Avant-Pop Literary Magazine

Excerpt: The Funeral by @amaranthinepoetry

Dayal Punjabi is back here with an excerpt from his latest novel, The Inherited Custody. If you enjoy what you see, make sure you go over to his profile and read the novel! amaranthinepoetry

He laid there, lifeless and delicately, crisply and finished- gone, gone.

A special coffin was made for his unusual size, to fit his uncooperative body into the wooden, cheap and ragged box. The old church stayed empty, almost- for the father in his pale white robes, so much so that it pricked the eyes, and slashed the room into two, kept walking by. He'd started by saying prayers for the body, clearly uninterested, standing with eyes closed right against the heavy coffin, his back to the face of Christ screwed to the Cross- seemingly tired, too. After he was done with the prayers, he kept walking around, peeping through the doors of his office- or whatever that room was, to check if Rustom had left already.

But Rustom Irani sat there, unknowingly, really dumbing over what he was really doing at an almost empty funeral. He thought, for sometime, and then forgot what he was thinking, already looking around, again dumbly trying to figure out this place. It was an old building. But painted brand new from the inside, a new and clean carpet rested in the middle of two large rows of bright mahogany benches, leading to the coffin- but in actuality to all that stood behind it, intact. Most of the place was red, brownish, dark but brighter than just bright.

There were statues of many, many women, angels, he was told. But what was most visible were the same but differently sized crosses with Jesus on them: on both sides of the coffin, the walls on all sides, one on the veranda outside, one behind the church building, one on the top of that building, and more, more than he actually wanted to know. What next made him look and not look away, were the very long ceiling fans, all of them dangling off the roof, spinning almost impossibly slow.

Rustom sighed, looked down at his sonata watch, and then looked back at the newly made, old looking, long wooden box. The man inside it- Charles Laurent - laid there with a dried face, wrinkled, sucked in, like that of a wet thumb. Dry, thin layers of the first skin were peeling off, scratchy. He looked pale, obviously paler than already how white he was, chalk-white. French, he was, but where exactly from, nobody knew, not even Rustom.

It was at the early hours of the day, the sun emerging as a villain in disguise, a bright divine pearl, the ball of everything that screamed day when Rustom found out about Charle's dead body floating in the very small, non-habitable lake in the lowland that steeped behind his cafè.
It was his servant that first saw it, while going to fill the pot full of heavy milk to make their signature irani chai. But what he saw made him stop and stare at first, wasting minutes of his life, and then very slowly inching closer to take a better look, making out that it was a man's body lying there. He then dropped the tin pot and let out a scream, but it came out in growing fragments of sounds of confused distress. And then, stepping away from that trickle of the water, he ran to the shop, the loud clanging of the now dropped pot clearly echoing through the quiet morning, making a bunch of crows fly. Tank-Tonk-Tonk-To.

"Rustom ji!" His servant had screamed, his face both distressed and horrified, one that said he had never seen a lifeless body, that once had life. "Die! He die! There, behind the shop, Rustomji! White man, white-white!" And Rustom followed the servant, shocked more than anything, leaving his cafeteria open, unthinkably, his slippers tapping against the stony, edgy, blithering tough ground, dodging pools of muddy water from the early monsoon that year.

The church had paid for the funeral, if that was one to be considered. It mostly seemed like they paid for the coffin to be made, the cheapest one of course; they could barely fix how rusty and old their building looked from the outside. The new painting happened as a blessing when some upper-middle class family decided to donate the church for their services.

"What a tragedy! Tragedy, I say!" The father said, snapping Rustom out of whatever he was thinking then, making him notice that the father was now striding slowly (because he was godly, allegedly) towards him, showing fake distress (unlike his servant). "Your friend, eh? Was he your friend?"

Rustom said nothing but shook his head. Yes. He couldn't say no. And of course, he couldn't just ignore, now could he? It was not polite, never polite to ignore.

"Sad, sad!" The father replied to that, with so much pitch, if there were anyone else here, they'd have laughed their heart out. "Nobody came for this, huh? Only you, true friend. But don't worry at all! He's happy now, happier! He's with God, and God always takes care of his children, he's home," he said clearly, stressing the last word.

Rustom felt the last word directed at him, pointily, violently indicating him to go, and not waste anymore time and let the people there bury the body already. And he didn't oppose. He got up from there, looking at his watch again. He picked up his thin, very neatly pressed sleeveless jacket of deep gray and stood. From the very tip of the corner of his eye, he made out that the father smirked a little.

He walked then, towards the dead body, looking at the almost unrecognizable man he once knew. A friend- he could say, a listener, a customer. While he looked at the very bony structure with flowers in it's bony hands clasped one over the other, his eyes caught something beside the face. It was a dragonfly, not as dead as Charles, but walked dizzily, faintly, of course silently, making its way on the face, and settling on the nose, just standing, staring. Rustom looked away then and saw some candles bent while standing on the altar, melting minute-by-minute, lit by the people who made it before him for prayer or whatever they wanted to do here. He went on and burnt the tip of a votive candle and turned around.

It was the first time, ever since he discovered the death of this man- Charles again, that Rustom was dawned with the fact that he was dead. Dead. It was his funeral that had killed him, suffocated him- like he must've in that trickle of a lake, pool, whatever one would call it.

He walked out of the church without looking back at all; not wanting to look for some reason. His attention was then grabbed by something on the right of the veranda, and he noticed that it was a silent graveyard. There were a couple of areas that had their insides out, the grass not as rooted, and then there were dug graves with thin, cement crosses sticking out- four to be precise; only one of them black in color and the rest were white. He looked there, a crow letting down a splatter of brown and white on one of those graves, a gulmohar covering them against the sun, partly burned already.

A bee laid dead on the black, metal gate.