The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

She looked at the address on the envelope and then up at him. He placed a hand briefly on her hair, and then he walked out to the courtyard, to Sagar’s body, and met Loknath’s questioning look. “I’m ready.”

  ***

  Some semblance of normalcy persisted in the bhavan. The junior-most priest, Dev, sat in the courtyard, his voice rising with the rhythm of mantras that recounted the journey of the soul after death. Women filed in and out, visiting the ghats and fetching water, helping their frail family members to the washroom if they could walk. Amid the preparations, the constant motion within the hostel, and Mohan’s harried trips to the market to retrieve the implements for the cremation, Shobha remained apart. She was not one to send up a wailing cry like other women; even when her own beloved father passed she kept all feeling firmly locked within.

  The vacancy in her husband’s eyes as he handed her the letter made her want to place her palms on his cheeks and bring his face down to hers until the light returned. But it was hard for her to muster feeling for the body. Perhaps if she’d met him … but like all the other what-ifs in her life, Shobha dismissed the thought. Besides, after seeing the address on that letter, someone else entered her mind.

  Kamna. The woman Pramesh’s cousin had married was named Kamna. She’d learned this early in her own marriage, but she never spoke the name, even in her thoughts. Doing so was enough to conjure a whole person, enough to breathe life into this woman whom Shobha had never met. And with her very real presence came a very real fear that Shobha kept inside herself, because speaking it aloud would make it true. A woman like that does not forget.

  Pramesh never spoke of this girl selected for him, the bride his cousin had accepted in his place. Seeing her husband’s twin dead in the courtyard of her home drew out her long-hidden fear as easily as a magnet pulls iron filings from a pile of sand. She concentrated on what she knew how to do: she distracted Rani by having her pick through a bowl of uncooked lentils, kept chai perpetually boiling on the fire, and made the rounds to each of the rooms, asking the women guests if they required anything. She let the work disguise her thoughts, because while everyone else focused on the dead man, Shobha—calm, collected, rational woman—could not stop thinking of the dead man’s wife.

  ***

  After the hostel manager came with his bhavan men to take the body away, Bhut went straight home. He was satisfied with his day’s work and did not dwell on the how and why. After all, he was a circle officer in the City of Death. Why should one police district keep an accurate account of how all those souls passed, when the important thing was the simple fact that they were dead? He had as little patience for the details of death as he did for what came after: the elaborate rites, the chanting and burning, the paying of priests, all done in a foolish attempt to stave off ghosts, which he did not believe in, despite his nickname.

  The manager and the dead man slipped from Bhut’s mind as he walked toward the wasps’ nest that was his house. Perhaps, just once, he would find that it was his neighbors who were quarreling. But no, the words tumbling out into the street were certainly spoken by his wife and his two older sisters, the heat of their argument burning his face the closer he came. He was tempted to turn back; no one had seen him. But then his elder sister’s voice rose high and shrill. Once she began she would never stop, like a fireball skimming along a trail of oil until it grew big enough to engulf an entire house. Bhut hastened to remove his shoes, groaning loudly as he bent to undo the thin laces, making as much noise as possible to announce his arrival before showing his face in the kitchen doorway. Like a douse of water, his presence extinguished the quarrel.

  “Chai?” he asked his wife.

  She turned to the hearth and set to smashing pieces of ginger into her steel chai pot. His sisters ignored him as he took a seat on the stool closest to the window. Those two women were like extra digits on a hand: more encumbrance than utility, a magnet for talk and embarrassment. Yet they had not always been that way. As children they had been full of jokes and mischief, and Bhut had been their foremost admirer even as they switched out his milk with rice water or filled his shoes with river stones. They had been so unlike his eldest sister, the one who always had a treat waiting when he passed his exams, who mended his pants when he ripped them before their mother found out and withheld his dinner in punishment. He did not think of her often; doing so reminded him of why the gossips had declared his other sisters unmarriageable. When his eldest sister’s life had been plucked too early, the other two became like fruit that hung fast to the bough, ripening and rotting and drying up past all recognition.

  “Yes, ignore us; even when you know we are right.” The flame of the quarrel rose up again, one sister muttering while the other shot dark glances at Bhut’s wife. His knee began to ache, and Bhut rubbed it harder than necessary, hoping the motion would distract the women.

  Sometimes, one of his deputies would report a disturbance in one of the lanes or cramped apartments that was blamed on a ghost or spirit. Bhut waved his hand at them, telling them to note the matter down in the logs as a domestic issue. Yet he now found himself wishing for such a supernatural appearance to halt the quarrels that rose like weeds around his sisters. But he did not believe in ghosts. A man with his past, after all, could ill afford to.

  7

  Women and men alike came out and stood in the doorways of their rooms, murmuring amongst themselves, staring at the body of a man who looked remarkably like the manager. Mohan unfolded the smooth, shimmering white piece of cloth he’d purchased in the market and let it fall in soft ripples over the body, his hands trembling, eyes darting from the face to the manager’s and back again.

  As Pramesh pulled one end of the milk-white cloth toward his cousin’s head, he drank in the details of Sagar’s features and tried to read the missing years in the lines and creases. The split eyebrow, the dark spots near the lip, scarred remains of the pox that both boys had endured at nine—Pramesh knew the stories of these as if his own face had been branded with them. But the yellowed remains of a bruise on Sagar’s shoulder, the whiteness of a slash near his ear like a streak of chalk that would not rub off—what of those?

  A hand rested on Pramesh’s back, and he looked up to see Narinder.

  “Loknath will lead the rites,” the head priest said. “Then, you’ll return home. Then the twelve days of mourning.”

  Pramesh tilted his chin. He knew the rituals that follow death as well as he knew the days of the week.

  “And on the eleventh day, Narayana bali.”

  At this, Pramesh looked up. Narayana bali was performed only when the death had been bad, an extra measure to ensure that the soul went straight to where it was supposed to go.

  The head priest gripped his shoulder, then turned and began to walk around the courtyard with his prayer beads as he always did at this time of day. Detach, the old priest always told the families when their grief sounded in heavy waves that washed over the bhavan. Your duty is to detach. Pramesh stifled a sigh, lifted the sheet, and let it glide and rest over Sagar’s head.

  Twelve other pyres crowded Manikarnika ghat that day. Most of the men from the bhavan followed and clustered some steps above to watch the proceedings like a cordon of resting pigeons. Mohan could not do enough; he insisted on helping carry the bier through the lanes, and his voice chanted the truth of Rama’s name louder than any other. Once at the ghats, the assistant fetched a barber, and though Pramesh protested, Mohan took employee loyalty to higher reaches and had his head shaved and tonsured alongside the manager’s.

  “In Kashi you are my family, and when I am under your roof, your pain is mine,” Mohan said. While the Doms stacked the wood and readied the pyre, manager and assistant bathed in the river and then donned the same gauzy white dhotis they’d helped guests purchase for so many years, the cloth unfamiliar to their skin, the newly shaved whiteness of their heads disquieting above their brown torsos.

&n
bsp; It all seemed a dream to Pramesh, something he watched from a distance when a guest passed away and the family headed down to the ghats. Those pilgrims, at least, had for the most part died good deaths, deaths that came peacefully at the culmination of a long life, deaths that gently drew the soul from the body and led it to join the great God. Pramesh tried to ignore the chatter that suffused the ghats that day. No matter that Bhut had declared to the old city that Sagar’s death was a drunken accident. Everyone with eyes could see that Sagar was young; he’d been ripped from his body before he could weave a completed life behind him. He had been alone, with no one to whisper the great God’s name into his ears as the water rushed to fill the pockets of his lungs. Most troubling of all, Sagar had died in ambiguous territory, neither holy nor cursed, that spot where the water from Kashi’s shores mingled with Magadha’s. “It is certainly not a good death,” the collective murmur seemed to say, and how could Pramesh argue?

  Loknath reminded Pramesh of the procedure. “You will fetch the fire from the Doms,” he said. “At my signal, walk around the pyre and touch the flame to the mouth. Five times, remember Pramesh-ji? We will wait for the pyre to burn. At the midway point I will again signal, and that will be the time to break the skull.”

  Pramesh blanched, but he breathed in deeply and Loknath continued. “At the end—forgive me, Pramesh-ji, I know you are aware of all this—at the end, when you extinguish the flame, remember, you must not look back. Continue on to the bhavan and we will meet you there, but no matter what happens, do not look back.”

  Pramesh shut his eyes. In that darkness he saw himself imparting the very same information to each family who left the bhavan carrying a body on a bier. The soul is gone, the body is burnt, the time is past. Do not show your attachment to someone who exists no longer and never will again. Do not look back.

  Perpetual clusters of foreigners, pilgrims, urchins, Dom children playing cricket, touts looking to squeeze some rupees from the rest, cows reclining in the mud, and various scattered ne’er-do-wells as always sprinkled the steps, while more leaned out of high balconies and windows to witness the day’s cremations at Manikarnika. They watched out of a desire as simple and instinctive as thirst: they needed a grand finale to the dead man’s story, which had festered on their lips for the last two days. When the river washed away the ashes, it would also rinse their mouths and ready them for the next tale.

  Like the mythic guards of Yamraj’s palace, the Doms awaited Pramesh, their arms crossed against sinewy chests, bodies glistening with sweat, eyes tinged red from the billowing smoke. Behind them, the river flowed black and glinted gold where the ripples reflected the sun. They may have been Untouchable, the only class of people to handle the dead, but their ancestry could be traced back to when the first fire of cremation had been entrusted to them, a fire that was theirs to care for and keep, to parse out to all who wanted proper funeral rites for their dead.

  When it came time for Pramesh to fetch the fire, he paid the asking price without argument. Numb and not a little frightened, he circled the pyre clockwise once, the first of the five revolutions, and stretched the bundle of grass, burning with that sacred flame, toward Sagar’s mouth. As his hand drew close, the flame sputtered and thrilled, the river droplets on Sagar’s skin sizzled and escaped with a gaseous hiss, the pyre was almost alight, the flesh was almost freed, and then—

  “The pyre will not burn!”

  Heads swung around to where a bandy-legged priest raised his fist, prayer beads held tight, in a gesture that was half benediction and half curse. “You will see,” the old man crowed. “The great God will not allow the pyre of such a sinner to burn!” Whether because of his proclaimed clairvoyance or because of the magnificent stink wafting from his skimpy dhoti, the priest received a wide berth on the cramped ghat steps. Such an interruption, such a thing to say—Pramesh froze as the sheaf of grasses in his hand smoldered with timeless sacred fury. What if the priest was right?

  Such things happened: Years ago, on this very ghat, the pyre of a prominent businessman, known for his particular tastes in philandering—“Nepali girls only, Bhaiya. He flies into a rage otherwise!”—had refused to burn, despite the quantities—gallons!—of ghee, the top quality sandalwood and mango timbers of the pyre, the profusion of sons that presided at his funeral, the priests said to be descended from the purest of dynasties, and the hundred thousand rupees donated from the dead man’s coffers to the city orphanage. Though the eldest son circled and circled and prodded his father’s body with that timeless flame, the pyre would not light, wouldn’t accept a single spark. Only when the sons recruited a manservant to procure a gas lighter did the wood flare with weak enthusiasm, producing more smoke than flame, enabling the supervising Doms to push the half-smoked body off the pyre and into the river under the cover of the enshrouding black clouds.

  But Sagar could not be compared to that man … or could he? The stork-legged priest remained in his spot with his prayer beads held aloft, and the crowd tittered like a flock of restless birds. As auspicious seconds ticked by, as people argued, as Loknath struggled to surmount the tumult of noise—“Light the pyre, Pramesh-ji. Ignore them and light the pyre!”—Pramesh was numb, unable to will his body forward or back, wasting both time and sacred flame, while Sagar’s body waited. Then, through a sudden imbalance in his feet or an encouraging gust of wind or a light push from Loknath that no one saw, Pramesh’s hand dipped toward Sagar’s mouth, and the undying fire, which had been on the verge of sputtering out, found flesh to bite into and absolve into ash.

  “It lights!” A triumphant cry burst from the crowd, and a cheer and laugh went up before being quickly stifled by the stern looks of the Doms, Mohan, and Loknath.

  “No good will come of it,” the stork-legged priest said, but now the crowd ignored him, and he knew enough to mount the steps and depart before the audience turned against him.

  Pramesh felt his legs move, his torch-holding hand touching Sagar’s mouth after each revolution, and he soon completed the five rounds. Loknath placed the fragrant powder of the rites into the manager’s hands, and Pramesh flung the stuff into the air, sending showers over the pyre and sparks spiraling toward the river. The heat surprised him. He’d never been so close before, and the blazing furnace roared with such affirmative energy that it seemed more capable of bringing the body back to life than reducing it to the mundane finality of ashes. Indeed, the flame pushed the body into motion, sending legs gliding away from the torso as the flesh melted away, releasing arms from their sockets, goading a hand to drape curled fingers over the pyre’s edge in a gesture that seemed plaintive from one angle and commanding from another.

  He dreaded what was to come next. During the countless cremations he had observed from the topmost step of the ghat, he had always turned away as the chief mourners performed the most vital action that ensured the soul’s safe passage to its final destination. To crack the skull, to strike the head he knew as well as his own, and allow the spirit to escape toward its final journey.… Even from many steps away the sound could be heard: the solid thuk! of wood cracking bone, like a cricket bat making contact or woodworkers beating a table leg into its socket.

  Many men, no matter how fearless, balked at the task. They escaped with a simple ceremonial tap of the bamboo staff on the skull, and with relief they allowed the priest to deliver the final blow. But Pramesh encountered death every day, and if he could not prove himself an example to his guests, or to those Banarasis staring at the back of his head with an intensity that threatened to crack his own skull, the resulting story would be one he would never shed. And then conviction—of a sick, haunting kind, but conviction nonetheless—came to him in a gush of bile and a voice long suppressed. You’ve never had the courage to do the thing that has to be done.

  Loknath locked eyes with Pramesh and gave a slight tilt of the chin. Mohan appeared at the manager’s side, a thick bamboo staff pulled from the disass
embled bier at the ready. Pramesh took it and pressed his hands around the smooth wood. He breathed in deep, breathed out the great God’s name, swung the pole, and brought it down with a crack on Sagar’s charring skull.

  He felt something break and lifted a foreshortened length of bamboo. Horrified, he looked down and saw Sagar’s skull, resolutely intact. He’d missed.

  A distressed Mohan cried out, “The staff must have already had some break in it—another! We require another!” Another was procured, appearing like a miracle out of the crowd, but Pramesh’s second swing had even less conviction than the first, and he missed again, sending sparks flying into the air and the river and even, unfortunately, into Loknath’s face. As the priest rubbed his eyes, already streaming with tears from the smoke, Mohan’s urgent whisper came at Pramesh’s shoulder. “You must try one more time, Pramesh-ji,” he said.

  The manager gritted his teeth and breathed in the fumes of flesh and bone, holy powder and blackened wood. Once more he raised the staff and brought it down. Loknath shielded his eyes from the sparks, and when the air was clear he glanced at the skull. Pramesh thought he could see a hairline crack, or perhaps it was a trick of the light. Whatever the damage, Loknath pronounced the effort sufficient.

  “The skull has been cracked!” he said. “It will do.”

  Mohan repeated the words in his loud and blustery way, and the verdict soon rolled through the lines of people. The flames were winding down, receding, as if, like the falsely prophetic priest, they’d had their roaring say and now accepted their lot, grumbling. Soon the ordeal would be over, the fire would die out, and all Pramesh would have to do was take up a pot of Ganges water, turn his back, and throw the pot over his shoulder and toward the pyre, walking away as the water extinguished any remaining flame. Gagri phute, nata tute. Pot broken, relationship finished.

  In the ashes, he scraped out a 9 and a 4, Vishnu’s conch and discus marking the final spot where Sagar’s body had rested. Then, pot at the ready, Pramesh waited for Loknath’s signal. The Doms stood nearby, waiting for the pyre to burn down, waiting to scrape the wood and ashes clean and shovel what remained of Sagar back into the river in which he’d spent his last moments. A calm settled over the crowd, and the outermost edges dwindled as people returned to the places they had come from. The story was complete, and now it was time to return to their own troubles and joys.