Cyrus Mistry

Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

About the book

At the very edge of its many interlocking worlds, the city of Bombay conceals a near invisible community of Parsi corpse bearers, whose job it is to carry bodies of the deceased to the Towers of Silence. Segregated and shunned from society, often wretchedly poor, theirs is a lot that nobody would willingly espouse. Yet thats exactly what Phiroze Elchidana, son of a revered Parsi priest, does when he falls in love with Sepideh, the daughter of an aging corpse bearer…

Derived from a true story, Cyrus Mistry’s extraordinary new novel is a moving account of tragic love that, at the same time, brings to vivid and unforgettable life the degradation experienced by those who inhabit the unforgiving margins of history.

About the author

Cyrus Mistry began his writing career as a playwright, freelance journalist, and short story writer. His play Doongaji House, written in 1977 when he was twenty-one, has acquired classic status in contemporary Indian theatre in English. One of his short stories was made into a Gujarati feature film. His plays and screenplays have won several awards. His first novel, The Radiance of Ashes, was published in 2005.

Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

For Jill and Rushad

One. Present Tense, Bombay, 1942

One

‘Oi, Elchi, you bloody drunkard! Still lolling in bed?!’

There was no sound more revolting or hateful to the ears than that voice which plucked me rudely from my garden of dreams.

I was under the bower of the giant banyan with Seppy. Of all our numerous hideouts in the forest, this was her favourite. But in that instant, when Buchia’s hideous falsetto impinged on my consciousness, she was gone.

A wretched fatigue hugged every inch of my body like a lover. On my threadbare mattress, I clung to traces of remembered sweetness, longing for more sleep, but knew it would be denied me. . The flimsy front door of my tenement was being slammed and rattled with an ugly insistence. Presently, the odious shrieking came again:

‘Two minutes is all I’m giving you! Not out by then, straightaway I’m dialling Coyaji’s number. And so much the better if he’s mad for being woken at this hour. .I’ll tell him everything: fucking corpses have begun to stink, mourners are congregating, but your chief khandhia’s still in bed, pissed out of his skull.’

Abusive harangue, the crunch of footsteps on gravel. .both receded.

Oh fuck you Buchia, you aren’t paying for our drinks, are you? No time for a sip of water, let alone a tumbler of booze.

Rustom and Bomi would have given anything for a quick stopover last night — all of us deadbeat after walking those six miles to Laal Baag and back with a stiff more corpulent than most — but even simple-minded louts like us know better than to leave a corpse unattended on the pavement while guzzling at an illicit den. So, we hit upon a compromise: resting one end of the bier against a compound wall, Fali’s brainwave this, Bomi ran in and purchased a bottle. Snugly secured between the corpse’s stout legs for the remainder of our jaunt, it had to be pried out with some force once we deposited the body in the washroom of the allotted funeral cottage.

Now how is that any of your business, bloody Buchia? Those damn biers we lug around — solid iron — each weighs nearly eighty pounds! And all corpses aren’t emaciated by death, let me tell you. Some positively swell, growing more flaccid by the minute. Besides, how else, I ask you this, how else are the best of us to keep up this carrion work, this constant consanguinity with corpses, without taking a drop or two? The smell of sickness and pus endures; the reek of extinction never leaves the nostril.

Good sport that he is, Fardoon waited until I had knocked back my share of the booze before joining me for the arduous job of washing the man mountain. Fardoon doesn’t drink.

It’s a job that takes courage and strength, believe you me— rubbing the dead man’s forehead, his chest, palms and the soles of his feet with strong-smelling bull’s urine, anointing every orifice of the body with it before dressing him up again in fresh muslins and knotting the sacred thread around his waist. All the while making sure the pile of faggots on the censer breathes easy and the oil lamp stays alive through the night; all this, before we retire ourselves well past midnight. So what’s your fuckin’ fuss about, you bastard of a Buchia?

One side of my head was throbbing, raw; felt a bit of a corpse myself. Then my eyes lit on the wall clock: twenty past six already!

Early morning silence punctuated by a tittering of birds soothed my nerves, but the muscles still ached. . Outside the wire-meshed window, a sprig of pale orange bougainvillea swayed slightly. As I climbed out of bed, the rays of a fledgling sun touched the treetops lightly with a golden brush. The sky was deep blue and softly luminous, without a speck of cloud. Had I really woken up from dreaming? Or was this a dream I was waking to?

How beautiful and peaceful is this place — much of the time, at least — where the faithful consign their dead to the vultures in a final act of charity, their bones pulverized by the sun, then washed away. .subsumed in the elements.

I grew up not far from here. When I was still a child, I may have been brought along by my parents to attend a funeral or two; but it was only much later I began to see this as my garden, my own private forest: an enchanted place in which I was free to roam, marvelling at leisure at the shapes, smells and colours of nature, the magnificent trees, birds, bushes and all that rocky wilderness.

Near the hill’s summit brood the squat towers — three in number — their jaws open to the sky, allowing birds of prey to descend and eat their fill, then fly up once more, unhindered. Surrounded on every side by a town that grows more noisy and populated by the day, this estate is so vast and secluded that no syllable of human voice or activity grates upon its timbre of peace. Though death is its precise reason for existence, in this garden, life — overwhelmingly — is the victor.

I first set eyes on my Sepideh in the forest on the hill. Even the most fleeting remembrance of Seppy can bring tears to my eyes — so evanescent her presence, so brief our togetherness.

This was her home, in a more literal sense than I realized when I first saw her. I had caught glimpses of her before — wandering through overgrown banyan vines, running, once, at breathtaking speed after a peacock through tall grass. I didn’t know then she considered animals her dearest friends. She fed as many as she could every day, often by her own hand: wild squirrels, pheasants, pye-dogs, stray cats, as though they were her personal pets.

The first time I approached her she was stooped to the ground placing a small bowl of milk in a clearing.

‘Who’s that for?’ I asked, as she straightened herself.

She was shy and only smiled without meeting my eyes; but after a moment answered:

‘A snake. A big grass snake who comes and drinks it all up, whenever I have any to spare.’

Lovely as the breeze wafting through the trees, just as light and feathery, she seemed to me a gawky, yet beautiful child of nature, completely at home in these woods in which I befriended her, and later, became her lover. Seven years have passed since then. .

Already I feel like a pack animal. I am twenty-six years old and strong as an ox, but the work’s definitely telling on me, on each of us. . No, I don’t mean the physical strain — that can be rough, no doubt — so much as the contempt and abuse we receive for doing a job no one else will touch.

Can’t deny I always knew it would be rough. It’s more than most people can stomach, many had warned me: let alone you, the coddled son of a priest. But in those first years, Seppy was at my side. Nothing, not the direst predictions of ruin and misery could have kept us apart. People said it was disastrous for first cousins to wed, that our children would be cretins! But we never felt we had a choice, you see. And never once in those seven years did I ever feel let down, or regret my decision. Nor did she, for that matter. Every evening, returning home from work, the happiness that gleamed in her eyes salved my every ache and bruise, healed the smarting of swallowed insults. In our mealy, narrow cot at night, her love refreshed and rejuvenated my body. And all that alarmist talk came to nought; our child was born perfectly normal.

But now, Seppy’s no longer with me. . And even in dreams I don’t see her so often. Dull nausea swelled and passed as it did every morning when I woke to the certain knowledge of being alone. My heart ached with longing for the woman who had taught me how to love; but I was running late. . I threw a crumpled muslin gown over my night clothes, slipped into my white cloth bootees and cloth cap, both essential accessories of my uniform, and knotted the strings on my face mask. I paused for only an instant to gaze at my three-year-old curled up in a corner of her mattress. Unmoved by Buchia’s ruckus, she was still engrossed in a deep sleep. A fierce surge of tenderness shuddered through my body, and I swore on Seppy’s sweet forehead to protect her, always.

‘Come son, your tea’s getting cold. .’

Temoorus’s living quarters abutted my own, separated by no more than half a wall of exposed brick and flaking plaster, and a thatched veranda. He would have heard Buchia’s screaming, and got a cup of tea ready for me. Not so much from the kindness of his heart, I should say, as to hasten me off to work so he can have my little one all to himself when she wakes. It annoys me how possessive he grows, day by day.

Crossing the threshold that divides our homes, I came face to face with Temoo: seated, as always, in his square, rattan chair, in the same pair of striped pajamas I’d seen him wearing for weeks now; the same translucent vest with the ripped sleeve that revealed his dark, hairy body: a thin, vulpine man of scruffy habits, made ridiculous by age, and an incongruous tumescence at his abdomen. Since Seppy’s death, we’ve been thrown together a lot — I depend on him much more now, I do — but try never to forget I shouldn’t trust him an inch. Yet nearly every day of the week, for several long hours, I am compelled to leave in his custody the most precious portion of my being: my baby, Farida. Simply, I have no option.

A large mug of tea stood on the small teapoy beside him, covered with an upturned saucer.

‘Behnchoad Buchia woke me from such a deep sleep,’ said Temoorus. ‘Bullying and yelling his head off first thing in the morning! What that bastard needs. .no, I won’t say it. .’

‘What. .?’

‘Don’t like to start my morning with swear words, but really, a bamboo up his arse. All the bloody way. .’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said, swallowing a generous swig of lukewarm tea. ‘Six corpses, yesterday! No joke, Temoo, lugging them in from all over town. And on top of it, the joker claims we came back sozzled.’

‘Fucking slob doesn’t know his arsehole from his gob. Stinks up the place with his farts and his taunts. What that man needs is a good hiding, but who’ll give it to him, I ask you? He’s our warden. .our boss. Who’s going to question the boss?’

‘Not to fret, my boys!’ said a voice over our heads. ‘Just leave it to the One-Above. .’

We looked up and saw Burjor, leaning over his balcony. But he wasn’t speaking of himself.

‘Time will come for that man, too, when he will choke on his wickedness — mark my word, boys — bleed remorse.’

Once a bodybuilder, this fair-skinned and still handsome corpse bearer had suddenly lost an alarming amount of weight in recent months, and much of his proud swagger. Though he grew feebler by the day, and his clothes had started to hang loosely on him, he remained rather self-conscious of his looks — the prominent, clean-shaven rock jaw, the thickset, well-trimmed moustache, green eyes — what’s more, Burjor never once complained about life’s unfairness. He remained confident of the infallible perfection of the divine master plan. He now declared, in the dramatic and slightly pompous fashion he’s given to:

‘One-Above watches everything, mind you. That maaderchoad’s days are numbered.’

Was I imagining it, I wondered, or had a furtive edge of bitterness crept into Bujji’s voice of late?

‘Oi, Bujji!’ yelled Temoo hoarsely, ‘don’t wreck your morning bad-mouthing excrement.’

‘Well, someone has to flush a turd into its pit and bury it. Too much stink. .too many flies. . Am I right or am I wrong? Tell me?’ chuckled Bujji. ‘If I had any strength left in my body, I’d do it myself.’

Like Bujji, everyone at the Towers had some reason to hate the man we were talking about. His real name was Nusli Kavarana, but his treatment of us menials was so sadistic that he was universally known as Buchia, or the ‘Corker’. He was some sort of labour contractor, directly in charge of hiring and firing us corpse carriers as well as all the maintenance staff on the estate; but very thick with Coyaji, the Punchayet’s secretary for gardens. God knows what sort of deal those two had struck up, but somehow, Buchia had become an inviolable fixture in the Towers’ establishment.

‘Now today, God knows what sort of day it’ll be,’ I said, resuming my conversation with Temoo. ‘Do you? I mean, have you heard anything at all? Bloody hell, so many Parsi corpses in one day is just not natural.’

‘Papers say certain districts have seen an outbreak of gastro: Parel, Dockyard, Khetwadi. .but these things have happened before. Shouldn’t last more than a few days.’

‘Gastro?’

‘That’s only the official euphemism, boys: more likely cholera,’ interjected Burjor from above; then, with apocalyptic finality, he turned to go in, saying, ‘But no one, mind you, knows just how bad. .and it could last longer than just a few days. .mind you.’

‘So much fanfare about that bloody hearse they bought— insertion in Jam-e-Jamshed and all — gone phut already?’ I asked Temoo.

‘At the garage being repaired, son,’ he replied. ‘Engine trouble, claims Buchia, but my point is, whether it’s cholera, or gastro, or whatever, they’d better hire more khandhias. You guys should refuse to work like this. Sixteen hours, eighteen hours. .! And especially, you, a nussesalar! In my time, no hearse, no nothing. But we never saw more than two, at most three corpses in a day. Oh yes, there was another time, much worse than this, even earlier. .in my father’s day. .’

It had always been a hereditary profession. Generations of inbreeding within families belonging to the small sub-caste of corpse bearers — together with a self-imposed and socially enforced isolation — had rendered them freakish, awkward and genetically unsound. How completely sad and despairing then, that corpse bearers continue to squirm and thrash about while trying to find ways to escape its inherited tyranny. My own case was completely unusual, of course: people were usually shocked and disbelieving when they learned that I voluntarily chose to marry a khandhia’s daughter, opting for a life at the Towers of Silence.

By rights, of course, I do rank higher than a mere corpse bearer. Before joining service at the Towers, I went through five weeks of training at the fire temple built on an eminence in this vast, forested estate, just a stone’s throw from the Towers themselves. After several days in solitary retreat and ritual purification, after committing to memory several runic hymns in a dead language, I was initiated by the high priest of the temple and formally proclaimed a nussesalar.

This strange word from the ancient Avestan means ‘Lord of the Unclean’. Nussesalars are corpse bearers, too, make no mistake about that, but invested with several ritualistic, priest-like duties. In our faith, dead matter is considered unclean. Segregation of the ceremonially purified corpse, to prevent its re-contamination at the hands of overly emotive mourners, is only one of my duties. More important is the responsibility I have of protecting the living from the contamination supposedly spewed by corpses.

All corpses radiate an invisible but harmful effluvium, according to the scriptures. Through prescribed ablutions, prophylactics and prayers, I’m supposed to protect the general populace — and myself — from the noxious effects of the dead; indeed, you could say the nussesalar shields the community from all that evil and putrefaction by absorbing it into his own being. In return for which noble service, the scriptures promise, his soul will not be reborn. The nussesalar who performs his duties scrupulously, forever escapes the cycle of rebirth, decrepitude and death. What the scriptures forget to mention, though, is that in this, his final incarnation, his fellow men will treat him as dirt, the very embodiment of shit: in other words, untouchable to the core.

Ordinary corpse bearers don’t have it any easier, believe me. That’s how our people feel about their dead — and all who come in contact with corpses. You could say, though, that as a nussesalar, I am a glorified untouchable.

Temoo’s sharp. He’d been rambling on about his father’s time, but is aware I haven’t been listening. Now he stops talking, and won’t resume until he’s sure he has my attention.

‘The plague it was, then, like I was telling you,’ he said, finally taking up his story again. ‘I remember Papa telling Mumma, “Zarthostis are dying like flies; never thought I’d live to see this day. . And as for the others on these islands, every day hundreds are picked up in bullock carts from the streets — hundreds! — all castes and creeds cremated in heaps at the municipal commons in Parel, Sewree. .” Come to think of it: that might explain Buchia’s abuses and threats. In times like these, you guys are entitled to an allowance, did you know that? Have any of you seen this special allowance? Now what do they call it?’

My attention had strayed again. Was Farida awake, and crying? No, I had imagined it. .not a sound from my end of the block.

‘I mean, for us. Our forefathers made provisions for this sort of thing. .what do they call it? “Pandemic allowance!”’ bellowed Temoorus triumphantly, pleased that his memory hadn’t let him down. ‘Pandemic allowance. . Trustees have made provisions for this kind of situation — it’s written in the fine print of the Punchayet deed — and Buchia, I daresay, is probably planning to pocket it all himself. Don’t take this lying down, son, I tell you. That warden will eat us alive.’

At the mention of eating, I felt a mild pang of hunger, but noticed there were only two slices left in the rusting bread-box; besides, I had lingered too long over my tea.

‘I must go. Keep an ear open for Baby,’ I said to him. ‘There’s some milk in the vessel on my sideboard. She likes her bread soggy and sweet.’

‘Of course, son, of course, don’t I know that? Saved those two slices just for her. I’ll be listening; don’t worry at all. .’

Two

Inside the stone cottage, in the centre of the floor lay the dead man, stretched out on an iron bier.

Nearby, a small fire crackled in a thurible on a silver tray. The cleansing smell of smoke and incense and sandal was everywhere. Three sides of the room — Buchia was right: the mourners, present and waiting — were crowded with women of various ages draped in freshly laundered white saris: swans, elegant in their grief. They sat shoulder to shoulder in closely arranged wooden chairs, their hair covered by scarves or the bob-pinned trains of saris, contained, like their grief, in an orderly, well-adjusted decorum. Some of them conferred in whispers.

The men wore spotless white as well, but ambled outside or stood around in random clusters on the crowded veranda. Some of them wore tall, brooding headgear. Most knew each other and exchanged pleasantries — or condolences — in muted murmurs. Everyone’s head was covered, and many bent in prayer. Must have been an important bawa, this big man, I thought to myself, to have attracted such a large and well-decked retinue of mourners.

Standing outside the funeral chamber, I hurriedly untied and re-knotted the sacred girdle around my waist. Fardoon was already there, waiting. He’s a nussesalar, too, though at least twenty years my senior. Presently, we entered the stone cottage together.

Gripping a hefty, three-inch-long iron nail I had collected from the storeroom on my way up, I got down on my haunches, and described a circle on the floor at a radius of about three feet around the supine body in an anticlockwise direction. Fardoon tagged behind me at the end of a long white cloth tape, both of us softly reciting, in tandem, thirty-three Yatha Ahu Vairyos — one of the prescribed ancient hymns that keeps the demon of foulness at bay. This magic circle, once drawn, firmly seals in the invisible contamination emanating from the corpse, or so it is believed. This was all pretty much routine. I wasn’t going to be needed again, until it was time to carry the corpse up to the tower. And I was thinking perhaps there might be just enough time to catch a nap. .? One of the khandhias — Bomi or Fali perhaps — would have been assigned the task of bringing up Moti the bitch on a leash, to show her the corpse once the priests were through.

But before we could make our exit through the crowded funeral cottage, two robed priests padded in, not willing to wait anymore. They seemed to be sulking, impatient about the delay I had presumably been responsible for.

Holding a long white handkerchief between them, they swayed from side to side, chanting a prayer of penitence beseeching forgiveness from the Almighty on behalf of the large, dead man whose name was Peshotan Pavri.

Meanwhile, a young girl, possibly a granddaughter of the deceased, began wailing. An older woman sitting beside her put an arm around the young girl and squeezed her comfortingly, while another, in front of them, turned in her chair and began whispering urgently:

‘No, no my dear, mustn’t cry like that. .’

‘Papa’s happy, darling, what’s there to cry about?’ said the other woman.

‘If you shed tears, they’ll only become like heavy boulders pinning his soul down to earth. . Let him go, let him soar up, Ruby. .’

Presently, the young girl’s sobbing softened to a whimper, became more sibilant, elegiac.

People never give a thought to death while there’s still time, I reflected, as the priests droned on. And when it comes upon you unannounced, there’s shock and disbelief, and a great gnashing of teeth.

As Fardoon and I withdrew from the crowded funeral hall, the congregated mourners shrank perceptibly, leaving a clear, if narrow, passage for us to walk through. I was thinking of my own little girl, who must be awake now, perhaps sitting in her grandpa’s lap, munching on those two slices of bread. . Despite my misgivings about the man, I felt grateful for Temoo that he was there to keep her company; that Coyaji had allowed the dotard to stay on in his quarters even though he’s too old for any real work.

Lost in thought, I didn’t notice a particularly lean, cadaverous man with a large mole on his forehead seated on the veranda among crowds of family and friends; nor did he see me approach. Perhaps he was merely inattentive or too abstracted from long hours of prayer? One leg hoisted over the other, vigorously wagging his cocked foot at the ankle while silently moving his lips, he was completely engrossed in a thick, but diminutive prayer book.

As I passed him, my leg brushed against this man’s oscillating shoe. Accidentally, of course, but the man who had seemed so lost in prayer, so oblivious of his surroundings, suddenly sprang to life. With the suddenness of a spring-operated toy he leapt to his feet, and began trembling like a leaf. A few other mourners noticed that something out of the ordinary was going on. Now the bony figure started making loud and insistent buzzing noises, like an incensed bee. He was saying something to me, abusing me in all probability, protesting his defilement at my hands— but all of it wordlessly, without parting his lips which remained tightly pressed together.

Having once trained for priesthood myself, I was familiar with this routine practiced by the most devout: the hallowed chain of prayer they have been so diligently weaving must not be interrupted by the profane utterances of everyday speech: hence, the buzzing. In a ferocious dumb charade the man was urging me to keep my distance, to take my unholy self out of his sight, disappear from the very face of the earth (if I read him correctly) — all the while flailing his arms and fists in the air like one possessed. Other mourners stood up too, shocked. The man whom I had thus desecrated by the graze of my shin against his polished leather shoe seemed angry enough to strike me, but fear of further despoilment rendered him impotent, and apoplectic with rage.

I felt an urge to break into guffaws of laughter. I felt like embracing this strangely awkward man so terrified of the ‘demon’ of putrefaction; smothering him in a friendly bear hug, and saying:

Do you seriously believe you won’t need me one day? Astride those emaciated shoulders rides the ghost of a corpse. You don’t see him now, but it’s only a matter of time, believe me, before your blood turns to ice, your limbs harden like wood. Then, ask yourself, will your near and dear ones wash and clothe you for the final goodbye? No, sweet man, you’ll have to depend on one of us. And then, we’ll have to rub you all over. .

Of course, I didn’t dare deliver that tirade; instead, only mumbled contritely:

‘Forgive me, please. My mistake, bawaji, please forgive. .’ and bowing low, quickly took my leave of him, as the rest of the grim congregation on the veranda glared at me.

I had witnessed instances of corpse bearers being fined by Coyaji, or even thrashed by self-important and wrathful members of our tribe for sitting on a bench intended for public use, or merely leaning against a wall in one of the pavilions during large funerals that teemed with mourners. Infringing the strict rules of segregation could be dangerous for us corpse bearers. Greatly relieved to have got away so lightly, I allowed my mind to relax, feel once again the silence and peace of the woods.

I had been feeling rather queasy and unwell all morning; what I wanted to do most of all was get back to my quarters and catch some sleep. But while cutting through the casuarina grove I found myself intercepted by Buchia. How the news of the tiny furore I had caused got to him so swiftly I’ll never know, but he’s not one to overlook such blunders. Without any qualms, spiritual or otherwise, Buchia thought nothing of laying hands on us corpse bearers. By close association, I suspect, he sees himself as completely sullied anyway.

‘Can’t see where you’re going, behnchoad? Bumping into all and sundry, instead of minding your own fuckin’ work?’

Buchia wore long sideburns that flowered into a sort of fleecy half-beard. He had a high dome of a forehead with very little hair on his head. Something about him never failed to evoke a sense of revulsion in me. It wasn’t just his unpleasant foul-mouthedness, or his oddly androgynous voice always startling to hear. Something about the very core of the man was unmistakably malodorous, if not malignant.

Short and stocky, but very strong, all of a sudden he slapped me on the back of my head. There didn’t seem to be much force behind the blow, but for a few seconds I was seeing double.

‘Don’t you dare lift your hand on me!’ I protested, reflexively raising my bunched-up fist.

‘And what will you do, my dear Piloo?’ he laughed. ‘Box my ears?’

His tone was no longer threatening, but teasing rather, almost affectionate in its use of my abbreviated name. No one else ever called me that. He put his arm around me, tickling the nape of my neck with his index finger, as if I were a kitten, but I shook him off fiercely with my elbow.

‘Your dad used his influence to get you this job, you know that,’ he purred. ‘But is he here now to protect you? I let you have a good snooze until so late this morning, kept everyone waiting so you could wake up fresh, didn’t I? Answer me, Piloo, didn’t I? Now cool off, and get some more rest while you can. Only make sure you’re back in forty-five minutes to take the corpse up to the tower. And immediately after that, be ready to start moving again. I’ve already informed the others.’

‘What?!’

Clearly, there was no redress against this unpleasant man’s manipulative authority.

‘What on earth are you staring at me for?’ continued Buchia. ‘The three others on duty will accompany you. They’re washing the bier. And Jungoo as well.’

‘But where to, now?’

‘Colaba. Cusrow Baag.’

‘Colaba! Oh God. .!’

‘Take the address from my office before you leave. Groaning and moaning won’t help when there’s work to be done.’

‘We’ll start straight after lunch, then?’ I asked.

Was there a hint of assertion in my voice? Perhaps, but it was already a quarter to ten, and I was famished.

‘Don’t act cocky with me! Didn’t I just tell you, immediately after this body has been consigned to the tower?’

I saw him raise his hand, as if to smack me on the head again, but I glared at him so fiercely he checked himself.

‘Next funeral has to start at four. If you wait for lunch you’ll never make it back before sunset. It’ll take you two hours just to reach Colaba.’

‘This is too much, saheb. .even we need to eat some time. And rest. It’s heavy work. What’s happened to the hearse?’

‘Never mind the hearse. These are trying times for everyone. Just do as you’re told, Piloo. There will be other times, later, for rest. And recreation, too. Don’t you think I, too, could use some of that once in a while? What do you say. .?’ And he scratched the nape of my neck again.

Sickened, I walked away without saying another word. Buchia had a reputation for liking boys, of bringing young men up to his quarters at night. If he had touched me again, I swear I would have struck him; but the truth is, I was completely off-colour that morning, ruing my previous night’s indulgence. A pint of country would have served us better than the full bottle that we’d glugged down at top speed: truth to tell, a most dreadful exhaustion had made us greedy for self-effacement.

Three

‘Make way! Make way for the corpse. .’

By the time we reached Kalbadevi, Rustom’s resounding bass had lost some of its operatic flair, his cries feebler and less frequent. My own legs felt tentative and wobbly. Nonetheless, people stepped aside respectfully, some even muttering to themselves—‘A Parsi corpse!’—as though impressed that death had actually touched a member of that privileged and idiosyncratic community.

This was going to be a long and tedious trudge, we all knew, even though we were taking the straightest possible route — past Flora Fountain and Dhobi Talao, through Girgaum and Hughes Road, then on to the Towers. Once, under the sun, I stumbled, nearly losing my grip on the bier.

I had had nothing to eat since last night. Just before leaving the house in Cusrow Baag, kindly neighbours of the bereaved family had handed us an earthen pot of fermented toddy — tart as hell, but I drank thirstily, my mouth was parched — and brown lumps of sweet jaggery tucked into rounds of soft white bread; sustenance for the long walk back.

For a while, the weight of the bier and corpse seemed entirely manageable. In fact there was a spring in our step. On certain streets, which were practically deserted, remembering Buchia’s admonition about the next funeral having to start at four o’clock, we raised the tempo and jogged. There, Rusi’s sporadic, breathless bellow actually helped us find our rhythm, but we couldn’t keep up that pace for long.

‘Let’s slow down a bit,’ gasped Boman.

‘Slow down, of course, slow down. .’ seconded Rusi, wheezing and heaving, ‘we’ll make it back in time, not to worry.’

But it was already half past two. We had lost a lot of time almost at the start of our return journey when we were held up by a commotion in the street caused by a large group of rowdy nationalists, who were yelling anti-imperialist and pro-Swadeshi slogans outside an emporium for clothes near the Army and Navy Stores. It was a place called Crawford and Allen: Importers of Fine Apparel. The protestors were taking exception to the dress shirts, jackets, jodhpurs, derbys or whatever was contained in a large number of parcels a wealthy man and his wife had just walked out of the shop with; browbeating them to show allegiance to the cause of India’s independence by consigning every last parcel in their arms to a large bonfire blazing on the macadamized public road.

Traffic had slowed down, there was smoke everywhere. Several Anglo-Indian officers in white stood by, glowering under their sola topees, none too pleased with the sweltering summer heat, smoke, fire and the sloganeering of nationalists. The protesters were cordoned off from the general public by a posse of Indian sepoys. Then something happened, what it was I didn’t see.

Perhaps somebody threw a stone. The officers barked a directive, and immediately a fracas ensued. The sepoys, in their baggy blue shorts, began caning the vociferous protestors. Many were arrested, and bundled into a waiting police van. Moti was barking her head off. Finally, one of the officers noticed us waiting patiently with a corpse and dog, and gave instructions to let us pass.

A Parsi funeral must be concluded before sunset. In Parsi-populated areas there was certainly no call for vocal histrionics. The sight of four burly men in white muslins, shouldering a corpse on a bier and walking as fast as they could was self-explanatory: the public knew where we were headed, and why in such a hurry. People made way for us long before we approached. Jungoo, the erstwhile driver of the defunct hearse, was walking a little ahead of us, holding on tight to the excitable Moti’s leash. It was he, really, who should have been clearing a path for us, admonishing pedestrians that a corpse was on its way. But, that very morning, he had complained of a sore throat; as always, Rustom was happy to take on the part of crier, boastfully revelling in the reverberations of his own deep voice.

‘Make way! Make way for the corpse. .’

Nobody quite remembers how the custom of showing a corpse to a dog began, but it’s probably as old as ancient Persia itself. Before modern medicine reserved that right for itself, it was canines that were believed to have an uncanny ability to sniff out the slightest flicker of vitality persisting in a body presumed dead. Hence, not once, but thrice in the course of the funerary ceremonies my Moti is brought before the corpse. Invariably though, after no more than a moment’s hesitation, she wrinkles her snout and looks away.

By the time we reached Opera House, obstructions in our route had increased manifold: all manner of traffic, crowds of people on foot, bullock carts, stray cows, taxis, public trams rattling past, and every now and then, a chauffeur-driven private sedan honking obstreperously. The voices of street hawkers rang in our ears through several long stretches during our journey.

‘Fresh leafy vegetables. .fresh methi, sua, maat. .’

‘Bombeel. .taaji, safed bombeel!’

‘Langraa. .langraa. .dasheree. Juicy, sweet dasheree. .’

Given the fierceness with which the sun was beating down, it was unlikely that either the leafies or the Bombay duck had retained any of their proclaimed freshness. The mangoes looked quite luscious, though. It was already a quarter to four, and I was terribly thirsty.

‘Shall we take the short cut through Khareghat Colony?’ asked Jungoo.

‘Hardly much shorter,’ snapped Rusi. ‘And taking those steep rocky shelves with a corpse’ll slow us down even more.’

Clearly, he was peeved, for not once had Jungoo offered to relieve him of his load. Not a corpse bearer himself, Jungoo was no stranger to nusso either; his own elder brother had been shouldering corpses for years. And Jungoo would have known just how difficult it is for the same person to yell for gangway while carrying the weight of a corpse and bier.

Having made it up to Kemps Corner and almost into the gates of the funeral grounds, something happened to me which I can’t quite account for, even after all these years. It’s never happened before, or since.

Fatigue, dehydration and exhaustion — all that, yes, but something else, too: for I went under at the very junction where one road bifurcates to Forjett Hill — towards the small fire temple where I grew up. Even on a normal day, if in the course of my work I happen to casually pass by the lane that leads to my father’s temple, the emotions that surge in me can be quite disordering. This time, however, I simply passed out.

Not in an instant, as with the flick of a switch, but rather gradually. .my legs turning to jelly and folding in, even as I heard clearly the agitated voices of my fellow-shoulderers.

‘Oh my God, watch out!’

‘What’re you doing, ghair chodiya! The bier! Hold on!’

‘Help, someone. .Elchi’s collapsed.’

As I crumpled to the ground — all this was reported to me only later — the corpse slid off the bier and turned turtle, causing a great uproar and commotion among passers-by. For me, the only odd impression which I still retain is that it wasn’t a gradual tunnelling into darkness; rather, I felt overwhelmed by the intense, dazzling heat of an inferno — a fierce, blinding white light — that drew me to it relentlessly and then, at the very last moment when I felt I should be consumed by it, repelled me violently: plunging me into complete darkness.

And all through this vertiginous delirium, but one bleak and sorrowful awareness held me in thrall: the white marbled spotlessness of the fire temple where I had spent some of the happiest years of my life, and the all-pervading presence in it of my father, its head priest, who, in the last many years, had refused to speak to me, or even set eyes on me. When I came to, minutes later, I felt immense bereavement. All that immaculate purity and holiness was out of bounds for me. Everything I had once held dear was lost, and forever, I had become a pariah. .

Four

My earliest memories are aural: a burst of startling thunder, the thrumming of torrential rain. Early evening, but already rather dark, a storm is raging outside.

Father has just woken up from his afternoon nap. While Mother puts the kettle on for his tea, he carries me in his arms, strolling idly, but at the same time gripping me with what seems like excessive caution. He carries me through the cool, shadowy back rooms of the temple, and into the dry, thatched arbour of the open-air well. When he stops by the well to peer in, Father clutches me even more tightly. I squirm in his arms, lean forward and drink in a glimpse of its deep, dark emptiness.

Another thunderclap and he moves away from the well. But I want to stay on: I twist my body in his fixed grasp, turning towards the sight we are walking away from.

‘What is it you want, Phiroze?’ asks Father. ‘All those sparkling jewels?’

All around the well are dozens of small tables with rows and rows of oil lamps, neatly arranged in tiny glasses. Most of the wicks are lit, their flames dancing in the draughty anteroom.

This is deemed a holy well. There could be hundreds or thousands of lamps here — the light-and-fog halo of each dazzled my infant eyes, merging all into a magical chiaroscuro.

Each oil lamp lit by a devotee, I later learned, represented an offering of thanksgiving, or a prayer of supplication, towards the cost of which, he or she was meant to slip a one paisa copper coin into the black slot of a large metal box placed on a table nearby. At the end of every month, Father would open this box with the large key suspended from the nail above it. When I was old enough, he enlisted my help in counting the total offerings. All of it, I was told, went to charity.

But right now, Father isn’t interested in lingering by the sparkling lights around the well. Plodding along lazily in his soft velvet slippers, he carries me into the cool marble-tiled main hall, where huge framed portraits of Zarathustra and all the saints brood on the periphery of the sanctum sanctorum.

Standing outside this dark chamber with its enormous gleaming fire vase, he whispers in my ear:

‘Look Phiroze, look there,’ directing my gaze at an enfeebled but still penetrating fire, ‘Khodaiji. .’

After he has had his tea and said his prayers, I know that Father will enter this chamber, clean the excess ash and extinguished embers, stoke the fire and feed it with sandalwood and frankincense. Then, when it’s blazing again, he’ll pull the rope several times, softly ringing the bell suspended from the high ceiling.

But before any of this can happen, the silence of the temple is suddenly shattered by an unholy clatter. So deep, perhaps, is my father’s own absorption in the palpating symbol of God he has just pointed out to me — or perhaps so bemused after the nap he hasn’t completely woken up from — that he jumps out of his skin at the loud report. The reverberating crash runs on for a while before dinning to a slow halt and I, too, experience the prickle of my father’s momentary gooseflesh. I cling tighter, sinking deeper into the comforting largeness of his body. But Father has had a real start, and his voice cracks with anger and alarm as he yells in a wild and intemperate manner:

‘Eh Mehernosh! Bomi! Mackie! Who’s there? Who’s on duty? Making such a racket at sunset? Any sense? Show yourselves!’

But no one appears, and Father decides to ignore this non-compliance.

‘Wash all those platters clean. I insist — every one of them again. And wipe them thoroughly with a clean cloth. I tell you, is there any sense in this? And at this, the hour of lighting lamps?!’ he mutters, as we head back towards his after-nap cup of tea.

Father is still trembling with anger, such has been the shock for him of that sudden clatter of silver trays on marble floor. But collecting himself, he whispers to me, almost conspiratorially,

‘Clumsy oafs. Unless I yell at them, they’ll never learn.’

I can tell he is trying to repair the nervous trauma he was afraid he might have caused by yelling so violently in my ear. For that one moment, he forgot he was carrying a very small boy in his arms.

All through childhood, I don’t remember ever being afraid of Father. If I think back, childhood was a piously happy time that flowered under his protective shelter and gentle authority. An awkwardly built, lumbering man he was powerful in most ways, but always very kind and considerate. I remember his boisterous laughter ringing through the tranquil temple in the evening, when he was amused by something I said or did, or some harmless prank played by Vispy and me, or our shenanigans with one of the pets. But that laughter was to dry up even before Mother died.

Somehow, over time, it congealed into a grim religiosity, a credulously ‘scientific’ approach to spirituality. Of course, I also remember innumerable occasions when my mother complained of his selfishness, but I never really learnt what exactly she meant by that.

Years later, when I was a grown boy, the distance between my father and me widened. Still later, it became a breach, impossible to ford. The playful whimsicality was all gone, scorched by an unbending sense of propriety and piety. I was to learn then, that his anger could be frighteningly implacable, merciless. But I am moving ahead too fast. .

When my father was appointed head priest of the small fire temple on Forjett Hill Road, only my elder brother, Vispy, had been born. Just when my parents had resignedly accepted that God had no more children in store for them, my mother discovered to her delight that she was pregnant again.

The great joy of this occurrence was enhanced by their belief that this second child, conceived nine whole years after the first, and so soon after they had moved into the residential quarters of the temple, could not but be a blessing bestowed on them by the departed and saintly Eruch Kookadaroo, the previous head priest of the temple. While he was still incumbent, Eruchsah always had a great fondness for my father; from his sickbed, he prevailed upon the temple trustees to offer him the post. When I was born, a few months later, on what turned out to be a highly auspicious day of the Zoroastrian calendar, my father read much meaning in my advent into this world. Though Framroze kept his presumptions to himself, and may have shared them on occasion only with my mother, the truth was that in his daydreams he was nurturing great hopes for me, for what I would grow up to become one day.

Small in size and of inconspicuous location my father’s temple may have been, but it was nonetheless venerable for its antiquity, and touching for the loyalty of its devotees, some of whom visited it faithfully every single day of the year.

As I grew up, I never stopped hearing stories of the long lineage of spiritual masters associated with the temple, powerfully endowed priests whose generous blessings flowed to all who prayed before its holy fire. How else could one explain countless, legendary accounts of the miraculous restitution to the righteous of what was always theirs, of near-fatal illnesses vanquished and glowing health regained, of the miscarriage of innumerable wicked schemes which the innocent found themselves inveigled into, eventually emerging triumphant — in short, of the assured fulfilment of every earnest prayer beseeched for on bended knees at the doorway of the temple’s sanctum sanctorum. For seventeen years, this temple was my beloved home, and stories of the miracles of faith my oxygen.

By the time I was born, Vispy was already a school-going child attending a reputed English-medium institution near Flora Fountain. He was a bright boy. His performance at school gave no cause for complaint to his teachers; moreover, increasingly, it became reason for praise and prizes. When I was enrolled in the same institution, Vispy had already reached his penultimate year at school. Given the vast age difference between us, it was natural that we had little in common by way of shared pastimes, or even a strong fraternal bond.

However, of the few activities which we sometimes jointly participated in, none gave us so much mirthful pleasure as feeding the family pets. As I grew in years and Vispy became busier with his school studies, I insisted — and mother acquiesced, albeit uneasily — on taking over this responsibility single-handedly.

Hilla, my mother, always had a soft spot for animals: to care for those dumb creatures who never complained about their personal woes seemed to her a worthy, ennobling activity. Over the years, she had accumulated a small menagerie of pets, housing them in the temple’s small backyard: a goat, who gave us milk every morning, a dourly enigmatic tortoise who could stride about with astonishing celerity when he wished to, two frisky adopted strays who loved to render him inactive by knocking him onto his shell (for no apparent reason), and an African grey parrot, Hormaz, who had belonged to Hilla’s father before her, and was estimated to be at least eighty years of age.

At various times she also tried rearing rabbits, squirrels and hens, though somehow, the latter were always very short-lived. The brief melancholy occasioned by the death of one of these minor pets (and its subsequent burial in the backyard), was a recurrent and heart-sinking motif that sounded like the temple bell through my childhood, and one of the few intense emotions I regularly shared with Mother.

Alone among the pets, the parrot’s favoured status allowed him space within our cramped living quarters, where a tall wooden stool served as pedestal for his impressive brass cage. Most of the time, however, Hormaz loathed being caged. He preferred to flap around our two rooms, or sat perched atop the dome of his cage, from where he would fix a sharply hooked gaze on the mundane preoccupations of humans. Only at dusk, when it was his bedtime, would he quietly strut back into the barred enclosure and, without warning, commence an outraged squawking to remind Hilla of the hour, that it was time to cloak his cage with the patched and musty blanket reserved for this purpose, without which, apparently, Hormaz couldn’t find it in him to fall sleep.

Framroze’s own bedtime wasn’t much later, though he was less impatient, and needed no more than a light supper to go out like a light. By 8 p.m. he was snoring loudly. The others stayed up until later. Sometimes, Vispy had homework to complete, and Hilla, her household chores. But the entire family was always considerate about not disturbing the exhausted high priest’s sleep. They knew he had set his alarm at forty-five minutes past midnight, so that at one o’clock in the morning, for the fifth and last time before daybreak, he would rise and re-enter the temple’s marble sanctum sanctorum to sweep up the excess embers and ash from the big fire vase, feed the fire with sandal and fan it back to life; then finally, at that desolate hour, ring several times the sonorous brass bell that hung from the ceiling inside the tiny square chamber.

Having thus marked the division of the day into the last of its five segments, Framroze would return to bed; that is, until 4.30 a.m., when he got up again to perform his ablutions, mumble his prayers and resonantly chime in the new morning. Shortly after, Hilla got up and began preparing the leavened breads, the sticky brown sweet with nuts and raisins which children love, the doughnuts, boiled eggs and crisply fried paapri. All of this was placed alongside fruits and a few buds of white flowers in trays of German silver, to make up the offerings which would be sanctified during a clutch of prayer services that began as early as 6 a.m. but concluded just before noon.

Framroze’s rubbery, porpoise-like frame was always to be seen lumbering hurriedly through the cool, tranquil inner halls of the Zoroastrian temple; that is, when he wasn’t seated cross-legged on the floor, taking part in some prayer service himself. His odd hours of waking and sleeping may have partly explained his perpetual air of dopiness, though even this was probably an inaccurate perception. In fact, he was a very busy man, attending politely not only to those who came to his temple to requisition prayers for their deceased, but also arranging for other freelance priests to fulfil some of these commissions at pre-arranged hours.

Moreover, he had to maintain a small notebook, in which he carefully noted the names of the deceased persons and all their relatives and ancestors whose names must be mentioned in the course of the recitation. He had to remember to give these names on a slip of paper to the officiating priest (or his junior partner) who would be performing the recitation. Often, subsequent to a flurry of ceremonies held during the first month after the occurrence of death, most relatives made it a point to have these and diverse other ceremonies repeated every month on the same day, sometimes for as many as twelve years.

So there was a large amount of paperwork involved in all this for Framroze — recording, scheduling, billing. Each ceremony cost the deceased relatives a certain modest, but specific amount. Only a portion of this amount went to the officiating priest. The rest of it covered the costs of various oblational offerings that were consecrated by the sonorous recitation of ancient Avestan hymns. Then, neatly packaged in paper parcels, the blessed fruit and bread were shared among the relatives of the family that had requisitioned the ceremony.

Besides all that, of course, someone had to take responsibility for ensuring a regular supply of fresh flowers and fruits for the services, and other comestibles for the resident priest’s family. Fortunately, there were florists and fruit and vegetable vendors who stopped by in the evenings, when the temple was at its most serene. Ardesar, my father’s assistant, himself a junior priest, or even Hilla, usually managed to secure bulk bargains for these products, and fix a date for the next delivery.

Often, Framroze had very little time for Hilla. I suppose this is what she must have meant by his selfishness. Days would pass without his enquiring after Vispy’s progress at school, and it was Hilla who held the fort, as it were, ensuring that a fresh school uniform was washed and ironed every day, that his homework was completed the evening before and his dry lunch ready and packed in his tiffin box every morning; that the family’s meals were cooked after Vispy left for school, that our tiny quarters were always spotlessly clean.

While they attempted to keep this complex domestic routine under control, for quite a while apparently, without knowing it myself, I had made my parents very anxious — by refusing to speak. My eyes shone, possibly, with some spark of intelligence, and occasionally I bestowed upon some member of my family the most endearing smile. But talk I wouldn’t, nor even, like babies do, blow spittle or burble meaninglessly. I was already three, and they had begun to worry that I was a little backward, if not actually feeble-minded; well, certainly not as bright as my elder brother — of that there was no question.

However, all of a sudden, I capsized their disparaging beliefs. One day, I finally did say something — a recognizable word! My first word, though, was not Mama, or Papa, or Vispy. Rather, it was something that sounded like ‘muss-muss’. It took Hilla a while to decipher, until she observed that I was trying to attract the attention of the parrot, Hormaz.

When Hilla reported the incident to him that evening, Framroze was thrilled.

‘The first word that escapes his lips,’ he pronounced solemnly, ‘is the name of the Almighty Creator. I have always known that wonderful things are in store for this boy. He may have had a tardy start but, perhaps, Hilla, one day our Phiroze will become a great priest, or a renowned Zoroastrian scholar.’

But my interest in the parrot came to an abrupt and chilling end. My mother at least, I believe, was never able to forgive me for what I did. To the others, it only seemed to confirm what they had always suspected: that I was a dull and pig-headed child.

Whatever opinion my family may have had of me, it probably had little effect on me. For at the age of four or about then, I grew into quite a brat, still often unintelligible in my locution, but nevertheless, very voluble and self-confident. Often wide-eyed and dumbstruck by Vispy’s ability to carry out the most prodigious feats, I was cautioned never to attempt any of them until I was his age. Such as walking along the narrow parapet of the temple’s veranda, which was quite deserted in the evenings, or turning multiple somersaults on Papa’s large bed. I felt proud of Vispy, of all his achievements, especially those for which he was lauded at the school he went to for the better part of the day. These were sometimes mentioned or discussed over family dinner.

One of his skills, which I would often marvel at, was the ease with which, on a squally January evening, after school, he put a kite up in the sky. There was a narrow stairway that led up to the temple terrace, and I’d follow him there. Sometimes, there were dozens of kites already in the sky, controlled by other invisible strings — careening, swooping, wafting, bobbing, spinning out of control, gliding high on a gentle breeze, or soaring deep into a darkening sky. Once, but only once, after he had put his kite up very high in the sky, Vispy allowed me to hold the thread. It was the lightest moment of my life. I felt myself airborne, flying. And also, I felt a great and momentous responsibility, as though I had been temporarily put in charge of a planetary configuration or of one of the world’s rarest elements; as if the earth’s continued equilibrium was entwined in my fingers to maintain. But before I could savour the moment for any length of time, Vispy took the string away from me.

‘You’ll cut your hand, don’t fool around! There’s ground glass coating this twine. .’

I didn’t understand what he meant by that. But my interrupted tryst with the sky may have inspired me to fly Hormaz.

Since I knew I could never put Vispy’s kite up in the sky by my own efforts, and would have left it hopelessly mangled had I tried, it seemed far easier to try and fly a bird. The very next afternoon, soon after he had left for school, I took down the reel of thread from where it lay atop Vispy’s cupboard, and approached Hormaz quietly. Since there was no question of my being able to take the bird up to the terrace, I thought I’d fly him right there in our front room. Mama and Papa were napping in the next one. With the trusting and slightly impatient indifference of an eighty-year-old, the parrot refused, at first, to react: perhaps, he thought, this little brat — how can he hurt me?

But when I had quickly wrapped the string thrice around his neck, he began to squawk in alarm. I hadn’t bargained for all this noise. I had just wanted to fly Hormaz around the room at the end of my string. Instead, he began to flutter and tremble and shriek, terrified. Flapping his wings madly, he would rise just a few inches, then descend again trembling, screaming his head off. I knew all this noise would wake up my parents. Before that happened, and they put an end to my experiment, I wanted Hormaz to fly up in the air just a bit and circumnavigate the room, maybe only a couple of times at the end of my string. So I tugged at the string, but he didn’t move. Then I tugged harder.

And this time, he did take off; Hormaz flew up with a great deal of force. And suddenly, there was blood everywhere. Not just on the feathers of the grey parrot lying on the floor, but everywhere, on my fingers and hands as well. And suddenly, I was shrieking louder than the parrot had been a minute ago.

Several cries and exclamations followed soon after — first concern, then horror — Mother rushed into the room and began shrieking, too. That was my first experience of death, though I was too young to know it by its name.

For many years after this, my parents were kind enough not to remind me of my stupidity, or blame me for this tragic mishap. It was tacitly accepted by my parents that I had been just too young, too foolish to fully understand what I had done. But even to my as yet underdeveloped ability to make inferences, the inescapable relation between the hard tug at the sharp kite-flying string, my own bloody fingers and the fallen parrot on the floor locked together with a terrifying logic. I couldn’t have put words to what had happened, but my guilt was enormous. Within myself, I was grieving silently for Hormaz and the whole episode only made me more taciturn than before.

Five

The notion that I was the stupid one in the family caught on.

To be sure, I did many foolish things when I was small — the unfortunate near-decapitation of Hormaz being only the first. That all my family believed I was endowed with an inferior intelligence was evident in the way they spoke to me, and of me. There may have been some degree of genuine concern underlying the tacit complicity they shared over my alleged mental deficiencies; but it was annoying to me that my mother, father and brother — all seemed bonded in a conspiracy of nervous apprehension, as though continually watching for further signs of my dull-wittedness. Rather than reassure them that their fears were misguided, I found it more gratifying to confound them with further evidences of my idiocy.

No, even that’s not completely true. My cussed disposition may have ensured that I felt perversely contrary, antipathetic to their bewildered suspicions. But I never deliberately postured, or projected myself as someone, or something I wasn’t. If my folks saw me as doltish, it was because their minds were already predisposed on that score.

And, perhaps, the biggest reason for this prejudice had its root somewhere in my own undeniable light-headedness: every now and then, for no apparent rhyme or reason, I would burst into bouts of irrepressible giggling. No matter how ostentatious or forbidding an occasion might be, no matter how dignified, exalted or solemn — if I sensed that some kind of formality was being called for, in itself this condition was sufficient to set me giggling.

Until the age of five or six, I suppose this is generally tolerated and may even seem cute. But the older I grew the more absurd any requirement of pomposity or piety seemed; immediately and automatically — irrespective of context — it evoked in me a burst of unstoppable and hearty rejoicing. Naturally, eyebrows were raised at this kind of compulsive, brazenly disrespectful, side-splitting risibility. To this day, I have to make a special effort to exercise control over this aspect of my reflexes. The mere knowledge that a part of me is telling me to restrain myself is enough to unfasten the lid on my irreverence.

I had grown up in the rear of a fire temple which was revered and visited by scores of people daily. At all times of day and night, every nook and corner of the temple was sanitized by the cleansing perfume of sandal and incense. In our tiny quarters at the back as well, the air was redolent with the smell of piousness; and our lives tangled in an elaborate network of rules and proscriptions that had been instilled in us from a very young age. Everything was sanctified and respect-worthy. No room here for fatuity, or impiety.

There were procedures for everything — for eating a meal, for pissing, for taking a crap, for washing one’s arse, for how to wash one’s hands after doing that, for taking a bath; and above all, for when and how frequently one must recite the prayers which would restore some measure of wholesomeness to one’s sullied, contaminated self.

Personal hygiene and purity — the rules of which, according to my father, were clearly laid down in our ancient texts — were essential prerequisites to spiritual progress. Naturally, I could not help being amused by the overblown logic or lack of it in some of these injunctions, which may have had good reason for being enjoined upon primitive pastoral tribes some three thousand or five thousand years ago, but didn’t need to be glorified into obsessive, all-embracing moral codes. Their obvious rationale at the time would have been sanitary — it seemed evident even to me — not mystical, or ‘scientific’, as my father would have us believe.

‘Why do you think there are so many strange, new, incurable diseases in the world? Why do people no longer live to be a hundred, or a hundred and fifty, or two hundred years old as they used to in the olden days? Why do you think evil has been able to tighten its stranglehold on humankind?’ Framroze would rage, if he ever he saw Vispy or me slip up in our routines.

‘It’s because people have forgotten the conjunction between hygiene and spirituality,’ he would continue, answering his own question. ‘Or because they presume it is inconsequential. No wonder the world has become such a bedevilled place!’

Nevertheless, of all my family members, it was my father I was closest to. His capacity for softness and indulgence towards me seemed limitless. There were times, I remember, during my fits of endless giggling — even while scolding me to stop being an ass — I could discern in his eyes and in the lines on his face, despite the thick camouflage of a riotous salt-and-pepper beard, the disallowed flicker of an impulse of love, the suppressed urge to join in my infectious giggling. Or did I imagine it?

In fact, until the time he completely disowned me, and never wanted to see my face again, my father was the only one in the family who refused to believe there was anything deficient with my intelligence. Unlike Mother, whose love for me was fraught with unspoken fears that she had perhaps given birth to a completely obtuse and moronic second child, I felt deep down that Father was actually proud of me; that, secretly, he continued to nurture hopes that once I had run through my juvenile frivolities, and stopped playing the fool, I would emerge a brilliant religious scholar, if not a respected high priest like himself.

My performance at school, however, was disappointingly below par, and far below the record established by my brother before me. Having cleared his matriculation exam with an impressively high score, Vispy was the recipient of a scholarship from a Parsi charitable fund for boys from underprivileged families. Already, he had joined a commercial institute where he was learning typing and shorthand, as well as bookkeeping and accountancy. Now that he had grown up, he travelled to the institute and back on the city’s public transport buses and trams, sometimes returning late in the evening only just in time for dinner. I envied Vispy his new-found freedom, but was constantly reminded by my parents that he had earned it.

‘Dunce!’

‘Donkey!’

‘Dullard!’

Some of the elderly teachers at school, I couldn’t help notice, reserved their angriest invective for me. On the verge of retirement themselves, they made it a point to recall the years they had spent giving instruction to my brother with exaggerated nostalgia and yearning. My own family members thought it, frankly, improper and nonsensical to even draw such comparisons between us.

The truth was I had no real interest in school, or in enforced learning. Nevertheless, goaded and punished, threatened and yelled at, often the butt of the practical jokes of my classmates— I suspect they saw me as a simpleton, too, but I didn’t mind — I stumbled slowly up the ladder through high school; but, alas, I failed to clear my final matriculation exam.

Father was disappointed. On a number of occasions during the last two years, he had been urging me to study hard, and see if I could possibly even improve on Vispy’s score. He was hoping that a healthy spirit of competition between the brothers might serve to uncover the depths of dormant potential in me. When he heard I had failed, he was as supportive as he could bear to be.

‘Start studying right away for the second attempt!’ he said to me sternly.

All those who failed were given a second chance by the Board to reappear for the exam in eight months’ time.

‘This time make sure that you not only pass, but do so with flying colours! Of course, I will do what I can, to help. .’

He muttered that last line sotto voce, as if reminding himself of something he had undertaken to do. I understood that he was making me a promise. Father had a great belief in the miraculous power of our ancient liturgy. In that respect, he was a worthy successor to his mentor, the great Dastoorji Eruchsah Kookadaroo. In the latter’s small bedroom, now occupied by my father (my mother, Vispy and I shared the other larger room, so as not to disturb Father during his odd hours of sleep), the venerable Eruchsah had preserved, in a wooden cabinet, some arcane handwritten manuscripts in the forgotten Avestan language.

Before he passed on, he had bequeathed this rare heritage to my father. The pages of these manuscripts were so old that they practically crumbled on touch; the writing on them faded, but nevertheless legible. One afternoon, while mother was getting our dinner ready in the kitchen, I discovered Father alone with a roll of brown-gum tape repairing one of these long, loose-sheaved notebooks whose parchment-like pages were coming apart. Abstractedly, as though speaking only to himself, he said:

‘Hidden in these sacraments are vibrations so powerful that when recited aloud, they can make the impossible come true: the mortally ill healthy again, the impoverished discover untold wealth and the foolish find it in them to utter words that command respect from the wise! Only, strong faith is demanded in their recitation; the kind of faith that can manifest a towering blaze on sodden earth.’

I understood that Father, busy as he was, intended to unleash the power of these ancient formulae to help me pass my matriculation exam. I was touched, and promised myself I would reciprocate his faith in me by doing my very best.

Despite my staunchest resolve, I found myself unequal to the task of competing with Vispy; indeed, of applying myself to any form of concerted study.

Every time I tried to focus on reading, or cramming, I encountered an immense rock-like barrier in my head which made me wonder if I wasn’t really the dunce and fathead my family had always made me out to be. On the other hand, it was also true that left to my own resources I was pretty certain this was no infirmity — a weakness of sorts, perhaps — but what I really craved was something more robust than books. To find myself out-of-doors, unconfined by Father’s fire temple with its holy smoke, salutary fragrances and workaday miracles: to be adult, free to go out and earn money, make my way in the world. .

By the time I was in my teens, I intensely hated the feeling of being hemmed in by the norms of temple living, of being controlled in the myriad subtle ways a family employs to augment dependence and prolong childhood. But I knew that so long as I continued to live with my parents, nothing would change, my day-to-day routine remaining as invariable as the hoarsely stentorian chanting of the priests through the morning in the prayer hall, in a language that nobody had spoken or understood for the last three thousand years.

The real disappointment, though, that irked my father was not so much my dismal performance at school as the fact that though I was already sixteen I was not even a naavar yet. This is the first test one negotiates on the road to full-fledged priesthood— being ordained a novitiate priest. Not that my father wanted either of his sons to become full-time priests like himself: he knew only too well how low his profession had slumped in our burgeoning city of commerce. There was no money in it and not much respect either. Nevertheless, in those days, every family of the priestly caste deemed it necessary and appropriate for their sons to go through at least this first stage of ritual training and initiation.

Vispy had already acquired a reasonable fluency in the scriptural passages one has to commit to memory in order to become a naavar. For most people, I suppose, this isn’t a very difficult task. In fact he had easily cleared that milestone while still in his fifth form and, since then, had been qualified and fully authorized to participate in certain of the less abstruse liturgical services.

(In those days, students matriculated in their seventh year of school. By the time I reached my seventh year, however, an augmented curriculum compelled the education board to move the final exam up, so that I had already been attending school for eight whole years when I failed my matric. During his final year of school, not wanting to distract him from his studies, my parents had denied Vispy permission to participate in the Mukhtaad ceremonies. Otherwise, for two consecutive years prior to that, the young naavar had donned the robes of a priest and joined in the jamboree of prayer.)

During All Soul’s Week — which with us Zoroastrians actually lasts an entire ten days preceding the New Year — Father’s small temple was virtually besieged by earnest supplicants entreating him to requisition prayers for their dear departed.

‘Impossible! Ek minute bhi nathi,’ Father would expostulate. ‘But how? From where will I find the time?’

The regular customers had booked their date and time weeks in advance. But every year saw an additional influx of believers who, by word of mouth, had heard stories of the fire temple’s wondrous aura of immaculate purity, where prayers were weighted with so much sincerity (and so well articulated) that they were actually known to elicit results.

At such times, Vispy, and several other young naavars like him, were summoned to perform the additional ceremonies. Then, every square foot in the marbled floor of the main hall would be crowded with frowzily-clad priests in white muslin gowns, some even younger and more diminutive than myself— and I had thought I was short — sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor, surrounded by trays of fruit, flowers and daraanmalido. Three sides of the rectangular room were circumscribed by long banquet tables crowded with silver or copper flower vases, each one in memory of a departed soul who, it was believed, returned during this season to partake of the incorporeal feast of prayer and food provided for by his or her family. There were also a few, small round tables holding a single vase each for those who could afford this exclusivity and didn’t want to be huddled among a rabble of souls — and, of course, dozens of glistening thuribles in the large room, one for each of the ceremonies being performed, crackling and spluttering with the strong aroma of righteousness.

By a skilful manipulation of timings, Father was able to accommodate everyone’s needs, and ceremonies in remembrance of the dead proceeded thick and fast, six, sometimes even eight, being performed simultaneously at any given hour of the morning. Before noon, though, all such ceremonies came to an end.

Lucky Vispy, how I envied him: he was allowed to retain the stipend he received for each ceremony performed, to use as he pleased. In my own case, I was not offered even a paisa in pocket money. Though my father could scarcely have afforded it had he wished to, he justified my deprivation, to himself as well as the rest of the family, as meet punishment for a rash, frivolous and undisciplined offspring.

By 8 p.m., when Father retired, if mother was not feeling too tired herself after dinner had been served, she would stretch out on the creaky easy chair with the book of liturgies open in her hand to some passage I was having difficulty with. I would sit beside her on a low stool repeating aloud after her certain verses and phrases in the hope they would stick in my memory. But every so often these strange sounds would trigger off involuntary aural associations in my mind that brought on the giggles. For instance, there was this extraordinary passage:

Mem pah geti manido

Oy-em goft, oy-em kurd, oy-em just, oy-em bud budastead.

It probably meant something completely profound and sublime, but in the wicked recesses of my mind I heard its intrinsic meaning distinctly. Utterly far-fetched nonsense, which never should have been verbalized; yet, only as a lark, I couldn’t resist offering it to Mother as my ‘free translation’ of the passage:

If I don’t get my malido on time,

I may just go nuts, and bite someone in the bud!

In an instant that seemed to linger for aeons, her eyes enlarged in growing disbelief. The effort of suppressing both anger and utterance — Father already fast asleep in the next room — rendered her voice flutey and jagged with hysteria:

‘Can’t show respect to even the most sacred? What’s wrong with you? What’s to become of you, you silly oaf? Everything is funny to you! You’ll end up a complete failure, a nobody: a jokester! And, in the bargain, break your poor father’s heart. .’

Her words echoed in my ears long after we had repaired in all sobriety to the holy text. I certainly didn’t want any harm to come to my father. Already, he endured acute flatulence and during his worst bouts, complained of chest pains.

As I had failed miserably in the final board exams, when the new academic year started, I no longer had the legitimate pretext of leaving for school every morning. At the same time, my curiosity about the world outside had increased tremendously. Luckily, my parents were officially notified about extra coaching classes that the school was providing for its eleven monumental duffers (including yours truly).

Also, to my advantage, they were more than aware of my friendship with Rohinton Kanga, whose father, Nariman, had just commenced production of bolts of cotton cloth at his new mill in Worli. Nariman Kanga’s reputation as entrepreneur extended well beyond the Bombay province. Though Kanga Mills was only one of over a hundred such enterprises that had been inaugurated in the state during the last fifty-odd years (and the third, among Kanga’s own), this mill had the distinction of being the first to be located in the Worli area. Moreover, Nariman had recently been in the news for simultaneously constructing rows of neat little back-to-back tenements not far from the mill, providing subsidized housing for his workforce that had been drawn from the native populations of Solapur and Nasik. This was considered another feather in the cap of Kanga’s numerous innovative achievements.

Given his considerable wealth, well-publicized philanthropic impulses, and unimpeachable prestige in the temporal world, Framroze and Hilla were actually proud of the fact that his son was a close friend of their own. That Rohinton, on occasion, had actually visited our quarters behind the temple, spent lazy afternoons stretched out on the easy chair playing draughts with me, or noisily sipping a Dukes’ aerated ice-cream soda, fetched post-haste by a temple boy — or sometimes by Mother herself, if no temple boy could immediately be located — from Merwaan’s, the corner Irani store.

Though my father frowned darkly at gossip he sometimes heard about Nariman Kanga’s freethinking ways and ardent nationalism, he was willing to ignore it since it was after all only hearsay. I, too, had been shrewd enough never to let on to family a piece of knowledge I was privy to: that during the sticky, summer months of Bombay, Rohinton himself — and probably, even his dad, or so my friend assured me — never wore a sudrah under his shirt: the sacred vest that every self-respecting Zoroastrian wears next to his skin: his spiritual armour.

So when I bruited the story that Rohinton was helping me prepare for my second attempt at the board exams, they were pleased, and in a smug, self-congratulatory way, never once attempted to check the veracity of my claim. The joke was that Rohinton himself had only just scraped through the finals. A plump, happy-go-lucky fellow with rolls of baby fat still cushioning his neck, forearms and cheeks, Rohinton would have shrieked with merriment had he heard I had cast him in the role of my tutor.

Six

Those were the best moments of my youth, when I could be out in the streets on my own.

Usually, I would escape from the temple precincts as early in the morning as I was able to, without any fixed destination in mind. More often than not — feeling, I suppose, obliged to live out the fiction I had created — I would head in the direction of Mazagaon. Rohinton had a large extended family of siblings, grandparents, cousins, servants and pets, who shared a two-storeyed, many-roomed ancestral bungalow at Mazagaon. The house, which was named Mon Repos, was encircled by a vast expanse of greenery, flowerbeds and moats. It seemed so enormous that I hardly ever met most of the people who, I believed, lived there. I knew that Rohinton’s brothers were much older than he, and worked in offices. I had never met them myself. As for his parents and grandparents, they were very busy people, too. I knew that his father had married twice, first a red-haired Irish woman he met during his student days in England, who gave him one son, and died rather young herself. Later, he married Rohinton’s mother, a Parsi from Karachi, who bore him three more children of whom Rohinton was the youngest.

His father’s eccentric tastes and enormous wealth were on display everywhere inside the house, in the shape of elaborate chandeliers, ornately-framed portraits of his forefathers, a grand marble stairway leading to a living room furnished with expensive Persian carpets, vases from China and a stone sarcophagus that dated back, purportedly, to Roman times. Outside, in the park, under a gazebo, stood a marble bust of Rohinton’s great-grandfather, Framji Kanga, whose adventurous trading in opium and silk during the early nineteenth century had ushered generations of the Kanga family along the path of financial plenitude.

Above all, the park boasted a small private zoo. Among the various animals, the deer and nilgai roamed unhindered, while some others — a porcupine, leopard, orangutan and an enormous python were confined to spacious individual enclosures. There were also three enormous, though gentle, hounds who were allowed to run free in the grounds. A high compound wall circumscribed the large park, heralded by an imposing wrought iron gate.

Mother would have given me two half-anna coins, just enough for my fare on the tram from Gowalia Tank to Mazagaon and back. These were terrific joyrides for me, as the tram slowly trundled through the crowded streets and bazaars of the town. But at the end of my journey to Mazagaon, I didn’t always feel like visiting the Kangas. I felt close to Rohinton, but it was obvious to me that we belonged to different worlds — and I could never feel entirely at ease under the fastidious eyes of so many bearers, stewards and watchmen.

When Rohinton and I tired of our idle diversions: gawking at the animals, teasing them or slyly feeding them when the park warden’s attention was elsewhere — trying, somehow or the other, to hold the animals’ capricious gaze for as long as possible — we played nine tiles, or tried our hand at an abridged version of the game of cricket (all the rage then, what with a largely Parsi cricket team having just returned victorious from the MCC, and Nariman himself, after a business trip to England, bringing home a fine, willow bat for Rohinton; pads, gloves, stumps, a full line of accessories as well). But the absence of playmates shrank our engagements to skeletal proportions — it was always just Rohinton and me, although the hounds were always eager to join in — and even cricket is no fun on such a diminished scale. Finally, tiring of our feeble distractions, we would venture outside, taking long exploratory rambles through the dock areas of Mazagaon.

The pier was so vast and busy no one ever took a second look at what we were about. Usually, we had nothing to do anyway, but lose ourselves in the crowd, look around, wonder, fantasize. Coolies, labourers, mechanics, unemployed layabouts, people waiting to sign up for a job, or a passage — or so we imagined — were everywhere, as were bales of hemp or cotton, great coils of rope, loosely folded sheets of sail-cloth and canvas, barrels, and all kinds of paraphernalia connected with the small and big trawlers and barges that had dropped anchor there, or the merchandise and men they were carrying.

Just to see the small murky cove off Mazagaon, widening into the vast expanse of sea — only partly visible from the pier, yet stimulating enough to my mind’s eye, which didn’t hesitate to fill in every imagined detail. Tall masts with unfurled sails rising above cavernous hulls, the fo’c’sle, or forecastle, where the wild crew bunked — the bo’sun, the coxswain and quartermaster, and other mariners who kept afloat every shape and size of vessel— skiffs, barques, steamers, freighters, trows, and once, we even saw a military frigate. Rohinton had picked up seafarer’s slang from dipping into his father’s paperback collection of adventure tales of the sea, and took vicarious pleasure in awakening in me a great yearning for the sailor’s life. I marvelled often at the putative pleasures of this solitary calling, and wondered if I shouldn’t run away to sea, escaping forever the narrow, claustral world of the fire temple in which I languished.

A hot, hazy day. Perched atop a large heap of crudely chopped logs, casually observing the hustle and bustle of the dockyard, we became aware of an odd-looking man standing some distance away, staring. In fact, you could say he was frowning at us. .who was he? Did he recognize me, perhaps, or both of us? Was he a friend of my father’s, by any chance? Had I ever seen this man among the dozens who visited the temple every day?

Short and fat, he was dressed in an oversized brown suit. When he started walking towards us, we noticed he had a curious start-and-stop gait, punctuated by an imperceptible limp. Rivulets of sweat streaked down his brown face, and lost themselves in overgrown, salt-and-pepper stubble. But the most menacing aspect of the man was, by far, his bulging eyes: bloodshot and popping out of their sockets as though in consequence of some extreme outrage inflicted on him, or of the terribly severe and vengeful moral outlook this had engendered. For one foolish instant, the thought crossed my mind that I should leap off the heap of timber and run as fast as I could, before the fat man got anywhere closer to us. But I didn’t move, and neither did Rohinton. We returned his stare stonily, and waited for him to approach.

‘Bas. .?’

He gestured quizzically, when he was finally standing in front of us: but for a minute or so after that, kept silent, only regarding us in turn with those truculent eyes, as though wishing to examine us from every possible angle.

‘Well. .? No work-business? No lesson-paani? What do you have to say for yourselves, you loafers?’

The rhetorical intent behind this gruff questioning was evident to us, and we didn’t attempt any reply. His voice was hoarse and he spoke inarticulately, as though with a swollen tongue.

‘It’s obvious that you boys have little, oh-so-little interest in studying, focusing. .’ he said, looking terribly aggrieved, as if wounded by some wanton act of negligence on our part. We continued to gawp dumbly at this stranger; and he in turn to goggle at us with those angry, protuberant eyes.

‘In my time, too, there were many like you at school. .loafers and layabouts, truants and shirkers. Absconders! And I can tell you from my many years of experience and observation — all of them, every single one, came to nought!’

The fat man continued to drip perspiration from his forehead, speaking in a furious manner, stumbling over his words, spraying spittle as he spoke. As though his thoughts were racing faster than his tongue could move, as though the pressure of all he had to say rendered his speech breathless and blurred.

‘I know. . I know people,’ he said, ‘I have tonnes of experience. I tell you, I can read people like a book, inside out. . Now you, for instance,’ he pointed a crooked index finger at Rohinton, ‘I can tell just by looking at you, you hate studying. . You’ve never read a book in your life, and won’t, if you can help it.’

It made me squirm to listen to this assessment of Rohinton which seemed so much more applicable to me.

‘Well, it takes all kinds. .’ he continued, at the same breakneck speed. The fat man was unstoppable. ‘This boy, now. .’ he was pointing his stubby, crooked finger at me, ‘now this boy’s different: he’s thoughtful, hard-working, persevering. But of what use are all these virtues, if he keeps bad company? Your “friends” will be the ruination of you. I know what happened in my own case.’

What happened in your case? I’m sure both Rohinton and I would have given a great deal to know the answer. But before our curiosity could be satisfied, suddenly this strange fat man was shouting at us in an intemperately loud voice:

‘Why are you not at school? Tell me. What are you doing out here, loafing about the docks? Answer me! Where is your school? Tell me, at once.’

‘We are quite finished with school, sir. Waiting to go into college.’

Actually, in Rohinton’s own case this was perfectly true. He was to leave for England next month. His father had arranged for him to join a finishing school at a place called Bath, before he was old enough to attend college in Cambridge.

‘Don’t you lie to me!’ the fat man became threateningly aggressive. ‘We spoke the same lies when we were dodging school. I’ll teach you a thing or two about telling lies. So what, you boys attend college in your school uniform, do you?’

In fact, Rohinton was in casual home wear. Only, his light brown shirt more or less matched the shade of our beige school shirt; as for me, that’s what I slipped into every morning, and the dark brown trousers of my school uniform, when it was time to leave home (supposedly to attend my extra coaching classes). And here I was actually cutting classes, I thought to myself guiltily — the fat man’s apprehensions were not entirely misplaced.

‘I never lie, sir,’ Rohinton insisted, with a hint of loftiness. ‘My friend here is yet to finish his final year of school, that’s why he’s in his school uniform. As for me—’

But the fat man wasn’t listening. He had bent down and picked up a heavy piece of wood, which he was brandishing ominously.

‘I don’t want to hear any more lies, I’m warning you,’ he spluttered in uncontrolled rage. ‘What you boys need is a good whacking. A whacking you won’t forget for the rest of your lives. And later, you’ll thank me for it, too. Indeed, you will. If anyone had given me a good thrashing when I was playing truant from school, I might well have been someone else today. .’

But this moment of reflective respite was overtaken by renewed rage. He began swinging the piece of wood wildly in the air, flailing it about him like a madman, seemingly intent on carrying out his threat. When he took small but purposeful steps in our direction, I was scared. It was too late for us to start running now.

Unexpectedly, as if out of nowhere, another man, a rather lean, clean-shaven man, appeared from behind the fat man and said something softly in his ear. I can’t be sure I heard him right, but this is what it sounded like:

‘Dhunjibhai wants to see you in his office. .’

This innocuous message, whatever it meant, had a devastating effect on the fat man. He seemed to crumble, deflate. .his anger and his bullying left him in an instant, and he became as frightened as any schoolboy who has been summoned to the principal’s office.

‘Oh, no. .I’ve done nothing wrong, I swear. But why, why does he want me? No, please. .please no, sir.’

The other man seemed familiar with the situation, and firmly but soothingly placated him.

‘Come. Don’t be afraid. Dhunjibhai will take care of everything. .’

So saying, he led the fat man away, holding him rather firmly by the arm. Meanwhile, the fat man seemed to have forgotten our existence, for he turned meekly, and left without even a glance in our direction. Such was our incredulity at this strange encounter, and our sense of relief at how it ended, that we burst out laughing.

When they were out of sight, Rohinton denied that he had been afraid.

‘I was sure all along he wouldn’t touch us. He daren’t. Why, if I had only mentioned my father’s name, he would have started sweating some more!’

‘But he might not have believed you,’ I pointed out.

‘How not? How dare he not believe me? I would have given him my father’s phone number.’

Not too many people had telephones in those days, except the most important.

‘I would have taken him home, shown him my park. If he still didn’t believe me, I would have set my dogs on him.’

And he went on in that vein, blustering rather like the fat man who had just been taken away. Not for the first time in the course of our friendship I noticed how much store Rohinton set by status, how much pride and importance he attached to family wealth and background. I was beginning to tire of him. The truth is, after that day, I gradually distanced myself from Rohinton, and met him only once more before he left for England.

Just as well. Thrown on my own resources, I learned to live with myself, exploring areas of Bombay that I had never seen before.

Everywhere, the hum of activity: buildings were coming up, traffic circles were being laid out, provincial-type bazaars replaced by structured marketplaces, itinerant hawkers provided permanent stalls, trading of every kind was rampant and thriving. I travelled to every nook and corner of town on every tramway route available. Buses were more expensive, so I avoided those. And if I found I had not enough tram fare, I walked. Actually, this was by far the most exciting means of getting around, for I could stop wherever I chose, and stare all I wanted; nobody cared. Silently, I absorbed into myself all the throbbing nervous energy of a young, vernal city taking shape all around me. It made my skin tingle.

The fat man at the docks who had challenged us — who was he? I never did find out. I presumed he was more of a loiterer than Rohinton and me put together; and perhaps not quite right in the head. But as day after day passed during those fateful eight months, I was even more surprised that I had managed to get away with my duplicity, my sham of preparing for the exams — for so many weeks and months! It was amazing that during all these days of my peregrinations about town, I was never once spotted by some distant relation or family friend and my truancy reported to my parents.

Through most of those months — a period which I had promised my father I would devote to making my second assault on the citadel of school-leaving exams — I lived deceitfully. And all the while, don’t forget, Father was waking up half an hour earlier than usual, to recite those special prayers for my success in the approaching exams.

Did I know what I was doing? I think I did: the task of preparing for the exams — let alone competing, or qualifying in them — seemed so completely insuperable I felt it pointless to even attempt. It was beyond me. After all, I was the acknowledged duffer of the family; besides, it was now obvious to me, dishonest and without an ounce of conscience. Here I was, cleverly weaving this web of lies to put my parents off the scent of my trickery — for their own peace of mind, too — or so I would have myself believe.

And how did I occupy myself during those eight months? As I mentioned, I had quickly tired of Rohinton and his company. The places I visited, the things I did during that time have no special relevance to this story — to what was to come soon after: that is, the best part of my remaining life — yet, some of them have stuck, indelibly, in memory.

December of my seventeenth year.

It must have been December, I believe, though I’m only guessing: only six in the evening (I remember looking at the luminous dial of my watch, a navjote present from Father), and it was already dark, with relatively few people about.

I should have been hastening homewards, but an argument with Mother that morning, in which she had threatened to curtail what she described as my ‘excessive freedoms’ made me stubbornly decide not to return home until after eight. I had been walking aimlessly, when something made me stop at the derelict shrine of a Sufi saint behind an abandoned railway siding, near the Cotton Green Station.

At least that’s what the flower-stall man outside told me it was. He said the service was about to begin, and offered me a long string-and-flower chaddar he had been weaving, for four annas. I said I had no money.

‘Take it, anyway, bachche, spread it on Baba’s kabar,’ he said. ‘Baba will help you. .with health, wealth, peace of mind. Everything will come to you if you believe in Baba’s blessings.’

I took off my sandals at the entrance, washed my feet under the tap outside, like I saw other devotees before me doing, and ventured in. It wasn’t a very clean place — visitors washed before entering, but there was no duct for the waste water to drain away, and the white-tiled floor — it wasn’t marble, I couldn’t help notice — was smeared with patterns of mud and wetness.

A great many people had gathered inside the cavernous, domed hall. I was directed by an acolyte to first go into the inner room, and make my offering. In a small chamber was the tomb of the Sufi Baba from the last century (whose name was mentioned to me several times that evening, but I can’t for the life of me remember it now) overlaid with dozens of floral tributes, like the one I was carrying. The service was about to begin. Then I noticed that apart from the innumerable devotees and volunteers congregated inside, on a sort of raised balcony above the main hall was a gathering of numerous women and young girls, who seemed to belong to the durgah.

Wretchedly poor, their clothing bedraggled, they looked like they had been rescued from the streets and provided shelter at the shrine. On the other hand, there was something strange about them. Their faces seemed haunted, vacant. They stood, or sat on the floor, motionless, drained of expression, like zombies. Others, among them, however, were completely preoccupied with the enactment of recurrent, mindless gestures — acting out twitches and tics, compulsive rotations of the neck and head, contortions of the hip and torso. I hadn’t noticed this earlier, but was startled to see that many of them were actually manacled, their ankles clamped and attached to individual chains leading onto one collective ring in the wall, secured by a large padlock.

An elderly devotee standing beside me followed my perturbed gaze, and whispered, ‘Yes, poor unfortunates. .their minds have slipped. .someone lays a black spell on them, and their own families don’t know what to do. So they bring them here. .by Baba’s grace most go home cured. He resolves every kind of problem. I could tell you — if you only knew — what miracles he has worked. Oh, oh. .shh. .the service begins. .’ he pointed out, immediately assuming a countenance of devout absorption.

The first resonant murmur of taut skin drew my attention to a huge kettledrum in a corner of the hall, placed on a slightly raised pedestal; a garishly colourful cloth was tied as decoration around the enormous drum. A slow, hypnotic beat began to rumble softly, at first. Dhoom. .da-bhoom-bhoom-dhoom. .da-bhoom. . da-bhoom-bhoom-dhoom. .

The drummer, striking the drum with long, padded knobsticks, appeared to be entering a trance of deep concentration, such were his own exaggerated movements. Slowly, the tempo increased, and he struck the drum more fiercely with every minute: layers of rhythm and resonance enveloped us. The commanding precision of his mighty booming, its irresistibly gradual and intoxicating acceleration brought life, I noticed, to the women in the balcony. Someone must have released their chains for the service, for they were on their feet now, swaying in their places, though their movements were still measured and restrained, as though they were only gradually rousing out of a deep stupor.

But as the drumming grew louder and more abandoned— though still preserving the compulsive strictness of its rhythm— they were possessed by frenzy, a wild spontaneity. Shaking their limbs, rolling their heads, moving backwards and forwards with inebriated ecstasy, gyrating round and round like dervishes, straining every muscle in their bodies with a savage energy. As if they knew in the privacy of their tortured souls that this was their only means to free themselves from enslavement to the overriding beast they had been consorting with.

When, after a passage of twenty minutes or more, the drummer, unable to drum any harder or faster, reached a prolonged crescendo that culminated in a sudden, ear-splitting halt, a great sigh of release swept through the hall. Or did I imagine it? I saw that a great many of the women had collapsed and were lying on the floor of their balcony, made insensible by their pitiless exertions.

This was but one unusual experience I had during my explorations of the city: my discovery of a revered nineteenth century Sufi saint whose grace relieved mental suffering through the medium of orgiastic drumming and dancing. Coming as it did, so soon after my encounter with the fat man at the docks — in retrospect, probably a very disturbed fat man — the spectacle of the crazy women made a deep impression on me. But my fascination with the strange and unfamiliar took me to many other places as well, where most people would never ordinarily venture.

As I left the durgah it was rather late. If my activities of the last eight months were found out, would my parents too conclude I was not in my right mind, that someone ‘had laid a black spell on me’, and chain me here in Sufi Baba’s durgah for treatment? Unlikely. They would probably rely on the restorative powers of my father’s Zoroastrian prayers. Though, if they thought to consult me — again, unlikely — I might feel more sanguine about dancing at sundown to those unstoppable drumbeats as a method for mending my dislocated priorities.

But I was clever enough not to be seen hanging about those parts of town where I was likely to be spotted. I chose instead to discover seedier segments of the inner city, and its outskirts. Places where no self-respecting Parsi would care to be seen: slums, shanty towns, areas in which low life and sin and poverty flourished; dens of vice and iniquity, where gambling, boozing and whoring thrived. On the other hand, it may have been no accident given the daily overdose of morality and righteous living I was force-fed at home that I deliberately sought out these very areas and activities — if only to find out to what extent indulgence in vice was truly pleasurable, and if it really resulted in the dreadful aftermath so often predicted.

Of course, I was too young to actively experiment with these moral quandaries. I suppose, if I had some pocket money, I might have. But, in fact, I remained always on the periphery of these goings-on, more a spectator than a participant, somewhat dazzled though, I do confess, by the riotous and undeniable vitality of wickedness. Only once, I have to admit, when I had, by chance, saved up on days of tram fare, I succumbed, following a buxom banana-seller into the stairwell of a dilapidated building where, alas, my anticipation of promised pleasure was so intense it was all over and done with in a flash; and I, wet and sticky in my underpants, was poorer right away by three rupees and five annas.

Then again, there were other places I wandered in, where you might least expect to find the son of a Zoroastrian high priest given the horror of contamination our people are susceptible to. The Muslim burial grounds at Charni Road, Chandanwadi, the Hindu cremation field nearby, where pyres burn and smoulder at all hours of day and night, even the ruins of the burial ground for British soldiers at Land’s End, beyond the Afghan War Memorial. I spent several hours here trying to read the quaintly sentimental or eerie inscriptions on broken tombstones and defaced engravings embedded in the earth.

Was it some prescient foreboding of my destiny that drew me to these terminal resting places? And afterwards, when I returned home to sleep in my own bed at night, I never once cleansed myself, never took the ritual bath necessary to wash off such spiritual ordure as presumably clung to me, and I carried back into my father’s fire temple. He would have been horrified, had he known of my polluting misdeeds. Even now, if there is an afterlife, and he has divined my awful secret, I’m not sure he’ll forgive me.

At least two or three times, I remember walking through the relatively deserted afternoon streets to the Muslim cemetery at Charni Road. Bombay was never so hot in those days as it is now. It was warm, but there were always soothing and balmy breezes blowing from the sea, even when it wasn’t high tide.

I was surprised to find several well-dressed men, both middle-aged and old, as well as the very poor and pathetic, stretched out on low cots smoking long pipes through the evening, dreamily self-absorbed. Later, one of the men in charge here told me it was afeem, or opium, they were smoking and, if I wasn’t interested in having any, I shouldn’t come there at all. He offered me a free trial smoke if I wanted one. I did, but it only made me cough and feel nauseous.

The Hindu cremation grounds were livelier, if only for the bright fires, the crowds of mourners, the chants, the pyramids of wood kept in readiness; and, of course, the body handlers in charge of laying the corpses atop the prepared pyre. Often enough, these latter were drunk as lords.

I went to a Parsi-run school, but I was more than familiar with certain Biblical sayings: ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’. When I think of all that went awry in my life, I wonder sometimes if those cruel twists and turns of fate were not simply meet punishment for a fatuous giggler who even in the face of the divine could never contain his asinine impulses. There’s one incident from my distant past that embarrasses me still when I think of it. This was before I met Seppy. I had just rediscovered the vast grounds of the Towers of Silence. Thrilled that such a lush arboreal kingdom could exist in the heart of the city, I spent hours on that occasion wandering alone among its gardens, orchards and copses. Before I turned to go home, I came upon a small heap of brambles, twigs and weeds, obviously swept into a corner off the walkway by some mali, and fired. A small bonfire was crackling and dancing in front of my eyes. As I stared into its radiant centre, fascinated, I felt a strong urge to pee.

Now fire, for any Zoroastrian — even one that is consuming garbage — carries an inescapable association with the Holy Fire. There was definitely a perverse impulse behind the sudden urge. But I was young, and my bladder was healthy. After a moment’s indecision, I simply turned away and walked home.

Whatever was wrong with me then probably remains unchanged. A part of me frivolously drawn to evil, allying willy-nilly with Ahriman’s dark legion. .? Nonsensical thoughts, such as these, make me laugh. As an old man, I do feel remorse for my childish extravagances. But another part of me could never regard itself, or life, with such joyless earnestness.

When I look back at that time I see now how apt it is that the graph of my life should have begun to ravel thus. Impossibly entangled in a maze of lies of my own creation, I grew increasingly fearful and restive that soon, my dishonourably appropriated freedom would be denounced, my wickedness brought to light and I, publicly shamed.

Surprisingly, my school hadn’t communicated any concern to my parents about my unflinching absence from its extra coaching class (having concluded, perhaps, that I had given up my intention of essaying a second attempt). In this frame of mind, increasingly apprehensive about my clandestine wayfaring in the city, I decided to put an end to it. But more pertinently, these aberrant tramps became unnecessary and devoid of meaning at around this time, for I had just discovered once again, and quite by chance, that the most beautiful and, moreover, completely secluded island of peace in the entire city was located no more than ten minutes’ walk away from my own home.

I speak of Doongerwaadi Hill, the estate of the Towers of Silence which, in those days, was largely deserted, wildly overgrown with vegetation and fruit, and to which access could be had from five or six different points of entry. As a child I was probably taken there once or twice to attend family funerals, but I had practically forgotten its existence. Nor were there any security personnel around in those days, to stop unauthorized entry. From thereon, I began to spend all my time in the sanctuary of its woods.

Seven

During a funeral I accompanied Mother to in this period, I caught my first glimpse of her in the far distance. Long-boned and gangly, with a shock of thick uncombed curls, a wild-looking creature about my age. .who was she? What was she doing there all by herself in the woods?

There was something strangely beautiful and desolate about her. Or perhaps, about the setting I spied her in. Anyway, I was completely fascinated. My pursuit of favour with Sepideh — for that was her name, I discovered later, a name deriving from Persian lore — began that very afternoon; for I went back to look for her, soon after I had seen Mother home.

My courtship of this strange creature of the woods was almost wordless. The dense florescence we were surrounded by — this could well have been a tropical forest in some remote part of the world — only heightened our sense of naturalness, our knowledge of the intrinsic validity of what we were about. We felt happily in-apprehensive of being disturbed by the world of adults. Spontaneously, and quite fearlessly, we discovered together, the tremendous world of sexual love. And we were adult enough not to shrink from it — from the responsibility of it — from understanding, in a complete sense, that from this moment on, there was no going back.

When I went back to Doongerwaadi that afternoon, the sun had dropped low, and the forest was filled with shadows. I spotted her almost immediately, though, reclining on the low-drooping bough of a mango tree with her eyelids shut. Sepideh looked so relaxed, at first I wondered if she was asleep. So raw, so natural lying there in the dusky half-light, I imagined I might have walked into a dream. She must have seen me at the funeral that morning, for she opened her eyes as I approached, and smiled shyly. But on that first occasion, I could not speak to her. A disembodied voice called out from afar:

‘Seppy! O Sepideh! Come home for a minute, will you?’

She did not reply, merely slid off the bough and started obediently towards the corpse bearers’ quarters. She was barefoot. She did not turn back to look at me, nor smile again. I hung around there for a while, but she didn’t come back. Not to be put out, I went there again the very next morning.

It was a splendid day. The birds chirped gaily, light danced and shimmered off every leaf of every tree, the whole park was magically alive, but I couldn’t see Seppy anywhere. Presently, she found me, and unassumingly sat herself down beside me, on the convoluted, extruding roots of a large guava tree. We spoke. I asked her name, and told her mine. She told me this was her home, that she lived here with her father. Her mother was dead. For a while, it seemed like we had run out of things to speak about, and remained silent. By then the sun had risen high in the sky, and it was hot, and we were thirsty. She said she knew a place, a secret place where it was very cool and there was natural, icy-cold water.

‘Would you like me to show you this place?’

I nodded, and she took me walking deeper into the woods alongside the hill, no more than five minutes away. Years later, it came to be known among us khandhias as ‘the grotto’, that is after I showed it to some of them as a trysting place; though at the time I speak of, it was indeed Seppy’s own secret lair. Against one side of the craggy hill, stood an immense conical boulder which, when viewed from the outside, appeared to stand flush against the rising incline of the hill; a casual passer-by would assume it was just one of several topographic irregularities of the terrain. But, if one clambered up to the top of this rock — and it wasn’t so sheer; sure-footed herself, Seppy showed me how to do it — behind the curved top edge of the boulder was a drop of about five feet and enough space to land in without hurting oneself. And immediately ahead, the low entrance to a small cave formation, inside which, at a wedge in the rock face of the interior, a natural spring oozed chilled water.

‘Yaah!’ I sucked in a deep breath of cold air, after I had found my feet again, and both of us had slaked our thirst.

It felt almost wintry inside if you came in from the hot sun, yet incredibly calm and pleasant and quiet. A canopy of foliage screened the space between the cave and the rock from light as well as attention. It was impossible to tell from the outside that, for those who sought complete privacy, the hillside offered them this improbable, astonishing asylum.

That morning, in this very hideout, Seppy and I commenced our journey of mutual self-discovery. Both of us, so young and inexperienced, had an unerring sense of how to proceed, of what was happening to us, or between us. This had to be love, we were certain. . It only took that first physical touch: incandescent, it fused us. She wasn’t shy. After that, nothing could have rent us apart. Even later, when all the disturbances had commenced, all the bickering and interventions by family and world, even then we never lost for a moment that silent understanding we had found between us, like the telepathic complicity of deaf-mute twins. Together, we were defined, happy, ourselves. Alone, we were amorphous, directionless, rather lost.

And every evening, once it was dark, as I wended my way home from Kemps Corner to Forjett Hill Road, I felt alone, and puzzled over that emotional conflict I probably would never have been able to define or verbalize then. The conundrum that lurks behind sexual joy, perhaps behind every form of ecstasy: that ultimately there’s nothing to satiety but emptiness, something not far removed from the void of despair. But this was only an abstract, momentary sensation; in reality, with every meeting, every merging, our love grew more steadfast, inviolable. She was not afraid. She trusted me. We were able to laugh together; everything we did, the whole world, seemed funny. Osmotically, as it were — through touch and caress — she communicated her own strength and fearlessness to me.

How else would I have found the courage during the nocturnal showdown that was about to take place to stand before my father and admit that I was in love with the daughter of a corpse bearer; and at that, as I was to discover later, of a man who was his sworn enemy from the time when I was practically an infant.

Most of the time, I knew my father as a preoccupied and mild-mannered man; but that didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of yielding to bouts of great rage. As a child, I had seen him once deliver a ferocious slap to a young chaasni boy who had consumed the choicest pieces of consecrated fruit he had been assigned to deliver to the home of a family, and then, when questioned about it — after the family complained of receiving a much depleted chaasni — lied outright, first to Ardesar, and then to my father as well, while he was questioning him.

‘Did your elders never warn you not to tell lies?’ I could hear him yelling at the boy, furious. He was probably just a few years older than me. ‘Never let a falsehood slip through your lips, even by mistake, do you understand?’

Father had a complete horror of the act of deliberately uttering a falsehood. He saw it as a terrible sin, a willingness to play ball with the Devil! Unable to efface the memory of that backhanded wallop he once delivered to the chaasni boy, I was petrified that night. I trusted his love enough to know that he would never strike me, and all through childhood, he never had: yet the enormity of my crimes of commission and omission were now in the balance and, I feared, could easily tilt it.

Yes, I do recall that season of my vagrancy and call it apt, insomuch as it was fully congruent with what was to follow soon after. When this eight-month period ended, instead of attempting to answer my exam as I had promised Father I would, I abruptly relinquished everything I held dear, embracing instead a completely new chapter in my life: narrow and segregated, cut off from most people and family, microcosmically cloistered, yet beautiful in its own fashion; even uplifting, you could say, for the very seclusion it enjoined on me.

The choice was thrust on me, and I embraced it with both arms — because that was the condition Seppy’s father stipulated: if I wanted to be with her, I was to marry her first, and be willing to live and work at the Towers of Silence. I didn’t take long to discuss or debate this proposal with my elders, or even with myself. My response was: if that’s the choice, so be it.

That night, when I got home quite late, I should have been surprised to see Father still up. He was seated at the small square marble table in the front room where the rest of us usually took our dinner, long after he was already in bed. But tonight, he was seated there himself, staring at the floor. Was he unwell? Mother and Vispy were there, too, standing behind him. My mother was hugging herself as though she were feeling cold, or frightened. Vispy had his arms akimbo, in the manner of a severe taskmaster. The expressions on both their faces, their refusal to meet my eyes, except in fleeting, reproachful glares, convinced me — that the game was up.

‘Where were you?’ asked Mother, in the hurt-filled voice she reserved for such occasions.

‘The usual,’ I answered, trying to sound as casual as possible. ‘Classes. Then I went for a stroll with Rohinton. Before catching the tram back. Have I come home so late?’

‘See? See?’ yelled Vispy, glowering, unable to contain himself. ‘God knows where he’s learnt to tell lies like that. .or maybe Ahriman, more likely.’

My father spoke sternly to Vispy:

‘Shut up! You stay out of this. .’

Then he looked at me, and asked:

‘Have you been studying, son? We heard something else. That you’ve been spending a lot of time at Doongerwaadi?’

Now look at that, I thought to myself, the very place I had assumed would be a safe haven — compared to walking the streets, which I had been doing for so long prior to that — had been my undoing. Caught off guard, I averted my eyes to the floor, which both Mother and Vispy all-too-promptly seized upon as an admission of guilt.

‘But why?’ asked Mother, even more agonized by her sense of hurt, as if my unworthy behaviour had cast a slur on her own parenting. ‘Don’t you want to study, be like your brother, and finish your matric? What did we do wrong? I never treated you differently from Vispy. Both my sons are equal, I always said. My eldest may be smarter in studies, but don’t underestimate my younger. Don’t you want to finish with school, get ahead in life like Vispy? It’s okay if you’ve failed once. Second time you’ll definitely pass. Nothing to be disheartened about. Just don’t—’

My father, who had been silent all this time, spoke rather roughly:

‘Hilla, please! Jara bolva bhi desay ke nahi?’ his deep guttural voice, seethed with irritation. ‘Let the boy answer!’

There was a moment’s silence, while I collected my thoughts.

‘I can’t study, Daddy. It’s too difficult. .’

‘I told you I’d help. Only try your best, didn’t I say?’ he reprimanded me.

‘I can’t, Daddy, I know I won’t make it. I know my best just isn’t good enough. It’s too difficult. .for me, at least,’ I said, sneaking a glance in Vispy’s direction.

My father looked away. Now he was hurt for my deficient faith in the power of his prayers.

‘If I felt I had any chance, I would, I would have tried my best. .’ I mumbled apologetically, ‘but I’m not making any headway. It’s all meaningless to me. You see, I feel I should simply start working, begin my life. .I can’t do this. .I don’t want to be a burden on you-all anymore.’

My mother, who had been waiting to interrupt, couldn’t contain herself.

‘Have you gone completely — Work? You’re so young still, and what will you do? In today’s world, without being a matric-pass no employer will let you even stand before him, let alone give you a job! Are you going to start muttering prayers day and night, like your poor father here? Didn’t I tell you?’ she said, addressing Framroze now. ‘All peas in a pod are not the same. We should be thankful that God has given us one bright boy. Studies were never Phiroze’s cup of tea. How much I have struggled, year after year, just so they wouldn’t hold him back, make him repeat the class. .Maths, English, Science. Every evening after school, I’ve been sitting with him, trying to drill a smattering of knowledge into his head, hoping he would retain it until the next morning. Sometimes, his studies were too difficult even for me to grasp. I won’t deny it — the same things that were smooth sailing for Vispy. But what do you know about all that? What do you want to know about all my struggles?’

‘Stop complaining!’ my father raised his voice, then muttered below his breath, ‘Silly woman. .’

But before the war of words between my parents could escalate, it was Vispy who butted in:

‘See, again! How cleverly he has deflected the conversation from his misdemeanours to his studies. But what studies? Jaalbhoy Master told me he hasn’t attended a single revision class!’ I stared at my elder brother, amazed. I had no inkling until now that he harboured so much resentment against me.

‘And just this morning, Temoorus Kaka phoned me at my office. I had to take a half-day’s casual leave to meet him at Doongerwaadi. I felt so ashamed to hear all the things he had to tell me.’

I had never felt anything but admiration and pride towards Vispy and his achievements. What was it that had made him turn on me so viciously? If Temoo Kaka had indeed complained to him about me, he could have spoken to me privately. I could hardly believe my own ears as he went on. And from the way my mother kept nodding her head emphatically and righteously as he ranted, as if to confirm that she already knew the truth of all these sordid details, it became obvious to me that, while working himself up into a rage, Vispy was repeating them for a second, or perhaps even a third time. The animosity of this terminal confrontation was essentially on display for my father’s mortification, it seemed to me, as if to prove to him, finally, who was the worthier son.

‘. .days on end, days on end, from morning till evening in their hideout in the woods until even Nusli Kavarana, the warden, noticed their goings-on and complained to Temoo that he must put an end to this public indecency — and imagine, with that slut!’

‘Enough said,’ rumbled my father, looking completely distraught. ‘I have heard enough. .’

‘Not the half of it, Daddy,’ continued Vispy venomously, ‘I haven’t told you the worst part: Temoo Kaka’s ultimatum to Phiroze is that if he wants to meet Sepideh again, he should be willing to marry her. And work and live with her at Doongerwaadi!’

‘Saalo badmaash!’

That was my father’s only impulsive outburst, and for the first time in my life I saw a spark of hatred in his eyes. But it was there for only a moment, before it faded. Meanwhile Hilla and Vispy were speaking at the same time.

‘An insult to our family! Proposing such a thing to the son of a high priest!’

‘How dare he talk like that, the drunkard! He should be thrashed! Flogged with sticks and chains!’

‘A thousand lashes would be too little. Teach him a lesson, Daddy. Complain to the Punchayet and get him sacked from his job. Then he’ll learn his position. Such insolence. .!’

While my mother and brother were engaged in this monody of vengeance, I remained completely silent, my eyes transfixed by that great jumble of my father’s grey beard that seemed to me to quiver and twitch ever so slightly. His eyes, beneath those shaggy eyebrows, were on the verge of dissolving into tears. When he spoke, the other two persons in the room fell silent.

‘Listen to me, Phiroze. . Without knowing it, you have become entangled in something that goes back many years. This man has been waiting patiently all these years to find the right moment to plunge his khanjar into my belly. And now it’s in, he’s twisting it. You don’t know what this is all about.’

‘But I do, Father. I know I love Sepideh. I’m not concerned with Temoorus. And I’m willing to — yes, I want to marry her, Father. .’ I heard a gasp of horror from my mother, but didn’t look at her. ‘Until a few days ago, I didn’t even know we were related.’

‘He’s gone completely mad,’ screamed Mother.

‘Shameful. .’ muttered Vispy, under his breath.

‘She’s your first cousin, son; well, almost. The girl may be blameless in all this. But we have no contact with that family anymore, haven’t had any since—’

‘Blameless!’ screamed Mother. ‘That loose bitch? And she’s so much older than our Phiroze! This has all been very cleverly planned and plotted, don’t you see? Just my rotten luck that I decide to take Phiroze to Hirji Mama’s funeral. Temoorus would have certainly recognized me immediately, and pointed Phiroze out to her, and immediately, the seduction starts. . What scoundrels!’

‘Oh, stop it, Mum!’ I snapped irritably. ‘Nobody’s been plotting anything. .’

‘Shut up, both of you,’ shouted Father, at the end of his endurance. ‘Anyway you can’t marry such a close relative, you should know that, you fool. But do you know what this is all about, what choice you are being asked to make? Do you know what it means to live the life of a khandhia?’

‘I was thinking, Father. .if I have to, maybe I could train to become a nussesalar? It’s the closest I’ll ever come to being a priest.’

(I forgot to mention this: some weeks ago, when Mother reported to him that I had finally succeeded in memorizing the longer segments of the liturgy, Father had strongly urged me to pursue my initiation into naavarhood. I pleaded that I needed time to study for my upcoming exam.

‘But there’s no harm in taking your books along,’ countered Father. ‘In the nine days of retreat, when you have to maintain a pious and meditative frame of mind, you’ll find plenty of time to study. Reading is a pious activity. And then see how well you do in your exams! An idle mind, as they say, can so easily become the Devil’s workshop!’

So I did go into retreat, carrying a fat science textbook as alibi, and did try to qualify as naavar, at one of our four main Fire Temples in Bombay, Wadiaji’s, the one near the big ice-cream shop at Charni Road. As luck would have it, on my very second night there, I had a wet dream. The shrivelled-up old dastoorji, Muncherjee, who had been assigned the task of grooming me through my initiation, was crestfallen when he saw the telltale blotches on my freshly laundered, white pajama next morning. Almost writhing in dismay — or was it disgust? — he moaned, ‘ Aai joyoo? That’s why we keep telling you boys, that’s why we always tell you — finish your naavar ceremony before you turn fifteen at least! Or you’ll have trouble. You’ll have to start all over again, my boy. .’

I could have — started my retreat again, made a second attempt; but just as I had privately resigned to failing my matric a second time over, I had no faith at all in the sustained piety of my own dream life. I gave up on this venture, too, and quietly returned home. . That was almost two months ago.)

‘What did you say?’ asked my father. ‘Nussesalar? Well, that might be preferable, I suppose, to being a mere khandhia,’ he nodded, approving sourly. ‘It’s supposed to be a noble vocation, that’s true. .but you would still remain an outcast, don’t forget. Ostracized from society, unable to meet your family. .’

‘But. .’ I wanted to speak, yet couldn’t find the words.

‘Even if you went through all the purificatory rites and rituals, and even if I was sure you had been through them diligently and precisely, without being lax or slipshod, I still wouldn’t want you to enter my fire temple. .do you understand? Now let’s go to bed. I have to be up tomorrow at 4.30 a.m. instead of at 4 a.m., like I have been doing these last three months — thinking that you were planning to sit for your exams next week.’

I nodded dumbly, and hung my head in shame. As Father rose stiffly to retire to his bedroom, I knew he was a deeply disappointed man.

Eight

In all fairness, none of us could possibly have expected the debacle of the corpse to go unnoticed.

A dead body deserves some modicum of respect and deference. That’s a belief that cuts across religious persuasion. Right there on the road where it happened, I’m told, it caused much righteous murmuring. The incident even got a brief mention in the next morning’s Bombay Chronicle, which Vera, Rustom’s daughter (who worked as a steno at Gagrat, Limbuwalla & Co, the well-known solicitor’s firm), brought home with her. Rusi showed me the ripped out snippet.

HEAD OVER HEELS

Bombay, 6th August 1942

Eyewitnesses stood flabbergasted — some even terror-stricken — when an unfortunate corpse toppled off a bier, falling flat on his face in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. Some claimed that the body immediately began to twitch, as though in great agony. Subsequent investigations revealed no substance to this claim, however, which originated, possibly, in some onlooker’s imaginative fancy. The corpse was quickly returned to its place on the bier, and carried into the sprawling, Elysian demesne of the Parsi community at Malabar Hill, wherein its members dispose of their dead. One corpse bearer, who had momentarily lost consciousness— and was probably responsible for the bier’s collapse — soon revived. In a few minutes, traffic on the road began to move smoothly again.

For more than a week, we heard nothing more about this matter. Of course, even more dramatic events took place in our immediate vicinity in the days to come, whose countrywide ramifications probably diverted attention from my own unfortunate fainting fit; though not for long. .

The morning’s funeral had just ended. For once, we had a free moment to ourselves. An impromptu get-together took shape around half a seer of milk that Bomi had to spare.

‘Can’t understand what Sola was thinking when he went and bought an extra half-seer from the shop,’ he said, offering it to Rusi. ‘In this heat, before you know it, it’ll curdle.’

Rusi’s mother, Aimai, made some spicy masala tea for everyone. Farokh and Kobaad were there, too. We were seated on the wrought iron bench on Rustom’s veranda — a few additional chairs had been pulled up — smacking our lips while sipping the aromatically pungent tea, when the first reports began to filter in of a terrific commotion at the Gowalia Tank Maidan, just a short walk from where we were. Today it had been Bujji, Sola, Yezdi and one other person — Manek, if I’m not mistaken — who had been walking past the fairground with a corpse, while these historic events were unfolding. Bujji came up to Rusi’s veranda afterwards and told us what he had heard and seen.

‘Saala,’ he said, still wiping his eyes with a kerchief. ‘What dhamaal! How to describe to you, boys? Here you all’re sitting peacefully sipping tea, and there something dreadful’s going on, no more than a stone’s throw away. .’

‘What? What’s going on? Didn’t hear a thing. .’ we exclaimed in unison.

‘They’ve been given marching orders,’ he said, which made no sense at all.

‘Who? What’re you talking about, boss?’

‘Are you okay, Bujji? Why are you crying like that?’

‘Those devils fired some shells in the air that made everybody cry. I’m surprised you guys didn’t hear anything,’ said Bujji.

‘I did, I heard some noise that sounded like firing,’ said Kobaad. ‘But muffled. Too distant and so soft I thought it couldn’t be gunshots. I had no idea what it was.’

It took a half-cup strained from the dregs of Aimai’s tea vessel — which she had promptly reheated for Bujji — to get a coherent story out of him. Apparently, at a recent Congress Working Committee meeting, Gandhi had given his call to the British to ‘Quit India’. This the four khandhias heard from the large crowd of people — both sympathizers and bystanders — who had collected near the maidan where, for perhaps the first time in Bombay, India’s tricolour was hoisted. The crowd, as well as the main organizers of the event were brutally caned by police and later, tear-gas shells fired to disperse them.

‘Did you see Gandhi? Was he addressing the crowd?’ Rustom asked Bujji.

Bujji shook his head.

‘There was some woman who hoisted the Indian flag.’

‘What woman? Wasn’t Nehru there?’

‘No one,’ Bujji explained. ‘All Congress leaders have been arrested, that’s what people say, and Gandhi, too. That chemical they fired at us — whatever it was — makes your eyes burn like anything. .’ he said, dabbing his eyes once again. ‘For a few minutes it blinds you, you feel your eyes are on fire; then the tears start streaming like anything. .’

All four khandhias were alarmed to have been caught in this disturbance because people were being arrested at random around them. But more than that, worried about the corpse they had to carry back safely. Bujji smirked and said, ‘Wouldn’t do to have one more topple off the bier, would it now? This time, it would have caused a stampede.’ The others sniggered at my discomfort.

It wasn’t until one night, two weeks later, while fiddling with the dial on his radio that Temoo accidentally tuned in to a woman’s voice (was it the same woman Bujji saw hoisting the flag at Gowalia Tank?) and we heard Gandhi’s own words — what he would have wanted to say to the people on that day when he gave the call to ‘Quit India’, if they hadn’t slammed him behind bars:

‘. .The mantra we have to adopt is Do or Die. We shall either free India or die in the attempt. We shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery.’

That was all we heard, before the voice was drowned out by disturbance and static.

The British completely overreacted to this open challenge. Thousands of Congress party leaders and workers were jailed. In the days to come, news of mass arrests incensed people all over the country. Telephone and telegraph wires were cut, railway stations attacked, bridges blown up, police stations burned to the ground. In a few corners of the country, the administration was paralysed, and parallel governments set up. But within two months or so the disturbances died down, and the rule of law was restored.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone, I suppose, that we hadn’t heard the last of the corpse that had toppled.

Only a week later, one afternoon I was once again on Rustom’s terrace keeping him and Boman company, when we saw a dishevelled Edulji, with an office folder clutched tightly under his arm, shuffling up the slope one step at a time.

‘Aavo, Edulji, aavo,’ said Rusi to the old man who had just climbed onto the porch. ‘And to what do we owe this gracious visit?’

‘Look, I want to tell all of you right away: I had nothing to do with this,’ stuttered Edulji, facial muscles twitching. The browbeaten old man worked under Buchia, as his secretary, dogsbody and whipping boy. Just on that account we felt sorry for him, though not a lot. We had to be careful, always, as to what was said in his presence; the cur was known to carry tales back to his master.

For a moment, in my mind’s eye I saw a picture of Seppy’s fey, pliable face doing a perfect imitation of Edul’s twitch: nose puckering up in the same instant as his lips shot to one side, in a sort of ludicrous smirk — like the anticipation of an elusive sneeze — and I had to suppress a giggle. But Edulji heard it and stared blankly at me, while twitching even more furiously.

‘I’m just the postman, you could say. Even these letters, I didn’t type them.’

‘What letters, Edulji?’ asked Rustom.

‘Well, see for yourselves. There’s one for each of you. Direct from head office.’

Edul wiped perspiration off his face with his hand and began handing over our letters.

‘Rustom Anklesaria. .Boman Khambatta. There’s one for Farokh Chinoy, another for Fali Bamboat. . Where’s Fali?’

‘Fali isn’t here. I think he’s on evening.’

‘And Jungoo Driver. .he’s not here either, I suppose,’ said Edul. Finally, ‘Phiroze Elchidana. .’ he said, and handed me mine. ‘Excuse me, I have to go look for Fali. Any idea if he’s up in his quarters?’

Nobody answered Edulji. Limping, slowly, he was already halfway down the path muttering to himself before any of us could tear our eyes off our letters. Nevertheless, he couldn’t have got far enough to not hear the torrent of swear words and abuse that issued from Rusi’s veranda a few moments later.

Apart from me, the others couldn’t read English fluently, but somehow, both Rusi and Bomi had grasped the gist of the letter. Poor Aimai, who had come out when she heard Edul’s voice, became particularly fretful, poring anxiously over her son’s shoulder.

‘Phiroze,’ she said, ‘you read yours aloud for all of us.’

I had run through my letter silently, once. It was enough to make one furious. Mine, at least, said that I had been suspended pending an inquiry into the ‘disgraceful’ incident during which a corpse was allowed to tumble off a bier and onto the road, causing a public outcry, and shaming the Zoroastrian community of the city. An inquiry was to be held on Saturday, at 10 a.m., and all concerned pall-bearers were expected to be present. It turned out that all three of us had received more or less identical letters. But there had been one for Jungoo, too, whom Edulji had gone looking for. And Jungoo only came along to help clear the way; he wasn’t even shouldering the bier.

‘What are they trying to do?’ asked Aimai querulously, in a frightened voice.

‘Give us a scare, no doubt,’ said Rusi, in his guttural bass. ‘Let’s see how far they’ll go. .’

‘Well, for one thing, they won’t pay us for all the days we stand suspended,’ said Boman, worried. Most corpse bearers lived from hand to mouth, from week to week, even day to day. Many had large families to support. ‘How can they do this to us?’ he exclaimed angrily. ‘They don’t give us time to eat nor drink, make us work like donkeys! And if one of us faints in the midday sun, all five are made to pay the price! Is that justice?’

‘Does it matter who actually passed out?’ asked Rusi. ‘Tomorrow it could be you or me. Don’t worry, Elchi, we’re behind you. Every one of us is in the same rotten eggshell, trying to stay afloat.’

‘They can’t do this to us,’ said Bomi again, shaking his head. ‘It’s absurd. .’

‘And at a time of epidemic?’ exclaimed Rusi. ‘The trustees must have taken leave of their senses!’

Our brigade of corpse carriers, in the employ of the Punchayet, consisted of only thirteen men. Plus two nussesalars. And as yet only one hearse driver, not to mention a defunct hearse. With five of us under suspension, were the others going to be made to work double and triple shifts? It was ridiculous — this ‘disciplinary’ measure now? When they should have been hiring more workers to help us cope with the pestilence. There was no sense to it. It was clearly a ploy of some sort, a pressure tactic. But to what end?

‘Since the last three days, some sort of normalcy has returned,’ pointed out Bomi. ‘Maybe there’s no epidemic, after all.’

‘Too early for anyone to say,’ insisted Rusi reasonably. ‘There could yet be another spate of deaths. Wait another week, and we’ll know.’

At the end of a half-hour’s desultory discussion, the anxiety and alarm that had gripped us initially was more or less dissipated; all present, I think, felt more upbeat. We may have received suspension orders, but it was only a feint by the management, of that there was no doubt. If anything, somehow we suspected it was we who had the upper hand.

This happened on a Wednesday; still two days to go before the inquiry, which was on a Saturday. If, under duress, I was being offered two whole days of restful repose, what was there to quibble about? I could use them to sleep longer hours, spend more time with my daughter.

When I reached home, there she was seated in Temoo’s lap on the veranda.

‘Daddy, daddy!’ she called out in her shrill voice, stretching her arms and her entire body at me. ‘You’re home?’

I picked her up and hugged her tightly.

‘All day, sweetheart, I’m here.’

Temoo seemed puzzled by my response. But I didn’t feel it necessary to explain, and he didn’t ask.

The inquiry was to be held in the boardroom of the Parsi Punchayet’s office at Hornby Road. Washed and soberly attired — only Farokh was decked out in an outrageously jazzy shirt which none of us had seen on him before; Bomi told us he had borrowed it from his brother, Sola, for the occasion — all five of us met early and caught a BEST double-decker tram at Gowalia Tank, that took us rather swiftly through Girgaum, Cheera Bazaar, Dhobhi Talao and on to our destination, the sumptuously arcaded Hornby Road.

As soon as we had climbed up the stairs to the third-floor office which was located in a splendid stone mansion (none of us had had reason to visit it before today), it became evident we were expected. There was an elevator, but the uniformed liftman in charge of it, after a couple of terse questions, seemed to guess who we were, and asked us to take the stairs. Fali was inclined to start an argument with him.

‘Arrey,’ he grumbled aloud, ‘we are here on official work. Who the hell is he to—’ but Farokh put an arm around his shoulder and led him up.

‘It’s only two floors. .’

‘Three, I say, not two! And I’d like to take — I never get a chance to. .’ By then we were already climbing up.

On the landing of the third floor, we were met by a grumpy, middle-aged clerk with an enormous, bald head, whose almost total loss of hair was further underscored by two longish grey tufts protruding from behind each ear.

‘Chaalo ni, chaalo ni,’ he urged us as soon as he saw us lumbering up the stairs, pointing at the wall clock in the lobby. ‘You are ten minutes late. Can’t keep them waiting like this, you understand? They’re our guardians, our providers. No, no, no. . now don’t be in such a rush! Just wait a few minutes, please, while I explain all the rules before you enter.’

He told us that he would be showing us through the main office to the trustees’ boardroom, which was a rather grand and important place. But first we must take off our footwear and leave it outside the office.

‘Walk in quietly, please. Don’t fidget, or touch anything along the way.’

We were led through a large room clustered with wooden desks whose tops were fitted with green rexine, and behind which sat the office staff — mostly men — already engaged in examining documents, or typing them. A few visibly indigent Parsis waited in queue for an interview with an officer. As we trooped in silently, barefoot, the office staff couldn’t resist glancing at us, though only for the briefest instant, before averting their eyes.

Not out of diligence or mindful application to their work but rather, as it were, nervous apprehension: as though afraid that even a slightly prolonged gaze might tarnish their spiritual well-being. That fleeting peek they gave us was probably resentment as well, disapproval of their superiors’ wisdom in inviting a bunch of raffish outcasts to their well-appointed workplace. How did they know who we were? Is there something about corpse bearers that makes us identifiably different from average visitors to the Punchayet offices?

The bald clerk, our chaperone, was impatient and rude. However, he showed us in gingerly, not saying much along the way, holding his breath almost, as if fearful of breathing the same air as us, into what was obviously a dark storage room. He switched on a naked electric bulb. Cobwebbed and dusty, cramped with cupboards, shelves, and volumes of obsolescent, mildewed paper, there was a wooden bench in the centre of the small room that had probably been placed there just for us. We were asked to be seated, and wait.

‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he instructed us. ‘Just sit here. No making any noise, please.’

Initially we spoke only in whispers and remained seated, as we had been instructed to. This being our very first visit to the august offices of the Parsi Punchayet, we were a little overawed. But we had a long wait, and gradually, we were back to our normal selves. After a while Rustom stood up and started pacing. He muttered loudly:

‘Saala, they ask us to be here at ten sharp: it’s a quarter to eleven already. I’m feeling so damn hungry. Left without breakfast, just to be on time.’

‘Forget it, Rustom,’ ribbed Fali. ‘You have no rights, certainly no right to feel hungry. You’re suspended, remember?’

‘Breakfast?’ added Farokh, not to be left out. ‘But that’s what you’re here for! Breakfast with the trustees.’

After a while, he said, ‘Oh, don’t look so sad, Rusi. In fact, it’s quite possible, isn’t it? Since we’re suspended, maybe none of us actually exists? How could you possibly be hungry if you’re not there? Think of that. .pinch him, Bomi, pinch and see if he squeals.’

‘Oh, I get you. .’ said Rustom, quickly catching the bug of waggish frivolity. ‘But if that’s the way it is, they may as well string us up at the end of a rope,’ he grinned, wickedly. ‘Then we’d really be suspended.’

But Fali was not about to let him score that point; immediately, he exclaimed with mock vehemence:

‘Oh come off it, Russ-ba, don’t try to play the martyr. Speak the truth and shame the Devil for once. Tell us: aren’t you suspended often enough as it is?’

This time, Rustom didn’t get it: he was taken aback.

‘What nonsense! What do you mean by saying such a thing? In twenty-five years, never once have I—’

‘Every evening, in fact, if you’re honest,’ Fali continued with a straight face. ‘Once you’ve downed your quota of navtaank, don’t you feel afloat? Suspended in mid-air?’

‘Now look who’s splitting hairs!’ said Bomi. ‘Charred kettle covets the burnt pot?!’

Our frivolous banter and guffaws soon drew forth a uniformed peon from the inner chamber, holding a stern index finger to his lips: our merriment, restrained as it was, had evidently been seeping through the boardroom’s closed doors.

‘Arrey, pankha to lagaao, dikra,’ Rusi said to him, wiping his forehead with a grubby handkerchief. ‘It’s hot in here. And if we have to wait much longer, how about some chai, or something?’

But in the next instant, before the nonplussed peon could decide how to respond to this aside, one of the double doors of the boardroom swung open, and a curiously chastened figure slunk out whom we almost didn’t recognize: Buchia. In freshly laundered white trousers and bush shirt, he smirked at us, first sheepishly; then the half-smile actually widened to a beam. For a moment we stared back, thunderstruck, as though we had encountered a spectre in broad daylight.

‘Ah, so you are all here?’ he said, voice syrupy with bonhomie. ‘Good, good. Don’t worry, boys. Nothing’s going to happen to you. They’ll call you in very soon. Just try to be polite. Unfortunately, I have to rush. To the Sessions Court, where that matter of the encroachment is supposed to come up.’

So saying, he strutted away with a friendly wave.

‘Don’t worry. .? Nothing’s g oing to happen. .? Behnchoad,’ swore Fali under his breath. ‘All this sly manoeuvring, it’s all his—take my word for it. Suspension orders, everything — it’s all at his prompting: Buchia at his manipulative best.’

‘What encroachment matter was he talking about?’ asked Rusi.

‘On the Babulnath side,’ replied Boman. ‘On that new plot of land donated by the Dadachandjis—’

‘Where—?’ asked Farokh blankly.

‘Arrey, exactly touching the Albless Bungli, on the west side: some fellows have put up bamboos and a tent. A couple has even moved in with a trunk.’

Just then, the peon came out again, holding a slip of paper from which he read out our names. Not all of them, only four actually. One by one, my mates stood up, as their names were called out, and prepared to walk in. I was the only one left sitting. Assuming some oversight on the peon’s part, I too started up, and made to follow the others. But I was stopped.

‘No, no, you must wait. Only those whose names were called.’

What the hell? I thought, sitting down again as the others shuffled into the inner chamber.

They were not inside for long. Four or five minutes later, when they emerged from the boardroom, relief was writ large on their faces. Bomi, Fali and Farokh were all smiles.

‘Didn’t I tell you all,’ said Farokh, ‘I was sure they wouldn’t dare do anything to us. How could they?’

‘Shh. Speak softly,’ cautioned Fali. ‘They’ll hear you inside.’

‘Let them,’ said Farokh. ‘Who’s left inside, anyway?’ Then he explained to me. ‘While we were being made to wait, most of the trustees had finished their business and slunk out by another exit. Only three of the eleven are still inside.’

‘But why didn’t they call you in with us, boss?’ said Rusi, frowning a little. ‘We had already started walking in before we realized you were not among us. .’

I shrugged.

‘Maybe they have something special to say to me.’

‘Anyway,’ interrupted Bomi, ‘they’ve promised there’ll be no salary cuts for these days of suspension.’

‘So long as we are not found sloshed, they warned us,’ elaborated Farokh, ‘or drinking on the job.’

The peon, who had been inside the boardroom all this while now reappeared and read out my name. Inexplicably nervous, I walked in barefoot onto the highly polished slippery wooden floor of the boardroom; I felt as though I were walking on thin air.

A vast room with wood panelling and a huge oval table in the centre.

Farokh was right. Most of the trustees had already left. Only three remained: a heavily-built dowager in a rich, embroidered sari, a dishevelled weasel of a man in a woollen double-breasted suit, and a large, podgy man in a white dugli whom I recognized instantly as the ubiquitous and obese Coyaji, superintendent of gardens. Despite all the empty chairs around the table, of course, I remained standing, and no one asked me to sit. The portly dowager it was who pouted at first, then scowled and enunciated frostily:

‘Well, Mr Elchidana. . As you can see, most of the trustees have already left. We are very busy people, you must understand. But before they left, we discussed your case in some detail. Mr Kavarana, your warden, has given us a full report of the unfortunate incident which all of us see as a serious blot on the community. Quite unprecedented.’

Visibly agitated by her mention of the so-called incident, she paused for breath, closely examining my face and appearance, searching perhaps for signs of remorse. The other two men murmured in sympathetic outrage:

‘Really. Evoo to koi divas bhi joyoo nathi!’

‘Indeed very shocking. A blot on the fair name of our community.’

‘Most of the trustees felt you should be summarily dismissed from service. But, as Chairwoman of the Committee for Welfare of Employees, they have left the final decision to me. Mr Maneck Chichgar,’ she said, indicating the other trustee, seated a chair away from her, ‘President of the Temperance Society of India, is also in favour of taking a more compassionate view of your misdemeanours.’

Now the scruffy-looking man in the suit spoke up in a squeaky, nasal voice:

‘You are very fortunate, young man, that the venerable trustee here, Mrs Aloo Pastakia, has such a kind heart. And both of us have a great regard for your father, the Ervad Framroze Elchidana.’

Suddenly, I remembered the name coming up in conversation between my parents, some reference my father made to Aloo Pastakia being ‘the flatulent old battleaxe’ of the Punchayet. Staring wordlessly at my self-important interlocutors seated pompous and contented in their polished, cushioned chairs — all three screwing up their faces to appear oh-so terribly concerned for me, while at the same time slightly discomfited by the whiff of some unpleasant odour I had brought in — in one corner of my head, I could sense a reckless wave of giggles building up.

For a moment I panicked. I knew it just wouldn’t do to burst into a fit of irrepressible tittering, not here. I was in a difficult position as it is. But what actually took place was quite different.

‘How much your father must have been pained to hear of your shenanigans. This drinking problem with khandhias has to be dealt with firmly. Drinking is sinful. It destroys man,’ whined the weasel from the Temperance Society. ‘We can show you a way to control your habit, oh yes. There is a way. .’ I felt like I was being court-martialled. ‘But it works only if you are ready to give it up completely. And you must follow my method sincerely.’

‘We have let off the others with a strict warning,’ said imperious Aloo Pastakia. ‘But we can hardly do the same with you.’

‘You boys have to learn some discipline. It’s very important,’ said Coyaji, not to be left out.

‘And so, as an exemplary measure, we have decided to put you back on probation for six months.’

‘Probation? But, madam,’ I whispered. ‘I’ve been working at Doongerwaadi for eight years.’

‘So what, eh?’ said Coyaji, brutally. ‘You can work for another eight if you like, but you will have to learn to behave.’

Crestfallen, my protest sounded pathetically feeble and frightened. I barely recognized my own tremulous voice. Nevertheless, I went on.

‘I don’t know what you’ve heard, sir. .madam, but I wasn’t drunk. The sun was too hot — it was sunstroke. On top of that I hadn’t eaten anything all day.’

‘Well, be that as it may, we have to take some corrective steps,’ the Madam replied; but I had a strong feeling none of them had even heard what I’d just said.

‘It’s for your own good, son,’ said Chichghar, the other trustee. ‘And this applies equally to all the other staff as well: consumption of alcohol will not be permitted on the Doongerwaadi premises henceforth. That is the final decision of all the trustees.’

‘As long as there is no other incident of this sort,’ said Aloo Pastakia, closing the file in front of her with an air of finality, ‘you have nothing to worry about, Mr Elchidana.’

Now the giggly impulse had left me completely, of course. Instead, I felt amazed and angry and disgusted; but perhaps, even more, cold and anxious. What would I have done, if the axe had really fallen, and I had been dismissed from service? Gone back to my father’s fire temple, with my three-year-old in tow?

It had been made amply clear to me that my interview was over. There was nothing more I could say or do. Except to turn around and walk out of the room.

Nine

The day after of our visit to the Punchayet’s office, I divulged the secret of the grotto to the other khandhias.

At an appointed hour, in the late afternoon of the next day, I led them there, one at a time. It wouldn’t have been wise for a gaggle of khandhias to be seen proceeding into the forest for no known reason. That would certainly have been noticed, and perhaps raised an alarm.

Until that afternoon, the grotto had remained a secret, an exclusive crypt whose existence only Seppy and I had been aware of.

Seppy had been dead these past ten months. This had been our hiding place, our refuge, venue of our first lovemaking: a private and precious bond between us made me loath to betray it to the world. Even after she died, I came here by myself a few times, to try and commune with her in my grief. But the grotto had changed: unexpectedly denuded of its charm and cosiness I found it a cold, unfeeling place permeated with the odour of bat droppings.

I stopped visiting it, but had continued to maintain its privacy as though compelled by the rules of a secret fraternity I had once belonged to: a fraternity of two whose only other member had perished some months ago. . Seppy, I do miss you very much. If only you were still here with me, I wouldn’t be afraid. . Our Farida must never know the insecurity I felt yesterday in that bloody boardroom.

Now, of course, the situation was different. Which is why, I felt, it might be safer for us to meet in the grotto. As per the new strictures, none of us could afford to be seen consuming liquor on our verandas or even inside our own homes, for that matter — even while off duty.

Truth to tell, on this particular evening it was I, perhaps more than the others, who felt a great desire to drink and discuss with my colleagues how exactly we should react to the outrageous and insulting conditions imposed on us during that morning’s sham ‘inquiry’; and moreover, how we were going to draw the trustees’ attention to our own vital concerns about working conditions— which had not been addressed at all, or offered even a cursory hearing.

We sat on the rock floor. Fortunately, the effusion of water from the niche among the rocks had stopped. Perhaps it still oozed during the monsoon, but for now the floor was dry. The smell of bats was everywhere, though not as overpowering as I remembered it.

By the time all of us had climbed into the cave and settled down, it was already quite dark inside. I lit both the candles that I had remembered to bring along. Then we passed the bottle around, taking our first draughts of the liquor in almost total silence, in an uneasy, flickering twilight.

I had poorly estimated the capacity of my mates to be cowed by intimidation. There was much resentment about the events of the previous morning. I had frequently to remind them to keep their voices down.

‘I mean this whole business of suspension orders, then trustees’ inquiry, and all,’ growled Fali, ‘it was all calculated to slap this ban on drinking!’

‘Are we children or what,’ huffed Rustom, angrily, ‘that they should tell us how to spend our spare time?’

‘Forget spare time, Rusi,’ said Farokh. ‘Even while on duty— ’pecially during duty — if I feel the need to prime myself with a few pegs before going in to wash a stinking corpse, who the fuck are they to—’

‘Never mind a corpse, a normal corpse — that’s normal,’ interrupted Kobaad in his soft voice; he hadn’t spoken all this while. ‘I’d like to see how many of the trustees can cope with even just the sight of an accident victim, or a burns victim — let alone clean and swaddle them for the banquet of the birds.’

‘All that’s exceptional stuff, Kobaad,’ said Farokh. ‘A whole bottle isn’t enough when we have to find strength to tackle such disasters.’

‘What the hell were they talking about?’ said Rusi. ‘I still can’t believe we actually stood there like buffoons, listening to their sermon on the evils of drinking.’

‘The whole idea of first suspending you guys, then calling you to their regal offices,’ said Kobaad, ‘was to put butterflies in your bellies — so that you’d forget to mention your own complaints.’

‘And this business of renewed probation for Elchi is just not on,’ said Boman. I felt grateful someone else had brought this up. ‘He fainted on the road because he was exhausted, not drunk! It’s just not right!’

His words trailed off, but I was reminded of Seppy, and something she had said to me once during one of our evening rambles.

‘It’s such a bloody joke,’ she said. ‘If you guys are so important to the Zarthostis, why don’t they provide you better working conditions? It’s sheer hypocrisy to say you guys’ll have your reward in the next lifetime; yet treat you like offal in this one. . Why don’t you guys get together, do something about it? Protest. .’

Like her mother before her, Sepideh was a fighter. Things that she had said to me in the past now became an important source of inspiration.

As the bottle’s contents dwindled, rumblings of discontent grew more raucous. Twice I had to shush them, afraid we might be overheard, and our secret conclave detected. Then, unexpectedly, there was a moment of intense, soul-searching silence: for someone posed the question: what’re we going to do about this state of affairs? I confess I was the one who first mooted the possibility of protest. A phrase we had all heard on Temoo’s radio in the context of Gandhiji’s exertions for home rule had been running in my head. And so it was that the idea of some sort of ‘peaceful non-cooperation’ took root among the corpse bearers, though none of us had any clue what form it should take.

Over the next three days, Rustom and I drew up a charter of demands; very modest and reasonable ones. Not for better wages, but simply an eight-hour working day, overtime compensation and a fixed entitlement of ten days’ casual leave in a year.

When we went across to Buchia’s office late one afternoon, and gave him the petition listing our grievances and expectations, he was careful not to show any reaction.

‘As you know, boys, I am not authorized to take any decision on such matters. I am just a functionary, like yourselves. .’ he said. ‘But I’ll take this petition myself to Coyaji later this evening, so he can circulate it amongst the trustees.’

Though we had been careful not to make our petition sound like an ultimatum — and nowhere had we referred to the possibility of rebellious action — they must have sensed trouble was brewing.

This time, they did not summon us to their office. Instead, the very next afternoon, podgy Coyaji himself came by to meet us, neatly trussed up in a white dugli. We were asked to congregate in the large hall of the Behramji Petit Pavilion. We took some time getting there, but found him waiting patiently until the whole lot of us had arrived. He was accompanied by Buchia, of course, his yes-man, who remained completely silent all through Coyaji’s speech, although he nodded his head in vigorous affirmation at certain emotional moments of the address.

Unfortunately, it was impossible to take Coyaji seriously, especially when he tried to sound effusive and impassioned. Owing not so much to his impressive girth or the tiny scarlet skullcap perched tentatively on the dome of his head but rather an involuntary dribble of saliva that escaped his mouth after every few sentences he spoke, and often hung there tantalizingly for a few seconds before he became aware of it and mopped it up with the same checked bandana he used to wipe beads of sweat that appeared on his forehead from time to time. That dribble of saliva engaged his audience’s attention more completely, I suspect, than what he was saying, keeping us on the edge of our seats as we tried to guess whether it would be staunched in time, or drip to the floor.

We corpse bearers, Coyaji said to us, should never behave like ordinary factory workers. Never, he repeated for added emphasis, and paused. For the work we did had tremendous religious and social significance for the entire community, and the Punchayet was like our foster father and mother, who looked after us through bad times and good. That such demands as we had presented had been made for the first time in the entire history of the community itself showed they were uncalled for! And that he, personally, was very hurt that we should have felt the need to spell out our demands in a formal petition, as though we were members of a trade union. Instead, if we had only come to him, in the same spirit as a child approaches its father for extra pocket money, he wouldn’t have felt such a sense of betrayal. Over a cup of tea, he said, we could have discussed and sorted out our differences.

Because, you must always remember, he emphasized, that like every father or mother in this world the trustees are basically good and generous people (in fact, surprise of surprises, after Coyaji’s address, tea and sandwiches were brought into the concourse and served to us. Buchia thought of everything! I wonder if they smashed the cups and saucers after we had drunk from them.) who would never do anything to harm their own children and, keep this in mind always, certainly nothing unfair or exploitative.

He had already been speaking for nearly half an hour. These, we guessed, were his concluding remarks:

‘That’s why we have to trust one another. We are all followers of the same religion. And our religion, the oldest and most influential in the history of mankind, clearly lays down all our rights and duties — not just yours as corpse bearers, but ours, too, as your guardians. And in the perspective of not just the here and now, but in the context of eternity, and all-powerful Ahura Mazda. . So let us not be hasty, let us not behave like ordinary rabble-rousers and undisciplined trouble-mongers. Someone may have misguided you, I’m sure. But if you choose to follow such negative advice, it’ll only bring us to ruin. Never once in the hundred-and-fifty-year-old history of the Punchayet, has anyone raised such demands, remember that. .’

Not a single concession was granted to us, even just to mollify or appease — except to proclaim that our grievances would definitely be looked into in greater detail.

Already humiliated by the events of the last fortnight, the boys were not impressed by the high moral ground taken by Coyaji, nor the syrupy pap he had just dished out. We were on our best behaviour, of course — no one heckled him, or argued during his discourse. But, as soon as he had left, another meeting took place, a great deal livelier, on Rustom’s terrace. Coyaji’s polemical efforts had only made everyone more determined not to let things quietly return to the way they were.

And yet, given the way poor people generally tend to accept their lot as unchanging, and unchangeable, it is quite likely they would have. Reverted to ‘normalcy’, that is, had the trustees handled the situation a little more sensitively.

The next week or ten days were eventful, possibly the busiest we had known. I don’t mean just with our regular duties. Those proceeded as usual, of course — and the number of corpses had definitely gone down in recent days — but there was the matter of Jungoo Driver.

Poor Jungoo. . It had been only three days since he had got back behind the wheel again of a more or less functional hearse. This was of course a great boon to us corpse bearers who, otherwise, would have been trudging along for several hours every day lifting the load of corpse and bier. But our luck — and Jungoo’s — didn’t hold out. On the very fourth day after he had started driving it again, a BEST bus rammed diagonally into the driver’s end of the hearse, nearly toppling it. Jungoo suffered two minor fractures and many abrasions. His condition wasn’t serious, and luckily, Bujji and Kobaad were with him.

Winding through the narrow streets of Girgaum to collect a corpse, the accident happened before they could reach the bereaved party’s address; so in its aftermath, they were not burdened with the responsibility of protecting a corpse. The driver of the BEST bus was arrested by the cops for drunken driving, and Bujji and Kobaad got Jungoo admitted to the Parsi General Hospital.

Much later, that evening, on the day of the accident, I was at Rustom’s when a deeply agitated Cawas stumbled in. Cawas, or Cowsi, as we called him, was Jungoo’s elder brother, a corpse bearer of many years’ standing. That night, he looked suddenly older and somewhat stunned as if suffering the effects of concussion; as though he had himself been driving the battered hearse, not his younger brother.

‘He won’t get a paisa, that’s what he says. . Imagine! Not a paisa!’

Cawas was nearly in tears. Apparently, he had just met Buchia to ask him for an advance towards defraying Jungoo’s hospital expenses. Buchia had been impatient and ill-tempered, deliberately sadistic.

‘Of course not,’ said Rustom. ‘If you expect Buchia to shell out anything from his own pocket you’re sadly deluded! A bloody miser, if ever there was one.’

‘No, no!’ spluttered Cowsi, unable to speak clearly. ‘Buchia said he’d spoken to Coyaji. In the afternoon — after the accident— by phone. “Can’t pay for careless driving,” he tells me.’

‘Who? Buchia?’ I asked.

‘No, no, listen! He was only reporting what Coyaji said. Then that Edul, that bloody chamcha, puts in his two bits: “Few hundreds will anyway go towards repairing the damage to a brand new hearse. .” “What!” says I, “brand new? It’s been with the garage these last five weeks.” “At least the body was brand new, before your brother banged it up. .”

‘Then Buchia continues, “And who’s to say he hadn’t been tippling with his good-for-nothing friends before he left for the pick-up in the afternoon? Should be happy he doesn’t have more serious injuries of his own. .” That’s Buchia for you, the hullkutt: “Coyaji’s in no mood to pay for anything,” he says. “Don’t even ask.” Don’t even ask. .? Now what do I do? How’ll Jungoo settle the hospital bill? His wife and kids, how they’ll manage?’

‘Calm down, calm down, Cowsi. .’ Rustom urged. ‘They can’t refuse to pay. There’s a police record to show it was the bus driver who was drunk. . Other trustees will make Coyaji see sense. Only, it may take a little time.’

‘If necessary, we’ll come with you to talk to the trustees,’ I, too, reassured Cawas.

Initially, though, we khandhias had to take a collection to help Jungoo’s wife and kids get by. Buchia himself, in a rare gesture of generosity, conceded fifty rupees, twenty of which were meant to go into the collection for the family, and the remaining thirty to be deposited at the hospital as an advance payment on Jungoo’s bills. No doubt, Buchia would claim it later from his bosses, or find a way to compensate himself for the expense. If, that is, the suggestion to placate us with a small contribution hadn’t come in the first place from Coyaji himself.

Usually one of the women — Dolly or Khorshed or Perin— carried a simple tiffin of home-cooked food to the hospital for Jungoo; the hospital provided a free tea and breakfast, but meals had to be paid for separately.

He was recovering nicely, and would be discharged in a day or two, the doctors had confided in him.

‘Don’t feel like leaving this place at all,’ he would lament to whoever carried him his lunch. ‘So much peace, so much rest. . It’s like being in heaven. .’

To make his discharge from hospital a little less regrettable, we had planned a small get-together on the occasion of his return. In the end, a sort of meeting did take place, but with only a few of us present. Nor were we clinking glasses or passing around the bottle. A grim affair it was, all told, at which we could only review our options. And we felt emboldened enough not to find it necessary to repair secretively to the grotto.

For that very morning of the day on which Jungoo was to return home, we received another visit from Edul. This time, he was carrying only two letters: one for Rustom, and the other one for me.

It was clear from the contents of these letters that both of us had been identified as ‘ringleaders’ or motivators behind the charter of demands, and the person or persons who had thought it fit to send us these letters wanted to snuff out any nascent trouble seen to be brewing at the Towers of Silence. Without a doubt, you could say, it was the trustees’ own obtuseness that forced our hand, and led us all to the edge of a precipice.

The most depressed sub-caste of the relatively affluent Parsis of Bombay — its khandhias and nussesalars — had never before struck work. Not that they didn’t have enough cause or provocation for such direct action, or that there was any substance to Coyaji’s claim that the trustees cared for them as though they were ‘their own children’.

I suppose the truth was that centuries of oppression and indoctrination had effectively robbed them of the imagination required to conceive of a different order of life, or to question a creed according to which the Almighty Creator had relegated them to such a lowly, depraved existence, while hypocritically promising them (at least us nussesalars) liberation from rebirth for faithfully carrying out their laborious duties in this lifetime. The argument smacked so completely of human rather than divine machination; I could see this more clearly, I suppose, because I didn’t actually belong by heredity to the sub-caste of corpse bearers.

Yet, ensnared in manacles of obfuscation, the vice-like grip of fear was unyielding. Even to convince Rustom that what I was proposing wasn’t utterly rash and suicidal took almost two hours of argument and debate. Finally it was belligerent Farokh who said something that tilted the balance.

‘If we let them get away with intimidation this once,’ he observed aloud, while sitting with us, ‘they will espouse this method as an all-time effective strategy for controlling us — hiring and firing at will.’

I should explain: the two fresh letters that Edul had delivered to us that morning stated that my services as nussesalar were terminated forthwith, and that I should vacate my quarters in fifteen days’ time, for indulging in subversive activities against the interests of the community even while ‘on probation’. And Rustom’s letter actually referred to the dire fate of ‘other troublemakers’, warning him of a similar end to his ‘long and hitherto successful career’ as corpse bearer, should he continue his association with mischief-mongers who were raking up trouble in the peaceful environs of the Towers of Silence.

On reading his letter, Rusi maintained a stunned silence for a whole minute, his large body heaving, as he breathed in deeply. Can’t remember if I mentioned this earlier, but Rustom is a pretty senior person who had already completed twenty-five years of service. In our community of khandhias, he is regarded as a sort of father figure, a particularly kind and well-meaning soul who could always be relied on for advice and support. By involving him in the disciplinary action taken against me, the trustees had made their worst faux pas.

As for the termination letter issued to me, I could not but believe that it was Buchia once again who had wrongly advised Coyaji to take this action. His cloying interest in me had grown to a point of obsession, at around this time, as also his unbridled sense of power. Knowing I had a small baby to feed and shelter, he would have liked nothing better than for me to turn up at his doorstep, begging for a reprieve.

Never before, and never since, have the corpse bearers of Doongerwaadi, the Towers of Silence, gone on strike.

In August 1942, when British towns and cities were reeling under attack from the German Luftwaffe, and Hitler’s army had undertaken major offensives in Europe, Africa and Russia (Temoo’s radio, as you see, kept us informed), we corpse bearers were completely united amongst ourselves in launching a hartaal — a complete stoppage of work. Our decision to ‘down tools’, as it were — or rather, not lift corpses — took Buchia, Coyaji, and the entire Parsi Punchayet completely by surprise. They were so flummoxed that for the first twenty-four hours, they did not react, as if hoping against all evidence to the contrary that the next morning they would find things had returned to normal.

Fortunately for us, in our line of work, no lockout or closure can be imposed by the management. For the assembly line of corpses keeps moving, regardless of whether the latter are disposed of or not. Calls to Buchia’s office, reporting deaths and asking for the corpse to be carried away continued as usual, followed by persistent and progressively impatient reminders. But no corpses were removed from the homes of the bereaved on that day, or for the next three days.

I had persuaded Rustom that there was no chance of our being summarily dismissed for dereliction of duty, and blacklegs being hired to do the work. It wouldn’t be easy to find replacements from within the Parsi community in a hurry; nor would any self-respecting Parsi allow his near-and-dear ones to be handled by an untouchable Hindu or Muslim beggar.

Within twenty-four hours, there was a great furore in the community. Letters to the editor in the local and vernacular papers came in, fast and furious. Only the most colourfully worded were printed.

Many of them condemned the Parsi Punchayet for being ‘a bunch of lazy and corrupt self-seekers’, ‘puffed up on privilege’, for allowing the situation to get so out of hand, for treating the corpse bearing caste with so much contumely and contempt that they had no option but to fight for their rights by refusing to work. This line of thought represented the reformist minority in the community, who felt that mindless adherence to age-old practices and conventions had alienated its weakest section; that bigoted and inflexible views were endangering the entire community and, in fact, the very traditions which our forefathers had sought to uphold and protect.

But the voice of orthodoxy was overwhelmingly represented, too, people who felt enraged that khandhias had actually dared to ‘hold the community to ransom’, that we should be ‘summarily sacked’ and punished ‘in the harshest possible way’. This faction even took out a small procession that marched through the streets demanding the strictest reprisals against us, carrying placards that made unpleasant broadsides such as:

BLACKMAIL IS THE LAST RESORT OF SCOUNDRELS

and

THOSE WHO FEED THE VULTURES HAVE BECOME OMNIVORES THEMSELVES!

They staged a sit-down protest on the pavement outside the Punchayet building’s entrance for ten minutes or so but, not having applied for police permission to do so, the cops soon shooed them off for obstructing pedestrian movement.

A feeble attempt was also made to engineer a split in our ranks in the hope, I suppose, of its leading to more defections. The target of this insidious potshot was poor Fardoonji, who was issued a veiled threat by Edul that he could lose his quarters and be out in the streets if he didn’t cooperate. I don’t know exactly how old he was at the time, but he was certainly very old. He might have appeared to be the most suitable candidate for this ugly gambit, because of his strong sense of duty and propriety, and the great reverence he showed towards all forms of authority — be it Punchayet trustees, or the Almighty himself.

I still remember what Fardoonji said when he came to condole after Seppy’s death: ‘Don’t judge Him, son. Don’t be angry. . We don’t understand everything that happens to us. How could we. .how could anyone? So vast the world is, the heavens so much vaster, and so much going on all the time, continuously. We can only bow our heads and pray. . I’m very sorry, Phiroze. If there’s anything you need. .’

But, though docile, he was a good man, and held out.

Despite the mixed public reaction, we corpse bearers stuck to our guns, so to speak. The strike lasted only three-and-a- half days before the trustees climbed down and granted all our demands, including the provisions for overtime, casual leave and my unconditional reinstatement. It was a tense period for us. During those three days the price of ice in Bombay skyrocketed from eight annas per kilo to six rupees per kilo.

Remarkably, the vultures themselves seemed to know in advance that no funerals were scheduled. Instead of the scores of scavengers who collect at the Towers regularly, in time for their repast, that first morning of the strike saw only three or four circling the sky vapidly; and within a minute or two even those were gone. After that, for the next three days until the strike was over, not a single vulture was seen anywhere near the Towers of Silence.

Once an agreement was reached between trustees and corpse bearers, there was a large backlog of funerals to be cleared. For those next three days, a fair amount accrued to us khandhias and nussesalars by way of overtime. And the vultures, too, clocked in with precision once the strike was over. Though instinctually constrained from gorging, they, too, I presume, enjoyed a continual and unlimited feast.

Initially, the mood amongst us was jubilant and celebratory. Most of us were working fewer hours, and our monthly incomes had gone up. When I resumed work, along with all the others, nobody said a thing to me; I was pleased to have come out of this sorry and slightly desperate chapter of my life cleanly.

One night when, out of sheer boredom, Temoo rigged the power line from the lamp post outside his tenement to his radio (Yezdi ‘Electrician’ had done it for him several times before, and showed him how), through much static and radio noise, while randomly fiddling with the tuner on his set, he caught once again that woman’s voice we had first heard by chance about a month ago.

‘This is the Congress Radio calling on 42.34 metres from somewhere in India. Bapu’s message to all Indian people is very clear. These are his words: “Now we have given the call to our rulers to Quit India, every one of you should from this moment on consider yourself a free man or woman, and even act as if you are free and no longer under the heel of this imperialism. This is no make-believe. . You have to cultivate the spirit of freedom before it comes physically. . The chains of a slave are broken the moment he considers himself a free man.”’

For some reason, we all remembered Udham Singh, the martyr. It was perhaps two years ago All India Radio had informed us of a man who had shot Brigadier Michael O’Dwyer at a public meeting in London. The news was exhilarating. When given a chance to speak his final words before he was hanged, Udham Singh had simply said, ‘I have no regrets. I feel proud to be the one who executed the butcher of Jallianwalla. .’ To the memory of that Sardar’s raw courage, we drank that night what was probably an unreasonable quantity of hooch.

Two. Echoes of a Living Past

Ten

It startles me that in all these preceding pages not once have I attempted a detailed description, physical or otherwise, of my Sepideh; even though she was the centre of my life — still is, she remains there — as also, she must inevitably be of these copious, rambling notes. Having realized this, I ought at least to try. Though the very thought of such an effort makes me clammy, sinks my stomach into queasy disequilibrium — but why?

The answer is obvious. Seppy’s gone; and because she’s no more, I must rely solely on recollection to evoke what would surely have overblown into an impersonation larger than life. Do I need to fear this? How indeed could exaggeration creep into a description of someone who constituted my world, my whole life? Or am I being dishonest to persist in believing so?

How quickly it becomes difficult to remember a person who is dead with any sort of clarity. No matter how I may long to believe otherwise, there are no signs or messages from her, from the beyond, that she’s still there. Or, if she is, that she has any interest at all in the fate of us living. . The details are fading faster than I can hold on to them.

Though we enjoyed being together at all times, Seppy and I never did have much to talk about, or discuss. By way of shared experience, we began with little in common. And as far as the world outside was concerned, by no stretch of imagination or experience, was that our domain. Cut off, completely and irrevocably from it, all the news that ever filtered in from that world came by word of mouth, or emanated from the large wooden cabinet of a box-like radio that Temoo owned.

In his own estimation, ‘a priceless instrument’, the radio was manufactured in Germany, and had been acquired somehow by his late wife, Rudabeh, from some well-wisher in earlier days. No, in those early days, our living quarters were not electrified — no electric lights, no fans, no radios. We lived by candlelight and, if we ran out of those, or oil for the lamps, or kerosene, as was so often the case, natural light alone defined the shape of our waking hours.

Though electricity was in Bombay already, it was still just a bit expensive and there were relatively few domestic consumers. Buchia’s own office-cum-quarters had electricity. And one electric street lamp splashed a patch of brightness at the beginning of the wooded path leading to the upper funeral cottages; happily, this lamp post was situated immediately outside the khandhias’ tenement block. It was from the junction box of this lamp post that Yezdi ‘Electrician’—that’s what we called this lanky youth with the long hair and awkward, camel-like gait to distinguish him from Yezdi Tumboly, another more senior corpse bearer— would tap the line to power Temoo’s radio.

This was a covert operation performed only after sundown, for Buchia would never have countenanced such piracy. Initially, Temoo himself was terribly jittery about the entire undertaking: the very idea of stealing electricity, as much as of the perilous act of sticking a screwdriver into the T-shaped slit of the junction box to prise its lid open, then locating the tiny cranny pointed out to him by Yezdi (amidst a jumble of other wires and terminals) into which he must insert the open end of the extended power cord that snaked from the radio, out his window, along the ground and all the way up into the junction box. It did seem frighteningly unsound; but then, once accomplished, the radio— and Temoo, and several others from our community, too — came into their own.

Usually that street light was switched on at dusk. If not, he would call on me to hold up a candle or a kerosene lamp while, fumblingly, he sought to make contact. Yezdi had created a permanent joint for him to the radio’s power cord, increasing its total length by some eight or nine yards. He had warned Temoo repeatedly, of course, about the danger of coming into direct contact with a charge of electricity. No wonder Temoo was so jittery. But, over time, he grew more confident about rigging this clandestine power connection even when Yezdi wasn’t around to supervise.

You see, Temoorus was always terribly proud of his radio and had jealously protected it ever since it had been gifted to his wife; even in the days when it was no more than a mere showpiece that occupied one corner of his dining table — a mute wooden cabinet — he would wipe the dust off it with a soft cloth every morning, tending to it almost worshipfully as if it were a deity, or the very fountainhead — a magic box from which all knowledge and truth flowed. Now that it could be made to break its silence, he was overjoyed.

Whenever an event of any significance occurred in our country or the world, and we got wind of it from someone who had heard something, or seen a newspaper, the event or crisis immediately took on the excitement of a festive, social occasion in our small community of corpse bearers. For then — sometimes by advance notice, or prior submission — the power connection was rigged, the radio turned on, and the air became thick with voices, music and the crackle of static.

Word spread quickly. Anyone was welcome to drop in and listen, and subsequently, sit around airing views, analyses, predictions. If they had something to drink, or munch on at home, they were expected to bring it along — a sort of tithe or offering for the privilege of listening to these critical broadcasts. Most often, of course, nobody had anything of the kind, and they came empty-handed; but nonetheless felt free to hold forth.

1935 was the year in which Seppy and I got married. It was also the year, I remember, in which a new Government of India Act was proclaimed by our British rulers. When Gandhiji undertook his famous Salt March in 1930, I was still in school. But the response had been terrific: there were similar marches undertaken all over the country, and massive civil disobedience. People refused to pay rent, revenues and taxes. In the face of this open challenge to the law, once again we witnessed brutal police violence, repression and mass arrests. Gandhiji and Nehru were both clapped in jail; but the British remained unbending in their attitude.

The call for complete Swaraj was then countered by this very insipid legislation of British parliament that promised ‘gradual development of self-governing institutions’ with a view to progressively achieving responsible government in India ‘as an integral part of the British Empire’. The demand for setting up a committee to draft a constitution for independent India was completely overlooked. Temoo often tuned in to ISBS as well, or Indian State Broadcasting Service, which later became AIR — All India Radio, or Akashvani. But sometimes, he was also able to catch short wave, and we heard the news from England.

Appeasement of legitimate national aspirations was flatly denied to us Indians. Yet, almost every other night or certainly on weekend nights, we heard confusing reports which indicated that British, and other European leaders, were recklessly appeasing the insane ambitions of a dictator who was systematically militarizing his country — in contravention of the restraints imposed on it by the Treaty of Versailles. It was a frenetic and difficult time— difficult to understand, I mean. Events unfolded so bewilderingly fast one couldn’t hope to grasp their logic, much less the politics that had inspired them. The fragmentary bits of information we culled from short wave often didn’t make any sense to us at all; yet, there was a frightening momentum in the build-up that led to World War II.

My interest in sports and sporting events was rather keen even at that age, for I remember listening with dismay to a BBC report that alleged exclusion of several high-ranking Jewish athletes from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Why on earth any government should want to exclude its best sportsmen I couldn’t understand until I had learned a little more about Hitler’s own beliefs and ideas.

Initially, it did seem that he was intent on presenting a clean image of himself to the world. Before the international press delegation could arrive in Berlin — we heard of this only much later, of course — Hitler had ordered his stormtroopers to clean up the city of its anti-Semitic posters and insignia. Even later, after the war had started, we heard reports of the cold-blooded murder of a handful of German journalists who heroically refused to toe the Nazi line: who had believed it was important to report accurately on what was going on in Germany during those years.

Well, as I said, all this proceeded at a reckless pace, but we did get some glimpse into the shape of things to come. It wasn’t our world, though, and we didn’t have much to do with it. Except that it became very obvious that our rulers adopted different standards when dealing with unrest in their own colonies, and quite different ones for negotiating with their European neighbours.

Seppy and me, we listened awhile but usually, once we had grasped the gist of the headlines, we left the old fogies to their meagre celebration and boisterous arguments. If it was a bright, moonlit night, we would stroll through the groves into the forest. The truth was our lives were so closed, so dispossessed, even world wars, riots, or our own country’s struggle for independence hardly seemed to matter. So far removed were we from these fateful eventualities of history that, except by a complex chain of inferences and deductions, none of them touched our personal lives at all.

It wasn’t very late one evening when Seppy and I walked through the casuarinas, towards the pear orchard, without speaking. . The sky was beginning to darken, but still held promise of great calm.

‘Tell me one thing, Fuzzy, will you?’ she said, breaking the silence.

Seppy thought Phiroze sounded too old-fashioned and staid, and almost always called me by that pet name she had made up. I must add, in those days I usually wore my hair long, and it was very curly.

‘But you must promise to be completely honest,’ she insisted. ‘Only then does it make sense. . Promise me you’ll search your heart before you answer.’

‘But answer what?’ I was curious. ‘You haven’t asked me anything.’

She waited a long moment before replying. Come to think of it, something had been bothering her lately.

‘Do you have regrets about your decision? I mean to marry me, and be trapped forever in the Towers of Silence?’

‘Trapped? Didn’t know I was,’ I joked. ‘I still have a few years left before they carry me up and dump me in a tower. And even then, the birds won’t take more than ten minutes to set me free. Before you know it, I’ll be soaring high in blue skies.’

‘I’m serious, Phiroze,’ she said, almost mournfully. ‘I stay awake at nights sometimes thinking about this. It just wasn’t fair to you, was it? To have to give up everything: your family, your studies, the whole world, and be confined to this shadowy, overgrown reserve. .’

‘Oh I don’t really see myself as confined,’ I replied. ‘Usually, once or twice a day at least I do go out — to fetch a corpse or two. As far as my studies went, I was always rather a dummy. If I hadn’t given them up, my school would probably have expelled me. Anyway, I’ve come to think of this place as the most beautiful in the whole world, Seppy. It really is. This is paradise we live in, Seppy, don’t you think so, too?’

‘You know what I mean, Fuzzy, don’t let’s pretend. .’

‘No, I don’t, honestly. I couldn’t ask for any better deal than to be held captive in paradise. With a licence to roam freely inside its boundaries — and with you by my side at that. You don’t know what the city outside’s like: all noise, and dirt, and people. . Anyway, I should ask you, what is it that you regret about our marriage?

‘I don’t. I only feel that I didn’t give you a chance. You are so young, Fuzzy. And sex is such a powerful thing. Once I had made love to you, I knew there was no way I would lose you. .’

For a moment my mind flashed back to what Mother had said on that night of the confrontation, that my first encounter with Seppy was no more than a cleverly plotted ruse for seduction.

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have made love at all until we got married. .’ she mused. ‘That’s what I feel, I shouldn’t have let you. That way you would have been free to find out if you really wanted to marry me. .and all the baggage that came with me — this place, the ostracism — whether you really wanted to take on any of that. Of course, you didn’t. Nobody could have.’

‘Given a choice, let me tell you. .’ I said, putting my arms around her, ‘I’d marry you again, sweetheart. .’ and kissed her beneath a raspberry tree in full blossom, under the waning blush of a darkening sky.

We lingered awhile under its canopy, and she persisted with her train of thought:

‘You’ve always been so gallant and charming about this. .I love you, too, Fuzzy. . But the work itself doesn’t bother you? I mean, don’t you find it too demanding, too demeaning?’

‘It’s a cakewalk, dear Seppy,’ I remember replying. ‘Don’t you worry about that. .and you, Sepideh, are my sugar plum fairy of these woods. It’s you who make it all so easy. But if you don’t watch out, soon you may end up being my sugar plump fairy!’

We laughed. Just a week or so later, Seppy found out, and told me that she was pregnant. How beautiful she was with child, how sated with happiness. . There were worries, too, because we had been reminded over and over again of the dangers of marrying a close family relation. But thank heavens, Farida was born absolutely normal.

The flowering of meaning and intellect in my life happened only after I met Seppy and fell in love. We shared something very special which even now isn’t easy for me to define. I could oversimplify and call it a sense of humour. But it was something much tougher, yet more frail. A shared matrix of perception? — I suppose one could call it that — whose common nodes so intricately intersected that there was complete parity in our understanding of all things: the world, people and every eventuality we encountered in life.

This was no small thing, I should say, for it meant that no matter how rough a day either of us had had, a mere look in the eyes, the subtle sparkle of a smile, a fleeting caress in passing, any form of communication however insignificant could transform one’s mood in an instant, engendering a whole new perspective for the other partner as well. It worked that way with both of us.

Our daughter, Farida, was already a year old when, one afternoon, Temoo’s radio was turned on. This had become possible only because Buchia was away on leave for three days, making a personal pilgrimage to Udvada.

The news was all thunder and fury about maverick Germany’s invasion of Poland, and Prime Minister Chamberlain’s reluctant but angry declaration of war. There were disturbing though still unconfirmed reports coming out of Germany — Austria and Czechoslovakia as well — about the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

I remember some of the excitement, comments and expostulations that were flying around Temoo’s crowded living room, before we made our exit.

‘What have we to do with their war, tell me? Let them perish if they want to!’

‘Just like that, without asking anyone, without checking with us first they declare that India is at war, too. .? And what prizes can we expect for fighting in their war?’

‘No prizes, brother. Just the glory of crushing the bogey of Fascism!’

‘Fascism-bashism is all very well but why put our lives on the line? Don’t we remember where all our sacrifices of the last war got us? The Jallianwalla massacre, the Rowlatt Act. Why is Gandhi being such a hypocrite?’

‘No prizes for guessing why Congress leaders are such arse-kissers. . So they can step into British shoes, once vacated. No matter if they be stinking with the sweat of those red monkeys, or soaked in Indian blood. Finally, power is the key. .they’ll do anything to take over, once our lords and masters decide it’s time to go home.’

‘Actually, that Hitler seems to me quite a decent, no-nonsense politician, really. We could use someone strong like that in our own country, don’t you think, instead of these crafty khaddar topeewalas!’

‘Oi, oi,’ interrupted Temoo, derisively, ‘we already have one Buchia here, don’t forget! Behnchoad, Hitler no baap!’

Farida will wake up any minute, Sepideh said to me, softly. It was time for us to leave. This time we weren’t planning a stroll, just getting back next door to our end of the tenement where our infant babe was sleeping, like an angel. It’s time for her feed, I can tell, she said; the ache in her milk-engorged breasts was growing more intense.

What I had said by way of reassurance to Seppy was quite true. To this day I am amazed how strong I was, how easily I took to the work. I am short, and built a little stockily, but I had endless reserves of energy.

I still remember my embarrassment on being teased by the other candidates at the naavar retreat which I flunked. It was the old priest, Muncherjee, in fact, who indulged in a sly witticism, while the other boys roared with laughter:

‘Perhaps koustee, not kustee, would have suited you better, Phiroze!’ he had punned, while reaching out to pinch my biceps.

Maybe freestyle wrestling, rather than ritual and prayer. God knows, he could have been right! Some of my strength and bulk has survived, though the muscles have frayed. When I look in the mirror I see that outwardly, give or take a little, I still look much the same as in my younger days. Except that rather rapidly I’ve lost almost my entire curly mop of hair. Now only a wispy aureole still attaches itself to my shiny pate, giving me an appropriately monkish appearance. If Seppy were still here, she would have had to think up another pet name for me: Egghead? Ostrich?

I miss my Sepideh very much. Sometimes I fear I won’t be able to carry on without her calming presence. Why did she have to die so suddenly, so improbably? Just when our happiness was reaching its zenith, and hers, too: just as she was beginning to realize the meaning of motherhood, the joy and anticipation of watching her only child grow up. .

But no matter how bereft I may feel, I have to carry on, if only for Farida’s sake. I had promised Seppy as she lay dying I would look after her daughter, make sure she went to a good school. . No, for my own sake, too. . There’s no choice in this, is there? At all times life demands from one courage, and perseverance. Humour, too, perhaps wit and discretion as well. . Without a grain of each of these, I’d certainly feel crushed by the monstrous encumbrance of an incoherent and meaningless existence.

Dreams, reality, nightmares — are these, in fact, distinct planes of consciousness? Or merely different modalities for perceiving the one grand canvas of an indivisible reality?

There have been moments in my life when I have felt genuinely confused by this question — whether a distinct line of division exists between subconscious and wakeful reality; or whether that bewilderment we experience in such moments of obfuscation is itself an illusion. .

The very last night I slept in my family quarters in the Soonamai Ichchaporia Agiari — for that is what my father’s small fire temple is called, in memory of its founding benefactress, an entrepreneur of the last century who, incidentally, provided employment to dozens of indigent women at a barn-like sweatshop on Sleater Road which produced bhakra, pickles, popatji, and other savouries — I was terribly exhausted; both physically and emotionally. The next morning, I was to leave for the Towers of Silence: that is, to make a more or less permanent separation from my family and the home I had grown up in — perhaps all too quickly. I still had two-and-a-half months to go before I turned nineteen.

Physically, of course, I was tired because I had spent much of my day finding, deciding about and putting together the things I would be taking along: my few clothes, my sudrahs, my topee, a couple of pairs of underwear and socks, various knick-knacks and lucky charms that held an emotional significance for me from childhood. A volume of Gujarati stories about a folk hero called Hameed Mia who had the power to become invisible at will, and his adventures with Parween Banu, his wife. I had heard these stories read out to me several times by Mother when I was a child, yet felt reassured by the idea of keeping the book with me. They were funny stories, and Mother used to read them to me when I wouldn’t sleep. My entire luggage fitted into my old school bag, and Vispy’s, both of which I had been told I could use to transport my things. We had no suitcases or trunks in the quarters which could be spared.

I spent the whole afternoon searching for a scrapbook I hadn’t come across in a long while. In it, I had pasted a rare newspaper clipping of the first All-India Cricket Team to tour England, which boasted of seven stalwart Parsi players, including Homi Kaka and Meherji Bulsara. The scrapbook had never got further than three or four pages of cricketing snippets — for want of a supply of printed matter — after which I had diversified to include swimmers, cyclists, bodybuilders and other stars from the sporting world. The eighty-page notebook was less than a third filled, but it was something I had done, something I didn’t want to just leave behind — even though Vispy had located and contributed about half a dozen of its portraits. No, it was my scrapbook.

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!’

‘That she may be,’ said Mother. ‘But today my son has to pay a high price for your swinish conduct. It was you who drove her to whoring, you beast! You! I know it! By your refusal to help when she was in trouble, by your heartless and spiteful conduct. .’

When I woke up in the morning, I was much surprised to find I could recall such a lot. All jumbled up, no doubt, and I’m terribly lazy with remembering my dreams, but these ones had seemed so particularly vivid, they were still before my eyes. Nevertheless, I had a busy day ahead of me and didn’t want to spend much time dwelling on the imponderable. Like other fragments that had preceded it, I dismissed this bizarre conversation between my parents as no more than an effulgence of my own fervid imagination. Soon, it sank once again into the pond of oblivion from which, no doubt, it had bubbled up, unheralded.

Always shrouded in mystery, especially for her own bewildered child, Rudabeh’s death occurred when her daughter was only three.

Sepideh had never heard any real explanation of how, or when or why it happened. She was too young, and Temoo, I suppose, too ashamed of the truth — of his own indirect acquiescence to, if not complicity in, its causes — to be able to explain it to his own child in any meaningful way.

Seppy saw her mother’s dead body only once, during its last rites when, except for a few inches of exposed nose and lidded eyes, she was entirely covered by a tightly-drawn white sheet. She wasn’t able to touch her mother, or embrace her. In accordance with Zoroastrian practice, she was constrained to maintain a distance of three feet from the body whose ritual purification had been concluded, and could only watch her from among the line of chairs put out for mourners. Within the hour, once the priests had recited their prayers, her mother was carried away from the funeral hall by four burly khandhias, to become a meal for patiently waiting vultures. Once again, of course, Seppy was not allowed to join the small train of male mourners that followed the body up the hill.

Once, while she was pregnant and reminiscing, Seppy told me how bitterly she had cried on the day before her mother’s funeral — when her father was summoned by the police to identify a body. Not at the apparent confirmation of her mother’s death, she explained, for that had somehow already dawned on her during the two days she had been missing, but in her desperation that her father should take her along, not leave her alone now. Naturally, he didn’t think it fit to take along a child to the morgue. Instead, he left her with Bujji, his wife, Khorshed, and their two young children.

‘I felt I was being punished,’ she explained, ‘for what had happened to my Mama. As if in some way I was responsible.’

Bujji’s old mother was alive then, and shared the flat with them. The children were unable to distract Seppy from her distress. It was the old lady, however, who put her in her lap and rocked her hypnotically, while whispering hoarsely in her ear:

‘Rarye nahin, dikra, rarye nahin. . Mamane chhootkaro mulyo.’ Don’t cry, child, don’t you cry. . Mama’s found her freedom.

This formula, repeated over and over again, accompanied by tender caresses over her face, hair, and entire body, calmed her; as the calculated secrecy and patchy verisimilitude surrounding the account she had been given of her mother’s disappearance and death had failed to. The hollowness of the story — that her mother had been out with a friend, when she met with an accident — her own intuitive conviction that some essential information was being held back (for why, she had reflected later on, as her ability to reason grew sharper, would extensive police investigation be involved in a simple ‘accident’, or for that matter why was there such grief and shock in it for her father, once he had identified her body; and why was her body covered like that at the funeral, so as to conceal every part of her face, except her nose and eyes?), all these unanswered questions disturbed her greatly. Something worse had happened to her, which she was not being told about. As if there was anything worse than the horror of losing a mother. .

And that final cruelty of not being allowed to touch or kiss her mother even after she finally found her laid out in the funeral hall had, over the years, congealed in a ball of pain that Seppy had never been encouraged to address, or appease.

In the beginning, we often discussed this tragic event of her childhood at length. By this time, of course, Seppy had collated every piece of information that she could worm out of Temoo, and others in the community who had been around at the time.

‘There was some kind of dispute over inheritance I’m told,’ I said to Seppy during one of those extended exhumations of the remote past. ‘I learned about it myself only quite recently, before moving here, to the Towers. .’

During my last few days at home I had often heard things which hardly made any sense to me: tearful and bitter recriminations from my mother, raking up a part of Father’s past I knew nothing about. Mostly, she seemed to be only muttering them to herself; and I knew the cause of her emotional disquiet was my own impending departure. Later, after I had moved to the Towers, some of the things she had said began to piece together. Seppy had been curious to learn every detail.

‘Apparently, my grandfather, Rustomji — Framroze’s father— married a second time, after his first wife died. Your mother was born to his second wife, Meheringez, who was, as you know of course, a Zoroastrian Irani. By the time she was born, Framroze himself was already twelve. They grew up in the same house. When Rudabeh was sixteen, and Father was in his late twenties. . Now this is my mother speaking and I would take it with a generous pinch of salt, knowing how possessive and jealous she can be — according to her, he was so besotted by your mother’s virginal beauty, he actually wanted to marry her!

‘Rustomji was furious: he wanted to know if his son had taken leave of his senses. Wiser counsel prevailed, however, and it was impressed upon Framroze that this would be tantamount to incest. And if he should persist in harbouring such filthy thoughts, Rustomji threatened to disinherit him and throw him out of his house.

‘After that strong rebuff, Framroze turned his attention to religion, and seriously pursued his vocation as priest. Rustomji lived to a fairly ripe age, even outliving your grandmother, Meheringez. By the time he died, my father had already met Hilla, and married her. If I’m not mistaken, Vispy, too, was born.

‘Now Rustomji wasn’t exactly wealthy, and the flat they had been living in at Sleater Road actually belonged to a cousin, who was keen to repossess it. You probably know all this anyway. .’

‘Go on. There may be some detail I haven’t heard of.’

‘Ironically, there wasn’t much Rustomji had left behind to share anyway, but Framroze, apparently, didn’t think any of it should go to Rudabeh.’

‘Don’t I know it?’ said Seppy, interrupting my monologue. ‘That’s something Temoo has never been able to stop harping on.’

‘My father was the elder son and heir in any case. And by then, Rudabeh had started an affair with a known profligate and hooligan of the locality, Temoorus Ollia. .

‘After Rustomji died, she even moved in with this man. Framroze was unforgiving, even vicious in his condemnation of his sister’s moral turpitude. Temoorus’s hard-drinking ways soon led to unhappiness and penury for Rudabeh, and Framroze felt his censure and disapproval stood vindicated.

‘Eventually, by way of compensation, he did do something to help her,’ I continued. But there was a wicked and deliberate irony about it. ‘He used his contacts with the Parsi Punchayet, to get a job for Temoorus as a khandhia at the Towers of Silence.’

My mother had added to this story a small detail which I didn’t feel I should disclose to Seppy. It wasn’t at all significant in that sense; but I remember, I myself was rather shocked to hear it from Mother; for I had never had reason before this to believe my father capable of stooping to such tawdry meanness. Apparently, when he called Rudabeh to hand over the appointment letter for Temoorus, he spitefully declared that given her paramour’s fondness for the bottle, there was no better or more suitable position he could find him.

One other incident from her mother’s brief life, which again I deliberately withheld, not wanting to further humiliate her, or compel her to relive her mother’s shame, humiliating enough for me to think of my own father’s outrageous behaviour:

This was from the time after Rudabeh and Temoorus had moved into their quarters at the Towers, and a sort of thaw had set in their relations with my father. He had himself offered to give his sister a monthly handout of fifty rupees, or thereabouts, to help them tide over their financial difficulties. Only out of the goodness of his heart — not obligation, he had emphasized— and if he should find it difficult at any period in the future to persist with this dole — after all, he had his own wife and school-going son’s needs to look to — he would feel free to stop it, forthwith.

I realize it’s impossible I should actually have been witness to the scene I am about to describe. Not even as an infant in arms — you see, for I was only born a year after Rudabeh met her unfortunate end. And yet, this incident remains vividly before my eyes, as though I had actually been present.

(Which only goes to show, I suppose, that parents should exercise greater discretion when they speak in front of their children. For mere tangential references, snatches of invective or exaggeration as I surely must have overheard in later years, became fodder for my seemingly disinterested but actually heightened child’s receptivity, lodging deep in the recesses of my subconscious mind, and acquiring entity.)

Mother had once described to me and Vispy while we were seated at the table helping her clean the french beans for our dinner — though this must have been specially for Vispy’s ears, I would imagine; she was very close to my elder brother, and often complained to him about various aspects of my father’s behaviour, and besides, she would have presumed I was too young to understand — how at the beginning of every month Rudabeh came to the temple gate and waited outside humbly, until Framroze came out and handed over some money, or sent it across with one of the temple boys if he was too busy. Mother didn’t approve at all of the way he had treated his sister, and felt it was completely wrong that we children weren’t even aware she was our aunt, who visited the temple every month but wasn’t allowed in, and that we actually had a cousin, about the same age as us whom we had never even met.

The scene I seem to recall having witnessed myself, but which I could not possibly have, was one in which standing outside the imposing wrought iron gate under the sun, my aunt absent-mindedly held with both hands, or leaned against, the gate’s ornamental fluted columns. Just then, Father came out himself with the money, and was incensed by what he saw:

‘Don’t touch! Keep away! Don’t press against the gate!’ he yelled at her from across the prayer hall. ‘What are you trying to do, girl? Have me reconsecrate my whole fire temple?!’

Even before she left from there, he instructed one of the temple boys to start washing the entire gate thoroughly with soap and warm water. Her humiliation must have been so great she never came back for her dole again. As it happened, the day after her last visit to the temple, a silver karasyo, that is, a ceremonial pitcher, was found to be missing. Anyone could have stolen it, I suppose, but my father chose to believe it was Rudabeh who was guilty of the theft, which was his explanation of why she never returned for her next handout, the following month, or thereafter.

How much of all that I imagined I remembered was factual, how much compounded by my own overwrought fancy I can’t really tell. But no sooner had I surrendered some of the less painful shards to approximately fit the vacant spaces of the puzzle, Sepideh herself began sifting through the grist of her melancholia trying to make further sense of it.

‘From earliest childhood, I seem to remember that Mother was often missing. She would put me to bed, and go out. If I woke up after she had left, Temoo was always there for me, to soothe me back to sleep with a feeding bottle, a warbling or a petting. But often, I would obstinately refuse to go back to sleep, and continue crying for my Mama; then, agitated, weary and tormented, Temoo would start muttering about his truant wife, would take me in his arms and walk me up and down the room, rocking me, calling her names under his breath which I didn’t quite understand but caught the emotional drift of. .I felt very close to my dad at those times, even believed in his harassed love for me. Didn’t know then, that my mother was out with strangers at his behest and with his approval, doing what she was doing to earn some extra money — which meant, I suppose, money for all of us.

‘When I was old enough to walk about, stay up until later, sometimes I would see them myself: strange men I had never seen before come to pick her up in fancy cars. Only that last night I went to sleep rather early. She had kissed me and tucked me in; I didn’t even know she was planning to go out. The next morning she wasn’t there; when it was evening, and she wasn’t back yet, Temoo grew worried.’

‘He didn’t see the man who picked her up that evening?’

‘He couldn’t give the police a description, nor a name or address. This time, it seems, Temoo told me later, the client had only sent his car and chauffeur. We never saw her alive again. Thirty hours later, the police found her body, dumped on the rocks off Land’s End. Years later, I found out from Merwaan, whose childhood friend and neighbour had grown up to become an inspector in the police force. .’

‘Merwaan?’

‘A khandhia, who died himself soon after. . Somehow, he had kept in touch with this friend. . Merwaan wasn’t even all that old when he died. Just past fifty. .’

‘What?’

‘The post-mortem report showed my mother had been tortured, then strangled. There were cigarette burn marks on her body. Maybe some sexual abuse, too, I’m not sure. Her last client was some kind of pervert it would seem. .I can talk about it now without breaking down. .because it’s you I’m talking to. I know you care. . It must have been horrible for her. .horrible. .’

‘He was never caught?’

‘No, never,’ she shook her head.

‘Poor Rudabeh,’ I said, in a whisper. ‘I’m so sorry. .’

‘Temoo believes that everyone’s death is preordained. .the time, the place, the kind of death we have. . So there’s nothing we could have done to help her, that’s what he’s always said, perhaps to console me. And himself. Though at other times, he’s also raged against Framroze — held him responsible. .’

‘My father?’

‘For never sharing Rustomji’s bequest, small as it may have been, with my mother. If we had a little more money, such escapades as she periodically undertook might have become unnecessary. . Wait, let me show you my mother. .the only photo I have of her.’

It was a fine portrait whose backdrop and lighting suggested it had been photographed in a studio; though the print had faded considerably with time. She was a handsome woman, with strong, broad shoulders, and an impressive bosom, wearing pendant earrings, and three long chains of beads, or semi-precious stones. The smile that flickered on her lips was faint, so removed as though it came from very far away, and wasn’t worn to please anyone. Her eyes showed great depth — or was it simply great isolation? She was clearly a very private person, and it was impossible to read any identifiable feelings into that half-smile, or those expressionless eyes. Sepideh took the photograph back from me, and folded it into the soft cloth she had unwrapped it from, before carefully putting it away. Another time, Seppy said to me, while speaking of her mother:

‘Oh, she had a wonderful sense of humour, a great fighting spirit. .’

Wiping her eyes which had begun to glisten with the precipitate of anguished memories, she continued:

‘When I was really little, she would spoil me completely with her coddling. .she couldn’t bear to see the slightest shadow of glumness or dispiritedness in my face. Immediately, if she thought she had sighted it, she’d do her best to cheer me up— by clowning, or saying something silly, or even performing a comical little jig just for my amusement. She would have me in splits of laughter in no time, till the tears started rolling down my cheeks. . Only after she was dead, I often wondered if her desperation to keep me distracted and “happy” at all costs didn’t have something to do with a deep suffering of her own — or the memory of a suffering — something which she had never let any of us catch a glimpse of. .’

Poor Seppy, she suffered, too. Until the end, there were days when she seemed completely overwhelmed by gloom. She told me she had never been able to quite rid herself of that feeling of guilt that kept coming back to haunt her — that she had been, in some way, responsible for her mother’s suffering and extinction. How strange then, that our own daughter Farida should have lost her mother when she was almost exactly the same age as Seppy had been when Rudabeh met her unhappy end: three years old.

Now older, Farida didn’t like being carried about in mine, or anyone else’s, arms. For me, there was nothing more pleasurable than to lift her lightweight, elfin body, and squeeze it tenderly against mine, as we strolled through the bamboo grove, or pear orchard, in the fading evening light.

This was the only free time I found to spend with her, after my work was done, and she had put away her schoolbooks. I liked to take her out, away from Temoorus’s obstinate fussing. But already, she had discovered she didn’t like being carried as much as she enjoyed walking beside me like a grown-up, conversing with me with the thoughtful circumspection of an adult. On one evening, that I can recall clearly, she seemed to be in low spirits. Her moodiness reminded me of her mother, Sepideh. For a while, she didn’t object to my carrying her; but, within minutes, she said rather firmly:

‘Put me down, Daddy.’

After only a short distance of walking hand in hand, her tiny palm smothered in my coarse and calloused one, a faint tremor informed her voice as she whispered the question that was, I realized, at the brooding swirl of her sadness:

‘Daddy, why did the snake bite my mummy?’

‘Well. .’ I thought for a long time before answering. ‘Snakes don’t know right from wrong. . Your mother must have stepped too close to that cobra, he must have been scared she would harm him. .’

‘Mummy would never harm anyone. .she loved animals.’

‘He didn’t know that. . He was scared. . And she didn’t see him, until he bit her. . Your mother loved all creatures. She would feed the squirrels with her own hand, and they were not scared to come up close and nibble. .stray dogs, peacocks as well. . That snake didn’t know all this, you see. .’

‘But then. .why. .?’ She let her question trail off.

Farida was perhaps not able to state in words what she wanted me to clarify, but I sensed her meaning. Even had she found the words, I’m not sure I would have had the answer. It was a question that has troubled me for several years.

Throughout childhood and youth, I cultivated, as well as earned the reputation of being a good-natured simpleton. But despite willingly abiding in this rather low-brow realm, I remember harbouring always a secret yearning — even a quiet confidence, you might say — that there was, that there had to be, some overarching meaning to the universe.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling this, and don’t deserve any special credit for it. It’s probably something about the way our brains are wired that makes us humans crave this grand design — some of us, like my father, even believed they had grasped, and harnessed it — that there is some divine formula or secret equation, that connects every phenomenon of existence, every shimmering facet of life and death. Father believed this divine secret wasn’t accessible to everyone, that it required deep and great faith to comprehend. But I’ve noticed, elaborate systems of belief have been concocted and espoused over the centuries by man merely to buttress this sad need for meaning; indeed to make life’s transience bearable.

Perhaps the question Farida had been unable to verbalize was just this: if her mother loved animals so much, and cared for them, then why, in our little garden of paradise, did the reptile have to infect our happiness so conclusively, so irreversibly? Was there simply no justice or propriety in this universe?

It was much darker now, as we approached the denser, gloomier forest at the top of the hill.

We had already left behind the three Towers, and now circumvented the fourth, defunct one, overgrown with weed and thicket, much of whose masonry had crumbled. . Just a few yards away was Seppy’s favourite hangout, the giant banyan, its aerial roots so overgrown and entangled, it was impossible to see any detail of it in the dark: it looked just a huge woolly, prickly mass.

I would have preferred to turn back, but Farida wouldn’t hear of it.

‘Just a little further, Daddy, please. .’

‘No one ever comes here, dear, really we’d better be getting home now. .’ Stubbornly, she kept walking, looking at her feet, as if she hadn’t heard me.

‘If you want to go any further, young lady, I’ll simply have to carry you.’

To my surprise, she readily agreed — the abundance of ferns and thistle would have begun to scratch and tickle her ankles— hugging me warmly, as I raised her to my arms.

The sounds of the twilit forest pressed about us, eerily. The trees towered over us, encircled with thick, winding creepers that looked in the dark like monstrous serpents skulking for prey. Through the canopies of the trees, occasionally, one could still see glimpses of the cloud-banked evening sky. The ground I was walking on was a carpet of decaying leaves, dead branches and occasional, rotting fruit. There were mango trees here and banana, berries, pepper and wild pineapple. . Soon it would be completely dark. I began to smell the prospect of a drizzle. But my little one, like her mother before her, wanted to press on, probing unrelentingly into her own unbearable, incomprehensible loss.

‘Was it here that she got bitten?’

‘Somewhere in these thick woods, I imagine. . Don’t know exactly. I wasn’t home when it happened, if you remember. . you may not, of course, you were so—’

‘I do remember, Daddy, I do. Her leg was swollen, she was in great pain. When they carried her in, I started crying. .’

Myself, I was pretty familiar with these unfrequented parts of the estate: secret places that glowed in the late evening and night with a natural phosphorescence engendered by the forest itself and its unique mix of vegetation and decay. Nobody ever visited these areas, in the course of things. In any case, they were out of bounds for all except the corpse bearers who had no reason to wander so far beyond the Towers. But I had walked here several times, late at night, aching for some contact with my lost partner. Beside myself with grief, I would talk to her aloud in these woods, weep, rage. . Had she merged with the forest, the banyan tree, those hills in the distance or those dark clouds? I would plead with her for some intimation, some sign. . but there was nothing; never.

It was here, in fact, born out of sheer frustration, that the realization came to me for the first time, dark and comfortless: how inhuman and cold Nature could be, how alien to man. I hugged Farida tightly and said to her, rather firmly, ‘We have to go back now. .’

The way back to our quarters, downhill, was that much easier to cover. But it had begun to rain, quite heavily. Though we got back in practically no time, Farida and I were both pretty wet by the time we reached Temoo’s portico. He was standing in the doorway, framed by shadowy lamp-light from the room behind, looking worried and rather haggard.

‘Where did you go?’

His voice was quavering with fright, or perhaps it was anger.

‘Thank God you’re back. So worried I was. Don’t take my baby out roaming so late. .’ Handing her a towel, he said, ‘Wipe your hair, first. .I even climbed up to the kennels, thinking you might be there with Nancy and Tiger. .’

Those names Farida had chosen herself, when she was only four, for a pair of dogs Buchia adopted after Moti died. Farida liked to think of them as her own pets, as Moti, and before her, Jehanbux, had been her mother’s.

When she had changed into something dry, Temoo took the towel from Farida’s hand, and asked, in a kind voice:

‘Bhookh lageech, dikra?’

Farida nodded dumbly.

‘Come. .the food is hot.’

‘Ask her,’ I said in my defence at last, ‘she didn’t want to turn back even until just ten minutes ago.’

‘Never mind, never mind,’ said Temoo, more conciliatorily, as we took our places at his table. ‘Wash your hands first, baby. Come Phiroze. Some potato-gravy and bread.’

Whenever he felt up to it, which was pretty often, Temoo cooked a meal for my daughter and me.

‘What do I have to do the whole day?’ he would say, ‘Cooking helps me pass the time.’

But that cloying protectiveness he felt he owed my little one was the price I had to pay for such familial comforts.

Nevertheless, she was his granddaughter. And the sudden loss of Sepideh had been traumatic for him, too.

He was alone at home when she got bitten, and Seppy compounded his panic when she told him she believed it was a cobra that had stung her. He was frantic. In those days anti-venin serum was not available, even though I heard some months later that the Haffkine Institute at Parel had begun producing a very limited quantity. God knows if they had had any in stock at the time Seppy needed it. But in such emergencies, most people would resort to the services of witch doctors and shamans. To Temoo’s credit, during my absence, he actually went out and found one, who claimed to be able to cure even the most poisonous of snakebites. And if it was a cobra that bit Seppy, it is remarkable that his unusual methods succeeded in prolonging her life for up to ten hours.

When I came home at a half past three that afternoon, I was astonished to see a wild-looking faqeer, with thick matted hair, a long, dusty beard, and ugly, misshapen teeth, in Temoo’s front room. His mouth was red with betel juice, his eyes bloodshot. He was chanting some peculiarly tuneless refrain in a low voice, while moving his feet in a shuffling sort of step-dance he was performing around a small clay pot of milk that was placed on the floor. Around the pot of milk, in red chalk, some spells, symbols, had been inscribed in an unknown algebra. Some of my neighbours were gathered on the veranda, grimly unresponsive to my salutations; and of course, Temoo, inside, who burst into tears as soon as he saw me. He could not bring himself to mouth anything articulate or comprehensible, but instead gestured to me to go on inside.

On Temoo’s cot lay my dear Sepideh. Her foot had turned purple, presumably on account of the ferocious coir-rope tourniquet fastened above her ankle, but also because of a blend of yellow, green and several other colourful powders which her wound had been liberally plastered with. As soon as I uttered her name, she opened her eyes and smiled at me.

‘Thank God you’re back. .’ she whispered. I held her face tenderly between my hands. But I saw that her sense of relief at my homecoming was shadowed by a vast sadness in her eyes: a reluctant resignation to the fact that our great romance was perhaps drawing to a close. It was now my turn to dissolve into tears, and I had to bite my lower lip hard to keep from sobbing aloud.

‘Seppy, my darling, don’t worry, please. You will become completely well again, my love. Don’t you worry.’

But even to my own ears, my confidence sounded hollow and credulous. Perhaps I imagined it, but Seppy responded with a very slight movement of her head that disavowed my reassurances. As yet, the paralytic effect of the cobra venom had spread no further than her leg.

Temoo had now collected himself and began to explain to me what was going on. He said that the disreputable-looking faqeer in fact had a formidable reputation in these matters; that his incantations and dance steps were meant to placate the serpent deity, so that after it ceased to be angry with Seppy for stepping on it, the very same cobra would appear again at Seppy’s convalescent bed; and with a second bite draw out the venom from her body; following which, he or she would spew the poison into the bowl of milk, thus neutralizing its effects; then Seppy would definitely recover and return to normal health.

My heart sank when I heard this. I was horrified that Temoo had actually been persuaded to believe this cock and bull story, that it could be the likely, or even possible, outcome of his daughter’s traumatic injury.

‘There’s still hope, son,’ he said. ‘Something told me I should trust this wild faqeer. He definitely has some powers. . Don’t give up hope, Phiroze. .the snake will definitely reappear when it’s dark. .that’s what he swears. .’

Hope, that palliative of every human suffering: in desperation, we cling to the flimsiest of straws. My own mind raced back to the fire temple, my father’s temple, and my father’s god whom I had, if not rejected, at least shown scant reverence for. He was in all probability a far more powerful god than this faqeer’s.

My mind recalled in quick succession all the marvellous stories I had heard in childhood of the miracles wrought by faith — of the ten-year-old polio-afflicted boy who had lost the use of his legs but who, after a twenty-minute spell of complete devotion, his forehead pressed to the threshold of the sanctum sanctorum, got up without any help and started walking away not realizing himself he had been cured; of the poor widow with six children facing starvation who found a small pouch of priceless jewels in her own backyard; of the old woman reunited with her long estranged, hate-filled son. . I wanted to go back to the temple and prostrate myself at the marble doorstep of the sanctorum — if that might save Seppy’s life; I was almost certain it would. But then I remembered: even just to set foot under the temple’s porch, I would first need to undergo a nine-day retreat of cleansing and self-purification. I wasn’t sure that Seppy would last nine hours.

At 6 p.m., while there was still light — and for that reason, according to the faqeer, the snake could not revisit her — the cobra venom had spread to her diaphragm muscles, rendering them feeble and ineffectual; and soon after, to her lungs; at six-thirty, she breathed her last. Both Farida and I were at her side — a quietly sobbing Temoo as well — when Sepideh passed away.

So much for the miracles of faith.

Eleven

When I moved out of home some twenty-six years ago I brought along a half-dozen, half-used school notebooks. Now mildewed, and inhabited by shoals of silverfish, are they the reason for my compulsive scribbling?

The years have gone by in a flash: such occasional note-taking as I do helps harness time, or so I imagine; lends a slightly firmer skeleton to the galactic emptiness of my life. .and makes me feel more composed.

Perhaps life is like that: slippery, elusive, impossible to get a hold on. The difference between this moment and the next is only one of awareness. . Yet we drift from morn till night, from day through week through months and years distracted, inattentive, and completely unprepared for the ambush — the moment of our inevitable extinction.

How can I deny death its unfair advantage of surprise? So that finally, when it does arrive, I am awake and aware, observant and unastonished!

Ah! But to what avail, you ask? Is there something awaiting us in the beyond? Some new landscape we’ll be spirited to: Elysian fields, blue skies; or perhaps smoking sulphuric pits, rivers of lava? On the other hand, it could be mere vanity that makes one crave such an advantage over death. That prompts the immense certitude we all share through our years of being alive that the innermost being doesn’t dematerialize in an instant; nor all the years of one’s lived life simply wash away like so much flotsam on the tides of time. .

Limp as a stuffed puppet, the lifeless body stiffens very quickly; and then it’s a real pain to wash and dress, to wind and knot the kusti around its insensible stump of a torso. There have been moments when, alone with a corpse at dead of night, I have been seized with a tremendous urge to slap its face hard as I could. Never did give in to such barbaric impulses: too cowardly, tasteless, and somehow, definitely profane. Yet the desire to provoke a reaction from the dead remains for me, I’ll confess, compelling.

Because, if the dead are really and truly dead, null and void, snuffed out without a trace — then everything we grow up believing in is a lie. All religion, theology, my father’s life and beliefs and prayers, the pumped-up ‘power of faith’—everything is simply wishful fantasy.

(i)

Farida, my daughter, is nineteen already. Next year will be her final year at the Punchayet-run school she attends, if all goes well. But like me, she too is disinclined to prepare for her matriculation.

‘Even if I put in all that hard work,’ she says, ‘I’m afraid I won’t pass. How terrible I would feel. . And you, too, Daddy, you would be angry with me, no?’

I suspect the real reason she feels this way is because her mind is already on the boys, on marriage and babies. Some new recruits have been added to our corps, and one of them, Khushro, is rather good-looking. Spotted Farida with him once, rambling in the woods. She’s still too young for marriage or a serious love affair, overprotected and spoilt as she has been by her grandpa and me.

‘Didn’t I ever tell you?’ I laughed. ‘I didn’t complete my matriculation either. But then, I never had a mind for studies. I wasn’t any good at them, like you are. And besides, twenty years has made such a great difference, my dear. Today everyone needs to be educated, keep up-to-date. There’s so much competition. And if you ever want to get out of this rut I’m stuck in. .look how well Vera’s doing.’

I do admire Rustom and his wife, Silla, for the way they raised their daughter. Silla, of course, is no more. Even though like Farida, Vera too has no siblings — and since the last twelve years, no mother either — through her years of growing up her parents enforced discipline on her in just the right doses.

Not only did Vera finish her school and her post-matriculate secretarial course in record time, her shorthand and typing were of such excellent quality and speed, she landed a plum job with the solicitors Gagrat, Limbuwala & Co. But this was only the beginning of her dream run.

Gagrat’s partner, Homiar Limbuwala — who later broke away and started his own law firm — has a son called Shapoor, about the same age as Vera. This boy took a fancy to her. He was supposed to be attending college doing his masters in jurisprudence, but there he was, always at his father’s office on some pretext or other, mulling over statute books, looking through records of old cases and whatnot. Then, after office closed and most of its staff left, he would ask her out and they would spend time together at Marine Drive or the Hanging Gardens, almost every evening. On one such evening, several months later, Shapoor asked Vera to marry him.

Now Vera had been prudent enough never to bring her boyfriend home to their flat in the Doongerwaadi quarters. But on the other hand, she had never deliberately deceived him either. All he knew about her station in life was that she lived in a flat at Malabar Hill, even today universally acknowledged as the most respectable and well-heeled address to have in Bombay. The period of courtship led to love, and at the end of those few months, Vera definitely began to care for Shapoor very much; as for him, he seemed entirely smitten by the slim, tall and soft-spoken Vera. The boy must have told his parents about his feelings for the girl in Daddy’s office and the Limbuwalas began making discreet inquiries.

Imagine the poor girl’s indignation and embarrassment when early one morning, on reporting to work as usual, she wasn’t permitted by the watchman — I repeat, the watchman—to gain entry into the office. He was apologetic, but firm: ‘saheb’s orders’. Instead of taking her usual seat at the typists and secretaries pool, she was kept waiting on the pavement until the accountant came out and handed her an envelope containing one month’s salary to cover her notice period, and a pre-dated letter of dismissal. No reason or explanation was provided in the letter. She was sent packing home that very morning.

Vera had always suspected that Shapoor lacked the gumption to stand up to his father, if ever it came to defending his choice of betrothed. Sure enough, the boy didn’t even make any attempt to contact Vera again, presumably in accordance with his father’s wishes. Or perhaps he wanted to, but didn’t dare incur his wrath.

I heard all this later, from Rustom, who was completely distraught by the turn of events that had overtaken his daughter’s life. He had always taken great pride in her achievements, her strength of character, and the rapidly escalating graph of her career. Why, only recently when she had told them that Shapoor Limbuwala had asked for her hand in marriage, he and Aimai, his mother, had been ecstatic. . Finally, a narrow exit from the stifling subjugation of their lives — this was nothing short of deliverance — if not for him and his mother, at least for his daughter. And now suddenly this: in retrospect, he told me, the thought had occurred to him it was just too good to be true.

He said to Vera that he would resign his job and move out of Doongerwaadi, if that would make her more acceptable to her prospective in-laws, but Vera wouldn’t hear of it.

At first she laughed bitterly, Rusi said, and then when he persisted in his offer, and wanted her to at least communicate it to Shapoor, she became angry.

‘What do you think, Daddy? That I have no pride or self-respect?’ Vera had flared up. ‘Am I now supposed to start feeling ashamed and furtive about how my father has spent the last twenty-eight years of his life?’

‘I don’t matter in this,’ Rustom had argued. ‘You don’t understand, Vera. This is your one chance to escape forever from this trap I put all of you in.’

‘It’s your life, Daddy,’ Vera had replied. ‘Our life. And you had no choice when you were orphaned at a young age, and your uncle cheated you and turned you out. You should be proud of what you achieved despite the odds.’

‘All that’s past history,’ Rustom had replied, ‘I’m talking about now. About your life. .’

Never once in all the years of our friendship had Rusi talked to me about how he came to be a corpse bearer. I could hardly ask him to disclose details now.

‘And how do you think I will feel every time Shapoor touches me.’ Vera had continued, unable to accept her father’s viewpoint. ‘Knowing what he’s thinking? And when we have children — if we do have children — am I supposed to hide from them who their grandfather was? Just because those puffed-up pot-bellied moneybags hold corpses in such revulsion? Thanks, but no thanks!’

‘She refused to discuss the matter any further,’ Rusi said to me, taking off his spectacles, and wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. I suspect he was crying not because he was sorry for his daughter, but because he was proud of her. This had been a terrible blow to him. And he’s nobody’s fool not to realize why it had happened.

‘My poor girl has been sitting home for the last two weeks, moping. I think she had really come to love that boy. . Now, who could have done this, I ask you? I’m sure the Limbuwalas didn’t find out just by accident. They must have received a phone call telling them what their son’s fiancée’s father’s profession is. .’

I knew he felt the needle of suspicion pointed to Buchia, who was the only person capable of such deliberate meanness. And ever since his inept handling of the khandhias’ strike, and his consequent embarrassment before Coyaji, and Coyaji’s own discomposure before the other trustees, Buchia’s stock had gone down considerably; as also his unconditional authority within his sprawling, herbaceous fiefdom. And Buchia knew very well that apart from me, Rustom had been a guiding force behind the strike.

‘It could just as well be anyone else,’ I said to him, not because I believed it but just for the sake of argument.

‘But what could anyone else’s motive for such a dastardly act be?’ Rustom asked me, genuinely bewildered.

(ii)

But I hadn’t had the courage to disclose even to my closest friend events that had occurred just a few months after the strike was over. It was all just a bit too complicated and convoluted, and finally, too distasteful a story for me to even attempt to narrate. Years had passed but I hadn’t breathed a word about it to a soul.

He sent a message to me through Daamji, one of the gardeners, summoning me to his office. Buchia’s living quarters and office are contiguous. It was already about seven in the evening, which should have made me smell a rat. I went up to his office, but he wasn’t behind his desk; the door was open, and a lit table lamp glowed on his desk.

‘Is that you, Phiroze?’

The shrilly nasal voice from the adjacent room, unmistakably Buchia’s, seemed to be in some state of tremulous excitement. Presently, he emerged, knotting the drawstring on his striped pajamas; his broad hairy chest was visible from behind the loose, diaphanous sudrah he wore.

‘Baes, baes. .’ he gestured at a chair. ‘You do remember what day it is tomorrow, Piloo. .’

‘What day. .’ I repeated after him blankly, wondering if there was something I had promised to do, but forgotten.

Rather solemnly, Buchia went on:

‘Tomorrow is 28th February, my dear Piloo. That is, the day on which your probation period finally ends. .’

I was mystified.

‘What probation?’ I laughed. ‘That’s an old story.’

After the strike, my own reinstatement, along with all the other gains we had achieved, was never in question.

‘Yes,’ said Buchia. ‘But like the allotment of casual leave, the regulating of working hours and payment of overtime, this is one matter you and your desperados didn’t demand in writing. So, you see, there’s no record of it; as far as we are concerned, the probation period still holds, even if we have revoked the dismissal.’

‘What!’ I asked, alarmed. ‘It was fully agreed upon and accepted that I would be reinstated! This is nonsense!’

‘Yes, but my dear Piloo, you didn’t take it in writing. . Reinstated yes, but still on probation. Tomorrow morning, in fact, it has been suggested to me, I could send you a letter stating that your probation period has ended, and that, alas, I am not happy with your work. So. .’ he shrugged.

I was silent, but my hands and feet had turned cold. Jobless and without a place to stay, where would I go with Farida. .? His face was expressionless as a mask. But as I stared into it I imagined I glimpsed a wicked grin lurking behind those stern thickly compressed lips, those deadpan eyes.

I shouted at him in exasperation nevertheless, even now unsure if he was serious, or playing some kind of trick on me.

‘What! Is this a joke, saheb?’

‘No, no, I’ll simply have to say your work isn’t satisfactory. What will you do then, Piloo, what will you do, tell me? Will you call another strike?’

‘Why do you want to say such mad things, saheb. . You know very well, I didn’t call the strike, it was everyone together. . And I don’t think this is fair at all. .’

He had remained completely earnest through the preceding rigmarole. If anything, there was an aggrieved accusatory ring to his voice as if it was we strikers who had betrayed his kindness; but below the affected tone of hurt, I was sure I could detect the low whirring whetstone of Buchia’s characteristic malevolence.

He was sharpening his knives, reminding me with barely concealed glee that he knew as well as I did: all thirteen of the remaining corpse bearers, quite satiated by the gains they had all collectively made, were not likely to go on strike a second time just to demand my renewed reinstatement — if it should come to that. Nor had we made any progress with formally registering our trade union of corpse bearers with the Labour Board (though the process had been initiated). It was true. Buchia and the rest of the blessed trustees — if they were in the know of this at all — could actually get away with such an incredible piece of calumny.

‘Oh, don’t look so sad, bawa,’ Buchia said.

There was a complete transformation now in his tone and manner. Even his high-pitched voice seemed to drop a few tones, becoming soft, almost syrupy and unctuous.

‘I would never, never do anything like that to you, my friend. .’ he said.

‘For a moment, I almost believed it. .’ I said despite myself, terribly relieved.

‘Never, I could never do such a thing. .and you — with your little one. .enu naam su?—’

‘Farida. .’

‘Farida. . Where would you both go to? What would you do? Never, never. I could never do such a thing to you,’ he reiterated. ‘I’m not a monster. .I’m there for you, Piloo. I promised you once, and I meant it. I will never let you get hurt, Piloo. .I’m your friend. .I was only pulling your leg just now.’

I laughed with Buchia, who was chuckling aloud at having successfully duped me.

‘You were frightened for a moment, weren’t you? Tell me honestly?’

I nodded sheepishly, while continuing to smirk and giggle, and sportingly share in his amusement; but also embarrassed. . I suppose I knew where all this was leading.

Without warning, Buchia embraced me, and a tearful emotiveness crept into his voice. His shiny pate was right under my nose now, smelling of pomade. Until just a moment ago he had kept up a rather formal, avuncular manner; now suddenly, I found him sobbing in my arms, trembling like a wet, bristly puppy, and holding on to me as tightly as he could.

‘Why, why do you hate me so, Piloo? Don’t you like me at all. .? Accept me as I am. We could be so happy together. .so happy. . Let me, let me just touch you. .I can give you so much pleasure, so much pleasure, you have no idea. .’

And his hand moved to my crotch. He began rubbing it and squeezing it. I didn’t react, I confess. I didn’t brush it off. I suppose that makes me something of a whore. But the truth is only a minute ago he had given me a real scare, reminding me of his own potential viciousness. And besides, I didn’t have the heart to compound the contempt I suspected he must already feel for himself.

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.

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. .’

‘Pun bol ni, bawa, bol ni, just what is it you find so strange? Such a long preamble, but we still haven’t a clue. .’

‘Let Cowsi speak at his own pace,’ protested Rustom. ‘None of you youngsters know the meaning of patience.’

‘Speak, speak, bawa, speak,’ relented Fali, pretending a yawn. ‘But don’t complain afterwards we finished the bottle while you were chewing your words. .’

‘Our revulsion for corpses,’ said Cawas. ‘That’s what I’m talking about, Fali. .’

‘Wah! Such an original point that takes you two hours to make?’ Fali ridiculed Cawas. ‘That’s why you have your job, ghela!’

‘I call it ingratitude,’ said Rustom, nodding at Cawas in agreement, completely ignoring Fali’s disdainful interjections. ‘Squeamishness and ingratitude. That’s if you will call a spade a spade.’

‘It’s as if they don’t want anything more to do with him,’ elaborated Cawas. ‘Or her.’

‘Ya, sure,’ agreed Jungoo, ‘as if they were all just waiting to pack him off.’

‘When the person is dead and gone,’ countered Fali disdainfully, ‘where’s the question of having anything more to do with him?’

Although we had been ignoring Fali’s boorish comments, I could see they were beginning to irritate Rustom.

‘All that bacteria and invisible radiation the scholars and priests keep harping on. .’ said Bomi, joining the discussion. ‘Arrey, I’ve been cleaning corpses for some years now, but never have I found them to be such deadly or dangerous creatures.’

‘Aae ghela,’ said Fali again, belligerently. He was already sounding quite drunk, maybe even feeling sidelined in the argument he had himself initiated. He turned his ire on Bomi now. ‘You can’t call them creatures. Creatures are living things. Corpses are dead. Fucking dead.’

‘Yes,’ replied Bomi calmly. ‘But are they dangerous? Like some of the living that we know? Arrey Rusi, just give this fellow something to eat, if you have any ganthias or anything. Again he’s been drinking on an empty stomach. Even though he knows very well he becomes like a hungry beast when he does that.’

‘What! What’s that you’re saying about my stomach? My stomach may be empty, but my head isn’t. Like yours!’ shouted Fali, suddenly combative again. ‘Behnchoad, don’t you put on airs with me!’

‘Shut up, Fali. Stop being so bloody aggressive all the time,’ shouted Rustom, who might have been feeling a little drunk himself. ‘Try and understand what we are saying. .’ Then he called out aloud, ‘Mum-ma. .’

The evening threatened to get completely chaotic, because Fali was not willing to accept a put-down like that. He stood up aggressively, just when Aimai, who had already figured out the cause for all the raised voices, walked in with a plastic plate filled with an assortment of ready fried savouries.

‘Yes, that’s just what we need. Now eat that up first,’ said Rustom to Fali. ‘Not another word from you, and no more drinks until you finish what’s in the plate. Thank you, Mum-ma.’

‘But I say, aren’t you getting a bit carried away here, Cawas?’ Bomi pursued the discussion as if there had been no interruption at all.

‘Why? You don’t believe what I’m saying is true?’

‘Don’t believe everything he says. .’ muttered Fali grumpily, sitting down again. ‘I’m not really hungry, I’ll eat just a bit, anyway. .’

But once he started chomping, Fali couldn’t stop until the plate was empty.

‘Well, no one can deny it,’ said Bomi. ‘But there’s another side to it, too, isn’t there?’

‘At least you could have saved a ganthia or two for the rest of us! Khaadhro!’Jungoo kidded Fali.

‘Don’t make too much noise, bawa,’ said Aimai. ‘Please. .I’m off to sleep. Rustom, Vera isn’t back yet.’

‘She told us, didn’t she, before going out — she’ll be late tonight?’

‘Then there’s no need to worry, I suppose. Goodnight boys.’ A chorus of murmurs bade Aimai good night.

‘Has to be up at four o’clock tomorrow to wash the corpse that just came in. She and Dollamai are supposed to do it,’ explained Rustom.

‘Oh yes, I heard,’ said Bomi. ‘A fairly young woman got knocked over by a train, while crossing the tracks at an unmanned level crossing. .’

‘My mother is eighty-two. I’ve told her to stop doing this work. But she won’t listen. She says washing the dead gives solace and meaning to her life. . Oh, then she’ll sniffle and sob to herself quietly, whole morning. The grief of the bereaved affects her deeply. .’

‘Poor Aimai, such a kind heart!’ said Cawas. ‘But washing up a train accident won’t be child’s play. .’

‘Sure it won’t,’ agreed Bomi. ‘And to think they still don’t pay our women anything for this service. .’

‘Except that hundred-rupee bonus, once a year at Pateti,’ said Khushro.

‘Oh yes, once a year. Or if the relatives choose to tip them. . Let our union register with the Labour Tribunal, then we’ll take up all these issues, one by one,’ said Rustom.

Excepting me, I doubt if anyone present was aware of the story of Vera’s dismissal from her office. For Rusi at least this discussion, about the horror we hold corpses in, was hardly a theoretical one.

‘What other side were you thinking of, Bomi?’ asked Cawas, picking up the conversation again where it had been diverted.

‘Other side. .? Oh yes. . Just that people are so disturbed by death, so shocked, they can’t accept it. There are those who will cling to their departed. .’

‘Why, of course,’ said Jungoo. ‘Nobody’s saying we are such monsters that have no feelings. .’

‘That’s just the point I’m making. Hardly a week ago,’ Bomi continued, ‘Bujji and I met this young man, thirty-five or so, a bachelor, who had probably been living with his mother all his life. Just couldn’t accept it. Weeping bitterly like a little suckling, squeezing, embracing, touching every part of her—’

‘It’s these — all these priests—’ Jungoo started to say, but Bomi wouldn’t be interrupted.

‘He wouldn’t let us leave with her body. Just a little longer, just a little longer, he kept blubbering. Then when we said we absolutely had to go, he actually wanted to lie on the bier beside her and ride in the hearse. . Luckily, an elderly neighbour of his intervened, and yelled at him, “Stop this nonsense, Percy. Get a hold of yourself. Mama is gone. She’s never coming back. . Get that into your head!” Only after a severe dressing-down, which continued for a few minutes, the son seemed to return to reality. Then the neighbour joined his hands and said to us, “You gentlemen, please leave. .”’

‘Well, I’ll tell you another story,’ said Khushro, unexpectedly, after a pause in the conversation. Relatively young and new to our company, Khushro had been shyly sipping his glass in a corner, not saying much. His story actually made us all relax and laugh, everyone, including Fali. Just the previous day, he told us, Khushro had been with Fardoonji and Farokh to Dhobhi Talao, to pick up what turned out to be a very obese dead woman.

‘Fardoonji, as you know, is an old man, without much strength left in his body,’ said Khushro. ‘When we saw her size, we were definitely alarmed. Even assuming we could lift her up, would she fit on the bier? We gazed at her and scratched our heads. . No, I’m not exaggerating. She was huge, this woman, a giant. You were telling us, Bomi, of this boy who wanted to lie down on the bier next to his mother. This one looked like even on her own she wouldn’t fit; she would need two biers tied together side by side! “What shall we do now?” Farokh whispered to me. First thing we did, of course, was to call Jungoo out from where he was hiding in the driver’s cabin.’

‘I was alarmed, too,’ said Jungoo, vouching for the woman’s size. ‘Somehow, huffing and puffing like coolies, we moved her onto the bier.’

‘Spilling off its sides she was, too,’ interjected Farokh.

‘The next part was more difficult — lifting the woman and the bier onto the floor of the hearse. .’

‘The funny thing about it all,’ explained Khushro, ‘was that through all this, the husband and two grown-up sons merely stood by disinterested, not offering to lend a hand, and moreover acting very casual, as though they considered it all in the day’s work for us professionals. Behnchoad, Farokh and Jungoo and me, our balls nearly fell off, but somehow we managed to lift the bier and push her into the hearse.

‘Then the husband visibly relaxed. He sidled up to me and said in a tearful whisper, “Carry her gently, please, I beg you. . Like a flower. .”

‘Then, shamefacedly, like a man indulging in a private, dirty act, he slipped me two tens. .’

‘Two tens? For carrying a grand piano?’ exclaimed Bomi. ‘You should have thrown them in his face!’

Khushro said, to all of us who had been following his story:

‘I was too breathless, too exhausted even to think of anything to say. .nor did I feel the need to retort. But as we drove off, a perfect answer popped into my head. And I regretted not being more quick-witted. I wanted to lean out of the moving hearse, and yell at the top of my voice:

“Like a flower, bawaji? Who? That she-elephant. .? For her you’ll need a crane!”’

I like Khushro. He seems a genuinely decent sort.

(vi)

Another member of our corps who interests me a great deal is young Kobaad. Only eighteen when he started work at the Towers, that is, about the age I was when I first met Sepideh, he should be at least twenty-five now.

I knew Kobaad had come from some place outside Bombay— Nargol or Dahanu or Bharuch or Bhiwandi, one of those Parsi settlements in Gujarat — I forget which. While he was still a child, his father, a small trader, moved to Bombay with his wife and five children. He had shifted to the city to try and improve his business prospects.

It was a miscalculation. While he had been making a living of sorts in the small town in Gujarat, several things went wrong for him when he moved here. He could not establish himself, and found living expenses too high. Finally, he was reduced to becoming an itinerant vendor: needles and threads, twine, thimbles, knitting prongs, hair brushes and plastic combs, glass baubles, trinkets and other such trifles; these were the objects he carried in a large, shiny tin trunk from door to door. He spent most of his day marching through various housing colonies of the congested inner city, calling out in a cracked and quavering voice that shrieked audibly above the din of traffic:

‘Nikhiya-bur-rush. .sooeee. . Bangles and beads, thimbles and thread, all sizes of stainless steel needles. .’

One day, while walking through crowded Kalbadevi peddling his wares, he was gored and trampled upon by a mad bull which may have been dazzled by the light of the hard sun reflected in his shiny tin box. The box, too, containing his treasure trove, was trampled upon and crushed. The totally unexpected death of his father was a great blow to the poor mother and the little ones.

Kobaad, being the eldest, it fell upon him to drop out of school and start working. But the mother wanted him to find employment anywhere, so long as it was not within the weltering chaos of a city that had already claimed her husband.

The horror and pity of their recent bereavement, the feeling of intense piety it had inspired in her, the great natural beauty and peace she experienced and imbibed during the three-day funeral obsequies at Doongerwaadi made her decide to seek a job for Kobaad that would rarely, if ever, take her son outside the boundaries of this safe haven; where, apart from everything else, the Punchayet would provide rudimentary residential quarters for the whole family. Her efforts bore fruit, and Kobaad was appointed corpse bearer.

But more than anyone else in his family, I do believe it was young Kobaad who was most deeply affected by his father’s sudden death. For nearly three months after the latter’s bizarre accident, Kobaad seemed preoccupied, continuously in a state of distracted dreaminess, other-worldliness — call it what you will— as though it was he, rather than his father, who had crossed over into the shadowy unknown. You could see he was grieving terribly.

Then after three months had passed, late one night I heard the plaintive sounds of a harmonium. I knew that Kobaad owned one, but had never heard him play it. He was playing softly now, hesitantly, without pumping the bellows too hard, searching out a plaintive tune. Three nights later, I heard him singing that same melancholic tune, along with lyrics he had put to it. The song was in Gujarati, set to a jaunty rhythm. It was very moving nevertheless; especially if one spared a moment to think of the events in Kobaad’s own life that had prompted such a sad and obsessive investigation into the heart of impermanence.

I will try to give a rough translation of what I remember of that unforgettable song:

Foolish to make plans:

O how foolish

To dream, presume, aspire. .

Every calculation you so painstakingly undertook

Is flawed. The numbers simply refuse to add up

To anything but nought. .

Time flashes past you. A

Man’s life is as enduring

As a lit matchstick, and just as

Brittle.

Oh yes, I’ve said it once,

But I’ll

Say it again:

’Tis foolish to make plans,

To dream, presume, aspire. .

You know nothing turns out quite the way

You had hoped.

Nothing,

Oh, nothing ever does.

I have rendered the gist of the song into English from memory. I may have dropped a line or two, perhaps even a whole verse. But as to its circular melody, the hauntingly resonant chords, I have no way of evoking their beauty. . Saddening, and painful to consider what will become of Kobaad’s considerable talent in the years to come.

Three. Future Imperfect

~ ~ ~

Keepers of the Unclean. .? Is that how posterity will label this sketchy log? Future generations won’t be interested in it at all, I’m certain; nor is there any likelihood of its ever coming to public attention.

Still, as I dip my stylus in a pot of Waterman’s royal blue ink, and continue to scratch upon the leftover blanks of my eviscerated notebooks, the irony doesn’t escape me. As much as I hated those eight years of schooling, they gave me the tools to keep myself occupied through the bleakness of my declining years. .

As a rule, I can’t bear to read any of this. Yet when I do turn the pages back, reread it in snatches, I wonder if I haven’t compromised the veracity of my narrative with too much grimness. Maybe an unmistakable deficit of humour as well?

I must point out: rubbing shoulders with the dead at odd hours of day and night doesn’t necessarily make us more gloomy, dour or over-serious about life. The truth is, like everybody else we corpse bearers, too, behave with the smug breeziness of immortals — convinced that death cannot strike us down in the conceivable future.

Make no mistake — my own narrative may be responsible for this erroneous impression — but much of the time our lives were anything but dull, dreary and repetitious. Despite routine, there was always room for excitement, passion and a frenzied tomfoolery.

Twelve

The end of World War II saw a spurt in building activity in Bombay. As land prices escalated, the vast wild acres of the Towers of Silence attracted several encroachment attempts.

Almost all of this land had accrued to the Parsi Punchayet over the years, in bits and pieces as well as larger tracts, through the generosity of its wealthy donors. In those early days none of the big builders and land sharks, who would later jointly destroy the charm and beauty of Bombay with their unbridled greed and frantic building, were active yet. Meanwhile, the Punchayet had an encroachment case pending in the High Court against a pair of Muslim brothers called Jameel and Ijaaz Sheikh. These were small fry.

The Sheikhs had owned, since their father’s time, an adjacent plot on the Teen Batti side, on which stood a shop selling brass and copper vessels. Now the father was dead, and the sons had extended its rightful boundaries by about twenty feet into our grounds, setting up there a makeshift hut made of bamboo, planks of wood and thatch. Here they had installed a desk and two chairs, with a painted signboard outside reading — if you please—Real Estate!

On information provided by the Punchayet’s officers, their law firm, Craigie, Lynch and Dubash had served them a notice for trespassing. Eviction proceedings should have started right away, and that’s what the law firm strongly advised, but even in those days, the Punchayet was completely embroiled in a finicky delegation of authority. While they dawdled over procedure, the Sheikh brothers got an ex parte stay order from the court, claiming the disputed land had been paid for by their father, and had been in the family for the past twenty years.

Now it so happened that one morning when Buchia and Edul were measuring the boundaries of the said segment in order to have it fenced, they were rather rudely asked by the elder Sheikh brother to leave, since they were trespassing!

Buchia was furious, and would have assaulted the man there and then, had Edul not intervened and restrained him. That afternoon Buchia organized a posse of about ten young and spirited corpse bearers, asking them to report to him at sundown; he said he had a plan that would show the encroachers their place.

I wasn’t among those picked for this punitive mission. But, after dark, under Buchia’s direction the boys, casually dressed in their sudrahs and shorts, created mayhem at the disputed site, ripping up the wood-thatch-and-bamboo cabin, smashing the table and chairs, pulling down the signboard advertising real estate and breaking it in two. Fali was bent on putting a match to the debris they left behind, but Buchia categorically warned him against indulging his pyromaniacal instincts; at which a disappointed Fali muttered to the other boys under his breath as they walked away, just loudly enough for Buchia to hear:

‘Saalo bailo!’

When I heard accounts of what fun they had had vandalizing the illegal structure, teasing and roughing up the lackey appointed by the Sheikhs to guard the place at night, I almost wished I had volunteered for the job and shared in their collective discharge of pent-up frustrations. But reprisal was swift, for the brothers made a police complaint. The very next afternoon the Deputy Commissioner of Police, a Mr Ignatius Strickham accompanied by three constables and a police van, entered the secluded premises of the Towers of Silence. Strickham himself rode in on horseback.

(i)

Now this was rather unusual, I should point out. Strickham was obviously new to India, and his job. Perhaps he was trying to impress and intimidate the locals with the added stature the horse gave him. But under the Places of Worship Act first enacted by the East India Company, for more than a hundred years the diverse religious communities of India had been assured the privilege of maintaining the sanctity of their places of worship. Moreover, the small corps of mounted police which had existed in eighteenth century Bombay had been disbanded long ago. I heard later that Strickham was a horse-lover who maintained his own private stable of horses.

As became evident, this arrogant and possibly corrupt officer was entirely out of tune with the times. For the year I speak of was, I think, 1945, or ’46: the War was over, the British were engaged in talks with Indian leaders to find a face-saving and ostensibly fair formula under which to withdraw and return to its own people ‘the jewel of the British empire’, which they had zealously guarded for so long.

‘You there. .! Yes, you, I am speaking to you!’

Concisely insolent in manner, but with an underlying nastiness to his voice the middle-aged Englishman, I’m told, cantered all the way up the hill to where the fire temple broods with its flame kept alive through all hours of day and night.

‘Do you know where I can find the manager. .? Here! I say, do you speak English? I said do you know where I can find the manager?’

Clean-shaven but for a thick moustache that showed flecks of grey, dressed in white flannels and wearing a pith helmet, the deputy commissioner, whom none of us knew to be a high police official, persisted in thus rudely demanding information from two old priests who had emerged from within and stood frozen at the temple’s entrance. Somewhat taken aback to see this ill-tempered, red-faced apparition within a restricted space of the Towers, they pointed mutely in the direction of Buchia’s office, upon which the policeman yanked the horse’s reins fiercely and spurred it on. All who saw this unlikely figure on a brown sorrel, bounding over hedges and galloping down quiet pathways, were stunned; especially to hear him yelling at the top of his voice:

‘Where the hell is that bloody manager?’

When the policeman finally located his office, Buchia happened to have stepped out on his rounds; but it didn’t take Strickham long to find and accost him.

‘Are you Mr Kavarana, the manager of this place?’

‘Who’re you? Horses are not allowed in here!’

‘You are under arrest, Mr Manager.’

‘And who may you be, sir, if I may ask?’

‘Deputy Commissioner of Police, if that’s any of your business.’

Some of the policeman’s impatience may have communicated itself to the horse, which whinnied and stood on its hind-legs for an instant. Buchia was dumbfounded, and more than a little frightened; he had no idea when he triumphantly and unilaterally undertook to evict the encroachers that he was violating a court’s instructions. He combed his fluffy sideburns nervously with his fingertips before asking:

‘On what charges?’

‘Assault, destruction of property, rioting and disturbing the peace. Come with me, please.’

Meanwhile, the constables in the police van had driven up to the adjoining disputed plot, and escorted back the watchman, who was wearing a white bandage on his crown; as well as Jameel and Ijaaz Sheikh.

Pouting grouchily, and limping every few steps, the watchman — evidently well-tutored by his employers — made a show of identifying members of the previous night’s ‘mob’ for the police; that is, he pointed out almost everyone he came across on the estate (barring the better-dressed mourners at the afternoon’s funeral), including a couple of gardeners who had been busy since early morning planting saplings for a proposed bamboo grove behind Albless cottage, and one seller of sandalwood who normally sat on a chair by the main gate retailing sticks to those attending the day’s funerals but who had left his post propelled by curiosity, alarm and an insidious feeling of excitement when the equestrian Englishman galloped past him.

The burra saheb rounded up men of different ages and professions, and had them bundled into the van — a motley group of corpse bearers in pajamas, sudrahs and prayer-topees, two gardeners in khaki shorts and mud-stained vests, the sandalwood-vendor and Buchia; all twenty-two of them were, moreover, handcuffed, and driven down to the Colaba police station where they spent a rough and sleepless night in the lock-up.

Later, I heard from those who had been present, there was a curiously contrived temper to the whole episode, as if the objective was to intimidate the culprits of yesterday’s destructive merriment, rather than apply the rule of law. Why a police officer should be so partisan in an ostensibly criminal matter was something that wasn’t speculated upon until much later, but I’m glad to say our boys, and Buchia as well, suffered these indignities without feeling cowed; in fact, they displayed a healthy and outraged resistance.

While all this was happening, myself, Jungoo and Kobaad were out. We drove back in the hearse with the corpse we had gone to fetch to a dark and desolate Towers of Silence with hardly anyone about. The sun had already set, and the whole place was immersed in an air of mourning. Luckily Edul had plucked up the courage to phone Coyaji as soon as the police van drove away and inform him of the arrests. Next morning all twenty-two prisoners were brought before a magistrate, and released on bail, for which the required amounts were put up by the Punchayet.

Three weeks later, when the case came up for hearing, the Punchayet’s lawyers had built a strong defence for its clients: land records had been dug up, certified gift deeds were produced and the verbal testimony of old-timers like Rustom and Fardoonji invoked to assure the magistrate that the land which the Sheikh brothers were claiming had never been in their, or their father’s, possession during the last twenty years. As for the relatively minor charge of assault on the watchman, some clever cross-examining of his deposition deflated the claims of ‘serious injuries inflicted by a murderous mob’.

As a final and dramatic trump in support of their contention, a handwritten receipt was produced by the plaintiffs— acknowledging payment of Rs 12,000 by a Mohammed Ghulam Sheikh to the Parsi Punchayet in 1919. But a brief examination of the paper by the court’s clerk, and then the magistrate himself, led him to observe that it was entirely deficient in details of the plot allegedly purchased; and moreover only semi-literate in its language. It was rejected by the magistrate outright as a ‘crude and unconvincing’ attempt at forgery; the case was dismissed.

The deputy commissioner of police, Strickham, too, came in for some strongly censorious comments from the English magistrate, a man called Peabury, who found the policeman’s entry into the Towers of Silence on horseback, and his handcuffing of the accused ‘overzealous beyond the farthest limits of civility’. This observation made in court was widely reported in the Indian press; and word of mouth even insinuated that Strickham was corrupt, and had probably received a large amount of money from the Sheikhs to behave in the way he did.

(ii)

Several months after this rumpus died down, we were already on the cusp of 1947—the year in which India got her independence — when, late one evening, I had a visitor at my quarters whom I didn’t immediately recognize.

It was already dark when he knocked at my door, and though we now had electric lights at Doongerwaadi, the one on my veranda hadn’t been turned on.

‘Phiroze. .?’

It was a husky, soft voice, which sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Only when the stranger drew closer as though wishing to embrace me, I recognized him at once: it was my old school buddy.

‘Rohinton?’

His face was round, his shoulders broad and fleshy: expansively at ease with himself in a colourful bush shirt, he still retained much of his baby fat but his features seemed wrinkled and pitted: Rohinton Kanga all right, but no longer the carefree and cheerful friend I remembered. Before I could stop him, he enveloped me in his arms and hugged me tightly. I was seeing him again after the passage of a very long time.

I observed only one unexpected change in his appearance. Like myself, he too had lost most of his hair; but, in his case, two outgrowths at the rear extreme of his crown — grey, hopelessly entangled bushes, straggling sideways — gave him the mien of a winged creature caught in a moment of fluttery indecision before taking flight.

‘Better have a thorough bath, once you get home,’ I said, apologetically. ‘I’ve just got back from washing a very old dead man. .’

He grimaced, opening his mouth wide and cried dismissively:

‘Aaargh. .! Bullshit, all bullshit. Baloney. Makes no sense at all. . Anyway, I’m so happy to see you again, Phiroze,’ and he gave me another bear hug.

‘It’s what — fifteen years — since you left for England?’

‘Fourteen, actually. Oh, I’ve been back, I’ve been back before. .’ said Rohinton apologetically, ‘several times as a matter of fact, but never thought to look you up. .until this time, when I need your help.’

‘That’s fine, no problem. I’m a nussesalar, you know, a “Custodian of the Unclean”,’ I reminded him. ‘You could hardly have invited me to a social gathering of your family and friends, and expected them to welcome me warmly.’

‘Why not? Why not!’ asked Rohinton angrily, emphatically. ‘I just don’t believe in all that bullshit.’

‘You’d be surprised how deeply ingrained these beliefs are. .I don’t believe myself as a rule that exposure to corpses contaminates the living, yet right now I feel an urgent need to bathe. I’ll feel uneasy and restless until I do. But tell me what—’

‘Don’t let me stop you, don’t let me stop you. . Please, go ahead. I’ll wait.’

‘You said you needed some help?’

‘Well, yes, we’ll talk about that when you’re feeling more relaxed. It was my dad who suggested to me, reminded me in a sense, that you might be able to help us.

‘In what way?’

‘In this whole matter of Joseph’s last rites. . Maybe you should have your bath first? Then we’ll talk at length. . And besides, I’m sure there’s so much else we have to catch up on as well. .’

It was then the penny dropped. So Joseph Maloney was Nariman’s first son by his Irish wife. And the entire hullabaloo that had been going on for the last two weeks or so — I was only vaguely aware of its shrill repercussions — about a Christian foreigner who had renounced his faith, and was seeking permission from his deathbed to be allowed a Zoroastrian funeral — was Rohinton’s half-brother! During all the hours I had spent in my youth at Mon Repos, Rohinton’s sprawling Mazagaon bungalow, never once had I set eyes on this ruddy half-Irish half-Parsi whose moribund spiritual aspirations were exercising Zoroastrian passions in the city of Bombay to a never-before-scaled pitch of rabidity.

‘Please do sit, Rohinton. Make yourself comfortable. I won’t be long.’

When I came out of the bathroom, I saw that Farida had made some tea for us. Rohinton was sipping his appreciatively, while another cup, covered with an upturned saucer, waited for me.

‘When Margaret went back to Ireland, Joseph went with her. My father couldn’t make that first marriage work. .but soon after — the poor boy was only six then — she fell ill and, in a few months, died. He was brought up in Ireland, and later England, by her relatives.

‘Though he retained his mother’s name, Maloney,’ said Rohinton, not wasting much time on preliminaries, ‘Joseph claims he’s always felt a deep connection with my dad, which he was able to renew only after so many years. In the meanwhile, at Oxford, he had studied World Religion, and even done a doctorate in Zoroastrianism. .but then it was not so much his intellectual appreciation of our religion, as his visits to Bombay and his meetings with my dad that deepened his desire to convert to Zoroastrianism.’

‘But your dad himself was never very much into—’ I interrupted him.

‘Traditional religious ideas?’ he completed for me. ‘No, never. He was a liberal, a freethinker. . But now, in his old age, he’s changed completely. You should see him: he’s turned completely revivalist. Does his Kashti prayers devoutly three times a day, coughing away in front of an afarghan; his greatest wish — which I suppose he’s praying for — is to see the religion prosper again, the faithful acquire a proper understanding of its basic tenets and the ultra-orthodox shed their hidebound prejudices. .

‘And secretly, he’s confided in me, he also believes in the imminent advent of Bahram Varjawan, the legendary preacher and messiah, who, it is believed, has already been born somewhere in the Middle East — whose dynamic reinterpretations of Zarathustra’s teachings will lead to a great resurgence of Zoroastrianism, perhaps even, or so Dad hopes, a new, independent nation of Zoroastrians, which will be among the foremost in the world.’

‘A tall order,’ I responded, somewhat sceptically.

‘Well, I confess there are times when I wonder myself if in his old age he hasn’t lost his marbles. . But he’s quite sanguine about it all,’ protested Rohinton, ‘and willing to put his money where his mouth is. In fact, two years ago, the last time Joseph was in India, they had planned for him a series of twenty lectures aimed at the average Parsi, on everyday as well as abstruse matters of faith. . But it was indefinitely postponed when, during that very trip to India, a variant of the Hodgkin’s disease that had killed his mother some forty-odd years ago was detected in Joseph. He went back to England, and doctors there confirmed it as well.’

‘Hodgkin’s disease?’ I asked, and he nodded.

‘Nowadays it’s more often called Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Basically, a form of cancer that attacks the immune system and white blood corpuscles. . You see, the problem is that Joseph’s navjote was never performed. His mother, and after her, her relations, brought him up as a Roman Catholic. Otherwise, technically, with a Parsi father, he should be perfectly eligible for a Parsi funeral. And now that he’s on his deathbed, no Parsi priest will agree to perform his navjote.’

‘If you’re hoping I can persuade Father to do it. .’ I said, and before he could express in words the exasperation that showed on his face, I hurriedly completed what I wanted to say: ‘No chance! My father’s the most diehard fundamentalist you could hope to meet!’

‘But haven’t you been following what’s going on in your city?’ said Rohinton, who had been waiting patiently for me to finish. ‘Why, it’s all over the papers!’

Actually, after Seppy’s passing it was true — it had happened so gradually I hardly noticed it myself — I had lost touch, as well as interest, in the outside world. Temoo’s radio had been silent for some years, and gathering dust. Now, of course, we had electricity. Aspi and Sola, a couple of others had bought radios too, but I hardly ever listened to it. Whatever little I came to know about the world was gleaned from the tittle-tattle of my better informed, more loquacious colleagues.

‘You see, after Dad offered them a donation of Rs 25 lakh, which the Punchayet gratefully accepted, it has softened its position on the issue. But the trustees are now saying that since there’s never been a precedent of a terminally-ill person adopting the Zoroastrian religion in the concluding hours of his life, they will have to first refer the matter to the high priests and religious scholars.

‘Dad is completely moved and saddened by the “homecoming” of his firstborn, whose untimely and tragic drift towards death is too painful for him to watch. My father is very, very keen to make it possible to comply with Joseph’s final, most heartfelt wishes. Of course, the hardcore element in the Parsi public is even more incensed. They’re saying that the Parsi Punchayet has been bribed by Nariman Kanga, that it’s willing to put the religion’s core values on sale, if the price is high enough.’

Now sixty-seven, my father, Framroze, had over time acquired an inviolable reputation for righteousness and integrity, apart from the one of being a bad-tempered priest who never tolerated any hanky-panky from his subordinates. Among the Council of High Priests (whose meetings he hardly ever attended) as well as informally, he had grown extraordinarily in stature.

In fact, when news of his wife’s premature death overlapped with long-forgotten tales of a dissolute and lascivious son who preferred to marry a khandhia’s daughter rather than follow in his father’s noble footsteps, Framroze acquired, among common people, the aura of a long-suffering, tragic and saintly figure, whose opinion on religious matters carried tremendous authority. Nariman Kanga would have known that, which is why he wanted his support. It would definitely strengthen the Punchayet’s case, too. But whether my father would agree to go against the fierce gale of public disapproval, and favour sanctioning Joseph’s last rites, was an open question. Personally, I doubted it very much.

‘I could certainly speak to him. Ask him what he feels. . The difficulty is that he doesn’t like to even meet me. .’

‘Ah,’ said Rohinton, ‘maybe we’re being a little unfair here. How do you know what his feelings for you are now? So many years have passed since you married against his wishes. . And even that poor girl you wed, it’s a long time since she passed away. .people change with the passage of time. . Your father may be secretly longing for a rapprochement, how do you know?’

‘Er, yes. .it’s possible,’ I replied. ‘Though I do keep up with news from home whenever I meet Vispy. . He drops in, every now and then. And I’ve had no inkling of such a mellowing.’

‘Hey, what’s Vispy up to?!’ asked Rohinton.

‘Nothing. . Just another job as accountant, like the one he had before. . This one’s slightly better paid, I think, with a firm that manufactures nuts and bolts. .’

‘Is he still single, then?’ asked Rohinton. ‘Ran into him once at Gowalia Tank, during a previous visit.’

‘He’s single. Goes out walking by himself in the evening. Sometimes he walks here, at the Towers. Anyway, I’ll definitely go and meet my dad. Tomorrow, perhaps? I’ll do what I can for Joseph.’

‘Let’s make it a date, then. Tomorrow evening? I could pick you up in my car.’

‘I don’t think he’d like that. I’ll have to talk to him alone.’

‘No, of course,’ said Rohinton. ‘I meant I’ll drive you there, and wait outside in the car. And after you finish your meeting with him, we could go some place, have a drink and dinner at a restaurant, catch up with all the news?’

‘But I have no idea how long it’ll take me to persuade Father. Or if I’ll have any success at all.’

‘You can take as long as you like. I’ll be waiting outside. Two hours, three hours, doesn’t matter. . And please do mention to him that my dad has offered to send a car and chauffeur to pick up Framrozeji and bring him to Dr Billimoria’s Nursing home at Queen’s Road, where Joseph has a private suite on the top floor. . His systems are rapidly failing one by one; there are needles and tubes kept permanently sticking into him, and nurses attend him day and night; but he’s still conscious most of the time. Framrozeji could talk to Joseph himself, and see how much this means to him. .’

‘Let me speak with Father first. I’m not terribly hopeful, but I’ll try. The best time to meet my father would be, I suppose, around six-thirty in the evening when he’s finished with the day’s work and eaten his dinner. . Tomorrow. .?’ I hesitated, doubtful for a moment; then remembered: ‘Oh yes, from tomorrow, luckily, for the rest of this week I’m on morning shift, my duty ends at four-thirty. Could you come here then, Rohinton, a little after six?’

‘Of course, Phiroze. Definitely. I’ll be there. Thank you. Thank you so much. .’

‘Don’t thank me yet, Rohinton,’ I cautioned my school friend, as he got up to leave. ‘And have a good night’s sleep. .’

(iii)

When Rohinton rolled by next evening in his red Buick convertible and honked obstreperously outside the khandhias’ quarters, I was ready.

He held the car door open for me, and as I slid into the seat beside him, I saw that a couple of my neighbours had appeared on their balconies to see who it was; among them, Temoo. Very old now and suffering a great deal on account of the growth in his belly, I wondered if seeing me drive away like this at night, in a fancy car, brought back memories for him of similar nights when his wife Rudabeh was driven away in equally swanky cars; and of that one fateful night, when she never returned. I suppose it did. But why am I thinking of that now?

‘Can’t tell you how much this means to me. .as well,’ said Rohinton, driving out of the wrought iron gateway of the Towers of Silence, and taking a sharp right. ‘I mean, apart from what it means to my dad. . Joseph is fourteen years older than me, you know, and I can’t say I ever got to know him well before this visit. He’s a really nice guy though, you should meet him sometime. .’

Then, as an afterthought added, ‘Well, there may not be much time. .’

‘What are the doctors saying?’

‘They don’t give us any hope. It’s only a matter of days now.’

Shops at Kemps Corner were downing their shutters, or were already shut. There were hardly any other cars on the road.

‘He must be in a great deal of pain, then?’ I asked.

‘If he is, he doesn’t show it,’ answered Rohinton. ‘He’s medicated a lot, and dopey sometimes, but still surprisingly cheerful.’

A few hawkers with their baskets could be seen squatting on the pavements as we drove past. A man selling purple grapes, another selling oranges, yet another pineapples; then a balloon seller with a gas cylinder on wheels filling up more balloons to add to a bunch of already inflated ones secured to his wrist with long lengths of string, the whole profusion of colourful gas balloons swaying gustily in a strong breeze as it aspired towards a darkening sky.

A family of street performers was tiredly wending its way home: a man, a woman, two kids and a puppy — you could tell they were performers or acrobats by the paraphernalia they were carrying between them: thin, long wooden poles, metal hoops, sharp skewers and one large cogged wheel whose precise application I had no way of guessing; though it was probably used in some trick the little dog performed.

‘Even in this condition he believes, with complete sincerity, that every suffering we undergo in life is perfectly calibrated to serve as a platform for surmounting specific flaws in one’s own character. .opportunities to polish our spiritual selves, become better persons. .

‘Everyone whose paths we cross — Joseph believes — our partners in life, our friends, all who give us grief or joy or frustration are merely playing out their insensible moves in perfect consonance with a preordained framework of spiritual conflicts and imperatives planned for our growth. “The planet itself is a veritable crucible,”’ said Rohinton, quoting his half-brother, ‘“and our time in it intended to purify weaknesses, purge baser instincts, clarify the soul essence through — how else, but through suffering?” That’s why,’ Rohinton went on, speaking mellifluously as he cruised along, ‘Joseph is so fascinated by the Zoroastrian symbol of fire, a symbol of cleansing and purity. In his hospital suite, he keeps an oil wick burning day and night at his bedside.’

The Buick halted at an intersection. In the stream of cars and buses cutting across us diagonally in the direction of Warden Road raced an ambulance with its bell clanging furiously, recklessly overtaking the slow moving traffic that impeded its progress.

‘I’m only representing to you the conclusions Joseph has come to after all his years of study. Myself, I can’t say I’m sure what I believe.’

‘Well logically speaking, Joseph’s point of view may well be the only one possible to espouse,’ I said. ‘To ensure that all the senseless suffering we see around us doesn’t become. . a desperately paralysing burden. However, whether logical plausibility can be seen as evidence of certainty. .it’s a big leap to take!’

‘Who can say? I guess you and me just don’t have the time to think about these things. Only a philosopher like Joseph has that luxury.’

Meanwhile, a very old, bent and obviously poor woman wearing a faded Koli-style sari hitched loosely between her legs stepped off the pavement and approached our stationary vehicle. She tottered momentarily; then steadying herself, bent a little to peer through the window I was sitting at. She wasn’t a beggar, no; only bent on peering inside out of some sort of curiosity, appraising the interior of the exclusive car we were seated in. But it was not to her taste, for she shook her head from side to side disapprovingly, as though finding something in it deficient. Or she may have been appraising the car’s inmates rather than its decor.

Rohinton’s hand went to his shirt pocket feeling for change to give the old woman, but just then the traffic began to move, and so did we. The charitable impulse was quickly abandoned.

‘I turn left into the next lane, right?’

‘No, no. You better park somewhere outside here. I’ll walk up.’

‘Best of luck, Phiroze.’

(iv)

At this time of evening, the lane that meandered up to my father’s small fire temple was entirely deserted; not a soul about. Though it wasn’t completely dark yet, most houses on both sides of the lane didn’t have any lights on. A solitary street lamp at the end of the footpath threw a sallow, bluish glow on the fire temple’s spacious portico, with its finely hewn, bare stone benches. Evidently, the fire temple had closed for the night.

I went around the temple following a small pathway that led to its rear to my father’s quarters. I had hoped the back entrance would be ajar. No such luck. It was tightly shut; however, I could see that the kitchen light was on.

I knocked. No one answered. There was no sound from inside. Then I knocked again, harder. After a minute the back door opened, cautiously. And my father’s hoarse voice asked:

‘Kaun? Vispy?’

‘No, it’s me. Phiroze.’

When he had opened the door wider, he still didn’t step aside to let me in.

‘I thought Vispy had forgotten his key. But it’s you. .why have you come here?’

‘I have something to ask of you, Papa. Something important. A favour.’ I explained. ‘Don’t worry, Papa. I’ve washed myself very carefully before coming here. Including application of taro at all key points of my body, as you taught me.’

When we met at my mother’s funeral, Father himself told me that the nine-day ceremony of purification could be abridged in cases of extreme emergency, and what procedure to follow in such cases.

‘But what was so urgent? Now, at this time of the night. .? Is there some problem, son? Come on, come in.’

In that instant, I saw something in his eyes, or imagined it: a flicker of warmth that made me want to embrace my father— but I’m glad I held myself back; for as I entered he stepped aside, rather deliberately, ensuring no physical contact was made between us. I stood there sheepishly, looking around my mother’s kitchen, which was as it had always been: only dustier, more cluttered and, overall, gloomier than I remembered it. My father and I remained standing just within the doorway.

‘You’re alone, Papa? Where’s Vispy?’

‘God alone knows where he goes loitering every night. I thought he had forgotten to take his key again, and it was him knocking. . Can’t expect anything from that boy; never could expect anything from you either. If that’s the way it has to turn out, I’m content. .I’m content. .’

This last was practically an aside, muttered to himself. I felt sad to see him so lonely, yet too proud to admit it.

‘Well, tell me: what is it you want from me now?’

It was his way of inviting me to speak my mind, but considering I hardly ever met him, let alone craved favours of him, seemed a little unfair. But I felt it expeditious not to point that out.

‘You remember my friend from school, Rohinton Kanga?’

‘H’mm.’

‘This is about his half-brother, Joseph Maloney Kanga, who is dying. .’

‘Ah. I thought it would be some such murky business. .’

‘He believes. Joseph truly believes. .he wants to become a Zoroastrian before he dies. At least he wants to go out of the world like a Zoroastrian.’

‘Well he isn’t a Zoroastrian, can never be. . He should have thought of it earlier. If he wants the vultures to make a meal of him, he should request the vultures. Why ask me? Whether they’d be willing to consume the product of a mixed marriage? I’m sure they won’t be that finicky. .’

It was many years since my father last shared a joke with me. Many years, perhaps, since he had a shy at making any joke at all. As such this wasn’t such a bad attempt. Both of us broke out into chuckles at first, then guffaws of laughter that continued for a whole minute. .and I was reminded for a moment of our closeness in younger days.

‘But seriously, Papa. .I’m told that it really does mean a lot to him. He would like to go through the Zoroastrian rites at death.’

‘But all these years, where was he? Having his malido, I suppose, and eating it too?’

Once again, Father revelled heartily in his own sense of humour, but this time I could only smile.

‘In any case, what have I to do with it?’ Framroze continued. ‘Nariman Kanga has already done the needful. Trustees know which side their bread is buttered on. Ho-ho-ho. .’ His amusement with the relevant facts of the issue, which he was clearly better informed about than me, seemed compulsive.

‘But public opinion is against it. They will be making a reference to you, I believe. To the priests.’

‘That’s all eyewash, Phiroze. Show-shaa for public consumption. Tell Rohinton, it’ll be okay. Where there’s so much money involved, why should they care for the opinion of priests? When Joseph dies, his body will be placed in the dokhma, and the three-day ceremonies too will be permitted. Whether he’s had a navjote or not. .’

‘But he hasn’t, you know that.’

‘Who cares? Do you? Only those who care for the religion feel it matters. The founding fathers of the Punchayet had vision. Today’s trustees are nothing but a bunch of banias. Panhandlers and money managers. I tell you, they’ll allow the funeral to take place.’

I could feel the irritation mounting in my father. Perhaps he was just getting tired of having to stand in the doorway through such a long conversation. Or perhaps I pushed my luck just a little too far when I asked him in a philosophic vein:

‘Personally, Papa, do you really believe it matters how we go out of this world? I mean, whether one is a Hindu or Muslim or Parsi, after we die in what manner our corpse is disposed of? I mean, does it make a difference to the soul that survives the body’s destruction? The means of our arrival into the next world? After all, the body is no more than a worn-out shell, I would think. .’

I should have kept my mouth shut. For it was then my father’s notorious bad temper flashed. And once again, I became painfully aware of the abyss separating our ways of thinking.

‘Of course it does! What are you saying? Every soul has a predetermined destination. And if it does not follow every detail of its spiritual map into the next world, it is bound to lose its way, and suffer terrible confusion and disorientation — possibly for millennia to come. .!’

He suddenly stopped short, refusing to discuss anything further with me. Within a few seconds his whole bearing and manner had changed. His large body was hunched over now, and more tense.

‘You!’ he shouted at me, almost viciously. ‘A nussesalar asking such a question? You who are supposed to minutely oversee the correct transmission of every Zoroastrian soul on its trajectory into the beyond! It’s because of people like you our religion and community have suffered! When you were small I would dream of a day when you would mature and become a priest! Or a serious scholar! But what did you become? Apostate! Go away! Get out, I say! I want to sleep. That’s all you could make of yourself. . Apostate!’ he muttered to himself, trembling with suppressed rage as he showed me out and slammed the door on me.

I hesitated in the dark, outside. But the moment was lost, and he had even switched off the kitchen light. I had wanted to say something nice before leaving, something grateful—‘Look after yourself, Papa. Try not to get so angry. Try to get a good night’s sleep, Papa. I love you. .’ But perhaps it was wiser to leave quietly, lest the vehemence I inspired in him did violence to his health.

Well. I stumbled back to the car waiting at the end of the dark lane, disturbed by my father’s final explosion of temper, wondering what exactly the word ‘apostate’ meant; although I could guess at its meaning. I assumed it meant someone like myself who had betrayed his father and his religion.

After I got into the Buick, Rohinton was keen to learn every word of how the interview had gone. It cheered him greatly to hear Framroze’s prediction that the Punchayet would oblige the Kangas, and Joseph’s funeral — after he died — would be allowed to proceed along Zoroastrian lines.

I was in no mood for the kind of evening Rohinton had planned, but it turned out a novel experience for me, which I can’t say I didn’t enjoy. He drove me to the Taj hotel at Apollo Bunder which I had only seen once or twice from the outside during the youthful days of my wanderlust. Upon entering it for the first time, I was already feeling somewhat dazed by its opulent interiors, its liveried and impressively large-built doormen who were very formal and severe, though welcoming, its high stuccoed ceilings and glittering chandeliers, finally its plush carpeted elevator that took us up to an exclusive bar and restaurant on its terrace called ‘The Rocking Boat’; I got very quickly sozzled on a couple of strong Scotch whiskies with soda and ice, thereafter losing any inhibition I might have had about enjoying myself.

Rohinton ordered an array of delightful food as well— crabmeat, fried pomfret, asparagus and a mutton dum pulao. An astonishing dessert completed the meal: sugared peaches in caramel custard with pineapple and cherries and a topping of ice cream!

(v)

Although it was about one o’clock when we finished our meal, Rohinton was in no hurry to leave and ordered more coffee. He was keen to get on with the ‘catching-up’ he’d said we’d do. He wanted to know about Sepideh, how I’d lost her so early in life, whether I enjoyed my work or found it oppressive, how I felt about the social stigmas that were imposed on my profession. I enjoyed talking to him about myself, my feelings in these and other matters, but every now and then found myself so completely absorbed in the grand view we had of the bay from our table, that I felt as though I had to tear my attention away from it to address some question Rohinton had put to me; the large ships anchored in the distance, the mesmeric pulsating of their lights on the dark waters, the immense glittering canvas of the starry skies: momentarily I actually felt a resurgence of my youthful longing for the life at sea!

We were the last customers still left in the restaurant; everyone else had left long ago. Two waiters hovered at a discreet distance, wondering how to tell us they were closing. But I suppose they must have sensed from Rohinton’s manner a handsome tip coming. My friend was in fact in no mood to wind up. He was so elated by the outcome of my meeting with my father, and the words I had reported to him, he ordered cognac. Then he started off about his life in London.

Of the flat he maintained there at a place called King’s Cross, and a woman called Lizbeth, who looked after it for him when he wasn’t there, and lived with him as his wife when he was, though they had never married. He said England was a wonderful place, but most of its people were small-hearted and racist. He told me of an ultra-nationalist group he was part of, some of them Indian, others Irish, who met every week, usually at his place in King’s Cross, to plan the overthrow of imperial rule in India.

‘Most of our group just don’t approve of Gandhi’s methods, they find them too soft. I wonder. . In fact, before I came to India this time — I’ll let you into a secret, but you must keep this to yourself,’ he said, lowering his voice to a whisper—‘a proposal was made to me: now just keep this to yourself. .’—Rohinton actually glanced around, to ensure that no one was listening, but all the other tables were unoccupied—‘that I help build a bomb at a secret location in Bombay. You know the new viceroy’s just been appointed? — the idea was to find someone to throw it at him during a visit he has planned to the Gateway of India, after his investiture in Delhi. When the question of a secret location in Bombay came up, I immediately thought of you, and the Towers of Silence. But let me tell you, I completely rejected the idea. I didn’t agree to do it.’

(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.

Thirteen

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.

‘See,’ said Buchia. ‘Just look at the scoundrel! Paid to stay awake, but already adrift in the land of Nod. Anyone who had a mind to could easily enter, steal a corpse, and walk away with it. .’ It was meant to be a sort of self-deprecating joke, for that’s exactly what he and his cronies were up to. But nobody laughed. Instead, Fali asked in all seriousness:

‘Now who would want to steal a corpse? Death has already robbed him of everything he ever owned. Why pillage a pauper?’

Nobody had an answer to that philosophical aside either. Then Shiavux intoned with the sanctimonious propriety of a school’s head-boy:

‘Please understand: we’re not stealing a corpse; no, actually we’re only relocating it. And that, too, for a very good cause: to protect the purity of our religion and race.’

If he had expected their leader, Buchia, to applaud his sentiments, he must have been disappointed, for Buchia only frowned, then growled at Shiavux:

‘Okay, okay, then. Less said the better. .’

Meanwhile Homiar, who had stepped out to open the gate for the hearse, shut it again and climbed back in.

‘Snoring away like an ox,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t have woken up if I had kicked the chair out from under him. .’

‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ said Buchia. ‘Try to think straight, boys. One witness is all it’ll take to identify the lot of us tomorrow, when the shit hits the fan. .’

Then they were off to Sewree. Streets deserted, not even a stray dog in sight. Poor people who might normally have been sleeping in the open on the pavements had found shelter under the awnings of shop fronts, or in the forecourts of residential buildings. It was the 23rd of December. The boys in the back were glad to be huddled together, despite having an icy corpse in their midst. Jungoo was the only one who had come prepared for the chill, wearing a long-sleeved pullover. Buchia wore a thick linen vest whose deacon-like choker protruded from under the collar of his shirt. Occasionally at junctions and turnings, he gave directions to Jungoo, who wasn’t as confident as he was, of the shortest route to Sewree.

There was something else that was bothering Buchia. In the prelude to the withdrawal of British forces from independent India, the partitioning of Bengal and the Punjab had become inevitable, and already reports of serious communal violence were coming in from these parts of the country. Bombay, as yet, hadn’t experienced anything comparable, nor would it even in later weeks and months when migration, dispossession and violent death afflicted more than a million people on the subcontinent. But travelling so late at night with a raffish, disorderly bunch of young men crammed in the back of a hearse made Buchia nervous.

‘Just in case we are stopped by a military or police patrol,’ he told his co-conspirators, ‘let me speak, and stick to my story: we are only routinely transporting a corpse from the home of a bereaved family in Wadala to the Towers of Silence.’

‘Yet moving in the wrong direction?’ pointed out Fali. ‘We’re heading away from the Towers, aren’t we? And what an odd time of night to be transporting a corpse, don’t you think?’

‘Well, let’s just hope they don’t notice it,’ said Buchia irritably, peeved by Fali’s quibbling.

But Fali was in an expansive mood. Sighing to himself, thinking about God-knows-what, he muttered philosophically:

‘Many a slip between the cup and the lip. .’

In the crystalline silence of the night, Buchia heard him, and got angrier.

‘For your sake, I certainly hope there hasn’t been. I mean, any slip between the bottle and your lips. .Fali! I can tell you’ve been drinking.’

‘No, saheb, not at all. Not a drop, I swear. Not a drop of alcohol has passed these lips in the last. .what, forty hours? Smell my mouth,’ Fali protested, thrusting his face at Buchia who was in the front seat. Buchia recoiled.

‘Smells of Colgate,’ Buchia said, disgusted.

‘Always remember to brush my teeth after dinner,’ said Fali smugly.

But nothing untoward happened. At no checkpoint were they stopped, nor did they see any military patrol. The night remained uneventful and icy as the deserted streets they were driving through until their vehicle came to a grinding halt outside the imposing cement archway of the Sewree cemetery.

‘Honk twice, and flash your headlights three times,’ Buchia instructed Jungoo, who did as he was told.

It was a pre-arranged signal, in response to which one gate of the cemetery swung open with an awful creaking, and a very short, bearded man appeared. Buchia got out of the hearse to meet him. The man had an enormous head. He was wearing baggy shorts and a sleeveless vest, but didn’t seem to feel the cold. Though dwarf-like in stature, the bearded man’s broad shoulders and thickset neck were intensely thonged by muscle; moreover, his large, extraordinary head was full of the oddest bumps, bulges and indentations; not unlike his hirsute, stumpy legs. He must have been younger than Buchia, though not by very much: his hair, too, had receded entirely and what was left of it was tied in a straggly pigtail at the back. On his vast and amazing forehead sat a huge carbuncle that shone by the light of the moon, red and inflamed.

For a few minutes, he and Buchia stood there, arguing. The caretaker, or whoever he was seemed to hold his ground, persistently shaking his head in refusal. Then Buchia extracted a wad of notes from his hip-pocket reluctantly, counted it, and handed them over to him. The other man counted the notes again. Presently Buchia climbed back into the hearse beside Jungoo. The bearded caretaker walked ahead and, very slowly behind him, the hearse followed.

I had visited the Sewree cemetery during the days of my peregrinations in the city, at least once, if not twice. I remember it as a pleasant enough place, vast and undulating, with paved footpaths, masses of furrowed earth, trees, shrubs and gravestones. Buchia must have been in touch with the caretaker the previous evening, for the latter led the way, with the hearse crawling behind him, until he raised his hand for it to halt. He had led them to a freshly dug open grave which was to become Joseph Kanga’s resting place.

Beyond a point, there was no access for the van, so the body had to be physically carried out to its grave. However, before that could happen, an unanticipated problem arose, bringing Buchia and the caretaker nearly to blows.

‘Where’s the coffin, man?’ the caretaker yelled in alarm when he saw Joseph’s corpse being carried out of the hearse on an open bier. ‘How can you bury a body without a coffin!’

‘We don’t use coffins,’ said Buchia. ‘We feed them to vultures. Everyone has different systems, you see.’

‘Then you should have followed your own!’ the caretaker snapped at Buchia, rudely. ‘Why bring him here? Can you see any vultures here?’

‘But Gomes,’ that was the first time the others heard him address the caretaker by name. Realizing that he hadn’t taken into account a crucial requirement, Buchia continued to argue, ‘We’ll cover him in mud. The earth will be his coffin!’

‘I cannot allow that,’ insisted Gomes, who seemed more than equal to Buchia in stubbornness.

‘What!’ exclaimed Buchia, both annoyed and aghast. ‘Where will I find a coffin at this time of night?’

‘I cannot allow a body to be buried directly in the soil,’ repeated the caretaker stiffly. ‘It’s just not done — it’s an outrage for you to even think that’s possible!’

‘But how does it help to put him in a box? Anyway the box will rot, and worms will get at him.’

‘Stray dogs, hyenas, bandicoots would dig him up before that, if he’s not in a coffin. You have to put a body in a coffin. Or take it back! A rule’s a rule,’ the caretaker was emphatic and obdurate. ‘Otherwise, take him back to your Towers, why don’t you, and feed him to the birds. . This is a Christian cemetery.’

It was a contest in aggressive obstinacy that Buchia sensed he was losing. Moreover, his nasal falsetto compared unfavourably with the other’s deep and resonant voice which lent him authority.

‘Well,’ said Buchia at last, ‘don’t you have any old coffin lying around?’

The caretaker shook his head.

‘The old ones are all underground with decaying skeletons in them. I do have a new one, which I was getting ready. I can let you have it if you want. But it’ll cost you eight hundred rupees.’

‘Eight hundred—’ Buchia was shocked. ‘That’s highway robbery! You see, now?’ Buchia appealed to his band of corpse bearers. ‘You see what this is all about? He wants to rob me! I’ve already given you two thousand!’

‘That’s for the use of the plot of land, for digging the grave and bending every rule for you. This is for the coffin. I’ll return nineteen hundred if you decide not to bury him here. . One hundred I keep for digging the grave. .’

Buchia had five young men behind him, but the caretaker was not intimidated in the slightest by their presence. He stood there rooted, fiercely refusing to budge, and Buchia glared at him.

It was then that Fali spoke, in the tone of a courteous and wise mediator:

‘Please sir, do not mind me if I make a suggestion. .’

The caretaker turned to look at him. Buchia stared at him suspiciously as well, almost certain now that Fali had ignored his cautionary warning about not tippling. But he looked sober; and Buchia was secretly glad for any help he could get in finding a way out of this impasse.

‘Sir, this gentleman — the deceased — is a respectable Christian, and we want him to have a proper Christian burial. But he has no money, and no family to provide for his coffin. If you would only allow us, my friends and I can knock together a coffin in no time. Some scraps of wood, a box of nails, a hammer. .’

The caretaker looked incredulous as he heard Fali’s inventory of his requirements. Meanwhile, Farokh whispered something urgently to Fali in Gujarati, and Fali replied in English,

‘Why, it’s only a box. We could easily—’

Now the caretaker interrupted, speaking harshly and contemptuously.

‘Don’t want you buggers messing around my workshop. .I can see how respectable you-all are, holding a funeral at two in the morning.’

‘There were complications. . You must believe us. The deceased is a sad, unfortunate person who has already suffered a great deal. . Let us not make things more unpleasant for him—’ said Fali.

But Buchia cut him short. Presumably tired and exasperated, he had decided it was time to take matters in hand and adopt the one tactic he found most effective in such situations: that is, to show rage. Or perhaps he did genuinely take offence:

‘Who’re you calling buggers, eh?’ suddenly raising his voice, he shrieked. ‘You bloody pimp! You swollen-headed greedy pig of a Gomes! You’ve been leading me on from yesterday. Haggling, haggling. . Every chance you get you want to squeeze out some more. You’re taking advantage of our difficulty. Even now at the last minute — I know what I’ll do. Give me back my money. Give me back my money! We’ll go find some other burial plot.’

‘You can have your money back at the gate,’ said the caretaker. ‘On your way out. First load the corpse back into the van.’

‘What!’ yelled Buchia, now really annoyed at being crossed. ‘I want it now, you understand? Then we’ll put the corpse back in. Right now! Hand it over, shorty!’

‘At the gate, I said. On your way out.’

‘When I say now, I mean NOW!’ screamed Buchia, like a madman, and lunged murderously at the caretaker.

Despite the brightness of the night, Buchia hadn’t noticed that the man he was attacking was standing in front of a freshly dug pit. The big-headed dwarf nimbly stepped aside at the very last moment, and Buchia would surely have crashed into Joseph Kanga’s intended grave but for a reflex split-second parrying on his part. Instead, he fell hard, sideways, against a stone; and while doing so, managed to grab the caretaker’s arm and pull him down as well. The latter wasn’t hurt, though. He quickly got back on his feet and dusted himself, while louring at the man sprawled at his feet in pure disgust.

But Buchia must have been in intense pain, for he started weeping. Not very loudly, he tried to suppress his sobs, yet he was loud enough for everyone to see that something had gone terribly wrong.

‘Be brave, sir, don’t cry,’ Fali consoled him. ‘At least you didn’t fall into the grave. Then we would have had to bury you here only. .with or without a coffin!’

But Buchia was in no mood for jokes. He wouldn’t even let the boys help him up. From the way he held himself, and gradually manipulated himself on to his haunches, it seemed like he had broken a bone, possibly his left collarbone. The pain must have been agonizing, but Buchia kept his presence of mind. Putting his right hand in his pocket he pulled out a bunch of notes and gave them to Farokh.

‘Count out eight hundred rupees and give them to him. Let’s finish what we came here to do.’

Next morning, when the mourners started arriving for Joseph’s funeral, and his body was missing, all hell broke loose. Buchia, whose injury had not been attended to all night, was trembling, and delirious with pain and fever. Many of the senior-most trustees including Aloo Pastakia, Tehmton Anklesaria, and the Punchayet’s Chief Executive, Burzhin Hirjibehdin, had decided to attend the funeral as a mark of respect and courtesy to Nariman Kanga. Coyaji was there, too.

Buchia was in no position to answer any questions. At night, he had stubbornly refused to seek admittance to any hospital after the last shovel of earth was heaped on Joseph’s coffin, saying he wanted to spend what remained of the night in his own quarters. But it had turned out to be the worst night of his life; for he could neither sleep nor ward off the fanciful torments his wakeful brain fabricated in anticipation of what the morning would bring. The pain must have been bad, too. Mercifully, during the outbreak of all the commotion over the missing body, Farokh and Jungoo quietly bundled him off to the Parsi General.

The redoubtable Nariman Kanga was completely distraught when he heard that his son’s body was missing — but only for a few minutes. He recovered quickly and phoned his friend Ignatius Strickham, now Commissioner of Police, who promised to immediately visit the Parsi General Hospital to cross-examine Buchia, and launch a probe into this devilish piece of trickery enacted no doubt by some extremist splinter group of the orthodoxy.

In the condition he was in, for Buchia to see the red-faced Englishman towering over his hospital bed firing questions at him must have put the fear of God in him, possibly precipitating his untimely end. He didn’t die of a broken collarbone, of course, but during that cold night when he had wrestled — or tried to wrestle — a dwarf to the ground, he had apparently caught a severe chill, that swiftly progressed into double pneumonia from which he never recovered.

On his deathbed, under the gimlet eye of Ignatius Strickham, Buchia confessed to kidnapping the corpse of Joseph Kanga and revealed the place of his interment. Shortly after, he died. Nariman Kanga dropped all charges against the miscreants who had kidnapped Joseph’s body. Nor did he desire that his son’s body be exhumed, or renew his efforts to arrange for him the Zoroastrian funeral he had so desired while still alive. Instead, he decided to let him lie in the selfsame grave undisturbed, and built a modest monument of flawless white marble in remembrance of his son at the site. It can still be seen at the Sewree Christian cemetery, smeared with dust and bird droppings, with its slightly cryptic but finely etched inscription still very legible:

Gentlest of souls,

Savant and scholar extraordinaire,

Who sought in death as in life to be

A morsel of tasteful

Charity.

Here lies Joseph Nariman (Maloney) Kanga (1902–1947)

Fourteen

For years, the forest on the hill had been my refuge.

Thick woods might more precisely describe the tangled profusion of fruit and flowering trees that covered the hill. Thickest near the summit where the crude path that led to the rusty iron gate of a small white fire temple was almost lost in tall grass and bramble; here grew casuarinas, banyans, date palms, mango, pear and so many flowering bushes and trees whose names I do not know. On occasion, I would spot a hare or a snake here; sometimes peahens, once, even a deer. In this strangely enchanting Eden, I felt completely at home.

Then, one day I saw a forest nymph, lying cradled in the low branch of a tree. After that, everything changed for me. .

Difficult to say when exactly my interest in the world began to wane. It didn’t happen in an instant, or a day.

Yet, if compelled to choose a moment, I would have to pinpoint the day Sepideh died. Remember this, though: the entire strike, Farida’s prolonged schooling, my brief intimacy with Buchia, my evening with Rohinton at the Taj, the abduction and forced interment of Joseph Kanga, India’s independence, the departure of the British, all these happened long after Seppy died and I can’t remember feeling so completely uninvolved in any of these events while they were happening, as I now feel from most public affairs. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve grown too old to care.

The British left India, Indians took over, but nothing really changed. When India achieved Independence from its British rulers, if I remember rightly, Gandhi was in favour of disbanding the Congress party. He wanted to abandon Western-style confrontational politics, and concentrate on reaffirming basic values of self-help, service and upliftment of all; on rebuilding a community-based consensus at the village level. But Gandhi fell to the bullets of a Hindu fundamentalist who believed he had betrayed the nation. After him, many leaders rose to power who strove to create a nation out of fragmented regional interests, but not one of them shared his vision. Nor did any of them care to pause and look back, reassess where, along the high road of history, he or she may have taken a wrong turn.

As in the usual course of things, earthquakes, floods, droughts, riots, wars, exploitation of the helpless, accidents, calamities of every sort continue to take their toll — the meaningless, mindless decimation of millions of human ants, or should I say, vermin? I’m not talking merely about the misery of the poor, or the disingenuousness of the powerful, but of that unstoppable merry-go-round of human suffering, of the abominable lack of any higher meaning or significance to life, entirely at the mercy as it is of random death. I have lived through almost sixty years of what was probably a historically significant century, and sometimes I do wish I had taken better notes, paid greater heed to Temoo’s radio for the news of the world it gave me. But I never cared to: the torrent of human suffering ran unabated, shutting out every glimmer of hope.

Politicians failed to act, reneged on promises; betrayed the people who elected them to office. Everywhere, everyone in public life, whoever he or she might be, is on the make, feathering a private nest. And so it has continued for decades. The only change I can make out in this compulsive industry is that incidents of fraudulence, cheating and theft of public money have accelerated both in frequency and volume beyond the wildest dreams of even those who first concocted them; until the very concept of probity in public life has become laughable.

Out here in my narrow microcosm of the Towers of Silence, too, so much has changed. For one thing, the roll call of the dead has been relentless. I don’t mean just the dead we attend to, but from among our own.

Poor Bujji was the first to go. His son had found a job, his daughter a husband. Living alone, without any visitors ever coming up to his flat, his body withered and dried like a twig. His front door had to be forced in when he didn’t appear for several days, and the smell from his flat became unmistakable. . A man, once proud of his looks, slunk into himself, and faced death alone in an attic room.

Aimai, much older than he, died shortly after. . And within six months, after a very brief illness, my friend Rustom, too. It was as if the bond between him and his mother was more essential than any of us had realized. Surprisingly, Vera didn’t take it so badly.

For a while, poor Temoo continued to potter about trying to help me in the kitchen. But the innocuous lump in his stomach had grown into a sepulchral mound that nagged him to tears; until one day, it burst and killed him of internal haemorrhaging. It was a bad blow for Farida, as I had always feared it would be.

But not as bad as the one that followed some three years later. Her childhood boyfriend, Khushro, had found a decent, well-paying job and moved out. He promised Farida he would come back and marry her once he had set up a home and saved some money. But he never did. The worst of it was that she didn’t know how to contact him, because he had changed jobs and moved on.

Like her spiritual sister, Vera, who has also remained single, Farida too may be headed for spinsterhood. But Vera at least has her work at the law firm, which is prized highly. Farida’s job is much more low-profile, on the shop floor of a workshop which manufactures nuts and bolts in Parel. Her Uncle Vispy helped her secure it. She enjoys travelling to work and back on a BEST bus everyday, but complains that traffic in the city is growing at an alarming rate.

Hardly anyone is still around who took part in the strike thirty-five years ago. But many of the advantages we wrested from our tussle with the trustees have resulted in positive change. Right now, for instance, there’s some replastering of my building going on. Whitewashing of all quarters every three or four years is a regular feature now. Children of khandhias and nussesalars are given free education up to high school, and easy loans or scholarships are available to those who show promise, or desire a university education. A new community room has been set up near the Albless pavilion, where there’s a carom board, table tennis and a television set.

But even here, at the Towers of Silence, commercial exploitation of properties has begun. Four acres of sylvan land were recently sold to a well-known Bombay builder for vast sums of money, and trees have been cut. Construction of a deluxe block of apartments has commenced; it will be called Ahura Apartments. Apparently, only bonafide Zoroastrians who can afford these exclusive flats, and who have booked them early enough, will move in. I fear for the wild garden of my youth. The teeming city nibbles at its edges. The turn of the wheel may well have become irreversible.

A few days before he died, Temoo begged forgiveness of me.

At the time I speak of, he was seventy-four, and rather obese. His fleshy brown skin hung loose, patchy and discoloured; unhealthy eruptions covered his forehead and other parts of his body. A large mole on his right cheek, which had been dry for some years, had begun to ooze. The protuberance in his abdomen had become more pronounced. When he left his bed to walk to the toilet, he needed to support it with his right hand; in his left, he gripped a stout walking stick.

‘What for?’ I asked him, puzzled, but immediately suspicious.

‘Ah,’ he groaned. ‘You ask me for what. .?’ Tears started rolling down his cheeks, and his voice choked in sniffles and sobs. I was not impressed. In the past, I had seen him produce tears at will.

‘Can you see my suffering?’ he asked. ‘If I were able to, I would go to Framroze and throw myself at his feet. . My Sepideh was taken from me so young. .it was punishment for my sins! Look at me now. .’

And for a few minutes once again he was crying piteously. The notion crossed my mind that what he was about to tell me was something along the lines of what my mother had declared after my first encounters with Sepideh, that it was all a conspiracy hatched by Temoorus to have her seduce me.

‘Hatred was in my heart, Phiroze. . The desire to avenge Rudabeh had consumed me. . But I had no idea that my daughter would fall so completely in love with you, or you with her. .I never thought that you would marry her, and renounce the world. .’

‘But that’s what you asked of me. . That was the condition you made. .’

‘Yes, yes, I know. .but I never thought you would actually agree. That your parents would permit you to follow such a course.’

‘They didn’t have a choice. . Well, while it lasted we were very happy, Seppy and me. I certainly don’t think you need to ask my forgiveness. I’m sure she doesn’t either.’

‘But it didn’t last very long. . That’s my point. My intention was evil. .to harm Framroze. . Instead, it was I who was punished, and my Sepideh taken from me so young. .I miss her so much, Phiroze. .I miss her. .’

Once again, the tears rolled, streaking his pitted brown cheeks with a film of gloss. I had not understood yet what he was on about. I waited patiently for him to come to the point, but my mind had wandered back to the days and weeks that followed Seppy’s sudden demise. .

I was devastated and, I have no doubt, Temoo was, too. But even more unbearable and frightening to witness was the enormity of Farida’s pain; my poor three-year-old cried inconsolably every night after her mother’s passing; and her tears wouldn’t cease until they were snuffed out by sheer exhaustion, or crushed under masses of accumulated sleep.

Initially, a panic-stricken concern for finding ways to distract the child from her overwhelming grief bonded us: two adults, relatively inexperienced in the ways of parenting, we urgently sought means to help her cope. But independently of our efforts, Farida displayed a gracious willingness to not dwell on sorrow and, as if to compensate herself, grew exceedingly attached to her grandpa.

We needed each other, Temoo and I–I, more than he. I had to keep working, and was often away from home for long hours, while he kept my daughter company. A smug awareness of this imbalance in our respective compulsions gradually became evident. It took the form of a sublime indifference on his part towards my own disquiet, which I had expressed on numerous occasions: that between us we might end up spoiling the little princess at the centre of our lives if we indulged her every whim.

At this time, Temoo was still drinking. The rowdiness of his younger days, which I’d heard something about while Seppy was still around, would erupt, suddenly, late in the night and, within moments, his outpourings of grief turn abusive. But, such imprecation and insult as were spewed out during these nocturnal displays of rancour were not directed so much at me as at my father, who Temoo claimed had ‘robbed and ruined’ his family. Somewhat incoherently, his ranting ran on late into the night; long after I had stopped listening, after I realized it was impossible to tell whether he was mourning his recently deceased daughter, Sepideh, or her long-departed mother, Rudabeh, for whose tragic end Temoo squarely placed the blame on Framroze’s head.

During one such particularly rowdy and rage-filled spectacle one night, Farida woke up. Aghast at seeing her usually kind and affectionate grandpa in the wild state he was in, she burst into tears. To his credit, I should say, after that traumatic night, which must have been harrowing for Temoo, too, he gave up drinking. Yet his tearful incoherence on this occasion brought back to mind those drunken tirades. I had almost switched off listening when I realized he was saying something quite different.

‘Your father is a good man, I’ll admit it. .a saintly man, in fact. He will outlive me, of course. I have but a few days left. That’s why I’m speaking to you. .’ His tone of voice, too, had dropped to a hoarse whisper. ‘Ask your father for the ruby earrings. . Ask him.’

My face must have expressed total incomprehension. I had never heard Seppy mention any such earrings before.

‘They were Rudabeh’s earrings, from her father’s time. Framroze kept them when she moved out of his home. At first he said it was for safekeeping. . Later, he denied it. Completely. Denied having any memory of them. He didn’t give them back. . It’s not fair, is it? Not fair at all. . Now at least, they should come down to Farida. . Framroze may be a good man, I won’t deny it, but how can he do such a thing?’

I nodded agreement, but even now my face must have shown disinterest. I could not see myself visiting Father one evening to ask for some chimerical earrings that had belonged to long dead Rudabeh. But Temoo emphasized once more, with much seriousness and urgency:

‘They are real rubies. .large ones. .in a beautiful gold setting. .’ For a brief moment, I thought I saw his dull eyes glint. ‘Should be worth a lot of money. Lots and lots of it. . They must go to Farida now. . Tell him that was my last wish, tell him that’s what I said before I died.’

In those days I often heard about Vispy, that he had been seen loitering around the Towers complex in the evenings, but to what purpose or pleasure I had no clue. Then one night, I surprised him alone in the cottage of a dead young woman whose body Dollamai had just washed and laid out in preparation for the morning’s funeral. The light in the room was off, but the glow of the oil lamp and the dying embers of the afarghan revealing.

He was on the floor near the corpse, and the sheet covering the dead woman was in disarray. He moved away very quickly and stood up when I opened the door and switched on the light.

‘Vispy! What’re you doing here?’

He looked sheepish. My heart sank. I had come to the funeral cottage only to retrieve a bottle of sanctified bull’s urine which Dollamai told me she had forgotten there by mistake.

‘Well, I was just passing through, you see. .I thought. .I was just. .’ His voice sounded thin and unsure of itself. ‘No, it isn’t what you’re thinking, Phiroze. .’ he said, running his hand over imaginary beads of sweat on his forehead.

‘What am I thinking?’

My voice sounded rather more aggressive than I would have liked it to. I stared at him for one long moment, then looked away. .but in the very next, I felt quite ashamed, for he went on to explain, sounding perfectly sincere.

‘You see, I knew this lady. .I had met her several times. . Ask Vera if you don’t believe me; it was she who introduced us. . If Shernawaz had lived, I had planned to propose to her. To marry her. .’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Vispy. .I’m so sorry. . Then you’ll be at the funeral tomorrow?’

‘Yes, of course, yes,’ Vispy said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

And he left quickly, looking very relieved. Obviously, that wasn’t sufficient reason to doubt what he was telling me. Yet the gratitude he felt in that moment — for letting him off the hook? — made me wonder. Could prolonged sexual deprivation drive a man to such extremes? Again, I was ashamed to be thinking such thoughts about my own brother.

A few months later, when Father died, Vispy did me a return favour. Involuntarily, my mind once again connected it with the night on which I had surprised him in the funeral cottage. Perhaps it is entirely twisted of me to think of it that way. But this favour, if I can call it that, bestowed on Farida, gave her a significant advantage.

Father was eighty-six when he died, still in good health, and able to manage his personal needs and chores without assistance. Though he remained, as it were, titular head priest of the Soonamai Ichchaporia Agiari, a few years before he died, I believe, a couple of relatively junior priests had significantly relieved him of his administrative duties there.

As a child, I had been very close to Father. Later the rift between us widened, and for a while I felt we had become adversaries. In spite of that, his death came as a great emotional shock to me. Initially, when Vispy informed me of his passing, over the telephone, it was as if, despite his advanced age, I could feel only disbelief. As though in the deepest recesses of my mind, I had wished him to live, and actually believed he would, forever.

It was after midnight when Vispy called. The watchman summoned me to Buchia’s office, now occupied by his successor, a slightly younger man called Rutnagar, to take the call. In the meantime, though, Vispy had already been speaking to Rutnagar, notifying him about Framroze’s death, and arranging for the hearse to be sent early in the morning. The funeral was planned for 4 p.m., the next afternoon, and Vispy told me when I took the phone, that he had already telephoned the offices of Jam-eJamshed and Bombay Samachar just in time for the announcement to appear in the morning’s newspapers.

‘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.

Endgame

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.

I am eighty years old now. My father, as I mentioned earlier, lived to eighty-six, hale and hearty until the end. But I am crippled by severe arthritis; and very painful, if intermittent, sciatica. I fear that my youthful excesses with alcohol — they continued until fairly recently, to be honest — are taking their toll. It’s months since I walked up to the Towers. I am hardly able to leave my quarters now. Once again, the trustees have been kind, and they continue to let me reside here in semi-retirement. I suppose they realize, too — or Rutnagar may have been consulted on the matter — I won’t be around for much longer anyway.

This may be my last entry. My commitment to keeping these notes is wearing thin. Even clutching a ballpoint pen and scribbling have become rather painful activities, you see. My sense of the chronology of events, too, has become rather muddled: I often find myself confused as to the correct sequence of historical events. I suppose it just doesn’t matter enough to me — which came first: the chicken or the egg!

For years, demographers have been giving warning of the dwindling numbers among Parsis. All that sound and fury, and contentious dialectic on the issue — with the usual stridency of disagreement between reformist and orthodox camps — about whether or not to permit conversion of non-Parsis into the community has remained unresolved. It’s a sad irony, I suppose, though pretty amusing as well: vultures have become extinct, even before Parsis could. A core element of our communal identity, a distinguishing feature of our ancient creed is lost. Three thousand years or more of a preciously revered tradition is at end because of a certain drug much used in veterinary compounds, which causes kidney failure in vultures that consume animal carcasses packed with it.

My quarters are just too far from the Towers for any stench of half-eaten rotting corpses to waft my way in the evening breeze. I can’t go up there to verify the claims made by some of the more raucous reformists. Perhaps I don’t want to find out.

But before I finally give up on these notes, there is something very much more important I need to set the record straight on: this account would remain incomplete if I didn’t. All these years I have regretted having no contact at all with Sepideh. A number of times in my notebooks I have remarked on the persistent frustration of my desire to sense her presence, see signs of her surviving spirit, find reason to believe she is somewhere out there, that I will communicate with her again, if not in life, then after my own death. Well, just a few days after my father died, almost thirty years ago, something remarkable happened that gave me reason for hope. In fact, though I’m old and ill, and probably won’t live long, it has given a whole new perspective to my sense of being alive; filled me with child-like anticipation for the near future. I don’t fear death any more, even look forward to its claiming me soon.

But why, you may ask, if it was so significant did I wait thirty years to put it down on paper? I have often asked myself the very question. .

It took me that long, I suppose, to come to grips with what flies so completely in the face of rationality: to accept that there must be dimensions of being which coexist along with the one we yoke our precious credos of reason and logic to.

Only a few days after my father died, Vispy was given notice by the temple authorities to vacate the premises, and move Father’s personal effects out. A new head priest had been appointed, one Ervad Dhanjishaa Colabawalla, who would be occupying the quarters soon, the letter said, once they were cleansed and a certain purifying ceremony for new beginnings performed.

It was May, the height of a particularly hot summer. Vispy asked me if I would like to come and help him decide what to retain of Papa’s things and what to dispose of. Luckily for him, he had recently found an apartment, fairly close to his workplace in Parel, that he could rent. I hesitated, but somehow knew it was important for me to go. This was in 1966, many years ago. I didn’t feel so physically crippled then as I do now, and I was glad for the chance to revisit the place I had grown up in, though I didn’t expect to be allowed to roam about freely. The main temple area, of course, was out of bounds for me, but as far as my movements within the back quarters themselves went, no objections were raised. I didn’t know why I had come, but something drew me. Just memories, a desire to imbibe for one last time the air he had breathed, the objects he had touched, the mustiness and fragrance of my long-vanished past?

Vispy had already packed his own things in a suitcase. There was almost nothing here that didn’t belong to the temple. Beds, a couple of simple wooden cupboards, a writing bureau. I looked through the manuscripts in the cabinet of ancient liturgy that my father had prized so much, which he had inherited from his predecessor Dastoorji Kookadaaroo. Strictly speaking, I suppose, I could have argued that these were his personal property. But I had no use for them, and Colabawalla would find them more interesting, probably. In the final analysis, I suppose they were temple property. Besides, how was I going to remove a dozen bulky volumes from the premises without eyebrows being raised and questions asked?

Vispy offered me a folding pen-holder attached to an inkstand, which stood on the writing bureau. I wiped the dust off its long plastic platform with my fingers, touching it gently, caressing it. In that moment something happened. I became completely detached from my immediate surroundings. I could barely hear Vispy’s voice; he was saying something to me.

‘Take it, Phiroze, please. You should have something that belonged to Papa. .’

‘No, no, no. . You take it,’ I muttered, feeling suddenly dopey and faint, and very hot.

And once again, I was dazzled by the white heat of an inferno, a great blinding light. But this time, unlike on that previous occasion so many years ago when I lost consciousness and sent a corpse toppling off a bier, I felt only very hot, and completely withdrawn from my surroundings — disorientated. At the same time, though I was in a daze, my attention converged with single-mindedness on only one thing: the brown rectangle of a wooden drawer. It was as if that mahogany object with its ornate handle was pulling me to it.

As though in a trance, I gripped the brass handle and pulled the drawer smoothly out of the writing bureau and laid it on the floor. Then, with an uncanny precognition, an abstracted sureness of focus, I inserted my arm up to the elbow all the way into the back of the vacant cavity left by the drawer. I didn’t know what I was doing. There was something somnambulistic about my actions, as though I were acting out a dream. Yet my thumb found a precise spot in the top left-hand corner of the rear of the cavity. I pressed hard, and the false bottom of a secret compartment sprang open. I felt around, and found in it a smooth, square box which, I suppose, was what I was looking for.

‘What? What’re you doing there?’

Vispy had been speaking to me all this while, but only now I heard him.

‘What’s in that box, I’m asking you,’ he was almost yelling at me.

I opened it. There were two of them, side by side. The ruby earrings!

I hadn’t seen them ever before. I didn’t even completely believe Temoo when he told me about them. As far back as I could remember, I had never seen my father releasing the hatch on this secret compartment, nor had he ever shown me how to do it; so it was not some childhood memory that had suddenly engulfed me. It was quite simply amazing! How did I discover the earrings, and find them with such a weird ease, as though I was being guided by some unconscious or supernal knowledge?

‘They were Rudabeh’s earrings,’ I explained to Vispy, holding the box out for him to see. ‘Temoorus told me about them, but I didn’t believe him. He wanted them to go to Farida.’

‘Well, good thing, then, you found them. Just in time,’ he said reassuringly, ‘before we moved out of here for good. Imagine if we had left them behind in that desk; they would be lost forever. Can I look at them again. .?’

‘They’re beautiful,’ he observed, taking the box from my hand. ‘Should be worth a fair amount, I would think. Of course, give them to Farida, please, they are hers. . By rights, they should go to Farida.’

I slipped them into my trouser pocket, and with Vispy carrying his own suitcase, we left the Soonamai Ichchaporia Agiari — the small fire temple at the dead end of a by-lane off Forjett Hill Road, where many believe that miracles, when earnestly prayed for, are realized.

I hadn’t prayed for any miracle. I hadn’t prayed at all in ages. Don’t get me wrong. I know from all those years I spent in childhood with my father that faith is a peculiar pool.

The longer the human soul swims in that pool of faith, soaking in the effulgence of its own dreams and longings, the more its need for rationality recedes, its very preoccupation with reality. Excuses are made for every frustration or impediment that doesn’t quite merge into the perfect blueprint of miraculous resolution already etched into one’s hopes and prayers: thus, there’s never any scope for disappointment. The person becomes blind to everything but the bewitchment of his own beliefs.

I was well aware of this, and wary of it too. But in this, my own case, I hadn’t been expecting anything. I didn’t even fully believe in the earrings, as a matter of fact; that they weren’t merely a figment of Temoo’s grouse-laden past. Yet, when I found them, it was not by chance or through diligent searching. It was not I who unearthed them but a force outside of me that momentarily transfigured my consciousness and guided me to them. Can you blame me for seeing it like that?

The quickening of my senses which seized me in those few minutes when I was possessed by a spirit of foreknowledge, while Vispy puzzled over what I was up to; when combined with the indelible memory of the dream I had soon after Father died, in which Seppy assured me that the dead were not dead at all, but still alive, make me feverish with excitement.

Or do you think old age is catching up with me after all? That I have merely succumbed to the bewitchment of my dreams? I don’t care what you believe. I know she is still out there waiting for me.

That I will meet her again. .

Author’s Note

In 1991, I was commissioned to write a proposal for a Channel 4 documentary on corpse bearers in the Parsi community of Bombay. The film was never made, but one story I heard in the course of my research on this small, segregated caste stayed with me.

It was about a middle-class Parsi dock worker of the last century, who married a khandhia’s daughter. He was in love with her, and gave up his job and his former social life to begin work as a corpse bearer. He took this step on the insistence of the girl’s father who had his own reasons for exacting vendetta on the dock worker’s family.

The person who told me this story, Aspi Cooper, was son to this improbable marriage. Improbable, because no one in his right mind would voluntarily accept the vicious stigmas that attached to the profession of corpse bearer in those days (albeit less pernicious possibly, than what ‘untouchables’ of mainstream Hindu society still face). Once a khandhia himself, Aspi found a way to ameliorate himself from this condition of social backwardness; at the time I met him, he was a successful racecourse bookmaker. The protagonist of the story, however, the former dock worker, was his late father, Mehli.

In 1942, while still a young man, Mehli Cooper organized and led an unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated strike of khandhias. He was promptly suspended and the strike fizzled out in a day or two. When later reinstated, according to his son, he became entirely submissive and quiescent, thus eking out the next forty-odd years of his life as a khandhia at the Towers of Silence.

Though I believe this story to be historical fact, there is no mention of the strike in the annals of the Parsi Punchayet; nor could Aspi, who was very young at the time, provide me any details of it. Such descriptions of the circumstances and course of the strike provided in the novel are purely fictional; as also many of my descriptions of the topography and layout of the Towers of Silence, which to this day remains out of bounds for all except Zoroastrians.

Landing on the west coast of India in the eighth century CE, after fleeing from successive Muslim invasions of their homeland, Persia, the Parsis of Bombay later prospered under the colonial rule of the British. Until recently, they had successfully preserved most of their religious traditions and customs. In recent years, however the community itself and its miniscule population have been on the decline.

As a mark of my respect for a man I never met, I would wish this novel to be an offering to the memory of Mehli Cooper. I also want to thank my late father’s dear friend, Mr Adi Doctor, for giving me his valuable time and scholarly explanation of the traditional Zoroastrian system for disposing of the dead. For such doctrinal inaccuracies or misrepresentations as may have crept in — the reader should remember this is essentially a novel, a work of fiction — I alone am responsible.

Cyrus Mistry

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Content

Cyrus Mistry
Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

About the book

About the author

Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

One. Present Tense, Bombay, 1942

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

HEAD OVER HEELS

Nine

Two. Echoes of a Living Past

Ten

Eleven

Three. Future Imperfect

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Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Endgame

Author’s Note

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