Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer by Cyrus Mistry

Previously published in Dawn’s Books & Authors.

It’s always amazed me that a culture as rich, as ancient as that of the Zoroastrian’s does not have much fiction written about it. Just the fact that it is probably the oldest of all known revealed religions, the first known monotheistic religion; a culture that has yielded empires as influential as the Achaemenid and Sassanid and yet dwindled into a worldwide community of less than two hundred thousand people means that it must have a million stories to tell. And yet only a dozen or so have been told - Bapsi Sidhwa’s sublime The Crow Eaters being the first and best known but with Zoroastrian writers such as Rohington Mistry, Thrity Umrigar and Firdaus Kanga taking up the mantle after Sidhwa. Yet there remain so many stories not told. Luckily, Indian playwright and journalist Cyrus Mistry has chosen to tell one of these stories in his new novel Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer, which began life as a proposal for a Channel 4 documentary and is now a novel about the khandhia community of Parsi corpse bearers in pre-partition India. 

Corpse Bearer is narrated by Phiroze Elchidana, the son of a respected priest who has made the shocking decision to live as a khandhia, knowing that he would be a part of a sub-community who are treated poorly and with disdain. Considered the untouchables of the Parsi community, the khandhia are considered so because of their contact with the dead - dead flesh being considered ‘unclean’ within the Zoroastrian faith. As the son of a priest who chose this lifestyle, Phiroze is able to train as a nussesalar, a ‘strange word from the ancient Avestan [meaning] Lord of the Unclean’, but he is also still very much a corpse bearer, living in the designated compound of the grounds surrounding the Towers of Silence with other members of the khandhia community who spend long hours traveling by foot to collect corpses from various parts of the city and to prepare them for the funeral and their final journey into the Towers. This is not a life Phiroze was raised for. As a traditionally hereditary profession, this is not a life anyone would choose - and yet Phiroze does. Why? For love of course. 

Phiroze willingly gives up the respect his family earns to marry and live with Sepideh, the daughter of a corpse bearer. That Sepideh dies a few short years after their marriage is made clear from the very start of Corpse Bearer, and Phiroze’s memories of her and of their love are all that are available to the reader, with Sepideh now barely lingering in the narrative. Phiroze’s entire life may have been changed by his love for her, and the sacrifices he has made for his love, but the fact that this love never manages to lift off the pages entirely is what makes the story completely tragic: ‘even in dreams I don’t see her so often’, says Phiroze. Their love is one that emerges suddenly, in the ‘lush arboreal kingdom’  of the Towers where Phiroze wanders for hours, ‘among its gardens, orchards and corpses’, but one that ends just as suddenly, existing entirely in the transient dream-like Eden, which includes, in fact, a snake that destroys their lives. 

Here is a story told by an odd, self conscious and sometimes stilted narrator who often reminds his audience that he isn’t the smartest person, that his family would be ‘continually watching for further signs of [his] dull-wittedness’, and yet here is a story told by a narrator who is quite pedantic in the language he uses. Phiroze is not an easy protagonist to relate to, his young life spent in the rooms connected to the fire temple where ‘everything was sanctified and respect-worthy. No room here for fatuity, or impiety’. Yet for all the strange distance that exists between reader and narrator, Mistry uses Phiroze well - the story he is telling here is not just of one man, but that of the entire community and its dependance on the corpse bearers as well as ‘ the ostracisation and segregation of the khandhias, the pseudo-scientific reasons and justifications for that’, as Mistry recently told The Hindu in an interview. 

But Phiroze - and Corpse Bearer itself - are both surprising. Mistry is able to wind together Gandhi’s movement for independence alongside that of the khandhia community, who are made to work relentlessly for not much more than the promise that those who perform this ‘noble service’ will forever escape ‘the cycle of rebirth, decrepitude and death’. Phiroze leads the khandias in what Mistry writes of as the only khandhia strike ever heard of, with the corpse bearers demanding better working conditions and compensation. It is quite a revelation when a character considered ‘a little backward, if not actually feeble-minded’ as a child grows to be a man who can bring an entire wealthy, powerful community to its very knees. 

Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer is not a perfect book, but it is an important one. Mistry uses Phiroze to tell the stories of Parsi priests in their fire temples, of the khandhias living near the Tower of Silence, of the impact of the Parsi community on pre-partition Bombay; of family, of love, loss and prejudice strong enough to ruin lives. Perhaps there is a little too much telling and not enough showing in Mistry’s narrative, but when the telling is about a community so richly, rhythmically imbedded in South Asia’s culture, it is, nonetheless, desperately needed.