“I am not really so interested in publicising myself. I realise that the industry is so competitive and the writer has to promote the book. You can’t be as reserved as someone like Samuel Beckett. He is a figure I would really like to be. He thought his work would speak for itself and it did,” says Cyrus Mistry, who has often been referred to as a reticent writer, as he chooses to stay away from the limelight. Every work of his has either won awards or has been critically acclaimed, from his first play Doongaji House to his novel Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer , which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, 2014.
He has worked as a freelance journalist and a writer of screenplays. But it took him some time to write his first novel The Radiance of Ashes. His next novel Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer brings to light the community of Parsi corpse bearers, the khandhias, who are relegated to the margins of society in Bombay.
In beautiful prose, Cyrus brings to life the wretched existence of this community. Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer tells the story of Phiroze Elchidana, the son of a Parsi priest. Phiroze doesn’t quite turn out to be the son his father wished for. He later falls in love with the daughter of a corpse bearer Sepidah. And thus begins a stark, soul-stirring story. Speaking about the book, Cyrus says: “The novel is set in the Tower of Silence. It is about corpse bearers which is a microscopic part of the Parsi community. I thought, let me take a minimalist platform and through that try to raise larger questions.”
The idea for Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer came to Cyrus in 1991. “I researched the subject for a film producer, who wanted to make a documentary on it. I wrote a treatment paper on how the film will be dealt with. But the film was never made.” And so he decided to write about the corpse bearers in a different way in the novel.
The Radiance of Ashes is an equally powerful novel set in Bombay, moving from a middle-class Parsi housing colony to a distant slum, and revolves around Jingo, a Parsi boy and market researcher. When it was first published, the novel did not get as much attention as it deserved. “It was lost in the morass of publishing activity. They published it without giving anything about me and when I told the publisher about this, she said ‘Oh! I am so sorry, I forgot.’” Fortunately, it has been republished by Aleph Books. Cyrus says it is a coming-of-an-age novel. “It evokes the whole multitude of the city and its multiplicity,” he adds.
What took him so long to write a novel? “For a long time, I didn’t have any idea of how to write. The whole idea of how to create a structure of the novel, it was a total mystery to me and I didn’t think I would succeed. First I started with plays, then I wrote short stories. I was also writing to earn a living by writing film scripts. In retrospect it seems a total squandering of one’s energy. It didn’t really help me in terms of my career. Then I thought I must write a novel. The Radiance of Ashes was written with great difficulty.
At the time, he was diagnosed with a serious physical ailment of the nervous system. “I thought to myself if I didn’t write a novel now, I’ll never be able to do it. Luckily, the illness wasn’t in such a serious form. Writing of the novel had a therapeutic effect.”
Rohinton Mistry, his brother, has for long been well-known for his novels. “He went to Canada in 1976 and he wasn’t at that time interested in writing. I had already been writing for some time, though he is older than me. He was inspired by some of my work to start writing.”
Each sentence is crafted with care. Each character is well etched. Cyrus says when writing fiction, everything shouldn’t be pre-planned. “It is an evolving process. In that sense, one word leads to the next, one paragraph to the next. It’s like the children’s game of passing the parcel, the thing is packed, where you open one wrapping and then you open another wrapping. As a fiction writer, that is the great pleasure of discovering where this thing is going. When you are finally left with the last gift, it should be a surprise.”
Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer has been published by Aleph Book Company and is priced at Rs. 295.
