Cyrus Mistry - Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

‘You will officiate as nussesalar at Papa’s funeral, won’t you?’ he asked me on the phone, rather persuasively. I hesitated for a moment, and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps Father had left written instructions asking for any other nussesalar to observe the rites except his apostate son; and Vispy was deliberately concealing this stricture from me out of the kindness of his heart.

‘Do you think it is what he would have wanted?’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Vispy, ‘no question about it. That goes without saying.’

I listened silently for any hint of unease beneath his ardour; then, after a moment, said:

‘In that case, I’d be happy to. .’

Most of that night, for some reason, I couldn’t sleep a wink. My mind remained awake, disturbingly animated by memories of my father, my mother and my childhood with Vispy.

At 6.30 a.m., when it was time to leave for the fire temple, I regretfully got out of bed, and then woke up Farida from a deep slumber, whispering to her that she should try to take the afternoon off from work, so as to be able to come home by 4 p.m. — if she didn’t want to miss her grandfather’s funeral.

Everything went according to schedule. There was a huge turnout of mourners for my father — well-to-do admirers of his seniority and moral authority, a couple of priests from the temple, some Punchayet trustees as well, but by and large, and in very significant numbers, the simple folk who visited his fire temple every morning. They filled the funeral cottage and pavilion to overflowing. Myself, I remained slightly numb and dispassionate through the day. My poor sleep during the previous night must have added to my sense of disorientation.

Only after I had lent a shoulder to three colleagues and carried Framroze up the hill, depositing him on the topmost step of one of the Towers; only after I had turned my back on him, and whipped the sheet off his naked corpulent body, clapping my hands loudly three times — which was the signal to let mourners gathered in the small temple garden know that the consecrated body of my father had been offered to the vultures to devour, that they should commence their prayers for the effortless transmission of his soul; only after all that was over and done with, and the mourners had left, and a deep silence had descended once again on the Towers, only then did the floodgates of my grief open, and I cried bitterly for my father whom I would never see again.

That night, I had a strange dream that remains as vivid today as it was on the night I dreamt it, so many years ago. You see, my father died in 1966. And the remarkable thing about this dream lies in its significantly prophetic nature. For in those days, vultures were still very much around. With preternatural instinct, these common Indian scavengers would populate every branch of every tree in the Towers of Silence complex until their greedy, motionless, black-brown-white presence loomed everywhere, stark and brooding — just about thirty minutes before the scheduled hour of a funeral. When I had that dream, no one in their wildest fancy could have guessed that vultures in India were on their way to extinction.

In the dream, I was walking through some kind of narrow sluice or gutter. There wasn’t much water here, only a kind of viscous, transparent fluid, and a great many dead bodies— decomposed, half-eaten, some only bone with shreds of torn flesh sticking to them. .I was wading through this ghoulish tumult of the dead searching frantically for something or someone: my dead wife, or at least for her gold bangles, which I was convinced in my dream I had forgotten to slip off her arms when I had carried her up to the Towers so many years ago. Now that I suddenly recalled this oversight, I got into a state of panic; yet, I was hopeful of still being able to find the bangles. No, I couldn’t: instead it was Seppy’s corpse I found, remarkably well-preserved amidst all the horrific rotting and decomposition! I noticed at once that her arms were thin and bare. The gold bangles my mother had given her at our wedding were nowhere to be seen. Then Seppy opened her eyes and smiled at me, warmly. I became aware — I couldn’t help notice — that the whole area around us was illumined by a strange, unearthly glow emanating from her ears — from a pair of exquisite, gold earrings studded with brilliant rubies.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Seppy said to me, and repeated, ‘don’t be afraid. . We are all alive — every single one of us — in one form or other. .yes. . We are still alive. .!’

I found her statement most bewildering, for in my dream I was jostling through dead bodies, stepping over them. But I felt immediately comforted, warm and happy. For a moment, I surfaced from this bizarre dream closer to the periphery of wakefulness, and remembered in my stupefaction, that on at least two occasions after Seppy died, I had pawned those bangles — to pay for some school requirement of Farida’s — and later redeemed them; finally, I had sold them outright to the same pawnbroker at Grant Road. How silly of me to forget about it, and worry!

Having thus reassured myself as to what had become of my mother’s bangles, I sank back into a deeply refreshing sleep.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s that an amateur ornithologist in Bombay observed a steep decline in the population of vultures.

He was immediately denounced by Zoroastrian orthodoxy as an agent provocateur set up by the reformist faction to bring disrepute to an ancient system of corpse disposal that was immaculate in its efficiency, hygienic and, moreover, ecologically sound. Vested interests were behind such propaganda, they claimed, intent on fomenting dissatisfaction with the ancient system to replace it with such offensive alternatives as stinky, polluting crematoria. These vested interests actually had their eyes on the vast commercial potential of the valuable real estate of the Towers of Silence, which was held in trust for the community by the Parsi Punchayet.

By the mid-nineties, the issue had become a talking point in the small community of Bombay Parsis, especially as there was a visible reduction in flocks of vultures that congregated at the Towers whenever there was a funeral. There was an incident as well, in which a middle-aged Parsi woman, who had recently lost her own mother, entered the restricted space of one of the Towers and took photographs of half-eaten corpses in an advanced state of decomposition. The photographs, published by a Parsi tabloid, immediately caused a great furore.

They are fake, most Parsis claimed, shocked by the temerity of the woman. It’s so easy in this day and age of computers to execute such visual tricks, they said. We are not fooled. Besides, the rays of the sun, above all, are powerful enough to destroy any residual corruption — vultures or no vultures. The trustees, moreover, had installed three powerful magnifying lenses high atop skyscrapers around the Towers to catch the rays of the sun and aim them directly onto the steps of the Towers where bodies were exposed to the birds. Khurshed Nagirashni, the heavenly spirit of solar fusion, will do her cleansing work, they said, not to worry.

But on this point, I myself remain sceptical. With pollution and smog growing thicker by the day in Bombay, besides four months of cloudy, monsoon skies, how can the sun’s purifying power actually pulverize entire corpses, if there are no vultures left to aid it? Meanwhile, security has been heavily beefed up at the Towers, especially around its restricted areas, to prevent a recurrence of any such unauthorized intrusion. The culpable watchmen who allowed this outrage to take place have been duly sacked.

What is the truth, you ask? I confess I don’t myself know.