The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  It had been so long since she’d teased him like this. She didn’t ask about the rites, but he felt her watching him closely. He stayed with her until she’d made the afternoon chai. “Gone,” he said, handing her his drained glass. Her hands paused over her sewing and then picked up again. The relief on her face was like a cool breeze on his.

  That evening, he blinked in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp as Shobha puttered about, hair loose in a dark waterfall down her back. Bangles and anklets jingling, she eventually settled on the bed next to him, sitting cross-legged, and uncapped a bottle of coconut oil. She looked more like a schoolgirl than his wife of ten years, mother of their child, with a lightness he always felt grateful for. He wondered if Rani would grow up to look like Shobha’s copy or if she would assume a face that reminded him of his mother. He had so few reminders of her.

  “I wonder what your father would think of me now,” he said. Pramesh had assisted that meticulous manager of Shankarbhavan for almost two years, until his own good death made Pramesh his successor. The most scandalous thing that happened in that time had been the family who brought not an elder or some wizened loved one who was dying, but a beloved dog, the family matriarch insisting upon a good death for the faithful beast.

  “He would think the same thing he always thought,” Shobha said, pouring a small amount of oil into one palm and massaging it into her scalp. Her dark hair glinted red-orange where it caught the light as she moved. Pramesh breathed in that warm familiar scent of coconut. “That there are far more foolish men out there than you, and far less patient.”

  “He never had a ghost in here. He never had this kind of trouble.”

  “Not here, he didn’t. But in the rooms where we lived, he and I and my mother, plenty of things happened in that building. There was a story at least once a week.” She poured more oil into her palm, rubbing it between her hands, and smiled. “Once my mother thought that we had something happening. She said she could hear a knocking sound on the window shutter every evening. It would get louder and louder and louder, but whenever she opened the shutter, nothing was there. She said she had the worst feeling each time; she wouldn’t let me leave for school without circling me with black salt and chili to pull off the evil eye. She was begging my father to call someone to get rid of it. Then, my father heard the sound when he happened to be standing by the window. Five quick knocks; he pushed back the shutter, reached his hand out, and grabbed it. What do you think? A long wooden staff, and then a yell from our upstairs neighbor! She’d been knocking on the shutter all this time, trying to get my mother’s attention so she could share the latest gossip she’d heard in the market.”

  Pramesh let out a soft laugh. It was not often that his wife told these stories. She, whom Pramesh had watched sitting by her father years before with such a glow in her face that, once married, he’d been filled with a brief irrational jealousy, now spoke of her parents rarely. She never indulged in reminiscence unless it illuminated some other point. Pramesh wished he could be the same way. To her, and to any other Banarasi, the end really was The End.

  His wife’s voice, her soft outline in the lamplight, the smell of the oil combined with the smell of her, enveloped him and dulled those other feelings. His eyelids drooped.

  “But that was just one thing. There really was a ghost, a man possessed living two floors down from us.” She continued the new tale, her words dropping in and out of Pramesh’s ears. Slowly, he slipped into sleep, but not before he heard his wife cap the bottle and say, “Who would he trust in those days, if not you?”

  Standing in an empty guest room, Pramesh turned, confused. Where was the family that was supposed to be here? Their things were gone, the bed stripped and pushed against the wall. The floor was clean, with not a grain of rice nor speck of dust to betray who had stayed there. The window shutters were stuck—he’d have to speak to Mohan about that. He turned in a slow circle, painted green walls meeting him as he spun. The signs on the back of the door were there, but the script was blurred—the rules and instructions illegible. He tried the handle, surprised that the door was shut. When he pulled it open, he saw the same green walls, the same bed, the same blocked window. Behind him was the space he had just been in; before him was one exactly like it. He frowned. Again he turned in a slow circle, looked at the floor, found it so clean that no mouse or insect met his gaze. He tried the door again, green walls again, an empty room, an empty bed, clean floors, no sound. Another room, and now he was angry. Where was everyone? He was alone in the building; no one would help him. He wrenched open yet another door and found only green walls, an empty room, an empty bed, clean floors, no—

  He woke, sweating. There was something urgent he needed to remember, some task he needed to complete right away. But what? The dream slipped faster than a kite string sliding through his fingers on a blustery day, and Shobha was shaking him.

  “Downstairs,” she said, but he could barely hear her voice. A wave of sound overwhelmed him. Metal on metal, just as furious despite the pains Govind had taken during the day. Heart pounding, Pramesh forced himself out of bed and down the stairs. Still half asleep and in the grip of his dream, a question formed in his mind: how was it that Sagar, who had never wanted the city in the way Pramesh wanted it, who had laughed at Pramesh’s boyhood dreams, was now the one unwilling to leave?

  13

  They didn’t need to fetch Govind; he was waiting at the gate early that morning, already sweating from the heat, eyebrows raised in question when Mohan turned the key in the stubborn lock. He’d brought a small cloth sack, and he pulled out a chai glass when Shobha served him, insisting she let him drink out of his own vessel.

  Sipping at the hot liquid, he popped the occasional peanut from the cone he’d brought, the manager, assistant, and head priest all sitting in a somber circle. “I know I had him,” he said finally, startling them all in their silence. “And I know I released him on the ghat. They don’t usually come back so quickly.” He frowned. He didn’t seem to expect a reply, and they offered none. “Still I wonder if there is more than one in there,” he mused. “Perhaps I only got one of them, and the rest were hiding. But then I would have felt them.…”

  As much as Pramesh wanted to believe this, that another ghost was to blame and the disturbance wasn’t solely the fault of Sagar—or his own inability to keep from looking back, to detach—he could not, and neither, it seemed, did Narinder.

  “Even if there were, what you did yesterday should have banished at least one of them. And yet last night was no different from the other nights—no weaker, no less vocal.”

  “If anything, it felt worse,” Mohan muttered.

  Govind considered this. He made his way through a handful of peanuts before another thought occurred to him. “Tell me: Did he have any land?”

  Pramesh looked up, frowning. “He did. He lived in our childhood home, and he farmed the fields left to him.”

  “And now it is yours?”

  A memory slipped from a door in his mind he had tried to keep shut: Sagar kneeling close to the ground and scooping up a palmful of dirt, smelling it and sifting it through his fingers, appraising the green stretching before him, his brow furrowed in ruts, just like the ones he would plow into the fields that planting season. The memory made the manager ache. That earth—Sagar had loved it so. Pramesh had never thought of the land as his, ever.

  “I ask because oftentimes the reason the ghost will not budge is because it has been treated unfairly in the life it just exited. Usually in some matter involving property. The land is yours now, isn’t it?”

  “They can have it,” Pramesh said. “His in-laws, whoever they may be, and his wife. I will sign it over to them today.” Sagar was gone, and if Pramesh could not have his cousin back, he had no desire for anything connected to the man.

  He sat down at his desk, writing out the words that unequivocally severed him from any ownersh
ip of the land, and then he walked to the closest government office to have the letter witnessed and stamped. The letter was with the post office in a matter of hours.

  “Is that it?” Mohan asked once the manager returned. “Will it know that we did as asked?”

  Govind, still snacking on peanuts while sitting cross-legged on the walkway, poured handfuls into the palms of any children whose parents allowed them to come near him, Dev and Loknath frowning. “Better to wait for the reply,” he said. “But I believe you will see the end of your problem, once they receive word. These things seem extraordinary, but they always come down to the same things, the same desires. The problems of the last life never end, not for some souls.” He twisted the top of the paper cone, about to hand it to the nearest child, but withdrew his hand when the mother stalked over and grabbed her son by the ear, dragging him away.

  “When you get the letter, fetch me, and we will formally present it to the ghost,” Govind said. “So it knows we dealt with it fairly. And one last thing. You will still have to bear with it for some days more, Manager-bhai. Take my advice—ignore it. Don’t respond to it. Let it continue, and soon enough it will stop on its own.”

  “But the guests….” What was he supposed to tell his guests with their dying, the ones who were preparing to leave this world and certainly didn’t want a reminder of what might happen to them after they passed, Kashi or no?

  “The guests will come and go, Manager-bhai. They are important, yes—but more important is allowing this thing in your bhavan to run its course.” He narrowed his eyes at Pramesh as he said this, and the manager forced himself to shake his head slowly in agreement. “Narinder knows where to find me, Manager-bhai,” Govind said in parting, and then he was out the gate.

  But the manager was unable to hold to Govind’s advice. Each night the pots rang out, rattling and seizing with enraged energy until they skipped and rolled across the wet concrete floor, and Pramesh gritted his teeth, strode to the washroom as quickly as he could, and said the only incantation that could silence it. On the second night after he’d sent the letter, he decided to make himself ready outside the door to quiet the ghost immediately. But by the fifth night, Bhaiya no longer worked with the same swiftness, and the pots continued to rage, the sound like a massive slithering creature sliding into his ears, squeezing him from the inside. By the ninth night, Pramesh stopped waiting by the washroom and slept in the kitchen—or tried to. Gazing at the small shrine before which Shobha lit an oil wick and incense each morning calmed him, taking away some of the sick cold, the lightning stabs of fear.

  “Perhaps,” Mohan ventured at one point after he’d followed a family halfway to the train station, trying to convince them to stay with the promise that the disturbance was sure to cease in just a few days, “You could speak to it. Tell it you have given it what it wanted.”

  So Pramesh tried that as well. On the twelfth night, he stepped into the washroom, holding back the urge to retch, feeling as if his skin were being turned inside out, and tried to explain. “I never wanted the land!” he yelled, but his voice crumbled in the face of the thunderous clamor of the pots. He didn’t try again. In the deepest part of himself, he felt his explanation was wrong, simply because Sagar never would have asked it from him. Sagar knew he had no desire for the land—it had never been a secret that one of them wanted to leave, the other to stay.

  ***

  The day came when Pramesh realized that an entire month had passed since he’d crouched over Sagar’s body in that filthy jail cell. A darkness settled on him like a hand pressing on his shoulder. When Shobha handed him his chai he ignored her, unable to shake his mood. When he felt her watchful eyes and saw the wrinkle of worry on her forehead, he was further annoyed. He left the kitchen without his usual morning meal, without the calming minutes he spent with his wife and child and assistant, the head priest joining them, catching each other up on the status of each family and planning for the day’s tasks. He didn’t want to be surrounded by those he was sure judged him, his priest frozen at the presence of a ghost, his assistant unable to do anything but scurry about like a mother hen, clucking at the guests that there was nothing wrong, nothing to fear as Sagar’s ghost made itself heard.

  Walking the courtyard, he took a deep breath. Such nonsense, to resent those people who only wanted to help him. His disgust for himself rose from his stomach to his chest, the dark hand pushed him down harder, as if to dig his feet into the earth, and he walked to his office like a man exiled.

  “Manager-ji? A question, ji?”

  Pramesh stopped, servant to his duty, and tried to assume the look of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

  “That thing last night, ji—what is it? Is it always here? My mother was terrified and no longer desires to stay here, but father’s wish was to die in this place. What do we do? Is there some other place we can go?”

  But where do I go? Where can my family and I escape to? Horrified at his own thoughts, Pramesh squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. The man still looked at him expectantly.

  “Rakesh-bhai, come with me—how is your father? Come, let us go see him together and I will explain everything.” Mohan swept up behind Pramesh, taking the guest in hand, his calm confidence like a magnet that pulled the guest after him. And though the manager felt grateful, in the next instant the same darkness twisted that gratitude into self-loathing. He had brought this upon the bhavan. What right did he have to wish to leave? And why couldn’t he master himself in the way that Mohan could and continue with his duty no matter how many guests, or ghosts, crowded the bhavan?

  In his office, he stared out the window. Why had Sagar, who’d never expressed interest in leaving the land, come to the city? What was Sagar’s final thought—that crucial last notion to cross the mind at the moment of passing? He pictured Sagar in the boat, bottle at his side. Lifting the bottle to his lips, emptying it. A shiver of revulsion passed through Pramesh, followed by deep pity. Once, he could predict the word about to leap off Sagar’s tongue a second before his cousin said it. But that was so long ago, and he didn’t know the person Sagar had become since they parted the final time.

  The door cracked open, and his wife peeked in. Pramesh pretended to be busy, shuffling his papers and reorienting his vacant stare into a focused gaze.

  “Are you going out to the post office today? Sheetal was willing to go, if you’d rather stay in.” Pramesh glanced out the window, as if he was expecting the weather to have a say in his decision. “Let the boy go,” his wife said. “He never goes anywhere; always he’s with his father. It would be good for him to see something besides these four walls. To think about himself for a change.”

  And for you to stop thinking about yourself. The words were unspoken, but her eyes made her thoughts clear. She shut the door without waiting for his reply. A laugh burst out of the manager. It struck him that her words were exactly like what Sagar might have said to him, if he were here. He looked out the window again. Shobha was right. The rains were days late in coming, and the air would heat up as the hours went by. A glass of sugar cane juice would do the boy good. The post office was near a fruit and juice stall; Mohan would know where. Pramesh went to find his assistant, closing the office door and leaving the dark pressure behind him.

  ***

  Mohan’s stomach grumbled. He was struck with a sudden craving for the puffed rice Govind had been snacking on a few days ago. The midday meal was still some hours away. Already the heat of the day made the air tight. Moist dark circles appeared beneath his arms and at his lower back and chest. He wanted a snack, and he wanted a moment of quiet after the tales he’d had to spin for the guests, each wanting their own personal explanation of what exactly was waking them up in the night. He had tried to tell the truth as closely as he could. “Oh, it’s just a soul passing on its way. It will be gone soon.”

  But that wasn’t enough, and a skeptical look or incr
edulous silence from one of the guests would send him scrambling to fill in the gaps with invented details. “From the neighbors—one spirit too many in their house, and somehow it’s come over here. Not to worry; it will realize we don’t have what it needs and get going.” With the latest guest, Mohan had blurted out, “A cat. Likely it jumped in from the roof and made a racket. It’s been going around the rooftops, stealing food where it can.”

  None of this was a lie if it was in service to the bhavan and hurt no one. He finished tightening the ropes on the bed in No. 10, went over the lists on the back of the door with the two sons in No. 4, who wanted to be prepared to take their mother to the ghats immediately once she passed, and then wandered outside the gates to satisfy his stomach’s desires. Perhaps he’d meet Sheetal on the way, join him for a glass of sugar cane juice and walk back with the youth.

  Somehow the air was more stifling outside the gates. Up at her window, Mrs. Chalwah looked damp with sweat even from Mohan’s vantage point. By the time he’d come to the end of the street where the lane split in three directions, Mohan felt winded. He stopped in the shade of a building and breathed heavily, the hot air of his exhalations making him hotter still. Looking back, he could see the bhavan gate and above it, Mrs. Chalwah, still watching him. He looked around and felt a chill. He now stood just where that man had been when he saw him round a corner and disappear.

  No, he shouldn’t think of him as that man. The cousin. Pramesh-ji’s twin, his blood. Mohan had suspected it, and perhaps he’d been slower to recognize the truth than a sharper man would have been. But he knew for sure when he heard the manager tell Govind the word he used to silence the ghost in the washroom. Mohan had felt his stomach seize with sick horror as the realization sunk in. The last thing Pramesh’s cousin had wanted before he died was to gain entrance to the bhavan. And Mohan had denied him that, so now the man’s ghost lingered here, in the place he couldn’t access while he was still flesh and blood.