The alleyway was empty. A ghost, she thought, and a laugh escaped her lips before she clapped her hand over her mouth in dismay. Shame, she chided herself. One more glance down the deserted lane, a regretful shake of the head, and then she was back inside the bhavan, readying for the start of the day.
***
In a way, Shobha had been right. A ghost was walking the lane, unseen, one who caught sight of the bhavan mistress and halted in the gully beyond until she slipped back inside. Unlike the other spirits purported to wander Kashi, this was a ghost in name only, dressed in a khaki uniform, making noiseless footsteps even in the most debris-strewn lanes, a ghost who smoothed his hands over oiled hair as he walked.
Bhut was in a foul mood. He was not an early riser, but on this day a fit of insomnia forced him to his feet at an hour that caught his wife, a lover of mornings herself, by surprise. While taking his chai, he thought he’d take a stroll around the lanes, as he’d once done back in the days when necessity and his lower position forced such patrols. “Not a bad thing, being up now,” he had said more to himself than to his wife or his two older sisters, who yawned and picked through trays of uncooked rice and lentils. “Not a bad thing,” he said again, “to see my city at all times, in every light,” and he laughed at his own unintentional joke, for anyone could see that no light had cracked through the darkness just yet. Bhut caught a signal passing between his sisters in the way that only siblings can detect. “What is it?” he asked, wary.
“You never wake up early,” his eldest sister said.
“Except for this day last year, yes?” the second eldest said, as if the thought had only just occurred to her.
“And the year before last,” the eldest said. She picked out a small stone and tossed it over her shoulder with relish, or perhaps bitterness; Bhut could find no difference between those two emotions when it came to his siblings.
“Is there some point to all of this?” He drained his cup, preparing to leave the room, his customary resolution to their arguments. But his sisters’ words moved more quickly than he could.
“Since he was thirteen,” the eldest said, never looking up from her dish of lentils even when her sister contradicted her, saying that no, it was not thirteen, Bhut had been twelve, or didn’t she remember? They had only been in their teens themselves when it happened.
That was all it took. The irritation Bhut had felt as a mere itching flared into something far fiercer. He stood with such violence that his stool shot backward into a wall. His emotion fairly propelled him out the door and into the lane and onward, until soon he was passing the bhavan and avoiding the hostel manager’s wife, blinded with temper. Passing beneath Mrs. Chalwah’s window, he felt her eyes on him, and though his knee ached, he quickened his pace, refusing to look at her.
Today marked the day of Menaka’s death, as Bhut’s sisters had so helpfully reminded him. More than fifty years had passed. So many memories, so many things he wanted to forget. He walked to escape all thought, to give movement to his anger. In earlier years, he had imagined that he traced the steps she had taken on her last morning all those years ago. Now, he scoffed at his own naïveté, his hopeful idiocy. Age had taught him which things mattered and which did not. All he wanted now was peace, but the memories kept coming unbidden.
That awful day, her eyes had brightened when she’d taken her newborn into her arms. His sisters had been at school; he’d feigned illness to witness the excitement. He was the only one left alive who remembered her pained cry, her confusion and despair at holding a baby that abandoned its life as quickly as it had come into it.… He would hear that cry for as long as he lived.
***
Shobha opened the tall kitchen window to throw out a bucket of dirty water, and something caught her eye. It was Mrs. Mistry, beckoning wildly. Shobha waved back and stepped through the window to cross the lane.
Mrs. Mistry poured a cup of chai and pushed two low stools together in her kitchen. “Only a moment,” she said when she saw Shobha’s face.
“There is so much to do,” she murmured as she attempted a smile.
“It can all wait,” she said as she patted the stool next to her and handed the cup to Shobha. “You must not fatigue yourself. Rest a little, nah?” Shobha nodded and sipped the chai.
“Everything is okay?” Mrs. Mistry asked.
“Yes,” Shobha said. “And with you?”
“Yes, yes. And your husband?”
“We are all doing well, praise Rama.” Shobha smiled. She did not mind these questions. Unlike Mrs. Gupta, Mrs. Mistry had no ulterior motives, nothing but goodness in her heart. She had as much right to ask about her family’s welfare as anyone of Shobha’s blood.
Mrs. Mistry swiveled her chin briefly and squeezed her palms in her lap. “There is something I wanted to ask you about,” she began. Shobha put her cup down and focused her full attention on her neighbor. “There are times …” Mrs. Mistry stopped, then started again. “What I mean is, I learned myself, quite early on after I married, something about my husband. All husbands.” Shobha wondered what was to follow. She’d been married nine years; any nuptial advice would have been quite late in coming. “Sometimes you needn’t tell them everything. Sometimes there are things that they do not need to know. Like that picture over there,” she said, pointing to a painted watercolor of a flower one of her daughters had made years earlier. “See that? Now, when your Mistry-maasad sees that picture, he only thinks ‘Oh! Such a beautiful flower!’ He doesn’t know as I do that it is there to hide a water stain. See it there?” She stood and walked over and removed the watercolor. A brown stain rippled through the paint on the wall. She re-hung the picture and returned to Shobha.
“It’s a lovely picture,” the bhavan mistress said, “but I don’t understand.”
“He sees only the good thing, not the bad, because I hide it from him. But does he need to see the bad thing? What would it give him if he knew? It would only upset him, so better not to say anything at all.”
“Of course,” Shobha said. Why had this been so urgent for Mrs. Mistry to relay to her? And then she understood. “If there is something concerning you, something you cannot say to him—”
Her older neighbor waved her hands in the air, as if to dispel the evil eye. “No, no, you must let me finish. Some things must be kept from the husband. Only some. And it is our job to determine what those things are. But we must not be too proud to continue hiding the things that get beyond us.”
Shobha looked upon her neighbor, this woman whose face was as familiar as her mother’s, who had seen her grow up, who had dressed her in her wedding sari, and felt an overwhelming tenderness. She took Mrs. Mistry’s hand in her own, the skin as soft as a bird’s wing, and looked that woman in the eye. “Tell me what is wrong.”
Mrs. Mistry seemed to have run out of words. She squeezed Shobha’s hand and pulled something from her blouse. “This isn’t a water spot to be keeping from your husband.”
Shobha took it. It was a letter, addressed in her own hand, to Kamna. It was the one she’d given to the postmaster in haste on the day Mrs. Gupta stopped her. “Why do you have this?”
“You forgot the stamp,” Mrs. Mistry said. “By the time the postmaster noticed, you were gone. But his wife was there, and she saw Mrs. Gupta—they are old friends. And she gave it to her, for you.”
The stamp was indeed missing. Shobha turned the envelope over, wondering how she could have forgotten, feeling relief lift her shoulders. Kamna would never receive this letter, at least. Her fingers ran along the top edge and hit a snag. The envelope was open. “Someone has read this,” she said, slowly. Her heartbeat quickened, and she looked up, searching the woman’s face.
“Not Mrs. Gupta,” the old woman said quickly. “She has her faults, but she brought me the letter, whole. She thought it would be better if I gave it to you.”
“You opened it?”
“I was worried about you. I knew something was wrong, and you weren’t telling me. You never ask for help when you need it; you try to do everything on your own.”
“But you read it?”
Mrs. Mistry looked down. “Before your mother died, I promised her I would always help you, even if you did not ask. We both knew how stubborn you can be. I read it because I remember who she is—that Kamna. I remember everything you told me after that village trip when you were first married.”
Heat rose into Shobha’s face, and all the relief she’d felt at the letter being in her hands instead of on its way to the village disappeared, replaced with mortification.
“Why are you writing to her?” Mrs. Mistry pressed. “Why are you telling her things about yourself, about Rani?”
“It isn’t—” Shobha stopped, shaking her head. “How could you do that? How could you simply read it without asking me?” She felt as if she could not breathe.
“That day on the terrace—you asked me if something bad can happen, simply if someone wills it. I wasn’t paying attention to you. Were you talking about her? What do you expect to gain by writing her?”
“What do you mean?”
“Her nazar—were you saying she’d cast the evil eye on your house?”
Shobha felt nauseous. “No,” she managed to whisper. “That’s not—”
“Does your husband know?” Mrs. Mistry continued. She reached out to cup Shobha’s face between her palsied palms. “You cannot keep communicating with this woman without telling him. It will destroy you both.”
Shobha jerked away and crushed the letter in her hands. All that she’d left unsaid, all the despair and frustration that she had pushed down bubbled forth like an overburdened boiling pot. “You are stepping where even my own mother would never dare,” she managed to say. Mrs. Mistry’s face blurred in the thick haze of her anger. “None of this was your business to fix, none of this—nothing of what happens in my house is yours to comment on. It isn’t something to laugh about later with Mrs. Gupta. It isn’t—” Tears choked her, and she swallowed a sob, unable to finish. The letter was still balled in her hand, the paper softening from the sweat seeping from her palms.
She rose and left the house. Once in the bhavan she threw the paper into a clay pot and sent a burning match down after it, transforming it into a pile of ashes that would not even fill a teaspoon. Shobha watched the flame and felt her anger recede along with the heat in the pot. She could not understand how the emotion had engulfed her so quickly. Seeing the letter in her neighbor’s hands, Shobha had felt like a woman caught without a clean sari on the riverbank. She was humiliated that someone else could know her deepest insecurity, no matter how close, how beloved.
But something else upset her even more. She set to work, threading her thickest needle with a length of strong white thread. She gathered a lime and several fresh chilis, and after spearing a steel skewer through them, she strung them together with the thread, the lime on the bottom and chilies crisscrossing on top. Then she gathered dried red chilies and black salt in her fist and went upstairs.
Rani was sleeping quietly, the blanket rumpled at her side, her dark curls haloing her face. She did not stir as Shobha reached up and hung the fresh lime and chili garland from a nail near the window, in a spot directly above the child. Then she knelt, pushing aside a strand of the girl’s hair, feeling her temperature with the back of her hand. Rani was cool, and she stirred at Shobha’s touch. Shobha held her spice-filled fist up over her daughter’s head and circled it over the child seven times, counterclockwise, concentrating on the great God. Then she ran downstairs and emptied her fist in the pot of ash, dropped in another lit match after it, and watched as the spices burned, and with it, the evil eye attached to Rani.
She’d never done such a thing in her life. Other mothers were vigilant with lining their children’s eyes with black kohl, with dressing them in torn or dirty clothes, all to deflect the evil eye. Had Kamna really set her nazar on the bhavan, on her child? A woman like that does not forget. All those years, her imagination had sought to fill in the blanks in that sentence—what kind of woman? Now she did so easily. A vindictive woman. A revengeful woman. A woman who was the reason for Rani being so endlessly sick the last few months, so susceptible to injury. Her hands rose up to her face where Mrs. Mistry had held her, up over her eyes, and she breathed in and out deeply in the way her father had taught her to do when she felt overwhelmed and unable to think for all the thoughts running in her head.
She sighed and turned to the window. Shame over the letters now turned into shame over something else: Mrs. Mistry’s house, usually one of the first to open itself to the world, was still shut up; doors barring the day, walls stretching up to the sky. What had she said? Those words had flown with such speed from her mouth that she could not recall them even minutes later.
She took up the clay pot of ash. As she blew the black dust out the window, she took little satisfaction in knowing that, this time, those words would not float back to her.
32
Despite his aching knee, Bhut’s legs moved to an angry beat until the heat within him cooled, and his pace slowed as his mind cleared; he looked up and took note of where he was. Dal-Mandi Chowk. He had to laugh; his body had known him better than he’d known himself. What better remedy to forget something awful than to come to the place where men came to forget themselves? People paced or loitered outside the dancing houses, but most turned away at the sight of the circle officer. Sickly sweet smells of perfume and moldering refuse surrounded him. A curtain shifted in one upper window, scratchy music emerged from another. He bent to rub his knee, and straightening, he heard a surprised intake of breath just behind him.
A sniffling man stood there, his face stained with tears, his eyes wandering over the smart starched pleats in Bhut’s pants and shirt sleeves.
“Ah, here comes the sun,” Bhut said dryly as he looked over that man’s stricken face. “Shouldn’t you be with your moon right about now?”
Raman, that love-sick boatman whose boat had cradled the dead man, was entering Dal-Mandi. The boatman’s obsession with the dancer Chandra was well-known. Money was a prerequisite to wooing his paramour, and for so long his mother’s savings had been the never-ending pool that he’d dipped into again and again. That woman had long maintained a blind eye to her son’s doings, but when he came to her pleading for funds to pay priests to exorcise his boat, the superstitious woman’s eyes opened and her pockets closed. One thing for her son to go about with a dancing girl, but to leave his boat—his livelihood!—unsecured as open prey for drifters and malevolent spirits? That was inexcusable. Now she demanded accounting for every coin she put into her son’s hands. When Raman found himself without money to finance even his ever-worsening beedi habit, let alone the expensive tastes of his Chandra, the dancer had closed her door against him. He continued to visit her famed house every evening, and though continually rebuffed, he believed each night that this time might be different.
“Ji, I was just with her,” he said, which was true in a way.
“What presents for the lucky lady this time?” Bhut pressed. Raman’s frivolous largesse with his dancer was just as storied as his ill-placed affection.
Raman breathed in and made a valiant effort at articulation. “Some ornaments, a strand of flowers.…”
Somehow, Bhut found the presence of this silly fellow to be calming. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few cloves, which he chewed on as he looked at the boatman. He was old enough to be Raman’s father. “You are young still,” he said. “It’s best not to set your heart in only one direction, you understand?”
“Ji.” Raman wagged his head. “Even my Ma has told me this.”
“The wisest man always follows his mother,” Bhut agreed.
“But it is no use. No, ji, only Chandra, only she.”
“Yo
u haven’t seen the world though, nah?”
“Mother has mentioned other girls, yes,” Raman said. His face crumpled. “But who could compare to my Moon?” he moaned.
Bhut was disgusted. Such a man as this, if one could call this weeping sniveling specimen a man to begin with, still had families clamoring to have him as a bridegroom for their daughters. And at his own home, two sisters had sat adrift in their own bitterness for years because no man would deign even to take chai from their hands given their family’s story. He swallowed his bile. He would not think of that, not today. Raman was not to blame. He was a simpleton, yes, but not at fault. The boatman lifted his shirttail to rub his eyes dry. A faint jingle sounded from his pockets. “What’s this?” Bhut asked. He forced a lighter tone. “Some last trinket that couldn’t wait until this evening? Is that why you’ve been straggling back this way?” Raman managed a smile and wagged his head. “Come, come,” Bhut said. “Show me the offering you’ve brought for your goddess.”
Raman could not resist. He pulled the bundle from his pocket and held it for the circle officer to see. “Perfect, ji,” he said with giddy anticipation as he unwrapped the bundle. “See how slender the chains are? Only an equally slender foot could fit these, only feet like hers, ji!” A pair of silver anklets lay coiled on a wrinkled bit of dirty green silk, like a snake gleaming and reborn from its old papery shed skin. “The shine, see the shine!” Raman babbled on. “A piece of the moon for my Moon, nah?”
Bhut stared at the anklets intently. “Where did you get those?” he asked. His voice was just friendly enough for Raman to look up, terrified.
“They were my mother’s,” Raman said.
Bhut looked at him.
“My sister’s!” Raman said.
Bhut looked at him.
“I bought them,” Raman said.
The City of Good Death Page 30