The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  The manager watched them go, wondering if he should follow and convince the ghaatiyaa that it wasn’t true. But what was the point, when he himself had no idea what kind of man Sagar had become in the last ten years? Somber, taciturn, even servant to a well-filled bottle, as Bhut and apparently others had insinuated.

  “Manager-ji!” Thakorlal cried when he saw Pramesh. “Either I am about to suffer a scolding for my work, or you have a big job for me. Let me guess: the front bhavan gate, nah? So old, ji, and the joints so rusted. Surely, you must want it replaced?”

  “Not such a big job yet, ji.” Pramesh held out a rusted key plate. “Do you have a match for this?” The metal-man took the key plate and set about rummaging through the haphazard wooden boxes stacked about his shop, humming all the while. Pramesh stood off in a corner, breathing in the heavy smell of drink enshrouding the small dark space. The metal-man was known for another, far more lucrative, business: he was the city’s main purveyor of cheap homebrew, stuff concocted from insecticide or rotting fermented fruit. The smell repulsed the manager, and yet he continued to take deep gulps of air.

  “I may have another box upstairs—a moment, ji,” Thakorlal said, excusing himself.

  Bhut had said that the empty liquor bottle found in the boat must have been Sagar’s, that the man’s death was a drunken accident that would have left a sober man alive. This was the piece of his cousin’s story that pained Pramesh the most, because if Sagar had indeed turned to drink in the intervening years, the manager had willfully done the opposite. He insisted on running most errands at Thakorlal’s shop, simply to prove that he could be in the presence of such persuasive poison and still overcome the temptation.

  They are not like us, the Elders said of the two cousins. He could see them, his father and uncle sitting on identical rope beds, each with a bottle and a small glass at hand, goading and laughing at one another while the young cousins hid in their room and tried to remain quiet. Even from deep inside the house the boys could smell the Elders’ breath, rank and stale like the air in the metal shop. Pramesh felt the old fear return, a spiky ball inside his stomach. No, he was not like his father or his uncle, and he never would be. But Sagar? What of the life he’d led after Pramesh had left?

  He reached up to trace his right eyebrow. Thakorlal returned with another box, and as he set it on his work table, he jammed his thumb into the sharp corner of a key plate and cursed. The metal-man looked up as he stuck his thumb into his mouth, and his eyes flicked to Pramesh’s fingers kneading the skin on his forehead. “Headache?” he asked in a helpful tone. “Shall I get you something?”

  “It’s nothing,” Pramesh said.

  “A glass of water, at least? Chai?”

  “No, nothing—it’s just a habit of childhood. I hardly know I am doing it.”

  The metal-man turned back to his box. “Strange, the things we leave behind and the things we keep from when we were small.” He continued flicking through the box, humming to himself. “My mother says I used to sleep in the strangest way—one leg always pulled up to my chest, with my arms around it. Like a stork in a pond. And my wife says I still do it. Don’t ask me why, ji. All I care is that I’ve had a good night’s sleep.” He got another box and hefted it onto the table. “Is there a story with yours?” he asked, pointing his chin in the manager’s direction.

  Pramesh swallowed. “An accident,” he managed. “Something that happened long ago, with my cousin. I can hardly remember.”

  “Oh yes. Poor man. That was a terrible thing, his drowning.” So buoyant earlier, the metal-man turned back to his box, lips pursed, brow wrinkled. He flipped through the plates more slowly, looking up once or twice at the manager. Then his fingers stopped altogether. “Manager-j, forgive me,” the metal-man said. “But I believe I met him. Your cousin.” When Pramesh remained silent, Thakorlal continued. “Remarkable, how I missed the likeness between you two. But of course he was your blood. He even had the same style of walking as you, Manager-ji.”

  Pramesh attempted a neutral look even as his heart sank down, down, down. Those men who were servants to the glass somehow always knew to seek Thakorlal out, whether they hailed from the city or not. An image swam up before his eyes: Sagar, red-eyed, shuffling, limp curses dripping from his lips—but then the picture of the one man split into two, and the faces were those of the Elders. He tried to shut his ears as the metal-man went on about the ease he’d felt in talking with Sagar, his great sadness at hearing of the man’s passing, which he was quite sure was a good death, regardless of the drowning and what those other cityfolk said. Pramesh felt his head might burst, thick as it was with alcohol fumes, with Sagar pounding on his ears, his heart, his mind. At last, he put his hand up. “Thakorlal-ji, I really must be going. I have taken too much of your time.”

  The metal-man came to an abrupt stop, offended. He turned back to the boxes and made a show of flicking through the metal pieces, his careful attention from before vanished. “As you wish,” he said. “If I cannot find it in this box, I am afraid you will have to pay extra so I can send away for the correct piece.” Pramesh was conscious of having insulted him, but he did not know what else to do or say. As the manager stepped to the threshold, Thakorlal spoke again, his voice tight and clipped. “He was not here for the reason you are thinking, Manager-ji.”

  Pramesh stopped at the door. “The man is dead,” he said. “You needn’t lie for him.”

  “Your own belief changes nothing, ji. Why would I tell a falsehood?”

  “Why then was he here, of all places? What else could he possibly want from you?”

  If the metal-man was twice offended, he did not show it. He stacked the boxes in front of him and pushed them to one side. “A bottle,” he said. “An empty bottle. He was quite emphatic about that.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “Nothing more. His instructions were simple. He needed it to be unfilled, clean, and with a tight cap. He said he had some traveling to do, and he wanted to be sure it would not leak.” Thakorlal looked at Pramesh, clearly expecting him to comprehend. He pointed in the direction of the ghats, exasperated. “To carry the river, Manager-ji. Do you see?”

  Pramesh blinked. A bottle for a draught of the holy river, a container to safely hold and transport that sacred liquid. With such easy access to the river every day since he’d come to live in Kashi, the manager had forgotten what it was to live much farther away, to feel the need of those pilgrims who filled jugs and bottles with the river for when they returned home and required it for blessings, rituals, illness, or the removal of the evil eye.

  “Traveling, he said.… Where was he going?”

  Thakorlal shook his head. “He didn’t say. But he mentioned you and your hostel, Manager-ji. Again, I don’t know how I missed the likeness, but so many people come and go—he must have come from afar because he looked quite worn out, but when he spoke of you he looked quite different.”

  “Different how?” Pramesh asked. Curiosity, a sudden hunger, swelled within him. “What did he say?”

  A simple sing-song voice sounded outside the shop. Maharaj was approaching, his signature earthenware pot in hand, his need evident as he sang his plaintive tune. “Ah!” Thakorlal pulled a piece of metal out of the last box, as if by magic. “I found it!” He handed over the latch, and after paying him, the manager turned to leave, careful to avoid Maharaj as the man began to plead with Thakorlal for something, just a little something.

  Pramesh walked slowly until he came to a temple, and he sank to the stairs. As the great temple bells rang out behind him, a new picture of his cousin shimmered to life. He wanted to feel relieved, to believe that Sagar had not changed in that way, but he still could not summon a whole man from the new picture. Not like us, his father had said all those years ago. They are not like us. His fingers reached up to his eyebrow, tugging at the thick hairs. Behind him, the temple doors closed as they always did
around noon, and the bells gave out a final clang, the sound echoing.

  Up until the year of the family illness, the cousins were identical: two skinny children with hands and feet and heads so much larger than their spare limbs and torsos that, from a distance, their appearance was comical. The fever whittled Pramesh down further, but it was the scar that cleaved Sagar’s right eyebrow in two that was the clearest indicator of which boy was which. One marked, and the other unmarred: in this way, at least, they were like the Elders, though those two men never acknowledged this connection. More often, the Elders preferred to speak about how the boys were so different from their own childhood selves.

  “Look at them,” Pramesh’s father would say. “Not like us at all, either of them.”

  “Where is the spirit?” Sagar’s father agreed. “Where is the spark? Eh, Bhaiya? The spark?” They laughed. Everyone knew the story. When the cousins did not hear it from the Elders, they heard it from some villager who still held the tale in awe, as if nothing since had surpassed the audacity of that night.

  The bonfire, a controlled blaze that the farmers sometimes lit in the winter against a chilled evening, rose and bit into the air. The young Prasad brothers ventured outside and sat on the ground some feet away, the heat pleasant and comforting, the tree branches cracking and popping like muted fireworks. The brothers sat on the ground, feet bare, light flickering in their eyes. One of them scooted forward, and his brother followed, each a little closer to the fire, the heat now slightly oppressive. Then, as if obeying an inaudible signal, they moved forward again. Moisture slicked their foreheads; their eyebrows sopped up the sweat dripping down their noses. Closer still, the heat blistered; they turned aside their faces. Sparks sputtered and flew as if the fire itself sought to warn those brothers from coming closer. Yet they moved forward again.

  By now, the lingering adults had noticed, and they yelled for the boys’ father and moved forward to pull them away. One farmer went for Younger, one for Youngest. Both were quick, but Youngest quicker. Just as he felt himself being lifted to his feet, he thrust his hand forward and made a final grab, and the fire reached out to greet him.

  The village remembered Youngest as the winner of that contest because he carried the scar to the end of his days. The entire outer edge of his left hand, extending from the tip of his littlest finger to the end of the palm, remained pink and shiny and stretched, a testament to the salutation he had dared offer Agni, God of flame.

  That was how these brothers were: one always the victor, the other not far behind, their childhood spent in devising and competing in contests that increased in difficulty and danger as the years passed. “We always tested the other,” they chuckled as their sons slept, or pretended to, in the next room. “We always sought to prove we could do something the other could not.”

  “I remember proving this more often than you, Bhaiya.”

  “Really? Perhaps the few you won blinded you to the total outcome. Ah, Bhaiya! Such days!”

  “The frog-catching contest! Or the rice-eating contest, remember that, Bhaiya?

  “And when we were older, remember the south-facing fields? Remember how we raced to see who could plow the fastest, and when I finished you still had two lines remaining?”

  “Yes, but what about the time Father asked us to rethatch the roof in the middle of summer? And you fainted dead away while I was hauling up the grasses, remember?”

  Their good humor, facilitated with homebrew and beedis, suffused their reminiscence. Inevitably, however, the effects wore off and the mood darkened.

  “What about when you said we could make money from the deal with that Singh fellow?”

  “Yes, well, what about how you swore that sway-backed water buffalo was the best we ever had, when it never gave a drop of milk despite how much it ate?”

  Blame became its own contest, each brother vying to bring up a greater grievance, a more disastrous blunder. In the end, they always came to the same final point.

  “One contest you cannot dispute,” Pramesh’s father said. “My boy is the oldest, after all. He beat yours into this world.”

  “And is your boy still the best?” Sagar’s father said. “Isn’t he stranded in bed, while mine goes out and sees the men working and already thinks of making his fortune?”

  They were both right—or, as Pramesh later came to think of it, they were both wrong. In the end, they called a kind of truce. “Where is our blood in either of them?” the Elders murmured as one stumbled to bed and the other stayed seated to fall asleep where he was. “More like their mothers. Weak. Why else would the fever take them? How else could they die so easily? Not like us.”

  Not like us. Not like us. At first, Pramesh understood that he and Sagar were to be ashamed of that fact. They tried their own competitions in imitation of the Elders. The frogs, the rice, the races. When Jaya was visiting, they enlisted her to act as the judge—but she rarely was able to announce a clear winner. Both boys ended up laughing or getting bored and abandoning the game altogether.

  One day, after the evening meal, the boys sat in the kitchen doing their sums by the light of the lamp Bua left for them, and she retired after the washing up was done as she always did. Usually the Elders spent the evening on the front veranda, working their way through whatever bottle they’d brought home with them. But on this night they walked heavily back inside, settled in the front room, and called for the boys in rough voices.

  Pramesh and Sagar obeyed, knowing it was better to take a beating now than delay it. “Here,” Sagar’s father dragged his son down by the shirt sleeve to sit next to him. Pramesh felt a similar tug as his father yanked him over so quickly that he stumbled. The men sat across from each other, their bodies giving off the scent of sweat and beedi smoke and the ever-present stench that made Pramesh inch away as much as he could, unnoticed.

  The familiar bottle was on the floor between them, along with two glasses. Pramesh watched his uncle pour a scant amount into each glass. His heartbeat quickened. He tried to catch Sagar’s eye, but his cousin seemed frozen.

  “You both were in the peepal today. Climbing,” Pramesh’s father said. “Why?”

  Pramesh felt cold and damp with sweat. “A contest,” he managed. “To see who could climb highest.”

  His father turned to Sagar’s, his voice smug. “Didn’t I say?”

  “Get on with it, then,” Sagar’s father said.

  Again, Pramesh tried to catch Sagar’s eye, wishing that Sagar would look up, just once, so that they could decide what to do. If they ran, they always ran together. But Sagar’s eyes were fixed on the glass, which his father set down roughly in front of him.

  “A better contest,” Pramesh’s father said, and Pramesh found the other glass in front of him, the medicinal smell of the liquid, tinged with a sweet rotting, wafting up. And still, Sagar would not look at him. Instead, he picked up the glass, lifted it to his face, took a hesitant sniff.

  A sharp pain erupted in Pramesh’s ribs; his father followed that jab with a slap to the back of his head. “Already he’s picked his up—why are you dawdling?”

  “Because he’s like his father—no stomach for it!” Sagar’s father said, his barking laughter cacophonous in the small room.

  Anger throbbed in Pramesh’s veins. The Elders would not let them go until one of them drank, and Sagar was like one bewitched, unable to put the glass down, unable to lift it to his lips. He could see no other way out of this. Pramesh grabbed the glass and tipped the liquid down his throat in one go, his father giving a delighted grunt beside him. In the next instant, he gagged, spitting out most of the drink. His mouth was filled with a foul taste, his tongue and gums burning, his ears warming from the inside. He coughed, mindful of the sound of his uncle laughing as he did so, tears springing from his eyes. He chanced another look at Sagar, and now at last his cousin met his eyes, his chin quivering with fear. His drink w
as untouched before him.

  “Not like us, Bhai,” Sagar’s father said. “Remember that first sip? Downed at once—and I had another one directly after.”

  “He took a drink though, didn’t he? Not like your boy,” Pramesh’s father said. “Still,” he added with a disdainful air. “They will never be like us.”

  Sagar’s father began a retort, but went silent.

  Bua appeared from the narrow hall. Her voice shook. “Must you? Must you also bring them into it?”

  Pramesh’s father said something beneath his breath. Then a gentle hand was on Pramesh’s shoulder, and his aunt helped him up. She made him drink a glass of water in the kitchen, then one more, Sagar hovering nearby. Pramesh avoided his cousin and swished the water around in his mouth, trying to get rid of the taste, wishing there was also something he could take to rid himself of the sound of his uncle laughing, the dull ache from where his father had jabbed him.

  Bua walked them to their room and smoothed their blankets over them.

  “Bhai,” Sagar called urgently in the dark once she left. “Bhaiya.” Pramesh would not answer. He heard Sagar slip out of bed and pad toward him. “Bhai,” he said again, staring into Pramesh’s face so that he could not look away. “They are not like us, Bhai.” His voice held a pleading note, and he searched Pramesh’s eyes. “They are not like us.”

  Pramesh held Sagar’s stare. He wanted to sustain his anger, to leave Sagar waiting just as his cousin had left him. But he was tired. “Not like us,” he repeated. “They are not like us.”

  19

  Though the pots rumbled and terrified Shobha every night, during the day, a more pressing subject possessed her. An idea, conceived the day she’d seen Pramesh revisiting Sagar’s letters, was curled in a corner of her mind. Each day, the idea grew larger, until its presence was too great to ignore, and she decided to act upon it.