Breaking Water

by Indrapramit Das

  They embraced him as if he was one of their own, the flies crawling all over him as if they too had agreed to mark him as dead. Most importantly, she embraced him, peeling back her cold, heavy lips to bare teeth that still clung to purple gums.

  2. Notes on Infancy

  I first met Guru Yama when he was taking refuge with his “first wife” at the Kalighat Temple. This was just days after the resurrections became public, and just as it was becoming clear that they might be global, with cadavers reported to be rising up in countries all around the world, including our neighbours Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

  The guru was sitting in the courtyard where goats are sacrificed to Kali. They had closed off the altars from the public, and people were being allowed in one at a time to see him. No cameras. At that point, “Guru Yama” was just a nickname given to him by the news media, but it had caught very quickly. The corpse he’d claimed at Babu Ghat squatted near him. He’d publicly refused, over and over, to hand the cadaver over to the police or any other organization, claiming that it was his wife.

  He seemed utterly stunned by the world when I saw him, clinging to the frayed rope tied around the purple neck of his wife as if it were a lifeline. Pierced into the skin of his other arm was an actual lifeline: an IV antibiotic drip on rubber wheels. Twenty-nine people around India had reportedly died from corpse bites left untreated. Each of the bite victims had also consequently become undead. The guru had been bitten but was given rabies and tetanus shots right after. He was younger than I’d expected, maybe even my age—mid-thirties at the most.

  Covered in sweat, bandages over the bites his wife and the other corpses had given him, shivering with fever, eyes bloodshot, the guru told me both his life story and the story of his dead wife with stunning candour. For one thing, I didn’t expect him to confess that she wasn’t really his wife, or hadn’t been when he found her. The priests at the temple had conducted an impromptu ceremony after he arrived, though no one was willing to say what that meant. Most temples in the city, the guru said, wouldn’t let them in, declaring the risen dead abominations. He was lucky Kalighat Temple had offered to house him and his wife, as he couldn’t keep her in the basti where he lived. He told me how grateful he was for their help, and also thanked the lorry driver who had transported him and his wife from temple to temple, trailed by crowds looking for something to focus on in this bewildering time.

  Though there were no laws in place for the risen dead, the guru considered himself legally bound to the woman he held by a rope leash, who had been dead for at least a week now. Because of that very lack of laws addressing this new world, the police or government couldn’t really dispute his claim, and they had other things to worry about right now, anyway.

  Throughout the interview, I watched the guru’s wife with barely suppressed horror as she ate out of the opened rib cage of a goat that had been sacrificed, not for Ma Kali but for her. Or perhaps for both of them. The guru noticed the look on my face.

  “She is a woman, just like you,” he said, which made me very uncomfortable. “Don’t be scared of her. You know what it’s like in this world. She asks only for sympathy.”

  I tried to hide my unease. The corpse was squatting, much like her human companion, and using her swollen hands and darkening teeth to eat the entrails. It hurt to see the infantile clumsiness of those slowly bloating fingers. I was ready to run, but she never approached or even noticed me. She looked very blue-green, very inhuman, different from what she’d been in the footage from the ghat, embracing and then biting this man who called himself her husband. She looked—as much as I hated to apply that term to a real person who had lived and died—like a zombie. The people outside the temple had told me to wear a surgical mask and rub Vicks VapoRub under my nostrils (and readily sold me both on the spot), but I could still smell her, see the flies around her and the maggots in her nostrils and eyes and mouth.

  “It’s good that it’s winter, no? She’d probably be falling apart by now if it were summer,” the guru said, looking at her. He stifled a shudder, wiping cold sweat from his brow. “We also have to make sure the street dogs don’t eat her. Usually, the dogs come in here when the goats are sacrificed, to lick up the blood. Not now, not now; we keep them out. They’d rip her up in minutes. Birds, also—they’re always trying. But humans are the worst.” He shook his head.

  “She can’t protect herself anymore. All of these waking dead have been raped, beaten, strangled, stabbed, killed, thrown away. They deserve someone to help them, to take care of them in this new life they’ve been given by God. I’ve told all the news people, and I’ll tell you, that I’ll take care of them if no one else will. Everyone’s calling me Guru for that,” he laughed, eyes wide. “Guru Yama, they’re calling me. I don’t know about that. I don’t want to take the name of a god. I’m just a man.”

  “But your parents already gave you the name of a god, Krishna. Is this different?” I asked him.

  He seemed startled by this, and I felt bad for bringing up his dead parents. To my relief, he changed the subject.

  “It doesn’t matter what they call me, I suppose. What matters is, I’m not afraid of these dead people. When I find somewhere to keep them, I’ll make sure they’re alright. When I am better, I’ll go looking for more before the police take them away and punish them again. Tell everyone. Bring me your dead, and I’ll care for them,” the guru said to me. From the fervent darting of his eyes, I couldn’t tell if he was a charlatan, if he was just looking for fame or up to something more sinister. I didn’t shake his hand, but I did smile at him, maybe in encouragement. I wondered about the rest of those dead people he had left behind at Babu Ghat, later taken away in those vans. It wasn’t the guru’s fault; how many dead could he walk around with?

  Before leaving, I asked if I could use what he’d told me to write a story or an article. He gave me his blessing. I left to let his next visitor, whether journalist or would-be follower, see him. I managed to wait till I was out on the streets before vomiting, just a little, into a gutter. I’m not sure anyone in the crowd gathered around the temple even noticed.

  I wrote in the midst of a global paradigm shift. I wanted to try and understand one man at that moment, as opposed to the impossibility of an entire world made new. Like anyone and everyone who would fixate on him in the days to come.

  It was only afterwards that I thought to look for the identity of that poor dead woman by his side.

  3. Notes on Maturation

  The second time I saw Guru Yama, it was to identify his wife and return her to her mother.

  I met the widowed mother, who requested I not include her name, at the Barista on Lansdowne. I bought her a plain coffee. As I handed her the cup, I marvelled at the fact that we can still enjoy the privilege of overpriced lattes and mochas while black government vans roam the state for the risen dead. Every time I saw those vans, some shining with the words WEST BENGAL UNDEAD QUARANTINE fresh-painted on them, I stopped to wonder whether I was remembering something from a movie or actually looking at something real. The cafe was relatively quiet—just a few afternoon customers chatting amid the burbling of espresso machines. But elsewhere in the city, people were striking and rioting to throw stones and claim their own religions and ideologies as responsible or not responsible for this cosmic prank. That very day, there had been a march on Prince Anwar Shah Road, by South City Mall, with fundamentalists of one or many stripes demanding that movies filled with immoral violence and sexuality be removed from the mall’s multiplex immediately in order to end God’s wrathful plague of the waking dead. The puritanical thrive in apocalypses.

  The mother is a Hindi teacher at a small school. She took one sip of her coffee out of politeness. I had to ask her, after apologizing for doing so, “Did you recognize your daughter on TV that day?” She looked like she was out of breath or keeping down vomit. After a moment, she nodded. She did recognize her daughter. Of course she did.

  I could understand the r
est without her saying anything more. Who would want to acknowledge to themselves that their missing daughter was on TV, on the news, in real life, a walking corpse? That was too many impossibilities to deal with. I couldn’t bear to think what this woman, with her greying hair in a dishevelled bun, wearing an innocuous blue salwar kameez that made her look like any one of my high school teachers, was going through. I felt sick with her, the coffee acrid in my chest. Having had an abortion during college—one of the wisest decisions I’ve ever made—I wanted to say I knew how she felt. But remembering the brutal, almost physical depression of that distant time only furthered my remove from this woman, who had seen her adult daughter walking across the mud of the Hooghly naked as she had been in the first moments of her life, but dead.

  I touched the mother’s hand, and she gasped as if terrified. We left the cafe in silence, her cup still full, cold on the table. My heart was racing just from being in the presence of such horror. Outside, the late winter sunlight did nothing to calm it. Thankfully, there were no marchers or black vans on Lansdowne. If we could forget for a moment, it might have felt like any other day in Kolkata, in that bygone world where the dead stayed dead.

  * * *

  I drove the mother to Kalighat in my old Maruti, and she slept through the ride. I got the impression sleeping was the easiest way for her to escape human interaction.

  The stinking alleyways outside the temple were lined with the guru’s growing mass of followers. Many pressed their palms to the mother as we passed, and some tried to touch her feet. They knew who she was. She walked through them as if in a dream, not responding at all.

  I had come prepared this time. We both wore surgical masks, and we’d both rubbed VapoRub under our noses. The hawkers still tried to sell us both.

  Guru Yama sat in the courtyard inside, same as before. His wife sat at the altar, like a goddess of death next to her husband, who had been named after the god of death by his followers. She was covered all over in heaped garlands of sweet genda phool, so many that it looked like they were crude, thick robes. Her jaundiced eyes peered from between the petals, and a ballooning hand stuck out of the flowers, the orange circlet of a single marigold in its bulging palm. The smell of the garlands wasn’t enough to mask the stench of the festering body beneath them.

  “Greetings,” the guru said to us, his eyelids drooping with antibiotics, with fever, with other drugs, or perhaps just spiritual ecstasy; I couldn’t tell. It had been three weeks since I had last visited him there. He sounded more confident and much calmer. His beard, too, was longer. More befitting a guru, I suppose.

  His wife did not move, though the hand holding the flower quivered slightly, as an effigy’s straw limb might in a breeze. From under those flowers came the rattle of air passing through tissues, a soft groan. But she was unnaturally still. It made me realize how jarring it was to see a living animal that didn’t breathe.

  “Don’t be afraid of her,” the guru said to the mother. “She is still your daughter. She has bitten me, yes; you see the bandages. But your daughter’s bite has made me feel more alive, Mother. I have infected myself with the poison of the dead so that I may live with them. It strengthens me. It gives me visions. Oh, Mother, don’t cry. Rejoice in this miracle, rejoice. She has a second chance in the world. She can’t talk; but in my visions, in my dreams, she speaks.” These were his first words to his mother-in-law (though certainly a dubious law).

  “What does she tell you?” the mother asked, her breathing tortured.

  “In my dreams she shows me the man who killed her. She tells me”—he lowers his voice—“the terrible things that were done to her. She shows me the face of the man so that he may be brought to justice if I ever see him in the world.”

  Given the smell in the air, the situation we were in, I expected the mother to throw up at the sight of the guru and his wife or react adversely. But she just seemed catatonic as she stared at her daughter sitting on that altar, buried in flowers save for her purple face and bulging eyes. It isn’t accurate to say the mother didn’t react; her cheeks were covered in tears. They dripped off her chin, soaking into the surgical mask that flapped against her mouth with each heavy breath she took.

  “Have you touched her?” the mother asked, very softly, and I felt a chill down my neck.

  The guru smiled. “I have touched her, but not as a husband would. I have held her, and guided her, at times. It is not easy to touch her. She is fragile. But I understand your fear. We are married so that I may shelter her in this new life; that is all. I want to protect her, from men who would do what you are afraid of, from men who would take her and let her rot in a cell or a grave. I want to protect her from the birds in the sky and the dogs on the street.”

  “I’m not afraid of what anyone will do to my daughter. They’ve already done what they will. Taken her. Taken her from me. Why is she like that? The flowers,” the mother said, out of breath.

  “It helps with the smell. In summer, she would be gone by now. But she’s strong. She ate meat from the sacrificed goats, wanted to eat it. She tried to eat me, I think, when she first bit me. But it’s just a habit that she remembers. I saw the meat sit in her stomach and make it big, like a baby in her.”

  Like a baby, I thought, and felt spots appear in my vision. I blinked them back, sweaty, the stench clinging to my throat.

  “She threw up many times, and it was still just meat and maggots. The body will not take food in death. It rots in her. Eating is not good for her, I think. Now I don’t feed her. She is happier. She tells me when I’m asleep.”

  I could see the mother’s hands trembling, grasped tightly together over her stomach, her womb. The mask was soaked through. “I’d thank you, Guru, if that’s what you call yourself,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry, Mother, I can’t hear very well; this fever fills my head. The poison of the bites has its toll, even if it’s a gift.”

  “I said, I’d thank you, Guru, if that’s what you call yourself,” she said, voice shaking.

  “That’s what they call me, Mother. Guru Yama. I’d be honoured if you called me son,” he said, bowing his head.

  I glanced at the corpse. I saw its distended eyes move in their sockets, looking at us from under the coils of marigolds. I took shallow breaths.

  “I’d thank you, Guru,” the mother said again, not calling him son, “for guarding my daughter from the kind of people who took her away from me. I’d thank you if I knew that you weren’t the one who killed her and threw her naked in the river, as if she were garbage.”

  “No, Mother. No, no, no,” he said. He looked genuinely dismayed by this suggestion, his eyes widening.

  “You found her; how do I know?” she asked, coughing. I flinched as her daughter rustled under the flowers, breaking from whatever mordant meditation she was suspended in.

  I touched the mother’s shoulder. “Ma’am, there were witnesses who saw him finding her; she washed up on the ghat…” I reminded her.

  “What if that thing isn’t even my daughter?” she said, taking off her glasses.

  “It is,” I whispered. “I looked at the footage, compared the photos. We can ask the police to do a DNA test, but I don’t know if that would work at this stage of decomposition. If you claim her, we can get her to a morgue before she starts falling apart completely.”

  “No. I don’t want that. She’s already gone. That … She doesn’t look like my daughter anymore,” she said, her voice so very small.

  The creature under the flowers crooned as gas escaped her mouth. It sounded eerily like song, and who’s to say it wasn’t? I saw the guru look at her, and I noticed his eyes were wet as well. Was it the accusation? Empathy for her mother?

  The corpse moved its fake-looking hand, the skin stretched like a latex glove half–blown up. And, to my shock, she raised that grotesque hand and wobbled the flower into her thick blue lips, eating it, the petals glowing bright against her black-and-brown teeth. The guru pointed. “Look: like I
taught her, Mother. Like I taught her. I taught your daughter not to eat, and if she does, eat the flowers. Small, they don’t hurt her. Good, beta, good.” He grinned, the pride on his face clear. The guru looked like a boy showing his mother a trick he’d taught his pet.

  The mother stared, and gasped with what sounded like laughter. She laughed, perhaps, and then she sobbed, sitting on the dirty ground of that courtyard. She sobbed and sobbed, scrunching the surgical mask into her face like a handkerchief as her daughter’s corpse munched on a marigold, and her unasked-for son-in-law held her hand with hope and fear in his eyes. The moment lasted barely a minute before she got up and asked to leave immediately. She had come to officially identify her daughter’s corpse, but she’d barely seen it. And yet, how could I force that? How could I ask that the flowers that hid that monstrous, infantile thing that was once her daughter be removed? I dreaded to see the decay, and so did she.

  “I am sorry for your loss, Mother,” the guru said as we left, his voice different from how it had been.

  “I want it burned. I can’t have that walking around. It’s not my daughter anymore. She’s gone. I want it burned,” the mother said to me in the car, once she had regained some of her composure.

  I drove her back to her apartment. She remained silent the whole time. Once I had parked by her building, she turned to me, eyes swollen. She grasped my arm, the first time she’d touched me. She held me very tight.

  “Miss Sen, do you think I made the right decision?” she asked.

  Swallowing, I told her, “I don’t know, ma’am. I truly don’t.”

  “I don’t think he killed my daughter,” she said, letting go of my arm. Her hand fell limp to her lap.