Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4

by Helen Marshall

  Next morning, when Krishna heard that the dead were waking up all over the city, maybe even the state, his first thought was: the dead woman he had left behind on the ghat. He was at a paan-shop on Gariahat, near the apartment building where he cooked meals for a few middle-class families in their posh homes, in their fancy kitchens with ventilation fans and shining tiles and big fridges. He was idly spitting betel juice at the footpath when the paanwallah mentioned history happening elsewhere in the city, pointing to a tiny television on top of his little Coke storage fridge.

  The paanwallah seemed bemused by the news on the TV, not quite believing it. “No wonder traffic’s hell today,” he muttered, scratching his whitening moustache. “All morning, this honking, I’m going deaf,” he waved at the street and its cacophony of cars, buses, lorries and autorickshaws stuck bumper-to-bumper like so many dogs sniffing each others’ exhaust pipes.

  Krishna believed the news instantly. It couldn’t be coincidence that he’d discovered a corpse during his morning bath the week the dead started rising.

  His second thought, with a bit of guilt for it not being the first, was of his mother, then, with some measure of fear, his father. But his parents were cremated and gone, safe from this mass resurrection, unless ash itself was stirring into life to fill the wind with dark ghosts. The realization that his parents couldn’t return came as a relief to Krishna, since he didn’t know how exactly he’d have dealt with such a thing, especially after they’d been gone for two decades. The surge of elation and dread that rose out of that thought and filled his chest so powerful he had to steady himself against the counter of the stall. He also had to look up at the sky to make sure there were no clouds of ashen ghosts raging across it. Thankfully, there was only sunlight suspended in winter smog, pecked with the black flecks of crows.

  Then he thought: I have to find the woman. That his parents couldn’t possibly come back to life only bolstered this thought. Surely his employers wouldn’t hold it against him to miss this day. In fact, Krishna suspected they’d be more preoccupied than most by this turn of events. He suspected that nobody living in those apartments really believed in God despite their indoor shrines, and what better evidence of Bhagavan than this? It would throw them into confusion. Money and work be damned. For a day, at least.

  “I found a dead woman. I left her, I have to find her,” Krishna said to the paanwallah who was fiddling with his paan leaves, as if proud of their very appetizing green. Then Krishna ran off. “Hai-oh, that fellow’s looking in the wrong places for a wife,” the paanwallah mumbled.

  As Krishna bussed across the city and back toward Babu Ghat, he saw the world as it always was but now a different place. The air you breathed felt different, when you knew the dead walked somewhere. The city was even worse off than usual for traffic because of the confusion. The police were everywhere, their white uniforms ubiquitous among the crowds on the streets. Krishna heard snatches of conversations in different languages, all talking about the same thing. As sunlight shuttered across the smeared minibus windows and he held his breath against the stink of sweaty passengers pushing up against him, Krishna listened. He heard wealthy students and youngsters babble incomprehensible English with unholy excitement, repeating one word, “zambi,” which was clearly what they called the risen dead. Krishna heard how bodies were rising out of the Hooghly and shambling in diverse but slow-moving crowds across the ghats of Kolkata. How they were falling—half-eaten by birds—from the Parsi Towers of Silence like suicide victims from the afterlife jumping to their new lives. How the cemeteries of the Muslims, Christians and Jews were filled with the faint thumps and groans of the trapped dead, too weak to escape caskets and heavy packed earth. How medical schools and hospitals and police morgues were now dormitories for live cadavers kicking in their steel chambers. How these places were reporting the highest number of corpse-bites in the whole city because of staff convincing themselves that the chilled bodies they were freeing were poor souls mistaken for dead and now frozen to drooling stupidity. Each time he got out of a bus he felt like he was having a panic attack, so filled was his head with this confusion of voices.

  *

  By the time Krishna got back to Babu Ghat early in the evening, the riverside was packed, like it was during the immersion of idols after Pujas. A column of crows towered above the ghat. The birds wheeled over the parade of the dead, taking turns to swoop down and peck at them. The police were keeping the walking corpses herded within the ghat by tossing lit (and technically illegal) crackers near their soggy feet every time they tried to wander up the steps. That seemed to do the job, sending the dead staggering back towards the water, though never back inside. Strings of bright red crackers hung from police belts like candy. Some of them held riot shields. In their hands lathis that they swung in panic if the dead came near their barricade of live bodies. Their hatred for these creatures, these once-humans, was immediate and visceral. After all, every walking corpse on that ghat was a remnant of crimes they’d never solved, or missing persons they never found.

  Krishna witnessed the resurrection with nauseous excitement.

  The Hooghly had disgorged the dead as if they were its children, all wrestling into the sunlight from a giant, polluted birth canal. They shone like infants fresh from the womb, swollen not with fat but water and gas. All stripped naked as the day they were born by water and time. Fifteen, twenty? Could they swim? Had they simply walked on the river’s bottom till they came upon this bank, all the while breathing water through their now amphibious mouths? He was shocked that there had been that many unknown people lying murdered, drowned or mistakenly killed at the bottom of the Hooghly.

  Some were still days-fresh, looking almost alive but for their slack faces like melting clay masks, their lethal wounds and bruises, their paled and discoloured skin, their jellied eyes and the sometimes lovely frills of clinging white crustaceans in their hair, the tiny flickers of fish leaping from their muddy mouths. Others were black and blue, bloated into terrifying caricatures of their living counterparts who watched in droves from the top of the ghat steps, behind the lines of fearful policemen. Fresh or old, all these dead men and women wading back to the world were united in the ignominy of their ends, un-cremated and tossed to the tea-brown waters of the Hooghly to be forgotten. Most, Krishna noticed, were women. All had the crows as their punishing familiars, clinging to shoulders and heads as they tore away with their beaks.

  Krishna searched for the familiar face amongst the dead. He felt uneasy, not at the sight of the resurrected dead, but at the roiling crowd he had to push through to witness this miracle, the street dogs biting and barking amid them to try and get to the corpses, only to be beat back by the police. There were people lowing like animals, speaking in tongues or pretending to, blabbering prophecy, priests and sadhus and charlatans chanting to the eager flocks of potential followers, many calling for the immediate destruction of these men and women who had been reincarnated into their own bodies—a sign, surely, that they were evil, punished by rebirth as creatures even lower than the lowest of animals because of some terrible karmic debt. It made Krishna uneasy, scared, even angry. Clearly these were people who had been wronged rising from the waters, the ones who hadn’t survived the injustice of the earthly world. Not the other way round.

  It was a miracle, Krishna told himself. It had to be.

  Why, then, did this feel like the end of the world, with the police in their cricket pads and riot shields and the crowds coagulating into a mob, with these terribly wronged souls blessed with new life being driven back like cursed cattle?

  The loud braying of horns and the glare of headlights swept across the crowd as two police vans with grills on their windows ploughed slowly through the crowd, nudging the spectators aside. Men got out, in hazard suits, a toxic yellow in plastic colour. They held the long poles with metal clamps that Krishna had often seen dog-catchers use to grab strays off the streets. They were going to shove the resurrected into vans and driv
e them away, quarantine them somewhere. And then what? They could do anything to them, destroy them, imprison them. If the world knew about them now through the news, they probably wouldn’t get rid of them, however much these policemen might want that. But if they took them away, they were gone, and subject to any and all injustices that scared people could dream up.

  And then, as he was thinking, Krishna’s eyes caught the woman he had found yesterday. She was right there on the ghat. She was a little worse for wear, having spent a day doing whatever she’d been doing. But she was here and still, well, alive, he supposed. Walking with her resurrected sisters and brothers. Clearly she had gotten away with being dead and walking around, perhaps because she’d looked somewhat alive when she washed up. No different from any wretched, broken beggar wallowing in garbage, to the average bystander.

  The catchers were nearing, through the crowd. Their plastic visors smudging them into faceless troopers, their poles spears shoved ahead of them, parting the howling people of Kolkata.

  “Oh god,” Krishna whispered, shoved from side to side by other sweaty shoulders. “God, thank you. I’m sorry I left her. I won’t, again. I won’t.”

  He shoved, and pushed, and struggled through the crowd, and he shouted as loud as he could behind the line of police. “My wife!”

  Policemen turned their heads and shoved him back into the churn of people. He rebounded off the mob, back onto them. “I see my wife! Let me through!” he cried out.

  They didn’t. He pushed under their reeking armpits and broke through. He felt the lathis lash his back, bruise his shoulder blades, the impacts exploding over his skin like crackers at the feet of the dead.

  My wife. He heard himself. A decision made.

  He ran down the crumbling ghat steps stumbling as the sun sank and sloshed into the waters of the Hooghly. The baying of street dogs and the horns of a million cars stuck on the roads of BBD Bagh rose into the evening a trumpet sounding the end of an age, and the screams of living throats, not dead, crackled in his ears. A living man, come to greet the dead.

  And there she was, her long black hair threaded with garbage, her crows on her shoulders. She looked at Krishna, and was there recognition in her eyes? No, she hadn’t even awoken to new life when he found her. And yet. For a moment, Krishna thought to hesitate as all the corpses turned their numb gaze upon him, and the cloud of flies surrounding them surged against him, biting like windblown debris. But his fear of the police behind him was far stronger than his fear of the unknown. They would not follow him into this their hell, so he ran forward, not back, his feet sliding on the filthy mud. He ran straight into the outreached arms and lizard-pale eyes of the resurrected, towards the woman who was to be his wife.

  They embraced him as if he was one of their own, the flies crawling all over him as if they too had agreed to mark him as dead. Most importantly, she embraced him, she did, lifting her cold heavy lips to bare teeth still clinging to purple gums.

  2. NOTES ON INFANCY

  I first met Guru Yama when he was taking refuge with his ‘first wife’ at the Kalighat Temple. This was just days after the resurrections became public, and just as it was becoming clear that they might be global, with cadavers reported to be rising up in several countries all around the world, including our neighbours Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

  The Guru was sitting in the courtyard where goats are sacrificed to Kali. They had closed the altars off from the public, and people were being allowed in one at a time to see him. No cameras. At that point, “Guru Yama” was just a nickname given to him by the news media, but it had caught very quickly. The corpse he’d claimed at Babu Ghat squatted near him. He’d publicly refused, over and over, to hand the cadaver over to the police or any other organization, claiming that it was his wife.

  He seemed utterly stunned by the world when I saw him, clinging to the frayed rope tied around the purple neck of his wife as if it were a lifeline. Pierced into the skin of his other arm was an actual lifeline; an IV antibiotic drip on rubber wheels. In India, twenty-nine people had reportedly died from corpse bites left untreated. Each of the bite victims had also consistently become undead. The Guru had been given rabies and tetanus shots after being bitten. He was younger than I’d expected, maybe even my age; mid-thirties at the most.

  Covered in sweat and bandages (from the bites his wife and the other corpses had given him), shivering with fever and eyes bloodshot, the Guru told me both his life story and the story of his dead wife with stunning candour. For one thing, I didn’t expect him to confess that she wasn’t really his wife, or hadn’t been when he found her. But the priests at the temple had conducted an impromptu ceremony by then, though no one was willing to say what that meant. Most temples in the city, the Guru said, wouldn’t let him in, declaring the risen dead abominations. He was lucky Kalighat Temple offered to house him and his wife (he couldn’t keep her in the basti where he lived). He told me how grateful he was for their help, and also thanked the lorry driver who had given him and his wife a mode of transport from temple to temple, trailed by crowds looking for something to focus on in this bewildering time.

  Though there were no laws in place for the risen dead, the Guru considered himself legally bound to the woman he held by a rope leash, dead for at least a week now. Because of that very lack of laws addressing this new world, the police or government couldn’t really dispute that, and they had a lot more on their hands right now anyway.

  Throughout the interview, I watched the Guru’s wife with barely suppressed horror as she ate out of the opened rib cage of a goat that had been sacrificed not for Ma Kali, but for her. Or perhaps for both of them. The Guru noticed the look on my face.

  “She is a woman, just like you,” he said, which made me very uncomfortable. “Don’t be scared of her. You know what it’s like in this world. She only asks for sympathy.”

  I tried to hide my unease. The corpse was squatting much like her human companion, and using her swollen hands and darkening teeth to eat the entrails. It hurt, to see the infantile clumsiness of those slowly bloating fingers. I was ready to run, but she never approached or even noticed me. She looked very blue-green, very inhuman, different from what she’d been in the footage from the ghat, embracing and then biting this man who called himself her husband. She looked, as much as I hated to put that term to real people who had lived and died, like a zombie. The people outside the temple told me to wear a surgical mask and rub Vicks Vaporub under my nostrils (and readily sold me both on the spot), but I could still smell her, see the flies around her, and the maggots in her nostrils and eyes and mouth.

  “It’s good that it’s winter, no? She’d probably be falling apart by now in summer,” the Guru said, looking at her. He stifled a shudder, wiping cold sweat from his brow. “We have to make sure the street dogs don’t eat her also. Usually, the dogs come in here when the goats are sacrificed, to lick up the blood. Not now, not now, we keep them out. They’d rip her up in minutes. Birds, also, they’re always trying. But we are the worst,” he shook his head.

  “She can’t protect herself anymore. They’ve all been raped, beaten, strangled, stabbed, killed, thrown away. They deserve someone to help them, to take care of them in this new life they’ve been given by God. I’ve told all the news people, and I’ll tell you, I’ll take care of them if no one else will. Everyone’s calling me Guru for that,” he laughed, eyes wide. “Guru Yama, they’re calling me. I don’t know about that. I don’t want to take the name of a god. I’m just a man.”

  “But your parents already gave you the name of a god, Krishna. Is this different?” I asked him.

  He seemed startled by this, and I felt bad for bringing up his dead parents. To my relief, he changed the subject.

  “It doesn’t matter what they call me, I suppose. What matters is, I’m not afraid of these dead people. When I find somewhere to keep them, I’ll make sure they’re alright. When I am better, I’ll go looking for more, before the police take them a
way and punish them again. Tell everyone. Bring me your dead, and I’ll care for them,” the Guru said to me. From the fervent darting of his eyes, I couldn’t tell if he was a charlatan, if he was just looking for fame or something more sinister. I didn’t shake his hand, but I did smile at him, maybe in encouragement. I wondered about the rest of those dead people who’d been left at Babu Ghat, taken away in those vans. It wasn’t the Guru’s fault; how many of the dead could he walk around with?

  Before leaving, I asked if I could use what he’d told me to write a story, or an article. He gave me his blessing. I left to let his next visitor, whether writer or journalist or would-be follower, see him. I managed to wait till I was out on the streets before vomiting, just a little, into a gutter. I’m not sure anyone in the crowd gathered around the temple even noticed.

  I wrote, in the midst of a global paradigm shift. I wanted to try and understand one man at that moment, as opposed to the impossibility of an entire world made new. Like anyone and everyone who would fixate on him in the days to come.

  It was only afterwards that I thought to look for the identity of that poor dead woman by his side.

  3. NOTES ON MATURATION

  The second time I saw Guru Yama, it was so his wife could be identified and returned to her mother.

  I met the widowed mother, who requested I not include her name, at the Barista on Lansdowne. I bought her a plain coffee. As I handed her the cup I marvelled at the fact that we still enjoy the privilege of overpriced lattes and mochas, while black government vans roam the state for risen dead. Every time I saw those vans, some shining fresh painted with the words West Bengal Undead Quarantine on them (some with exotic misspellings like Quarantin or Qaruantine), I stopped to wonder whether I was remembering something from a movie or actually looking at something real. The cafe was relatively quiet—just a few afternoon customers chatting amid the burbling of espresso machines. But somewhere in the city people were striking and rioting and holding curfews to throw stones and claim their own religions and ideologies as responsible or not responsible for this cosmic prank. That very day there was a march on Prince Anwarshah Road, by South City Mall, with fundamentalists of one or many stripes demanding that movies filled with immoral violence and sexuality be immediately removed from the mall’s multiplex, to end God’s wrathful plague of the waking dead. The puritanical thrive in apocalypses.