Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer Read Online Free Page B

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