Skulduggery

by Ram Govardhan

Distressed with dwindling arrivals, Mani, the undertaker at the Saidapet Cemetery, needed desperate measures. That hazy morning, as he caressed Meao, his black-spotted white cat, the rustle of the first funeral party stirred his dreary brood.

Rajan, the scientist-turned-entrepreneur, the body’s eldest brother, sought the cheapest funeral, lamenting that the super-specialty hospital had already exacted a fortune. Rajan’s three other brothers, who were there with him, nodded in silence.

Being the first ‘affluent’ body in days, dreading the long month ahead, Mani grinned as he scratched the back of his head, and politely conveyed too steep a price.

Rajan bargained, as was his wont; in life or business, irrespective of size, he believed, deals without haggling were sure-fire ways of going bust.

Mani’s trigger-happy tongue took on the irreverence typical of his line.

‘We don’t milk bloody money out of thin microchips. Unlike other buggers, I don’t fleece… we dig and dirty ourselves no end. Do I smell of greed? The hospital that cheated you was greedy,’ Mani said, setting Meao after a plump rat scurrying across him.

The idea that it might not be his day was taking root in Rajan’s mind.

Mani had already noticed Rajan’s Porsche Panamera parked outside the cemetery, next to the huts. Rajan loved Porsche because the last three letters were the first three letters of the city he lived in: Chennai.

Graves of contrasting shapes, upkeep and ruin cluttered the cemetery, hemmed by slums. Expansion was impossible and going vertical was no option because bodies are to be planted, even if they don’t germinate. The eerie quiet of daytime was utterly deceptive because the cemetery had a gratifying nocturnal facet: it metamorphosed into a peddling hub and vast latrine by night.

The shown patch for the grave was overflowing with bones, guts and other sickening things. As if on steroids, plump mongrels overwhelmed the piles. Omitting the appetising heaps of edible superabundance, the dogs tore away tissues out of each other’s jaws. Unmindful of that, in a parallel world, all up in each other’s business were rats, vultures and bandicoots. And restless on the periphery were the timid opportunists: crows.

Covering his nostrils with his palm, an overwhelmed Rajan waved towards a decent-looking patch.

‘That’s too expensive,’ Mani said.

‘How much?’

‘Triple of what I quoted….’

The brothers bickered in whispers, unaware of Mani’s lip-reading skills. They then tottered back offering double the rate, not a penny more.

Mani’s stare carried the contempt he reserved for lepers who pestered him for free burials.

Spitting a mouthful of reddish pan-saliva blend around Rajan’s toes, Mani said, ‘Okay, but it would disappear in a week or so, including the marbled tombstone.’

Two weeks was too little for a grave to exist. And the first anniversary was significant at least for the sake of ritualistic relations.

How about a permanent grave at a lower price?

‘Don’t irritate me…when lives are mortal, aren’t thoughts of eternalising graves utterly absurd? Where’s enough place on earth?’ Mani said.

Mani’s agitation wasn’t unreasoned. Unlike his father’s days when plagues, epidemics and pandemic afflictions brought windfalls, of late, arrivals shrank to precarious levels. The few funerals of impoverished people rendered undertaking quite unviable. And the debts that supported families of his two wives and the new concubine mounted by the week. Death was anyway unpredictable; even the business of disposing it had turned so.

During Mani’s heydays, he kept several readymade pits to expedite things, the bank managers repeatedly offered overdrafts, while he repeatedly declined them. Until recently, he delivered stunning graves with clean lines and curves to please everyone. He fused art and architecture to implore divinity to bestow peace upon the departed soul.

Mani understood that the notion that a cemetery is one hell of a leveller is a deadly misreading of human affairs. He knew that the funeral parties staggered to him not just to bury but also to reiterate their social status in the architecture of the graves. He knew that death made real sense because endless degeneration is bad. And he knew the only secret that remains a secret forever: one’s own death. Yet, as for according decency to funerals, Mani knew, many men were breathtakingly mean.

Alas these days, people talk of his cold-blooded outlook, not knowing much about the ways things unfold in cemeteries.

‘It’s such a dark, brutal… cursed world,’ Mani often said, ‘that I would never let my offspring into.’

As Rajan was about to say something, Mani leapt to his feet and strode towards a funeral party entering the gates. After a short, animated tiff, Mani furiously waved the body in. His burly gravediggers, who doubled as his unkempt bouncers, began spading. The priest was told to wrap things up in minutes. They threw a decayed skull, bones and other smelly things onto an adjacent grave. Stomping over the very things, Mani lent a hand hustling them to shove the body down. Halfway through, he exacted cash and hurried towards Rajan.

The crudity didn’t shock Rajan. The spiritual seeker that he was, nothing shocked Rajan because, he believed, everything in the universe was made out of nothing and the vast bubble of cosmos was expanding into immeasurable nothingness at the speed of light. While the rationale for such breakneck cosmic expansion was unfathomable, grasping that money would escape at the speed of light unless you are tight-fisted wasn’t.

‘That was a murder case… they were in a hurry to dispose of the body that won’t be part of state statistics,’ said Mani, spitting all over the place. ‘Ok…made up your mind?’

‘We want a decent patch that is undisturbed,’ said Rajan.

‘Look… there’s a patch in the upper-class pocket… at triple the rate,’ Mani said. ‘But decide quickly… goats and buffaloes are quicker these days…’

‘Just a while,’ said Rajan.

Mani spat in anger and began fondling Meao. In moments as vexatious as this, he believed, the pet somehow fetched him a little peace.

Unmindful of Mani’s reaction, Rajan’s party huddled together.

A kid’s body in their bare hands, three ragged men scurried in. Taking deep puffs from a dying butt, Mani drew a rectangle with his toes around a muddy mound that seemed an abandoned grave. The pit was dug out and the funeral was over in a jiffy. After sticking a few incense sticks, the old man handed a tightly rolled bundle of notes. Mani thrust it back into the old man’s hands and waved them away. The trio kept saluting Mani up until the salute disappeared beyond the gate.

Flicking the butt away, puffed up with pride, Mani said, ‘That was an abandoned kid’s body… the old man is a social worker and great fortune-teller. He has prophesied ups and downs of my fifty years with precision.’

Sizing each one of the brothers up, lighting a beedi, Mani said, ‘Two funerals away… you chaps are still figuring out… thoo, thoo.’

When dealing with such people, Rajan always braced himself for dirtier flak because frugality mattered. Profanities can be shrugged off at no cost, but a penny gone was a penny lost forever.

Soon gusts picked up, and the moment Mani predicted a rainstorm, it poured. Rajan’s party unfolded umbrellas leaving the body to the elements. Mani picked up a dirty gunny sack and covered the body. Within moments, the dirt drained onto the body underneath, leaving the sack clean. Though the dead are calm, clueless, and at our mercy, it is in the way we treat them that we prove our disdain, proving the dissimilarity.

Declining an umbrella offered by Rajan, Mani said, ‘Unlike you guys who take salaries to sit in cosy offices, I am fever-proof.’

The downpour obscuring their faces, a stout woman and a tiny girl entered the gates. They charged along despite his repeated cries of warning. As they closed in, the proximity made Mani long-faced. The girl gripped Rajan’s legs and cried, ‘Appa, appa, appa…’ He jerked the girl down.

As cries grew shriller, picking the girl up, the woman said, ‘Nothing at home, nothing… not a handful of rice to boil… give me a hundred.’

‘Why don’t you fast… plump as a pig that you are?’ Mani cried.

As the downpour eased a bit, three bright yellow bullfrogs with purple-blue vocal sacs sprung out of the puddles between the graves. A frightened Meao hid behind a tomb. Cheered by the spectacle, the girl jumped out of her mother’s waist and gave the frogs a chase. The amphibians hopped away a bit every time the girl hopped. After a brief stare-down, as she gained on them, the frogs leapt the longest hop to vanish into the bushes. The girl resumed crying. Meao reappeared, only after ensuring that the frogs had really disappeared.

‘What about the hundred I gave you? You must have had drinks with it,’ Mani said.

Drawing closer, Mani smelt her to sniff out the truth; he got the whiff of undiluted sweat despite the downpour. ‘It’s true…sweat is always thicker than rainwater,’ Mani said.

‘I bought some pills for your mother,’ his wife said.

‘The oldie is dying anyway… don’t get her anything hereafter… get her here, burying her alive will not be an unfair riddance.’

Gusts carried the note Mani threw at his wife; she scrambled to grab it near the gates. He then handed a tenner to his daughter; she jumped with joy, kissed Meao, kissed Mani and dashed to join her mother as the rain resumed.

‘Still shilly-shallying? You guys piss me off. Take the body out of here and bury it inside your home,’ Mani said.

‘Why, why… we are okay… we just want a fresh grave… the build must be of good quality,’ said Rajan and handed a wad of notes to Mani.

‘Don’t you worry, master… that’s our workaday thing, I’ll give you a fresh one,’ Mani said pocketing the cash. ‘You’ve weathered the elements for quite a while now… let me get some tea for you.’

Meao wrung the wetness off her fur, spraying it on Rajan’s party, and scampered behind Mani.

The rain petered out to facilitate digging as Rajan and his kin sipped hot masala tea in the cold conditions. Halfway through their glasses, a nauseating stench hit them. They moved away and turned to see a skull being slipped into a gunny sack. Rajan frantically looked for Mani in vain. The diggers then pulled out one bone after another until they caught hold of ribs and vertebrae in one piece. They jubilantly flaunted it, holding it aloft as if it was a rare trophy. The skull and the bones weren’t dry; one could see rotting tissues still clinging.

Rajan sought stoppage; in response, they dug twice as fas. A while later, Mani synchronised his entry with the finishing stroke of spadework.

Rajan argued about the whole thing.

‘Push off with the body…’ Mani yelled.

‘I’ll call the police right away,’ Rajan shouted.

‘Don’t care a damn… don’t you know the rats lick my boots? Why are you so riled up? It’s just recycling people like you talk about all the time,’ Mani said.

‘Recycling? What sort of recycling?’ Rajan asked, exasperated.

‘Recycling the pits so that mother earth has space for other things; if we don’t, the whole of her would be littered with graves. And I sell loads of bones and remains to quacks, witches and even medical doctors who recycle them into drugs, ointments, eyes, teeth and umpteen awful things,’ Mani said. ‘Don’t fool around, get the body out of here… my guys are raring to thrash you.’

Mani was no pushover. Rajan felt it utterly unsuitable a matter to involve his contacts in the police department. Since he was already coming off like a fool and was anyway on Mani’s dirty tricks, Rajan pleaded.

Mani snapped his fingers to signal Rajan’s priest to initiate the rituals. He then asked his men to wrap up in no time.

As Rajan’s party was leaving, two short, pot-bellied constables cycled their way in and stopped at the grave Mani was sitting on, relishing his puffs.

‘So short that both must have been rejected during recruitment,’ Rajan said to his brothers, ’Hard cash must have made up for the shortfall.’

Leaning on a tombstone to balance, the constables grinned. Mani handed a few hundred-rupee notes to each and they cycled away, giggling at Rajan.

Eleven days later, Rajan and his kin were shocked to find a newer grave in the exact place where they had buried their brother’s body.

Mani waved towards a tomb few yards away and said, “Your grave is intact over there.”

They went through the rituals half-heartedly, not knowing whether it was their brother’s grave or someone else’s. They left resolving to shun the cemetery forever.

Mani heard them and told his men, ‘Many such resolutions have gone to the dogs…’