When writers borrow from the verisimilitude of historical fact to make a case for a marginalised social reality, they begin with the advantage of a harmonious bone structure that they merely need to flesh out. Cyrus Mistry was handed a true romantic drama when, while researching the Parsi khandia (corpse bearer) community, he was told the story of Mehli Cooper. Cooper was a Parsi dock worker in the 1940s who fell in love with a khandia’s daughter and was forced by her father (out of familial vendetta) to give up his job and become a corpse bearer himself.
Like many Hindu subcastes assigned the hereditary profession of dealing with dead bodies, the khandias too are deemed “untouchable” by the rest of the Parsi community. In pre-Independent India, they often had to walk the length of Bombay to carry a corpse to the doongerwaadi on Malabar Hill, and then wash and prepare the body for the last rites. The employment conditions the khandias were forced into were oppressive, and in 1942 Mehli is supposed to have organised the first and only strike of the khandias. According to Mehli’s son, the authorities quickly suppressed the strikers and, after a suspension, his father was left “entirely submissive and quiescent”.
This is a compelling story; a man who transcends the class-and-caste barrier out of the passion of love, and attempts in his zeal to instigate change and rebellion, only to be put back in his adopted place by a bigoted and oppressive society. But by fictionalising his portrait, Mr Mistry commits the deadly sin of producing a novel that is more dull and tone-deaf than a biography. Instead of a blue-collar dock worker, we are given Phiroze Elchidana, the indolent younger son of a Parsi priest who bunks exams and loafs around till he meets and marries his estranged first cousin Sepideh. Mr Mistry tries to amplify the social ostracism his protagonist faces through an estrangement from his devout temple-tender father, and provides Phiroze further cause for angst by killing off Sepideh via snakebite, leaving behind a baby daughter.
If we were allowed to discover the tribulations of becoming a khandia along with Phiroze, and empathise with him as he grew from the grief of familial loss, this character could have at the very least connected the narrative with the community. Instead, Mr Mistry chooses to introduce the salient tragedies within the first 10 pages, and then spend the rest of the book shifting back and forth through Phiroze’s maudlin, self-pitying memories of underappreciated childhood and the trials of widowerhood. The khandia community is used as window-dressing to highlight how special and transcendental Phiroze’s sadness is, with random exoticised references to the work — from rubbing bull’s urine on a corpse in the beginning to a farcical grave-theft towards the end.
The most alienating and inauthentic aspect of the book is Phiroze’s self-absorbed, ponderous and hyperbolic first-person narration, the tedium of which kills any sense of empathy with his situation. You might be a socially ostracised grieving single father with a rotten job, but telling your story like a pompous windbag does little to widen your experiences to symbolise the grave social and political ills that underpin your existence. Instead, Phiroze comes across as an unintentionally unreliable narrator, whose melodramatic proclamations (complete parental estrangement! Total societal isolation!) fizzle into pragmatic compromises made by the people around him, none of which he seems to have the capacity to appreciate.
A skilled writer can make even a dislikeable character interesting, but Mr Mistry relies on worn-out clichés to populate Phiroze’s narrative. Even the love of his life shows up like some personality-less nymphet frolicking in the lush forests that secrete the Towers of Silence. She beguiles a 17-year-old Phiroze into premarital lovemaking, but entire pages whine by without a peep from the woman about whose love he is rhapsodising. There’s also a villainous predatory homosexual, since Mr Mistry seems to be under the illusion that we queer folk haven’t had enough of that stock trope.
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The most tedious sign of Mr Mistry’s lack of craft is his tin ear for voice and argot. Considering he is an award-winning playwright, you would think he knows the importance of code-switching vocabulary and idiom as a way to reinforce class, caste and other identities. Instead, Mr Mistry’s khandias flip-flop between awkwardly italicised Gujarati and Parsi phrases and implausible English puns of the word “suspended”. We are supposed to believe that Phiroze is scribbling into a notebook a narrative peppered with words like “elegiac” and “consanguinity” on the one hand and colloquialism such as “So what’s your fuckin’ fuss about” on the other, and that his internal landscape manifests in 21-century pop psychology insights about “the way our brains are wired”. Witness this rare verbalisation from Sepidah, a poor, lower-caste woman in the 1940s. “It’s such a bloody joke.[..] Why don’t you guys get together, do something about it? Protest?” Like, dude, totally. Stick it to the Man, you know?
In terms of linguistic dexterity, Cyrus Mistry’s prose seems to fumble around like an uncomfortable outsider poking prissily with knife and fork when he should be nimbly wielding fingers. The result is a badly digested story that lets down the facts he had to feast on.
CHRONICLE OF A CORPSE BEARER
Cyrus Mistry
Aleph/Rupa; 224 pages; Rs 495