Cyrus Mistry - Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

I had always been aware of his perverse interest in me even before this evening’s melodrama was enacted; but this time he was begging of me, rather pathetically, to show some lenity. I didn’t react at all; just stood there frozen like a statue in some children’s game and let him have his way. The whole physical encounter didn’t last longer than a few minutes. I was wondering what I should do next to bring his sentimental incontinence to an end. As he was fiddling with the buttons on my fly, he experienced a seizure of sorts that left him gasping; and me breathless, for he had tightened his embrace on me into a fierce, vice-like grip. Then very slowly, he released me, and tenderly kissed my lips.

‘Come. Please come by any time at all,’ he said, ‘in the evening preferably, when we have both finished our day’s work. . If you’re ever feeling lonely or bored, don’t hesitate to stop by. We can pass the time together. .I can give you so much pleasure, believe me, Piloo, a-ha-ha-ha-ha, I’ll make you so happy, so happy. .’ And for a moment Buchia embraced me again, gratefully.

I hadn’t told anyone about this meeting with Buchia. I suppose I had preferred to forget the whole incident. I could have said something about it to Rustom now. Instead, I continued to address his rhetorical question.

‘Pure malice.’

‘Nonsense. I can’t think of anyone else but Buchia who would stoop so low.’

‘In a dog-eat-dog situation, nobody likes to see one team member make a clean exit. . They’ll pull him down. . And besides, the parents of the boy would have found out eventually, anyway.’

‘Perhaps. Or we could have found some way of. .Vera might have been able to talk to Shapoor, break it gently. . I’m quite sure that Limbuwala received a call from Buchia. I know it in my bones. .I could kill that bastard. .’

He said it very quietly, without a trace of anger, but I could see that he meant it.

A crueller twist to Vera’s story was that for quite a while, she had no reference letter, no certificate of endorsement putting on record her four years of sterling service to Messrs Gagrat, Limbuwala and Co. It would have been difficult for Vera to find a new job on the basis of her previous experience without such a certificate. Luckily, within two months, Limbuwala decided to launch his own firm. Then Rusi Gagrat, a very decent sort by all accounts, sent a message to Vera to come and see him at his office and provided her with the generous testimony she so sorely needed.

For some reason he did not offer her old job back, perhaps not wanting to cause offence to his former partner. Subsequently, with a reference from Gagrat, Vera found another well-paid job, this time with the patent lawyers Hathangadi and Golikeri. She has since become quite indispensable to that firm.

But now that I have related Buchia’s story to my notional readers — no one else knows about it, and I intend to keep it that way — I shouldn’t leave out mention of the fact that it wasn’t all odious or unpleasant. Nor was I completely unmoved by his embracing and fondling and kissing. Strangely, I felt, after a very long time, human again; living again, grateful to Buchia that he saw me as more than just some cadaverous, unclean thing whose very breath it was undesirable to commingle with.

Later that evening, I thought of my unyieldingly rigid father whose mind, so trussed up in the twists and turns of religious ideology, had severed ties, forsworn the love he had once felt for me and never wanted to set eyes on me again. Who did not even send me a message when Mother lay dying in great suffering in the General Ward of the Tata Memorial! If it were not for Vispy’s dropping in to give me the news, I would have had the shock of seeing her pain-wracked, shrivelled corpse carried in on a stretcher. But even Vispy’s communication was just a token thing, and came too late. I rushed to the hospital that very evening but by then she wasn’t conscious. Heavily drugged with morphine, she had slipped into a coma which she never came out of. Nor did she ever learn that I was at her bedside at the end, longing for a flicker of her eyelids, a single moment of recognition.

(iii)

All through childhood my father doted on me, and I on him. Mother was much closer to Vispy than to me, or so I believed.

Maybe I was wrong, for when I got married to Sepideh, she was the only one from the groom’s side who thought it right to be present (of course, Vispy came along, too).

Framroze, my father, claimed to be much too busy to be able to take the morning off and did not attend. Though I knew, without anything having to be said, he was simply boycotting the wedding, protesting what he had described to my face as my “everlasting imbecility”!

My marriage to Sepideh, recorded in a unique register of corpse bearer weddings maintained by the Parsi Punchayet, was officiated over by the head priest of the fire temple in the Towers of Silence complex, where I’d had my training as nussesalar. These weddings, of course, never boasted a large retinue of guests, except for other corpse bearers, and sometimes, very rarely, a family member or two. My mother and Vispy were present at the ceremony, representing the groom’s side. From the bride’s side, there was only Temoorus, her father, who also signed as witness.

In the evening of the same day, there was a small celebration, in the casuarina grove, where some chairs had been put out. Other corpse bearers attended, and made merry on a small cache of three rum bottles paid for and provided by Temoo. Even Buchia made a brief appearance, though he wouldn’t drink. That was Seppy’s dowry — three bottles of Hercules Triple X Rum, which we all shared.

Not that my mother’s decision to be present derived from any feeling of acceptance of my marriage to Sepideh, or any desire to celebrate it. In fact, until it became amply clear that I was leaving my homestead — renouncing, by choice, my birthplace, my family, my origins, to become a social outcast — she resorted to all forms of hysteria, blackmail, threats, even bribery and inducement to get me to change my mind.

In the end, she relented, witnessed the wedding, and even gave a pair of gold bangles that had belonged to her mother as a wedding gift to her daughter-in-law. In that sense, I had always found her less dogmatic than my father, more human. A part of the reason for her decision to attend the wedding may have also been to act differently and independently from her husband, who, she felt, was too swollen with the religious authority invested in him by priesthood and who attempted to control her life and actions as well. Later, when our child was born, she came and stayed with us for a few days. Even later, when Seppy died, she was by my side for the next three days. She tried to persuade me then to resign, and come back home with Farida. But I knew from the way she proposed this it was her own idea, which didn’t have the approval of my father.

When she returned home after staying with me, I know she would have had to undergo an excessive number of purification rituals at the behest of my father, without which he would have been unwilling to readmit her into his temple.

In that sense, though I loved Father very much, and she loved Vispy more than either of us — or so I imagined — in the end I knew my mother had acted in a more humane manner than he. Perhaps at the bottom of it all, there was some fundamental unhappiness in their relationship, that ‘selfishness’ on my father’s part which she had imputed; and all those rules and strictures he made it incumbent on her to uphold, his means of controlling her. During all those years, though, that we were living together as a family, I don’t remember ever seeing her so deeply unhappy. Yet the unimaginable pain and suffering the uterine cancer put her through make me wonder how profoundly neglected her sense of hurt really was.