Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

by Cyrus Mistry

  During All Soul’s Week—which with us Zoroastrians actually lasts an entire ten days preceding the New Year—Father’s small temple was virtually besieged by earnest supplicants entreating him to requisition prayers for their dear departed.

  ‘Impossible! Ek minute bhi nathi,’ Father would expostulate. ‘But how? From where will I find the time?’

  The regular customers had booked their date and time weeks in advance. But every year saw an additional influx of believers who, by word of mouth, had heard stories of the fire temple’s wondrous aura of immaculate purity, where prayers were weighted with so much sincerity (and so well articulated) that they were actually known to elicit results.

  At such times, Vispy, and several other young naavars like him, were summoned to perform the additional ceremonies. Then, every square foot in the marbled floor of the main hall would be crowded with frowzily-clad priests in white muslin gowns, some even younger and more diminutive than myself— and I had thought I was short—sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor, surrounded by trays of fruit, flowers and daraanmalido. Three sides of the rectangular room were circumscribed by long banquet tables crowded with silver or copper flower vases, each one in memory of a departed soul who, it was believed, returned during this season to partake of the incorporeal feast of prayer and food provided for by his or her family. There were also a few, small round tables holding a single vase each for those who could afford this exclusivity and didn’t want to be huddled among a rabble of souls—and, of course, dozens of glistening thuribles in the large room, one for each of the ceremonies being performed, crackling and spluttering with the strong aroma of righteousness.

  By a skilful manipulation of timings, Father was able to accommodate everyone’s needs, and ceremonies in remembrance of the dead proceeded thick and fast, six, sometimes even eight, being performed simultaneously at any given hour of the morning. Before noon, though, all such ceremonies came to an end.

  Lucky Vispy, how I envied him: he was allowed to retain the stipend he received for each ceremony performed, to use as he pleased. In my own case, I was not offered even a paisa in pocket money. Though my father could scarcely have afforded it had he wished to, he justified my deprivation, to himself as well as the rest of the family, as meet punishment for a rash, frivolous and undisciplined offspring.

  By 8 p.m., when Father retired, if mother was not feeling too tired herself after dinner had been served, she would stretch out on the creaky easy chair with the book of liturgies open in her hand to some passage I was having difficulty with. I would sit beside her on a low stool repeating aloud after her certain verses and phrases in the hope they would stick in my memory. But every so often these strange sounds would trigger off involuntary aural associations in my mind that brought on the giggles. For instance, there was this extraordinary passage:

  Mem pah geti manido

  Oy-em goft, oy-em kurd, oy-em just, oy-em bud budastead.

  It probably meant something completely profound and sublime, but in the wicked recesses of my mind I heard its intrinsic meaning distinctly. Utterly far-fetched nonsense, which never should have been verbalized; yet, only as a lark, I couldn’t resist offering it to Mother as my ‘free translation’ of the passage:

  If I don’t get my malido on time,

  I may just go nuts, and bite someone in the bud!

  In an instant that seemed to linger for aeons, her eyes enlarged in growing disbelief. The effort of suppressing both anger and utterance—Father already fast asleep in the next room—rendered her voice flutey and jagged with hysteria:

  ‘Can’t show respect to even the most sacred? What’s wrong with you? What’s to become of you, you silly oaf? Everything is funny to you! You’ll end up a complete failure, a nobody: a jokester! And, in the bargain, break your poor father’s heart. . .’

  Her words echoed in my ears long after we had repaired in all sobriety to the holy text. I certainly didn’t want any harm to come to my father. Already, he endured acute flatulence and during his worst bouts, complained of chest pains.

  As I had failed miserably in the final board exams, when the new academic year started, I no longer had the legitimate pretext of leaving for school every morning. At the same time, my curiosity about the world outside had increased tremendously. Luckily, my parents were officially notified about extra coaching classes that the school was providing for its eleven monumental duffers (including yours truly).

  Also, to my advantage, they were more than aware of my friendship with Rohinton Kanga, whose father, Nariman, had just commenced production of bolts of cotton cloth at his new mill in Worli. Nariman Kanga’s reputation as entrepreneur extended well beyond the Bombay province. Though Kanga Mills was only one of over a hundred such enterprises that had been inaugurated in the state during the last fifty-odd years (and the third, among Kanga’s own), this mill had the distinction of being the first to be located in the Worli area. Moreover, Nariman had recently been in the news for simultaneously constructing rows of neat little back-to-back tenements not far from the mill, providing subsidized housing for his workforce that had been drawn from the native populations of Solapur and Nasik. This was considered another feather in the cap of Kanga’s numerous innovative achievements.

  Given his considerable wealth, well-publicized philanthropic impulses, and unimpeachable prestige in the temporal world, Framroze and Hilla were actually proud of the fact that his son was a close friend of their own. That Rohinton, on occasion, had actually visited our quarters behind the temple, spent lazy afternoons stretched out on the easy chair playing draughts with me, or noisily sipping a Dukes’ aerated ice-cream soda, fetched post-haste by a temple boy—or sometimes by Mother herself, if no temple boy could immediately be located—from Merwaan’s, the corner Irani store.

  Though my father frowned darkly at gossip he sometimes heard about Nariman Kanga’s freethinking ways and ardent nationalism, he was willing to ignore it since it was after all only hearsay. I, too, had been shrewd enough never to let on to family a piece of knowledge I was privy to: that during the sticky, summer months of Bombay, Rohinton himself—and probably, even his dad, or so my friend assured me—never wore a sudrah under his shirt: the sacred vest that every self-respecting Zoroastrian wears next to his skin: his spiritual armour.

  So when I bruited the story that Rohinton was helping me prepare for my second attempt at the board exams, they were pleased, and in a smug, self-congratulatory way, never once attempted to check the veracity of my claim. The joke was that Rohinton himself had only just scraped through the finals. A plump, happy-go-lucky fellow with rolls of baby fat still cushioning his neck, forearms and cheeks, Rohinton would have shrieked with merriment had he heard I had cast him in the role of my tutor.

  Six

  Those were the best moments of my youth, when I could be out in the streets on my own.

  Usually, I would escape from the temple precincts as early in the morning as I was able to, without any fixed destination in mind. More often than not—feeling, I suppose, obliged to live out the fiction I had created—I would head in the direction of Mazagaon. Rohinton had a large extended family of siblings, grandparents, cousins, servants and pets, who shared a two-storeyed, many-roomed ancestral bungalow at Mazagaon. The house, which was named Mon Repos, was encircled by a vast expanse of greenery, flowerbeds and moats. It seemed so enormous that I hardly ever met most of the people who, I believed, lived there. I knew that Rohinton’s brothers were much older than he, and worked in offices. I had never met them myself. As for his parents and grandparents, they were very busy people, too. I knew that his father had married twice, first a red-haired Irish woman he met during his student days in England, who gave him one son, and died rather young herself. Later, he married Rohinton’s mother, a Parsi from Karachi, who bore him three more children of whom Rohinton was the youngest.

  His father’s eccentric tastes and enormous wealth were on display everywhere inside the house, in the shape of elaborate
chandeliers, ornately-framed portraits of his forefathers, a grand marble stairway leading to a living room furnished with expensive Persian carpets, vases from China and a stone sarcophagus that dated back, purportedly, to Roman times. Outside, in the park, under a gazebo, stood a marble bust of Rohinton’s great-grandfather, Framji Kanga, whose adventurous trading in opium and silk during the early nineteenth century had ushered generations of the Kanga family along the path of financial plenitude.

  Above all, the park boasted a small private zoo. Among the various animals, the deer and nilgai roamed unhindered, while some others—a porcupine, leopard, orangutan and an enormous python were confined to spacious individual enclosures. There were also three enormous, though gentle, hounds who were allowed to run free in the grounds. A high compound wall circumscribed the large park, heralded by an imposing wrought iron gate.

  Mother would have given me two half-anna coins, just enough for my fare on the tram from Gowalia Tank to Mazagaon and back. These were terrific joyrides for me, as the tram slowly trundled through the crowded streets and bazaars of the town. But at the end of my journey to Mazagaon, I didn’t always feel like visiting the Kangas. I felt close to Rohinton, but it was obvious to me that we belonged to different worlds—and I could never feel entirely at ease under the fastidious eyes of so many bearers, stewards and watchmen.

  When Rohinton and I tired of our idle diversions: gawking at the animals, teasing them or slyly feeding them when the park warden’s attention was elsewhere—trying, somehow or the other, to hold the animals’ capricious gaze for as long as possible—we played nine tiles, or tried our hand at an abridged version of the game of cricket (all the rage then, what with a largely Parsi cricket team having just returned victorious from the MCC, and Nariman himself, after a business trip to England, bringing home a fine, willow bat for Rohinton; pads, gloves, stumps, a full line of accessories as well). But the absence of playmates shrank our engagements to skeletal proportions—it was always just Rohinton and me, although the hounds were always eager to join in—and even cricket is no fun on such a diminished scale. Finally, tiring of our feeble distractions, we would venture outside, taking long exploratory rambles through the dock areas of Mazagaon.

  The pier was so vast and busy no one ever took a second look at what we were about. Usually, we had nothing to do anyway, but lose ourselves in the crowd, look around, wonder, fantasize. Coolies, labourers, mechanics, unemployed layabouts, people waiting to sign up for a job, or a passage—or so we imagined—were everywhere, as were bales of hemp or cotton, great coils of rope, loosely folded sheets of sail-cloth and canvas, barrels, and all kinds of paraphernalia connected with the small and big trawlers and barges that had dropped anchor there, or the merchandise and men they were carrying.

  Just to see the small murky cove off Mazagaon, widening into the vast expanse of sea—only partly visible from the pier, yet stimulating enough to my mind’s eye, which didn’t hesitate to fill in every imagined detail. Tall masts with unfurled sails rising above cavernous hulls, the fo’c’sle, or forecastle, where the wild crew bunked—the bo’sun, the coxswain and quartermaster, and other mariners who kept afloat every shape and size of vessel— skiffs, barques, steamers, freighters, trows, and once, we even saw a military frigate. Rohinton had picked up seafarer’s slang from dipping into his father’s paperback collection of adventure tales of the sea, and took vicarious pleasure in awakening in me a great yearning for the sailor’s life. I marvelled often at the putative pleasures of this solitary calling, and wondered if I shouldn’t run away to sea, escaping forever the narrow, claustral world of the fire temple in which I languished.

  A hot, hazy day. Perched atop a large heap of crudely chopped logs, casually observing the hustle and bustle of the dockyard, we became aware of an odd-looking man standing some distance away, staring. In fact, you could say he was frowning at us. . .who was he? Did he recognize me, perhaps, or both of us? Was he a friend of my father’s, by any chance? Had I ever seen this man among the dozens who visited the temple every day?

  Short and fat, he was dressed in an oversized brown suit. When he started walking towards us, we noticed he had a curious start-and-stop gait, punctuated by an imperceptible limp. Rivulets of sweat streaked down his brown face, and lost themselves in overgrown, salt-and-pepper stubble. But the most menacing aspect of the man was, by far, his bulging eyes: bloodshot and popping out of their sockets as though in consequence of some extreme outrage inflicted on him, or of the terribly severe and vengeful moral outlook this had engendered. For one foolish instant, the thought crossed my mind that I should leap off the heap of timber and run as fast as I could, before the fat man got anywhere closer to us. But I didn’t move, and neither did Rohinton. We returned his stare stonily, and waited for him to approach.

  ‘Bas. . .?’

  He gestured quizzically, when he was finally standing in front of us: but for a minute or so after that, kept silent, only regarding us in turn with those truculent eyes, as though wishing to examine us from every possible angle.

  ‘Well. . .? No work-business? No lesson-paani? What do you have to say for yourselves, you loafers?’

  The rhetorical intent behind this gruff questioning was evident to us, and we didn’t attempt any reply. His voice was hoarse and he spoke inarticulately, as though with a swollen tongue.

  ‘It’s obvious that you boys have little, oh-so-little interest in studying, focusing. . .’ he said, looking terribly aggrieved, as if wounded by some wanton act of negligence on our part. We continued to gawp dumbly at this stranger; and he in turn to goggle at us with those angry, protuberant eyes.

  ‘In my time, too, there were many like you at school. . .loafers and layabouts, truants and shirkers. Absconders! And I can tell you from my many years of experience and observation—all of them, every single one, came to nought!’

  The fat man continued to drip perspiration from his forehead, speaking in a furious manner, stumbling over his words, spraying spittle as he spoke. As though his thoughts were racing faster than his tongue could move, as though the pressure of all he had to say rendered his speech breathless and blurred.

  ‘I know. . . I know people,’ he said, ‘I have tonnes of experience. I tell you, I can read people like a book, inside out. . . Now you, for instance,’ he pointed a crooked index finger at Rohinton, ‘I can tell just by looking at you, you hate studying. . . You’ve never read a book in your life, and won’t, if you can help it.’

  It made me squirm to listen to this assessment of Rohinton which seemed so much more applicable to me.

  ‘Well, it takes all kinds. . .’ he continued, at the same breakneck speed. The fat man was unstoppable. ‘This boy, now. . .’ he was pointing his stubby, crooked finger at me, ‘now this boy’s different: he’s thoughtful, hard-working, persevering. But of what use are all these virtues, if he keeps bad company? Your “friends” will be the ruination of you. I know what happened in my own case.’

  What happened in your case? I’m sure both Rohinton and I would have given a great deal to know the answer. But before our curiosity could be satisfied, suddenly this strange fat man was shouting at us in an intemperately loud voice:

  ‘Why are you not at school? Tell me. What are you doing out here, loafing about the docks? Answer me! Where is your school? Tell me, at once.’

  ‘We are quite finished with school, sir. Waiting to go into college.’

  Actually, in Rohinton’s own case this was perfectly true. He was to leave for England next month. His father had arranged for him to join a finishing school at a place called Bath, before he was old enough to attend college in Cambridge.

  ‘Don’t you lie to me!’ the fat man became threateningly aggressive. ‘We spoke the same lies when we were dodging school. I’ll teach you a thing or two about telling lies. So what, you boys attend college in your school uniform, do you?’

  In fact, Rohinton was in casual home wear. Only, his light brown shirt more or less matched the shade of ou
r beige school shirt; as for me, that’s what I slipped into every morning, and the dark brown trousers of my school uniform, when it was time to leave home (supposedly to attend my extra coaching classes). And here I was actually cutting classes, I thought to myself guiltily—the fat man’s apprehensions were not entirely misplaced.

  ‘I never lie, sir,’ Rohinton insisted, with a hint of loftiness. ‘My friend here is yet to finish his final year of school, that’s why he’s in his school uniform. As for me—’

  But the fat man wasn’t listening. He had bent down and picked up a heavy piece of wood, which he was brandishing ominously.

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more lies, I’m warning you,’ he spluttered in uncontrolled rage. ‘What you boys need is a good whacking. A whacking you won’t forget for the rest of your lives. And later, you’ll thank me for it, too. Indeed, you will. If anyone had given me a good thrashing when I was playing truant from school, I might well have been someone else today. . .’

  But this moment of reflective respite was overtaken by renewed rage. He began swinging the piece of wood wildly in the air, flailing it about him like a madman, seemingly intent on carrying out his threat. When he took small but purposeful steps in our direction, I was scared. It was too late for us to start running now.

  Unexpectedly, as if out of nowhere, another man, a rather lean, clean-shaven man, appeared from behind the fat man and said something softly in his ear. I can’t be sure I heard him right, but this is what it sounded like:

  ‘Dhunjibhai wants to see you in his office. . .’

  This innocuous message, whatever it meant, had a devastating effect on the fat man. He seemed to crumble, deflate. . .his anger and his bullying left him in an instant, and he became as frightened as any schoolboy who has been summoned to the principal’s office.

  ‘Oh, no. . .I’ve done nothing wrong, I swear. But why, why does he want me? No, please. . .please no, sir.’