The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  This letter was another betrayal. Pramesh’s pain was equally hers, and she had forgotten this in her passion to understand this woman she’d wondered about her entire married life. How certain that handwriting looked as it marched across those four scraps, how assured! She grasped the square and tore it into tinier pieces, and then she dug the other scraps from the pile and did the same. She flung all the bits save one out the arched bedroom window. As they floated in a confused haze before drifting to the ground, she printed the day’s market list for Mohan on the remaining large shred of the former envelope, and then went downstairs.

  29

  At sunrise, Narinder led the way to the ghat, Loknath and Dev at his side. Pramesh in a dhoti and Shobha in a new sari delivered a sleeping Rani to Mrs. Mistry’s care for the day and followed after. Mohan stayed behind to look after the bhavan. Narinder chose a high platform overlooking the bloated river away from the busy traffic of the steps, and he directed Pramesh to sit across from him, Shobha sitting just slightly behind her husband. Loknath and Dev lined up an array of offerings between them, bananas on green leaves, a row of rice balls, copper vessels filled with holy water, copper lamps with ghee-soaked cotton wicks, small piles of flowers, and then they sat on either side of Narinder. As the sun rose higher and the ghats filled with people coming and going to bathe and pray, Narinder began.

  He recited mantras for hours, his breaths so seamless between the natural breaks in the line that he seemed to Pramesh not to pause at all. The manager listened closely, watching as the head priest’s hands indicated he pour water with a copper spoon into his hand, that he light one of the lamps, that he place one of the rice balls in front of him. Shobha sat with her hands folded in prayer; now and again Dev or Loknath leaned forward to push an item closer to Pramesh’s reach so he might be able to access it at exactly the point when Narinder indicated it was time. A vein stood out on Narinder’s forehead as he unfurled word after sacred word. Pramesh’s hands did not tremble, and his voice was strong in repeating back the mantras the priest nodded at him to say.

  All the while he concentrated, his mind fixed not on Sagar or pots or the washroom but on the great God, and soon the crowds of people who drifted their way and watched, curious, or the ones who walked by indifferent, the chatter and laughter and distraction of the ghats all melted away, and he felt himself so fully immersed that he did not notice the sun’s passage across the sky, forgot even that Shobha was just behind him, saw nothing but the task at hand, focused on performing this ceremony of appeasement for Sagar perfectly, so that everything he had done wrong the first time, and every element of his cousin’s bad death, might be wiped away completely.

  ***

  Walking back to the bhavan, Pramesh was exhausted, but at Mrs. Mistry’s, Rani ran straight into his arms and he swung her up and to his shoulders, grasping her chubby legs to steady her. Her short fingers gripped his hair, grown back to what it was before Sagar burned on the pyre. He breathed deeply. At home, he ate the simple meal that Shobha prepared, and before putting Rani to bed, he carried her out to the courtyard to show her the sky stippled with stars.

  “I will stay up,” he said to Shobha once he’d tucked a blanket over Rani.

  In his office, Pramesh waited out the time. He’d made many mistakes in his lifetime, perhaps more than any man had a right to. Yet, to regret what had gone wrong, he would also have to regret what had gone right. His wife. His daughter. His livelihood. His city. All this had come out of a single act of selfishness, an act that doomed Sagar to one kind of life even as it raised Pramesh to the happiness he’d come to know in Kashi. The new life, the one that remained with Shobha and Rani, would not have been possible without Sagar. He could trace it all back to a single moment, a single word.

  They were men, twenty-one-years-old and tall, Sagar more muscular than Pramesh, with identical neat mustaches.

  “Kashi?” Sagar had said. “Why would you want to go to Kashi?” They sat on the kitchen floor, eating the rice and dal that Bua spooned onto dried banana leaf plates, talking of where they might go if they had the choice and the means.

  “Well, what is wrong with Kashi?” Pramesh said between bites. “The holiest place in the world. Doesn’t that interest you?”

  “Holy, unholy, it’s all simply land to me.”

  “Always the farmer.” Pramesh shook his head.

  “I know what it is with you and Kashi,” Sagar said, taking more dal and shoving a great fingerful into his mouth. “It’s the Mothers. You listened to the stories too much, Bhai. You always took them as truth.”

  Pramesh flushed. “It’s not a serious thing for you,” he said.

  “I’m not laughing at you, Bhai. You should go! See all the places Ma and Tayi talked about—why not? All those thousands of pilgrims going to Kashi every year—you’re not the only one following a story.”

  Pramesh couldn’t tell if Sagar was being serious or jesting. “Forget, then, that it is holy,” he said. “It is still a city, nah? Neither of us has been to one; Kashi is closest.”

  “But Kashi?” Sagar wrinkled his nose. He had not shed certain facial expressions from childhood. Sagar smells something bad! Pramesh would shout when they were younger and his cousin made that same face. Now, he laughed as he ate.

  “Bhaiya,” Pramesh said, smiling as he scooped more rice and dal into his mouth. “I am talking of where it is possible for us to go.” He glanced down the short hall to the front veranda where the Elders lounged in the evenings. Usually, they were obliged to take the evening meal with them, eating in silence and communicating via small motions of the hand or a smirk.

  “They are out late tonight,” Sagar said.

  “Doing the usual?”

  “No, something different. They wore their best sandals. They were walking somewhere, it seems.”

  The cousins fell into a different line of talk as they ate. After, they lay outside on the veranda on low rope beds, a kerosene lamp flickering between them.

  “Well, where would you go?” Pramesh asked, yawning. He lay on his stomach, the dinner a satisfying weight within.

  Sagar reclined on his side with his head propped on one hand. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps I would visit you in your Kashi, or wherever you might go. But I suppose I would simply come right back here.”

  Pramesh smiled. For three years, Sagar had carefully won the favor of the surrounding farmers. He’d looked over the messy account books, created schemes to increase their meager production and bring in money for more land. He was so young, yet he had a head for such a life, the neighbors often said in admiration. The Elders, meanwhile, spent their days on these same rope beds and drank and smoked beedis and remained mostly silent. The land had shrunk since the family’s prime years, when fields fanned out around them in all directions. But it was enough to make a life.

  A life—just one. Pramesh had never felt at home with farming, preferred listening to their neighbors tell stories rather than offer advice on how to approach the coming planting season. When Sagar was outside, Pramesh remained in, reading from his mother’s collection of religious texts, the Bhagavad Gita and Puranas long since falling to pieces.

  “And the land is the only reason you’d come back?” Pramesh raised his eyebrows at Sagar, who lay with his arms folded beneath his head, eyes closed. A small smile curled his mouth, and Pramesh laughed. His cousin couldn’t keep the secret, no matter how he pretended to. The previous summer he’d begun to make excuses to go to Jaya’s grandparents’ house while she was visiting—to borrow this or that, to drop off something ostensibly at Bua’s request.

  “As if she would have you,” Pramesh teased. “You were so mean to her when we were children!”

  “Me? I was a prince of a boy,” Sagar retorted. “No finer manners anywhere.” He listed his best qualities as Pramesh snickered. They stayed up late, talking, and eventually fell asleep. They did n
ot hear the Elders come home.

  In the morning, the cousins rose and washed and went into the kitchen for their chai. Bua handed them steel cups and continued thumbing her prayer beads while they drank. When they were finished, Sagar headed outside as usual and Pramesh went to continue his reading, but their aunt stopped them. “Your fathers are waiting to speak to you,” she said. Something in her tone was off, and Pramesh caught Sagar’s eye. “Outside,” she said. “They are waiting on the veranda.”

  The men were seated together on one of the rope beds and indicated that the cousins should share the other. When they were children, the cousins had felt the Elders to be giants; they had dictated Pramesh and Sagar’s every motion. At some point the beatings had stopped, though the drunken diatribes and evenings of shouted vitriol continued. As the cousins aged, the Elders shrunk to average size, or perhaps it was only their own arrival into adulthood that balanced their perspective.

  “There is a man in town,” Pramesh’s father said without preamble. “A man whose nephew is very important at the university in Kashi.”

  “The head of sciences,” Sagar’s father added. They went on, one speaking and the other elaborating: Though the admissions period had passed, though both cousins were older than the usual incoming students, though they still required a personal interview and much convincing, this uncle of the head of sciences had agreed to have his nephew make an exception for somebody from the Prasad family.

  “For one of you,” Sagar’s father said. “Just one.”

  Pramesh’s father cleared his throat. “You will go,” he said.

  And he looked at Sagar.

  Pramesh had listened with increasing excitement, and though his heart dropped when the Elders indicated Sagar, he did not feel jealousy. Sagar had proved himself the ambitious one in the Elders’ eyes. Sagar in the fields, Sagar conversing with workmen, Sagar thinking up new ways to do things. Of course, Sagar must go.

  Except—Sagar did not want to. “He is older,” he said, pointing to Pramesh, who felt shocked by this fact, as if his cousin had just accused him of something terrible. “He should be the one to go.”

  “That is not your decision,” Pramesh’s father said, refusing to look at his son. After all these years, that man still felt the sting of coming in second, of having a child whom he saw as inferior to his brother’s. “We have evaluated your character, your prospects, the way you have lived thus far. We have agreed.”

  “You have proved yourself more capable, physically and mentally,” Sagar’s father said, not without a ring of triumph in his voice as he looked at his son. To these older men, the cousins were merely players in another contest, one that had taken many years to come to a climax. Sagar was the victor, the one who could do what Pramesh could not.

  Sagar was disgusted. “This is nonsense. Why gift us this thing if you are giving the gift to the wrong person?”

  “Careful,” Sagar’s father said, the warning in his voice that once terrified the cousins as children.

  Sagar grabbed Pramesh’s hand and raised it in the air. “This is the one who should go. When will you wake up and see that?”

  “Sagar!” Pramesh’s father roared, a man who had once beaten them equally for the most insignificant of faults. But the cousins were no longer children, and they were no longer afraid. Sagar stalked off the veranda and disappeared behind the house and into the fields. Pramesh followed.

  Sagar had devoted one field to wheat, one to mustard, one for rows of different vegetables. A fourth plot, the smallest, was overrun with sugar cane. “Something different for each one,” Sagar had explained to Pramesh. “In a year, we will see what does best and go from there, expand, increase production.” The Elders disapproved of this tactic, waiting for the experiment to fail, but so far the fields seemed to support everything, each crop flourishing in its own plot. Pramesh found his cousin at the edge of the wheat field. The green plants reached his knees. The air smelled sweeter here than by the house, where beedi smoke and cooking fires colored everything with a dark smoky taint. He stood beside Sagar and surveyed the field, trying to see the land with the same eyes as his cousin.

  “You are angry,” he said after a time.

  “And you are not,” Sagar replied. There was both irritation and weariness in his voice.

  “What they say is true. You will get more benefit from it. Go, learn something, and bring back what you know when you are finished. It is only four years.”

  “A wasted four years,” Sagar muttered. He reached out to grab a thin wheat stalk and tore the top away from its root. A green smell rose from the exposed broken ends. “And what will you do while I am gone? Will you take care of all of this?”

  “I won’t be totally helpless,” Pramesh said with a rueful look. “The neighbors will be there to advise me. We will write; you will tell me what to do. And when you return, you will have your fields again.”

  “And then? What will your life be then?”

  “My life?” They had never talked of lives as separate things: your life, my life. Our life was the way they’d always thought of it. A journey they embarked upon together. They had their differences—Sagar with his land, Pramesh with his books—but those were just likes and dislikes. Fundamentally, they had grown together, like two tree trunks growing so closely that the trunks entwine and mesh. No difference between where one tree began and the other ended.

  Even when they each married, they would still be together to raise their children in the same home. And then Pramesh understood. “We can go talk to her parents, her grandparents, together,” he said. “We can ask them to wait. To have their daughter married to a university-educated man—what family would refuse that chance? Perhaps they might even consent to an engagement. We can tell the Elders, say you won’t go unless they speak on your behalf as part of the bargain.”

  “The Elders?” Sagar laughed. “I wouldn’t dare send them. It would be a disaster, Bhai—they know us only as the sons of two drunks. As does the whole village.”

  “No,” Pramesh said. “They know us for us, now. Separate from the Elders. And you know they respect you.” He couldn’t tell if Sagar was listening to him. “Four years,” he said again. “It isn’t such a long time. Then life will be as it was.”

  Sagar threw the torn wheat stalk away from him, where it floated to rest near its root end, still firmly planted in the ground. “Don’t you see? Nothing will be as it was, Bhaiya. They’ve made sure of that.” He turned abruptly and stalked off. His gait, the stiff way he held his shoulders, told Pramesh that he wanted to be alone.

  That night, Sagar arrived late for dinner. They ate in silence. Before he rose, his father spoke. “You will leave in a week,” he said. And that was all. Discussion over.

  Because Sagar refused to prepare, Pramesh did so for him. He laid out his cousin’s new shirts and pants that Bua had quickly made, and packed a small bag with all the things he thought were needed. Sagar neither helped nor advised, except to take his handkerchiefs—embroidered by his mother and Pramesh’s—and hand them to Pramesh to be packed away with the rest of it.

  On their last night, Pramesh lay on his reed mat. He tried to imagine what the farm would be like for four years, all that time without his cousin, and could not. He hadn’t really believed in this imminent parting; he wouldn’t until the event actually happened and he was left alone as the train pulled away, watching Sagar go farther and farther until his cousin was gone.

  Sagar came in and closed the door. “Listen,” he said. “You know you must go in my stead.”

  Pramesh kept his eyes closed. “The bags are packed. Your letter of introduction is waiting. Why start this again?” A kick in the legs opened his eyes. Sagar stood over him.

  “This is not a joke.”

  Pramesh sat up. “No, it isn’t. Everything has been prepared. We can’t simply decide differently. The Elders decided; the letter
of introduction is for you.”

  “Forget the letter, forget everything. This is the chance for you, don’t you see?”

  But Pramesh didn’t see. “I am not jealous, Sagar-bhai,” he said. “I want you to go. The Elders are right, you will get more benefit from it.”

  “No, you are wrong, completely wrong,” Sagar was whispering fiercely to avoid waking the others in the house. “They care nothing about the benefit to you or me. They care only about their game, about the winner. We are pawns, Bhaiya—we always have been. No more. I will not go in your place; I will not take the path you have the most right to. I refuse.”

  He was serious; Pramesh could see it in his face. His heart sped. He had not allowed himself to yearn to go because he had truly felt that his cousin should have the chance. “You are sure?” he asked.

  “I am, Bhaiya,” Sagar said.

  “The Elders.…” Neither had so blatantly disobeyed them before.

  “They made their choice. We made ours. What can they do? We are not children anymore, Bhaiya. All our lives, it has always been the two of us, taking care of each other. Why should it be different now?”

  “One word,” Pramesh said. “One word from you, Bhaiya, and I will go. But you must think carefully before you speak. Think it over, first.”

  Sagar stared at his cousin. They both knew what the answer would be. “Go.”