Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

by Cyrus Mistry

  Though electricity was in Bombay already, it was still just a bit expensive and there were relatively few domestic consumers. Buchia’s own office-cum-quarters had electricity. And one electric street lamp splashed a patch of brightness at the beginning of the wooded path leading to the upper funeral cottages; happily, this lamp post was situated immediately outside the khandhias’ tenement block. It was from the junction box of this lamp post that Yezdi ‘Electrician’—that’s what we called this lanky youth with the long hair and awkward, camel-like gait to distinguish him from Yezdi Tumboly, another more senior corpse bearer— would tap the line to power Temoo’s radio.

  This was a covert operation performed only after sundown, for Buchia would never have countenanced such piracy. Initially, Temoo himself was terribly jittery about the entire undertaking: the very idea of stealing electricity, as much as of the perilous act of sticking a screwdriver into the T-shaped slit of the junction box to prise its lid open, then locating the tiny cranny pointed out to him by Yezdi (amidst a jumble of other wires and terminals) into which he must insert the open end of the extended power cord that snaked from the radio, out his window, along the ground and all the way up into the junction box. It did seem frighteningly unsound; but then, once accomplished, the radio— and Temoo, and several others from our community, too—came into their own.

  Usually that street light was switched on at dusk. If not, he would call on me to hold up a candle or a kerosene lamp while, fumblingly, he sought to make contact. Yezdi had created a permanent joint for him to the radio’s power cord, increasing its total length by some eight or nine yards. He had warned Temoo repeatedly, of course, about the danger of coming into direct contact with a charge of electricity. No wonder Temoo was so jittery. But, over time, he grew more confident about rigging this clandestine power connection even when Yezdi wasn’t around to supervise.

  You see, Temoorus was always terribly proud of his radio and had jealously protected it ever since it had been gifted to his wife; even in the days when it was no more than a mere showpiece that occupied one corner of his dining table—a mute wooden cabinet—he would wipe the dust off it with a soft cloth every morning, tending to it almost worshipfully as if it were a deity, or the very fountainhead—a magic box from which all knowledge and truth flowed. Now that it could be made to break its silence, he was overjoyed.

  Whenever an event of any significance occurred in our country or the world, and we got wind of it from someone who had heard something, or seen a newspaper, the event or crisis immediately took on the excitement of a festive, social occasion in our small community of corpse bearers. For then—sometimes by advance notice, or prior submission—the power connection was rigged, the radio turned on, and the air became thick with voices, music and the crackle of static.

  Word spread quickly. Anyone was welcome to drop in and listen, and subsequently, sit around airing views, analyses, predictions. If they had something to drink, or munch on at home, they were expected to bring it along—a sort of tithe or offering for the privilege of listening to these critical broadcasts. Most often, of course, nobody had anything of the kind, and they came empty-handed; but nonetheless felt free to hold forth.

  1935 was the year in which Seppy and I got married. It was also the year, I remember, in which a new Government of India Act was proclaimed by our British rulers. When Gandhiji undertook his famous Salt March in 1930, I was still in school. But the response had been terrific: there were similar marches undertaken all over the country, and massive civil disobedience. People refused to pay rent, revenues and taxes. In the face of this open challenge to the law, once again we witnessed brutal police violence, repression and mass arrests. Gandhiji and Nehru were both clapped in jail; but the British remained unbending in their attitude.

  The call for complete Swaraj was then countered by this very insipid legislation of British parliament that promised ‘gradual development of self-governing institutions’ with a view to progressively achieving responsible government in India ‘as an integral part of the British Empire’. The demand for setting up a committee to draft a constitution for independent India was completely overlooked. Temoo often tuned in to ISBS as well, or Indian State Broadcasting Service, which later became AIR—All India Radio, or Akashvani. But sometimes, he was also able to catch short wave, and we heard the news from England.

  Appeasement of legitimate national aspirations was flatly denied to us Indians. Yet, almost every other night or certainly on weekend nights, we heard confusing reports which indicated that British, and other European leaders, were recklessly appeasing the insane ambitions of a dictator who was systematically militarizing his country—in contravention of the restraints imposed on it by the Treaty of Versailles. It was a frenetic and difficult time— difficult to understand, I mean. Events unfolded so bewilderingly fast one couldn’t hope to grasp their logic, much less the politics that had inspired them. The fragmentary bits of information we culled from short wave often didn’t make any sense to us at all; yet, there was a frightening momentum in the build-up that led to World War II.

  My interest in sports and sporting events was rather keen even at that age, for I remember listening with dismay to a BBC report that alleged exclusion of several high-ranking Jewish athletes from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Why on earth any government should want to exclude its best sportsmen I couldn’t understand until I had learned a little more about Hitler’s own beliefs and ideas.

  Initially, it did seem that he was intent on presenting a clean image of himself to the world. Before the international press delegation could arrive in Berlin—we heard of this only much later, of course—Hitler had ordered his stormtroopers to clean up the city of its anti-Semitic posters and insignia. Even later, after the war had started, we heard reports of the cold-blooded murder of a handful of German journalists who heroically refused to toe the Nazi line: who had believed it was important to report accurately on what was going on in Germany during those years.

  Well, as I said, all this proceeded at a reckless pace, but we did get some glimpse into the shape of things to come. It wasn’t our world, though, and we didn’t have much to do with it. Except that it became very obvious that our rulers adopted different standards when dealing with unrest in their own colonies, and quite different ones for negotiating with their European neighbours.

  Seppy and me, we listened awhile but usually, once we had grasped the gist of the headlines, we left the old fogies to their meagre celebration and boisterous arguments. If it was a bright, moonlit night, we would stroll through the groves into the forest. The truth was our lives were so closed, so dispossessed, even world wars, riots, or our own country’s struggle for independence hardly seemed to matter. So far removed were we from these fateful eventualities of history that, except by a complex chain of inferences and deductions, none of them touched our personal lives at all.

  It wasn’t very late one evening when Seppy and I walked through the casuarinas, towards the pear orchard, without speaking. . . The sky was beginning to darken, but still held promise of great calm.

  ‘Tell me one thing, Fuzzy, will you?’ she said, breaking the silence.

  Seppy thought Phiroze sounded too old-fashioned and staid, and almost always called me by that pet name she had made up. I must add, in those days I usually wore my hair long, and it was very curly.

  ‘But you must promise to be completely honest,’ she insisted. ‘Only then does it make sense. . . Promise me you’ll search your heart before you answer.’

  ‘But answer what?’ I was curious. ‘You haven’t asked me anything.’

  She waited a long moment before replying. Come to think of it, something had been bothering her lately.

  ‘Do you have regrets about your decision? I mean to marry me, and be trapped forever in the Towers of Silence?’

  ‘Trapped? Didn’t know I was,’ I joked. ‘I still have a few years left before they carry me up and dump me in a tower. And even then, the birds won’t take
more than ten minutes to set me free. Before you know it, I’ll be soaring high in blue skies.’

  ‘I’m serious, Phiroze,’ she said, almost mournfully. ‘I stay awake at nights sometimes thinking about this. It just wasn’t fair to you, was it? To have to give up everything: your family, your studies, the whole world, and be confined to this shadowy, overgrown reserve. . .’

  ‘Oh I don’t really see myself as confined,’ I replied. ‘Usually, once or twice a day at least I do go out—to fetch a corpse or two. As far as my studies went, I was always rather a dummy. If I hadn’t given them up, my school would probably have expelled me. Anyway, I’ve come to think of this place as the most beautiful in the whole world, Seppy. It really is. This is paradise we live in, Seppy, don’t you think so, too?’

  ‘You know what I mean, Fuzzy, don’t let’s pretend. . .’

  ‘No, I don’t, honestly. I couldn’t ask for any better deal than to be held captive in paradise. With a licence to roam freely inside its boundaries—and with you by my side at that. You don’t know what the city outside’s like: all noise, and dirt, and people. . . Anyway, I should ask you, what is it that you regret about our marriage?

  ‘I don’t. I only feel that I didn’t give you a chance. You are so young, Fuzzy. And sex is such a powerful thing. Once I had made love to you, I knew there was no way I would lose you. . .’

  For a moment my mind flashed back to what Mother had said on that night of the confrontation, that my first encounter with Seppy was no more than a cleverly plotted ruse for seduction.

  ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have made love at all until we got married. . .’ she mused. ‘That’s what I feel, I shouldn’t have let you. That way you would have been free to find out if you really wanted to marry me. . .and all the baggage that came with me—this place, the ostracism—whether you really wanted to take on any of that. Of course, you didn’t. Nobody could have.’

  ‘Given a choice, let me tell you. . .’ I said, putting my arms around her, ‘I’d marry you again, sweetheart. . .’ and kissed her beneath a raspberry tree in full blossom, under the waning blush of a darkening sky.

  We lingered awhile under its canopy, and she persisted with her train of thought:

  ‘You’ve always been so gallant and charming about this. . .I love you, too, Fuzzy. . . But the work itself doesn’t bother you? I mean, don’t you find it too demanding, too demeaning?’

  ‘It’s a cakewalk, dear Seppy,’ I remember replying. ‘Don’t you worry about that. . .and you, Sepideh, are my sugar plum fairy of these woods. It’s you who make it all so easy. But if you don’t watch out, soon you may end up being my sugar plump fairy!’

  We laughed. Just a week or so later, Seppy found out, and told me that she was pregnant. How beautiful she was with child, how sated with happiness. . . There were worries, too, because we had been reminded over and over again of the dangers of marrying a close family relation. But thank heavens, Farida was born absolutely normal.

  The flowering of meaning and intellect in my life happened only after I met Seppy and fell in love. We shared something very special which even now isn’t easy for me to define. I could oversimplify and call it a sense of humour. But it was something much tougher, yet more frail. A shared matrix of perception?—I suppose one could call it that—whose common nodes so intricately intersected that there was complete parity in our understanding of all things: the world, people and every eventuality we encountered in life.

  This was no small thing, I should say, for it meant that no matter how rough a day either of us had had, a mere look in the eyes, the subtle sparkle of a smile, a fleeting caress in passing, any form of communication however insignificant could transform one’s mood in an instant, engendering a whole new perspective for the other partner as well. It worked that way with both of us.

  Our daughter, Farida, was already a year old when, one afternoon, Temoo’s radio was turned on. This had become possible only because Buchia was away on leave for three days, making a personal pilgrimage to Udvada.

  The news was all thunder and fury about maverick Germany’s invasion of Poland, and Prime Minister Chamberlain’s reluctant but angry declaration of war. There were disturbing though still unconfirmed reports coming out of Germany—Austria and Czechoslovakia as well—about the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

  I remember some of the excitement, comments and expostulations that were flying around Temoo’s crowded living room, before we made our exit.

  ‘What have we to do with their war, tell me? Let them perish if they want to!’

  ‘Just like that, without asking anyone, without checking with us first they declare that India is at war, too. . .? And what prizes can we expect for fighting in their war?’

  ‘No prizes, brother. Just the glory of crushing the bogey of Fascism!’

  ‘Fascism-bashism is all very well but why put our lives on the line? Don’t we remember where all our sacrifices of the last war got us? The Jallianwalla massacre, the Rowlatt Act. Why is Gandhi being such a hypocrite?’

  ‘No prizes for guessing why Congress leaders are such arse-kissers. . . So they can step into British shoes, once vacated. No matter if they be stinking with the sweat of those red monkeys, or soaked in Indian blood. Finally, power is the key. . .they’ll do anything to take over, once our lords and masters decide it’s time to go home.’

  ‘Actually, that Hitler seems to me quite a decent, no-nonsense politician, really. We could use someone strong like that in our own country, don’t you think, instead of these crafty khaddar topeewalas!’

  ‘Oi, oi,’ interrupted Temoo, derisively, ‘we already have one Buchia here, don’t forget! Behnchoad, Hitler no baap!’

  Farida will wake up any minute, Sepideh said to me, softly. It was time for us to leave. This time we weren’t planning a stroll, just getting back next door to our end of the tenement where our infant babe was sleeping, like an angel. It’s time for her feed, I can tell, she said; the ache in her milk-engorged breasts was growing more intense.

  What I had said by way of reassurance to Seppy was quite true. To this day I am amazed how strong I was, how easily I took to the work. I am short, and built a little stockily, but I had endless reserves of energy.

  I still remember my embarrassment on being teased by the other candidates at the naavar retreat which I flunked. It was the old priest, Muncherjee, in fact, who indulged in a sly witticism, while the other boys roared with laughter:

  ‘Perhaps koustee, not kustee, would have suited you better, Phiroze!’ he had punned, while reaching out to pinch my biceps.

  Maybe freestyle wrestling, rather than ritual and prayer. God knows, he could have been right! Some of my strength and bulk has survived, though the muscles have frayed. When I look in the mirror I see that outwardly, give or take a little, I still look much the same as in my younger days. Except that rather rapidly I’ve lost almost my entire curly mop of hair. Now only a wispy aureole still attaches itself to my shiny pate, giving me an appropriately monkish appearance. If Seppy were still here, she would have had to think up another pet name for me: Egghead? Ostrich?

  I miss my Sepideh very much. Sometimes I fear I won’t be able to carry on without her calming presence. Why did she have to die so suddenly, so improbably? Just when our happiness was reaching its zenith, and hers, too: just as she was beginning to realize the meaning of motherhood, the joy and anticipation of watching her only child grow up. . .

  But no matter how bereft I may feel, I have to carry on, if only for Farida’s sake. I had promised Seppy as she lay dying I would look after her daughter, make sure she went to a good school. . . No, for my own sake, too. . . There’s no choice in this, is there? At all times life demands from one courage, and perseverance. Humour, too, perhaps wit and discretion as well. . . Without a grain of each of these, I’d certainly feel crushed by the monstrous encumbrance of an incoherent and meaningless existence.

  Dreams, reality, nightmares—are these, in fact, distinct plan
es of consciousness? Or merely different modalities for perceiving the one grand canvas of an indivisible reality?

  There have been moments in my life when I have felt genuinely confused by this question—whether a distinct line of division exists between subconscious and wakeful reality; or whether that bewilderment we experience in such moments of obfuscation is itself an illusion. . .

  The very last night I slept in my family quarters in the Soonamai Ichchaporia Agiari—for that is what my father’s small fire temple is called, in memory of its founding benefactress, an entrepreneur of the last century who, incidentally, provided employment to dozens of indigent women at a barn-like sweatshop on Sleater Road which produced bhakra, pickles, popatji, and other savouries—I was terribly exhausted; both physically and emotionally. The next morning, I was to leave for the Towers of Silence: that is, to make a more or less permanent separation from my family and the home I had grown up in—perhaps all too quickly. I still had two-and-a-half months to go before I turned nineteen.

  Physically, of course, I was tired because I had spent much of my day finding, deciding about and putting together the things I would be taking along: my few clothes, my sudrahs, my topee, a couple of pairs of underwear and socks, various knick-knacks and lucky charms that held an emotional significance for me from childhood. A volume of Gujarati stories about a folk hero called Hameed Mia who had the power to become invisible at will, and his adventures with Parween Banu, his wife. I had heard these stories read out to me several times by Mother when I was a child, yet felt reassured by the idea of keeping the book with me. They were funny stories, and Mother used to read them to me when I wouldn’t sleep. My entire luggage fitted into my old school bag, and Vispy’s, both of which I had been told I could use to transport my things. We had no suitcases or trunks in the quarters which could be spared.