As we drove toward the surreal location of the coffin maker’s shop, Kaleem reminisced about how Ratna used to cling onto him with her stiff, stick-like arms when he carried her to the many events we attended with the Jyothi Seva children. He recounted how she would nestle her head up under his chin. In fact, the last time he had carried her was only four months ago, he said, when the children went by van and by his rickshaw to the Little Sisters of the Poor Old Age Home in Lingarajpuram. All dressed up in their costumes, they were going to present a Christmas pageant, Joy to the World, a play that I had written just for them.
“Do you remember, Madam?” Kaleem wanted to know. I would never forget. And he knew it. On that day, Holy Little Ratna played the part of an angel, dressed in white. Not surprisingly, perhaps, she stole the show.
I felt confident that our chore would be completed by nine. Kaleem, though he had never been to the coffin shop before, and was going on Sister Agata’s verbal instructions and his wondrous intuition, managed to maneuver the maze-like pathways, just wide enough for a rickshaw, as if they were speedway roads. The streets and alley ways surrounding us were flooded with people, other rickshaws, motor bikes, and as we approached the address, we saw that there were many coffin shops.
Nevertheless, Kaleem found the exact place where Ratna’s coffin was waiting. When we drove up there were several Muslim coffin makers busy sawing and planing wood. They all wore crocheted white skull caps, not unlike Jewish men’s yarmulkes. I got down out of the rickshaw and stood in the middle of the actually pleasant atmosphere, looking around for a child-size coffin. Obviously, everyone there knew what I had come for because Ratna’s coffin appeared quite soon, brought out from around the back of a tin-roofed shed. The child-size casket looked like a giant white jewelry box with a cross, painted gold, on the lid.
Earlier that same night Sister Agata and I had gone shopping for Ratna’s burial dress. I had been standing in front of the Kamat Hotel waiting for her to arrive, watching the crowds roll by like waves, and wondering how my once-luxurious, suburban-housewife-writer life had been pulled out from under me, like an expensive Kashmiri rug, and how I was now standing on a dirty sidewalk being washed in the toxic smoke of hundreds of vehicles. Where had I come from and where was I going?
Suddenly, Sister, still quite tom-boyish at 42, arrived on her motorcycle, a common mode of transport in the over-crowded city, and mercifully my musings were interrupted. I never liked to think too deeply about what I was doing with my life. For whenever I did, I got very depressed and went into fits of self condemnation. After she parked her Suzuki, Sister and I, without so much as a greeting, plunged into the ocean of humanity and wrestled our way into each children’s clothing store we encountered. We had to get the business of the death dress over as perfunctorily as possible.
Few shops had white satin dresses, what the nuns had wanted. Fewer had them in Ratna’s nearly toddler size. Then we saw it! Perfect! But the price, especially created for our foreign faces, was totally inappropriate—800 rupees.
The child is only going to wear this dress once, I negotiated.
“But later, another child can wear it, Madam.” The shopkeeper made a reasonable bid. “Perhaps I can give you a discount,” he said sensing my determination to get the dress, but not at his inflated price.
This dress is for a dead child to wear, I said loudly in the very crowded shop. She’s going to take this dress to the grave! She’s going to be buried in it the day after tomorrow! It’s not going to be worn by anyone else but her! It will be eaten by worms!
In desperation, the storekeeper, stuffed the dress into a bag and took the 200 rupees I handed him with no complaint. He was obviously eager to have us off the premises. Death talk is not appropriate in a children’s clothing shop. Nevertheless, Sister Agata was thrilled with my bargain-by-intimidation skill.
When we parted, she handed me an envelope with 4,000 rupees in it, the price that she felt Jyothi Seva could afford to pay for Ratna’s elegant coffin, and what the shop owner had estimated. But I knew that this amount would involve great future sacrifice for the Jyothi Seva Home and cut backs on the little things that were already too little—like sweet biscuits and the occasional ice cream that the kids enjoyed so much.
At the coffin shop I was not in the mood to try and skin off any rupees for what I knew would be a fair amount. Nonetheless, I asked somberly: How much?
“Four thousand,” the owner said gently. “That is the correct price.”
No problem, I said, opening my purse to remove the envelope that sister Agata had given me with the money in it. But then I was seized with the knowingness that the Jyothi Seva kids would probably have to go without ice cream for months, not weeks! Simultaneously, I was seized with my own inadequacy. I could barely manage to keep a roof over my hard-working head; and every extra cent I got I was continuously tossing at the poor and the needy, acting like a big benefactor, and now when I really could have used some cash to purchase the coffin on my own so that the kids could go on eating ice cream and sweet biscuits I didn’t have jack! So, I did the next best thing to producing the money out of my own cache, I drew on my negotiating skills which were midway between my heart and my gut. At the heart was the courage to make a fool of myself and at the gut was the fear that I was doing just that.
I reached into my purse. I produced the envelope. I opened it up and took out 2,500 rupees. I handed them to the shop owner. He stared at me. I stared back. He looked confused. I didn’t dare to blink. Inside myself, I said a silent prayer. Please, God, help the Jyothi Seva kids. Finally, the owner understood what I was trying to do. He took the 2,500 and didn’t say a word. Kaleem picked up the coffin that suddenly didn’t look nearly as tiny as Ratna and he carried it to the rickshaw. I followed a few steps behind.
And if it weren’t so dark in the coffin-making yard, squat in the rush and crush of the Commercial-Street area, and if there wasn’t a slow-moving puff of cloud covering the Muslim sliver moon, maybe I could have been certain that the eyes of the coffin makers, the eyes of the shop owner, and the eyes of Kaleem were flooded with tears. As it turned out, I could never be sure.
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