The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  “They are all gossips,” Mrs. Mistry said when Shobha told her about the latest incident, and she waved her hands as if to banish the stories.

  “Words worse than nonsense,” Shobha agreed.

  The older woman looked reflective as she stirred her chai. “But some say there is always a seed of truth in the ugliest lie. She has seen all the doctors?” Shobha felt her heart skip. They had never spoken of Rani so openly, and talking of the problem with someone other than her husband made it more real. She found she could say nothing. She merely wagged her chin and ran her finger round and round the rim of her glass. “Do not worry,” Mrs. Mistry said as she took the glass from Shobha and refilled it. “The child is smarter than all of them; she simply hasn’t spoken because she has not yet found something worthwhile to say. It is a lesson many others could learn from. She will talk when she is ready. Rama will see to it.” Shobha attempted a smile and then raised the steaming glass to hide her trembling lips. “You keep too much to yourself,” Mrs. Mistry said softly.

  Shobha blushed. “Only what needs to be kept.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Mistry replied. “As we all do. It is part of the responsibility of the woman of the house, no matter how young.”

  “Weren’t you young when you married?” Shobha said.

  “I was, but I was not the woman of the house. I had my mother-in-law, and his sisters and aunts. I was the last on the list, with plenty of elders to advise and manage and see when a thing might go wrong. But you, who do you have to rely on?”

  “Myself,” Shobha said.

  “Wrong. I am here.” Mrs. Mistry grasped the younger woman’s hand and pressed her fingers. “Have you forgotten?”

  Wetness sprang into Shobha’s eyes. No, she had not forgotten. She worked to compose her voice. “You already have so much to do. I could not ask for more when you have already done so much.”

  “And yet I find I can fit in one more thing,” the older woman smiled. “The heart can always expand. It has an infinite number of rooms. You cannot doubt that.”

  Shobha thought about her own heart. The rooms were few but large, some more frequently visited than others. An airy spacious room for Pramesh, another for Rani, another slightly smaller room in the upper stories, the door shut and rarely opened, for her mother and father. Opening that door brought back the hollow pain of loss that she knew she should have long ago relinquished, but sometimes, when she found herself in the room, drawn by a smell or sound or thought, she allowed herself to enjoy the warmth of a memory of laughter, a smile, a perfect moment with one of her parents.

  There was another room, one that always remained locked. She imagined it as a dark and cramped space, hot and airless one moment, cold and damp the next. Though empty, the room ached with all that should have been there. Have you forgotten? She would never forget. Shobha remembered gasping aloud in pain, alone save for Mrs. Mistry, who had responded to Pramesh’s desperate summons when the midwife could not be found. The feeling of not being ready, of this being wrong, all so wrong, of that child slipping out of her in tandem with her cries and the sudden conviction that if only she had held fast to her pain, then her body would have held fast to the infant within rather than delivering it prematurely into her neighbor’s trembling hands.

  “Let me hold it,” she’d pleaded when it was over, her eyes glued to the wet bloody bundle that Mrs. Mistry held wrapped in a bit of torn cloth. One moment she had been with child; the next, she was empty, with nothing to show that she had ever had a full womb to begin with. She wanted to feel in her arms that weight she’d carried for weeks. “Let me see.”

  “Quiet, now,” Mrs. Mistry said as she wiped Shobha’s drenched brow with one hand while the other held the bundle at a tantalizing distance just beyond the mother’s reach. “You had me so frightened, and the midwife is never here when one needs her! Who knows what could be more important than this.…”

  Shobha asked again, her pleas becoming desperate, her weak hands curling in the air toward the bundle.

  “Really,” Mrs. Mistry tsked in a tone that belied the worry wrinkling her forehead. “There is nothing to see. What could be gained from it? Come, close your eyes, get some rest and then I will return and get you cleaned.”

  “Maasi,” Shobha begged as tears choked her voice. “You must—please! How else can I understand?” That arrow of a question found a gap in Mrs. Mistry’s armor. Shobha was not the only woman to have lost a baby, nor the only one to be refused her request to see, to touch, to hold, to comprehend. At last, she handed Shobha the bundle. And then she went downstairs to tell a distraught Pramesh that he would need to call for rites for only one body and not two, as they had all feared.

  The memory never left Shobha. For months she would feel as if she were holding on to her child. She felt the heft in her arms, curved her body to accommodate the phantom baby when she slept. Her breasts wept with real milk when she heard its imagined cries. Each time she looked down at her empty arms or woke from a dream and felt around the bed, the loss enveloped her anew.

  That baby she’d brought into the world not yet fully formed, a child in pieces, haunted her dreams until Rani came. Here was a whole child: ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes, a nose and mouth in proper position, a full head of hair. She brought that girl forth in agonizing self-imposed silence, and only after Rani was safely in her arms did Shobha let loose a breath she felt she’d been holding her whole life. No matter that the baby rarely cried; she was a girl formed perfectly. Who cared what gossips might say? Why attach importance to a single deficit when Shobha was thankful every day that she did not have a second room, equally dark and silent, carving a hole in her heart?

  Her neighbor’s heart, Shobha thought, was just the same size, yet it had more rooms than the bhavan, enough space to hold her husband and children and grandchildren, her neighbors and friends, any person she’d done a good turn for. Shobha wondered, was it crowded for those who roamed the halls and channels of Mrs. Mistry’s love? “Maybe some hearts have only room for a few,” Shobha reflected. “Maybe some hearts are huts and others are palaces.”

  “Maybe,” Mrs. Mistry assented. Shobha got up to leave, slipped on her sandals where she’d left them on the veranda, her neighbor following behind. Then she touched Shobha’s shoulder. “Maybe some hearts are small. Maybe they are all the same size. Regardless: the rooms are there.”

  18

  “Did you ever look at the door upstairs? It won’t lock anymore,” Shobha said as she handed Pramesh his morning chai.

  He winced. Of course, he had forgotten. “You have to angle the key to one side,” he said.

  “I did that,” Shobha said, irritated. “It’s jammed even more.”

  Mohan bustled into the kitchen and offered up Sheetal’s services. “That boy can fix anything.”

  But the key plate proved beyond even Sheetal’s expertise. “Rusted through,” he declared with regret. He removed the plate and held it out to Pramesh, who admitted to his wife that she had been right. Declining Sheetal’s offer of further assistance, he set out to fetch a replacement.

  Walking cleared his head. He came upon the home of Kishore the ghaatiyaa, who stood outside with his ornate walking stick waiting for his young grandson to put on his sandals. As if sensing his presence, the river-side priest looked in the manager’s direction.

  Long ago, on the day Pramesh arrived in the city, meaning to go to the university, this priest of the ghats had instead secured his position at the bhavan. In the first hour he’d spent stumbling about the lanes, finally ending at the ghats, Pramesh forgot all about the further pursuit of his studies. He was dazzled by the life he saw bursting from everywhere, outside shops, on verandas set high off the ground, people talking and laughing and arguing and sulking, from the barber waving his foamy brush around as he railed against his in-laws, to the uniformed schoolchildren skipping arm in arm past him, sweet voices rising in a cr
ude song, to the housewives easing baskets strung on rope down out of upper-story windows to the vegetable sellers below for a knob of ginger to finish off the evening meal.

  This was all so different from the endless fields and siloed family groups he knew. But it was more than just the constant hum that drew him. Walking through thin passageways that dumped him into larger lanes, he came upon lingas festooned with garlands set into alcoves, humble home temples anointed with rice and sindoor behind barred gates, holy eyes staring back at him no matter where he stumbled. He saw temples much larger and grander than anything in his village, bells ringing out at random intervals as monkeys scaled the roofs and jumped on the brass. Holy men were everywhere, popping out of dark corners or sitting in a tidy row down one lane, wearing identical orange robes, grizzled hair and beards the same iron shade of grey, all speaking a constant refrain of mantras that suffused the air and surrounded him wherever he walked.

  The air here felt different, a crackle in the atmosphere that sent tingles across his skin. A feeling that there was more to life than simply living. He remembered something, and he flagged down the next man he saw. “Bhai—Manikarnika ghat?”

  He walked and walked until he arrived at the cremation ghat, pyres burning and filling the air with smoke and a thick stench, mourners and priests and Doms milling about. He wandered, got turned around, asked for directions again, until he found it. The place where Vishnu had stood in the most severe meditation for 500,000 years, a slab of marble imprinted with footsteps marking the spot where the God’s austerity resulted in the birth of the universe. Just as his mother had described. If only Sagar could be here with him! Even he would find it hard to laugh in such a spot.

  He stared until the heavy air made breathing difficult, and then he walked in a daze to another ghat, where he stopped to rest. The sun was going down, and he realized he needed a place to stay. So he asked the next man he saw—a river priest.

  “Durga Hostel is not far from here,” the ghaatiyaa said, looking Pramesh up and down. “Let me take you there.” So Pramesh had followed, and as they walked, the ghaatiyaa asked him questions about his age, his name, his purpose in the city. Pramesh answered freely, and when they arrived at the guest house, the ghaatiyaa turned to leave, then turned back. “The university, you said. Well, there are universities everywhere.”

  “I suppose,” Pramesh said, unable to concentrate, eager to be alone so he could think about all he’d seen that day.

  “There is only one Kashi, though.” He smiled. “You look like you have good bones. Come back to see me at the ghat tomorrow, if you wish.”

  In the morning, Pramesh went to Kishore’s ghat to bathe, and then watched him work, more people passing him on trips up and down the stairs in a single day than he’d seen in an entire lifetime. Some of them stopped to talk to him; others continued on their business. The priest asked him to come back again the next day, and the day after, thoughts of attending university fading from Pramesh’s mind amid the overwhelming clamor of the city. After the sixth morning, the ghaatiyaa at last pronounced, “I have a place for you.”

  “You are very young,” Shobha’s father, Dharam, had said to him on his first day at the bhavan. “Not easy, for the young to be around the dead day after day.”

  Pramesh couldn’t disagree. He missed the bustle of the ghats, the chatter enveloping him from all sides, the movement and life. But time passed, and he came to enjoy helping the families, listening to their questions, listening more intently to the old manager’s answers. It was a life so different from how he’d grown up, alone in the house with the Elders and Bua, only Sagar for companionship. How Sagar would have hated it! But here, Pramesh had found something that made sense to him. At night, he sometimes wandered out to the courtyard on the pretense of doing another round of the rooms to soak in the quiet, the black night pouring in, knowing that all around him, souls would soon slip out of their bodies as easily as he slipped out of one shirt and changed into another each morning.

  “You lost someone when you were very young,” the manager said to him a few months into his tenure. Pramesh looked up, surprised. “It’s why this place suits you. You get to see the ending you missed.”

  Perhaps that was it. He’d had a mother, and an aunt who was like a second mother, and then he’d blinked, opened his eyes, and they were gone. With them, death had been a disappearance, not a state of change.

  But at the bhavan, the transformation fascinated him. He was comforted by the rituals around the family preparing the body, carrying it to the ghat, then the burning pyre. A body—a life—didn’t just vanish. It transformed into something, was broken down into ash, while the soul went somewhere. Daily, the bhavan offered proof of this.

  He visited Kishore’s ghat each morning to bathe and pass along news of his progress, thinking—foolishly, he later realized—that the ghaatiyaa took interest in him, perhaps even as a father might. But soon Kishore’s manner went from familiar to brusque.

  “There was a family of leatherworkers who came to you yesterday, wasn’t there?” the ghaatiyaa said one day.

  “Yes,” Pramesh replied.

  The ghaatiyaa sucked his teeth, eyes on the steps below. “You didn’t mention it. These are things you should tell me—who comes, who goes. How is the father, the dying man?”

  “No better or worse than the others,” Pramesh said, disconcerted. “What—”

  “When he passes, come tell me immediately.”

  Back at the bhavan, Pramesh observed that family, wondering why the ghaatiyaa was so interested in them. They kept to themselves, the daughters massaging their father’s feet, the sons praying, none of them saying much to the other families or to the bhavan staff. Late that night, the man passed, and the women kept vigil, touching the body to keep ghosts from occupying that shell, until morning when they quickly washed and prepared it and the sons carried it away. They were all gone before it was time for the midday meal. Pramesh stayed where he was. What he observed was a family linked to each other and to the mission of seeing their father through to a good death. It wasn’t his business to report their doings to anyone.

  Still, he stopped at the ghat the next day, hoping the ghaatiyaa had forgotten. Kishore hadn’t. “The old man died, I heard. The leatherworker.”

  Pramesh gazed at the river, worrying a loose button on his shirt cuff. “He did.”

  “And? Gone?”

  “He died a good death. His sons burned him. They left yesterday.” He felt the ghaatiyaa staring at him. Pramesh continued to sit, keeping his eyes resolutely ahead, feeling a resolve harden within him. He faced the ghaatiyaa and said, “What is it you wanted with them?”

  Kishore held his gaze, then turned away and began berating a man below for leaving his things for too long. “Are you intending to be down there all day?” He said nothing else to Pramesh, not even raising his hand in farewell when he stood up to leave.

  After that, he began to visit Kishore less frequently—and soon, he stopped altogether. He took to visiting a different ghat to bathe in the morning. And when he did stumble upon Kishore in the streets, he kept his thoughts to himself, his lips pressed together in a neutral smile.

  Now the ghaatiyaa held his hand out, and when Pramesh tried to bypass him, pressing his palms together and saying “Rama-Rama, Kishore-ji,” Kishore stuck out his walking stick in the manager’s path.

  “Always so quick these days, Pramesh-bhai. Such a busy life you cannot say hello to old friends?”

  The manager pressed his palms together again. “It’s like that with death, Kishore-ji. All day they come, and from all places. But you know this—it’s because of you that I have such a busy life. How is your family?”

  Kishore grunted and pulled his shawl closer around him. In recent years, his reach across the city had become broader than ever; he was a magnet for every manner of folk, from businessmen needing the latest news on a c
ompetitor’s doings to the street sweepers and beggars who’d picked up their own crumbs of information they wished to sell. “Better to be busy than occupied with other things,” he said. “Other vices.”

  “Vices?”

  “I was surprised that the Doms gave you the wood. Of course I was glad—such a shock, losing your—cousin, was it? But to lose him in that way … and then imagine not being able to properly do the rites as well!”

  Pramesh spoke evenly. “I was also glad. The Doms did everything without question. I’m grateful to them. They’ve always dealt fairly with those who stay with us.”

  “Fair might be a matter of how you see it. But it all turned out well, as Rama willed.” Kishore dug his walking stick into the ground, turning it one way and another, as if to screw it into the dirt. “Still, one wonders. If they gave wood for a man like that.…”

  “Like what?” He should have stayed silent, given his salutations, and walked on, but Pramesh felt a perverse satisfaction at answering back. “What are they saying, Kishore-ji?”

  The man waggled his hand, his face noncommittal. “Oh, the usual gossip. I hear it all. Separating the truth from the chaff—it’s a difficult thing sometimes.”

  “But you manage.”

  “I do, I do. If it pleases Rama.” He glanced at the open door of his house, rapping his stick impatiently. “Where is that child?” He looked up to find Pramesh still there, suddenly in no hurry to leave. “What they say is that he was a good-for-nothing, your cousin. A common drunk, no better than Maharaj. That if the Doms gave wood for such a man, they may as well give the fire to any wretch who passes in some filthy place, doing Rama knows what.”

  “And what do you say, Kishore-ji?”

  A child emerged from the house at last, sandals slung on his dusty feet and with a shawl, a miniaturized version of the one his grandfather wore, draped around his shoulders. One end slipped off, and the fringe dragged in the dirt. He grasped Kishore’s outstretched pinkie and pulled on it. “That is something I am still separating for myself, Pramesh-bhai. You’ll excuse me now—yes, yes, we’ll go as fast as my legs can take me, don’t hurry an old man.”