Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer (27 page)

(When he told me this, I, too, immediately thought of the ‘grotto’ as an ideal place for building bombs!)

‘In principle, I found it impossible to agree with the idea of “a parting kick for the British”, or “a lesson to imperialists for all time to come”. I thought it rather foolish to endanger negotiations for independence with a terrorist act at such a late stage. Besides, after I arrived in Bombay, my dad apprised me of Joseph’s condition, which is how I approached you for a completely different and more meaningful purpose.’

Twice, a waiter drew near our table respectfully bowing, and said the restaurant and bar were closing now. But Rohinton wanted a last round of cognac for the both of us, which the waiter obliged us with. We knocked it back with gusto and finally made our way out of the restaurant.

We didn’t feel like going home right away, so we spent another half-hour sitting on a wooden bench on the pier, listening to the lapping of the waves, gazing at the stars in a cloudless sky.

‘Thank you, Phiroze, for a great evening,’ Rohinton said when he finally dropped me home at almost four in the morning. Both of us felt flushed with a mutual sense of warmth—our youthful bond had been revived, of that there was little doubt.

At Kemps Corner, before he turned into the gate of the Towers of Silence, we heard an itinerant hawker who was carrying a wooden tray of glasses containing something white and viscous on his head. In the stillness of the cold morning, he was calling in a sharp, high-pitched voice:

‘
Doodh na puff. . .doodh na puff. . . Jelleee
. . .’

‘
I
should thank you, Rohinton,’ I replied. ‘After all, you paid what must have been a whopping bill at the Taj!’

‘
Aargh
!’ he said, making his favourite deprecating grimace once more that evening, ‘Money’s no object. Did you have a good time, Phiroze?’

‘I had a great time.’

‘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.

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 front 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.