The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  The words were like stones, each larger than the last, Sagar throwing with such precision that Pramesh no longer felt pain. He was numb. He squeezed his eyes shut. Just a year ago, he and Sagar had been in their childhood bedroom, where Sagar had made a decision for him, one that he’d accepted. When he spoke, he said each word clearly and slowly, to be sure that Sagar understood what he was saying.

  “One word from you, Bhaiya, and I will go. But you must think carefully before you speak.”

  Sagar did not flinch; he did not hesitate. His voice was perfectly controlled, and he met Pramesh’s gaze with his own determined one. “Bhaiya,” he said. “Go.”

  And then, as if he did not trust Pramesh to do the same unless he did so first, he turned abruptly, striding back in the direction of the house. Pramesh stared at his cousin’s back, heart galloping, sorrow and anger fusing into a hardened mass at his center. With every step that his cousin moved further away, Pramesh felt something diminish within himself, some essential part that existed only in conjunction with Sagar. He was desperate for his cousin to look back, just once. But a louder voice in his head told him to move his legs, walk in the opposite direction just as fast as Sagar was moving. To help his cousin in this decision he’d made, to widen the distance between them, make it a gaping chasm, and to move as far away from the pain that this life in the village had only ever caused him. To leave that old life—everyone, and everything—behind.

  Once he began, he walked with purpose. And he did not look back.

  41

  Pramesh kept his eyes on the window with its unchanging view, clear blue sky, the barest glimpse of the neighboring building terraces from where he sat. Shobha held his hand.

  “Your father and uncle.…” She started and stopped. “Such a thing to keep from me.” She leaned her face into his shoulder, reaching her arms around him, and he allowed himself to be held. He felt like a hollow shell, emptied of everything that he was and had been.

  “They died long ago,” she said. “They are gone—they were the past. Whatever they thought then, whatever they did to you and your cousin—they were wrong.”

  “I should have gone back to him,” Pramesh said. “I was older. It was my responsibility, even if we’d fought. I should have tried harder to talk to him.” Shobha squeezed him gently.

  “Perhaps. But would he have let you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll never know.”

  She released him. “On the train platform. You asked me about looking back, about whether I believed in it.”

  The end of her sari brushed his hand, and he grasped that cloth, smoothing it between his fingers. “Yes.”

  “And I said yes. I believed it then.” Gently, she held his chin between her fingers. She turned him to look at her. And then she forced him to look at Rani. “She is all that matters. It’s not looking back if you do it for her. Please.”

  The exorcism had failed, the transfer of land, tripindi shraddha—nothing had worked to dislodge the spirit from the washroom. Shobha was right. There was nothing left to try but to ask that woman. She’d never entered his thoughts, never even seemed like a whole person, only a character in the stories he’d heard about her.

  “What if she isn’t there? What if she refuses to speak to me?”

  “She’s asked for you,” Shobha reminded him.

  He turned back to look at Rani again. He touched her foot. She did not stir, her skin was so hot that he almost lifted his hand away. Her tiny chest rose and sank in shallow breaths. “If only you could come as well, and Rani with you. If only.…”

  He did not continue. He thought of those scraps of letters. Your sister, your friend.… Kamna might refuse to talk to Pramesh, but she could not refuse to speak to Shobha. But bringing Rani, or Shobha leaving her, was impossible.

  “You must try your best with her,” she said, her hand on their daughter’s burning forehead.

  Pramesh rocked his chin slowly. “In the morning, then.” He rose and stepped to the door. His eyes caught on the lime garland. “Do you—did you think that she…?”

  Shobha made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know what to think. But you’ll go. And you will ask.”

  ***

  Shobha could not find sleep as the hours ticked by and Rani’s breaths labored, hot and harsh. As he’d done every night since the hopeful multitudes came and Rani fell ill, Pramesh slept with his body stretched across the doorway of the family quarters, while Shobha slept upstairs with her daughter in the bed beside her. Throughout the illness, Rani had suffered a fevered sleep that kept her tiny body still, but now a coughing fit shook her. Shobha rose and poured a glass of water from the clay pot on the bedside table. She helped the girl sit and held the cup to her mouth. For a moment, Rani was quiet, but another fit overtook her, and then a darkness left her lips that Shobha recognized even in the blackness of the room.

  Blood. Blood in spots on the pillow, and blood flecking the girl’s mouth. She put her fingers to the wetness on her daughter’s lips and smelled it, and the certainty of that wet metallic scent, like coins discarded in a puddle, filled her heart with fear.

  And then the pots rang out.

  The pots. All these months, something had pushed Rani’s blood to the point of fever and back to the depths of chills; something had moved blood to spill with abandon from mysterious cuts and had painted the girl with purple-blue bruises. What else but the pots? And she felt a chill wash over her. During that first exorcism, when an insect had feasted on Rani’s blood and Pramesh had killed it … when their daughter’s blood had stained his hands and the ghost refused to leave. She now saw what she had been blind to before: not a nazar from Kamna, but blood like some hideous rope wrapping around the girl’s throat and leading to the washroom. Each time the pots called out, the ghost tugged on that rope, and the girl suffered.

  She was aware that the women in her kitchen nudged each other awake and probed her with eager glances as she came down the stairs; that her husband sat up and followed her; that the strangers crowding the walkway perimeter and courtyard stared at her, some openmouthed, others greedy-eyed, as she strode through their midst with her head bare and face in full view. She ignored their shouts as she entered the washroom, a place they’d deemed holy and therefore off limits. She closed the door behind her and turned to face the noise that had haunted the bhavan for months. “He is going,” she said. “Whatever it is you need, whatever you wanted before you died, he is going tomorrow to find her. He will set it right.”

  She’d never before come to the washroom. She’d never seen the pots thrash about, never felt their cold brass shock her toes as the vessels rolled toward her. With the door closed, the hollow wail of the ghost was excruciating, as if someone had pulled the nails out of her fingers or filled her chest with ice. She had to remind herself that this being was once attached to her husband, and therefore to her; that Sagar had been a man made of flesh with a heart and a mind and a life that he’d been unable to live to completion. If she could imagine a man’s voice in place of that cold metallic wail, then she could hear the pain in that sound, a longing for something out of the ghost’s reach, a sadness that touched Shobha’s heart even as the maternal anger she felt toward this specter gave her courage to speak into the damp night. “Whatever has passed, whatever has happened—can it truly be worth her life?”

  The pots were still. But as she took a step backward, the unearthly screech recommenced. “What is it?” she asked, feeling ridiculous and desperate as she spoke to the empty room and her invisible conversation partner. “What could you possibly want?”

  The pots wailed ever louder and longer. And then each pot tumbled toward Shobha so that she was encircled by a ring of the haunted vessels, and the sound emanating from each rose up and over her in a cage of despair and anger that she could neither understand nor escape. “He is going,” she kept repeating. “He is leaving in the morning; y
our brother is going!” Louder they wailed; closer they came. She felt as if the living soul in her body would suffocate in the unnatural presence of this shadow.

  And then, she understood. “I will go with him. I will speak to her, and she will listen to me. I know she will.” The pots were still. Her body moved of its own accord. Out of the washroom, past the leering men and her own husband, away from the women who regarded her with narrow eyes as she fled up the stairs. She scooped her daughter up and ran back down, Pramesh behind her as she side-stepped the crowd occupying the courtyard and walkway. Out of the bhavan, the lane felt strange in the dark, but she did not have far to go. Her daughter felt weightless in her arms as she mounted the three steps up to the Mistrys’ porch and pounded at the door, oblivious to the neighbors now looking out their windows.

  Mr. Mistry answered the door, took one incredulous look at the bhavan mistress and Pramesh behind her, and went to fetch his wife. Mrs. Mistry came down directly, and whatever anger and hurt and mortification that may have been jockeying within her during the previous days melted away at the sight of Shobha standing in her doorway, a limp Rani in her arms.

  “Maasi,” Shobha said. Her voice quivered with pain. “Maasi,” Shobha said again, her voice now a whisper. “I need you.”

  42

  One bit of good fortune came out of Mohan’s becoming the temporary manager of Shankarbhavan: His nighttime visits ceased. This wasn’t because of a change in diet, or an after-effect of his blurry night on the ghat, the details of which he still could not completely recall. Rather, the sudden onset of responsibility, of worry over Rani’s worsening condition, of trying to make quick decisions in the face of people who did not belong in the bhavan—all of this conspired to create a perpetual ball of anxiety that resided in Mohan’s stomach. Instead of manic twitches and cramps, he felt the round weight of worry weigh him down wherever he went.

  “Pramesh-ji,” he had pleaded with the manager, “I am not the man you need. You should not put the bhavan in my hands.”

  “There is no other man, Mohan-bhai. You have never lied to me. We know that I cannot say that for myself.”

  And there it was. With that long-awaited admission, Mohan felt his heart swell. He tried to dwell on that single truth when he felt overwhelmed, which was often. As it turned out, Mohan was exactly the right man for the job, although the reason for this was something neither he nor Pramesh anticipated.

  “There he goes,” various men and women whispered when they spotted the assistant. They stopped bickering and moved aside wherever he walked. When he spoke, all chatter ceased. They all tilted their ears in his direction, even if he was only telling Dev that the weather was unusually cool. He’d acquired almost instantaneous respect from these hopeful travelers, who passed the knowledge amongst themselves that this was the man, the proof of what this bhavan and its washroom spirit were capable of. To them, Mohan was not the proxy manager. He was the Dead Man Come to Life.

  “How quickly did it happen?” men asked him. “Was it an immediate thing, an immediate feeling?”

  “What was the nature of your illness?”

  “How long were you dead for?”

  “Where exactly were you when you came to life?”

  “Were the pots banging when it happened? What was the cadence, exactly? Fast, slow? Do you suppose it makes a difference?”

  They treated Mohan like a holy man or a movie actor. Eyes followed him wherever he went. Once ridiculed for something he had not done, Mohan now found himself praised for something else he did not do.

  Mrs. Mistry sent over meals. Mohan ate with the priests and with Sheetal, united in their fellow feeling of false occupation. Sheetal endured dark glares from the crowds waiting outside, who felt that his father had already benefited from what the washroom specter could offer. “He is alive, isn’t he? Why take up space here? Take the man home!”

  As for the washroom, the pots acquired renewed vigor with Pramesh’s departure. Once they began each night, the banging continued until the sun touched the open courtyard. During that time, the more zealous guests engaged in loud bhajans or threw flowers and rice and holy water into the washroom, hoping the specter might notice their attentions and home in on their loved one. Sleep in those hours was impossible both in and near the bhavan.

  Every morning, Mohan rose from his cramped space between the priests’ neatly lined beds and steeled himself for what always happened first thing. A crowd of people awaited his entry to the courtyard, all descending upon him with the same angry plea. Why are they not better? What must we do to appease the ghost? Why isn’t it working?

  “Friends, please. Anger will achieve nothing with this ghost, believe me. As I once told other families who stayed with us at Shankarbhavan, no one can tell when death comes. So it must stand to reason that no one can tell when life comes, yes? Isn’t it so?”

  What to tell these people? Mohan did the best he could. His years of negotiating with the Doms, of making shopkeepers smile even as he bargained for a lower price, of making friends with every stranger he met, all gave a kind of varnish to his person that made others instantly trust him. And while Mohan couldn’t help with the question of life, he could and did help with living. He gave advice on the best markets to visit, directed women to the safest and cleanest ghats, even hailed rickshaws to the train station for those few who gave up and wished to return home.

  With every passing hour, more and more people crammed into the building. Soon they were spilling out of the hole where the gates had once stood and crowding into the alley between the bhavan and Mrs. Mistry’s house. Mrs. Chalwah could have easily seen them from her usual window perch, but she had been in her bed for many days. She received reports from her daughter-in-law, who’d taken on a new respect for her husband’s mother since the circle officer’s visit. “So many people, Ma. And at night, the racket! I don’t know how you sleep through it. They all get up and rush in once the washroom gets especially loud. A sea of people, hai Rama.” The old woman said nothing. As the younger one took back the untouched dinner plate, or the still full cup of chai, she often cast a wistful thought toward the bhavan just across the street. After all, Ma was doing poorly. She’d never given much thought to her mother-in-law before, thinking her a simple and submissive old woman. But now, if the stories about the bhavan giving life were true.…

  As for the hopeful people who came from places far south and west and north and east, who traveled days or took a short train ride over—they shared the commonality of illness. What always differed, however, was the story that lay behind it, and that was how these folk passed the hours between each bout of sound from the washroom.

  “My sister is from that village; perhaps you know her?”

  “That was how our Ravi became ill! They closed the well up the very next day.”

  “Well, she was born in this position, but all the doctors said she would die very soon after and look, she is now in her sixth year! But always suffering, always in pain.”

  “Brain fever, they said. He was so bright, first in class, bound for university, and then in one week he was in bed and everything changed.”

  “Did you happen to try….”

  So many people, so many illnesses, so many stories. So much sadness, and yet so much hope! Mohan tried very hard to keep them all straight, but the sheer volume of people made the task impossible. The new tenants coming to the bhavan were just like the former guests in that they, too, were dying, but these folk all aspired for an end to their story that would match that of the weaver who had left so long ago. However, they forgot one crucial detail of the weaver’s tale. Out of the sick and the young and injured, out of the brain-addled and disabled, out of the ones who were skin on bone and the ones who’d ballooned so large that no single room could comfortably accommodate them—out of all these ailing men and women, youths and children, none of them realized the missing detail that made th
eir stories different from the weaver’s.

  None of them had actually died.

  43

  On the first day their journey, the engine broke down, and Shobha and Pramesh waited on the tracks with the rest of the passengers as the engineers clanked with their hammers and ran back and forth between the cars. They tried to sleep that night in the carriage, their thoughts overwhelmed with worry for Rani, and late the next morning they heard the rumble of the replacement engine. Several hours later they disembarked in a cloud of dust whipped up by a sudden wind, Shobha holding the end of her sari to her mouth, Pramesh shielding his eyes as he led the way. It was late afternoon, and they walked until Pramesh was able to hail a farmer, a man he’d never seen before, rattling toward them in a bullock cart.

  “Can you drop us close to the old Prasad house?” he asked.

  “The Prasads!” the man exclaimed. “Relatives of yours?”

  “How were the rains for you, this season?” Pramesh asked in reply, diverting the farmer’s attention, and the man talked of too much rain, then not enough. Pramesh looked toward the fields, felt the sun warm his face while a deep melancholy settled over him.

  “What is it?” Shobha asked, worried, her voice low enough to settle beneath the farmer’s ongoing monologue. Pramesh touched his hand to hers, the farmer lost in his own story.