The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  “Do you think he was actually drunk?”

  He did not say anything for a long time. “I don’t know.”

  Shobha wondered what he wasn’t telling her. Most of her questions had brewed within her for years, but she had always faced the same dilemma: in order to satisfy her curiosity, she risked plunging her husband into one of his dark moods, the periods of vacant silence that she’d endured in the months after their marriage. He became less prone to them once Rani was born. When their daughter was an infant he would sit with her, rocking her to sleep during quiet times in the bhavan, or he’d walk around with her against his chest, soothing her at the same time that he soothed the guests, the child acting as a shield against whatever dark clouds followed him. But that darkness was always on the horizon, and so Shobha had held her tongue.

  “A new life,” she said instead, mulling over that possibility, now never to be. Then she recognized something in her husband’s tone. “You feel guilt,” she said. “You feel as if you abandoned him.” He tensed beside her. “But you did everything for him in death,” Shobha continued. “You did what you could at the moment you could. If you had seen him in life, you would have done more. Think on that. Even if the life was bad—he will be at peace now.”

  Her husband gripped her hand.

  ***

  Once Shobha was asleep, Pramesh let out a long breath, his throat burning with all he had been unable to say. He thought of that pot he’d thrown over his shoulder. He felt the sting of broken pottery on his back. And shards at his feet, years ago. A sharp pain beneath his right eyebrow. He rubbed the spot. Why had he looked back?

  He felt the weight of another clay pot in his hands. The water within making it unwieldy, but not unmanageable. The pot hefted up and over. What if he had shifted his hands? What if he had rebalanced his weight? Again and again, he threw the pot in his mind, as if rewriting his memory in order to change reality. Until at last, he fell asleep.

  ***

  Shobha woke first, blinking in the dark, aware of a building noise coming from outside the family quarters. Thunder? Had the monsoons begun? She felt pain in her bones, a chill that penetrated her hands and made it hard to curl her fingers. But the air was still stifling, with none of the veins of cool breeze that the rains brought. And the sound wasn’t the steady drum of rain. More like metal on metal, like Rani banging together two steel tumblers, but louder and fuller, with a chaotic beat. She shook her husband. “Do you hear that?” She shook him again. “Something is happening downstairs.” His back was slick, and Shobha realized he was trembling. A nightmare. He woke and looked at her as if he did not recognize her, but then the sound crashed over him and the glaze lifted from his eyes. “Stay here,” he said as he bolted out of the bed.

  With each step his ears felt assaulted, the disturbance becoming louder and more frenzied, and his feet struggled to move. He had no weapon, and even if he did, he wasn’t sure he could wield it against what sounded like a whole gang of intruders raiding the kitchen and the guests’ rooms and throwing things about. This was a holy place; what coward attacked a building that held only pilgrims and priests and the dying?

  But the kitchen was empty. Mohan met him as the manager threw aside the privacy curtain. Dev, Loknath—they were all out, circling the walkway, calming the guests who had crowded out of their rooms, hair disheveled, eyes wide or bleary, hands in front of their mouths as they whispered amongst themselves. The gate was shut. Nothing else was out of place—except for the crashing, the banging, the unmitigated fury of noise coming from a dark corner of the hostel.

  Mohan followed as Pramesh strode to the door of the washroom, leaned in, and immediately backed away. “What—”

  “You felt it too?” Mohan asked loudly. “I tried to go in, to see what it was—some animal, I thought. But as soon as my foot crossed the threshold….” He trailed off, then rubbed his arms. He looked almost green.

  “A candle, Mohan-bhai?”

  The assistant ran to fetch one, and as Pramesh waited, a feeling of nausea rose within him as the sound echoed around the bhavan, hideous voices swirling into his ears. Where was Narinder? His head priest should have been on night duty, reading aloud for a few hours. He spotted an open text in the corner where the priest usually sat, while Dev and Loknath attended the families, trying to shuffle them back into their rooms, yelling to make themselves heard.

  Then Mohan was back, a candle thrust into the manager’s hand, a shaking match igniting the wick, and he saw everyone grimacing as if their veins had been filled with icy sludge, their insides shriveling, as the sound like snakes wriggled into their ears. Shobha came downstairs, Rani crying and clinging to her, and she rocked the child back and forth in her arms as the blood drained out of her face.

  Pramesh gripped the candle and crossed the threshold. Louder and louder, a knife’s edge grinding across metal, amplified many times. He blinked, held the light out, tried to see what was there. “Who is it?” he said into the dark washroom. “Is someone there?”

  No one had followed him inside. He was alone as he turned, sweeping the candle’s light around the room. No one crouched or writhed in the space, there was no man or woman or child suffering a tantrum or convulsing from sickness.

  But he did see pots. Brass water pots, usually crowding a corner of the washroom in a single line, ready for guests to carry to the river to bathe their dying in the holy liquid. Brass water pots, which had no business rolling in a jumble on the stone floor, looking like disembodied heads for the poor light sputtering from the candle, bashing into each other, cracking against the concrete wall, the sound pouring out of their black mouths like poison.

  His back was still damp from the nightmare. Pramesh felt the hairs on his arms bend up and backward, imagining—feeling—a host of unseen things circling him, breathing their foul desperate stench on him, sending waves of nausea through his body. The dream—what had he been dreaming about? What had sickened him so?

  Pots. And now pots moving from an unseen hand, or thrown about of their own volition, or flung by something or someone who was becoming more and more furious as the manager stood there with his flickering candle and his furiously beating heart, the vessels moving faster, louder, angrier, crashing about until—

  “Who is it? Why are you here?” he yelled. Foolish thing. In the pit of his sick stomach, he knew. And he vomited up the word.

  “Bhaiya?”

  Brother.

  And the pots were still.

  9

  In the commotion and confusion, no one noticed that a family left with their skeletal mother in the middle of the night, bundles of belongings slung over their shoulders, bound for the ghats or who knows where.

  “The Sens,” Mohan said to Pramesh that morning over their chai. “The ones with the wealthy uncle, who insisted on staying here instead of some high-end place. I didn’t even realize they were gone until this morning, Pramesh-ji. Neither did Dev or Loknath-ji.”

  Pramesh sighed, then took deep breaths to clear his mind. They sat alone in the kitchen, without the usual company of Narinder. The head priest was in his room, sitting on his bed, counting his prayer beads. He was in the same position, in fact, that Pramesh had found him in after stumbling out of the washroom, heart beating wildly, ears echoing with the sudden silence that was almost as painful as the violent sound it replaced. The prayer beads were motionless in the priest’s hands, the lips that usually moved constantly with the holy mantras were set in a flat line. And the man, that immovable man, was trembling.

  “Put the family from Haridwar in that room—they have a week left still,” the manager said now, as if such departures were commonplace. He blew on his chai, aware that neither of them spoke of the thing from last night and feeling thankful to Mohan for it. Perhaps the assistant, too, suspected the entire thing could have been a dream, or the result of a particularly bad crossing of planets.

&nbs
p; In any other place, the soul suffered a yearlong journey as it traveled to the Land of the Dead. But in Kashi, that year shortened to two days. Just forty-eight hours to follow the servants of the Bearer of Death, to breach the Vaitarani river using the holy word to secure safe crossing—the same holy word received from the great God just before passing into shadow—to reach the end of ends, to be done not only with this world and this life, but all lives, forever. How many hours since Pramesh had set the pyre alight? And since he’d walked those twelve days as a dead man?

  ***

  Standing at the doorway of the family quarters, Shobha shifted Rani from one hip to the other. Since last night, she had been unable to let the child go; she needed always to be holding her or at least touching her, her fingertips on her daughter’s skin proof that Rani was safe. Such horrible thoughts had encircled her the night before, filling her head with an intense illusion once she fell asleep. It took time to pull herself out of that dream, to recall herself to reality by focusing on the dark room, the narrow bed, the curtain pulled around Rani that sometimes fluttered with the child’s breaths.

  So vivid, that nightmare. She’d been sitting in the kitchen listening to the chants from within the bhavan. She felt intensely alone. Abandoned. As she picked through pigeon peas, rolling each between her fingers, she heard knocking, loud and insistent, like a drum echoing through the bhavan, and footsteps. Her husband was coming. Pramesh walked through the gates, stepped lightly across the courtyard, came to the door of the kitchen, and paused to look at her and his surroundings. He slowly stepped past the threshold, and then pulled someone in with him. A flash of red, a spangle of gold, the jangle of anklets and bangles. And there she was: Kamna, dressed as a bride, brought home to the bhavan.

  Holding Rani, she tried to banish that image from her head, but harder to shake was the fear that lingered. The morning work was done, and outside in the courtyard, only stares and whispers of ghosts and spirits awaited her. Rani squirmed, tired of being held, so Shobha shifted her weight again and put the girl down, keeping hold of her hand. “I think,” she said, her voice overbright, “We should visit your favorite neighbor. Shall we?” Rani’s eyes widened and she pulled on Shobha’s hand, leading the way with a grip so strong that Shobha had to laugh.

  She felt a little better when she found Mrs. Mistry alone with her family, the usual gaggle of friends and neighbors absent. Mrs. Mistry led her up to the roof terrace, where several of her grandchildren were already playing, and when Rani ran to join them, Shobha did not clutch at her or feel the separation as she had in the bhavan. “Did you sleep well last night?” Shobha ventured to ask once her neighbor’s eldest granddaughter had brought chai and small bowls of spicy snack mix.

  “Oh yes—though I did wake up a few times. The heat you know.” Her fingers worked a tiny silver hook in and out of a length of white cotton thread, an intricate length of lace unfurling slowly from her hands. “Some nights are unbearable. But when you get to my age….” She trailed off, a half smile on her lips.

  So the thing that had visited the bhavan hadn’t touched the houses nearby. Shobha shivered, despite the heat, and took a sip of her chai. “Maasi,” she said, after a time. “Do you believe in something bad happening because someone else desires it?”

  Mrs. Mistry glanced up at her grandchildren. Her youngest grandson Mittu was leaning over the roof ledge, and she yelled at him to come away. She peered at Shobha. “What do you mean?”

  The bhavan mistress blew on her glass and watched Rani, who was pretending to braid the hair of one of the older Mistry girls. “I mean, if someone thinks badly of you, enough to wish you ill—do you think that wish can come true? Simply because of the force of their want?”

  “Wish you ill? Who could possibly wish anything like that toward you?” The older woman put her hook down, about to say something else, but then Mittu again caught her eye, this time leaning so far over the ledge that one leg dangled off the ground. “That boy….” She gritted her teeth and stood. “Since when did you become so completely empty-headed? Are your ears burned from the inside? How many times have I warned you?” Grabbing Mittu by the ear, Mrs. Mistry dragged her shrieking grandson to a safer corner and released him, then set him to doing fifteen squats, fingers gripping his earlobes, as punishment.

  Shobha watched, laughter bubbling up in her throat. A flash of green caught her eye: a parrot alighted just behind her. It pecked at the concrete ledge, then at its neat grey feet. She had grown up hearing the story of the Green Parrot Girl, had been in rooms with women who, looking out the window, whispered Rama-Rama whenever that bird crossed their vision. Before having Rani, she’d always thought those women were silly, too susceptible to superstition, too easily excited—like Mrs. Gupta. She looked at it, its plumage the color of a mango just shy of the first blush of ripeness, its curious eyes glinting. A bird, she told herself, could be just that—just a bird. The parrot skittered one way, then another, and finding nothing worthwhile, it flew off, melting into the sky.

  “What were you saying?” Mrs. Mistry asked when she picked up her lacework, having sentenced Mittu to sitting in the corner for ten minutes more.

  Shobha shook her head. “Nothing, Maasi.”

  ***

  That night, after seeing that Dev had all that he needed for the first evening reading shift, the manager seated himself in the kitchen, thinking, as Shobha lay curled in bed upstairs with Rani. Pramesh had been trying to remember his dream from the previous night, the one that had sickened him, made him weak with fear in his throat, in his veins. If he could remember what had frightened him, it might be a key to what had summoned Sagar.

  He didn’t want to believe that his sojourn into the Land of the Dead, his attempt to walk the same steps Sagar should have been walking, had been in vain. That yet again, and at the most crucial moment, he had failed his cousin. He’d said nothing to Narinder, to Mohan, even to his wife. But he didn’t need to. He could see in their eyes that they were asking the same questions.

  He soon nodded off, but then he jolted awake. Beneath him, the ground trembled. A slow hum, then a faster vibration, sending his teeth rattling in his head, making the wood on the hearth shiver, shaking the room from side to side until Shobha’s neatly lined canisters of rice and chickpea flour tipped over and rolled to the other end of the room, the walls swayed, the pictures hanging above the rope bed rattled off their hooks.

  A dream, Pramesh thought, even as the earth quaked beneath him. He tried to get up, but his limbs felt frozen, while his blood was on fire. His jaw clenched and he was unable to speak, to scream. He could only move his eyes, and he darted his glance from side to side and up and down, locked in his body, a feeling swirling around him that nauseated him and set his nerves ablaze with terror. It pressed down on him, pushing harder, and the walls all around him cinched in like a box growing ever smaller, squeezing him ever tighter. Intense sadness, intense wanting, coursed through him like a gale tearing through the branches of a tree. And then the room rumbled again, and one of the pictures at the head of the home shrine tipped over, the divine eyes looking directly into the manager’s.

  Rama, he thought. Rama. And he forced all his will into his lips and his tongue, forced all his breath into his voice. “Rama.”

  His paralysis, the sensation of being in a box, subsided. Bracing himself, he walked to the washroom, where, he knew in his bones, the same nausea, the shivering blood, the ghostly thoughts swirling around his skull awaited him. Yesterday, he had thought that nothing could be worse than how he’d felt as the pots wailed, the sound snaking into his ears, his blood turned cold. He was wrong.

  “Bhaiya,” he gasped into the night. And the cloud lifted, his head felt clear again, his blood thawed and ran free in his veins. The bhavan stilled. Upstairs, Rani cried out, and he heard Shobha try to calm her. In the courtyard, another child cried, a man breathed out a loud exclamation of the great God’s name. Mo
han emerged from his room, looking like a man awake from a long illness; Dev was wide-eyed, hastening to catch up with where he’d left off reading holy word aloud before his tongue froze. And the manager knew he hadn’t been the only one to feel it.

  Sagar had seated himself in the bhavan, determined to be heard.

  ***

  They lost two more families, both packing up so quickly and carrying their dying between them with such haste that no one had time to run after them in the street, reasoning with them to stay. Even so, four other families turned up that day. The manager could take comfort in that, at least: Ghost or no, the dying would never stop coming. Sheetal stood at the door of the room he shared with his father, watching as Pramesh and Mohan kept busy. “I can help,” the boy said when Pramesh looked his way. “If you need something mended—I can do simple things. Bapa taught me how.”

  “Pramesh-bhai—the bed in No. 1 wobbles,” Mohan said. “Another of Balram’s. I think the legs are loose—easy enough to fix. I can show him where the tools are.”

  Pramesh tilted his head and watched Sheetal run off to follow the assistant. The day when he would have to ask the youth to leave would come soon enough, but it was far from the most urgent of the manager’s problems. He and Mohan divided up the rooms and oriented the new arrivals, all while they carefully picked their way around the questions that the more seasoned guests peppered them with about the previous night.

  “What was it? Will it happen again?”

  “Has it anything to do with the night before?”

  “Strange thing, my father did not seem to notice anything. But then, perhaps he is so far gone; death must be coming any minute now, yes?”