Picking up Ratna’s coffin was certainly a different experience. In Bengaluru you can buy a coffin on the side of the road. In this case it was a back alley off the Commercial-Street area which is famous for its little-hole-in-the-wall shops where you can bargain for everything from glass bangles to pure gold earrings, from one-piece bathing suits with long sleeves and pants that literally cover your calves to black lace G-strings the size of rubber bands!
Ratna was going to have a Catholic burial because when she arrived at Jyothi Seva Home she had already been baptized. Often accused of proselytizing and converting orphaned children, Sister Agata used to reply quite vehemently to whichever know-it-all happened to be attacking her. Once, she explained her position to me.
“Okay! Okay!” She was screaming in her native Polish, her blue eyes rolling behind large glasses, her plump face blushing with anger, the black wooden rosary beads around her ample waist swinging back and forth over her traditional grey wool habit, her matching head cover slipping off to one side.
“We do baptize the ones we find in the rubbish bins, the ones with no identity whatsoever. Is this a crime? I say, let these families come forward and tell us what religion their throw-away-babies are. We will gladly raise them in the religion of their birth. In fact, if the people who are so damned concerned about us raising some of our kids as Catholics want, they can come on over and adopt them. I say, come on over! You take care of them for the next 20 years. It’s okay with me! You are welcome!”
Rarely, though, some of the Jyothi Seva children did get parents who loved and cared for them. During the years that Ratna lived in the home, one Polish woman volunteer, who happened to be blind herself, got permission to adopt a blind baby. It was a very complicated procedure—partly because in India adoption requires that the child have two parents. Since Wanda, the adoptive mother was single, the first answer she got from the court was, “No.”
But, believe it or not, there is a little-used law in India which allows for a handicapped person to adopt a child. However, it still took a ton of prayers and the intervention of Mother Teresa, who sent many abandoned blind babies from Calcutta, now Kolkata, to the Jyothi Seva nuns, before Wanda could keep the child she had been taking care of since it was three weeks old. Meanwhile, finding homes for sighted orphan children, particularly girls, remains a national problem.
On a few occasions a blind baby would arrive with a family member and be legally handed over to the nuns with instructions indicating which faith the child was to be raised in. So at Jyothi Seva there were Hindu, Muslim, and Catholic children; and the non-Catholics were given regular instruction in their own religion, by qualified outside teachers.
But Ratna, having worn a Catholic body for 8 years meant that body could be buried at Holy Family Cemetery. The nuns did not want her body cremated, as is the general practice in over-crowded Bengaluru. For those of us attached to her physical presence, this meant there was more time to bid farewell, if you will. We could have a wake, a funeral Mass, and a burial ceremony. But we knew that Ratna, Holy Little Ratna, could never be disposed of.
Still dressed in my flaming red sari and purple blouse I set out to help with the many chores surrounding Ratna’s death. There was no time to change, practically no time to think. I had routinely engaged Kaleem, an auto rickshaw driver who I had known for years, to help me pick up the coffin that Sister Agata had ordered by phone in the morning. It was supposedly going to be ready at nine p.m. Kaleem was a genius when it came to locating the most-difficult-to-find addresses and then having a photographic memory of routes he had taken to get you there. So once visited, you could count on him to be able to take you back to any spot.
You said things like: Imitation alligator briefcase, or orange shoes with butterflies, and he remembered where you had purchased them; and in a flash he’d spin the rickshaw around and deliver you to the door of the exact shop you were hoping to find. One of his neighbors had a phone and whenever I was going to Bengaluru I would call the number Kaleem had given me and leave a pidgin-Hindi message. Puttaparthi Madam, bus standah, sevenah morningka! I was understood; and as sure as the sun rises, Kaleem would be waiting for me at Majestic, or at the Railway Station, depending on how I had come into the city.
What’s more, he had known the Jyothi Seva children for nearly as many years as I had, since he became my rickshaw driver shortly after I had met Sisters Agata and Adella one day on Mahatma Gandhi Road when I heard them speaking my mother tongue and I ran over to introduce myself. Kaleem loved the children and they loved him. The nuns adored him too and they counted on him to help them out during the days when I wasn’t using him to get around town. In fact, he was basically employed by a few special long-time customers, the Jyothi Seva nuns, and me.
At 38, he looked much older because of his many wrinkles and his bushy grey hair. But the perpetual smile on his face, due in part to his slightly bucked teeth, gave him a cheerful visage. He was polite, eager to share a joke and probably the most honest and hard-working man I have ever had the good fortune to meet. He was the only wage earner in a family of one son, two daughters and a wife. They lived in a tiny one-room, ground-floor flat in a row of such dwellings. The home was so clean it literally shone.
All Kaleem’s children were going to school, a fact that he was quite proud of because he paid the school fees out of his own earnings. His wife was a Christian who Kaleem, a Muslim, had happily married. Theirs was a non-traditional “love” marriage, and it had worked. Their affection for each other was obvious and to be in their company made you feel content.
The one window in their home was draped with a pale-blue satin fabric that shimmered like water. The same fabric acted as a curtain on the ever-open-to-the-street doorway. As poor as the family was, the members were always happy to share whatever they had with neighbors, friends and the many visitors who stopped by. Often Kaleem’s wife would cook mutton biriyani for me, and occasionally a most-delicious fish dish.
Therefore, Kaleem and I—though from two very different worlds, had found that we had two things, in common—mutual respect for each other and a desire to serve the Jyothi Seva children. So we were both heavy-hearted as we set out to pick up Ratna’s coffin. This time all we had to go by were the shop owner’s instructions given to Sister Agata over the telephone, and the address: Shed number six, behind the bicycle shop, three streets parallel behind Jewelry Street in back of the big masjid…..
………to be continued in next instalment of Terry’s Words.
No comments:
Post a Comment