Dr. Paymaster opened his black bag to empty it. After all, it was only a morcha prop, and would be lighter to carry. Then he gazed for a moment at the carefully arranged contents. Not once since starting out in practice had his bag been without its multitude of vials, syringes, scalpels, lancets, and the trusty sphygmomanometer. He changed his mind and let everything stay.
He clipped on his stethoscope, locked the door to the office, and, with his faithful old compounder by his side, stepped out. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, he thought, wondering what follies and wisdoms were to be enacted this day, what new farces he was to witness with his tired old eyes.
The waiting crowd applauded as the two emerged. Too late now for regrets, thought Dr. Paymaster. He acknowledged the cheers with a half-hearted wave. Peerbhoy, resplendent in his brightest and best loongi — maroon, with green and yellow vertical stripes — was already at the head of the column. Dr. Paymaster took his place beside him. The compounder walked behind.
ii
After filling the water drums and buying milk, Dilnavaz opened Miss Kutpitia’s Jam-E-Jamshed to the middle page and scanned the pydust section for death announcements. Her usual sense of anxiety gave way to relief as she came to the end of the list without encountering any familiar names.
Then she glanced at the Stop Press section on the first page, the little box that usually appeared blank; there was something in it. Puzzled, she read that the funeral of J. Bilimoria would be held this morning. There was no further information. With Miss Kutpitia’s permission she borrowed the paper to show Gustad.
He was also puzzled: ‘Who could have brought the body from Delhi?’ Jimmy had no relatives that they knew about. Who had made the arrangements at the Tower of Silence?
They agreed it was probably someone else with the same name, and did not discuss it further, which relieved Gustad. What use was it to get emotional all over again? When he had brought the page home that day from office, it was all he could do to calm her and stop her crying.
‘But what if it is our Jimmy?’ said Dilnavaz after a while.
The uncertainty became oppressive. The only thing was to go to Doongerwadi, decided Gustad. ‘If it is our Jimmy, and I miss the funeral, it would be unforgivable.’ And if it was someone else, that would be all right too, there was no sin in attending a stranger’s funeral.
So he set off to the Tower of Silence, thinking — second time in less than thirty days. And two friends gone. He looked up. Like old Cavasji, he felt like protesting, raging against the sky, but went his way in silence.
Later, after the prayers were over and he descended the hill, he was still wondering who had arranged and paid for the death ceremonies. He felt grateful to whoever it was; something had been put right; and now Jimmy was conveyed safely beyond the reach of his tormentors.
To think I almost did not come. Would have been no one in Jimmy’s bungalee. To watch the fire, listen to his prayers. And to offer sandalwood, sprinkle loban in the afargan. Powder bursting into fragrant flames. Like shining from shook foil. Frankincense and myrrh, and sandalwood glowing red. Colour of the rising sun. And Jimmy’s face through the thin white smoke. In Delhi he was…but strange how death. On the marble platform, looking again like our Khodadad Building Major. And the final walk up the hill. So many for Dinshawji…the gravel path, a great ovation. But I alone for Jimmy. And the gravel spoke softly, like friends in a room.
By the time Gustad came down from the Tower, the dustoorjis were nowhere to be seen. He hoped the registration clerk at the office would know who had arranged the funeral.
The man at the desk was not pleased with Gustad’s intrusion. Questions had become the bane of his life, and he looked up suspiciously, his nervous eyes darting around the room. As far as he was concerned, Jimmy Bilimoria’s funeral was over and done with. He was tired of people coming to him, especially relatives of the deceased, with their strange requests.
The two women last week, for instance. So short, and slightly built, reminded him of little sparrows, the way they walked and moved their heads. But turned out to be tough as hawks. ‘We forgot to remove a diamond ring from Grandmama’s finger,’ they said. ‘Can you please shoo off the vultures for a few minutes? So we can go inside the Tower and get it back?’
What was he to say to such people? How to deal with two loose screws? He explained that before the nassasalers left the Tower they removed all clothing, every single article, as laid down in the Vendidad. So even if the ring was overlooked in the prayer bungalee, it would have been found in the Tower.
But the women told him to hurry before the priceless diamond ring wound up in a vulture’s belly. Money was not the question, it was the sentimental value. ‘We have no faith in the work of illiterate cretins like nassasalers,’ they said, ignoring his reminders that laity were forbidden inside the Tower. Eventually, the clerk had to plead for help from the high priest who led the two away for further discussion, nodding his owl-wise head sagely in response to their arguments.
If this was the only problem besetting the clerk, he might have endured without turning embittered and suspicious. But, of late, luxury high-rises proliferating around Doongerwadi’s green acres had blighted his life.
‘Your vultures!’ the tenants complained. ‘Control your vultures! Throwing rubbish on our balconies!’ They claimed that the sated birds, flying out from the Tower after gorging themselves, invariably snatched a final bite to savour later. And if the tidbits were lost in mid-flight, they landed on the exclusive balconies. This, said the indignant tenants, was absolutely intolerable, considering the sky-high prices they had been charged for their de luxe flats.
Of course, no one had proved conclusively that the morsels from the skies were human flesh. But before long, relatives of various deceased parties heard about the skyscraper scandal. They protested that they were not paying funeral fees to have their dear departed ones anatomized and strewn piecemeal on posh balconies. The bereaved insisted that the Punchayet do something about it. ‘Train the vultures properly,’ they said, ‘or import more vultures, so all flesh can be consumed in the well. We don’t want a surplus which can be carried off and lost in impure, profane places.’ Meanwhile, the debate was also raging between the reformists and the orthodox. These two camps had a history of battling lustily in newspaper columns, in letters to the editor, in community meetings — any forum where they were welcome. For a while they had engaged in rhetorical combat over the chemical analysis of nirang. Then there had been the vibration theory of Avesta prayers. When the vulture controversy erupted, the orthodox and reformists heartily joined the fray, delighted to sink their teeth into something after long inactivity.
The orthodox defence was the age-old wisdom that it was a pure method, defiling none of God’s good creations: earth, water, air, and fire. Every scientist, local or foreign, who had taken the trouble to examine the procedure, using modern hygienic standards, sang its praises. But the reformists, who favoured cremation, insisted that the way of the ancients was unsuitable for the twentieth century. Such a ghoulish system, they said, ill became a community with a progressive reputation and a forward-thinking attitude.