Not Mum's Jaw By FATIMA NORONHA
Waves of heat, along with the Angelus peal, rolled over us, but no one stopped to pray. Namdev and Kistu wanted to finish the job by lunchtime. So did I. Sweat dripped off their chins. Their shorts covered with red dust, they shovelled out heap upon heap of loam. I coveted that mud, made of the goodness of human bodies. My chikku saplings longed for compost like that. One of the handles of Dad's coffin slid down the pile. I picked it up. It was made from a biscuit tin. The other handles appeared in turn. Nothing else showed there had been a coffin. I stood at the crater's edge, waiting. The diggers worked gently now, lifting off shallow layers of soft soil. When they found the remains, they brushed away the clods with their bare hands. The skeleton in the blue-black suit lay as the body had lain twelve years earlier, precisely the way Dad used to sleep. That suit -- he wore it to my wedding, to my middle sister's wedding in this very church, to my mother's funeral, and, shortly before he died, to my little sister's wedding. He wore the same dark tie, too, and I would not be surprised if it was the same white shirt every time. Whatever Dad could spare he gave to someone else. "Do you want the skull?" asked Namdev, senior grave-digger at Saint Andrew's. "Yes," I said. "Is there water in that tap to wash the bones?" "No, bai, the tap stops by mid-morning. There is water in the open tank." They did their work, moving the parts that had long been still. Gone was the mirage of a complete body. Shreds of blue-black fabric mingled with russet loam. The skeleton, now visible, was only the big sections really, no carpals, metacarpals and phalanges. Kistu shook the skull free, blew on it, and flicked a crust off the forehead. Bar me, no one ever presumed to flick a particle off my father's sleeve in his day. Within minutes Kistu handed me the perfect skull and three long bones. He gathered the rest in his aluminium basin, which he emptied into the open ossuary -- the Ezekiel Corner -- at the edge of the cemetery. Waiting for him to return, Namdev lit his beedi and sat smoking on the nearest marble slab. "Now you have to find my mother's bones. They were dug up on my father's funeral morning and buried in a suitcase at the head of his coffin." "It's a wonder you knew where to look for your father," he said. "Even the headstone's been stolen. There's nothing to show it's a grave at all." "Oh, I knew it was near the dentist's fancy vault over here." In my youth I knew the dentist well enough, mildness itself when you met him in the street, but a terror with the forceps. We preferred to go to his rival, Muhammad Ali, despite the knock-out name. How often is a book like its cover? Namdev was right about our family sepulchre. Archeologists would probably not have found it. When Mum died, there was only standing room among the regular rows, so her resting place was dug in the odd space between the last row and the whitewashed cemetery wall. Four years later, in a thunderstorm, Dad's coffin was lowered into the same grave. My sisters, not I, kept track of the spot. On All Souls' Day each year they covered the rectangle with marigold petals. They lit candles and said a prayer. Being a vegetarian, I have always taken a detached view of mortal remains. Maybe that is why it fell to me to oversee the exhumation of our parents' bones, to transfer them to a niche in the graveyard wall. It was well past midday. The workers had begun to lose patience. They had to be careful, though, not to break any vestige of my mother's bones. "Nothing here, bai," Namdev declared after a while. "Arrey, dig deeper," I urged. Kistu's shovel clinked against something. He bent down and sifted the mud through his fingers. He held his trophy aloft. "Jawbone!" said Namdev, his own jaw slack. His mate looked closely at it and gasped. He quickly handed it to me. "This isn't my mother's jaw." Kistu may have thought I was scolding him. He said, "Bai, there is nothing else left." I sat heavily on the dentist's tomb. True, it was a long time since I had seen my pretty mother, but I was sure the object in my hand bore no resemblance to her petite, hyperactive jaw. It looked, as she herself would have said, like the jawbone of an ass. "I have to go and sort this out. Please wash those three bones, Namdev, and wrap them in this cloth." I poked around in my bag. "No one will rob them from the open niche, will they?" "Na, bai." "Then keep them there. I'll bring the mason's boy tomorrow to fix the slab. Thank you both. Please take this." They wiped their hands on their shorts, and accepted their wages. I stomped up to the parish office. "Where's Father?" I asked the dormouse hunched over his empty teacup. "The parish priest is out," he drawled. He looked up at my face and hastened to add, "But you may meet Father Nascimento, if you wish." That was a stroke of luck. Padre Nascimento had at his fingertips the four hundred and forty years of Saint Andrew's Church and of our town of Vasco da Gama, once a jewel in Goa's crown. The vicar's audience hall was empty. I walked across to his antique desk and deposited the muddy jawbone on it. Padre Nascimento walked in with a stoop more of courtesy than age. "Good afternoon, Father." "What a pleasant surprise!" I glowered at the excavated specimen on the table. "Senhor Padre, might you be able to explain how the jawbone of an ass landed in my mother's grave?" He chuckled. Then he said, "Sit down, ahn, dear lady." He examined the maxillary relic, pausing to note the one remaining tooth that certainly was not my mother's. He smiled, his apple-smooth cheeks colouring. "Would you like a glass of water?" "No, thank you, Father. You have a theory, I can see." "Yes. Only a theory." Leaning back in the vicar's carved mahogany chair, he spoke without hurry. "In your dear parents' time, Sant' Andre had a temporary parishioner named Sacra Familia: Holy Family, no less! I knew him from my childhood, in Saligao. There we used to call him Sacru, but one fine day he started calling himself Sacrula! Why?" I took a deep breath. I was in no mood to be entertained. "Because," he said with a grin, "he was in love with his neighbour Ursula. Sadly, she said no. Poor Sacrula became -- how shall I say it, ahn? -- unconventional! He wore brown robes like a Franciscan, and gave pious orations wherever he went. At first he went round on a bicycle. Much later, towards the end of the Portuguese era, when he came to live in Vasco da Gama, he rode a pony." I sighed. Father Nascimento looked amused, and raised a bony index finger as he went on. "He lived as a paying guest over there, on the main road, near the Pereiras' house. And he was quite a sight, riding down Avenida Craveiro Lopes -- you know, Swatantra Path -- all the way down to the praca. He used to stop in front of the main entrance to the Camara Municipal, our municipality building, and make his speeches." "Did my mother know him, Senhor Padre?" "It is likely she knew him by sight at least. Sacrula was the only parishioner who owned a horse. It is even more likely he knew your dear mother. Maybe he was one of her silent admirers. Many people who never met her used to see her here in church. She was very active, I am told. I met her once. A very fine lady!" He must have noticed my lack of enthusiasm. He studied my face. "You are a lot like her." "Hm." People said the same old things. "But I must tell you about Sacrula's pony. That creature was his best friend. He took good care of it. Even so, it fell ill and died. Poor fellow, he wept like the monsoons in July. He came here and pleaded with the vicar to let his friend be buried in the churchyard." I sat up. Behind the black-rimmed spectacles, Father Nascimento's eyes brightened. His cheeks turned pinker. "‘Bury a horse in holy ground? No, no!' said the vicar -- at that time, Padre Pedro António, I think your grandfather was a good friend of his. So Sacrula dug a trench in the strip between the cemetery fence and the main road, and buried the pony there. He could see the spot from his window across the road. A couple of years later, the church's holdings were surveyed, and the vicar built a boundary wall according to official specifications, leaving only the required setback from the main road. The new wall brought the pony's unmarked grave into the cemetery, much to our Sacrula's delight. With each new coffin that went into the ground, the old boundary lines grew less distinct. By the time I was posted here, there was no sign of the old fence, although the sacristan told me about it -- you know, this gentleman is almost eighty, he's seen a lot." My hands were over my face, my elbows on the vicar's desk. "My good lady, please don't be upset." I could not answer him. "I'm sure the parish authorities meant no offence, but I suppose the pony's grave was hollowed out to accommodate your dear mother's coffin." Giggles found their way out through every chink in my anger. Three hours in that griddle of a graveyard had melted away whatever poise I otherwise affected. I felt close to tears, but all I could do was laugh. When I stopped shaking, I stood up. "Thank you very much, Senhor Padre." "You are most kindly welcome." He nodded, smiling. "God bless you, ahn!" I snatched up the pony's bone. It left a little red mud on the mahogany. Brushing it off in three strokes, my hand looked like Mum's when she slapped crumbs off the dining table. The similarity irritated me. It alarmed me. Was there something brutal in my bones too? Marching down the stairs and out, I thought it was just as well only a brute's bone was found in Mum's grave. If Kistu had exhumed her jawbone, I -- ever the dutiful daughter -- would of course have washed it, wrapped it in white muslin and placed it in the niche along with my father's skull and three long bones. That delicate little jaw of hers pronounced words of wisdom and comfort to other people. They would not have believed her capable of even thinking the words she reserved for her children, words that dug a pit in our path, words that insisted on keeping us company years after her jaw was at rest. The grave-diggers were gone, but the cemetery gate was open. With a jawbone pointer to help me read names and dates, I sauntered between the rows of graves of people I had known or heard about -- sweet Tessie here, my teacher's drunken husband there, eight Dutch aviators who crashed into the Dabolim hillock in 1959. In an ancient Goan ritual, the voiz, or medicine man, burns a dummy of the cause of your trouble, and you are promptly cured. The poor pony had done me no wrong, but its relic came in handy. I judged my distance from the high whitewashed walls of the Ezekiel Corner. A bone dump would do for a voiz's fire, I thought, as I took aim. -- >From Stray Mango Branches and Other Tales with Goan Sap. Contact the author via fatimamnoro...@gmail.com Fatima M Noronha is a writer and editor based in Chicalim, Goa.