NOBODY LIGHTS A CANDLE
Anjali Deshpande
5
In Adhirath’s view the assurance he had given Ramwati was like the ritual consolations offered the bereaved the intention of keeping which is as weak as the expectation of its being kept. He had not been able to talk to Nitesh either. However, the next day his restlessness began to grow so he left the house again heading straight to the nearest English Wine and Beer shop.
Peeling away from the crowd outside the booze shop he tucked in the half bottle, the addha under his shirt. As he strode back to the mobike he noticed a crane towing away a car, clutching it in its jaws and bumping it around. The little car looked very sad as it followed the crane in its wake its bowed forehead licking the ground. A man in a suit was berating a thelawala who had set up his mobile street shop right in front of cars parked untidily. As the fruit seller moved away, the man cranked open the door of a car and aimed a kick at Adhirath’s Motorbike parked right across his headlights. Just aimed, he did not kick it. Adhirath had by then arrived and calmly opening the little storage box by the side of the seat he began packing in the booze bottle.
“Is this your bike,” asked the man in the suit in an infuriated tone.
“No. I stole it,” said Adhirath to him arrogantly as he clicked shut the locker cabinet having deposited his booze bottle in it. Then climbing on his bike he said “Jaa police bula le,” and laughed uproariously as he sped away with the English speaking man’s frustrated abuses drowning in the loud roar of his bike. He heard the epithets, some of which he even understood but his motorcycle had enough of a growl to drown any noise. After all it was an Enfield. The Hondas of today may flaunt their wide fibreglass breasts but they were no match to an old sinner of an Enfield.
He arrived at the mortuary soon after lunch. The morgue was behind the thick walls of the old building and he knew it well. He had been to this low ceilinged garage like place several times. He went round to the entrance of the morgue and stopped at the open doors. Everyone could not enter the building but the guard knew him and sometimes let him in. Sometimes the guard dozed off after lunch so he quickly slipped in. Today the guard raised a hand to forbid him from entering and looked too alert for him to try his tricks. Adhir thought that his ill fate was still accompanying him. Perhaps a VIP had died. That means there were doctors inside. He began to chat with the guard. Spotting a staff member passing by Adhir called out to him to inform Bhikulal that he was waiting outside. The guard laughed and added that he was a real VIP for Bhikulal.
Bhikulal emerged after half an hour.
“You keep your son-in-law waiting do you? Tauba, tauba how much the world has changed!” said Adhirath.
“Arre all those sasuras are inside. I can’t leave a post mortem in the middle,” he said.
“Yes, I guessed it the moment I arrived. I thought now that the Ganga is flowing in the reverse, nobody sends a packet of sweets on Holi, sons-in-laws are waiting on their fathers in law, I might as well bring you a gift.” He fished out the bottle.
Bhiku took it but did not look happy. “You could have got me a full bottle for a change considering how I never charged you anything for the work I have done for you, being as you are the son-in-law. Not easy I tell you, I am not the only one who takes his fees. Everybody does. It is not a small thing. The money does not go into my pocket alone. Everybody demands fees. You will die if it told you what the surgeon charges. And I am the best in this business. There is no doubt about it. Nobody is better at postmortem than I am.” A half a bottle of rum was his fees for any post mortem and business had been truly good in the last two years with at least one body arriving for PM, some days as many as three people got murdered in a day, that is those three who get to the newspapers. The others nobody even counted.
They chatted for a while as Bhiku asked after his niece and reduced two beedis to foul ash. After a while Adhirath came to the point.
“What is happening with the enquiry?” asked Bhiku.
“Will happen in its time.”
“Had you accepted my gift of a jageer, you would have had something to do today. Everything does not have to be done personally, you can employ people to do it for you, you would have got some share at least.”
Bhikulal had offered a residential territory to Adhir as dowry where his family had the exclusive traditional contract for cleaning the area. Sweeping staircases, taking out garbage. A nice source of income but an embarrassed Adhirath and his family had refused despite many pleadings.
“Mamu, did you cut up that girl who was killed in the farmhouse?”
“The one who was brought here on Tuesday? I did, only yesterday. There was a long queue. Why? You know her?”
“Just curious. My friend is looking into the case,” he said. “In charge.”
“I know. He came here and was trying to rob me of my addha. Tell me who can work in this stinking place without something to stiffen the nerves? You need liquor in your bones to work here, pure liquor. Those doctors, they have blood in their veins so they can’t even come inside the morgue. If they did they would die of the foul smell alone. They spend crores on education. These sausras, they get degrees to loot patients. It is a business. When I joined here there used to more bahman doctors, now there are banias. That alone is enough to tell you what a good business this doctors” business is. Now, I don’t have a degree but I can teach a few things to all of them. I am the first to get to know how the people died. Died of fetty leever or kidney cracked open or intestines cut up, died naturally or was killed. ? You know about the bomb blast case, don’t you? How many bodies were brought here. In many many pieces. It wasn’t clear which arm belonged to whom. Which trunk had which arms. Who do you think pieced together bodies from scattered parts? I did,” said Bhiku as he smote himself on the chest with great pride. Adhir sat on his bike swirling the keyring on his index finger. He yawned with boredom. “Those white coats, who go to nice classrooms and sit on benches, they did not even come here to see what people blown up by bombs look like. I tell you, they look like pieces of watermelon. You have seen seeds in watermelon? Exactly like them there were black spots in the bodies. You know what they were? Intestines. Stuff inside the intestines. There is all that they had eaten a while ago, samosa, pakoda, roti, korma...”
Adhirath yawned. He had heard many stories from this uncle of his wife. They all began with this same story of how he had put together a body having hunted for pieces in the rubble of bomb blast victims. He had the heard the short version, the long version and the longest one once which contained gruesome details of how the pieces looked like pieces of watermelon and how there were black dots in it to resemble the cut fruit and what those black dots were. Adhirath had heard, the filthiest, the most frightening description of that incident. How intestines were scattered everywhere. How when they went to pick up the bodies some of the intestines were still steaming. How there were black spots in red flesh just like there are black pips in the pink flesh of watermelon, these were undigested or digested stuff inside the intestines or pieces of spleen. Bhiku enjoyed telling him how intestines are several kilometres long and are so nicely coiled and packed inside the abdomen. “That grey rope, that is your large intestine. Several kilometres of it packed inside that little torso. All coiled up and full of shit. Black and yellow.” The first time Adhir had heard the story he had puked many times and had not been able to eat anything and screamed at Pushpa, “I will never meet your mamaji again.”
Yet he came again and again to meet this man with the colour of the divine crow, kaagbhushundi, the bhangi at morgue who had not been able to expel the victims of bomb blast from his stomach. Bhikulal looked as if black colour had been dusted over him like surma and if he as much as shook his head the colour would fly in the air.
“I had pieced them together, only then the doctors prepared their reports.”
“Mamu, that girl, the body that came from the farmhouse...”
“I told your friend no addha no post mortem, no report. He began to tell me that he is my son-in-law’s friend. That is all right, I told him, but you are not the lover of this girl, are you? If you are, you will have to pay double fees. Doctors will write report only after I report to them and give them all those leever and sapleen in jars. They will only peer into the microscope. Give me a microscope. I bet I will learn in six months. There is nobody who can conduct a better post mortem than me. I told him clearly, no addha, no post-mortem...”
“Oh, ok, I will get you his share of the addha too,” said Adhirath trying to cut short the litany.
“I got it out of him all right. Two addhas instead of one,” said Bhiku and laughed.
email: anjalides@gmail.com
*****
