The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  “He does no good, either. Shall I tell you the hostel man’s story or not?” The crowd grew thicker on the ghat, the sun’s heat pressed down, and Bhut had no feeling for the drunk one way or the other. He grunted his assent; Kishore began. “Your hostel man arrived ten years ago. He came with nothing, but had some story about winning admission to the university—perhaps he told the truth, but it was easy enough to convince him in another direction. Old Dharam at the death hostel had been looking for an assistant for some time.”

  “You recommended a stranger?” Kishore’s show of altruism sent Bhut’s eyebrows high up his forehead.

  “Him as well as any other,” the ghaatiyaa said. He paused to bark at a man a few steps below who made a grab for a pair of sandals that were not his own.

  “The great Kishore-ji is no fool. You had a reason—what did he promise you in return?”

  “Nothing.”

  Bhut waited. Eventually, the ghaatiyaa scowled. “He looked like a newborn, that man. Like he’d never seen the river, never breathed the air, never used his legs—everything fascinated him. Another country fool, staring as if the great God made the city for his benefit alone.”

  “So?”

  “So, a man like that—other men will talk in the presence of a man like that.”

  “And you were right?”

  Kishore flicked his hand in disgust. “I am not the first to mistake a man’s character.”

  The circle officer shifted his feet on the stone steps. Some paces away, a pair of women plucked marigolds from a fat basket sitting between them and strung the flowers into garlands. Bhut watched the round orange blossoms pass between deft fingers until the garland was finished and tied off. He sucked the air between his teeth. “And yet he is not such a fool from the village, is he? To have married the old housemaster’s daughter just a year after arriving? And then to become the manager himself when the old man died.…”

  “No. Not such a fool.” Kishore counted the money in his hands before slipping the coins into a pouch and bouncing it in his palm. The muffled jingle sounded cheerful amid the chanting and chattering, the bickering and bartering on the ghat. Kishore looked grim; he was not a man who enjoyed doing a good deed without receiving something in return. Bhut smiled. The ghaatiyaa rarely made a mistake in the people he deigned to favor.

  “Have you spoken to him recently?”

  “He used to come to me for advice, to tell me the goings-on at the bhavan. Then, suddenly, he stopped, and his mouth closed like a fist.” For a moment, Bhut enjoyed seeing the ghaatiyaa discomfited. Kishore kept his eyes focused on the river. “This is about the dead man they found this morning, isn’t it?”

  Bhut’s smile vanished. “News travels quickly to your ears, Kishore-ji. Perhaps you should tell me what you have heard.”

  The ghaatiyaa straightened his back and jerked his thumb behind him. “My end of the bargain is done, Bhut-sahib. Yours is behind you.”

  “Rama-Rama,” Bhut said as he turned and walked up the steps.

  “Rama-Rama,” Kishore answered, shifting the money pouch from hand to hand.

  Maharaj greeted Bhut in his usual wheedling tone, and Bhut answered with an expletive.

  “A moment to rest, one moment only and then I shall go, I shall go to Thakorlal-ji’s,” Maharaj said in his sing-song voice as he drummed his fingers on his pot in a hollow, echoing tune.

  Bhut was never afraid to use force when needed, though he moved slower now than he had forty years ago as a young deputy. He yanked Maharaj up by the ear and let go abruptly, bringing the man to his knees. “Now,” he said. He followed as the drunk crawled up the ghats on all fours, offering a helpful kick to Maharaj’s backside when he stumbled, and thinking all the way.

  ***

  Bhut sat in the hostel office across from Pramesh at his desk, loosely gripping a metal tumbler of Shobha’s milky chai and staring intently at the hostel manager’s face, his cap balanced on one knee. Pramesh looked down at the much-abused scrap of paper on the desk before him. It had been sodden in the dead man’s soaked shirt pocket, then roughly handled as it was passed and folded and unfolded throughout the day. When Pramesh picked it up, the paper sighed like something alive and the soft edges clung to his fingers. It held only a single word, twice underlined. Shankarbhavan.

  “So this dead man meant to come here,” the manager said, putting the chit on the desk between them. “A pilgrim, then? Was someone with him?”

  “Who can say?” Bhut said, still staring at Pramesh’s face. “But I feel he may be familiar to you.”

  Pramesh looked back at the circle officer, wary.

  “I have seen the body. The face is exactly yours—except the dead man has a scar,” Bhut said calmly. “It splits his right eyebrow in two.” Pramesh froze. The circle officer released his gaze and took a slow, drawn-out sip from his cup. “And now that I have seen you, I can tell you with certainty. He is your copy.”

  Fear glazed Pramesh’s heart. His mouth felt packed with hot ash, a taste of sickness that he remembered from years ago—a lifetime ago. You cannot leave me—

  “A mistake,” he said, interrupting the thought.

  Bhut finished his chai and stood. “Anything is possible,” he said, fitting his cap to his graying head. “Best if you see for yourself. Come.”

  ***

  Across the street, a dusk-colored pigeon paced on a second-floor window ledge, the iridescent feathers around its throat winking like an opal necklace. The widow Mrs. Chalwah pushed the bird away with one curled hand and watched the hostel manager and the circle officer pass through the bhavan gate. She shrank out of view until she was sure both men were far enough down the lane, and then leaned forward and watched them turn toward the ghats.

  She spent her days counting her prayer beads, pinching God’s name out of each one, and watching families carry their dead out of Shankarbhavan. One day soon, she hoped, she would be one of them; the great God and the Mother would greet her soul and whisper the words needed to cross the hellish Vaitarani river to reach the end of all ends. Today, however, no bodies had left the bhavan. No one had died, and she felt a queer unease. Seeing the two men take fast and even strides along the packed dirt, she sighed, turned away from the window, and resumed her recitation of the great God’s name.

  5

  In the back corner of the police station, inside the largest cell with its doors wide open, a man was stretched on a white cloth, with another draped loosely over him. Bhut remained outside while Pramesh ventured in. The other cells sat empty or held a few hunched individuals who fixed Pramesh with a desperate stare or ignored him as he passed. The two deputies and the clerk in the front of the building, who’d nudged each other and followed the manager with their eyes as he trailed Bhut, remained where they were.

  He knelt and gingerly drew back the cloth and stared down into a face he had last seen nearly ten years before. The body was bloated, the skin cast with an unnatural dark tone. Dried yellow spittle clung to corners of the mouth. Unwashed, the body smelled of river water and decay, a paralyzing stench in the windowless jail cell, and Pramesh drew the front of his shirt up and over his nose and mouth. Yet despite those marks of death, he saw himself in the familiar features: the hawkish nose, the dark mustache, the long-lashed eyes shadowed with dark circles, the skinny and tall frame. Like looking at his own reflection, but for the scar splitting the right eyebrow in two. Sagar.

  Pramesh set a palm on the cold arm. Perhaps it was a mistake; perhaps Sagar was still there, like the old man blinking to life under Sheetal’s gaze…. His hand remained still, with no rise and fall of a breathing chest, no breath streaming from the nose to warm the skin. He lifted his hand and dragged his fingers through his hair as if to pull it out by the roots.

  “In the water for hours,” Bhut said from outside the cell, “yet the likeness is still there. Remarkable.”

 
; “We would play twins when we were children,” Pramesh said hoarsely. He dropped the front of his shirt from his face, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and stepped outside the cell. “Sometimes even our mothers could not tell us apart. Or perhaps they were pretending, teasing us, but at the time we believed them.”

  “When was the last you’d heard from him?” Bhut asked.

  “Almost ten years.”

  “And what do you suppose he was doing here?”

  Pramesh tried to shake loose from the drift of his thoughts. Hot ash, the stench of sweat and sickness, and that voice: Sagar’s voice. You cannot leave me behind.… “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Any news from your village? Some event that brought him here?”

  “I heard nothing.”

  Bhut leaned against one of the iron-barred doors, blowing impatiently through his nose. “Your family—where are they? Tell me from the beginning.”

  Pramesh blinked and named his village. “Two of everything, in my family. Two fathers, two mothers, two sons—my cousin and I.” He felt strange, his voice giving life to those people when he had not spoken of them for so long.

  “Two fathers?”

  “They were brothers. They married at the same time.”

  “And all living together?”

  Pramesh slowly rocked his chin, his eyes still fixed on Sagar. “My cousin and I were never apart. Our mothers died when we were very young. A fever that swept the village.” His mouth went dry, but he continued. “I was ill as well, but I survived.”

  “What became of your fathers?”

  “They had to sell much of our land. Their sister had been widowed and childless, so she arrived to care for us. All are now gone. Dead some years after I left for the city.” Pramesh shifted his weight. “That was when I was twenty-one. I wanted him to come with me, but he was stubborn—he loved the land.”

  “So you came here alone. You met Kishore. Then, the death hostel,” Bhut recited. “It’s a lucky sort of life, the way things ended up for you.”

  “Yes,” Pramesh admitted. “I hadn’t been anywhere like Kashi before. And Shankarbhavan as well. I wanted to do that work.”

  “But dealing with the old and the dead, day after day, and you, a young man.…”

  Pramesh raised his hand, palm upward, and let it drop to the side, eyes on Sagar. “It satisfied something within me. I cannot explain it.”

  Behind Bhut, a low hum began, rising in volume until it was a wail, rich with pain. The circle officer walked down the hall a few paces to the cell where the sound emanated and aimed a vicious kick at fingers clutching the barred door. The sound stopped.

  “Was he upset when you left him?” he asked, returning to his original spot, expressionless. “Or when he found out what you were doing?”

  Pramesh shuddered and tried to concentrate. “No. He wanted me to leave. There wasn’t anything there for me in the village.”

  “You didn’t keep in touch?”

  “We did, at first. But then … we drifted. He had his life. I had mine.”

  “What did your cousin do after you left? Was he successful with the land?”

  Pramesh swallowed. The stench was becoming unbearable, but he forced himself to look at the puffed face. “As I said, we parted ways. I don’t know what his life became, once I left him—and he never knew mine, for that matter.”

  The circle officer grunted, letting the silence stretch between them. Pramesh kept his face neutral, his answers carrying the heft of truth so that all the things just beneath the surface might remain there.

  Bhut scratched the back of his neck, then came to the point. “You will be responsible for the funeral?”

  “Yes. Of course.” Pramesh exhaled. The interrogation was coming to an end. He wanted to get Sagar away from this place, out of the filth and the darkness.

  “You know the Doms are divided.”

  “In what regard?”

  “Some will refuse to give you the wood.”

  A weight settled on Pramesh’s chest. Those who took their own lives were never cremated. Their fate was to be floated off on a bier, bodies unpurified by fire, to be disposed of as the Ganges willed.

  “One thing.” Bhut stretched the words out, pausing long enough for Pramesh to look away from Sagar and focus on the circle officer. “Just one thing I neglected to mention. They found an empty bottle in the boat.”

  Pramesh’s breath caught. “What of it?”

  “An empty liquor bottle,” Bhut clarified. “That boatman, Raman, claims it is not his, and we believe him. He is a fool, but not fool enough to drink on the water. A sober man slipping and falling from a boat … difficult to pin as an accident. But you would believe the story with a drunk man, would you not?”

  Nothing but the son of a drunk. Pramesh closed his eyes.

  Of course, the insatiable city would demand a story to ingest. He thought of the gossips greedy for some salacious tale of murder or revenge or mistaken identity—or, even better, all three bound together in Sagar’s lifeless body. No boring, domestic tale would do—and even then, someone would find a way to change it, another would add to that, and soon it would become a story any person would be proud to repeat on the way to the market or to a neighbor stopping in for chai. But a bottle, a drunk—not that. He couldn’t let it be that.

  “He never drank a drop in his life,” Pramesh said, struggling to convey a conviction he did not feel. “Ever. He and I—we are not that sort.”

  “And yet, you had not seen him for how long?” Bhut tilted his head to the side. “Either he killed himself, or he was drunk and fell. Which was it?”

  Pramesh wanted neither story to be Sagar’s. But which would hurt less?

  “Later, you will understand,” Bhut said. Pramesh looked up. The circle officer’s gaze was distant. “Bad as it seems now—neither end is as bad as it could be. Though time will tell whether the story will linger or die.”

  He met the manager’s eyes fleetingly. Pramesh recalled a tale about something that happened long ago, decades before he arrived in the city. The versions and variations had changed over the years, but the essential details remained—something about an older sister—Bhut’s sister—who had died mysteriously less than a year after becoming a wife, and a husband who’d fled the country. A story that shimmered into being whenever anyone from that family passed into view, like an odor that dogged their steps in the lanes. Whatever Pramesh said now, whatever he decided, would determine whether his own family would acquire a scent that trailed them through the city.

  Worse than this was the possibility of it being true. Two versions of his cousin existed: the man he’d grown up with, and the man he’d grown apart from. The former, he knew never to have touched alcohol. But might the latter, who’d bound himself to a shell of a life on a dwindling farm, to a woman he never should have married, and to a family with the worst of stories attached to their name, have been driven to drink in the years that followed? He couldn’t be sure. But suicide was unimaginable. “I have not seen him in years,” he said at last.

  “It was an accident, then,” Bhut decided. “Even if they insist it was suicide, how can they know? The bottle was there; we have two witnesses for that. He meant to see you; the note makes it clear. Rama knows why he was in the middle of the river, but he fell from the boat; that I can see.”

  “Of course,” Pramesh said bleakly, wishing he could feel grateful. But now all he could do was stare at that copy of himself, sealed and preserved in death, while he would continue to walk the streets of Kashi, powered by a life that should have been flowing through Sagar, a life that was no better than a mango stolen to satiate an unbearable hunger, bitter from first bite to last.

  6

  As if sensing that Pramesh’s mind was already overburdened, no one at Shankarbhavan passed away the next day, the day of Sagar’s funeral. Though S
heetal’s father in room No. 5 and the weaver in No. 8 drew rattling breaths, though the teacher’s mother in No. 9 had long ago succumbed to delirious musings and the frail woman in No. 11 endured impatient glances from her grandson; though they all should have toppled out of their bodies like overripe fruit from a tree, they held on, bound by a collective knowledge that only one dead man would command the manager’s attention that day.

  With the help of Mohan, Sheetal, and a spare deputy, Pramesh carried Sagar’s body to the bhavan on a bier. He drew comfort from completing the journey his cousin had set out upon, bringing him to Shankarbhavan even though he knew that this body, this abandoned shell of flesh and hair and bone, was not Sagar. In the courtyard, as he washed the strong limbs and muscled torso with the buckets of holy river water that Mohan had fetched for him, wiped the smooth brown skin and fine black hairs on Sagar’s arms and chest, slicked the hair back with a wet comb and set the part neatly, all to prepare the body for the pyre, Pramesh felt an overwhelming tenderness and sorrow threaten to engulf him. He had no right to such emotion. The soul was gone, and no amount of nostalgia could bring it back.

  The body was ready, and Mohan had the other items—the flowers and cloth in hand, the wood and oil waiting at the ghats. Silence reigned outside the bhavan; a death like this was no occasion for the raucous brass bands that led every other dead body to the funeral pyre. “A moment,” Pramesh excused himself and went into his office. The thing he needed to do was best done immediately, and then forgotten.

  I write with the news that Sagar-bhai—my cousin, my brother—has passed. He burns on the pyre today.

  There is nothing that I want from you. I will complete all the rites; everything will be done properly.

  I am writing only to let you know.

  He addressed the letter to his childhood home, and then he found Shobha in the kitchen sitting in front of the hearth. “Will you take this to the post office for me?” he asked, pressing it into her hands. “As soon as we leave with the body?”