It was a contest in aggressive obstinacy that Buchia sensed he was losing. Moreover, his nasal falsetto compared unfavourably with the other’s deep and resonant voice which lent him authority.
‘Well,’ said Buchia at last, ‘don’t you have any old coffin lying around?’
The caretaker shook his head.
‘The old ones are all underground with decaying skeletons in them. I do have a new one, which I was getting ready. I can let you have it if you want. But it’ll cost you eight hundred rupees.’
‘Eight hundred—’ Buchia was shocked. ‘That’s highway robbery! You see, now?’ Buchia appealed to his band of corpse bearers. ‘You see what this is all about? He wants to rob me! I’ve already given you two thousand!’
‘That’s for the use of the plot of land, for digging the grave and bending every rule for you. This is for the coffin. I’ll return nineteen hundred if you decide not to bury him here. . One hundred I keep for digging the grave. .’
Buchia had five young men behind him, but the caretaker was not intimidated in the slightest by their presence. He stood there rooted, fiercely refusing to budge, and Buchia glared at him.
It was then that Fali spoke, in the tone of a courteous and wise mediator:
‘Please sir, do not mind me if I make a suggestion. .’
The caretaker turned to look at him. Buchia stared at him suspiciously as well, almost certain now that Fali had ignored his cautionary warning about not tippling. But he looked sober; and Buchia was secretly glad for any help he could get in finding a way out of this impasse.
‘Sir, this gentleman — the deceased — is a respectable Christian, and we want him to have a proper Christian burial. But he has no money, and no family to provide for his coffin. If you would only allow us, my friends and I can knock together a coffin in no time. Some scraps of wood, a box of nails, a hammer. .’
The caretaker looked incredulous as he heard Fali’s inventory of his requirements. Meanwhile, Farokh whispered something urgently to Fali in Gujarati, and Fali replied in English,
‘Why, it’s only a box. We could easily—’
Now the caretaker interrupted, speaking harshly and contemptuously.
‘Don’t want you buggers messing around my workshop. .I can see how respectable you-all are, holding a funeral at two in the morning.’
‘There were complications. . You must believe us. The deceased is a sad, unfortunate person who has already suffered a great deal. . Let us not make things more unpleasant for him—’ said Fali.
But Buchia cut him short. Presumably tired and exasperated, he had decided it was time to take matters in hand and adopt the one tactic he found most effective in such situations: that is, to show rage. Or perhaps he did genuinely take offence:
‘Who’re you calling buggers, eh?’ suddenly raising his voice, he shrieked. ‘You bloody pimp! You swollen-headed greedy pig of a Gomes! You’ve been leading me on from yesterday. Haggling, haggling. . Every chance you get you want to squeeze out some more. You’re taking advantage of our difficulty. Even now at the last minute — I know what I’ll do. Give me back my money. Give me back my money! We’ll go find some other burial plot.’
‘You can have your money back at the gate,’ said the caretaker. ‘On your way out. First load the corpse back into the van.’
‘What!’ yelled Buchia, now really annoyed at being crossed. ‘I want it now, you understand? Then we’ll put the corpse back in. Right now! Hand it over, shorty!’
‘At the gate, I said. On your way out.’
‘When I say now, I mean NOW!’ screamed Buchia, like a madman, and lunged murderously at the caretaker.
Despite the brightness of the night, Buchia hadn’t noticed that the man he was attacking was standing in front of a freshly dug pit. The big-headed dwarf nimbly stepped aside at the very last moment, and Buchia would surely have crashed into Joseph Kanga’s intended grave but for a reflex split-second parrying on his part. Instead, he fell hard, sideways, against a stone; and while doing so, managed to grab the caretaker’s arm and pull him down as well. The latter wasn’t hurt, though. He quickly got back on his feet and dusted himself, while louring at the man sprawled at his feet in pure disgust.
But Buchia must have been in intense pain, for he started weeping. Not very loudly, he tried to suppress his sobs, yet he was loud enough for everyone to see that something had gone terribly wrong.
‘Be brave, sir, don’t cry,’ Fali consoled him. ‘At least you didn’t fall into the grave. Then we would have had to bury you here only. .with or without a coffin!’
But Buchia was in no mood for jokes. He wouldn’t even let the boys help him up. From the way he held himself, and gradually manipulated himself on to his haunches, it seemed like he had broken a bone, possibly his left collarbone. The pain must have been agonizing, but Buchia kept his presence of mind. Putting his right hand in his pocket he pulled out a bunch of notes and gave them to Farokh.
‘Count out eight hundred rupees and give them to him. Let’s finish what we came here to do.’
Next morning, when the mourners started arriving for Joseph’s funeral, and his body was missing, all hell broke loose. Buchia, whose injury had not been attended to all night, was trembling, and delirious with pain and fever. Many of the senior-most trustees including Aloo Pastakia, Tehmton Anklesaria, and the Punchayet’s Chief Executive, Burzhin Hirjibehdin, had decided to attend the funeral as a mark of respect and courtesy to Nariman Kanga. Coyaji was there, too.
Buchia was in no position to answer any questions. At night, he had stubbornly refused to seek admittance to any hospital after the last shovel of earth was heaped on Joseph’s coffin, saying he wanted to spend what remained of the night in his own quarters. But it had turned out to be the worst night of his life; for he could neither sleep nor ward off the fanciful torments his wakeful brain fabricated in anticipation of what the morning would bring. The pain must have been bad, too. Mercifully, during the outbreak of all the commotion over the missing body, Farokh and Jungoo quietly bundled him off to the Parsi General.
The redoubtable Nariman Kanga was completely distraught when he heard that his son’s body was missing — but only for a few minutes. He recovered quickly and phoned his friend Ignatius Strickham, now Commissioner of Police, who promised to immediately visit the Parsi General Hospital to cross-examine Buchia, and launch a probe into this devilish piece of trickery enacted no doubt by some extremist splinter group of the orthodoxy.
In the condition he was in, for Buchia to see the red-faced Englishman towering over his hospital bed firing questions at him must have put the fear of God in him, possibly precipitating his untimely end. He didn’t die of a broken collarbone, of course, but during that cold night when he had wrestled — or tried to wrestle — a dwarf to the ground, he had apparently caught a severe chill, that swiftly progressed into double pneumonia from which he never recovered.
On his deathbed, under the gimlet eye of Ignatius Strickham, Buchia confessed to kidnapping the corpse of Joseph Kanga and revealed the place of his interment. Shortly after, he died. Nariman Kanga dropped all charges against the miscreants who had kidnapped Joseph’s body. Nor did he desire that his son’s body be exhumed, or renew his efforts to arrange for him the Zoroastrian funeral he had so desired while still alive. Instead, he decided to let him lie in the selfsame grave undisturbed, and built a modest monument of flawless white marble in remembrance of his son at the site. It can still be seen at the Sewree Christian cemetery, smeared with dust and bird droppings, with its slightly cryptic but finely etched inscription still very legible: