Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

by Cyrus Mistry

‘That’s what matters. All’s well that ends well, thanks to you. . .’

  ‘Thanks a lot, Rohinton.’

  He waved to me and drove away.

  But, as we found out the following day, all wasn’t well, and wouldn’t end so well either. Neither of us had any inkling when we parted, that though one conspiracy, hatched in London—to blow up Mountbatten with a bomb constructed at the Towers of Silence—was quite rightly abandoned even before it could be further elaborated on, another conspiracy, amusingly paltry and low-down in intent, yet equally nasty, would be enacted at the very location before the next forty-eight hours had elapsed.

  Thirteen

  Two days after my evening with Rohinton at the Taj, Joseph Maloney Kanga passed away. His body arrived at Doongerwaadi late in the afternoon, in a private hearse requisitioned by Dr Billimoria’s Nursing Home.

  Before it could be moved from the hospital stretcher onto our iron bier, a flurry of phone calls flew to and from Buchia to Coyaji and from Coyaji to other senior trustees of the Punchayet. Finally, it was decided by the higher-ups, (and Buchia was told to follow instructions precisely), that the body be accepted as usual on presentation of a death certificate from the presiding doctor, and normal procedures for a Zoroastrian funeral followed. However, as an additional if unusual precaution, Buchia was advised that after the body was ceremoniously placed on the floor of Wadiaji’s cottage, with an oil lamp at its head and a tray of sandalwood and afarghan at its feet, he should ensure that the door of the cottage was padlocked through the night, until mourners started arriving in the morning for the funeral.

  Whoever issued these instructions hadn’t taken into account the fierce reaction of orthodoxy amongst the corpse bearers themselves—a contagion Buchia himself had caught in full-blown form rather early in his career. For nearly a month, debate on the issue had raged in the vernacular press, dividing Zoroastrians in the city. The more liberal, pro-reform sections, perhaps sensing how volatile and sensitive this matter was to the common people, adopted an ambivalent and particularly indecisive posture.

  They argued that though Joseph could not strictly speaking be considered a Zoroastrian, and hence wasn’t entitled to avail of a funeral at the Towers of Silence, his case was a unique one, and any exception made for it needn’t become a binding precedent for all time; that his scholarly intimacy with the faith was akin to, if not equal to, the ritual significance of a navjote, which for circumstantial reasons he had been denied; moreover, as the son of a fully fledged and altruistic Zarthosti, Nariman Kanga, the trustees of the Parsi Punchayet were not violating any essential mandate of the authority invested in them by allowing his funeral to take place; and finally, that the valuable donation made by Nariman Kanga would go a long way towards benefiting the needy of the community (but which should not be interpreted under any circumstances as having biased the Punchayet’s decision).

  The legalistic shilly-shallying of the reformist faction, both within the Punchayet and outside it, led to the orthodoxy’s vocal majority raising its campaign to a shrilly hysterical intensity. Their leaders were quoted in the press describing the proposal to minister funeral rites to Joseph as the ‘Great Betrayal’. Naturally, khandhias, nussesalars and priests, that is, all those in charge of physically handling the corpse and conducting obsequies for it, could not be expected to remain dispassionate at the centre of this great clamour. Myself, frankly, I felt quite indifferent to the whole hullabaloo; though mostly sorry for Joseph and his family. In the course of the afternoon, when instructed to do so by Buchia, I completed the washing of his corpse. That was the full extent of my arrested acquaintance with Joseph Kanga.

  Now Buchia himself, a very traditional-minded person when it came to religious matters, was horrified that the body of a half-caste ‘Parsi’ who had never had a navjote, was to be allowed into the sacrosanct space of the Towers. For the first time in his long tenure, he felt completely at cross-purposes with his bosses, whose feeble judgment he felt had undermined his own authority and competence. In other words, he felt that left to his own devices, he would have found a better solution to the entire complicated dilemma, neither offending orthodox Zoroastrian sentiment, nor repudiating Kanga’s generous donation.

  It seemed amazing to me that Buchia, who had been in cohorts with the trustees so slyly during the khandhia’s strike, and did everything he could to subvert it, should now mutinously, albeit covertly, be militating against their decision in the matter of Joseph Kanga’s funeral. Even more amazing, perhaps, was the decision of a group of khandhias to approach Buchia to ventilate their disquiet, and seek his views on finding some last-minute redress for it.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Buchia is reported to have declaimed when the group of five approached him: it was Farokh, Fali, Jungoo, Shiavux and Homiar, I believe.

  I realize I’ve hardly mentioned these last two in my narrative so far. From among the newer lot recruited after the strike, I took an instant dislike to Shiavux, whose foppish, effeminate and craven manner put me off the very first time I met him, and as for Homiar, I found him decidedly dull; so never really got to know either of them. Nor was I present at that meeting where Buchia made that emphatic response—and as it turned out, prophetic as well—to their discontent about the funeral which was to take place the following morning.

  The kidnapping of Joseph Maloney body, pre-planned, and meticulously executed in the small hours of the morning, was the concluding act in a sordid and farcical morality play which no one got wind of, until the very end. But there was a completely unexpected fall-out to it, an unscripted final scene, which was irreversibly played out as well. The following description of that night’s events is a reconstruction based on my subsequent conversations with Farokh and Jungoo.

  Nettled that the wishy-washy submissiveness shown by his superiors in a matter which, in his opinion, constituted a serious threat to the tradition and conventions of an ancient religion— which customary practices, after all, had been its mainstay, and the very reason for its having survived the depredations of the centuries—Buchia decided to take matters into his own hands.

  It was of crucial importance of course, he realized, that this be a top secret operation. If he was at all apprehensive about it, it was only because he knew he could not pull it off on his own, and would be compelled to depend on his accomplices. That afternoon, in his office, he tried to impress on the gang of five the utmost need for secrecy. He told them that the police would definitely press charges against all of them if they were found out. The other matter which he stressed as being of greatest importance was that they should remain sober, and not under any circumstances, touch alcohol during that entire night.

  As far as the first imperative went, all five kept their word, not disclosing their plans to anyone outside the gang, not even their closest friends or their wives. Of course, Buchia had been careful to reveal even to his co-conspirators no more than a small fragment of his plan at the time, only as much as was absolutely necessary to carry it forward. Somehow, it seemed, the boys had unexpectedly developed great confidence in their leader’s ability and acumen. As far as the second condition went, however—that of abjuring alcohol—there may have been some difficulty. For one thing, the operation was scheduled to commence at 1 a.m. Now, for confirmed boozards to be able to stay awake and alert at that hour without recourse to a swig or two of the warmth-giving beverage seems unlikely. Some of their actions and conversations during the long night that followed also indicate that one or two of them may have consumed more than just a swig or two.

  Buchia himself had padlocked the door of Wadiaji’s funeral cottage, after Joseph’s body was deposited there. The key was in his office but cleverly, to ensure he himself wasn’t directly implicated, at a quarter to one that night he got one of the boys to break the lock using an iron rod as a wrench. Jungoo had been told to bring the hearse up to the cottage. Within minutes, Joseph’s body was shifted into the hearse. At precisely one o’clock, Buchia got into the fron
t cabin next to Jungoo, and the four others, Farokh, Fali, Homiar and Shiavux squeezed into the back of the hearse with the corpse.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Buchia whispered to Jungoo. It was a cold night; and a full moon bathed everything in ghostly white. The engine of the vehicle wouldn’t restart until the boys in the back got out and pushed it for a hundred feet or so to a point where the declension in the hill was marked. Then it just took a nudge, and the hearse rolled down, firing the cylinders of its engine spontaneously. The boys cheered, and Jungoo raced the engine for a few seconds until Buchia shushed them harshly.

  ‘Do you donkeys have any sense at all?’ he asked in an urgent whisper. ‘The watchman will be up here in a minute to investigate what the ruckus is all about. . .’

  Everyone quietened down.

  ‘Where to now?’ Jungoo whispered back at Buchia.

  ‘Sewree,’ he answered. ‘The cemetery—do you know it?— where we can give our friend a decent Christian burial. . .’

  As it was the watchman at the gate of the Towers of Silence was completely dead to the world, smothered in a muffler and a monkey cap. He didn’t stir even when the hearse approached.

  ‘See,’ said Buchia. ‘Just look at the scoundrel! Paid to stay awake, but already adrift in the land of Nod. Anyone who had a mind to could easily enter, steal a corpse, and walk away with it. . .’ It was meant to be a sort of self-deprecating joke, for that’s exactly what he and his cronies were up to. But nobody laughed. Instead, Fali asked in all seriousness:

  ‘Now who would want to steal a corpse? Death has already robbed him of everything he ever owned. Why pillage a pauper?’

  Nobody had an answer to that philosophical aside either. Then Shiavux intoned with the sanctimonious propriety of a school’s head-boy:

  ‘Please understand: we’re not stealing a corpse; no, actually we’re only relocating it. And that, too, for a very good cause: to protect the purity of our religion and race.’

  If he had expected their leader, Buchia, to applaud his sentiments, he must have been disappointed, for Buchia only frowned, then growled at Shiavux:

  ‘Okay, okay, then. Less said the better. . .’

  Meanwhile Homiar, who had stepped out to open the gate for the hearse, shut it again and climbed back in.

  ‘Snoring away like an ox,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t have woken up if I had kicked the chair out from under him. . .’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ said Buchia. ‘Try to think straight, boys. One witness is all it’ll take to identify the lot of us tomorrow, when the shit hits the fan. . .’

  Then they were off to Sewree. Streets deserted, not even a stray dog in sight. Poor people who might normally have been sleeping in the open on the pavements had found shelter under the awnings of shop fronts, or in the forecourts of residential buildings. It was the 23rd of December. The boys in the back were glad to be huddled together, despite having an icy corpse in their midst. Jungoo was the only one who had come prepared for the chill, wearing a long-sleeved pullover. Buchia wore a thick linen vest whose deacon-like choker protruded from under the collar of his shirt. Occasionally at junctions and turnings, he gave directions to Jungoo, who wasn’t as confident as he was, of the shortest route to Sewree.

  There was something else that was bothering Buchia. In the prelude to the withdrawal of British forces from independent India, the partitioning of Bengal and the Punjab had become inevitable, and already reports of serious communal violence were coming in from these parts of the country. Bombay, as yet, hadn’t experienced anything comparable, nor would it even in later weeks and months when migration, dispossession and violent death afflicted more than a million people on the subcontinent. But travelling so late at night with a raffish, disorderly bunch of young men crammed in the back of a hearse made Buchia nervous.

  ‘Just in case we are stopped by a military or police patrol,’ he told his co-conspirators, ‘let me speak, and stick to my story: we are only routinely transporting a corpse from the home of a bereaved family in Wadala to the Towers of Silence.’

  ‘Yet moving in the wrong direction?’ pointed out Fali. ‘We’re heading away from the Towers, aren’t we? And what an odd time of night to be transporting a corpse, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, let’s just hope they don’t notice it,’ said Buchia irritably, peeved by Fali’s quibbling.

  But Fali was in an expansive mood. Sighing to himself, thinking about God-knows-what, he muttered philosophically:

  ‘Many a slip between the cup and the lip. . .’

  In the crystalline silence of the night, Buchia heard him, and got angrier.

  ‘For your sake, I certainly hope there hasn’t been. I mean, any slip between the bottle and your lips. . .Fali! I can tell you’ve been drinking.’

  ‘No, saheb, not at all. Not a drop, I swear. Not a drop of alcohol has passed these lips in the last. . .what, forty hours? Smell my mouth,’ Fali protested, thrusting his face at Buchia who was in the front seat. Buchia recoiled.

  ‘Smells of Colgate,’ Buchia said, disgusted.

  ‘Always remember to brush my teeth after dinner,’ said Fali smugly.

  But nothing untoward happened. At no checkpoint were they stopped, nor did they see any military patrol. The night remained uneventful and icy as the deserted streets they were driving through until their vehicle came to a grinding halt outside the imposing cement archway of the Sewree cemetery.

  ‘Honk twice, and flash your headlights three times,’ Buchia instructed Jungoo, who did as he was told.

  It was a pre-arranged signal, in response to which one gate of the cemetery swung open with an awful creaking, and a very short, bearded man appeared. Buchia got out of the hearse to meet him. The man had an enormous head. He was wearing baggy shorts and a sleeveless vest, but didn’t seem to feel the cold. Though dwarf-like in stature, the bearded man’s broad shoulders and thickset neck were intensely thonged by muscle; moreover, his large, extraordinary head was full of the oddest bumps, bulges and indentations; not unlike his hirsute, stumpy legs. He must have been younger than Buchia, though not by very much: his hair, too, had receded entirely and what was left of it was tied in a straggly pigtail at the back. On his vast and amazing forehead sat a huge carbuncle that shone by the light of the moon, red and inflamed.

  For a few minutes, he and Buchia stood there, arguing. The caretaker, or whoever he was seemed to hold his ground, persistently shaking his head in refusal. Then Buchia extracted a wad of notes from his hip-pocket reluctantly, counted it, and handed them over to him. The other man counted the notes again. Presently Buchia climbed back into the hearse beside Jungoo. The bearded caretaker walked ahead and, very slowly behind him, the hearse followed.

  I had visited the Sewree cemetery during the days of my peregrinations in the city, at least once, if not twice. I remember it as a pleasant enough place, vast and undulating, with paved footpaths, masses of furrowed earth, trees, shrubs and gravestones. Buchia must have been in touch with the caretaker the previous evening, for the latter led the way, with the hearse crawling behind him, until he raised his hand for it to halt. He had led them to a freshly dug open grave which was to become Joseph Kanga’s resting place.

  Beyond a point, there was no access for the van, so the body had to be physically carried out to its grave. However, before that could happen, an unanticipated problem arose, bringing Buchia and the caretaker nearly to blows.

  ‘Where’s the coffin, man?’ the caretaker yelled in alarm when he saw Joseph’s corpse being carried out of the hearse on an open bier. ‘How can you bury a body without a coffin!’

  ‘We don’t use coffins,’ said Buchia. ‘We feed them to vultures. Everyone has different systems, you see.’

  ‘Then you should have followed your own!’ the caretaker snapped at Buchia, rudely. ‘Why bring him here? Can you see any vultures here?’

  ‘But Gomes,’ that was the first time the others heard him address the caretaker by name. Realizing that he hadn’t taken in
to account a crucial requirement, Buchia continued to argue, ‘We’ll cover him in mud. The earth will be his coffin!’

  ‘I cannot allow that,’ insisted Gomes, who seemed more than equal to Buchia in stubbornness.

  ‘What!’ exclaimed Buchia, both annoyed and aghast. ‘Where will I find a coffin at this time of night?’

  ‘I cannot allow a body to be buried directly in the soil,’ repeated the caretaker stiffly. ‘It’s just not done—it’s an outrage for you to even think that’s possible!’

  ‘But how does it help to put him in a box? Anyway the box will rot, and worms will get at him.’

  ‘Stray dogs, hyenas, bandicoots would dig him up before that, if he’s not in a coffin. You have to put a body in a coffin. Or take it back! A rule’s a rule,’ the caretaker was emphatic and obdurate. ‘Otherwise, take him back to your Towers, why don’t you, and feed him to the birds. . . This is a Christian cemetery.’

  It was a contest in aggressive obstinacy that Buchia sensed he was losing. Moreover, his nasal falsetto compared unfavourably with the other’s deep and resonant voice which lent him authority.

  ‘Well,’ said Buchia at last, ‘don’t you have any old coffin lying around?’

  The caretaker shook his head.

  ‘The old ones are all underground with decaying skeletons in them. I do have a new one, which I was getting ready. I can let you have it if you want. But it’ll cost you eight hundred rupees.’

  ‘Eight hundred—’ Buchia was shocked. ‘That’s highway robbery! You see, now?’ Buchia appealed to his band of corpse bearers. ‘You see what this is all about? He wants to rob me! I’ve already given you two thousand!’

  ‘That’s for the use of the plot of land, for digging the grave and bending every rule for you. This is for the coffin. I’ll return nineteen hundred if you decide not to bury him here. . . One hundred I keep for digging the grave. . .’

  Buchia had five young men behind him, but the caretaker was not intimidated in the slightest by their presence. He stood there rooted, fiercely refusing to budge, and Buchia glared at him.