The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  Still, Mohan cycled around the bhavan, making his own inquiries: Did they have enough water? Had they found the market? Was there something specific they wanted to hear the priests read aloud?

  In the middle of this, a low cry sounded, and he straightened at the familiar signal and excused himself. Sobs, muffled at first, then slowly growing louder and clearer, until the sound bloomed into a woman’s full-hearted wail that filled the bhavan. Narinder emerged from the priest’s quarters and followed Mohan to No. 3, where they found the family inside hunched and rocking over the tiny form of their departed matriarch, a woman who’d lifted her mouth in the slightest of smiles whenever anyone walked into the room during her stay.

  “So a death today, after all,” the head priest murmured to the assistant, his fingers busy on his prayer beads.

  Mohan addressed the room brightly: “Your mother has passed in the holiest of places—this is a happy day!” Beside the list of rules tacked up in each room, another list hung on the door that detailed exactly what the family must do as soon as death visited them. Mohan pointed it out to the men who sat silently alongside their wailing women. “As soon as you can,” the assistant urged the closest man, “while the women wash the body, someone will need to get the necessary supplies.” He read through the items listed, the flowers and cremation shrouds, the bamboo for the bier and the wood for the funeral pyre, the approximate amount that the priests and the Doms and countless others would expect as their rightful tax for services provided. He was about to mention the holy basil in the courtyard, whose leaves should cover the body’s mouth and ears and other orifices once bathed, when Narinder gestured with his eyes behind him. “A moment,” Mohan said to the family, whose men remained listless, and he stepped outside to Dev beckoning from No. 10.

  Narinder sat down in a corner and began to recite from the Garuda Purana from the beginning and from memory, while Mohan hurried over to the other room. “Another?” he asked. Dev followed him in, and they found the potter in No. 10 weeping, his loud choking sobs drowning out the grief of his mother and his sister.

  “His grandfather,” Dev said. “It must have just happened. He was fine, but as soon as the man passed he simply broke.”

  Mohan swiveled his chin, wondering how the manager would deal with a loudly grieving man. He laid his hand on the fellow’s shaking back. “Calm yourself, Bhai, calm yourself,” he urged. “We know this is the best thing for your grandfather, nah? This isn’t befitting, not here of all places.” But the man’s sobbing only increased in volume and fervor, and the sound drew other families to the room, curious to see this man who did not know or care that such grief was the privilege of women. Not a good thing, for a man to be breathless with sobs as he shouldered the corpse’s bier through the lanes.

  Then Loknath pushed through behind Dev.

  “Another,” he said. “In the courtyard.” At the words, the guests parted, some wandering to No. 3, others lingering on the fringes of the walkway, others staying where Mohan was in No. 10.

  “Hai Rama,” Mohan said, his mood lifted. Such a lucky thing, this third death—and so close after the others. He allowed himself a laugh, remembering Pramesh’s tales of how sometimes, when the bhavan was full, one death seemed to set the rest of them off, like a line of women in labor.

  “Shall I fetch Pramesh-ji?” Loknath asked.

  “No, no; there are four of us, aren’t there? No reason to disturb him,” Mohan said. The priests left to look in on the most recent death. The wailing from various corners of the bhavan echoed off the walls and floated up through the open courtyard and into the air, the man at his feet the loudest of all. The assistant turned to the door, about to get the family started on preparing the body and the cremation materials, when an agonized howl sounded, and he was almost knocked off his feet.

  “Gone! But too soon, too soon, and what will we do without him now?”

  Weeping, the man gripped Mohan’s ankles and shook his legs, while the womenfolk—silently shedding tears until then—erupted into their own wailing.

  “This isn’t your place, Bhaiya,” Mohan said, trying to unclench the man’s white-knuckled fingers. “There is still work to be done, rites you must fulfill—you are the chief mourner, nah? Think of your duties; think—”

  “Ji,” came a breathless voice from the door. One of the guests, a man who’d just arrived a few days ago with his uncle, pushed forward. “There is a man at the gate. He wishes to speak to someone in charge here.”

  Mohan could not move; the convulsing man had the iron grip of someone lost at sea who’d laid hands on a drifting piece of wood. “He will have to wait. Is he with anyone? Someone who is dying?”

  “He is alone,” the guest said. “He’s asking to speak to the manager.”

  “Tell him the manager is not here,” Mohan said. The sobbing man reached out and grabbed him by the arm. “Tell him to return tomorrow.”

  The guest ran off and Mohan turned his attention back to the sodden man, those crowding behind him murmuring to each other in disapproval. But soon enough the guest was back again. “He says he must see him, the manager,” he reported.

  “Is he dying?” Mohan asked, temper short. “Tell him we are here for the dying only, not the living. Tomorrow, Bhai, tell him to come back tomorrow. He will not find what he is looking for today.”

  Finally, the grieving man tired out and crumpled in a heap next to the body. With no other man in that family to speak to, Mohan turned to one of the guests lingering behind him and pointed to the list on the door. “When he wakes, Bhaiya, make sure he heeds the list. No good to wait about these things, not when the body must be tended to, and others are waiting their turn in the space.”

  Out in the courtyard, Mohan remembered the waiting man. He ventured to the gates, but no one stood there. He crossed the threshold and saw only people walking, carrying on with their business. Mrs. Chalwah’s eyes pierced him from where she kept watch at her upper-story bedroom window across the street. He raised his hand in greeting as always, though she never returned the wave.

  As he turned to go back in, his eyes caught on a man making long slow strides across the street. The bearing and gait were as familiar as his own, now rounding the corner, now out of sight. How did—

  But that was impossible; of course Pramesh was upstairs, and it would be a least another hour before the pain subsided enough for him to venture down. Foolishness, Mohan thought, and he pulled the gate shut firmly and turned back to the death awaiting him inside.

  3

  Shobha was desperate to return to the bhavan, but the neighboring women who had gathered in a chattering circle in Mrs. Mistry’s kitchen did not seem inclined to let her go. She sat with them, Rani hugging her shoulders, and she resigned herself to listening to how so-and-so’s cousin’s daughter had forgotten to stay silent during visits from prospective grooms, yet again revealing her persistent lisp, and what was that girl’s poor mother to do?

  “Fear works,” Mrs. Gupta said as she pulled a loose thread from her sewing up to her mouth and bit off the excess. The half dozen women gathered in the kitchen had already traded ideas about threatening the girl with spinsterdom or coating her tongue with alum. As they chatted, they worked embroidery into a blouse sleeve or picked through rice or rolled wisps of cotton into lamp wicks. Mrs. Mistry sat before the cooking fire and wound a spoon through a pot of ground almonds, sugar, and ghee, a rare treat made in celebration of her newest grandchild’s birth. “Tell her the story of the Green Parrot Girl,” Mrs. Gupta continued. “That will be enough.”

  “Is that the same as the Weeping Woman?” Mrs. Mistry asked as she continued moving her spoon through the fragrant almond mixture. She touched the back of her hand to her sweating forehead.

  “It’s the girl who was always back-talking to her parents, then her husband, then she was stolen away in the middle of the night and forced to marry a demon, rememb
er? And when she refused, she was turned into a demon-spirit herself, forced into the body of a parrot.”

  The women murmured amongst themselves, comparing their friend’s version of the story to the versions they knew. “The point is you must scare her into behaving,” Mrs. Gupta continued, her voice rising above the others. “Tell her the tale, and that will be that. Problem solved.”

  Shobha spoke up without thinking. “But surely she will need to say something to the boy during the meeting, nah? Before they are married?” She regretted her words the instant they left her mouth, but too late; the women all turned to her.

  “Plenty of time to speak to the boy after the wedding,” they clucked.

  “Besides,” Mrs. Mistry said as she smiled at Rani, who peeked over Shobha’s shoulder and then ducked behind again, “You will not have that same problem with this one.” She said this kindly, but Shobha winced. Rani was far ahead of other children her age in many ways, but she had yet to speak a single word, a fact whispered amongst the housewives of Kashi.

  “You don’t know it now, beti,” an older neighbor said as she patted Shobha’s knee and tweaked Rani’s elbow, “but when this one grows and all the matches come in, you will have the same worries. Every mother does.”

  Shobha held her tongue, focusing on the warmth she felt at being included in the classification of mother, a title long sought and lately won. Six years was a very long time to be married and without child, to endure silent looks and not-so-silent comments. Rani’s delivery had been painful and prolonged, and Shobha’s agonized labor had lasted for the entire day and into the night. With no living family nearby, she trusted few others to look after the child. Mrs. Mistry was a good woman who was always ready with some sweet thing or funny story for Rani whenever Shobha needed to drop the girl off. So if etiquette decreed that she sit here for a half hour and listen to her neighbor’s friends, then that is what she would do, even if her goodwill was beginning to crack.

  “Such pretty silken hair,” the sari-seller’s wife murmured as she eyed Rani’s locks.

  “Pretty, yes, but not as thick as my nephew’s son’s,” Mrs. Gupta said with an appraiser’s air. The other women in the room looked away, and Shobha felt the blood rush to her face. Rani was now intent on undoing her coiled bun, and she reached up to disengage the girl’s hands and pull her into her lap. They all knew that Mrs. Gupta, who was childless, had taken personal affront when Shobha had refused her nephew’s hand all those years ago and instead chose to marry a village nobody who’d only recently taken up residence in the bhavan.

  “Well, the barfi looks to have come together nicely,” Mrs. Mistry said brightly. She stopped stirring, the almond sweetmeat now ready to be scooped into shallow pans and cut into diamond shapes once set. She wiped her brow with the end of her sari. “I expect her father spoils her,” she said to Shobha as she held up a piece of green mango for Rani, who pushed away from her mother immediately and went to Mrs. Mistry’s side. “And she will have so many choices before her that none will be left for the other girls in Kashi.”

  “Who can tell what may have been,” Mrs. Gupta continued before drifting off so that only Shobha could hear what came next. “If things had been different, perhaps you would have two children in your lap instead of just one.”

  No woman could have kept silent at that moment, even if Mrs. Gupta’s words stemmed from disappointment. Shobha’s anger felt like a wave churning and speeding and crashing within her, irreversible and destructive. “Well,” she said, eyes flashing, “If—”

  “Dadi!” a child’s voice called from the door. One of Mrs. Mistry’s grandsons ran into the room. “The bhavan uncle says to ask the bhavan auntie to come home.” Duty done and message delivered, the boy held his hand out for a piece of jaggery and coconut, his grandmother’s standard medium of reward. And that woman, thankful for the additional service the spindly child unknowingly performed, piled a double fistful into the boy’s hands, which he promptly crammed into his mouth before running off to tell his siblings that their grandmother was in an especially generous mood.

  Watching this, Shobha remembered that she was not in her own home and that Mrs. Mistry had always gone out of her way to show Shobha a gentle, unsmothering kindness. Today was a celebration for her neighbor: a new grandson, a new life, a time to revel in sweetness and cast aside the bitter. She exhaled and released her anger. “I will be going, then.” She stood and adjusted her sari before beckoning Rani to her and taking the girl’s hand. “Come now,” she said to the girl, “wave to all of your aunties.” The girl raised a shy and dimpled hand before burying her smile in Shobha’s legs. The older women cooed over her one final time and said their goodbyes, and Mrs. Mistry made Shobha take a bit of the almond barfi in a silver dish for Pramesh.

  “Let it cool first,” Mrs. Mistry called after Shobha, “And remember that tomorrow I will have that lemon pickle ready for you to taste. It wants just one more day in the sun.”

  “I will, Maasi,” Shobha called as she stepped lightly out the door, Rani at her side. She pulled the end of her sari over her head and tried not to look at Mrs. Gupta as she fled.

  ***

  Awake, wary of the pain still lingering on the edges of his skull, Pramesh drank three cups of chai in quick succession. He sat on the rope bed at the edge of the kitchen and held his daughter on one knee as Shobha picked through rice for that evening’s meal. He felt buoyed by the deaths he discovered once he’d come downstairs, the families all in the midst of preparing the bodies, men scurrying about to gather the cremation items while the women sat in a circle around the deceased and stroked the lifeless arms and legs. But he needed to tell his wife about Sheetal.

  “So the boy will remain here alone?” she asked.

  The manager tilted his head in assent. “Rama willing, the old man will go quickly, and soon. Because otherwise.…”

  “That will come later,” Shobha said. “We will help him as much as we help any of the others. For now, he will stay.” And with that, the matter was concluded. Pramesh relaxed in the face of his wife’s decisive nature. Their emotions often balanced in each other’s presence, as if one were taking on the other’s load. Shobha reached her arms out for Rani, who brought her an old glass bangle she was playing with. Shobha held the violet circlet up to the soft beam of light that slipped through the arched window, and it erupted into tiny flecks that flickered across the room, some quivering in Rani’s small hands. The child curled and stretched her fingers in glee, her face strong with the likeness of Pramesh’s mother—or so he liked to think. He’d been so young when she’d passed; he did not always trust his memory of her face.

  “How many kisses from the light? How many blessings on your head?” Shobha murmured as she tweaked her daughter’s nose, the many bangles on her slim arms chiming as she moved.

  Later, the bands would arrive, ready to lead each grieving family to the ghats with the loud music of celebration that preceded the processions of weddings and funerals alike. But now, this corner of the bhavan was quiet, and Pramesh allowed himself to relax and enjoy the presence of his family, to rest his eyes on Rani’s face and feel his own smile bloom as he watched her reach out to grasp something she could not hold.

  4

  Having spotted the ghaatiyaa Kishore at his usual platform halfway down the stone stairs, Bhut quickly covered the distance and came straight to the point. “That hostel man,” he asked as bathers climbed past on their way back into the city, “what do you know of him?”

  Startled, Kishore let out a laugh that turned into a laborious cough, shaking the white hairs on his chest. “Bhut-sahib, you should warn a man before coming upon him like that.”

  The circle officer at Dashashwamedh Police Station had a reputation for approaching undetected, materializing among the men smoking in the alley or the wrestlers exercising on the ghats, unexpected as a ghost. The cityfolk had therefore shortened his g
iven name of Bhudev to Bhut. He stood behind the ghaatiyaa, unmindful of the sun and the stares bearing down upon him, and waited for an answer.

  “Why not ask the man himself?” Kishore said with a sideways glance as he continued to accept coins from the bathers. “The bhavan is just some lanes over.”

  Bhut raised an eyebrow. He was not the only one with a reputation. Daily, as Kishore tended the duties of his work—sitting sentry over the river and watching over the bathers’ clothes, lending out plastic combs and razors, performing the odd religious rite—he cultivated a business of another kind. When the bathers stopped to pay him, they also stopped to gossip. Every birth, every death, every assignation behind a temple, news of all this and more came to him, and he in turn parsed out choice details to the other bathers, boatmen, ghaatiye … and even to the odd circle officer looking for information. “They say you were the one to install him in his position all those years ago,” Bhut said. “They say he arrived in the city from no-one-knows-where, and suddenly he was the old man’s assistant at the bhavan.”

  “They will say what they say.”

  “I care what you say,” Bhut said, patience run low. “Either tell me now or tell me at the station. You may choose.”

  “The drunk.” Kishore jerked his head toward the wide expanse of stairs behind him where a filthy man lolled on the stone. “He insists on sleeping here at night. And yet I understand vagrants are discouraged from such loitering?”

  “Maharaj?” Bhut glanced at the drunk, who seemed to have just woken. The man rubbed his eyes with dirty fists and grasped for the lopsided pot he kept with him. The bathers gave him a wide berth and regarded him with narrowed eyes as they passed. “He does no harm.”