And then?
What do you mean, ‘and then’?
I mean, said Mrs Verma, what will they do with the body? They can’t keep it in the morgue for ever.
Dr Mishra shrugged: They’ll do whatever they usually do under these circumstances. I suppose they’ll hand it back to the next of kin. Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with you or me or any of us.
Mrs Verma thought hard, with her chin cupped in her hands. That means, she said, that they’ll hand the body back to Mr Bose. But what will he do with it?
How does it matter to you? Dr Mishra said brusquely. He can do what he likes. It’s none of your business. You don’t even know them. They just turned up today and you gave them shelter. For all you know, they may be international criminals or something. I think you should be very, very careful. Don’t get mixed up in this business.
Let’s see, Mrs Verma said, counting the possibilities on her fingers. He could take the body to Algiers. But how, and what for? Or he could fly it back to India. But how? He’d have to take it to the airport at Hassi Messaoud, and who knows whether there’s a plane tomorrow — and anyway the body would never last. Or else he could just leave the body with the authorities and let them … dispose of it.
Her eyes widened as she thought out the implications of that last possibility. What do you think they’d do with it? she said. Involuntarily she clenched her fist and raised it to her mouth. What do you think they’d do?
Dr Mishra chuckled: What’s another corpse to you, Mrs Verma? You’ve been seeing dozens every day ever since you first went to Medical College. You’ve chopped them up, pulled out their gullets, pickled their hearts in alcohol. Don’t you think it’s a bit late to start weeping over a bit of dead tissue?
It’s not the same thing, she said confusedly, when it happens in your own house.
It’s exactly the same thing, he answered, tapping the table with his pipe. Surely you don’t need me to tell you that. There’s nothing there that you wouldn’t find in any morgue or any textbook.
But only a few hours ago I offered her a room in my house because she had nowhere else to go. Don’t we owe her anything now; now that she’s dead?
We owe her nothing, he said sharply. We didn’t even know her.
But what will her husband do? Where will he go with the body?
He can go, Dr Mishra said gleefully, back to wherever he came from.
Mrs Verma rose from the table, her hands clasped determinedly together. There’s only one thing to do now, she said. We shall have to cremate her ourselves, properly, somewhere among the dunes.
Dr Mishra slumped back, stunned. After a while, his voice hoarse with shock, he murmured: How can we do that? There’s no crematorium here. What will the authorities say? We can’t do it. There’s a proper procedure for these things.
That can be worked out very easily, Mrs Verma said, clearing the table. After all, the authorities know us and we know them. We can explain the circumstances. I’m sure they’ll be sympathetic.
Mrs Verma, Dr Mishra said softly, recovering himself. When you said ‘a proper cremation’ what exactly did you mean?
Well, like we’ve seen it being done for our fathers and mothers, I suppose.
Say it, Mrs Verma, don’t be afraid. What you mean is a proper Hindu cremation.
It doesn’t matter what you call it.
Dr Mishra leant forward with all the aplomb of a chessplayer about to signal a checkmate. But, Mrs Verma, he said smiling, what makes you think she’s eligible for a proper cremation?
How could Jyoti Das explain, especially with Alu’s expectant, unblinking gaze clamped on him like that, what she had looked like when she first came through the door, how he had seen her then? It was an image with too long a past; it had appeared so suddenly, like the last photograph in a hastily riffled album, out of the haze left by pages of blurred pictures.
There was, for example, that final interview with the Ambassador in al-Ghazira, when he had said, with a sarcasm which could have sliced silk: Tell me, is it true, Mr Das, that you were away shopping when your so-called ‘extremists’ made their getaway? And before he could deny it the Ambassador was off, reminiscing pointedly about the incompetence of all the cloak-and-dagger men he had ever known; about the grudge they bore against the world because they hadn’t qualified for the more prestigious services in the examinations; about the ‘extremists’ they concocted to wangle trips abroad at government expense.
Mr Das, do you really think, he asked softly at the end, that we believed all this business about ‘extremists’? We know quite well why they send you people to visit embassies every now and then; they send you to watch us.
Then later there was Jai Lal sitting beside him, telling him how a First Secretary in the embassy had confided to him that even a small part of the report the Ambassador had sent to headquarters would be enough to stub out young Jyoti’s career like a half-smoked cigarette. And then Jai Lal again, telling him how there was only one way of retrieving something of his once bright future — and that was to find the Suspect.
After that, grey, sour days, waiting for his permission to proceed Cairowards to be cleared. And more grey days even after the permission arrived, for nobody in the embassy in Cairo would meet him. His contact said: The news is spreading fast; everyone’s heard about the business in al-Ghazira and your, your …
Failure? prompted Jyoti.
Inability to fulfil your commission, corrected his contact. Nobody wants to get involved.
But there were two flashes of light in Egypt as welclass="underline" one the encounter in Alexandria when he knew that he had sighted the right flight-path; and the other a letter from his engineer uncle in Düsseldorf with a hint about a job for him in Germany as well as a draft for a few hundred dollars.
The money bought him a ticket to Tunis, but once there it was all darkness. When he rang the embassy a voice asked him for his name, designation, rank, business, and then informed him gleefully that they had received a telex from the Ministry notifying a Shri Jyoti Das to show cause why he should not be suspended for dereliction of duty.
Luckily there were a few more hundred dollars from Düsseldorf, waiting poste restante. What could he do, but put them in his pocket and set off to look for the only people he knew in that continent?
So there he was, in the desert, lying on a sofa, terrified of the future, without a past, aware only of the prickings of his painfully virginal flesh, and there, suddenly in the doorway, was Kulfi.
There I was, he said to Alu, lying on a sofa thinking of a vulture, and I looked up and there she was in her yellow sari, framed in the doorway, like an oriole in a Mughal miniature.
You can’t give her a proper cremation, Mrs Verma; your own scriptures won’t permit it.
Why not? she demanded.
Well, Dr Mishra said, I can think of two perfectly good reasons. To begin with, I think I could undertake to persuade anyone who’s interested that her death was largely accidental — sudden shock, etc. Do you agree?
Mrs Verma nodded uncertainly: How does it matter anyway?
There, he cried. You see how you pay the price for your well-intentioned ignorance? Don’t you know that, strictly speaking, someone who’s died accidentally is not entitled to a proper funeral? If you don’t believe me, have a look at the Baudhayana Dharmasutra — you can see for yourself. The argument, if I recall correctly, is that someone who dies accidentally can’t enter Pitrloka anyway, so why bother? I can’t quite remember offhand, but I think in scriptural times the bodies of people who died accidentally were thrown into rivers or left in forests. That should give you something to go on, except that, as you’ll notice if you look out of the window, there aren’t many forests here, nor rivers, and it’s possible that the Algerians might be a little upset if we dumped her in an artesian well. So maybe we can just leave her on a sand-dune somewhere and give some of Mr Das’s vultures a nice meal. What do you think?