Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4

by Helen Marshall

  The mother’s a Hindi teacher at a small school. She took one sip of her coffee out of politeness. I had to ask her, after apologizing for doing so: “Did you recognize your daughter on TV that day?” She looked like she was out of breath, or keeping down vomit, and after a moment she nodded. She did recognize her daughter. Of course she did.

  I could understand the rest without her saying anything more. Who would want to acknowledge to themselves that their missing daughter was on TV, on the news, in real life, a walking corpse? That was two impossibilities too many to deal with. I couldn’t bear to think what this woman was going through, with her greying hair in a dishevelled bun, her innocuous blue salwaar-kameez that made her look like any one of my high school teachers. I felt sick with her, the coffee acrid in my chest. Having had an abortion during college—one of the wisest decisions I’ve ever made—I wanted to say I knew how she felt. But remembering the brutal, almost physical depression of that distant time only furthered my remove from this woman, who saw her adult daughter walking across the mud of the Hooghly naked as she had been in the first moments of her life, but dead.

  I touched the mother’s hand, and she gasped as if terrified. We left the cafe in silence, her cup still full, cold on the table. My heart was racing, just to be in the presence of such horror. Outside, the late winter sunlight did nothing to calm it. Thankfully, there were no marchers or black vans on Lansdowne. If we could forget for a moment, it might have felt like any other day in Kolkata, in that bygone world where the dead stayed dead.

  *

  I drove the mother to Kalighat in my old Maruti, and she slept through the ride. I got the impression it was the easiest way for her to escape human interaction.

  The stinking alleyways outside the temple were lined with the Guru’s growing mass of followers. Many clasped their palms to the mother as we passed, and some tried to touch her feet. They knew who she was. She walked through them as if in a dream, not responding at all. I had come prepared this time. We both wore surgical masks, and we’d both rubbed Vaporub under our noses. The hawkers still tried to sell us both.

  Guru Yama sat in the courtyard inside, same as before. His wife sat at the altar, aptly, seated like a goddess of death next to her husband, who had been named after the god of death by his followers. She was covered all over in heaped garlands of sweet gandhaphool, so much so that it looked like they were crude, thick robes. Her darkening face peered from the petals with those jaundiced eyes, and a ballooning hand stuck out of the flowers, in its bulging palm the orange circlet of a single marigold. The smell of the garlands wasn’t enough to mask the stench of the festering body beneath them.

  “Greetings,” the Guru said to us, his eyes drooping, with antibiotics, with fever, with other drugs, or perhaps just spiritual ecstasy, I couldn’t tell. It had been three weeks since I visited him here. He sounded more confident, and much calmer. His beard, too, was longer. More befitting a guru, I suppose.

  His wife did not move, though the hand with the flower quivered slightly, as an effigy’s straw limb might in a breeze. From under those flowers came a rattle of moisture through tissues, a soft groan. But she was unnaturally still. It made me realize suddenly that she was a living animal that didn’t breathe. This was jarringly evident when she wasn’t doing anything.

  “Don’t be afraid of her,” the Guru said said to the mother. “She is still your daughter. She has bitten me, yes, you see the bandages. But your daughter’s bite has made me feel more alive, mother. I have infected myself with the poison of the dead, so that I may live with them. It strengthens me. It gives me visions. Oh, mother, don’t cry. Rejoice in this miracle, rejoice. She has a second chance in the world. She can’t talk, but in my visions, in my dreams she speaks.” These were his first words, in Hindi, to his mother-in-law (though certainly a dubious law).

  “What does she tell you?” the mother asked, her breathing tortured.

  “In my dreams she shows me the man who killed her. She tells me,” he lowers his voice. “The terrible things that were done to her. She shows me the face of the man, so that he may be brought to justice if I ever see him in the world.”

  With the smell in the air, the situation we were in, I expected the mother to throw up at the sight of the Guru and his wife, or react adversely. But she still seemed catatonic as she stared at her daughter sitting on that altar buried in flowers but with her purple face and bulging eyes visible. It isn’t accurate to say the mother didn’t react; her cheeks were covered in tears. They dripped off her chin, soaking into the surgical mask that flapped against her mouth with each heavy breath she took.

  “Have you touched her?” the mother asked, very softly, and I felt a chill down my neck.

  The Guru smiled. “I have touched her, but not as a husband would. I have held her, and guided her, at times. It is not easy to touch her. She is fragile. But I understand your fear. We are married so that I may shelter her in this new life, that is all. I want to protect her, from men who would do what you are afraid of, from men who would take her and let her rot in a cell or a grave. I want to protect her from the birds in the sky, and the dogs on the street.”

  “I’m not afraid of what anyone will do to my daughter. They’ve already done what they will. Taken her. Taken her from me. Why is she like that. The flowers,” the mother said, out of breath.

  “It helps with the smell. In summer she would be gone by now. But she’s strong. She ate meat from the sacrificed goats, wanted to eat it. She tried to eat me, I think, when she first bit me. But it’s almost like a habit that she remembers. I saw the meat sit in her stomach and make it big, like a baby in her.”

  Like a baby, I thought, and felt spots appear in my vision. I blinked them back, sweaty, the stench clinging to my throat.

  “She threw up many times, and it was still just meat and maggots. The body will not take food in death. It rots in her. Eating is not good for her, I think. Now I don’t feed her. She is happier. She tells me, when I’m asleep.”

  I could see the mother’s hands trembling, grasped tightly together over her stomach, her womb. The mask was soaked through. “I’d thank you, Guru, if that’s what you call yourself,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry mother, I can’t hear very well, this fever fills my head. The poison of the bites has its toll, even if it’s a gift.”

  “I said I’d thank you, Guru, if that’s what you call yourself,” she said, voice shaking.

  “That’s what they call me, mother. Guru Yama. I’d be honoured if you called me son,” he said, bowing his head.

  I glanced at the corpse. I saw its distended eyes move in their sockets, looking at us from under the coils of marigolds. I took shallow breaths.

  “I’d thank you, Guru,” the mother said again, not calling him son. “For guarding my daughter from the kind of people who took her away from me. I’d thank you, if I knew that you weren’t the one who killed her, and threw her naked in the river as if she were garbage.”

  “No, mother. No, no, no,” he said. He looked genuinely dismayed by this suggestion, his eyes widening.

  “You found her, how do I know?” she asked, coughing. I flinched as her daughter rustled under the flowers, breaking from whatever mordant meditation she was suspended in.

  I touched the mother’s shoulder. “Ma’am, there were witnesses who saw him finding her, she washed up on the ghat … ” I reminded her.

  “What if that thing isn’t even my daughter?” she said, taking off her glasses.

  “It is,” I whispered. “I looked at the footage, compared the photos. We can ask the police to do a DNA test, but I don’t know if that’ll work at this stage of decomposition. If you claim her, we can get her to a morgue before she starts falling apart completely.”

  “No. I don’t want that. She’s already gone. That … she doesn’t look like my daughter anymore,” she said, her voice so very small.

  The creature under the flowers crooned as gas escaped her mouth. It sounded eerily lik
e song, and who’s to say it wasn’t? I saw the Guru look at her, and I noticed his eyes were wet as well. Was it the accusation? Empathy for the mother?

  The corpse moved its fake-looking hand, the skin stretched like a latex glove half blown-up. And, to my shock, she raised that grotesque hand and wobbled the flower into her thick blue lips, eating it, the petals glowing bright against her black and brown teeth. The Guru pointed. “Look, like I taught her, mother. Like I taught her. I taught your daughter, not to eat, and if she does, eat the flowers. Small, they don’t hurt her. Good, beta, good,” he grinned, the pride on his face clear. The Guru looked like a boy showing his mother a trick he’d taught his pet.

  The mother stared, and gasped with what sounded like laughter. She laughed, perhaps, and then she sobbed, sitting on the dirty ground of that courtyard. She sobbed and sobbed, scrunching the surgical mask into her face as a hankerchief, as her daughter’s corpse munched on a marigold, and her unasked-for son-in-law held her hand with hope and fear in his eyes. The moment lasted barely a minute, before she got up, and asked to leave immediately. She had come to officially identify her daughter’s corpse, but she’d barely seen it. And yet, how could I force that? How could I ask that the flowers that hid that monstrous, infantile thing that was once her daughter be removed? I dreaded to see the decay, and so did she.

  “I am sorry for your loss, mother” the Guru said as we left, his voice different than it had been.

  “I want it burned. I can’t have that walking around. It’s not my daughter anymore. She’s gone. I want it burned,” the mother said to me in the car, once she had regained some of her composure.

  I drove her back to her apartment. Once again, she was silent. Once I had parked by her building, she turned to me, eyes swollen. She grasped my arm, the first time she’d touched me. She held me very tight.

  “Miss Sen, do you think I made the right decision?” she asked.

  Swallowing, I told her: “I don’t know, ma’am. I truly don’t.”

  “I don’t think he killed her,” she said, letting go of my arm. Her hand fell limp to her lap.

  “I don’t think so either. I interviewed a lot of people who were at the ghat, both when he found, the body and when he came back. Everyone confirms he was among the morning bathers when the body washed on to the ghat.”

  She let out a long and heavy breath. “I don’t think it should be burned.”

  I don’t know why, but I was relieved when she said that. I remembered those horrible, deformed hands lifting a flower to a rotting mouth, and my chest ached.

  “All right,” I said, nodding too hard. “Whatever you feel is right, ma’am. And please, call me Paromita.”

  She placed her fist against her forehead, her bangles jangling. Her eyes closed, she said, “He can keep it. You know,” she opened her eyes, looked at me. “My daughter never seemed interested in marriage. I know I asked her about it too much. I wanted grandchildren very much, a son-in-law. To fill up our family, you know? My husband left it so empty, even though he was one person. So I pestered her all the time, to meet a man. She was still young, after all, but no interest in weddings and children. Such a good student, always career-minded. She was so happy to go to college. Really, she wanted to go abroad to study. I didn’t have the money. I don’t know how much that hurt her, but she never, ever used it against me, even when we fought about things. And we did fight. College was good for her. She needed to live apart from me. But I missed her so much. She’d say, ‘Ma, that’s ridiculous, we live in the same city,’ so I didn’t tell her, but I missed her all the time. Honestly I was grateful she didn’t go abroad, so that she could still visit me. She did. She did, until she was missing. And then, that was that. Now I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “No,” I agreed. I put my hand, very lightly, on her arm, before returning it to the steering wheel. “Nobody does.”

  “You’re not as young as my daughter,” she said. “But you’re young. You have so much energy, to be doing all this, figuring out the identity of my daughter’s body, finding me, when the police should be doing things like this. All this work, all this energy, when the whole world’s going mad. You should be very proud.”

  “Thank you,” I said, my ears going hot. I felt suddenly ashamed to be alive in front of her, despite her kindness.

  She took the crumpled hankerchief from her handbag and wiped her nose. “The person who killed my daughter. That person was unkind to her. Horrible to her. I don’t know, whatever animal her body has become, I don’t know what it feels. If it’s walking, eating, maybe it’ll feel the flames. I won’t be that unkind. I won’t, in my daughter’s honour. That man can keep the body, and whatever it is now. You’ll tell the police?”

  “I will. They’ll call you, and probably ask if you identified her. You’ll probably have to talk to your lawyer, and get a death certificate. But I’ll tell them.”

  I smiled, though she didn’t look at me, staring straight ahead through the windshield. “Thank you, Paromita. For everything you’ve done, are doing, for me, and for my daughter.”

  I nodded, and found myself choking on my words. I barely managed to say “You’re welcome.” before she took her handbag and got out of the car. I’ve talked to her a few times on the phone since, to organize a meeting with her lawyer and the police, but that was the last time I saw her.

  4. NOTES ON DEATH

  I saw Guru Yama and his wife one last time at Kalighat. I went there to tell him he had the mother’s consent to keep the body. I had ad hoc legal papers from her lawyer giving the Guru ‘official’ custody of the walking cadaver. The Guru thanked me, but his enthusiasm had turned to sadness, because his wife was on the verge of falling apart. She was attracting rats and other vermin into the temple, and dangerously close to liquefying. “I do have to burn her,” the Guru told me, dishevelled and weak, scratching at his bandages.

  “You can give her to the hospitals, the research institutes, if you want to keep her from the police,” I said. “They can put her in cold storage.”

  He shook his head. “No, Miss Sen. Maybe if she was younger. The dead have short lives. This I know now. She would suffer a lot if they tried to freeze her now.” He had decided. Perhaps because of his meeting with the mother. Perhaps not.

  He led her from the altar to a hired lorry by the rope leash. By now she was barely able to walk, waddling slowly and leaving a trail of dark brown droplets that her garlands dragged into smears. Men with mops swept the trail away as she was led across the courtyard. The walk took half an hour. The Guru draped a cloth over her face so all the people watching didn’t panic her. Dragging her ropes of flowers she was lifted into the back of the lorry in a large blanket, five sweating men heaving at its sides and rolling her in with no dignity. I followed the lorry to Garia crematorium.

  I waited in the crematorium’s cold, shadowy halls as the Guru’s wife was taken in for incineration.

  The worst thing I have ever heard in my life in the brief scream that rang out through the crematorium, sharp and human, before being lost in the hum of the ovens. I went outside to find a dog barking furiously in the courtyard, drool flying into the dirt. I leaned against the yellow walls of the building and waited.

  The Guru emerged and thanked me again.

  “That scream, was that her?” I asked.

  He nodded. “It’s good. It’s good that her mother wasn’t here.” I saw his hands shaking, like the mother’s had.

  “What’ll you do now?” I asked.

  “I’ll find more of the dead, who need my help. People want to give me their dead also, to take care of, to speak to in my visions. I have followers. I’ll never let one of the dead down like this again. One day, Miss Sen, I’ll be a big Guru, like the ones you see on TV, in the newspapers. I’ll have money. When I do, I’ll buy one of those resorts, those hotels in the mountains, high up. In the Himalayas or,” he paused, and said carefully, “Switzerland. I saw them in magazines. It’s always cold, and they’
re huge. There, my dead can roam free, and live longer. You see, you watch. Away from all these people trying to take them, away from police. They’ll be happy there.”

  I wished him luck, as he walked back to his followers, looking strange without his wife by his side. In my car, I cried quietly for that walking corpse his wife, as if I were crying for the woman who had died in its body.

  *

  Guru Yama doesn’t yet have a Swiss ski resort for his dead. He does have an ashram in Uluberia, with refrigerated chambers for his ‘children’ (no more wives or husbands, to reduce the accusations of necrophilia). He keeps himself in a perpetual state of fever, allowing his children to bite him every month, staving off death and resurrection via antibiotics paid for by his followers and clients. Detractors of dead-charmers say that the visions and dreams through which they talk to the dead are nothing but delirium brought about by fever and drugs, including heroin and hash taken for the pain. I plan, one day soon, with my friend Saptarshi, to do a book of photo essays on him and his flocks, dead and alive.

  I still don’t know whether he’s a charlatan, or deluded, or a prophet.

  Perhaps because I’m an atheist, I’ve never trusted charismatic religious figures who use their influence to gather wealth. I don’t quite recognize the man I see in video and pictures now; covered in ash, turmeric paste and bandages, cloaked in hash and incense smoke, beard hanging down to his hollow stomach, surrounded by veiled corpses like a true lord of death. But I remember the man who walked out of Garia crematorium, his shaking hands, his shocked stare. His grief for the creature he called his wife, so very real. We both heard her scream as she died a second time.