The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  His eyes followed the swift currents of the river. Whenever he felt Rani was straying too far, he called after her, and the children responded by moving up the stairs to play near him. He turned back to the river, to the bobbing boats that lined the lowest ghat step in neat rows two deep. Some men walked along the line of boats, deep in talk that soon grew more agitated as one of them, a young man smoking beedis with a manic speed, threw up his hands and said something that made his companions laugh unkindly. “Don’t complain to us—lodge a report with Bhut,” one of the men cackled. Another turned and pointed at Pramesh with a glint in his eye.

  “The dead man’s twin is right there. Blame him, if you must blame someone.”

  The manager’s mood darkened as the young boatman stalked off, his laughing companions following. The last man in the group, who had neither laughed nor smiled when his friend singled out the manager, hesitated near the boats. Then he mounted the steps and sat down next to Pramesh. “You must forgive my friends, ji,” he said, eyes toward the river. “Raman, you see.… His boat is the one your twin took out on that night. He’s had trouble getting any passengers, even after exorcising the boat. No one will trade or take it off his hands.”

  Pramesh nodded. “I am sorry for him,” he said, and he realized that he really was.

  “Was he—your cousin, I mean.… Was he fond of boats?”

  “We were country boys, farm boys. Neither of us had any business on the water. I don’t know what he was thinking, where he meant to go.” He looked at the river’s far shore, a stretched ribbon of white in the distance. “He could have been going to Magadha, for all I know.”

  Before he’d come to Kashi, he had heard about Magadha: a cursed ghost land, the most unfortunate place to die. Yet despite the warnings and superstitions, over the years he had seen the occasional boat on the far shore and people moving about that sandy beach. Walking, talking, laughing, even picnicking! The trip was a fad among young people especially, who scoffed at their elders’ warnings and gathered friends for an afternoon in the sun.

  The boatman looked out into the distance. “Do you think he was one of those who tried?”

  “Tried what?” Pramesh glanced at the boatman. “Going to Magadha? At night and by himself?” The boatman raised his eyebrows and wagged his chin slowly. “That seems foolish,” Pramesh said.

  The boatman offered a beedi to Pramesh and then lit it for himself when the manager declined. The smell of smoke wafted up to the hostel manager like an invitation to speak, but he said nothing as he stared at the river with its swollen surface and undulating ripples, and at the desolate far shore. The boatman’s beedi grew shorter until it dissolved into a stub of ash. “Those who go there are never foolish, ji,” he said, more to himself than to the manager. “Desperate—yes. But not foolish. There’s a story—don’t you know it?”

  Pramesh shook his head, wondering if he should be listening to this man. Behind him, the children were drawing on the steps with chalk. His daughter was so at ease with them. He did not want to take her home just yet. The boatman, meanwhile, lit another beedi, and when Pramesh did not object, he started to speak.

  “There is a certain kind of brave man. A dying man, and young—not like the old and frail folk who come here for a good death at your bhavan.”

  Pramesh swallowed, thinking of his mother, his aunt. Thinking of Sagar. He glanced over at Rani, sitting quietly as another young girl traced the outline of her plump hand with a stub of chalk.

  “Say this dying person has tried everything: prayed and fasted and tried all the medicines, all the swamis and babas and doctors. They say that person can try one last thing, and go to Magadha. He must go alone, no matter how weak he is, and then he must walk as far as he can, until he feels he will collapse and die right there on the sand. And then, when he is at the immediate point of dying—then they say the Bearer of Death will come.”

  “Yamraj?” Pramesh looked across the river at Magadha, as if he might see that divine being from his sitting place on the ghats. A chill rolled over his shoulders and down his neck.

  “There is no other.”

  “But this is the city of the great God. Yamraj is forbidden here.”

  “Here in Kashi, yes. But on Magadha the Bearer is welcome.” The boatman flicked away the ashes of his beedi and reached for another. “It’s not an easy thing. The man must really be dying—only those so close to the edge of two worlds can see the Bearer of Death. And he must be alone as well. If a healthy man, a living man whose time has not yet come hovers nearby, neither the dying nor the living will be able to see Yamraj. But if the dying man does everything correctly, if he actually sees the Bearer, then he has his chance. He can plead with Yamraj to put down the noose, snatch his soul on another day. Perhaps the Bearer will listen. But there is no way to be certain unless that dying man actually tries.” All of this, the boatman explained, was a great risk. The moment had to be exactly right—too late, and the man ended up dying before touching both feet to Magadha; too soon, and Yamraj would never appear. There were folk who ended up dead on the far shore, having never seen the Bearer or having been denied their request; there was no way of knowing which. In those cases, what would have already been a bad death became a disastrous one, a death that was not only early and untimely, but away from Kashi and on the most cursed land imaginable.

  “I have never heard this tale before,” Pramesh said. He stared from Magadha to the boatman and back. “It is not in any of the scriptures. Where did it come from? And why does nobody speak of it?”

  “Because speaking of it keeps the story alive. And then how many would we see, mad with hope? Not just from the city, but from every other place?” The boatman took a long pull from his beedi. “No. Better for the story to die. And better for the young to suffer bad deaths in their homes than dying on Magadha.”

  “None of our books speak of such a thing, and no dying man has ever returned from Magadha suddenly healthy—news of such a feat would spread to villages and beyond. How can you take it seriously when there is no proof?”

  “Who says there is none?” the boatman asked. He looked the manager in the eyes. “There is proof. There is a man who did this, and he survived to come back. But the change in him.… He may have received a reprieve from death, but the life he received thereafter was not the same as the life he begged the Bearer to extend.”

  Pramesh did not bother to hide his laugh. “I suppose this is a man who lived.… When, exactly? In your grandfather’s time? And it was a story that his father told him, and it passed down the generations until you, yes?”

  “No. Our time, yours and mine, ji.” The boatman ignored the disbelief plain on Pramesh’s face. “You never saw him as he was before—young, quick, well-liked. They expected great things of him before he became ill. His family could not go two steps in the market lanes without being stopped by matchmakers, potential business partners, someone eager to stand in the path of that young man’s light and snatch some of his radiance for themselves. There was talk of sending him to Delhi, to a grand university, a government position, an advantageous marriage.”

  “Where is this man? I have never heard of or met him before.”

  The boatman laughed. “Oh, you have, ji. All of us have, though the wiser among us avoid him just as much as others sought him out before. He has changed, as I mentioned. He went looking for an extension on his life, and instead the Bearer provided him with a different kind of life entirely. But the body, the shell, remains.”

  Pramesh shook his head. “His name, then?”

  “He went by a common enough name, once. No one calls him by it anymore; they all use the name the city gave him long ago.” The manager’s breath caught in his throat. The boatman smiled. “Didn’t I say you know him? Everyone knows him, from the smallest child to the oldest graybeard. He is impossible to avoid.”

  “Maharaj.” Pramesh looked back at the
river, at Magadha, and rolled this thought around until he knew it to be true. “His name is Maharaj.”

  ***

  With no husband to think of or child to look after, Shobha enjoyed the quiet at first. But then she replayed the morning in her head and wished she hadn’t been so short with Rani. She felt restless, unable to focus. She took herself upstairs, ostensibly to organize her saris, but soon enough her hands abandoned the task, cotton and chiffon in a heap on the bed, and she instead took out Kamna’s letter from her almirah and read it over again.

  That woman did not have to write a response, especially without knowing who exactly was writing to her in the first place. But she had. More than that, she had put something quite plainly into her letter, something that Shobha had not wanted to admit the first time: sorrow, floating off the page, suffusing the ink. The woman was a widow now, after all. How had it felt to get that letter from Pramesh detailing her husband’s death? To have her last memory of her husband be a hurried farewell, never guessing that he would not come back, with not even a last look at his lifeless body, the chance to bathe the limbs and pray over it before it was given to the pyre?

  In one ear, the warning from that female voice in a strange kitchen all those years ago, saying Kamna was a shameless woman, a runaway who forgot nothing. In the other ear, the farmer’s wife. She’s had a difficult life. And a gentle reminder from Mrs. Mistry, her friend, that the heart could sometimes fit more than one thought it could.

  Shobha took a pen from her husband’s desk. The ink was drying and the nib skipped upon the page. The finished letter was messy and short, but it was done, and she sealed it and affixed the stamp before she could change her mind.

  Kamna-behan,

  I am Shobha, the wife of your husband’s cousin, the writer of that letter

  you received.

  I am your sister. I am your friend.

  Please. Tell me what happened.

  23

  Night after night, the clanging of the pots below wrenched Pramesh from his dreams, the unbearable sound rising in high shrieks that pierced the brain and dipped to aching lows that seeped into the bones. Down the stairs he went, Shobha following to cover him with a shawl, through the kitchen to the courtyard, into the cold needles of rain, past the guests who prayed or gave out startled cries, feet in inadvertent sync with the rhythm of the mantras echoing from Dev’s throat (Om Tat Sat), to the washroom door. The priests had taken to stuffing their ears with cotton as they loudly read from their books, and Mohan slept with a shirt wrapped around his head. The dying remained motionless but for the shallow rise and dip of their chests, as if they heard nothing at all.

  But one night, something happened. As Mohan unswaddled himself and tried to calm the guests, there came a new sound amid the din.

  A low wailing rose from No. 8, the weaver’s room, the human sound competing with the metallic lament across the bhavan. The voices belonged to the weaver’s daughters. At first Pramesh thought someone had fallen ill. It had been so long since he’d been able to record a death in his ledgers that he’d forgotten the signals. He motioned to Mohan to check the guests while he tended to the pots.

  But now he was unable to silence them. “Bhaiya,” he whispered. Then, louder: “Bhaiya.” He then yelled out the word, and it produced no effect besides waking a baby staying within the bhavan, whose wailing cries surpassed even the pots.

  Trying to think of what else he might say, Pramesh turned to see what Mohan had found. As soon as his back was turned, the pots ceased and the washroom was quiet. Guests rimmed the dry walkway as the rain falling into the courtyard blurred the image of those across from him.

  Then he went in to see the dead weaver—for he had indeed passed—and Pramesh’s life and duties returned to him. The man’s features, frozen in that wash of blankness universal to every corpse, brought clarity to Pramesh’s mind. “Mohan-bhai, fetch the white cloth from the office cabinet,” Pramesh said before turning to Dev. “It must have happened just a short while ago. Did you see him before you retired this evening?”

  “I did,” Dev said. “We gave him tulsi water in the early evening as we always do, and the chanting seemed to calm him.”

  The weeping daughters had no male chaperone. Shobha would be the one to talk to them; she would provide the solace they needed right now just as she had done many times before. She came at once at her husband’s request. There remained just one more question: he needed to know if the man had said anything before his departure, and, if he’d managed the breath for speech, it was of utmost importance that Pramesh know what the man had said. For if the weaver had been able to form the divine name, if he had given a verbal indication that his mind was on that higher plane at his moment of passing, during the holiest month in the holiest city, then it would be a sure sign that his death was not only good—it was, in fact, the best death possible. Such a death, despite the banging and clanging of brass in the washroom behind him, would mean.… What? That the ghost that was once Sagar was finally weary of its in-between existence? That it would leave of its own accord?

  While Mohan soothed the guests, the priests discussed who would take charge of the funeral in the morning. Pramesh retired to the family quarters. For the first time in weeks he realized just how exhausted he was, and with great effort he kept his flickering eyes from closing completely as he waited for his wife. The privacy curtain fluttered open, and she pulled it closed behind her.

  “Rama,” Shobha said. “He just said it once, but they are positive. The last word was Rama.”

  When morning came, it was difficult for the staff to assume the neutral look of detachment that was standard when someone passed. The priests, who, excepting the unflappable Narinder, had become affected to a point of listless torpor, responded to their duties with renewed vigor. In the absence of any male relatives, Pramesh headed to the marketplace to get the things needed for the rites while Mohan went to the ghats to negotiate with the Doms.

  Children clad in school uniforms walked by, their books swathed in plastic bags to keep off the rain; an old vegetable seller with his dhoti rolled to his knobby knees pulled his laden cart, wares also covered with fluttering plastic, through the soft muddy lane. Maharaj was out, going from stall to stall and begging for work, a few coins, anything. He shuffled over, clay pot held tight against his body, and held his hand out to the manager. Pramesh took a long look at Maharaj’s face, the crooked mouth that hovered between smile and frown, the blank eyes, trying to find some sign of the man who once lived within that shell. He dropped a few coins into the drunk’s palm, hoping that the money might be used for food instead of homebrew.

  He wandered about, filling the market bag Shobha had given him: a coconut, flowers both in loose bundles and strung into a thick garland to wreathe the dead weaver’s neck, spindles of cotton thread and hanks of jute rope to secure the bier. He strode deeper into the marketplace until he found Arjuna the tailor who sat cross-legged on a cushion with various pins and needles protruding from his mouth. He sat in his hole-in-the-wall shop, working tiny sesame-seed stitches into the border of some filmy purple material, but stopped and took the pins out of his mouth when Pramesh approached. “Ah,” the tailor said. “At last the man whose shirts I make but whose face I never see! What lucky day is this that brings you here?”

  “We had a death today—last night actually.” Arjuna, already anticipating what the manager needed, released himself from his curled position and took two steps to the opposite side of the lane. His practiced hands rummaged through the haphazard stacks of cloth until he located what Pramesh needed and then he cut up the necessary lengths of each material and folded them into crisp rectangles, using one long fingernail to press creases into the cloth. “I was afraid you bhavan people had abandoned me after all these years and were going to someone else,” he said as he folded the last piece of cloth. He caught the eye of a chai-wallah and held up two fingers. />
  “What do you mean?” Pramesh asked.

  “Your assistant is still there, yes? I see Mohan walking around the marketplace almost every day, but he has not come to see me for funeral things in so many weeks! Where has he been going, then?” Just as Pramesh was about to chide the man for being oversensitive, the chai-wallah’s running boy came toward them with a metal tray and two steaming glasses, and a familiar voice arose from behind the manager and the tailor.

  “I’ll join you for a glass.” Kishore snapped his fingers at the running boy, and Pramesh felt a low burn kindle within him. In the next breath, he doused it.

  “What is this that our tailor friend was saying to you, Pramesh-bhaiya?” Kishore asked “You’ve stopped visiting his shop? Has some rift occurred between you two?”

  “No rift,” Pramesh said, hoping to avoid the details. Kishore’s look, however, quite plainly said he required more information. “We all know there is no pattern to death, whether it be the season of Shraavana or of the new year. We just happened to have a drought of death that ended recently. Nothing more.”

  “Very strange,” Kishore said, blowing on his chai. If there was one place Kishore’s eyes and ears did not reach, it was the bhavan. The families were too transitory for him to get any information out of them, and the priests, of course, could not be depended upon to divulge any gossip.

  “Not so strange,” Pramesh said, Arjuna looking between him and Kishore. “You can never tell—some weeks, nothing. Other weeks, the entire bhavan is emptied all in one day.”

  “But for a whole month?” Kishore persisted. Pramesh sipped his chai and rocked his chin. His entire body was stiff with wariness. “Didn’t that Govind visit you? That batty low-caste fellow—an exorcist, once, wasn’t he?”

  “He and Narinder-ji are old friends,” Pramesh said. He tried to keep his tone light. A green parrot flew overhead and landed behind Kishore. It seemed to fix its eye on Pramesh, turning its head one way, then another, before flying off.