The Story of the Gunny Bag Corpse
A childhood story that I will not tell at a dinner party.
Listen, I know this can be a hard story, and you haven’t asked for it, but — I need to tell you this. When I was a kid, we had a neighbor, a young, handsome police officer. He married a beautiful girl, and then two months later, his body was found in a gunny sack. Can you believe it? In a gunny sack! The same sack in which folks pack onions and potatoes, and rice and flour. In that sack, some men had packed a human body.
But then, it wasn’t anything new. At the time, it was the most popular way of killing. The city was experiencing terror and violence, and gunny sacks with human remains were commonly found. People called such a dead body ‘bori bund laash,’ the gunny sack corpse. They were the modus operandi of certain political quarters. No, no, don’t ask me the names of these quarters. I’m not here to name names, or tell truth to power, or to other violent forces. I’m only here to tell you my story.
And in my story, you know what’s the most weird thing? It’s this: Somebody ‘I’ knew became — a gunny bag corpse. A thing you’d only read about in newspapers. I think about it, and I’m like, what the fuck, man? Trust me, I really need to tell you this story.
***
Why do people tell stories? Why do so many of us have the urge to tell others about something that happened to us?
Van Gogh looked out the windows of an asylum in St. Remy and painted the irises, wheat fields, and olive groves. Why?
The ancients chiseled stick figures in rocks. People sat around fires and listened to an oral story. Our siblings returned home from school and said, ‘You know what happened at the school today?’ Why must they tell the stories they were telling?
Maurice Sendak, the famous author and illustrator, said about his work, “I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it.”
***
Ok, here, pay attention. Don’t get distracted, my story isn’t done yet.
The news of the gunny sack corpse spread in the neighborhood sometime late in the evening. There was a commotion on our street, and various neighbors stopped by our home to discuss the news with my Mom. I remember standing in our yard in the dark, surrounded by our plants and trees, trying to listen to those conversations. That’s how I learned most of the details: by lurking around the adults. They were too distracted to shoo me away.
People don’t say it, but childhood is a stupid, difficult time. You are small, the adults tall, and to look at their faces, you gotta turn your head up. Looking up, in the dark, you are disoriented, but now you also gotta absorb the news of a murder.
And here’s what I absorbed :
The evening before that day, a few men knocked on the neighbor’s door and asked for him. He knew them and felt comfortable leaving with them. That night, he did not return home. The next day a bori, a gunny sack, was discovered at a garbage dump, and his body was in the bag, with severe torture marks on it.
The killers had also broken his bones to fit him in the bori. This can happen because the boris can be small, and the beautiful, dead men can be tall. His closely wrapped, broken limbs had become so stiff that his family could not even pull them apart for a proper Muslim burial.
Everyone knew who killed the neighbor and why they killed him. His two crimes: being a police officer & being the other. His death was drawn in the specifics of his facial features. It was encoded in the language he spoke at home. And for those with discerning ears, it could be heard in his accent. In a violent city, those are enough reasons to get anyone killed.
***
On YouTube, you can find a recording of a Mr. Rogers show from the 60s where he’s gently talking with children about sad and scary things. In their case, the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy.
And a kid says, ‘when I heard about when that one man got shot in the head, I ran upstairs, and my parents started praying for him that he stayed alive.’
Mr. Rogers: ‘That was certainly frightening, wasn’t it ?’
The child nods.
***
Now, be patient. We are coming to the end of my story. And let me tell you the funny part. Yes, there is a funny part, at least to me.
The guy had died but was still not the main character in the story of his own death. Everyone, from our neighbors to my family members, was lamenting about somebody else: the neighbor’s beautiful, young wife. Poor girl, so young, so beautiful, so recently married, so widowed. What would happen to her now?
Learning from everyone’s reactions, I got deeply upset on behalf of the widow. I wanted to somehow fix it for her. I did not run to my room or prayed. Instead, I did what came to me naturally. I started imagining stories where a strong, good man rescued the widow. Because, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a young widow who has just lost her first husband, must be rescued by a second.
In my storytelling, sometimes I myself would become that man because I couldn’t trust anyone else with this important rescue job. And in all the versions of my stories, the girl will always end up living happily ever after. The stories didn’t change the widow’s situation but they comforted me.
Isn’t it funny? A child’s obsessive silly, imaginary storytelling to resolve an issue. Maybe not in a ‘funny funny’ way, but in a dark humor funny way — or maybe not.
There is just so much that a very young child can take, without it being overwhelming.
— Mr. Rogers
***
A long time has passed since that gunny bag corpse was discovered on a garbage heap. Enough time that I’m longer upset about the widow. Instead, I am sad about the dead man, and the reasons he was killed for.
But still, I would not tell the gunny sack corpse’s story at a dinner party, then why tell it now, here?
And unlike my childhood self, I’m not telling you an imaginary, new story. I’m no more so overwhelmed that I need to spin fake narratives to feel better. But on that evening from my childhood, when I was imagining stories of rescuing the widow, unbeknown to me, another story had started to store within me. The story of the child standing in that dark yard, confused & overwhelmed, listening to the adults talking about a murder. Surprised that gunny sack corpses aren’t just in newspapers.
Today, I’ve no imaginary stories to tell. I can only pull up a very old story that has been lying within me, in the large store room of things that baffle me, and make me sad. I’m on the ground, on all fours, and the story is gushing out of me. Not from my brain, but from my body. It had been there for too long.
Listen, I know you had not asked for it. But I had to tell you this story, because in the words of Maurice Sendak — I couldn’t not do it.
*****