The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  Narinder had not exited his section of the priests’ quarters since that night. Sheetal had barricaded himself in his room, and Dev had joined him to ensure that no one displaced the boy’s father, the only man who rightfully should have been there. Mohan, who’d made the mistake of leaving his room one night only to return to a space occupied with two entire families who ignored him completely and bickered over his bed and steel cabinet, had joined the priests in their already cramped quarters. Had Pramesh the time to think over that first day’s events, he would have felt his failure. As it was, another worry occupied him.

  Rani lay on the upstairs bed, listless for many days now. The fever would not abate.

  ***

  Shobha felt as if she were in the worst kind of prison, confined to a single stuffy room in her own home, with her only child beset with an illness so quick and mysterious that she felt truly terrified. The doctor had come and gone, careful to close the door behind him each time.

  “Nothing to do but wait,” he said with unsettling frankness. Shobha held her tongue even as her heart screamed out against this passivity. She tried to lower Rani’s temperature with cool cloths that she kept soaking in a nearby basin, and she waited. She looked for signs that the girl was opening her eyes, whimpering, reaching for her, and she waited. At intervals, she parted the tiny lips and forced coconut water or a paste of jaggery mixed with water into her daughter’s mouth, and she waited. She waited for this illness, which had come about like a curse, to detach itself and land elsewhere, away from her home.

  “There is nowhere else I can take her,” Pramesh said one night. “That doctor is the best in the city—you know this. What can we do but wait?”

  “Wait for what?” Shobha asked, her voice becoming higher with each word. Downstairs, the sharp-eared women sitting below shushed their children, hoping a quarrel meant that the coveted upstairs bedroom might soon be empty. “I have a mob of people in my home, all convinced that this ghost downstairs will bring their loved one back to life, yet my daughter falls ill on the day that same ghost was supposed to be expelled. What are we waiting for? What reason is good enough?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You know what I mean—this is no usual illness. It is the ghost—there is no other explanation. Why was he here, why does he still linger? What did he want when he came to see you?”

  Pramesh ran his hands up to his temples, pulled at his hair. “I’ve told you. He was ill; he came to see me. There is no other mystery—and even if there were, who would we ask? I’ve spoken to everyone.”

  Shobha went to her almirah, her nerves on fire. “You are my husband, and I will not go against you,” she said. “But you did not ask everyone.”

  She handed him a letter.

  There was a letter someone sent. A letter asking about me.

  I am here. I am well.

  But when will he be here? My husband’s brother.

  He said he would come.

  We are waiting. Write soon.

  Pramesh flipped the page over, flipped it back and read it again. He faced his wife. “How did you get this?”

  “I wrote. Many weeks ago, when all of this began.” Pramesh stared at her. Shobha twisted the end of her sari and summoned her courage. “I wanted to find out what had happened to her. You’d never told me anything of her before. But I’d heard things, that time we went to the village. Things that match the story your cousin told you.” Still, Pramesh was silent. “I thought perhaps someone in her family would answer, but she sent me that. I didn’t know what to think. Those words—read them!” She watched Pramesh look at the paper again. His face was inscrutable. “I wrote her again, asking her to tell me what happened. And I got this only some days ago.” She shook out the pieces of letter onto the bed and moved them into place with her fingers so Pramesh could see.

  He turned away without reading them. “We told her people about Sagar-bhai, we gave them the land—they had a chance to ask about him, to show me they understood everything he had done for them—for her. They said nothing. Why would you write to her?”

  “But look,” Shobha said, trying to pull him back over to the bed. “She calls me her sister. And she was expecting a visit from you. Why?”

  Pramesh shook his head. “I don’t know. How do you know it was not them talking, telling her what to write? Or if they were the ones to fix some idea in her head?”

  She waited for him to say something else, to deign to look at those paper scraps, her heart beating furiously, but he remained stubbornly still and silent, and anger rose within her. “How can you understand what a woman thinks?”

  “What?”

  “She was married for almost ten years—as long as you and I. She is not the same woman who did whatever her elders told her to all those years ago—you don’t know what she is. For her own reasons she decided to write to me. There’s pain in this letter—can’t you see it? She is expecting you. She must know something; she’ll at least understand what your cousin was doing here. Even if her elders put her up to it—why does that matter? Why won’t you go?”

  He tossed the letter at the bed, and it floated gently to the edge and slipped off to the floor. “We went there once, all those years ago. It was a mistake. I’ve regretted it ever since. I vowed I would never go back again.”

  “Why not?” He said nothing, and Shobha almost sobbed out with frustration. “Why can’t you just speak of it? What happened then? Why did they refuse to meet me? What did they say to you?” Shobha sank to sit on the bed, to curl herself up next to Rani, her eyes squeezed shut, her hand light on the child’s head. She heard her husband walk to the end of the bed, pick up the letter, and sit down near her feet. After a moment he laid a hand on her skin, below the anklets.

  “You weren’t there to hear any of it,” he said, softly. “I was always thankful for that. That you were spared.” Her eyes fluttered opened and found his. He looked away. And then he began.

  40

  A week after the wedding, Pramesh was making the rounds of the bhavan rooms when he stopped in the kitchen to check on Dharam. The old manager sat on a bare rope bed, a wool hat on his head and a shawl around his shoulders, and he beckoned to Pramesh to come in.

  “How long has it been since you’ve returned to see your people?” A shuddering cough gripped him, and his entire body shook until he mastered himself. “A year?” he continued, clearing his throat in a phlegmy growl.

  His blunt way of asking, as if they were already mid-conversation, made Pramesh smile. “You have kept me busy, ji.”

  “Then you should visit them. Now—with your new wife. It’s only proper.” The man had an urgency in his voice that Pramesh recognized. Anything said in that tone was not a request, but a command.

  “If you wish,” he said. “But perhaps I should go on my own. It’s been so long. And they aren’t expecting me to bring along a bride.” He was still in disbelief over his newly married state, the fact that Shobha had said yes.

  But Dharam would not be dissuaded, even as another coughing fit overtook him. His body shook with such violence that Pramesh grabbed a pillow and bolster and set them firmly at the manager’s side to give him something to hold onto. Gripping a pillow to his chest, Dharam fixed Pramesh with a penetrating stare.

  “Is it their fault they don’t know? You married without obtaining their permission. You made that choice, didn’t you?” Pramesh opened his mouth the protest, but Dharam raised his hand. His voice was gravelly, made no better when he cleared his throat. “It was necessary—you did it for me, to humor an old sick man, and I am grateful. But there are still consequences from your action. You cannot run away from them. Anyway, what are you afraid might happen?”

  “My cousin will welcome her, no doubt,” Pramesh answered carefully. “My aunt as well, in her own way. She won’t say much, but that isn’t a problem with your daughter.” He att
empted a smile, but it dissolved at the thought of the two he did not mention.

  “Your father and uncle?” the old manager prompted. “Have they written to you at all, while you’ve been here? Have you written them?”

  A chill passed over Pramesh. He rubbed his arms; his hand drifted up to his eyebrow. “I ask about them in each letter. I’ve written to my aunt. She conveys whatever she’d like to say to my cousin. If they—my father, my uncle—had anything to say, they haven’t passed it along to Sagar-bhai.”

  Dharam looked out the window. “Well. You cannot avoid them. No matter what they were, what happened, they are your elders. What you should do,” he said, turning to face Pramesh, “is focus on your cousin, your aunt. Think of this as a visit for them—they are your family. My daughter should meet them, get their blessing. But you must still try with your uncle and father. You’ve been away a year. You don’t know what that time can do to a father missing his son, how one can change.”

  There was no refusing the old manager. “Ji,” Pramesh said.

  He felt Shobha’s anticipation as he waited with her on the train platform, the way she constantly looked down to make sure her bag was still there, her eyes flickering whenever it seemed like the train might be approaching, hands moving up to tuck away any hairs that escaped the coiled knot at her neck. Watching her, Pramesh allowed himself to forget his fears and to feel her excitement. She was wearing a new sari, sky-blue printed with small yellow flowers, arms stacked with her wedding bangles, a smile lifting her mouth and lighting her eyes.

  He was still in disbelief that he was her husband—he wanted to tell her so many things, stories of Sagar and the other people in his village, yet here on the platform, surrounded by passengers and porters, he was stymied by shyness. Strange, that it was easier to talk to her at night when it was just the two of them alone together, her face turned toward him and her breath warming his skin.

  She caught him looking at her, and the pink that rose to his cheeks was mirrored in her own. She looked down, mouth twitching in a suppressed laugh. “Do you put your right foot first?” she asked softly. “When getting on the train?”

  “I’m not sure.” Pramesh tilted his head in her direction so he could better hear her in the bustling space. “I never thought about it.”

  “It makes for an auspicious trip, Bapa said. That, and saying the great God’s name.”

  “Easy enough to do,” he said. “We’ll both do it, once the train comes.” He was rewarded with another smile, his wife gracefully dipping her chin in agreement, and when the train arrived, he had her get on first, and he copied her movements exactly.

  On the farmer’s cart, Hardev, Champa-maasi’s husband, regaled Pramesh with tales of Sagar’s experiments in planting, in irrigation methods, in going around to all the different farmers for cuttings and seeds and advice. The air was filled with the light perfume of earth and the soft plodding of the bullocks leading them along, the bells around their necks punctuating their steps with a full and clear sound. “How is everyone at home?” Pramesh asked once the farmer paused to take a breath from his chatter.

  The farmer clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Things don’t always change when you leave a place,” he said after a pause. “Some things, some places, remain exactly as they were ten years before. And they will continue to be the same in another ten, twenty, thirty years. It’s like a furrow in a field. Once you are in that line, you cannot get out.”

  Pramesh felt the slightest tightening around his heart, a shallowness in his breathing. A light chime sounded behind him as Shobha repositioned her legs from where she sat in the back of the cart, her anklets like a cheery rejoinder to the bullocks’ bells. And the band around his heart pulled tighter.

  “My wife speaks of both you cousins often, and with fondness,” Hardev said. “She would welcome you, if you’d like to visit the house first.”

  He spoke easily, as if this were the expected thing, for a man to bring his new wife straight to a neighbor’s house after a long journey to the husband’s childhood home. Pramesh bit his lip, eyes on the slow-moving ground beneath him, hands gripping the seat of the cart.

  “Your wife must be tired as well. She can rest there. I can take you on myself. And then, when you return, you can take her back with you, or I will bring her. Later. If you wish.”

  So he’d done it. And though he’d lacked the courage to linger for more than a second on his wife’s eyes as he left her in a place they hadn’t intended to visit, as he neared his old home, he knew he’d done the right thing. Because there, dead drunk, was his uncle, asleep on one of the rope beds.

  His snores were loud and he mumbled in his sleep. Once, he’d commanded the boys to do squats in the back yard, their fingers grasping their ear lobes. Up and down they’d pumped their legs, over and over again, fifty times, sixty, while the man watched. When they slowed or stopped, unable to lever fully up, chests heaving, muscles burning, tears pricking the backs of their eyes, Sagar’s father had been there to whip their legs with a tree branch, white slashes soon turning into red welts on their skin. When he walked away, releasing them, both boys had collapsed in the dirt, gnats buzzing around their sweaty heads. What had they done to anger him so? Pramesh wondered. What could a child do to a fully grown man that warranted such a punishment?

  Now that same man seemed shrunk to half his size. Drool pooled on his sleeve as he slept. He held one hand, shiny and pink with the bonfire scar, curled near his chin, the gesture giving him the appearance of a sleeping infant.

  Pramesh walked in, hoping Sagar would be inside. In the front room rarely used when Pramesh was a child, his father sat.

  The man stared at him, dark shadows cupping his eyes, liver spots dotting his temples and throat. “A wife, they say. You have come here bringing a wife.”

  Pramesh swallowed. He’d forgotten how quickly news could travel, especially when you least wanted it to. “She is with Champa-maasi. I thought she should rest before—”

  “We wrote you. And yet you deliberately defied my wishes. Didn’t even think to tell us what you’d done. Nattu’s grandnephew saw you getting off the train—I had to hear it from him.”

  Strange, to feel that fear, the old sadness, once again glaze over his heart, drip into his stomach. How much lighter he’d become in Kashi. And if this was how it felt to escape and return, what about Sagar? Had Sagar ever known life without that weight?

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, slow and intentional with each word.

  “You were never the quickest one. Among other things,” his father replied. He was skinnier, with much less weight on his tall frame, and his hands, Pramesh noticed, betrayed the slightest of tremors as he filled a clouded glass with the brown liquid whose scent Pramesh recognized all too well. His voice had a quaver in it, not of old age and certainly not of feeling for his son, but of disdain. “What did you think you might gain, coming back here? When you left us as you did? When you threw away the chance that was never yours to take?”

  A blessing, was on the tip of Pramesh’s tongue. Shobha wanted the blessing, the chance to touch his father’s feet and brush the dust on her forehead, to greet him just as she might greet her own father, because both men now occupied the same place in her heart. She was determined in this idea, this fantasy. And, bolstered by Dharam’s conviction that a person could change, Pramesh had done nothing to tell her otherwise. Their marriage a week old, and he’d been the one to commit the first betrayal. He swallowed, thinking of her waiting for him.

  Dharam’s voice rang in his thoughts. You still must try. “Will you meet her?” Pramesh asked.

  “Meet her? Why? You are no one. Why would I meet the wife of no one?” The old man didn’t laugh, didn’t raise his voice. He talked as if he were discussing whether or not it might rain. A chill rolled across Pramesh’s skin.

  The glass was already half empty, and his f
ather downed the rest in a single gulp. “Better for me to meet this father of hers. Clever fucker. Getting to keep both the daughter and the son in his home.” He replenished his drink, missed the table when he set the bottle down, and glass shattered, Pramesh flinching at the sound. “What of the dowry?” that man continued, as liquid pooled at his feet. “Did you think to tell them, or were you so besotted that you went into it thinking only of what you’d get to do to her in the night? Is your father-in-law both a fucker and a thief?”

  Pramesh struggled to reply, but his tongue was clay in his mouth, his thoughts frenzied, his anger incandescent. He stretched his fingers to keep them from curling into fists, and when that did not work he pressed his arms flat against his sides. Not like us, he repeated to himself. He would not be like this man sitting before him.

  His father barked out a laugh. “Yes. I thought so.”

  “The temple,” Pramesh said, words rushing out with all the contempt he could muster. “He asked me what I would have. I said nothing. He gave it all to the Mother’s temple. And he paid to feed anyone who came to the bhavan that day.”

  “So he decides how to use my money—I should thank him for that? Thank you, thank you, dearest fucker father-in-law, thank you for showing Rama what a thief you are at my expense,” he said mockingly.

  Had he always been this cruel? Had he talked to the Mothers this way? Or had that ugliness festered in this man, lying dormant while Pramesh was in his home, under his control, becoming inflamed once his son showed he was capable of defying him?

  “You have disobeyed me this second time,” his father said, draining his glass. “Did you think about how we would look, what people would say? Only a wretch marries without his father’s blessing. You have dragged us down into the mud—and here is the most surprising thing—you returned! Why? Did you think we would welcome you and that thief’s daughter with marigolds, with sweets?”