The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  Pramesh was settling the last of the guests when he noticed Shobha lingering just inside the kitchen, trying to catch his eye. “I need to stop at Arjuna’s for your shirts,” she said, her eyes on the washroom. “I don’t want to leave her, but you know he doesn’t like children underfoot.”

  “I’ve just finished,” Pramesh said, walking inside to pick up Rani. “Has she eaten?”

  “She’s had a snack—we’ll eat when I get back.” She tweaked the girl’s cheek and smiled at him before walking out the door. Pramesh settled Rani more comfortably in his arms, though she twisted as far as she could, her eyes following Shobha.

  “Oh, Queen of Flowers,” Pramesh sang to distract her. “Where is your horse, Little Queen?” Mohan had given her the wooden toy, her favorite. Her warmth suffused his body, and her weight was a comforting load in his arms, made precious given how long he and Shobha had waited for her to come into being. “Ah ha,” he said, pointing to a spot beneath the rope bed while her eyes followed, “He was hiding from you.”

  He set her down next to the bed and handed her the horse. As she marched it around the edge of the bed, he gently ran his fingers through her tousled hair, combing it back into order. He wondered if she remembered what had happened the past two nights, and if the memory would dissolve or stay with her as she got older. She was only three—she would forget. But if anyone outside learned of what was happening…. He thought of the tale that followed Bhut and his family name no matter how high he rose in the ranks. He could already imagine what people might say on Rani’s engagement day, on the eve of her wedding. “He thinks he can marry his daughter off to so and so, but do you think he told the groom’s family about that thing from so many years ago?”

  He slid off the bed to sit on the floor next to her. Each day he listened as Shobha held up random objects during the morning meal—a spoon, a cup, a small clay bird—and slowly spoke the names of each, hoping this constant repetition might induce the child to speak. While Rani knew exactly what those objects were, she persisted in her silence. She will speak when she is ready, Pramesh maintained to his worried wife, and most days he believed this. His daughter must be the sort who would rather observe first and piece the story together in her head before participating in it herself.

  But perhaps Shobha was right, and he should have been coaching his daughter all along. He took the wooden horse from her and pointed first to its nose, then his own. “Now, little Queen of Flowers,” he said as he raised her hand to touch his face. “This is the nose, yes? Can you say it?” Rani smiled and reached for the horse. Pramesh tried again. “Eyes,” he said. He touched her hands to his closed lids. “Say eyes, little one.” Rani maintained her silence.

  Her smile waned and a small furrow deepened on her forehead. Pramesh handed over the horse, but she no longer wanted it. She pushed the toy to the floor and squirmed, reaching to her back, trying to grab at something between her shoulder blades. He pulled back the top of her dress, and a mosquito wafted up from that dark pocket and settled in her hair. All that time, as she sat next to him, the insect had bitten her in several places and left behind red welts, each raised like a small angry island on the girl’s skin.

  The sight of the insect in his daughter’s hair, engorged on her blood, made him act without thinking. He snatched the mosquito from Rani’s head, ignoring the girl’s cry as he took some hairs with it, and slapped it against the green concrete wall. When his hand came away, the bug was a mere outline of body and legs, like an aborted sketch. Rani’s blood, expelled from the mosquito during its violent demise, was on Pramesh’s hand, a crimson blotch in the center of his palm.

  10

  That night, two hours after midnight, the pots in the washroom of Shankarbhavan rattled and seized. Mohan, bleary-eyed and drowsy, stamped to the back of the building and shouted an admonition: “Ey, quiet! Shut up, you! There are people trying to sleep and die in this place! Go, wander somewhere else!”

  The newer guests, who had come with their dying just that day, stood in the shelter of their doorways, blinking like children blinded by fireworks. The rest wedged blankets and spare cloth beneath their doors in a hopeless attempt to drown out the sound.

  Dev sat on a blanket in front of the priests’ quarters and read aloud from the book before him. He raised his voice and redoubled his chanting efforts just as Mohan endeavored to calm the guests between his shouts into the washroom. “It is nothing, just some monkey that likes to play in the pots, nah?”

  This excuse had sufficed for the past two evenings, but the merchant from No. 2 strode forth, his bald head glinting as he crossed the courtyard, and confronted the assistant. “We are supposed to be in a house of good energy,” he said. “How can my mother concentrate on Rama with such nonsense?”

  “Silence!” Mohan shouted out once more to the washroom before turning to the merchant and assuming his usual ingratiating manner. “Please, ji, what can we do? Only a monkey, you see—it must be climbing from the outside and jumping from the roof. He has some attraction to those water pots. Rama knows what entices him so.”

  “Hai Rama, unbelievable,” the merchant swore. “And you cannot throw out this monkey?”

  “Ah, but in the holy city even the animals are blessed—he must hear our priests chanting every night, and that is why he returns! A creature listening to the holy word.… It would be disastrous to expel such an animal.”

  “Nonsense,” the merchant said. “If you refuse to, I will see to it.”

  As he spoke the racket continued. The teacher’s family in No. 9 stood in the doorway and whispered to each other. Across the courtyard, a young man from No. 6 stood with his nephew asleep on one shoulder, his toddler niece leaning against one of his legs and sucking her fingers as she peered into the dark. Illuminated by a flickering kerosene lantern, Mohan yawned, and stifling that yawn, bit his tongue and tainted his shouts with a temporary but debilitating lisp.

  The irate merchant marched to the washroom. He had arrived with his brother and their wives that afternoon, accompanying his ailing mother, and was in a foul temper. His brother had squandered ten rupees at the market to buy mustard oil that his wife massaged into the moaning old woman’s legs, a frivolous purchase if their mother died, as expected, in the next day or so.

  He stopped at the doorway and peered in, but the light from Mohan’s lantern did not reach into the damp recesses of this corner of the building. As the merchant clapped his palms together and stamped his feet, he squinted his eyes, looking for the monkey that would surely leap from the pots and reveal itself. No animal appeared, and the pots continued to jump and shiver. “Come now,” the man bawled, adding his own voice to the din. “Beat it! Go sit at some temple instead!”

  The sight of this man who stamped and clapped and yelled out suddenly brought to Mohan’s mind the tales he’d heard of those infamous dancing girls at Dal-Mandi Chowk, and he stifled a snigger, biting his tongue again, as his imagination dressed the angry merchant in a shimmering turquoise blouse and sari, a twisted strand of jasmine flowers crowning the balding head.

  “Is this funny?” the merchant snarled. “You should be yanking the beast out by the tail and throwing it out the window!” Mohan composed himself even as he refused, so stubborn in his belief that the animal was holy that he forgot that the monkey’s existence was a story he’d invented to mask what was really going on at Shankarbhavan.

  In their bickering, the men didn’t notice Pramesh walking with determination across the courtyard to the washroom. At his approach the pots became more frantic, punctuated shrieks and prolonged wails of brass scraping and clattering against the wall as the vessels rolled across the concrete. The manager stopped at the doorway and said the thing. And the pots stilled.

  Dev’s straining voice thundered in the courtyard, and a baby, previously undisturbed by one set of loud noises, bawled in anguish at the sound of another.

  “Wher
e did the beast go?” the merchant shouted. “The monkey—where is it?”

  “What does it matter?” Mohan said. “It is gone, yes? Come now, back to bed, ji. The night still has many hours to it.”

  Weariness overcame curiosity, and the guests who had ventured out pulled blankets and shawls closer around their bodies and packed themselves into their rooms. Even the merchant, who had grabbed Mohan’s lantern and shoved past Pramesh to investigate the washroom on his own only to find it empty and so damp that sneezes took over his body, eventually accepted the call of sleep and stamped back to his room.

  “Pramesh-ji, do you need anything?” Mohan asked. The manager shook his head, and after shooing the remaining ogling guests back into their rooms, Mohan turned in, hoping to salvage some sleep in the hours left to the night.

  The next morning, Mohan woke with an idea, a solution so obvious that he lay in bed turning it over in his mind for flaws before feeling confident enough to tell Pramesh. He found the manager drinking chai with Dev. “The pots,” he said. “Pramesh-ji, they needn’t always stay in the washroom. Out in the air, out in the sun … there’s that shed in the alley—surely there is room there?”

  “Of course,” Pramesh said, looking startled. A small laugh escaped him. “Foolish of me, Mohan-bhai. Not to think of it myself.”

  Buoyed, Mohan refused help with the water pots, but he first dawdled about the bhavan, checking in on Sheetal, talking to the other guests. Proposing the idea to shift the vessels was one thing; acting upon it was another. He stood for a long time outside the washroom threshold, gazing at the things that, not so long ago, had seemed as alive as the young boy now kicking a stone around the courtyard. While mustering up his courage, he tried to push away the sinking feeling he’d had since first seeing Sagar’s body.

  That day, when it seemed everyone had been dying. Had he dreamt it? That man, walking away and rounding the corner, so similar to the manager. So alike to that dead body that, a day later, arrived at the bhavan, the manager wiping the limbs with a tenderness that made Mohan’s heart seize. Why hadn’t he been able to go to the gate? And his words—what exactly had he said to that guest acting as the go-between? And that guest—what message had he in turn delivered?

  He focused on the pots, picking one up with fingers that hesitated, as if the metal might bite him. But after that first one, which felt merely like metal, like a water pot, he gathered them up three or four at a time, until soon the washroom was empty and the pots sat in neat rows inside the alley shed, no more alive than the other rubbish occupying the musty space.

  ***

  “Where is Narinder?” Pramesh asked Dev once Mohan had gone to move the pots. The priest’s quarters had been empty that morning.

  “Out on an errand, he said,” Dev offered.

  Everyone knew that Narinder rarely went out on personal errands. Pramesh thought back to the look on that man’s face the first night, the features frozen in something that the manager suspected was terror. Pramesh had caught him in a moment as private as if he’d seen the man unawares in the middle of his morning evacuations. Still, a ghost was no uncommon thing. He would have thought that Narinder had seen plenty in his seven decades in the city.

  They busied themselves with the work of the day, with the folk who were still dying and the guests who still had questions. Glancing into the empty washroom, Pramesh felt the weight on his chest ease.

  When Narinder returned, his walk was as brisk as ever, his fingers busy on his prayer beads. He entered through the gates and immediately began circling the walkway as he always did. At the door of the washroom, he paused. He looked Pramesh’s way, seemed about to say something, and then continued.

  ***

  Sitting crosslegged on his bed that night, prayer beads in his hands as always, Narinder tried to drive his mind back into the familiar groove of meditation. But his fingers simply pushed the beads down the string, one after another, with as little intention as a child sliding beads back and forth on an abacus. Sleep would not come, and his eyes slid over the words of whatever book he opened.

  And then it happened. The location of the pots didn’t matter, certainly not to a thing like that. The sound was a low whine at first, and then it built, like a powerful wind trapped in the washroom, building to an echoing rush that made his hands shake. He was overcome with nausea, the uncontrollable shivering of his body, the feeling that his mind was open to a host of things he did not understand. In the airless room, the candle at his side flickered wildly. He wrapped his shawl tighter around himself and hunched inward.

  He heard Pramesh striding forward, his voice calling out to the same spirit for which Narinder had performed the Narayana bali. The quiet was immediate, and the manager walked past again, his footsteps slower this time.

  After the first night, the priest told himself it was simply a matter of the mind. Let the mind run you ragged, or grab those reins in your own firm grip, control it, bring it to focus in the direction you willed. He tried to think of the great God, but recalled nothing. The words were gone from his memory.

  All those years of prayer: where was his focus now?

  11

  The need for an exorcism was not unusual, on the level of finding out, say, that the paan-wallah at the end of the fruit bazaar, who was staying with his in-laws because of money troubles, had been scaling the walls from his upper-story bedroom window to meet his neighbor’s wife in secret each night. Everyone had a ghost or two living in their house or some side-alley shed. What everyone contested, often in hot arguments that drew crowds in the city’s lanes, was how to expel the ghost, whom to go to, and when to allow the presence to simply stay, since a little disturbance here and there could be tolerated if it meant a few rupees saved in the pocket.

  The morning after the fourth night, Narinder broke his silence to reject that last option. “It is our duty to free that soul,” he said, taking pains not to mention Sagar by name. “At some point it was diverted. It forgot where it was meant to go and instead chose to stay here. It is suffering, and it is making us suffer as well. So, we must remind it.”

  “Someone to exorcise it?” Pramesh asked, and when Narinder tilted his chin in agreement, he sat, thinking. “Who can we trust?”

  “I have a man in mind,” Narinder said. “He does not usually do these things, not anymore. But I spoke with him yesterday. And he—Govind-bhai—was willing to come and see for himself, and to try, if he could.”

  So that was who he’d gone to see. Watching the priest hold his glass with steady hands, lift it up to his mouth and blow on the liquid while never breaking his gaze, Pramesh wondered if perhaps he’d dreamed seeing Narinder frozen that first night. And then he wished, not for the first time, that he’d also dreamed the rest of it.

  The white-haired man who arrived at the gate was short, his head barely reaching Pramesh’s shoulder, and he carried with him only a newspaper packet and a peacock feather. Any illusion that the packet held the tools of his trade evaporated when, sitting in Pramesh’s office, he unwrapped it and pulled out fingerfuls of fried mung dal, munching away while Narinder detailed the problem in the washroom.

  Pramesh suppressed the impulse to ask the man to put the packet away, or at least keep it hidden from the guests. “Narinder-ji mentioned you no longer attend to such matters,” he said, gesturing toward his head priest, “so we are grateful that you came.”

  “Old friends,” Govind said. Craving satisfied at last, he rolled the top of the newspaper cone and set it on Pramesh’s desk. “But it’s true, I stopped doing this work years ago.”

  “Not enough money?” Pramesh ventured.

  “Too much! Once people find out you have the talent, they don’t stop coming. Then you start to see ghosts everywhere, Manager-bhai. And you realize that sometimes the problem is not the ghost, but the person wanting to exorcise it. There is no solution yet for moving people to another place if
they will not go. I wanted a simpler life.”

  “Do you think this will be easy? Removing this ghost?”

  “Let me see it first. In the washroom, you said?”

  They led him to the space, where the water pots sat in neat rows once again, returned there by Mohan after moving them had proved useless. Govind walked around the space, murmuring mantras and circling the room several times in a way that reminded Pramesh of Narinder walking the perimeter of the bhavan with his prayer beads. At times he stroked or tapped the pots with the peacock feather, or he brushed the walls and the corners of the washroom. “Two hours past midnight, you said?” the man asked after his final round, when he came to a stop a few steps from the pots and stood contemplating the quiet brass.

  “Yes. At least, that is how it was the last four nights.”

  “There is something here,” Govind said. “But I’d like to see what it does. Strange—it almost feels as if there are multiple ghosts. It happens, you know. Sometimes there are three or four, and they all have different wants.”

  “Wants?”

  “Oh yes. The thing it wanted before it died. You have to satisfy that want, somehow. It’s easier that way.”

  “But you can always banish it regardless?” Narinder asked. It was an odd feeling, Pramesh thought, to hear his head priest ask a question rather than provide the answer.

  “If you wish, but better to wait,” Govind demurred. “I prefer to see what it does.”

  At the gate, Govind took his leave, promising to return in the evening. He looked back into the courtyard as he shoved his feet into his sandals. “A place like this, Manager-bhai—it surprises me that you haven’t needed me before.”

  “The people who come here don’t intend to linger,” Pramesh said quietly. “If they show up at our gate, it is because they are ready.”

  “Perhaps,” Govind said. “Or perhaps you were lucky, and the spirits all stayed quiet until this latest one showed up. We’ll see.” He raised his hand in farewell and went on his way.