That was how Pramesh allowed himself to be convinced. “I will visit, every year. And after the four years, I will be back for good.”
Sagar flopped down on his reed mat, assuming Pramesh’s position from moments before. “Look at you, Bhaiya,” he said, eyes closed. “Going to Kashi after all.”
Early that morning, before leaving, both Sagar and Pramesh knelt to touch their aunt’s feet. She hugged Sagar, lightly running her hands over his hair, and she held Pramesh tightly. She handed Sagar a packet and then turned away. The Elders said nothing as the cousins set out for the train station. As soon as they were far enough away from the house, Sagar pressed the packet into Pramesh’s hands. “She knows,” he said. Pramesh opened the cloth covering and found a stack of warm rotis slick with ghee. “I tried to tell her this morning, but she already knew, somehow.”
Pramesh peeled one from the stack for Sagar and took one for himself. It was just roti, just water and flour, but he savored this one, knowing he might not taste another like it for some time. How many had Bua made for the boys over the years, rolling out round after round, hunched before the hearth? “She is a good woman,” he said, putting the packet into the bag that had been Sagar’s, packed so hastily the night before with his own things replacing his cousin’s.
They walked in unaccustomed, awkward silence. “I will be back, soon enough,” Pramesh said to dispel the quiet. “Even if the school takes me in.… Anyway, it will be as it was before.”
“Will it?” Sagar said absently. Pramesh looked closely at his cousin. More often lately, a blankness swept his cousin’s face that he couldn’t read. Pramesh was becoming used to the idea of being two different people, rather than the one fused together that they had been for so long.
“You should ask Jaya now,” he said.
Sagar laughed. “And offer her what? I barely know what I’m doing, Bhai—how am I supposed to give her any kind of guarantee of what our future will be like? Besides—they’ve probably already picked out their future son-in-law. Her parents won’t want her marrying a failure.”
“Don’t ask them to promise anything, but at least let them know your interest, your intention. Don’t work in silence, waiting, assuming.”
Sagar walked on, thinking. “Well,” he said at last. “You might be right. Anyway, even if I was settled, it isn’t as if I could marry her straight away.” He glanced at Pramesh. “The elder is supposed to marry first, after all. How would it look? What would they say about the Prasad boys otherwise?” he asked in mock horror.
“Idiot.” Pramesh flicked Sagar’s ear lightly. But he was glad that Sagar’s tongue had loosened, and they talked freely as they walked the five miles to the platform at the station.
Theirs wasn’t a popular stop, and only a few people milled about. Pramesh paid for his ticket, taking it from the agent. His heartbeat quickened. The ticket made the journey real.
Sagar was standing at the edge of the platform, looking down the tracks in the direction the train would arrive from. He pointed, and Pramesh saw it, a black dot topped with white steam. “Listen,” he said. “You must promise me something.”
“Anything!” Pramesh felt suddenly excited. Adrenaline powered through his limbs. He was not sure he would be able to sit still for the duration of the journey. “Whatever you wish.”
“Forget this place. Do not come back.”
Pramesh looked at Sagar, but his cousin kept his eyes on the train. Pramesh laughed. “You are joking.”
“Am I?” Sagar said, his lips tight.
“I cannot do that.”
Sagar turned to look at him. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose you can.” The faintest of vibrations began to roll beneath their feet. Pramesh reached out and squeezed his cousin’s shoulder.
“Listen,” Sagar said again. “Just listen once, before you protest. What is there for you here? They will not allow you the life you want, not while they continue to live. They think I am the winner and you are the loser in one of their contests; they will continue to think so for the rest of their days. This is life, Bhaiya, yours and mine—not a contest. Until today we shared everything, but this is where we must part. You are defying them once; do you think they will allow it to happen again?”
A sick feeling burned in Pramesh’s stomach. “But to leave you here, with them.…”
“That is different. I have chosen my life here. I want the fields, I want to recreate what they lost. You do not.”
“And because of that we should never see each other?” The idea was ridiculous, and Pramesh laughed. Sagar did not return his cousin’s smile. Pramesh gripped Sagar’s shoulders again and squeezed hard. He was yelling now to make himself heard over the loud jangle of the locomotive on the tracks. “You cannot ask me for such a thing.”
“I know I cannot,” Sagar said, turning to Pramesh. “But I am asking you regardless. How else can you build a life for yourself if you are always tied to the past?”
The train slowed as it approached, steam billowing behind it. They were too far to the front, and they began walking quickly to the back where the third-class cars were. People streamed off, some of them jumping from the top of the car or alighting as the train moved.
Sagar pushed Pramesh toward the open door of the third-class carriage. The wails of a screaming child poured from the car; a man blocked the stairway as he glanced backward and chatted with his companion. “Bhai, just a moment, can you move just a bit?” Sagar yelled at him, and then he gave Pramesh a hard piercing look and pushed him up the stairs. There was no available seat, but Pramesh shoved his way to an open window and leaned over the annoyed man seated there so he could look down at Sagar waiting below. The train jerked forward, and Sagar lifted his hand in farewell.
“I won’t make you that promise,” Pramesh said, his voice rising above the talk and rickety wheezes from the engine.
“I know. I knew you wouldn’t,” Sagar said. “You will always do the thing that I cannot.”
“Really, Bhai,” the man at Pramesh’s elbow said, glaring. “Must you?”
“A moment,” Pramesh said. “I’m sorry but just until the train leaves.” He felt his heart in his chest. This was not how he envisioned his departure. He was not supposed to give up one happiness in exchange for another.
A low grasping rumble vibrated beneath him. “Just one thing,” Sagar yelled up at him in a rush. “Make me another promise if you cannot hold to the first one.”
“Anything sensible,” Pramesh said, hoping for a return smile.
“When the train leaves, don’t look back at me, at anything.”
“But—”
“You’ve already committed. You are starting a new path in your life, so start it correctly. Look to the future, not to the past. Keep this promise for me, at least.” The engine rumbled louder, the wheels groaned and began to move forward. Sagar looked so sincere. Desperate, even.
“All right then. I promise.”
One last look at Sagar: the split in his eyebrow, the identical mustache, the sweat on his forehead. And the eyes, the eyes in which he longed to see a spark of laughter, but which instead met him with a determined and steady look. The train continued to creak forward, getting faster. Pramesh leaned forward, craning his neck, but he remembered his promise just as Sagar shouted, “Never look back, Bhaiya! You promised!”
Pramesh straightened from the window and turned his eyes to the front. He imagined Sagar standing on the platform, watching the train pick up speed. He pictured Sagar’s dusty sandals, his worn cotton trousers. He’d had his whole life to memorize Sagar’s features, and yet now Pramesh was burning, even frantic, for one last look at his cousin. The other request, the one Pramesh refused, throbbed in his mind.
Forget this place. Do not come back.
That promise was unthinkable, but he kept the other. He did not look back.
The clock hands reached two hours past midnight. Pramesh walked out to the courtyard, pausing in front of the quiet washroom. Narinder and Loknath came to the door of their quarters, Dev lingered with the book he’d been reading from near No. 5, Sheetal sitting in the open doorway. They all waited.
The washroom was silent. The pots were stacked in neat rows, static. He walked around the room, stood in spots where he’d felt the pain of that sound, the horrible thoughts slithering through his mind, under his skin. He felt nothing but the emptiness of the room. He wished for Govind, wished he knew what to look for. Yet here was proof: in a place and at a time of night when his thoughts had only been in chaos, he now had a clear mind.
Sagar, the last vestige of that old life of Pramesh’s, of that first family whose blood was his own—was he truly gone? Was he now making his way to the Vaitarani river? Pramesh hoped for it, hoped that the calm that descended on him in this place that had held so much pain meant that Sagar, too, was appeased.
Narinder hovered near the doorway, then crossed the threshold. He took a turn about the room as well, completing the round with sure steps. When he was finished, he looked at Pramesh, a grim satisfaction in his eyes, and he walked out the door, murmuring the great God’s name beneath his breath.
Shobha was awake and waiting for him, her eyes bright with the question he could see even in the dark.
“Nothing. Not a sound.” He lay down next to her, wrapping his arms around her and resting his head atop hers, feeling her nestle closer. He searched himself to see what he felt, where Sagar was in his mind. There was sadness—but more than that, a desire to move forward and leave the past behind. Gone. Soon he fell into dreamless sleep.
30
Mohan held vigil in his small room. When the others had returned from the tripindi shraddha, he excused himself, fixing his face into a pained look while holding his stomach, but the manager hardly acknowledged him, his focus elsewhere. Late that night, he heard the priests gather in the courtyard, waiting to see if the pots would ring out, and the assistant took his chance, slipping through his window with his small bundle of clothes. He stood outside the locked gates, a thickness rising in his throat like dough. For so long he’d guided pilgrims through the city, but he’d never imagined that he’d one day have to guide himself.
Into the night’s embrace he went, feeling no weariness despite the hour. His loyalty, his unswerving good faith, his true fellow feeling for that family that had replaced the one he’d never known—what had been the use of any of it? Tonight, he was determined to leave the past behind him. Yet uncertainty dogged his steps. Guilt that had been his companion since the arrival of the ghost in the washroom continued to walk with him. And one other thing refused to leave Mohan—his frantic bowels, which forced him to make a detour.
The swollen river lapped at the first few stone steps of Mir ghat as if to touch the feet of the city. Boats bobbed and swayed on the water as far as their tethers allowed. Mohan kept to the topmost steps and walked to the middle of the ghat, to the place that street-sweeper child and holy man alike often used as their toilet according to urgency and the audience. Often he had cringed at the thought of such filth near such holiness, of man indulging in that essential earthly act when the divine Ganges and several temples were so near. Why couldn’t they walk the short distance to the line of public toilets just two lanes behind? How could control elude them here? Now he longed for restraint even as he tore open his pants and squatted in the dark, his brass lota beside him at the ready with water he’d dipped from the distended river.
“Hai Rama,” Mohan groaned. “Hai hai Rama.” He leaned his forehead against the concrete wall that rose in front of him with its scabbed-over layers of paint and grime. As he felt the more tangible of his troubles slip from his body, he relaxed, and, for just a few seconds, he forgot all the awkwardness of his situation, forgot all that lay before and behind and beneath, forgot himself completely and experienced the bliss of a blank mind.
And he forgot one more thing. In all of his night-time excursions, he had always locked onto one face and one memory: the warning of old farmer Ramu, squeezing chunks of sugar cane between his ancient teeth. Never go at night! Never! Always Mohan had been on his guard against those spirits preying in the dark—but if Ramu could have seen his erstwhile disciple now! Mohan, back exposed to the wide expanse of steps fanning behind him, to the river, and to the gaping maw of Magadha, a country of spirits unto itself. His sealed eyes, shut not in prayer but in contentment. A wisp of warm air emerging from his parted lips as he exhaled, a stench rising from below him as he lingered, and the false belief that all was right and well. In those few ruinous seconds, Mohan did not exist in the world. But the world came to pull him back.
Someone, somewhere, sneezed with such violence that Mohan almost lost his balance. Now alert, he flung hurried splashes of water onto himself from his lota and sprung to his feet, pulling his pants up and stepping down from the top ledge to assess the ghat. Ramu’s warning rang anew in his mind and echoed his fear. “Who is it?” he called out into the night, his voice quivering like a flame in the breeze. “Who is there?”
He didn’t know what he expected. Ghosts, after all, never arrived with a specific physical form. They revealed their presence in the things they did and the sounds they made, like the raucous spirit he had just left behind in the bhavan washroom. He heard sand scraping stone, and footsteps first hesitant and then certain. From the dark, a figure emerged. At a different time, Mohan may have thought the shape coming toward him was a walking corpse, a half-burnt body emerging from the sticky slurry of river and mud and trash at the base of the ghats. But lately he’d had enough with dead men come to life. Impatience settled into his limbs as his eyes traced the figure of a living man, one Mohan recognized. Maharaj walked toward him, hugging his clay pot in the darkness.
“Ah, Rama,” Mohan groaned beneath his breath. If only emotion could be like a muscle, something he could exercise at will, but he could no more control his feelings than he could rein in his bowels. Still some paces away, Maharaj slipped on the wet stone and only just caught himself with one hand on the step behind him, the other holding tight to his precious pot.
Pity and obligation, and some resentment as well, welled in Mohan’s chest. How could he leave now? How could he abandon Maharaj on the ghat, where he might slip again on the wet stone or be easy prey for thugs? No, Mohan had seen the man and now it was his duty to protect him; the task as good as assigned to him by the great God.
“Don’t you know this isn’t a safe place for you, walking alone in the middle of the night?” he asked, coming to meet the man on the same level.
“Some nights it is difficult to sleep,” Maharaj said. “Some nights a man must walk.” He seemed unsurprised at meeting another wandering the ghat; his tone was companionable, as if he had only been waiting for someone to come and chat with him.
“Where do you usually sleep? I will take you there; it is no trouble.”
The drunk instead lowered himself to sit on the cold stone, hugging his clay pot. After a moment, he set the pot down by his side and then looked up at Mohan, his eyes hopeful. The assistant sighed, looked toward the sky. “From Shankarbhavan, yes?” Maharaj asked.
Mohan winced. Was he still from the bhavan? Was he still from anywhere? “Yes,” he said, and left it at that.
“What were you doing up there?” the drunk countered. “All alone, in the middle of the night—such a thing is to be saved for the morning; don’t you know this?”
“Yes, yes,” Mohan sighed. “But sometimes it cannot be helped.”
“It’s simply a question of proper diet,” Maharaj said with airy comfort. “Eating the right things at the right time, nah?”
Mohan suppressed another sigh. “Come,” he coaxed. “No need to continue to speak of it. Shall we go?”
“But this is a dangerous place!” the drunk said, evidently ex
cluding himself from his own warning. “To do such things here.… You were lucky this time. Find some other ghat if you must—Lalita ghat is right there,” Maharaj continued. He smacked his lips and shook his head. “But to stop here, of all places.… Such is the action of a man who does not fear a cursed fate.” He peered at Mohan. “Don’t you know the story I speak of?”
Mohan tried not to let his interest catch. “This city has many stories.”
“Yes, but what of this story? The story of the ghost that wanders here.”
“Ah,” Mohan said, disappointed. Everyone knew the story Maharaj spoke of, the story of the Green Parrot Girl. The drunk was like someone’s grandfather left out on the porch, calling out to all who passed by, declaiming the same story that had already been told so many times it was falling apart at the seams.
Maharaj chuckled. “You think it is nothing, that it is just a story, nothing real in it. But all stories were alive for someone, once.”
“As many as die here still linger afterward,” the assistant murmured, and then, louder: “Well, they say the spirits are everywhere, not just this ghat.”
“All the more reason to be careful, nah?”
“Yes,” Mohan said, changing tack. “Yes, you are right. I have been a fool.” He held his hand out to Maharaj. “And because this is such a dangerous place, we should go now. Come, where do I take you?”
The drunk looked down at the assistant’s hand as if he had never seen one before. Then, he faced the river and blew a long stream of air from his mouth. “It is a woman’s, they say.”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“Do you? And what else do you know?”
“From a Kashi family. Married, I believe. A sad story—she birthed a child and lost it, all in the same day. And then the lady herself, just some time later, dead. Grief, they say.”
“But it was more than grief.” There was a tone in the drunk’s voice that made Mohan’s heart sink: the man was enjoying himself, and once he began speaking he was likely to continue for hours into the night. Mohan sighed, accepted his fate, and took a seat on the ghat.
The City of Good Death Page 28