Madras on My Mind: A City in Stories by Chitra Viraraghavan & Krishna Shastri

Author:Chitra Viraraghavan & Krishna Shastri
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2017-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

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V. Sudarshan

The next day four men came in the morning along with the sun with a rusting saw, a crooked machete and a blunt axe to cut down the tree so we could have our own wood to make a pyre to burn his body which lay outside and was beginning to go bad in the heat. Somebody sent for the vadiyaar and he came, twisted and bent and old. He stooped over the body and looked it all over and noticed the liquids oozing out of it. Somebody had stuffed cotton into the nostrils and it had turned red and yellow with blood and something else, and you could see the mucus whenever the flies got off. Flies were all over the body and covered the face like a noisy blanket. He was laid out on a bench thinner than his width under the awning of one of my mother’s tired saris that flapped now and again in the desultory breeze, and his one arm kept falling onto the ground, and nobody was keen to put it on his chest and cross the arms like they used to in Egypt, and so I had to do it, thinking, Why don’t stiffs stay stiff? Once his whole body threatened to fall off the bench and in that miserable upheaval I fought clumsily so as to put some order into his agitated repose, and in the process his veshti started coming off. It was then I noticed he had finally lost all control. Even his sphincter had loosened up. I can’t say I was embarrassed but when I re-knotted the veshti I did so surreptitiously for I could not bear the smile he now had on his face, his mouth crinkling at their lewd corners with drying blood that already looked like ash. Grappling with his weight, and now that smile convinced me and I told myself: So long he was pretending to be alive, now he pretends to be dead. The vadiyaar was examining him with a pathological interest, uttering guttural shlokas, shuffling around the body in his bare feet where his nails curved like sharp black talons, varicose veins running down his calves like thin green snakes, his head cocked to one side and then the other trying to peer through the mists in his opaque eyes like some blind bird of prey examining carrion. Through the crackle and hiss of the radio somebody was singing a convoluted and wordless song already lost in its own trackless mazes, and the vadiyaar called to turn the radio up and somebody did. He listened for a while and declared, Thyagaraja kirtana, Todi ragam. He continued his examination until they interrupted the song again with another curfew announcement. Irritated, the vadiyaar looked up at the climbing sun and said, Go get some ice or your father will burst.

The shops were closed because of the curfew and I had to go from house to house, asking for ice from refrigerators and somehow, because

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