The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  The packet was heavy, but its weight was misleading: a sealed envelope had been rolled and wrapped around a stone. The envelope was shriveled and stiff, like a soaked book left out to dry in the sun. A note was attached, and she recognized the old postmaster’s hand, explaining that the letter had dropped from the mailbag into a crevice behind a desk. It stayed there for many weeks, soaking up all the water from a leaking window. Only when the postmaster’s wife was cleaning did they discover the misplaced piece of mail.

  She could not open the envelope seal without taking some of the paper as well. She slit open one side along its seam with a pen knife but discovered that the letter inside had meshed into a thin slab of paper fibers. Still, she worked the knife as best she could along the folds and creases. The ink had faded in spots and ran down in weepy lines beneath the letters. It was good that Pramesh was occupied downstairs, because Shobha spent the next hour salvaging the scraps, and then arranging and rearranging the ones she was able to read. In the end, what she had was this:

  … who understood …

  … beautiful girl …

  … strong but c …

  … of my own.

  … promised before …

  … so long since …

  … rainy and wh …

  … told him he …

  … kindness?

  Nine pieces, nine fragments of stories that Shobha had no hope of deciphering. But her fingers held fast to the one piece that she valued above all.

  … ister, your Friend,

  Kamna

  ***

  After Bhut left, Mrs. Chalwah took to her bed. Without the ever-present prayer beads, her fingers had nothing to do. Even now, as if they were separately cognizant of that loss, her palsied hands trembled on the blanket that her daughter-in-law had spread over her. The younger woman had offered to sit and read from the worn Gita that always sat on the bedside table—a marked change from her earlier attitude toward her mother-in-law’s devotion, which bordered on derision. “Ma prays as if she is the biggest of sinners,” the older Mrs. Chalwah had often heard the younger say. “As if being in Kashi is not enough; living here, why does she have the need to pray at all?”

  Mrs. Chalwah had not always been so pious, but she’d never bothered to contradict the younger woman. She simply continued to pray because that was the only solace she had. Even then, she wondered if such prayer would be enough when her soul begged passage across the Vaitarani river. One could reach moksha only if they were able to cross that divine waterway, and one could cross only if they’d been given the right words, the words a death in Kashi were guaranteed to provide. Mrs. Chalwah’s fear, the dark knot she refused to acknowledge even to herself, was that at her turn, the great God would have nothing to say to her, no words of passage would be whispered into her ear so that she might cross. Kashi or no, some souls were unfit for the final freedom of moksha.

  “Ma,” her son stood at her door. “I am going over to the bhavan to see what has happened. I may stop at the market as well. Shall I get you anything?”

  She shook her head. She needed nothing, but she knew her son would bring back fruits and fresh coconut water and powders from the pharmacist, as if a simple herbal concoction was all she needed to be herself. She had not been herself for a very long time, and no amount of turmeric or triphala powder would fix that. She wanted a drink of water quite badly, but she bit her dry tongue and returned to the habit of praying. She’d had two sons, but only one remained. This one had chosen his wife himself, and since the day that new daughter-in-law crossed the threshold of her house, Mrs. Chalwah had said not a single word of reproach to her, never an order or demand, certainly no harsh words of criticism. Her reward was that her younger son’s wife paid her no respect, the exasperation heavy in her voice when she spoke of Mrs. Chalwah to others.

  “She must know nothing of anything,” the younger Mrs. Chalwah had often mused to her friends, unaware, or not caring, that her clear voice carried to the older woman’s upstairs sanctuary. “If you ask her for help or advice—nothing. As if she was never responsible for a household in her life. As if she doesn’t know what to do with a daughter-in-law.” How wrong, how utterly and completely mistaken that younger woman was, but who was there to tell her so? Who was left to tell the story of Mrs. Chalwah’s year with her first daughter-in-law? The year she never spoke of, the year with Menaka, wife to her other, now dead, son.

  With what happiness they had brought that girl into their home! After her own husband’s death, Mrs. Chalwah had assumed full responsibility for fixing the marriage. She had never doubted her choice; even as her older son and Menaka made the seven rounds around the wedding fire and garlanded each other with fat joyful marigolds, she’d felt not a single prick of hesitation.

  rs. Chalwah did not think she had been a bad mother-in-law—at least, she had not set out to be one. In the beginning, she had resolved to bite her tongue. Hadn’t she kept quiet when Menaka insisted on sitting by the window, her hands idle, while Mrs. Chalwah was busy at work with the evening meal? Hadn’t she turned a blind eye when the girl again failed to count the pieces of laundry that the dhobi’s boy brought back, when she didn’t see that Mrs. Chalwah’s best-fitting blouse and an embroidered handkerchief gifted by the late Mr. Chalwah were missing? Eventually, she began to complain to her son, but what mother-in-law didn’t do this? She was not unusual in her treatment of Menaka. She was not like the Singhs, who everyone knew were shameless in beating their son’s wife, and who had shut the girl up in the house for a week so that the black eye clouding her face would not be on display for the entire street to see, never mind that the man selling shawls door-to-door had glimpsed that bruised visage and reported it to everyone immediately.

  Bad fortune had the way of moving like a stone tumbling down a hill: its descent only quickened. When Menaka began slipping out night after night; when she lost the baby, the grandchild that Mrs. Chalwah had not been able to hold; when she screamed all the nights thereafter; when the neighbors began to avoid Mrs. Chalwah or to talk to her solely for the pleasure of prying—she had accepted all of it as her lot. Barring leaving the city altogether, there was not much she could do. Her mistake was assuming that the stone had finally halted, had reached the true bottom. Life could not get worse.

  On That Night, however, it did.

  She had followed Menaka out as she left the house. She knew the girl’s sleepwalking footsteps; Mrs. Chalwah herself felt as if she had not slept in months, in years. She knew the routine by now: follow, follow, follow through the streets, don’t lose sight or sound of the girl! Down lanes and past houses, she prayed that no one would look through the windows and see, that no one would step out the door and inquire, even though she knew that they all knew. Of course they did, when that girl insisted on wearing those horrid silver anklets that were a clear warning to all that she was walking in her dreams.

  Down to the ghats, and Menaka took those steps down two at a time as if she were leaping into the arms of a lover rather than hedging close to the black glistening river. If only she were going to a lover, Mrs. Chalwah had thought so many times—such a thing would have been so much easier to manage, so much more ordinary than this bizarre and awful truth. And why did she always have to go so close to the edge, feet dancing about the lapping water, coming closer each time and yet never getting wet?

  That was how it had been before, night after night. But on That Night, that last time—even now she remembered every detail, for she had dissected the scene endlessly, trying to understand what had happened, how that night could have ended so differently. She clearly remembered Menaka lingering on that last step. This had always angered her, this blatant disregard for her own life, as if the girl were forcibly pushing it into Mrs. Chalwah’s hands for safe-keeping. Yet she was asleep, the older woman had seen it for herself during those first shocking nights when she’d held a candle close
to the sleepwalking Menaka’s face, when she’d pricked her hand with a pin, when she’d snapped her fingers next to the girl’s ears and yet still failed to bring her back into this world.

  Why did That Night end so differently? Menaka had done the same dance by the water’s edge before, had come back up the stairs and safely into the lanes hundreds of times with no mishaps. Sometimes, in her memory, Mrs. Chalwah imagined that someone else had been there, because there had been movement, a cough, a step.

  Menaka had been swaying back and forth, back and forth, singing as she sometimes did at the water’s edge. Hari, Hari, I am here. I have come. I am here for you. Her parrot green sari glowed even in that ink-black night. The awful chiming sound that came from her feet! Mrs. Chalwah shuddered even from the safe distance of years, to recall it.

  She had only been a few steps away, watching from a higher level on the stairs. When Menaka did slip, as Mrs. Chalwah had always feared the girl would, the older woman had the time to be quick, to grab one of the slim wrists and pull her back. If only Menaka had not screamed—if only she’d kept quiet! If she’d been silent, Mrs. Chalwah would have had both hands free to drag her son’s wife away from the river, closer to the dry safety of the top steps. Instead, Menaka had screamed at the touch of her mother-in-law’s hand on hers, just as she’d screamed all those times Mrs. Chalwah’s son had tried to come near her after the baby died. Mrs. Chalwah had clamped her hand over Menaka’s mouth while praying hard that no one would hear. The remaining hand had not been strong enough to hold the girl, and Menaka, still screaming, wrenched herself away.

  And so Mrs. Chalwah lost her grip.

  And so her daughter-in-law slipped.

  And so Menaka fell, head meeting the unforgiving stone, soul soon in flight.

  She died with her eyes open, and Mrs. Chalwah had hated her for it. When she was awake, Menaka’s eyes had been as ordinary as any schoolgirl’s: downcast and plain, with little mystery or depth. They had tricked Mrs. Chalwah into thinking the girl was simple and ordinary—wasn’t that what every mother wanted for her son, for her family? Special was simply another way of labeling a girl who was trailed by talk and therefore by scandal. Yet when Menaka was in the thick of her sleepwalking, the look in her eyes spoke of some place that Mrs. Chalwah could not get to, a place she couldn’t comprehend. Now dulled by death, Menaka’s eyes contained a shadow of that place, as if to taunt Mrs. Chalwah that she was there.

  Mrs. Chalwah could do nothing else but flee.

  She’d never told anyone, even as she observed the young Bhut standing and staring outside her house, his hate and despair as tangible as glass shards thrown in her face. She allowed herself tears only once, and that was for her older son. He had loved her, his mother, but he had loved Menaka more. Mrs. Chalwah knew what things the city had whispered about him, about her, she knew how those lies had seeped into her son’s skin, poisoning him from the inside, his hair falling out, his teeth rocking in softened gums, eyes bulging from his hollowed face. The doctors had no advice, so she’d paid to send him away, hoping he could forget Menaka and start a new life, and the city talked about that as well. But when he died, when she received word and, with no body to wash, no ashes to cry over, she performed rites of her own kind at the ghats, the city was indifferent, their mourning akin to what they might feel for a beggar crumpled in an alley corner. She cried then, in her room, but after that, Mrs. Chalwah’s eyes remained dry, her mouth stopped. She remained silent as she heard the false tales that made the rounds. She did not even tell her remaining son what had really happened, and as the years went by she sometimes wondered if she despised him, her own flesh and blood, for his ignorance about the thing she lived with.

  The city didn’t forget about the scandal, but they chose to remember only certain parts, twisted to suit the way they wanted to tell—or hear—the story. The girl, the ghost, green parrots and silver anklets, something strange and abnormal hovering over the things they left out or forgot. But Mrs. Chalwah remembered. Bhut remembered, and his sisters remembered. They were all linked to one person and her passing, and yet none of them could discuss it with the other for fear of the pain of bringing that truth into the open.

  38

  Children, emissaries of mothers who’d learned their husbands’ whereabouts and had sent over hot lunches and dinners in tiffins for their men, streamed into the bhavan and handed their cargo to their fathers, who either took the packages and sent them away with a grunt or bade the little folk to sit and share their meals. Shobha began to serve the priests behind the privacy of the kitchen curtain, which someone had tacked back up into place. Some of the children had brought rolled blankets and pillows, and after eating and washing, the men unfurled this bedding in whatever free corner they could find and reclined or dozed, waiting for the promised moment. Amid the mood of eating and drinking, of bedding down and idle talk, Pramesh could almost fool himself that things were no different from the bhavan in busy times, when families occupied every room and claimed any other available space.

  Shobha prepared a thali for Mohan, which Pramesh carried over. He found his assistant sitting up in bed, a compress placed over the large bump on his head, his face cleaned of blood. The manager wondered who had cleaned it off, wishing he’d been able to do it himself. He handed over the thali of food and sat, not knowing how to begin. The assistant chewed in silence, and when he was done Pramesh fetched a brass lota of water and a basin so that Mohan could wash and rinse his mouth.

  “Too much, Pramesh-ji,” Mohan spoke. “You are doing too much.”

  The manager shook his head, mouth dry. He took the empty thali from Mohan and stacked the lota and basin in corner to take away later. But he didn’t leave. He traced the outside edge of the thali with one finger. “How did he look?”

  “Ji?”

  “When you saw him. How did he look?”

  Mohan flushed. “I didn’t see him, Pramesh-ji. We had so many deaths that day—I tried to make it to the gate in time. He was gone. I saw him walking away, when he was already at the end of the lane.”

  “So you never spoke to him?”

  “No. If I had seen him—I think I would have known, ji, if he looked like a dying man.”

  Pramesh swallowed. “It was my mistake, Mohan-bhai.” Mohan held up his hand, but Pramesh forged ahead. “You have always done your duty. Even when I have not.”

  “I should have run after him,” Mohan said. “I thought it was you at first, walking away from the bhavan. He was so like you. I thought it was a dream, some trick of the light.”

  Pramesh could see it, the straight-backed walk, the long strides. He allowed his heart to ache for a moment, to feel the loss of that meeting. Then he put the feeling aside. “It is done, Mohan-bhai,” he said, the words more for himself than for his assistant. “We won’t speak of it again.”

  The assistant’s door had been damaged in the morning’s madness, but he closed it as far as it would go. He considered sleeping upstairs, but he instead took a bedroll and blanket and settled himself with the men, choosing a spot farthest away from the washroom. When the pots proved to be silent, he did not want to seem as if he had distorted the truth. He would be a neutral observer, an ordinary person who’d experienced something extraordinary.

  All these months, he’d avoided thinking about why Sagar had chosen pots to manifest himself in. He thought of the pot shard that had pierced his back. Fragments scattered on Sagar’s funeral pyre. Other fragments, long ago, scattered at his feet. His hand rose to his eyebrow, massaging the skin. That memory, long suppressed, pulled itself loose, unfurled before him.

  The boys had shared a chore since they were old enough to perform errands on their own: filling the two water pots at the village well each day. Sagar and Pramesh took the clay vessels from their corner in the kitchen, and together they walked to the well at the center of their village. Young girls, sometimes including Jaya, congre
gated around the well, their own earthenware pots gripped against their waists or balanced on their heads in miniature imitations of their mothers or aunts or grandmothers. “Look at the Prasad boys,” they sang out at Sagar and Pramesh’s approach. “Are they boys?” one would say. “But they are acting like girls!”

  Red-faced, shuffling, the cousins would approach the well and fill the pots as quickly as they could. Arms wrapped around their quivering loads, they made their escape, trudging away as fast as their small legs could carry them. “Such a heavy load for a boy—shall one us help?” the girls would cry out in parting. Pramesh and Sagar would feel the blood rise to their necks and ears until they were out of sight of those giggling girls. At least, they each felt but did not say, they did not have to perform the task alone.

  But then their mothers went to bed one night and were seemingly gone the next, the illness made its rounds in the village before moving on, and Pramesh, his breaths still short and labored, watched from the window as Sagar trudged off alone, hauling first one water pot, then returning for the other and repeating his journey.

  “Did they say anything to you?” he always asked when Sagar returned and flopped down on his mat on the other side of the room.

  “No one said anything. The girls pretend I am not there.”

  Pramesh did not believe him, and each day he watched with increasing guilt as Sagar made the two trips. Sometimes, he tired long before Sagar came home and had to lie down again. With each day, however, he strengthened. Soon he was waiting at the door with one pot in his lap, ready to hand it off to his cousin as Sagar traded the full pot for the empty.

  All this time, his father and Sagar’s were either lost in a drunken blackout or off somewhere, anywhere but the house that echoed with the absence of their wives and the presence of their widowed sister. One day, Sagar’s father woke and stumbled to the back veranda, where he spied Pramesh waiting, hugging the empty pot to his hollow chest, his breaths still hot and hoarse. Pramesh felt his uncle staring at him, and he tried to keep still and make himself smaller than the fever had already made him. Finally, he heard the man laugh, and then he left.