Flesh

It is the middle of the afternoon, and amid the honking cars that are playing popular Bollywood music and the cry of street hawkers, I can hear the steady dirge 'Ram Nam, Satya Hai', over and over again.  Then, as I look into the narrow crowded street, past the jutting balconies on either side caked with dust and nests of electrical wires, and into the thicket of overlapping tin shop roofs and swarms of moving black heads, I see the shroud.  It is lying on a barely visible wooden stretcher, covered completely like a mummy in a white cloth surrounded by yellow and orange marigolds. The four men that carry this stretcher on their shoulders are shouting the familiar refrain of mourning over and over again. As they pass by, I can see the mass of life of the street beneath me. It moves slowly like one enormous, pulsating, snake, weaving its way through the concrete. Some people raise their hands slowly, touching their foreheads in a semi salute, asking for blessing, exhibiting respect- not to the dead body that is passing by, but to the spirit, the atman, the eternal spirit that has been liberated through this ultimate shedding of the skin, hoping that this earns them good karma, or a place in the hallowed halls of the gods.
Immediately after the body passes, their arms drop to their sides, elbows jutting out slightly as they battle their way through the crowd from the bus stop and train station across the road to their workplace, maybe at the Parsi Dairy Farm outlet or Liteolia- the light shop, where I can see the chandeliers like big crystal wedding cakes hanging in the window. For them, the somber moment is gone. Its back to clutching worn out plastic bags full of stuff, metal tiffin boxes, heavy with their lunch, and important paper folders that contain real world problems. Its time to get on with the day for these people on the outside, but for me, it is time to reflect, to quietly contemplate. 

Comfortable in my house, cooled by the large rusty fan, I sit contentedly and ruminate.  Outside on the street, each person’s atman is the eternal; and the body, only that which becomes a ‘once was’.  All those ‘once was-es’, baking in the glaring heat, slowly disintegrating, just like a tar covered Mumbai city street that starts to melt when the sun is its most cruel in the summer.

And then there is the shrouded body, just lying there with no alternative but to accept everything it is dealt.  I know being dead means not being able to feel or think.  The body is now almost the same as any lifeless object; devoid of what one might commonly refer to as essential humanness- that very quality that made all those people stop everything they were doing this morning, even if for a fleeting second, to pay their respects. 'Ram Nam Satya Hai’- Only God is true, there is nothing else. 

The body is on its way to Chandanvadi, the cremation grounds where it will be burnt to a grey soot in an electrically heated chamber.  The ashes will then be collected and sprinkled in the sea or perhaps taken all the way to Benaras, the holy city, where they will be set afloat in a pot on the Ganges.  They will be disposed of in such a way that it will not be possible to revisit them in any concrete, physical way.  There will be no tombstone or grave, no marker of the burial ground. Instead they will be dispersed by the wind and drunk by the sea; there will be no holding on. Only memory.
       I think of a hill, the tallest hill among the seven islands that now make up Bombay, where lies the formidable Parsi burial ground, the Tower of Silence.  Once it was a quiet place, surrounded by deciduous forest, far removed from the scant population of Maharashtrian fisher folk and high-class baboos.  Today, however, the Tower of Silence contends with the high rise skyscrapers that have encroached inland from the coastal beaches. And here, in these secular towers, live the newly arrived intelligentsia, who are easily shocked by the barbaric practices that still take place within the walls, behind the locked iron gates.  But they have never been inside the Tower.  Instead, what they fear is a creation of their own imagination.  The only people who know what really goes on inside are all Parsi and even they cannot see the well at the pinnacle of the hill.
The families of the dead are expected to stay within the grounds for a span of three days in a cluster of bungalows at the foot of the hill on which the actual tower is located, so that the souls of the departed can remain near them.  I have been inside a bungalow only once when I was very young.  It was the last place I saw my grandfather.  After the purification rites had taken place, I remember his body being cleansed for the last time on the evening of the third day.  After that, pallbearers carried him on an iron stretcher up the mound, as a train of people, all Parsi, followed quietly.  I was not allowed to go through those gates however, for I am not a Zoroastrian.
But it was almost not necessary to go up.  I knew the ritual; that the body would be laid naked and exposed to the harsh glare of the sun and eventual downpour of the rain, until vultures picked off the flesh and the elements had pulverised the bone into a white powdery mass that would later be washed down into the well, into the deep recesses of the earth, the secret heart of the Zoroastrian Tower. Gruesome as this knowledge is, it was never kept secret from me- even at that young age I knew what was happening to my dead grandfather.  I knew that his body; which would have felt the slightest of mosquito bites when alive; now no longer felt anything, even the vultures ripping flesh from bone.

Then at six am the morning after his body had been laid at the tower, I remember awaking from a deep, dreamless sleep.  The room was unfamiliar, but not threatening, and as I viewed it through a filter of blue morning light, I heard a shrill-pitched cry.  It was not human, and if it was animal I had never heard anything like it before. It seemed to start at the top of the hill way above our bungalow and curve and bend its way down, until, it had wrapped everything in close proximity with its sound.  Then came a steady thumping, not unlike the sound of hail hitting the ground, only louder.  Flock after flock of peacocks in florescent blue, green, and black then came streaming down the hill in an unearthly glow of iridescence, until every inch of space in front of the bungalow in which I had been staying was flooded with peacocks pecking at the ground. They lowered their strong necks to pluck all the grain from the gravel, swallowing it with a delicate contraction of their throats and a quick soft gurgle.  I do not know how long they were there, but when they left as suddenly as they came the sun was shining bright in the sky.
I was amazed and oddly happy all at once, for I remember this scene vividly, as vividly as I had seen the shrouded body being carried on the street littered with marigold flowers.  Many, many Marigold flowers. They were common enough, and seemed to be everywhere. Bright, mildly fragrant, edible. I even held one between my own fingers. My own fingers. I realise, finally, that it is no longer just somebody that they carry to the burning chambers of Chandanvadi. It is no longer someone unknown and unrelated.  And I am surprised that I do not vomit at the realisation. That motionless body, covered and shrouded, is mine.