The Funeral

The Funeral

Stars shine in the eyes of old princesses, too, I thought, watching Rosa Aunty standing in a fresh, polka-dotted frock before the clinical, slabbed steps of the Asiatic Library. Head back, she was gazing intently at the library. Her frail, pallid coloring complemented that vast, milky whiteness gleaming, resplendent, in the clear nine o’clock sun. On a normal day, we could hardly find any space for our feet, but today, there were no feet apart from ours. The air was thick with the lethargic reticence of an unhurried Sunday.

Once we’d climbed out of the black-and-yellow Mumbai taxi, she’d handed me her bag, and the two of us stood this way for some time before she began mounting the library steps, very slowly, gripping me with her left hand, her cane with her right.

On the fifth step, she paused. “How many have we climbed?” she asked breathlessly.

“Five.”

A moment later, she continued the ascent, her bony hand tightly wound over mine.

“Now?”

“This is the tenth step.”

She turned and climbed down one step.

“Count again. This would be the ninth step, no?”

I launched into a performance of loudly counting each step and affirmed cheerfully, “Yeah, the ninth.”

From up there, we looked down toward the street. Despite not being very high, we now had a panoramic view of the street below. Slowly, steadily, she sidled, cane clacking, all the way to the right edge of the steps, at which point she released my hand and motioned for me to sit. I carefully lowered her down before squatting beside her in the space to her right. Our bottoms were resting on the ninth step. Smoothing out her frock, she stretched her legs, her heels propped on the seventh step. Like a restless pigeon cocking its head, she scanned the odd banalities of our surroundings.

A vehicle or two whizzed past intermittently. Her eyes would chase them until they disappeared beyond view. She took her bag from me and fumbled with its contents before taking out a small lunch box.

“You don’t look eighteen,” she said, setting the bag aside. She was looking at me intently, her eyes kind.

“I’m fourteen,” I said pleasantly.

“Oh! You’re four years away.” I detected a note of surprise beneath her words.

I smiled at her, more out of habit than anything else.

Then, as if startled into consternation, she said, “But—but why are you sitting on this side? You should be on this side,” and, pointing to her other side, “C’mon, get up. Come over to my left.”

I never tried to understand her oddities. So I rose obediently and took my place on her left. As if these were our natural places.

She slid sideways and leaned against the balustrade. I remained squatting in my assigned place. Looking at the distance between us, she said, “Come closer, not so far away.” I moved closer. “Places have great importance in life,” she said. “The world we see depends on where we are perched.” I smiled at this succinct, philosophical sort of statement, as she opened her lunch box. In it were two sandwiches, with a spangle of red cherry on top. She wrapped one in tissue paper and handed it to me. “Eat.”

I opened my mouth wide and, voracious, bit off a huge chunk. “Eat slowly,” she warned, though not unkindly.

Embarrassed, I suddenly became self-conscious. Bowing my head, I tried to control the speed at which I gorged myself. When I finished, she said, “If you’re still hungry, you can eat my sandwich as well.”

“No, I’m done,” I said, wiping my lips with the tissue paper, to which she responded with a vague, faraway smile. For a while after, her lunch box lingered open. Perhaps she was waiting for me to snatch her share. We didn’t have any further conversation. The vast surroundings lay open before us. From where we were perched we watched our respective worlds in silence. After a good half hour like this, I ceremoniously helped her to her feet and guided her step-by-step down all nine steps to the street where we stood waiting a bit longer before finding ourselves seated in another black-and-yellow taxi.

The Mumbai heat was becoming oppressive. Whenever the taxi stopped at a red light, we sat in the still heat, sweat streaming down our faces. When the taxi picked up again, we felt the relief of the sea breeze through the open window stinging our skin. Now and then, Rosa Aunty yawned and her head would dangle to the side, drooping more and more until the lurch of the taxi going over a speed bump caused her to wake with a start and straighten herself up.

The outside world seemed alien to me. Our surroundings passed us from the opposite direction with such blinding speed that I wouldn’t have been able to recognize the racing geography even if I’d wanted. There were very few Sunday markets open. From the shop signs, I could discern that we had passed Churni Road, the Mahalaxmi neighborhood, and other such places.

I must have dozed off because next thing I knew the driver was informing us we’d reached Mahim Church. Rosa Aunty suddenly became very erect and alert, looking out the window into a maze of lanes cutting across one another. She told the driver to turn down one of them. A narrow lane, the taxi had to maneuver very slowly. Once, twice, several times, Aunty made him turn down other lanes, finally telling him to stop at a four-way intersection.

For a while, she scrutinized the lanes flowing from the intersection, finally deciding on one of them. I held her shaking hand and her bag as she got out of the taxi and clacked excitedly down the lane about fifty paces, then paused.

It was a quiet and ordinary looking lane, like an average street but rife with potholes. Gravel dumps and woodpiles lay scattered throughout. Few doors opened to the lane; rather,  most houses were positioned with their backs facing it. At other times of the week, this lane was probably used for parking. Even now there were some cars, covered with a layer of dirt as if they hadn’t been moved for years.

She pointed to a tall lamppost that stood by the side of the lane some ten steps away. Reaching it meant squeezing ourselves into the extremely narrow spaces between the burning hot metal parked almost bumper to bumper in the empty lot abutting the lamp. Part of Aunty’s frock was coated in a layer of dirt from the metallic bodies. She was breathless in the dusty heat. Yet she moved swiftly and went to stand under the lamppost.

It was a stoic British-era lamppost with a certain old-world charm and a filigree of ornate motifs so fine that you could gaze at it endlessly and never get tired. The round glass dome was an opaque white. The patch of street below was bathed in the shadow of the adjacent building, thankfully providing us cool, dark shelter. I tried to imagine what sort of glare the lit lamp would throw on the ghostly street at night.

She slid her arms up and down the post, feeling its firm thew. But before long she became still, standing there like a statue, her glazed eyes fixed on a point off in the distance. I was at a loss. There didn’t seem to be anything there, at any distance. I stood looking at her, her eyes staring blankly.

It was through my fecund imagination that I saw her. A mirage conjured up by the heat. A youthful hue brimming beneath her pallid skin. Her eyes flickered in the noon sun.

All of a sudden, she stirred, her eyes met mine, and her pallidness returned.

“You are eighteen—” she remarked out of the blue, with the same vague, faraway smile. “Have you ever kissed a girl?”

I could feel the rapid succession of  a half-smile, hesitation, embarrassment, and flaming confusion flood my face. I lowered my head and eyes under the weight of her gaze. “No,” I mumbled, vigorously shaking my head, “—and I’m fourteen.” But I had been kissed before, and I chose to conceal that fact.

After lingering a while longer, we retraced the dusty path. Her hand was limp in mine. Back in the taxi, we slid past a church and, a little farther, stopped at a flower shop. Aunty peeped out the window and asked the driver to honk, whereupon a youth came running from the shop with an enormous bouquet. He wanted to put it on the empty front seat, but Aunty took it and propped it on her small lap. “All seventy-two?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“All red roses, no?”

“Yes.” His head bobbled from side-to-side.

“Come by later and I’ll pay.”

“Okay.” He made the same head bobbling gesture again.

The taxi lurched into motion. This time the journey wasn’t long. In about five minutes we’d reached Old Cadell Road. Aunty took out her diary and, stopping the taxi every few minutes, asked the passersby for the address of one G. M. Kulkarni. It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon when we finally located the place. The sun had peaked, and close by the Arabian sea seethed.

A crowd of twenty-something stood in small clusters in front of the house. Some vehicles were parked on either side of the lane. Aunty didn’t hold my hand this time. With one hand she clutched the bouquet to her chest, and with the other she leaned hard on her cane. I carried her bag slung over my shoulder. She asked a gentleman standing nearby, “G. M. Kulkarni…?” and before she could even finish, the gentleman pointed toward the house.

In the veranda lay a body swathed in white sheets. Clumps of incense burned at all four corners of the body, giving off oversweet fumes, and by the head shimmered the bright flame of a large oil lamp, suffused with the scent of grief. Some women were squatted on the ground along the righthand side, while young men bustled in and out of the house, looking busy. They must have been tasked with the preparations for the funeral. In the intensified gloom of the lamp’s glare, everyone looked so sorrowful that it was impossible to tell who was family and who an outsider.

It was the dead body of G. M. Kulkarni. The reason we had come here.

To return to the beginning, it had all started that morning soon after sunup, when the neighbor’s maid had knocked on our door and shouted to Ma in her high-pitched drawl, “Big Ammi has called you—go quickly.” Big Ammi was Rosa Aunty, our neighbor, who in the claustrophobic labyrinth of our neighborhood ran an open-air café where the young crowd came for coffee or a cold drink. Chic English-style umbrellas sheltered small, round tables and chairs. Summers brought a riot of colors to Mumbai and gave the café its special hues—the red, orange, and yellow of wild hibiscus, the pink and purple of queen’s crape myrtle, sweet-scented, white spider lilies, and daisies. Apart from the subtle perfume of the flowers, the air was also redolent with the thrilling sweetness of a Chopin nocturne. But inside Rosa Aunty, her inner planted clumps defied growth and atrophied into a stunted thicket of silence. The café—airy, green, and golden—expressed a lifetime of sacrifice and abnegation. She ran the café singlehandedly until her health began to decline, at which point her sister’s daughter chipped in to help. Aunty did not wed. She lived alone. With her old maid—who had doddered over to our house asking for Mother. Half an hour later, when Ma returned, I was still in bed, drowsing in the rakish lethargy of my newfound youth. She shook me out of my slumber and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “Some acquaintance of Big Ammi has passed away. You have to accompany her.”

“Send Sis,” I proposed. “They’re both ladies, they’ll chat. What will I do? I’ll get bored.”

“No, no. She asked especially for you. And no one says no to her.”

I tossed and turned for some time, rising finally, knowing I’d have to go willy-nilly. Ma came up to me then. “The whole world calls her Big Ammi and today I find out that you call her Rosa?!”

“Not Rosa—Rosa Aunty!” I corrected her, but my voice wavered with all sorts of emotions.

“Yes, yes. Exactly. Rosa. Now get up and get going. And take good care of her.”

But I did not tell Ma that I loved that name, Rosa! Or that it had a certain mysterious ring to it that fascinated me. Or that she looked like a heroine from the old, bygone days. Or that I often liked to loll in the café lawn listening to her footsteps winding past each table, the soft murmuring of leaves, the mating call of birds creating a rhythm in the mindless heat.

All of that I hid outright.

This long, hot day, from morning till now, Rosa Aunty and I, we’d been out on our aforesaid mission.

Seventy-two blooms make for an enormous bouquet. So far only a rose or two lay by the deceased; the rest were all marigolds. We removed our footwear outside and approached the body. Everyone turned and looked at us with curiosity as we passed. A woman, about thirty years old, who was draped in white mourning clothes rose and came to Aunty and inquired with unrecognising eyes, “You…?”

“Rosemary D’Souza.” Aunty responded crisply.

The woman’s face remained blank. No one seemed to know Aunty in that gathering. She tried to bend and set down the bouquet, but it was huge and the act threatened to topple her over. I offered her my hand. The woman also offered her hand. And together we three placed the bouquet on the deceased’s belly.

It was a good-looking corpse. Shrouded completely in sheets. Only the face was visible. With cotton in the nostrils. This was the first time I’d seen a dead body up-close. Aunty was standing—the picture of stillness—the way she’d sat on the library steps—the way she’d stood under the lamppost. Gazing attentively at the deceased’s face, hands respectfully clasped, perhaps murmuring a prayer to herself. There was something reverential in her manner that drew people closer, and we all huddled around the deceased, our heads bowed, gazing at his face.

Suddenly it seemed as if the lips of the dead fluttered. We were startled into wakefulness. I looked at Aunty. She was standing, as before, motionless. Wooden. But several of us had seen the corpse’s lips flutter momentarily. The lips had parted for a moment, then closed.

The respectful silence of a moment earlier gave way to commotion. People were astounded. They turned to each other, wanting to confirm what they’d just witnessed: Lips moved, right? The dead man’s lips fluttered—I saw it, did you?—I did—Me too—Yes, yes, his lips opened and closed—Yes.

A boy hurriedly bent over the body. Removing the cotton from the nostrils, he waved his finger under them, feeling for any breath, any life.

“It looks as if Aaba’s lips fluttered. Call the doctor please. Hurry! Let him check again!” the woman in white cried, with nervous haste. She was his daughter.

A doctor was already there. Swiftly, he placed the end of his stethoscope to the chest, searching for a pulse. Then he waved his finger under the nostrils. He repeated the same examination four or five times. And then he shook his head.

“But his lips moved,” insisted the daughter.

The doctor shook his head again.

Despite the doctor’s refutation, people still discussed how for a fleeting moment the corpse’s lips had fluttered. Slowly the cries of excitement died down. In the arpeggios of the fading chatter, people started leaving. The dead body was ready for its final journey.

Rosa Aunty, who up until then had stood like a statue, stirred. The space left behind by the corpse emptied into her. Her hands, now embracing herself, were just as they’d been earlier, by the lamppost, as if holding a memory open. She took two steps back and, hands folded in namaste, offered a silent gesture of mourning to everyone present, who responded in turn by bringing their palms together.

Then, clutching my hand, Rosa Aunty slowly made her way back outside. It was late evening.

When we’d put a good thirty to forty paces between us and the house, I burst out, my voice high with excitement, “His lips moved. I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes. They moved. I’m dead sure.”

“Yes, they moved,” said Aunty laconically.

Her eyes were alight with the luster of the brightest constellation in the sky.

“You know,” her voice was quiet, “I had faith that he’d come. Maybe just for a moment but he’d come. Even after death he would. Fifty-four years ago, when he was a boy of eighteen, on a street corner under the broken bulb of a lamppost, he left a girl in the middle of a kiss and ran off. She loved him utterly, intensely… Today he returned to finish that kiss.”

She just stood there, like a princess in a polka-dotted frock. The dazzle of her eyes had now extended to her lips. Everything was dead and silent, as if the roaring sea had suddenly gone still. The fishermen would soon be spreading their nets in its waters, I thought as I watched her tighten her grip on my wrist.

Image by Antonio Carrau.