The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  As people siphoned away, Pramesh felt relief. Now all that existed were the pyre, the river, himself, and Sagar. For the past day, the persistent taste of hot ash had stayed with him, but as he looked at the charred remains of Sagar, the bones and the sooty black of wood indistinguishable from flesh, he had an unexpected and intense craving. He wanted aam paana.

  He was startled; he hadn’t tasted aam paana in years. The green mango juice, spiked with black salt and cumin and thrilling to the tongue, had been Sagar’s favorite. A treat made by their mothers, something to soothe the heat of a stifling day, cool glasses held against skin, pungent liquid slipping down the throat. Pramesh wiped the sweat from his brow, looking at the smoking pyre, trying to recognize Sagar but seeing only the bones, the skull. Again he felt bile rise to the back of his throat, and he looked at the river instead, bidding his mind to go back to aam paana, to think of something else as he waited for the Doms to pronounce the burning complete.

  He had missed seeing his father burn, as well as his uncle, his old widowed aunt. He’d missed seeing his mother and Sagar’s burn as well. This pyre, loaded with just one man, felt piled with all the people he’d tried not to think about since resolving to leave his old life behind. Unbidden, the memory came to him like a spark landing in his palm from one of the many spangling the air.

  A golden day. The Mothers laughing, and Sagar flexing his thin arms, showing off, willing the tiny muscles to pop. The air as hot and tight as today, but tinged with a clean smell, of dirt and water and green things springing up and waving in the rare breeze.

  “Help us if you can’t think of anything better to do,” Sagar’s mother said to Pramesh, who’d been aimless, unable to finish the book his mother had given him, bored with scratching numbers in the dirt next to the peepal tree, too hot to race Sagar around the yard, wandering from front room to the kitchen, looking over his mother’s shoulder and hanging about his aunt’s elbow until they pulled him down to sit next to them. Sagar was still running through the house and back outside again, hands sticky with brown tamarind paste or some other thing he’d stolen from the kitchen, until his mother yelled at him to sit down. “Or I will marry you off this instant. That Jaya is quite fond of you—I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” At the mention of the neighbor’s visiting granddaughter, Sagar wrinkled his nose and squatted down beside them immediately.

  They all sat in the yard at the back of the house, fields beyond, a fire lit and water bubbling away in a large steel pot. The day was hot and promised to get hotter, but trees provided shade, and the breezes were frequent enough to refresh them. A pile of tart unripe mangos, like smooth green stones, sat on a clean cloth between the Mothers. Sagar’s mother handed the boys knives made slightly dull with age, while she and Pramesh’s mother kept the sharper blades, and she showed the boys how to take one of the fruits, peel it, dice the flesh, and remove the soft pit before dropping the sunshine-colored cubes into a neat pile next to the whole fruit.

  “Let’s see who is fastest,” Sagar said, fruit and knife poised in his hands, grinning at Pramesh.

  “No need for that,” Pramesh’s mother said sharply. She softened her tone. “It won’t taste any better for you racing each other.”

  Where had the Elders been? Certainly not at home. Their mothers had been laughing that day, had walked to and from the house with purposeful steps, belonging to that place and to themselves. And Pramesh and Sagar had belonged to them entirely.

  The smell, tart and clean, the smooth curve of each fruit fitting perfectly in their small brown palms. The knives were just sharp enough to cut but required effort and concentration, and soon both boys were silent, brows furrowed, focused on their task. As they worked, Pramesh’s mother began to tell a story, this time the tale of Markandeya, a boy fated to die at sixteen but who was rescued when he spent his birthday praying before a linga, out of which the great God leapt to subdue the Bearer of Death.

  Halfway through the tale, Sagar dropped a fistful of cubes into the pile but kept some back, and he waited for the Mothers to look at some other thing before cramming the fruit into his mouth, his grin triumphant. And then Pramesh had to follow, and the sour burst dazzled his tongue. As Pramesh moved to shove another palmful of cubes in his mouth, his mother finished the story, tsked, and looked up at Sagar’s mother. “Perhaps they think we were never like them, once?”

  Sagar’s mother wagged her head in agreement, earrings swaying, and fetched the carved spice box with its compartments for black salt, cumin, and chili from the house. She sprinkled the spices on a small pile of cubes set between herself and Pramesh’s mother, which they snacked on while dodging the boys’ outstretched hands. “Well you wouldn’t share with us, would you?” Sagar’s mother teased. But they relented, the Mothers feeding the cousins by hand.

  Once all the cut fruit had been dropped into the bubbling pot, Sagar and Pramesh took turns peering inside, poking at the contents with a wooden spoon, running back to tell their mothers about the color of the liquid, the softness of the fruit, until one of them came over and pronounced it done. Sagar’s mother added the spices with a deft hand, and Pramesh’s mother mixed in water, still cool from the earthenware pot that the cousins had carried to the well and back again, and then it was ready. The boys marveled at this thing they had made, the color of light filtered through a tree’s leaves, made liquid; pungent and smoky with black salt and cumin.

  Pramesh remembered leaning against his mother as she’d given the mixture a final stir. She was solid and warm and smelled of chai and an unknown spice. His blanket had the same smell; he often buried his nose in the cloth before falling asleep. “Who would have thought such monkeys could be such good workers?” she said, eyebrows raised, and with one hand still swirling the liquid with her spoon she reached the other around Pramesh and tickled him in the side, in his most vulnerable spot, and Pramesh shrieked with laughter. She handed the pot over to Sagar’s mother, who instructed him to hold the glasses while she poured out generous portions.

  Had they tasted it? A small sip, even a drop on the tongue? He thought he remembered loud footsteps coming from the front room, and louder voices, his father and uncle come home from wherever they had been, and the Mothers getting up quickly, shooing the boys outside without their hard-earned aam paana.

  They both knew that it was wiser to stay out of the way. They occupied themselves outside in the heat of the day until they thought they might venture in. Through the back door, into the kitchen, their eyes immediately turned to the tumblers, the steel pot.

  All empty. Not even the dried stickiness usually left behind, clinging to the pot or the glasses.

  Later, in bed, when their mothers came to smooth their brows and ask them if they’d said their nighttime prayer, Sagar kept asking, “All of it? Is it really all gone?”

  “Hush,” Pramesh’s mother had said. “So easy to make; such a stupid thing to be upset over. Tomorrow we will try again.”

  “Your fathers were hot and tired,” Sagar’s mother said, by way of consolation. “And they are your elders; remember that.”

  Remember that. Their Elders, to heed and obey without question. How long had it taken for Pramesh to slough off that last piece of maternal advice? To push it away meant pushing the Mothers away as well. But to keep it close—he and Sagar knew that price.

  Soon after, everything changed. Pramesh had asked for aam paana when he was sick; he recalled the awful tight thirst in his throat, his tongue like a hot coal packed inside his mouth. He waited for his mother or Sagar’s to come, his body shaking and twisting on his straw mat, the sweat rolling down his temples and chest. They were still not there when he woke from the fever, many weeks later. But Sagar was. His face greeted Pramesh when he opened his eyes, reentering the world of the living. Pramesh swallowed, felt the walls of his throat burn as if he’d drunk acid. He tried to speak, saying only the simplest and most necessary thing. “Ma?” Then, ex
hausted, he fell asleep.

  The next days followed a similar pattern, Pramesh asking for his mother, then for Sagar’s. Sagar’s face swimming into view, relief sometimes showing in his eyes, fear at other times, then everything going black as Pramesh succumbed to sleep. But as time went by, he was able to stay awake longer. There was always a fresh blanket across him, a clean shirt and pair of pants on his skin though he could not remember his mother or aunt coming to dress him. He would eat what they’d left—a glass of coconut water and a bowl of broth, strong with ginger and turmeric and laden with rice, the vessels difficult to lift to his mouth. Sagar stayed at his side, hunched in a corner playing cat’s cradle on a loop of string. “Where are they?” Pramesh asked when he finished eating, still hungry for the sight of his mother and aunt.

  “Coming,” Sagar said. His voice was strange, fear still in his eyes.

  Pramesh looked down at his wasted body, and he thought he understood why. His legs were thin and unfamiliar. His breath was acrid and sour, and his nails had grown unchecked into coarse points that frightened him. The two cousins had always looked like twins, but the illness had whittled away at Pramesh so that he was a shadow of his former self, of the boy Sagar still was.

  One day Pramesh woke to Sagar crying. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you sick as well? Shall I call for Ma?” Silence. Insects singing in the night, a breeze blowing a branch against the side of the house. In the perfect blackness of the room, Pramesh lolled his head to the side and spied a single star winking outside their window. A shivering shudder, breathless, and he heard Sagar choking down a sob. He tried to sit up but was so suddenly dizzy that he lay back down. “What is it?”

  “You cannot call them.”

  “Yes I can—what do you need?”

  “They won’t come.”

  “Are they away? Why didn’t we go with them—was I sleeping?”

  “They won’t come.”

  Pramesh’s head spun; talking exhausted him and he could not think straight. They won’t come meant they were not here; if they were not here, they were somewhere else; if they were somewhere else, they would return; when they returned, they would come. The next thing in the sequence eluded him.

  “Why did they leave? When are they coming back?”

  “They won’t come.”

  The repetition enraged him. “They will; they will; why do you keep saying that?” And then, to prove Sagar wrong, Pramesh gathered his meager breath and screamed, that single, perfect syllable, the sound that had always worked before, an infallible incantation, to summon his mother.

  Rustling from inside the house. Someone rising, someone walking. See how simple it is? But the footsteps were all wrong, the hulking darkness in the doorway all wrong, and Sagar stiffened in a way that Pramesh could feel from the other side of the room. His father, silent and still.

  “Another word,” the man said, “and I will pull your tongue from your throat.”

  He turned away.

  That was when he knew. The fever had taken them, his mother and Sagar’s, but had been of two minds about Pramesh, lingering so long that his father and uncle gave him up for dead. The world he returned to was like a different planet. Where once there had been two mothers, two bright points of light who laughed and consoled and seemed to know every wonder of the world, there was now Bua, an old widowed aunt, the older sister of the Elders, who brought the food and changed the linens, did her work and counted her prayer beads, but who said little, with no stories to share or games to offer when the cousins came to her with their troubles and questions.

  The Elders became larger in their mothers’ absence. Their voices and hands boomed loud and harsh; words and beatings carried the scent of alcohol and anger. The Mothers had once been there to say Stop and Enough and Please. Their aunt echoed the same pleas, but what power did a widow’s voice carry? The Elders ignored her.

  Sagar urged Pramesh to stand, to take slow and halting steps around their tiny room. Out the window, looking at the world he’d been absent from for many weeks, Pramesh saw strange men in the distance working their land. Fields once theirs had been lost in doctor’s fees and drunkenness and ill-advised business dealings. He retreated to his mat on the floor where he’d sweated and slurred. He sank into dreams, tried to forget, and when he woke, Sagar was there, watching him with worried eyes, prodding him with hot, trembling fingers.

  “Bhai? Bhaiya? Are you awake? Are you still there?”

  “Here. I am here.”

  In his fever dreams Pramesh had asked for the Mothers, and they had not come. But Sagar had, always: Sagar looking at him through the window, fetching water, Sagar asking to see him, Sagar stealing in when all others were asleep and whispering in his cousin’s ear. And always, Sagar’s voice penetrating the other boy’s thoughts, a voice that stood tall against the fever and refused to yield even if Pramesh wanted to. A voice that echoed in his ears now.

  You cannot go without me. You cannot leave me behind.

  “Pramesh-ji,” Loknath said. His wheezing voice, thick with smoke and sparks, brought the manager back to himself. “The moment is here. Throw the pot.” Tears streamed anew from Loknath’s irritated eyes; the priest could no more see the steps in front of him than the pyre, and he gestured in the general direction of where Pramesh should walk once the deed was done.

  Pramesh had almost died all those years ago, but Sagar had pulled him back to life solely with the force of his will. Yet, when his own turn had come, Pramesh had left his cousin with such ease, such eagerness to start a new life in Kashi, that he had relinquished his chance to challenge the Bearer of Death the way Sagar had and snatch his cousin back. The weight returned to his chest and pressed down more fiercely than before, and he gasped.

  “Pramesh-ji,” Loknath said again, urgency lacing his voice.

  Pramesh breathed in deep for this final step of the rites, the soot swirling in the air burning in his lungs, the heavy smell of oil and flesh and wood turning his stomach. He hefted the pot as he turned his back to the pyre. Eyes shut, he concentrated on the great God’s name and pushed the pot over his shoulder. He blinked, caught a glimpse of green flying overhead and disappearing into an alcove.

  The clay shattered against the pyre. An errant shard spiraled toward the manager and met the tender skin between his shoulder blades. The sting jolted him, forcing a movement before the mind could register its meaning. And then, then, then.…

  Pramesh looked back.

  The beginning and the end: that was all anyone ever agreed upon when they told the story. In between, the tale of the ghost on Mir ghat diverged according to the whims and memory of the teller. First, her beginning. The ghost was a woman, once. And she was remembered for three things: her eyes, her anklets, her parrot-green sari. After that….

  Some said that, in life, she was in love with a spirit. She danced on the stone steps every night, summoning her paramour with the rhythmic jingle of delicate silver chains slung around her light feet. Night after night, she danced, until one evening she danced so long and with such fervor that her bloodied feet gave out beneath her and she collapsed, dead, a smile on her lips.

  Some said she was a changeling, her true soul sucked from her body by a demon, who then deposited it into a parrot’s body every night. The demon used the parrot to do his bidding, they said, to cast the evil eye. You might hear a flutter of wings by your window as you lay in bed; you might see a flash of green as your eyes succumbed to sleep; the scratch of tiny feet on a window shutter would be enough to wake you, to keep you alert for the rest of the night.

  Some said she was simply a disobedient girl, one who flouted her elders, who assumed the freedoms of a man though she bloomed with the beauty of a woman. She walked where she willed, spoke to every person she met, felt no boundary in age or gender or propriety. She loved in places where such ties were forbidden. And though her life had been wasteful, s
ome said, her death was not: it was used as a warning for all other women, married and unmarried alike, to heed.

  Some said that the truth was simpler than that. A tale of a woman drugged and pushed and abandoned on the ghats, a thousand cracks spreading across her tired and soul-weary skull. Victim of her husband, victim of her in-laws—no uncommon thing.

  Go to one neighborhood, and you might hear one story with small variations. Another neighborhood, and you hear different tales for every floor in a building. Some scoffed at the idea of demons, of the supernatural. Others breathed in the great God’s name at the sign of a green bird flying overhead. Children absorbed the version favored in their house, and when they grew up and left Kashi, they marveled that outsiders had never heard this story that seemed to them common knowledge, like a shared understanding of when the monsoon rains would begin.

  As for the woman’s end….

  Morning saw her alive and well and sitting by the upper-story window, watching the world wake. Night saw her sprawled on the bottom-most step of the ghat, mouth agape, eyes open, hands curled, a trickle of blood tracing a delicate line down her creamy forehead, as if some painter had dipped a brush into that dark red pool beneath her head to sign his name on her skin and claim her for the city, for the great God, for the river, for the cursed land stretching out beyond like a sigh.

  Part II

  8

  Ten days of silence. Ten days of holding his tongue in Shobha and Rani’s presence, of giving a wide berth to Mohan and Narinder and the other priests just as they did to him, of keeping his eyes down and walking through the clusters of guests who still sought him out.