“So I can visit you.”
“If you like. But after this life, I will be gone, as you wish.”
“What?” Sagar’s voice lost the anger, instead tinged with panic.
“I will go there, make it my home, become a very very old woman.”
“Veena…” Pramesh’s mother said.
Sagar’s mother ignored her. “And one day, I will die, just as all of us will. And I won’t come back.”
“Why not?”
“No one who dies in Kashi comes back. It will be as you wish. You’ll never see me again, not in this life, never in any life after that.”
Sagar leapt out of bed, bolted to his mother and grabbed her around the legs. She pretended to be resolute, then let her hands fall to his head. He pulled her to the bed, made her sit down, then climbed into her lap and hugged her to him, mimicking Pramesh.
“All right,” she said. “All right. I will stay. I will be your ma.”
“Veena, you shouldn’t say such things,” Pramesh’s mother chided. Pramesh continued to cling to his mother as she started the story. He didn’t listen to the words so much as the sound of her voice, the vibrations from deep inside her body radiating into him as she spoke.
The pressure in Pramesh’s chest loosened, but the space behind his eyebrow throbbed. His shoulders and back ached, remembering the bruises put there all those years ago. The rain came down from the sky in looser droplets, light enough to see to the other end of the lane. The two boys continued to pet the dog, but now they sat on either side of the animal, right in the filthy lane that ran brown with rainwater, and took turns holding the umbrella over it. Their mother would discover them soon enough, and the entire street would be the audience to her fury. He cast an upward glance at the sky and quickened his feet in the direction of the bhavan.
16
Outwardly, Shankarbhavan was doing well. A dying person occupied every room. The rain had slowed the traffic of pilgrims to the city, but the holy month of Shraavana was approaching, and because this was the most auspicious time for a soul to leave the body, people either dying or hoping to would soon arrive. Such a death would complete the holy trifecta: to die a good death in the holiest city at the holiest time of the year. What a dream that was, a death that a family could return home and brag about.
And yet, weeks had passed since anyone had exited her body within the confines of the hostel walls. Women who were sure their last days were nigh improved at miraculous rates and began issuing orders to their daughters-in-law; men felled by strokes lingered in suspended states, neither worsening to the point of release nor resuming their function as the heads of their families. In fact, the last dead body to grace the hostel was dead when it arrived. Sagar’s was still the latest funeral that the bhavan had facilitated, and there was no sign of a succeeding corpse in any of the twelve rooms that filled and emptied and filled again with each passing week.
Pramesh had realized it some days after his visit with Govind. He kept meticulous records regarding every dying person in the bhavan. As he did his monthly accounting, his pen faltered when it came time to tally the month’s deaths. He went back and looked; he checked once more. He flipped through the previous month’s numbers, and then the month before, until he’d reviewed the entire preceding year. He pulled out the logbook from the year before that and flipped through it as well. And then he penned a round zero on the page for that month and closed the book, angry at himself. Why had it taken him so long to notice?
In the bhavan, families came and families departed—at least that remained the same. But the bathing of bodies in the courtyard, the procurement of flowers and wood and cloth, the construction of a bier, the gathering of money to pay the priests and the Doms, the raucous brass bands leading the way to the ghats—those things faded from bhavan life. Now, as Pramesh took a turn about the rooms, the sight of the newer guests studying the instructions on the back of their doors filled him with a sick wash of guilt.
***
Narinder and Pramesh may have accepted that nothing could be done until the dryer months, but Mohan was not so convinced. He found Pramesh as he was looking into the rooms and broached the topic of the pots. “Is there anything we can do to at least make it quieter?” he asked. “Or is there something I can tell the guests instead of the same story night after night?”
Pramesh’s attention surfaced as if from a great depth. “The story you mention—you’ve been telling the guests it is a cat,” Pramesh said slowly, and Mohan wobbled his head, shamefaced. “How do we know it’s not?”
Mohan, confused, tilted his chin. “Ji?”
Pramesh sighed. “How do we know anything in this world at all?” That was all he would say. Mohan, who could no longer look at the manager without feeling the burden of the untold story—the truth—took a turn around the courtyard and then took himself out into the street, the rain now falling at a moderate pace. He could think better when surrounded by the constant hum of chatting voices and running children and the low grind of bicycle and rickshaw wheels. The wheels in his own brain turned as he walked, and he came to rest on the wet stairs of the nearest temple.
Mohan remembered the early days of the bhavan, before Rani was born, when dark moods would sometimes bury the manager. Long periods with the office door closed to visitors, Pramesh so sunk in sadness that it took many tries to get his attention and recall him to the world. Then his child was born, and the moods diminished and disappeared—but now they were back. Surely if Mohan told the story of the dead man, of his visit to the bhavan, the manager’s bleak mood would only worsen.
Perhaps, he reasoned, if he could find a cat, he could transform the story he’d been telling the guests each night into truth. He could blame the ghost’s exploits on a real animal, and Pramesh would feel at least some of the stress lift from his shoulders. The task was not so difficult; there seemed to be a litter of kittens in every street. Mohan passed through the bazaar lanes, keeping his eyes especially sharp around any food stalls. Intent on his mission, he waved away the many people calling out his name or approaching him with the latest bit of gossip. Rounding the corner past the wireman’s stall, he saw a pair of boys tempting a skinny grey feline with a piece of fresh coconut.
“You there,” he said to the older one. “Fetch me a bag from the stall back there—tell them Mohan-ji has sent you. Quickly, now!” The boy ran off, and his companion meanwhile popped the coconut into his mouth. The cat sat near the wall and blinked. It was a calm little beast and did not protest when Mohan gently took it by the scruff and deposited it into the burlap bag the older boy brought him. Once in the bag, however, a plaintive mewling started up, and the bundle began to squirm. Mohan threw a couple of coins at the boys and hurried down the lane to the bhavan, his burden becoming louder and more difficult to carry with every step.
He still thanked the strange luck that had secured his position at the bhavan. Alone in the world, he had been an orphan, a street ruffian. He’d stolen to eat and survive, but, once caught, he’d so charmed the vendors with flagrant excuses and well-chosen gossip that they’d turn a blind eye to his pilfering even as their wives berated their soft hearts. In return Mohan had performed little jobs for them on the side as he grew older, his abilities as a reliable running man well known across the city.
That was how he’d ended up at the bhavan. The old and ailing manager Dharam, Shobha’s father, was looking for someone to help his new son-in-law and protegée. His contacts led him to Mohan, and a few hours after the old man met with the young one for a cup of chai and a brief interview, Mohan found himself running across the city to fetch his things from the tiny room he rented in the vegetable alley, next door to a shaky shed where goats congregated around the carrot peelings and cabbage leaves. Despite the unbearable stink in hot summer months, as Mohan handed his key to the landlady and walked away with a sack of clothes on his back, he felt nostalgia even for the mang
y goat that followed him down the lane as if to say goodbye.
Happy days followed—filled with hard work, death, and constant planning for funerals—but happy nonetheless. In the bhavan, he had something he’d wanted for a very long time: family. Shobha became like a sister, and Pramesh an older brother. Rani’s arrival gave Mohan a niece, and he spoiled the girl as much as he would have any blood relative. They had chosen him; such a precious gift demanded a loyalty that had never been difficult to summon.
His arms strained with the writhing bag as he passed through the gates, but he felt triumphant. Pramesh was in the courtyard, speaking to a guest, surrounded by others who had some quibble or question. He looked so deflated, as if he had aged ten years. Mohan thought to wait until Pramesh had a quiet moment to talk in his office, but the bundle had other ideas. With a great wrench, the burlap twisted from Mohan’s hands and released its contents. The cat tumbled out, hissing at the manager’s feet, and then shot between Mohan’s legs back out through the gates. “Oh, Rama,” the assistant groaned. “A minute, Pramesh-ji. Just a minute, and I will fetch it directly.”
Pramesh looked from the gate to the assistant and back again, his brow furrowed. The men surrounding them were unamused—they had urgent questions about their dying loved ones that only Pramesh could answer.
“The cat,” Mohan reminded him. “Remember, we spoke of it, earlier?”
“A cat?” Pramesh asked, his face blank. “Mohan-bhai, why on earth would we want a cat in the bhavan?” He frowned and turned back to the men in the courtyard.
The words did not wound Mohan so much as the tone. He’d never heard such irritation from the manager. That night at dinner, when Pramesh seemed once again lost in his thoughts, Mohan kept replaying it: the look of disdain on the manager’s face, the abrupt dismissal. Shobha, too, seemed to treat him differently—no doubt Pramesh had told her what happened.
That night in bed, sleep elusive and hunger gnawing at him, his cowardice and this second failure echoing in his head, his hands reached of their own accord to the steel cabinet. Quickly, he ate one, two, three packets of biscuits, unable to stop. Then he promptly fell asleep, snoring deeply until the roaring of the pots, the sick chill washing through the air, snatched him back and he got up to calm the guests.
The next day, running errands, Mohan bought more biscuits to replenish his supply. But then once again his hands reached out by themselves, snatching up other things he usually bought only for children or for Rani. Bags of roasted cashews, red with masala or speckled with black salt and lime. Gram flour fried into crunchy chips and blazing with more masala. An entire box of sweets, sticky jalebi and round ladoos, carrot halwa, almond and pistachio barfi.
Shoving his purchases deep into a jute bag, laying a newspaper on top to hide the contraband, Mohan walked home. He knew the rules. He was the one to recite the list on the back of each door in the bhavan, to issue gentle reminders for first offenses and to report further ones to Pramesh. The rule regarding outside food was just as important as the nightly curfew or the instruction to keep the mind fixed in prayer. “Someone who is dying must concentrate on the great God, on separating himself from physical attachments,” Narinder would explain to an unconvinced guest. “Your father cannot sever himself from this life and this world if his mind is fixed on some desired object, much less his neighbor’s dinner.”
Mohan stowed the things away in his steel cabinet, pushing the door firmly shut, and continued with his day’s duties. That night, he lay in bed, alone in the dark, and thought of his job, his secure place in the bhavan, his respect for Pramesh and Shobha, his inclusion in the priests’ circle even though he was not their equal. He thought of the dying guests and the sacrifices their families made to bring them to this holy city. He thought of the ghost, of the manager’s stress, and of his own inability to help. He had prided himself on being capable, ready to meet any challenge to ease the lives of those who dwelled in the bhavan. But he hadn’t been capable enough, quick enough, to answer a stranger’s call at the gate, to realize just how important that stranger was, to usher him in and alert the manager.…
First, he ate the cashews, alternating between spicy and sour-salty. He finished with three pieces of barfi, and only then was he able to sleep. Each succeeding night, he ate more, and each day, he brought more home. The saltiness, sweetness, and spicy sour, the unbridled tingle on his tongue that assailed his senses—he needed these to face the night. By the time he rose for his nightly charade against the ghost-addled pots, the wrappers were disposed of, the scent of chewed cloves covered his breath, and he held in the need to belch until all the guests and Pramesh were back in bed.
These things were within his control. Others were not.
“Mohan-bhai, you have stopped liking my food, I think,” Shobha said to him one morning when he eschewed the roti from the previous night’s dinner that they always ate for breakfast.
“No, no, ji,” Mohan replied with a half-hearted laugh. “What person can resist your cooking? I have had stomach issues for some days now.”
Shobha, who did not know how to face a problem without offering a solution, promptly dipped a spoon into a castor oil concoction and forced the assistant to take it, which so distressed him that tears ran from his eyes. “One more at midday and everything will be clear,” Shobha said.
No amount of home remedies, however, could fix Mohan’s problem. He’d forgotten the basic principle that anyone past the childhood years of eating green mangoes could tell you: changes in diet will lead to other, inevitable, changes. In the mornings, as the priests queued outside the washroom for their morning evacuations, Mohan took his place behind them, but his need was false. Later, however, when the midnight hour bridged the old day and the new, his muscles tightened in urgent familiarity and he faced his most distressing dilemma yet.
He almost soiled himself, thinking about the stories. “Never go at night, never!” the old farmer Ramu used to warn the circles of dusty children who gathered at his feet to hear his ongoing narration of the Mahabharata. “Dhoti loose,” he said, “ass like some black marble in the moonlight, and that’s when they get you.” They, of course, were the night spirits, ghosts, souls in limbo—just like the one in the washroom. Mohan shivered at the recollection. Anything could happen to a person who let his bowels loose in the night hours. You could be possessed or struck dumb, forced to walk backward while singing for the rest of your life, or simply disappear. And if he ventured out beyond the bhavan gates to some narrow lane where the beggars ensconced themselves, or to the ghats that the sweepers used in the mornings? No, there was Ramu again, warning him.
“Once,” the old man had said in between great bites of sugar cane, wrenching off the hard green peel with his five remaining teeth and spitting the shards a good three meters behind him, “there was someone in the village. We called him Chikku because he was always eating those fruits. He was a good fellow, but he got into trouble when he drank, and hey! That is another thing to stay away from! Well, one day he angered a sadhu who lived next to a nearby temple. This Chikku took a piss right in the spot where the sadhu would sit for his meditation, and that was it. After that, nothing ever worked properly for Chikku. Every time he sat down he’d have to get up again to take a piss, and at night his stomach gave the worst rumblings and sent him racing from his house to the field. He tried everything! He begged the sadhu’s forgiveness, he did puja at the temple, he walked for days to visit every doctor he could find. Nothing. Once the curse was there, no one could take it away, not even the sadhu himself. And then one day I heard that Chikku had disappeared. No one knew what happened, but there were some boys traveling the road who stopped to sleep near a field, and they said they were woken in the night by a man who ran past them screaming, and from behind they could see his ass shining in the moonlight, covered with shit like a buffalo’s! No one ever saw him again, but anyone could guess at what had happened. Ghosts like such thi
ngs, nah?”
As the cramps and exertions of Mohan’s intestines accelerated, he let loose the rapid breaths of a woman in labor and thought with increasing panic of the unfortunate Chikku. His options were to risk going outside where ghosts could be, or go to the washroom where a ghost most certainly would be. The danger of possession, of being cursed or seized or at the very least frightened, was enough to make him pause. But he couldn’t hesitate for long. Quietly, the assistant crept from the bhavan with his water-filled brass lota in hand, slipped into the haven of a wet dark alley, and—saying the great God’s name as his stomach churned and sighed—did the thing.
17
The sun had been up for some hours, but Rani slept on her soft mat in the corner of the bedroom. She’d had trouble closing her eyes even after the bhavan was quiet; the child’s frequent chills persisted and her sleep was often restless. Shobha’s vigilance with ginger-spiced chai and milk laced with turmeric sometimes brought Rani back to herself, and now her breathing was light and even.
A three-year-old who did not speak was not much of a story in this city whose attention was always pulled in many directions at once, most recently with the scandal of the groom who somehow escaped his own wedding procession as it marched with single-minded determination toward the bride’s home and managed to slip into his favorite house at Dal-Mandi for a quick—very quick, people said—courage-inducing lay. Sometimes, however, when gossip was scant, talk turned to the child living in the hostel who had yet to utter a single word. Some blamed the environment; others sniffed over family connections, and then there were the venomous few who blamed Shobha. Anyone can see how she spoils the girl, how she always has the child by her side. Never a correction for bad behavior! That child requires a slap or two to knock the words out of her.
Shobha rarely heard the words directly, but sometimes the odd woman in the marketplace, like Mrs. Gupta, pulled her aside to tell her what was being said in what they surely imagined was a helpful way.
The City of Good Death Page 14
