The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  No purity by fire, no freeing of the life essence. The body is burned and so should the memory be. His sister’s body remained in Kashi, albeit at the bottom of the river; perhaps even now she walked its depths, pacing the sands deep below. And so too, the memories remained, rotting in a hidden corner of Bhut’s brain, growing putrid with time and festering no matter how hard he tried to forget.

  He walked with his deputy through streets, the ground littered with refuse and drunks. As they approached Dal-Mandi Chowk, the infamous street of dancing houses and brothels, he was surprised to come upon the hostel manager, who seemed lost and relieved to see Bhut’s face.

  “What business do you have here?” the circle officer asked.

  Pramesh held up the sullied card. “This other Shankarbhavan—do you know anything of it? I believe my cousin may have stopped there.”

  The circle officer stared at Pramesh and shook his head. “What point could there be in this journey? Go home, Manager-ji. Go home to your daughter. Live your life. Don’t bother learning a story that can only bring you pain.” He spat out those last words along with a wad of tobacco. A moment later, his deputy hailed him from a side street. “Mark my words, Manager-ji,” he said before following the deputy. “Most times, it’s better to know nothing.”

  ***

  Pramesh watched the man’s back as he stalked off, but remained undeterred. Down an alley, then another, round a bend, and at last he found the place. In contrast to the wide expanse of street that his hostel occupied, this false Shankarbhavan seemed no larger than any other house in Kashi. The paint on the sign outside was worn and flaking, and the front desk, seen through the open door, was a rough, lopsided table where a boy not even in his teens sat scribbling away in an exercise book.

  “Hello,” he greeted the boy. “You have another man here, one who picks up guests from the train station, yes? Is he here?”

  “Arrey, Sahib, who can tell?” the boy kept his head down, his pencil skittering across the page in a busy hand. “So many people in and out and in and out, all day long. All day I am here listening to orders: do this, do that, another towel, a lizard in the bathroom, mosquitoes in the bed.”

  The manager looked around. Red paan spit stains spattered the walls, and an unpleasant acrid odor permeated the air. A staircase wound upward behind the desk, so narrow that Pramesh would have had to walk up sideways to traverse the passage, and loud yells and banging sounded from the upper floors. He noticed a rickety chair near the entranceway, and he sat down. “I will wait, then,” he said.

  The boy continued to mutter to himself as he finished writing and squinted at the page. Then, as if suddenly cognizant of Pramesh’s presence, he looked up and stared at the manager, who tried to give a reassuring smile. But the boy bent his head and bit his lip, his hand now idle on the notebook before him, his complaint forgotten. “Another man, you said?”

  “That’s right.” Pramesh could not remember any distinguishing characteristic about the tout. “He was passing out cards at the train station, cards for this place.”

  The boy looked down the hall to his right and shuffled his feet. “Yes, yes. He’s out all day today. Tomorrow, too.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Who can tell?” the boy said again. The grip around his pencil was tight. “Honestly, Sahib, he is barely ever here. I’m sorry you wasted the trip.”

  A woman’s laugh sounded from upstairs, and a man’s voice, singing a song, answered. The boy’s ears turned red. He closed his notebook and sat still, his hands folded in front of him. Pramesh could see that he was not wanted in this place, and he, too, wished to leave; every part of him felt repelled by the smell, the sounds, the sight of this false Shankarbhavan. He thought a moment. “Might I see a room?” he asked.

  “Ji,” the boy sighed. He beckoned Pramesh to follow him up the stairs. They stopped at the second floor, and the boy pushed open the door of the first room they came to. Hai Rama, the manager whispered as he entered the space. A single cracked window opened onto a view of the street, but the shutters were closed and no light entered the space. A narrow low bed with rumpled blankets sagged in one corner. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling. The walls were water-stained and peeling, and insects marched from one corner of the room to a rupee-sized hole near the baseboards. The entire space had a sweet and acrid stench about it, like rotting garbage, an odor accumulated from beedi smoke and ganja and more, the years combining into a stink that lived within the walls. He heard feet running upstairs and the woman’s laugh again.

  “Well?” the boy said. His tone was defiant, as if he knew quite well that Pramesh was stalling. He should have been in school instead of scribbling away in this horrid place; he should have been playing cricket or joking with friends on the ghats instead of trying to squeeze a few coins from degenerates. A wave of pity for the boy overwhelmed the manager, and he felt cheap, wasting the child’s time in an ill-advised quest.

  “Arun!” a voice bellowed from below. The irritated look on the boy’s face disappeared, and he turned to Pramesh, his finger on his lips, in a plea for the manager’s silence. “Arun!” The second call came quickly after the first, louder and angrier, and the child left Pramesh to fly back down the stairs. The manager hesitated, then followed after just far enough so he could hear the conversation below. “Are you empty headed?” the man asked. “How many times have I told you never to leave the desk?” The boy muttered apologies. “So, how many while I was out?”

  “Just the ones from the night before,” the boy replied. “And a couple.”

  “They asked for the hourly rate, I’m sure.” The man laughed. A chair scraped. Pramesh crouched lower on the step. He could see the dark top of a man’s head, the chair tilted back against the wall, beedi smoke blooming. The boy hovered near the desk but his face was out of view.

  “You said you’d be back hours ago,” the boy said. “You said I could have the afternoon to myself.”

  “Careful.” The quiet in the man’s voice had a lethal quality to it. Pramesh felt his stomach clench. More thuds sounded from the floor above.

  “Well, are you staying here, now? May I go?”

  “Careful—didn’t I say?” the man said. “I am here, now. If I have something to entertain me, I may stay for a very long time.” He grabbed the notebook that the boy had left behind and ruffled the pages.

  “Manoj—Bhai, don’t.…”

  “Why not? My brother will be a famous writer, nah? Shouldn’t I be able to read what he writes?” The rickety table sat between them, but the boy still made a grab for the notebook, which his brother held out of reach. “Which page?” the man said in a low sing-song voice. “Which page shall we read today?”

  “Bhai; please, Bhaiya, don’t—”

  Pramesh winced and looked away. His reluctant ears took in the mocking sounds of the man reciting his brother’s poetry, pausing only to spout an exaggerated “Wah! Wah!” of appreciation after each verse. The boy had come around the desk, grabbing at his brother’s arms to wrest the notebook away. “What’s this, a longer poem? Is the famous brother writing a novel, now? The man with the split eyebrow waited on the corner as we’d agreed upon earlier—”

  Pramesh’s breath caught. He stayed absolutely still on the stairs.

  “Manoj, please, please, Bhaiya,” the boy tried again, his voice laden with panic.

  “He looks frail and thin, like a bird plucked of its feathers. His eyes are bright like a baby’s and when he smiles I can see it go up and reflect in his eyes. This is how I know he is an honest man. Honest man, wah! So, little Bhai is a writer and a philosopher now?”

  The boy made a desperate grab at the book, knocking the beedi from his brother’s mouth. At this, the man stood up and gave the child a swift slap and a shove to the ground. Pramesh stood, his heart bursting, and descended the remaining stairs before the man could strike another b
low. He bent, trying to help the boy up, but the child wrenched away, tears streaking his face, and ran out into the street.

  “The book is his,” Pramesh said, facing the man. “Give it back to him. Enough fun for the day.”

  “Rooms are upstairs, Hero-sahib,” the man said, putting a fresh beedi to his lips. He lit the end and flicked the match away. After the first puff, his eyes met Pramesh’s, and he twitched. A flicker of fear passed over his face, or so the manager thought. Pramesh recognized him now, this tout, this man, who was really more a boy. He was like Sheetal in build, and he even carried the same weight in his face. But unlike Sheetal, there was a hardness in the young man’s features, as if he were slowly turning to stone.

  Pramesh pulled the card from his pocket. “You gave this to me in the train station. There was a man here, some weeks ago, a man who looks exactly like me. You tricked him into coming to this place instead of the death bhavan.”

  “No trick, Hero-sahib: if the names are the same, what can I do? I force no one to stay here. They may leave as they like. Anyway—do you really expect me to remember one man out of hundreds?”

  “I know you remember him. The boy’s book—you just read aloud a description of that very same man.”

  The tout took a long draw of his beedi. “If it’s money you’re after, if you’ve come to take back whatever you think I took from him, you are a bigger fool than you are a hero. I am no thief. He came, he looked at the place, and he left. If anyone is owed money, it is me—what of the time I wasted, bringing him here? What of the room I did not fill?”

  The manager exhaled: Sagar had not stayed here. But a gap of time remained in between his coming to this place, his visiting Thakorlal’s shop for an empty bottle, and his body ending up tangled in a boat’s anchor rope in the middle of the river. The manager’s eyes fell on the exercise book still in the tout’s hands, but that man came upon the idea at the same moment as Pramesh. His eyes gleamed as he waved the notebook in front of the manager’s face. “Perhaps we can both be satisfied, Sahib.” His tone changed from mocking to business-like. “I lost money on a room. You seem to want to know what my famous writer-Bhai had to say about your twin, nah?” He rubbed his fingers together in a gesture that Pramesh understood. Still, the manager hesitated. The man’s brother was still a child, with a child’s fancies. Who could know if what he’d written were actually true?

  “Manoj? Manoj are you back?” A woman’s voice, the laughing voice Pramesh had heard from the upper floors, floated down to where they stood. She laughed again, and the sound extended to a metallic jingle, which landed in a tinkling shower at their feet: she’d thrown an anklet down. “Manoj, come up, nah? God, I’m so bored in this place! What are you doing down there—Manoj?”

  “One last chance, Hero-sahib.” The tout held his hand out. “You can see I already have a better offer.”

  The man with the split eyebrow. The child had written those words, and that, at least, was true. Pramesh reached into his pockets and placed money into the tout’s eager palm. The tout looked to Pramesh, the fear gone from his hardened face. He ripped the notebook in half and tossed it at the manager’s feet. At the same time he spit, and an orange-red paan stain bloomed on Pramesh’s shirt. Then he was up the stairs, two at a time, and the woman was exclaiming and laughing and slamming a door shut.

  The boy was nowhere to be found. Pramesh walked, searching, the notebook halves in his hands. The streets felt cramped, as if he were in a box with the lid fastened shut, and the air tasted tight and stale. A sour smell wafted up from his ruined shirt. He felt ill, and he gave up looking for the child and instead walked to the closest ghat. There, he stripped off his shirt and dunked it into the river, rubbing the fabric as best he could. The air was damp, and the shirt would never dry without the help of the sun, so he put it back on, sodden as it was, and shivered on the stone steps. Shobha would scold him later, but he did not want to walk back into his home, into the real Shankarbhavan, with the scent of that place still on him.

  The notebook pieces sat next to him on the stone. All he had to do was hold the open halves together and begin to read. But as his eyes fell on the first few pages of verse written in the round scrawl of a child, he felt ashamed. These words were not his to read, even if they featured a story about a man he’d known better than himself, once. He fixed his eyes on the black river and the bobbing boats, trying to lose himself in the ebb and flow of conversation and chatter from the folk walking up and down the steps, the women hauling laundry and a group of old men watching the crowd with milky eyes. He scanned the crowd, hoping to spot the boy, and return this thing that had never been his. When he felt he could stand the chill of his soaked shirt no longer, he stood, hesitating, then left the notebook halves where they were on the steps. He had paid for them, but he had no more a right to those pages than to a piece of mail misdelivered to his home.

  Halfway up the steps, he felt movement behind him and turned. His eyes locked with those of the skinny lad from the front desk, the exercise book gripped tight in his small hands. The child looked both terrified and defiant, his legs frozen. Pramesh managed a smile, and then he continued up the steps and into the lane beyond.

  “Sahib? Sahib!”

  Pramesh kept going, his steps swift and sure. He took a detour through a market lane crowded with people and stalls, folk out buying wares for the midday meal and for chai. Shobha would be looking for him soon. He thought of Rani, and his legs moved faster. He wanted to be away from the events of the morning, from that other life he’d come so close to touching. He wove in and out, nudging past housewives and packs of peons hurrying to fetch lunch tiffins for their bosses. He felt a tug on his wet sleeve.

  “Sahib,” the boy panted behind him. “You go too fast.” The boy looked at him, the notebook pieces clutched to his chest. “You read none of it, Sahib. I was watching you.”

  “It was not mine to read,” Pramesh said. Crowds pushed behind and in front of them, this odd pairing of man and boy. He moved to the side of the lane, close to a snack stall, and the child followed after.

  “Manoj will not give you your money back,” the boy, Arun, ventured.

  “He should not have sold it to me in the first place. And I should not have presumed to buy it. I am only sorry about the damage. I can buy you another, if you wish.”

  “No, Sahib,” the boy said. “This was not so bad. He’s ripped the pages out before, ripped them into shreds.” Then he hastened to add, “He is not all bad, my brother.…”

  Pramesh watched the child. “Perhaps.”

  “He could have kicked me to the streets. But he took me along; he brought me to this place; he lets me stay here instead of chasing after people in the train station. He just loses his temper sometimes. Does things he doesn’t mean.”

  He seemed desperate to convince Pramesh. “He is older than you,” the manager conceded. “Older boys often act that way, at that age, and especially with their brothers. Men act that way, too.”

  “Did you ever do that to your brother?”

  “No. Not exactly. That is, I can only hope I did not hurt him knowingly.” His hand wandered up to rub his eyebrow.

  “Twins.” Arun nodded. “Perhaps it is different when your brother is a twin, and not the eldest.” He spat, a gesture that looked too adult to belong to him. “Bhai is the one who brought your brother to the guesthouse. Your twin didn’t stay long, though.” He paused, a shadow crossing his brow. “Why didn’t he go straight to your home?”

  “I didn’t know he was coming,” Pramesh replied. “I wish I had.”

  The child contemplated the wad of spit bubbling on the ground before him. He smoothed the covers of the exercise book. “You truly did not read anything, Sahib.” He presented the words as a statement.

  “Yes. Truly.”

  Again, Arun drew his hand over the notebook. “Bhai brings me these notebooks. A new one ever
y month,” the child said. “He never forgets.”

  Pramesh thought back to the arrogant face at the false Shankarbhavan, the features that had turned to stone. Well, not quite stone—not yet. The child opened the halves, turning the pages of each. Halfway through, he grasped a number of pages and gave a gentle tug. The binding released the thin paper easily. “Here,” he said. “It is my story, but it is your brother.”

  Pramesh felt a ball of dread in his stomach. “Is it a story, only?”

  The pages trembled in the child’s hands. “No, Sahib. It is the truth. I felt I owed him that much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The boy shook his head. In a year or two he would be a teenager, and then more years would pass and he would be a man like his brother. Time would determine how much his features would harden, would turn to stone or remain as they were now, so open, so clear. He would not meet Pramesh’s eyes, and his upper lip trembled. “I am sorry, Sahib.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Please, Sahib. Just take it.” The boy tried to push the paper into Pramesh’s hands, but the manager curled his fingers inward and folded his arms behind his back.

  “I have no right to read your words,” he said. He was surprised to see tears fill the boy’s eyes, which shone luminous in the dull surroundings of the crowded lane. He seemed so lost, and Pramesh thought of the humiliation of his brother reading his words aloud with such mocking disdain, the fear he must have felt while watching to see if the manager would read the pages or discard them. The dread remained in his stomach, and yet he realized he wanted to know the story. He wanted something to fill the hole of the past ten years, and especially the hours of Sagar’s last day. He wanted this knowledge in the same way a man waits to hear of his fate from a doctor or from a judge.