Cyrus Mistry - Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

Vispy, partly to justify his own failure to inform me in good time of her illness, told me that her physician, Dr Variava, had termed it a ‘galloping cancer’ which consumed many of her vital organs within barely a month of its detection.

‘Everything happened so quickly. Here we were rushing from pillar to post, from agiari to Tata Memorial and back, getting her meals prepared, taking them to hospital. .though she had almost completely stopped eating. .and here Papa and I were also tied up with saying prayers and managing the fire temple’s affairs. . You have no idea what kind of a hectic few weeks we had; and then just when the doctor gave us some hope that she might be going into remission, and she seemed indeed to be feeling better, Papa said to me, “First thing we should do now is inform Phiroze. .” Just then the doctor found that the cancer had spread to her brain as well, and there was no hope. . It all happened so quickly. .’

After her funeral, when all the other mourners had left, we spent some time together as a family, Father, Vispy and myself, seated in the pavilion, chatting. Temoo had sent a special chair for me from the storehouse, so that I could sit with them without polluting the benches meant for the public. Most of the conversation was about how terrible her anguish had been, all that suffering suddenly heaped on her. .

‘ Aapre thi to jovay bhi nahi ! ’ said Father. ‘So painful, so painful. .it was impossible for a normal person to witness. Bichari ne chootkaro mulyo , that’s the way I look at it. There is no other way. .’

‘Towards the end,’ said Vispy, ‘they would keep her drugged almost twenty-four hours a day. To ease her suffering, her agony. .’

I remember thinking, while Father was waxing eloquent about her pain and suffering: perhaps there was some love he felt for her, after all.

But as they were getting ready to leave, and we were enveloped by a deeply shared sorrow as well as, I suppose, some sense of relief, my father spoke again. And this time he said:

‘You know, your mother never believed in strictly following the prescribed customs of our religion. Even when she was younger, and she would go into her monthly cycle, she wouldn’t accept quarantine. She would leave the menstruating room at will, wander around the house, touch anything and everything, until I had to shout at her to go back inside. .

‘Even when your child was born, even when your wife died, I told her: don’t live there in the khandhia’s quarters, just meet Phiroze if you want to, have a bath and come home. But she was just too stubborn, Hilla, always, about not following these traditional practices. . You see, this is what can happen. Cancer is a modern disease, and it comes from neglecting ancient truths. .’

Still horrified and deeply disturbed by the accounts of my mother’s intense suffering, I hardly heard what my father was saying. I was thinking to myself, is there no justice in the world? Why, on what account, did my mother have to suffer so much? What were her crimes?

But as they drove out the gates of the Towers of Silence in a taxi they had found waiting just inside the compound and waved goodbye to me, I was astonished that my father could have been so unbelievably tasteless and ugly in saying what he had just said: I suppose it took me a few moments simply to register what he had been on about, and only after the taxi melted into the stream of traffic at the Kemps Corner junction did I feel an enormous rage welling up inside me. .

Wickedly unjust, thoroughly muddled, preposterous — these adjectives hovered imprecisely in my head, aimed not merely at qualifying my father’s cherished beliefs about the world, but the world itself: our universe, and the lot of its hapless denizens. If there is a god who is responsible for all the profusion of life and locomotion in the universe, then surely that being has arrived at an advanced stage of senility, I declare, or one of cynical and extreme indifference.

(iv)

My curiosity fuelled by Vera’s reference to her father’s hard times in childhood, I couldn’t resist asking him about it one afternoon when we were alone.

‘I don’t like to remind myself of that phase of my life,’ he said. ‘I lost both my parents in quick succession to the cholera epidemic of 1908. I was only ten years old then, my little sister, Soona, only seven. .’

Instead of looking after his children, as he had promised Rustom’s father on his deathbed he would, his uncle, Savak, turned them out of the house within six months of the father’s death. Pretending offence and outrage at some imagined slight or injury inflicted by young Rustom on his wife and infant baby, he was vehement and ruthless. At the time his wife was pregnant again; the truth, Rustom said, was that they wanted the flat exclusively for their own family.

For some months, Rustom lived and slept in the streets with his sister, Soona, who didn’t survive the ordeal; she developed a high fever and a stomach infection that despite her brother’s frantic efforts couldn’t be treated in time.

‘I swore to avenge my sister’s death, fantasizing all kinds of terrible ways in which to kill Savak, but finally could do nothing. I had no one to help me bring him to justice. But there was a neighbour in the building who knew of my plight, and of Savak’s villainy. He took me to see a lawyer friend he had, who actually filed a writ petition in the Small Causes Court, paying for all costs himself. But it was dismissed — you see I had no papers at all to prove my father’s ownership of the flat, nor even my own birth certificate to prove I was my father’s son. Savak had destroyed everything, and fabricated his own documents. . Finally, I went back to Darvish Petigara. .’

‘Petigara. .?’

‘The man whose place Buchia took when he retired. .I had already met him before at the time of Soona’s death. Out of pity, he offered me a job. I accepted, of course, with a sense of relief. By then I was very tired. .all my anger, my fantasies of a triumphant vengeance, fizzled out once I began handling corpses. . Like everyone else, you see, I was an egoist. I used to believe too much in myself. But this job makes you aware that all that self-importance is nothing but illusion. What is a man in the end, Phiroze, but the powder of a few dried bones. .?’

(v)

‘Just think about it,’ persisted Cawas, taking a large swig from his glass of rum and soda. It was the hour of our regular booze-up.

Incidentally, the so-called strictures against drinking at Doongerwaadi seemed definitely to have lapsed. Nobody cared anymore whether we drank or not. The only deciding factor became the availability of funds. Fali, always willing to initiate a collection drive, complained that that afternoon’s contributions were so insignificant we’d have to be content with just one bottle between the eight of us. All present on Rustom’s terrace, listening to Cawas hold forth, had contributed for the raw concoction we were sipping.

‘A father will not touch his son’s dead body. A son will not touch his own dead father. . So much repugnance about death? So much disgust for corpses — and even before any stench or rotting has started?’

‘Where did you buy this booze, Bomi?’ asked Fali indignantly. ‘Seems to me definitely adulterated — with some potion that inspires the most boring of sermons!’

‘ Bakaro and Bakwaas : Sellers of fine liquors. .’ said Bomi, taking his cue from Fali, and everyone laughed.

‘No, no. I’m serious,’ said Cowsi. ‘See. When it comes to disposal of the corpse, our religion is so sensible. We don’t pollute the earth by burying, nor the air, by cremating. .everything’s so nice in our religion — must be the finest in the world: we are not asked to fast, avoid liquor, or congregate on Sundays for prayer. A happy normal life is all we are asked to lead — earn money, eat your meat, drink, enjoy. . Only this one thing is so strange. .’