Gods and Soldiers (48 page)

Toloki decides that he will rush to the home of the deceased, wash his hands and disappear from the scene. He will have nothing to do with people who have treated him with so much disrespect. Hungry as he is, he will not partake of their food either. If he did not have so much reverence for funeral rituals, he would go home right away, without even washing his hands. People give way as he works his way to the head of the procession, which is already outside the gates of the cemetery. By the time he gets to the street, the procession has come to a standstill, and people are impatiently complaining about the heat. Others attempt to sing hymns, but their voices have gone hoarse from the graveyard feud. Those who can still come up with a feeble note or two are overwhelmed by blaring hooters in the street.

These come from a wedding procession of many cars and buses, all embellished with colourful ribbons and balloons. They are going in the opposite direction, and will not give way to the funeral procession. The funeral procession will not give way either, since out of respect for the dead, it is customary for funeral processions to have the right of way. The wedding party is enjoying the stalemate, and they sing at the top of their voices. Their heads, and sometimes half their colour-fully clad bodies, appear from the windows of the cars and buses, and they beat the sides of these vehicles with their hands, creating a tumultuous rhythm. The driver of the convertible car in front, which carries the bride and the bridegroom, argues with the driver of the van which carries the mother of the dead child.

“You must give way!”

“But we are a funeral procession.”

“We are a procession of beautiful people, and many posh cars and buses, while yours is an old skorokoro of a van, and hundreds of ragged souls on foot.”

“It is not my fault that these people are poor.”

No one will budge. There might be a violent confrontation here, since the driver of the convertible, who is a huge fellow, is beginning to call certain parts of the van driver's mother that the slight van driver never even knew she had. Toloki walks to the convertible. He greets the bridal couple, and is about to give them a stern lecture on funeral etiquette, when the ill-humoured driver of the convertible suddenly decides that he will give way after all. He signals to the other drivers in the wedding procession to park on the side of the road so that the funeral procession can pass peacefully. Toloki smiles. He has this effect on people sometimes. Perhaps it is his fragrance. And the black costume and top hat of his profession. It cannot be that the driver of the convertible is intimidated by his size. He is quite short, in fact. But what he lacks in height he makes up for in breadth. He is quite stockily built, and his shoulders are wide enough to comfortably bear all the woes of bereavement. His yellow face is broad and almost flat, his pointed nose hovers over and dwarfs his small child-like mouth. His eyes are small, and have a permanently sorrowful look that is most effective when he musters up his famous graveside manner. Above his eyes rest thick eyebrows, like the hairy thithiboya caterpillar.

The driver of the van approaches him. “The mother of the child we have just buried wants to thank you for what you have done.”

So he goes to the van, and his suspicion is confirmed. He has no doubt that this is Noria, the beautiful stuck-up bitch from his village. She has grown old now, and has become a little haggard. But she is still beautiful. And she too recognizes him.

“Toloki! You are Toloki from the village!”

“Yes, Noria, it is me. I wanted to see you at the graveyard, but they wouldn't let me get near you.”

“You can't blame them, Toloki. Ever since my son died, all sorts of people have been pestering us.”

Then she invites him to come and see her at the squatter camp when the sad business of the funeral is over. Toloki walks away with a happy bounce in his feet. He will wash his hands and leave quickly. He will see Noria tomorrow, or maybe the day after. My God! Noria! He has not seen her for almost twenty years! How old would she be now? She must be thirty-five. He remembers that he was three years older. A hard life has taken its toll since she left the village. But her beauty still remains.

It is not different, really, here in the city. Just like back in the village, we live our lives together as one. We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people's closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, “They say it once happened . . . ,” we are the “they.” No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems it fit. We would not be needing to justify the communal voice that tells the story if you had not wondered how we became so omniscient in the affairs of Toloki and Noria.

Both Toloki and Noria left the village at different times, and were bent on losing themselves in the city. They had no desire to find one another, and as a result forgot about the existence of each other. But we never stopped following their disparate and meagre lives. We were happy when they were happy. And felt the pain when they were hurt. In the beginning, there were times when we tried to get them together, like homeboys and homegirls sometimes get together and talk about home, and celebrate events of common interest such as births, marriages, ancestral feasts, and deaths. But our efforts disappeared like sweat in the hair of a dog. Indeed, even in his capacity as Professional Mourner, Toloki avoided funerals that involved homeboys and homegirls. Since his bad experience with Nefolovhodwe, the furniture-maker who made it good in the city, and now pretends that he does not know the people from the village anymore, Toloki has never wanted to have anything to do with any of the people of his village who have settled in the city. He is not the type who forgives and forgets, even though his trouble with Nefolovhodwe happened many years ago, during his very early days in the city. Noria, on the other hand, has always lived in communion with her fellow-villagers, and with other people from all parts of the country who have settled in the squatter camp. So, we put the idea of getting Noria and Toloki together out of our minds until today, at the funeral of this our little brother.

The distant bells of the cathedral toll “Silent Night,” as Toloki prepares to sleep for the night. The strikes are slow and painful, not like the cheery carol that the angel-faced choirboys sang that very morning on the steps of the church. He was on his way to the funeral, and he stopped and listened. Christmas Day has no real significance for him. Nor has the church. But he enjoys carols, and always sings along whenever he hears them. He could not stop for long, since he did not know what time the funeral would be. He was not involved in this funeral in his professional capacity. In fact, until that morning he was not aware that there was going to be a funeral on this day. It is not usual to hold funerals on Christmas Day. He thought he was doomed to sit in utter boredom at his quayside resting place for the entire day, sewing his costume and putting his things in readiness for the busy coming days in the cemeteries. Then he heard two dockworkers talk of the strange things that were happening these days, of this woman whose child was killed, and who insisted that he must be buried on Christmas Day or not at all. Toloki there and then decided to seize the opportunity, and spend a fulfilling day at the graveside. He did not have an inkling that a home-girl was involved in this funeral, otherwise we know that he would not have gone. But after all, he was happy to see Noria.

At regular intervals of one hour the bell tolls “Silent Night.” At the window of the tower, perhaps in the belfry, Toloki can see a Christmas tree with twinkling lights of red, green, blue, yellow, and white. The cathedral is a few streets away from his headquarters, as he calls the quayside shelter and waiting-room where he spends his nights. But since it is on a hill, he can enjoy the beauty of the lights, and tonight the bells will lull him to a blissful sleep with carols. But first he must prepare some food for himself. From the shopping trolley where he keeps all his worldly possessions, he takes out a packet containing his favourite food, a delicacy of Swiss cake relished with green onions. He pushes the trolley into one corner, where he knows it is always safe. Though his headquarters are a public place, no one ever touches his things, even when he has gone to funerals and left them unattended for the whole day. Everyone knows that the trolley belongs to Toloki who sleeps at the quayside, come rain or shine. No one ever bothers him and his property. Not the cleaners, nor the police. Not even the rowdy sailors from cargo ships and the prostitutes who come to entertain them.

He takes a bite first of the cake, and then of the green onions. His eyes roll in a dance of pleasure. He chews slowly, taking his time to savour each mouthful. Quite a tingling taste, this delicacy has. It is as though the food is singing in his mouth. Quite unlike the beans that he ate this morning. Those who have seen him eat this food have commented that it is an unusual combination. All the more reason to like it. Although it is of his own composition, it gives him an aura of austerity that he associates with monks of eastern religions that he has heard sailors talk about.

Sometimes he transports himself through the pages of a pamphlet that he got from a pink-robed devotee who disembarked from a boat two summers ago, and walks the same ground that these holy men walk. He has a singularly searing fascination with the lives of these oriental monks. It is the thirst of a man for a concoction that he has never tasted, that he has only heard wise men describe. He sees himself in the dazzling light of the aghori sadhu, held in the same awesome veneration that the devout Hindus show the votaries. He spends his sparse existence on the cremation ground, cooks his food on the fires of a funeral pyre, and feeds on human waste and human corpses. He drinks his own urine to quench his thirst. The only detail missing is a mendicant's bowl made from a human skull, for he shuns the collection of alms. Votary or no votary, he will not collect alms. It is one tradition of the sacred order that he will break, in spite of the recognition of the shamanistic elements of almstaking. When he comes back to a life that is far from the glamour of the aghori sadhu in those distant lands, he is glad that even in his dreams he is strong enough not to take a cent he has not worked for. In his profession, people are paid for an essential service that they render in the community. His service is to mourn for the dead.

He curls up on the bench and sleeps in the foetal position that is customary of his village. Although he has been in the city for all these years, he has not changed his sleeping position, unlike people like Nefolovhodwe who have taken so much to the ways of the city that they sleep in all sorts of city positions. In all fairness, he has not seen Nefolovhodwe in his sleep, but a man like him who pretends not to know people from his village anymore now that he is one of the wealthiest men in the land is bound to sleep with his legs straight or in some such absurd position. Unlike the village people, Toloki does not sleep naked, however, because his headquarters are a public place. He sleeps fully-dressed, either in his professional costume or in the only other set of clothes that he owns, which he calls home clothes. Since his mourning costume is getting old, and the chances of his getting another one like it are very slim indeed, he often changes into his home clothes in the public toilet as soon as he arrives back from the funerals. He would like to save his costume, so that it lasts for many more years of mourning. This is December, and the weather is very hot and clammy. So he does not cover himself with a blanket. For the winters, when the icy winds blow from the ocean, he is armed with a thick blanket that he keeps in his shopping trolley.

Sleep does not come easily, even with the hourly lullaby of the bells. He thinks of the events of today. Of course he is piqued. What self-respecting Professional Mourner wouldn't be? Why did they treat him so at this boy's funeral? He is well-known and well-liked all over the city cemeteries. Only yesterday he surpassed himself at the funeral of a man who died a mysterious death.