Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

by Cyrus Mistry

  I spent the whole afternoon searching for a scrapbook I hadn’t come across in a long while. In it, I had pasted a rare newspaper clipping of the first All-India Cricket Team to tour England, which boasted of seven stalwart Parsi players, including Homi Kaka and Meherji Bulsara. The scrapbook had never got further than three or four pages of cricketing snippets—for want of a supply of printed matter—after which I had diversified to include swimmers, cyclists, bodybuilders and other stars from the sporting world. The eighty-page notebook was less than a third filled, but it was something I had done, something I didn’t want to just leave behind—even though Vispy had located and contributed about half a dozen of its portraits. No, it was my scrapbook.

  My exhaustion, I’m sure, was most certainly caused not so much by physical exertions as by the unrelenting emotional flagellation Mother inflicted on both of us, herself as well as me, unable to accept, until the final moment, the inevitability of what was to befall her unhappy family.

  Throughout that entire last day she had been at least partly effective in suppressing her tears—not so for most of the previous week; but now Mother resorted to a new stratagem—of abstaining from looking at me altogether, wearing an expression of dreamy nonchalance, or looking into the distance even while speaking to me, which she only did if she absolutely had to. Perhaps it was her buffer against breaking down altogether. Whatever had to be said, in any case—in simple phrases, or lamentations of grief— had already been expressed, and expended in fairly extravagant measure. Now, only lassitude remained.

  In the evening, after he returned home from work, and Father hadn’t yet come in for his dinner, Vispy pulled me aside for a brief, confidential chat.

  ‘You’re still only eighteen, right?’ he said to me in a slightly hoarse whisper.

  ‘Nineteen, soon,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Lucky bugger, aren’t you, Phiroze, you should know that. . .’

  ‘Lucky?’

  ‘I’ll be twenty-seven next month, you know. . .and so far, I’ve never been with a woman.’

  ‘You will, you will. . .’ I said to him with an air of superiority, unwilling to forgo the trump he was offering me, ‘when the right woman comes along.’

  ‘Right or wrong, I don’t know,’ he confessed, almost mournfully, ‘right now I feel just any woman would do.’

  I didn’t see Father that night at all. It appeared he had decided to make an appearance much later than usual, so he could avoid meeting me. In the last few days his nocturnal schedule of early sleep and rousing had gone completely awry; although, however tired or somnolent he might feel, he had never once missed his morning’s vigil of ringing the temple bell at cock’s crow.

  I embraced Mother silently and wished her good night. She didn’t speak, but returned my tight embrace and kissed me on the forehead.

  I must have fallen asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow, but my sleep was disturbed by a string of dreams. As usual, they were rather fragmented and humdrum. A boy of eleven—me, presumably—was being taken through the paces of tying the sacred girdle around his waist by an enormous, bearded priest. My father? Not Muncherjee, certainly.

  Evidently what was in progress was my navjote ceremony, for the burly priest standing behind me held my hands aloft, in which I held raised, my kustee. He was enunciating with precision and vigour those passages which must be spoken while knotting the thread in its three all-important stages. I had to articulate the words in unison with the priest, while he guided me through the procedure. The odd thing was I couldn’t concentrate on any of this, because the priest’s long beard kept caressing the nape of my neck as his chin wagged while uttering the words of the ancient text with guttural precision. Unintentionally, yet without respite, and perhaps without his knowledge, the priest’s whiskers tickled me so that finally I broke into a helpless chuckling. This angered him greatly, and I immediately desisted. But somehow, before I knew it, I found myself hopelessly entangled in my own sacred cord which had developed elastic properties, elongating inexplicably into a coil several yards longer than it should have been. Enraged, he expostulated in my ear:

  ‘Shame on you! Don’t know how to do even that much? And you’ve come out to perform your navjote? Shame on you!’

  Next I was on the terrace of the fire temple, flying a kite with Vispy. But this time, it was I who was in charge; Vispy was only cheering me on, guiding me with hints, strategies, tactics. The sky was chock-full of other kites, and very breezy; with masterful finesse, I cut them down, one after the other, watching them detach from the controlling strings of their manipulators, swoop and go into free fall. Even more than myself, it was Vispy who seemed to be enjoying himself greatly, yelling whoops of orgasmic delight with every kite that came a cropper, urging me to cut some more. . .screaming, after each triumph, that blood-curdling war cry of every kite fighter: patang kapyo che!

  Then I was in a dark forest: it was dusk; this was my forest, I was sure, though an exceptionally dense and wooded part of it which I had never seen before. On the darkening horizon I could make out the silhouettes of the Towers. In a small clearing at my feet, I was digging a pit with a shovel, to bury a collection of dead animals—presumably, my own expired pets. I shovelled in a dog, a leopard, an ostrich, a porcupine, and finally, incredibly, an entire hippopotamus! When I looked up again, I saw that every branch of every tree around me was populated by hundreds of vultures. A moon was up and, by its light I could see that each of these dark creatures was staring hungrily, not at the dead beasts I was burying, but at me. In my dream I remember thinking, how odd that there are vultures still out even after dark. . .

  Something must have made me stir at that moment, for I began to feel half-awake, woken up by a loud argument in my father’s room. Yet, in what seemed like just a few minutes after, a deep sleep overwhelmed me, drowning everything out. When I finally rose in the morning, I was no longer sure if what I had overheard was something that actually happened, or if it was all a dream.

  My mother’s voice, with shrewish sophistry was disinterring and dissecting some episode from my father’s youth.

  ‘Why weren’t you straight with her right at the start? You should have warned her right then that you couldn’t help her, that you had a fiancée. You should have let her know right then you were about to get married and start a family of your own. Instead you led her on. . .’

  ‘Who’re you talking about?’

  ‘As if you don’t know. Your Rudabeh, of course’

  ‘Please never mention that name inside my agiari!’

  My father’s voice, usually thick and gruff, sounded subdued, almost frightened in the face of Mother’s vengeful aggression. But presently, he shouted back:

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Hilla? Have you gone completely mad? That was twenty-five years ago, and the woman has been dead for nineteen! You wake me up in the middle of the night to rake up some stale, moth-eaten slander that’s over and done with—?’

  ‘Oh, it’ll never go away, don’t fear, some things never do. And how can you think of sleeping on a night like this? I haven’t slept a wink.’

  ‘Then go to sleep, why don’t you? What’s so special about this night?’

  ‘What’s so special you ask? Tonight’s the last night my son will spend in his home. Maybe the last time we’ll see him again. And you ask me what’s so special about this night. . .?’

  I could hear Mother sobbing bitterly.

  ‘It’s all your fault. All your fault. . .because you could not treat your own sister with some decency and respect.’

  ‘Not sister,’ Father corrected her. ‘Half-sister.’

  ‘Okay, half-sister, but you still didn’t treat her right. You had no kindness in your heart for the woman you had once desired!’

  ‘Oh stop it, Hilla! She was a bloody tramp!’

  ‘That was later, we all know about that. She became the most sought-after harlot in Bombay. But before? When both of you were young? Don’t think I know not
hing about all that went on before you married me.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Hilla, go to bed! The woman has been dead for nineteen years!’

  ‘That she may be,’ said Mother. ‘But today my son has to pay a high price for your swinish conduct. It was you who drove her to whoring, you beast! You! I know it! By your refusal to help when she was in trouble, by your heartless and spiteful conduct. . .’

  When I woke up in the morning, I was much surprised to find I could recall such a lot. All jumbled up, no doubt, and I’m terribly lazy with remembering my dreams, but these ones had seemed so particularly vivid, they were still before my eyes. Nevertheless, I had a busy day ahead of me and didn’t want to spend much time dwelling on the imponderable. Like other fragments that had preceded it, I dismissed this bizarre conversation between my parents as no more than an effulgence of my own fervid imagination. Soon, it sank once again into the pond of oblivion from which, no doubt, it had bubbled up, unheralded.

  Always shrouded in mystery, especially for her own bewildered child, Rudabeh’s death occurred when her daughter was only three.

  Sepideh had never heard any real explanation of how, or when or why it happened. She was too young, and Temoo, I suppose, too ashamed of the truth—of his own indirect acquiescence to, if not complicity in, its causes—to be able to explain it to his own child in any meaningful way.

  Seppy saw her mother’s dead body only once, during its last rites when, except for a few inches of exposed nose and lidded eyes, she was entirely covered by a tightly-drawn white sheet. She wasn’t able to touch her mother, or embrace her. In accordance with Zoroastrian practice, she was constrained to maintain a distance of three feet from the body whose ritual purification had been concluded, and could only watch her from among the line of chairs put out for mourners. Within the hour, once the priests had recited their prayers, her mother was carried away from the funeral hall by four burly khandhias, to become a meal for patiently waiting vultures. Once again, of course, Seppy was not allowed to join the small train of male mourners that followed the body up the hill.

  Once, while she was pregnant and reminiscing, Seppy told me how bitterly she had cried on the day before her mother’s funeral—when her father was summoned by the police to identify a body. Not at the apparent confirmation of her mother’s death, she explained, for that had somehow already dawned on her during the two days she had been missing, but in her desperation that her father should take her along, not leave her alone now. Naturally, he didn’t think it fit to take along a child to the morgue. Instead, he left her with Bujji, his wife, Khorshed, and their two young children.

  ‘I felt I was being punished,’ she explained, ‘for what had happened to my Mama. As if in some way I was responsible.’

  Bujji’s old mother was alive then, and shared the flat with them. The children were unable to distract Seppy from her distress. It was the old lady, however, who put her in her lap and rocked her hypnotically, while whispering hoarsely in her ear:

  ‘Rarye nahin, dikra, rarye nahin. . . Mamane chhootkaro mulyo.’ Don’t cry, child, don’t you cry. . . Mama’s found her freedom.

  This formula, repeated over and over again, accompanied by tender caresses over her face, hair, and entire body, calmed her; as the calculated secrecy and patchy verisimilitude surrounding the account she had been given of her mother’s disappearance and death had failed to. The hollowness of the story—that her mother had been out with a friend, when she met with an accident—her own intuitive conviction that some essential information was being held back (for why, she had reflected later on, as her ability to reason grew sharper, would extensive police investigation be involved in a simple ‘accident’, or for that matter why was there such grief and shock in it for her father, once he had identified her body; and why was her body covered like that at the funeral, so as to conceal every part of her face, except her nose and eyes?), all these unanswered questions disturbed her greatly. Something worse had happened to her, which she was not being told about. As if there was anything worse than the horror of losing a mother. . .

  And that final cruelty of not being allowed to touch or kiss her mother even after she finally found her laid out in the funeral hall had, over the years, congealed in a ball of pain that Seppy had never been encouraged to address, or appease.

  In the beginning, we often discussed this tragic event of her childhood at length. By this time, of course, Seppy had collated every piece of information that she could worm out of Temoo, and others in the community who had been around at the time.

  ‘There was some kind of dispute over inheritance I’m told,’ I said to Seppy during one of those extended exhumations of the remote past. ‘I learned about it myself only quite recently, before moving here, to the Towers. . .’

  During my last few days at home I had often heard things which hardly made any sense to me: tearful and bitter recriminations from my mother, raking up a part of Father’s past I knew nothing about. Mostly, she seemed to be only muttering them to herself; and I knew the cause of her emotional disquiet was my own impending departure. Later, after I had moved to the Towers, some of the things she had said began to piece together. Seppy had been curious to learn every detail.

  ‘Apparently, my grandfather, Rustomji—Framroze’s father— married a second time, after his first wife died. Your mother was born to his second wife, Meheringez, who was, as you know of course, a Zoroastrian Irani. By the time she was born, Framroze himself was already twelve. They grew up in the same house. When Rudabeh was sixteen, and Father was in his late twenties. . . Now this is my mother speaking and I would take it with a generous pinch of salt, knowing how possessive and jealous she can be—according to her, he was so besotted by your mother’s virginal beauty, he actually wanted to marry her!

  ‘Rustomji was furious: he wanted to know if his son had taken leave of his senses. Wiser counsel prevailed, however, and it was impressed upon Framroze that this would be tantamount to incest. And if he should persist in harbouring such filthy thoughts, Rustomji threatened to disinherit him and throw him out of his house.

  ‘After that strong rebuff, Framroze turned his attention to religion, and seriously pursued his vocation as priest. Rustomji lived to a fairly ripe age, even outliving your grandmother, Meheringez. By the time he died, my father had already met Hilla, and married her. If I’m not mistaken, Vispy, too, was born.

  ‘Now Rustomji wasn’t exactly wealthy, and the flat they had been living in at Sleater Road actually belonged to a cousin, who was keen to repossess it. You probably know all this anyway. . .’

  ‘Go on. There may be some detail I haven’t heard of.’

  ‘Ironically, there wasn’t much Rustomji had left behind to share anyway, but Framroze, apparently, didn’t think any of it should go to Rudabeh.’

  ‘Don’t I know it?’ said Seppy, interrupting my monologue. ‘That’s something Temoo has never been able to stop harping on.’

  ‘My father was the elder son and heir in any case. And by then, Rudabeh had started an affair with a known profligate and hooligan of the locality, Temoorus Ollia. . .

  ‘After Rustomji died, she even moved in with this man. Framroze was unforgiving, even vicious in his condemnation of his sister’s moral turpitude. Temoorus’s hard-drinking ways soon led to unhappiness and penury for Rudabeh, and Framroze felt his censure and disapproval stood vindicated.

  ‘Eventually, by way of compensation, he did do something to help her,’ I continued. But there was a wicked and deliberate irony about it. ‘He used his contacts with the Parsi Punchayet, to get a job for Temoorus as a khandhia at the Towers of Silence.’

  My mother had added to this story a small detail which I didn’t feel I should disclose to Seppy. It wasn’t at all significant in that sense; but I remember, I myself was rather shocked to hear it from Mother; for I had never had reason before this to believe my father capable of stooping to such tawdry meanness. Apparently, when he called Rudabeh to hand over the appoi
ntment letter for Temoorus, he spitefully declared that given her paramour’s fondness for the bottle, there was no better or more suitable position he could find him.

  One other incident from her mother’s brief life, which again I deliberately withheld, not wanting to further humiliate her, or compel her to relive her mother’s shame, humiliating enough for me to think of my own father’s outrageous behaviour:

  This was from the time after Rudabeh and Temoorus had moved into their quarters at the Towers, and a sort of thaw had set in their relations with my father. He had himself offered to give his sister a monthly handout of fifty rupees, or thereabouts, to help them tide over their financial difficulties. Only out of the goodness of his heart—not obligation, he had emphasized— and if he should find it difficult at any period in the future to persist with this dole—after all, he had his own wife and school-going son’s needs to look to—he would feel free to stop it, forthwith.

  I realize it’s impossible I should actually have been witness to the scene I am about to describe. Not even as an infant in arms—you see, for I was only born a year after Rudabeh met her unfortunate end. And yet, this incident remains vividly before my eyes, as though I had actually been present.

  (Which only goes to show, I suppose, that parents should exercise greater discretion when they speak in front of their children. For mere tangential references, snatches of invective or exaggeration as I surely must have overheard in later years, became fodder for my seemingly disinterested but actually heightened child’s receptivity, lodging deep in the recesses of my subconscious mind, and acquiring entity.)

  Mother had once described to me and Vispy while we were seated at the table helping her clean the french beans for our dinner—though this must have been specially for Vispy’s ears, I would imagine; she was very close to my elder brother, and often complained to him about various aspects of my father’s behaviour, and besides, she would have presumed I was too young to understand—how at the beginning of every month Rudabeh came to the temple gate and waited outside humbly, until Framroze came out and handed over some money, or sent it across with one of the temple boys if he was too busy. Mother didn’t approve at all of the way he had treated his sister, and felt it was completely wrong that we children weren’t even aware she was our aunt, who visited the temple every month but wasn’t allowed in, and that we actually had a cousin, about the same age as us whom we had never even met.