Behind the Closed Doors - 1

This is a partially fictionalized version of a factual happening.
I pray Almighty to let his soul either to sleep in peace or play around in glee.

Amen.

1.
5:35 PM.

The man stood there looking at the locked doors.
The drizzle was dripping from his glasses, blurring his vision.
The light of the day was slowly fading into the west. The evening gloomed further into night.

The doors still remained closed and locked.
And behind the closed doors is someone sleeping. Sleeping… for eternity
Someone he knew. Rather someone who the man knows more than himself.

The man kept waiting for some more time for the doors to open.

Then he went back to get them opened.

* * *

6:39 PM

The uneasiness and nervousness in the man was really raw and killing him. He walked with a focused look on the gravel, lost in thought, paradoxically. He was too exhausted to feel anything emotionally. The grief had solidified itself that it isn’t melting to flow off like tears. The head is to numb to come up with a suggestive emotion.

“..the body can stay for 15 days.”

"..After postmortem, the organs might be taken away, while packing the body. Actually depends upon the case.."

Body.
He’s just a body now. The friend ceased to be anything else except a body now.
Everyone refers to him as the Body. The same body bore a name till the morning. It smiled. It frowned. It felt.

And then it died.

Now it’s just a body and nothing else.

The morgue keeper was walking ahead talking morbid details with the same tone as one can talk about vegetables and weather.
He would be around 45 years old with a grey stubble. His fingers were stout with no emotions in them. They flickered occasionally and idly as he swung the hands in a awkward demeanor. He isn’t a very huge guy. He was modestly built, but his psyche is partly blurred and partially hardened with the daily rendezvous with the dead.
Death has become just one more chore of life. The irony is that he is making a living out of it.
He was walking casually all along just as a guide.
Isn’t he one ?

He was in no hurry. There’s none awaiting his arrival there.

He clung to the last of the cigarette he was smoking and threw the burning butt onto the grass. The wet grass put that off with a hiss.
He spat on that remains.

He was probably a little drunk, concluded the man to himself.

Otherwise keeping oneself so distanced yet so close to death wouldn’t be so easy.

The keeper gets a call, and he speaks in Tamil. He was talking to his wife.

What would the wife ask him, about his day, when he comes home, tired, at the end of the day?

“seri..”
“….”
“seri..”
“okay. Illa...ippo konjem velirriken. Seri..seri.. naan tiripi call panra…”
“….”

“Thevad..” he mumbled the rest to himself while shutting off the call.
He looked irritated.


Right adjacent to the mortuary is the animal house, which stores the lab rats and other guinea pigs, silently aiding in pioneering the medical advances, most oftenly with their lives.
The animal stench fills the air, en route.

The man observed in surprise that the ambience around the mortuary is very silent as if everything outside is also dead to accompany the lonely ones inside.

The sound on the feet walking on the gravel was the only proof of life there.

The keeper spat again as we reached the mortuary. The mortuary building had a board, in local language, on it about the category of it’s inmates. The whole building was kind of subterranean and was freshly painted. The smell of the paint along with the chemicals was nauseating. Big coolers jutted out of the small ventilators and were wheezing with a dim buzz.
He switched on the tube lights on the way to the entrance.

“Do you always keep it locked?”

“aama saar. Only when the body comes in, we open it either for the post mortem or to store the body in cold storage.”

“Why is it locked otherwise?”

Before he answered that, the lock is opened. A whiff of cold chemicals hit the surroundings. A dimly lit corridor led the man inside.