Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (23 page)

‘Speak, speak, bawa, speak,’ relented Fali, pretending a yawn. ‘But don’t complain afterwards we finished the bottle while you were chewing your words. . .’

‘Our revulsion for corpses,’ said Cawas. ‘That’s what I’m talking about, Fali. . .’

‘Wah! Such an original point that takes you two hours to make?’ Fali ridiculed Cawas. ‘That’s why you have your job, ghela!’

‘I call it ingratitude,’ said Rustom, nodding at Cawas in agreement, completely ignoring Fali’s disdainful interjections. ‘Squeamishness and ingratitude. That’s if you will call a spade a spade.’

‘It’s as if they don’t want anything more to do with him,’ elaborated Cawas. ‘Or her.’

‘Ya, sure,’ agreed Jungoo, ‘as if they were all just waiting to pack him off.’

‘When the person is dead and gone,’ countered Fali disdainfully, ‘where’s the question of having anything more to do with him?’

Although we had been ignoring Fali’s boorish comments, I could see they were beginning to irritate Rustom.

‘All that bacteria and invisible radiation the scholars and priests keep harping on. . .’ said Bomi, joining the discussion. ‘Arrey, I’ve been cleaning corpses for some years now, but never have I found them to be such deadly or dangerous creatures.’

‘
Aae ghela
,’ said Fali again, belligerently. He was already sounding quite drunk, maybe even feeling sidelined in the argument he had himself initiated. He turned his ire on Bomi now. ‘You can’t call them creatures. Creatures are living things. Corpses are dead. Fucking dead.’

‘Yes,’ replied Bomi calmly. ‘But are they dangerous? Like some of the living that we know?
Arrey
Rusi, just give this fellow something to eat, if you have any ganthias or anything. Again he’s been drinking on an empty stomach. Even though he knows very well he becomes like a hungry beast when he does that.’

‘What! What’s that you’re saying about my stomach? My stomach may be empty, but my head isn’t. Like yours!’ shouted Fali, suddenly combative again. ‘Behnchoad, don’t you put on airs with me!’

‘Shut up, Fali. Stop being so bloody aggressive all the time,’ shouted Rustom, who might have been feeling a little drunk himself. ‘Try and understand what we are saying. . .’ Then he called out aloud, ‘Mum-ma. . .’

The evening threatened to get completely chaotic, because Fali was not willing to accept a put-down like that. He stood up aggressively, just when Aimai, who had already figured out the cause for all the raised voices, walked in with a plastic plate filled with an assortment of ready fried savouries.

‘Yes, that’s just what we need. Now eat that up first,’ said Rustom to Fali. ‘Not another word from you, and no more drinks until you finish what’s in the plate. Thank you, Mum-ma.’

‘But I say, aren’t you getting a bit carried away here, Cawas?’ Bomi pursued the discussion as if there had been no interruption at all.

‘Why? You don’t believe what I’m saying is true?’

‘Don’t believe everything he says. . .’ muttered Fali grumpily, sitting down again. ‘I’m not really hungry, I’ll eat just a bit, anyway. . .’

But once he started chomping, Fali couldn’t stop until the plate was empty.

‘Well, no one can deny it,’ said Bomi. ‘But there’s another side to it, too, isn’t there?’

‘At least you could have saved a ganthia or two for the rest of us!
Khaadhro!’
Jungoo kidded Fali.

‘Don’t make too much noise, bawa,’ said Aimai. ‘Please. . .I’m off to sleep. Rustom, Vera isn’t back yet.’

‘She told us, didn’t she, before going out—she’ll be late tonight?’

‘Then there’s no need to worry, I suppose. Goodnight boys.’ A chorus of murmurs bade Aimai good night.

‘Has to be up at four o’clock tomorrow to wash the corpse that just came in. She and Dollamai are supposed to do it,’ explained Rustom.

‘Oh yes, I heard,’ said Bomi. ‘A fairly young woman got knocked over by a train, while crossing the tracks at an unmanned level crossing. . .’

‘My mother is eighty-two. I’ve told her to stop doing this work. But she won’t listen. She says washing the dead gives solace and meaning to her life. . . Oh, then she’ll sniffle and sob to herself quietly, whole morning. The grief of the bereaved affects her deeply. . .’

‘Poor Aimai, such a kind heart!’ said Cawas. ‘But washing up a train accident won’t be child’s play. . .’

‘Sure it won’t,’ agreed Bomi. ‘And to think they still don’t pay our women anything for this service. . .’

‘Except that hundred-rupee bonus, once a year at Pateti,’ said Khushro.

‘Oh yes, once a year. Or if the relatives choose to tip them. . . Let our union register with the Labour Tribunal, then we’ll take up all these issues, one by one,’ said Rustom.

Excepting me, I doubt if anyone present was aware of the story of Vera’s dismissal from her office. For Rusi at least this discussion, about the horror we hold corpses in, was hardly a theoretical one.

‘What other side were you thinking of, Bomi?’ asked Cawas, picking up the conversation again where it had been diverted.

‘Other side. . .? Oh yes. . . Just that people are so disturbed by death, so shocked, they can’t accept it. There are those who will cling to their departed. . .’

‘Why, of course,’ said Jungoo. ‘Nobody’s saying we are such monsters that have no feelings. . .’

‘That’s just the point I’m making. Hardly a week ago,’ Bomi continued, ‘Bujji and I met this young man, thirty-five or so, a bachelor, who had probably been living with his mother all his life. Just couldn’t accept it. Weeping bitterly like a little suckling, squeezing, embracing, touching every part of her—’

‘It’s these—all these priests—’ Jungoo started to say, but Bomi wouldn’t be interrupted.

‘He wouldn’t let us leave with her body. Just a little longer, just a little longer, he kept blubbering. Then when we said we absolutely had to go, he actually wanted to lie on the bier beside her and ride in the hearse. . . Luckily, an elderly neighbour of his intervened, and yelled at him, “Stop this nonsense, Percy. Get a hold of yourself. Mama is gone. She’s never coming back. . . Get that into your head!” Only after a severe dressing-down, which continued for a few minutes, the son seemed to return to reality. Then the neighbour joined his hands and said to us, “You gentlemen, please leave. . .”’

‘Well, I’ll tell you another story,’ said Khushro, unexpectedly, after a pause in the conversation. Relatively young and new to our company, Khushro had been shyly sipping his glass in a corner, not saying much. His story actually made us all relax and laugh, everyone, including Fali. Just the previous day, he told us, Khushro had been with Fardoonji and Farokh to Dhobhi Talao, to pick up what turned out to be a very obese dead woman.

‘Fardoonji, as you know, is an old man, without much strength left in his body,’ said Khushro. ‘When we saw her size, we were definitely alarmed. Even assuming we could lift her up, would she fit on the bier? We gazed at her and scratched our heads. . . No, I’m not exaggerating. She was huge, this woman, a giant. You were telling us, Bomi, of this boy who wanted to lie down on the bier next to his mother. This one looked like even on her own she wouldn’t fit; she would need two biers tied together side by side! “What shall we do now?” Farokh whispered to me. First thing we did, of course, was to call Jungoo out from where he was hiding in the driver’s cabin.’

‘I was alarmed, too,’ said Jungoo, vouching for the woman’s size. ‘Somehow, huffing and puffing like coolies, we moved her onto the bier.’

‘Spilling off its sides she was, too,’ interjected Farokh.

‘The next part was more difficult—lifting the woman
and
the bier onto the floor of the hearse. . .’

‘The funny thing about it all,’ explained Khushro, ‘was that through all this, the husband and two grown-up sons merely stood by disinterested, not offering to lend a hand, and moreover acting very casual, as though they considered it all in the day’s work for us professionals. Behnchoad, Farokh and Jungoo and me, our balls nearly fell off, but somehow we managed to lift the bier and push her into the hearse.

‘Then the husband visibly relaxed. He sidled up to me and said in a tearful whisper, “Carry her gently, please, I beg you. . . Like a flower. . .”

‘Then, shamefacedly, like a man indulging in a private, dirty act, he slipped me two tens. . .’

‘Two tens? For carrying a grand piano?’ exclaimed Bomi. ‘You should have thrown them in his face!’

Khushro said, to all of us who had been following his story:

‘I was too breathless, too exhausted even to think of anything to say. . .nor did I feel the need to retort. But as we drove off, a perfect answer popped into my head. And I regretted not being more quick-witted. I wanted to lean out of the moving hearse, and yell at the top of my voice:

“Like a flower, bawaji? Who? That she-elephant. . .? For her you’ll need a crane!”’

I like Khushro. He seems a genuinely decent sort.

(vi)

Another member of our corps who interests me a great deal is young Kobaad. Only eighteen when he started work at the Towers, that is, about the age I was when I first met Sepideh, he should be at least twenty-five now.

I knew Kobaad had come from some place outside Bombay— Nargol or Dahanu or Bharuch or Bhiwandi, one of those Parsi settlements in Gujarat—I forget which. While he was still a child, his father, a small trader, moved to Bombay with his wife and five children. He had shifted to the city to try and improve his business prospects.

It was a miscalculation. While he had been making a living of sorts in the small town in Gujarat, several things went wrong for him when he moved here. He could not establish himself, and found living expenses too high. Finally, he was reduced to becoming an itinerant vendor: needles and threads, twine, thimbles, knitting prongs, hair brushes and plastic combs, glass baubles, trinkets and other such trifles; these were the objects he carried in a large, shiny tin trunk from door to door. He spent most of his day marching through various housing colonies of the congested inner city, calling out in a cracked and quavering voice that shrieked audibly above the din of traffic:

‘
Nikhiya-bur-rush
. . .
sooeee
. . . Bangles and beads, thimbles and thread, all sizes of stainless steel needles. . .’

One day, while walking through crowded Kalbadevi peddling his wares, he was gored and trampled upon by a mad bull which may have been dazzled by the light of the hard sun reflected in his shiny tin box. The box, too, containing his treasure trove, was trampled upon and crushed. The totally unexpected death of his father was a great blow to the poor mother and the little ones.

Kobaad, being the eldest, it fell upon him to drop out of school and start working. But the mother wanted him to find employment anywhere, so long as it was not within the weltering chaos of a city that had already claimed her husband.

The horror and pity of their recent bereavement, the feeling of intense piety it had inspired in her, the great natural beauty and peace she experienced and imbibed during the three-day funeral obsequies at Doongerwaadi made her decide to seek a job for Kobaad that would rarely, if ever, take her son outside the boundaries of this safe haven; where, apart from everything else, the Punchayet would provide rudimentary residential quarters for the whole family. Her efforts bore fruit, and Kobaad was appointed corpse bearer.

But more than anyone else in his family, I do believe it was young Kobaad who was most deeply affected by his father’s sudden death. For nearly three months after the latter’s bizarre accident, Kobaad seemed preoccupied, continuously in a state of distracted dreaminess, other-worldliness—call it what you will— as though it was he, rather than his father, who had crossed over into the shadowy unknown. You could see he was grieving terribly.

Then after three months had passed, late one night I heard the plaintive sounds of a harmonium. I knew that Kobaad owned one, but had never heard him play it. He was playing softly now, hesitantly, without pumping the bellows too hard, searching out a plaintive tune. Three nights later, I heard him singing that same melancholic tune, along with lyrics he had put to it. The song was in Gujarati, set to a jaunty rhythm. It was very moving nevertheless; especially if one spared a moment to think of the events in Kobaad’s own life that had prompted such a sad and obsessive investigation into the heart of impermanence.

I will try to give a rough translation of what I remember of that unforgettable song:

Foolish to make plans:
O how foolish
To dream, presume, aspire
. . .

Every calculation you so painstakingly undertook
Is flawed. The numbers simply refuse to add up
To anything but nought
. . .

Time flashes past you. A
Man’s life is as enduring
As a lit matchstick, and just as
Brittle
.

Oh yes, I’ve said it once,
But I’ll
Say it again:

’Tis foolish to make plans,
To dream, presume, aspire. . .
You know nothing turns out quite the way
You had hoped
.

Nothing,
Oh, nothing ever does
.

I have rendered the gist of the song into English from memory. I may have dropped a line or two, perhaps even a whole verse. But as to its circular melody, the hauntingly resonant chords, I have no way of evoking their beauty. . . Saddening, and painful to consider what will become of Kobaad’s considerable talent in the years to come.