydust arrangements.’

  The clerk was encouraged. For the first time, he had successfully put a questioner (perhaps even a complainer) in his place. ‘Who knows?’ he said guardedly. ‘The behesti was delivered, money order and death certificate with all proper attachments was delivered. Our chief dustoorji said, if there is a dead Parsi, our duty is to perform the funeral. We don’t poke our noses anywhere else.’

  ‘But what about the announcement in Jam-E-Jamshed?’ persisted Gustad. Hopeless fellow, this. The clerk on duty that night, when I came for Dinshawji, was so helpful.

  ‘Pydust announcements in Jam-E-Jamshed are always inserted by the family of the deceased,’ he answered stiffly. With his dignity partially restored, he found it demeaning to have that paltry function attributed to him.

  ‘This man had no family.’

  ‘So?’ Was he to be blamed for Mr Bilimoria’s lack of family? Anything was possible with the kind of crackpots he ran into these days.

  Gustad gave up. ‘Thank you very much for helping,’ he said, and continued down the hill, his steps quickening with the slope.

  Just within the entrance gate, a taxi was waiting in the shade of a tree. Its meter was flagged to the side: out of service. The driver was wearing dark glasses. And a moustache that was identical to Jimmy’s, thought Gustad. I know this man, he felt, as he got nearer.

  iii