Cyrus Mistry - Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

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 nothing 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!’