The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  “What did they say?” Pramesh asked when Sagar came back and reached for the empty pot. “The girls?”

  “You are like an old woman, asking that question over and over,” Sagar said. Pramesh felt like an old woman, or at least like an elderly person whose body is as useless as a puppet with broken strings. Sagar saw his face. “Nothing,” he said as he turned back for his second trip. “They always say nothing.”

  “At least Jaya isn’t here,” Pramesh said. “You don’t have to worry about her seeing you.” Her parents forbade her from visiting that summer, lest she catch the same fever. Pramesh didn’t say so, but he missed her chatter. He thought Sagar missed her, too.

  The next day, Pramesh was again waiting on the back veranda. This time, he recognized his father’s footsteps behind him, and he froze and shrank within himself. Here, at least, was the one vestige of his old life that remained unchanged: fear was his and Sagar’s old friend, and the fever had not driven it away.

  “Sitting, all day? While the other one does the work?” Pramesh knew better than to say anything. His heart drummed a manic beat in his chest. Sweat beaded his brow. “Sitting,” his father said again, “Such idleness, when we give you food, when you have clothes? When after all this, you … you.…”

  You are the one still alive, Pramesh completed the sentence in his head. His father’s words were garbled and halting and a sickening stench emanated from his person. He saw a small form walking toward the house, Sagar returning, and his heart lifted. He willed his father to grow bored, but the man did not leave. Sagar came closer to the house, and he kept his eyes on Pramesh until soon he was setting the full pot down on the veranda and taking the empty. But Pramesh’s father was quicker.

  “Take it,” he commanded, thrusting the pot at Pramesh. “Take it to the well and fill it. You have rested long enough; you are no weaker than this one.”

  Pramesh had no choice. He grasped the pot, cool to the touch. He avoided his father’s eyes. “I can do it,” Sagar protested.

  “Yes, he can do it,” Sagar’s father said, suddenly emerging from whatever dark corner of the house he’d used to sleep off his delirium. His face had an amused expression. He laughed and disappeared back into the house.

  “Go,” Pramesh’s father said, ignoring them all.

  And so Pramesh began to walk, and he soon heard two pairs of footsteps behind him: one loud and unsteady, the other quick and light. He concentrated on this second pair, Sagar’s, and felt the rhythm match his own ragged breaths. Everything ached. His legs felt like the bones had dissolved and left nothing to hold up the flesh surrounding them. But he could not stop. He knew the price of stopping.

  Halfway to the well, he collapsed and vomited. His head was bursting; his limbs burned. He sat on the bare earth, still clutching the pot, while Sagar hovered near him and his father stood behind him, saying nothing, offering no reprieve. When his cousin tried to take the empty pot, the man slapped the boy away. Pramesh got up again and wobbled, light-headed, but he set one foot in front of the other.

  They arrived at the well. Small comfort that Sagar was right: the girls were still there, waiting, but they turned their heads and hid their mouths behind their hands, retreating to a nearby tree and pretending not to watch. At that moment, Pramesh wished they would say something, anything, to break the silence. Somehow, he hooked the pot to the rope; somehow, he lowered the pot into the watery depths. And then he pulled, and the weight below was too much, and he was gasping as he held onto the rope, in danger of being dragged down after the pot.

  Sagar was there to grab the rope, to allow Pramesh to sink to the ground while he pulled up with practiced hands and retrieved the full pot. They both waited, fear sour on their tongues, for Pramesh’s father to again swat Sagar away. But he said nothing and only watched the two boys with eyes that did not seem to see. Sagar unhooked the pot and began to lift it to his head.

  “Take it,” Pramesh’s father said. The disgust in his voice sounded all the way to the girls by their tree, and they huddled closer to each other, eyes flicking from the well to each other. “Take it,” he said again, and the fear in Pramesh’s stomach exploded into a poison that washed over his insides. His trembling hands, slick with sweat, took the pot from Sagar. The weight was incredible. He tried to bend and create a perch on his head for his cousin to set the pot upon. He could not do it. He instead grasped the vessel, his arms too short to go all the way around, and he struggled to stand. Nausea overcame him, and he had a distinct sensation of fading, as if he were an old chalk outline like the ones he and Sagar sketched in the dirt of their front yard, sometimes with Jaya, and then ran their fingers through, blurring the shapes.

  Left to himself, he could not have walked more than five paces without collapsing with his burden. Sagar could see that, and he tried to pull the pot from his cousin’s hands. Pramesh would not let go. He observed his father’s eyes and saw, beneath the many layers of drunken fog, a spark of revulsion. In those seconds, he was determined to do this impossible thing, to carry this pot all the way home without losing a single drop. But Sagar’s temper broke. He grabbed for the pot again, and in the struggle the pot slipped, and the clay shattered into several large pieces at their drenched feet.

  A large shard bounced off the ground and landed at Pramesh’s father’s feet, like an offering of appeasement. He bent to pick it up. There was genuine curiosity in his face as he examined it, as if he had forgotten why he was even there. He looked up at the boys staring at him, at the well, and then at the audience of girls. And then, with a speed that belied his befuddlement, he flung the sharp piece of pottery straight at the boys’ heads.

  If Pramesh had been quicker, could he have stepped in front of his cousin or reached a hand out to shield them both? If he had been stronger, could he have pushed Sagar out of the way and taken his place? If he had been anything than what he was at that moment, would that have been enough? Sagar stumbled back, lost his footing, and fell. The sharpest part of the clay buried itself into Sagar’s right eyebrow, cleaving it in two. He reached up and knocked it away, and then the blood poured like rain. Tears, which Sagar had once shed only at night, sprung from his eyes and coated his cheeks; sobs gurgled out of him, chest heaving as he tried to breathe. There was a jingle of anklets, urgent on the packed earth, and the sound faded and then returned. One of the girls had run for her mother, who swooped over Sagar and held the end of her sari to his head while she led him to her home to be tended to, Pramesh following. Just before they all disappeared into the woman’s house, he turned to see where his father was. The man had not even waited to see which house the boys entered. His back was turned, small puffs of dust springing up beneath his steps.

  The village barber set careful stitches into the skin and closed the gash. When the boys returned home late that night, the stitched wound swollen and angry on Sagar’s forehead, their aunt seemed shaken, and her eyes were lit with a fire Pramesh had never seen before. But she said nothing. When the boys sat down to eat across from the Elders, Pramesh’s father stared at his food, his face hard. But Sagar’s father took one look at his son and barked out a laugh. He slapped his brother’s back, the gesture as devoid of camaraderie as his mocking voice.

  It took years for Pramesh to understand that moment, years to see the meaning behind the cruelty. Years to understand that the laugh was the same as his uncle saying, See? My boy even takes a beating better than yours.

  The hours ticked by. Some of the men dozed, woke, forgot where they were and what their errand was, then dozed again. Some remained awake, flicking matches or twigs between their fingers, staring up into the night sky. Some fell into dreamless sleep, as if they were in their own homes. Pramesh stayed awake out of habit. More memories visited him. He gazed at the washroom, and in the blackness behind the open door he saw two boys, twins.

  Sagar and Pramesh, gathering fallen peepal leaves and giggling as they held them
to their lips and blew, each trying to push their leaves further in flight than the other.

  Midnight came and went.

  Sagar, coming home with the day’s lesson and then scowling when he saw Pramesh was already months ahead on his own time.

  An hour into the new day.

  Pramesh and Sagar marking out the new field boundaries, and Sagar scolding Pramesh for paying more attention to daydreams than work.

  Minutes until the fatal hour. The men were all up now, shaken awake by their neighbors or the general hum of noise. Dev and Loknath had gathered by their door, and even Narinder was alert.

  “Two hours past midnight, wasn’t it? Two hours past?”

  The seconds ticked by, and the hour arrived. Pramesh held his breath.

  “Where is it? Where is the sound?”

  The washroom was silent. The pots were still.

  “The washroom, you said?”

  “Two hours past?”

  “Quiet, all of you! Perhaps it is happening. Perhaps we are not listening hard enough.”

  The minutes died away. Somewhere in the bhavan, water dripped. The men leaned forward, breathing as one, straining to see and hear what they’d devoted the day and night to.

  “Is this a game? I hear nothing.”

  “That tapping? Is that it?”

  Narinder stepped into the moonlight. He did not smile or frown. “I told you that the ghost moved on. You can see it is so. You have your proof, men of Kashi. Now what will you do?”

  These men had already argued with him once that day, but none had the stomach to argue with a priest twice. The crowd, so filled with purpose just hours ago, felt their energy drain. They had sought something special; coming to terms with the mundane was a slow and difficult process.

  Narinder’s voice should have been the final word. A different voice, however, changed everything.

  “The doctor, has he left? Is he still here?” Shobha stood in the kitchen doorway, the curtain shoved aside with one trembling hand. She had not bothered to cover her head, and she repeated the question, voice betraying the slightest quaver, eyes looking everywhere. She did not seem to care that the men either stared openly or looked away and smiled amongst themselves, embarrassed at her lack of modesty. Pramesh stood and found her eyes, and a chill rippled across his skin. “She is almost completely still. The fever is worse. She is so hot to the touch! I don’t know what to do.”

  The doctor was still there, and both he and the manager pushed forward through the men. “Rani?”

  Shobha nodded. She echoed her husband and breathed her daughter’s name into the air. “Rani.”

  Like thunder, like an ocean churning, like the Earth shifting—from the depths of the washroom, at the bhavan mistress’s signal, the pots erupted with the noise that the men had all been waiting to hear.

  She had wanted something for as long as she could remember. Something she could not articulate or even understand.

  At night, her feet led her. When she woke, she wondered what her heart had yearned after, but no one would tell her. In the morning, she picked the stones from her bare soles and searched her heart to see if the need was gone, if her wanderings had been satisfied. She assumed that was why she walked in her sleep: to seek the thing she could not identify while awake. Nothing changed; the sun set; she left her bed and searched anew; she returned and awoke and still the hole remained. Sometimes, her mind would slide into a waking dream, and she thought she remembered this thing that was so vital, so necessary to her being.

  A family? No: she had a family, parents and siblings, a full childhood but for the emptiness that followed her everywhere, that she understood she would have to one day fill. Marriage? She expected this to be the answer, and yet felt no different the day after, a month later. This man who was to be one half of her soul was the piece she tried to fit into that hole, that want, but he would not go.

  When her belly swelled, she remained in her bed through the night. A child, she decided. She’d been waiting for a child, and she was relieved to know that the hole—a gaping maw that grew bigger and deeper, that seemed to suck at her insides like an insatiable whirlpool—would be filled. The weight of the one she carried would drive her feet into this life, this world, like an iron post pounded deep into the ground.

  But then the child died, and the hole widened to a chasm. How would she fill it now? The child hadn’t been the answer. What need was there to try for another? She pushed away her husband, pushed away her life, always searching, unable to find relief.

  One night, she woke and found herself on the ghats. This had never happened; always she’d slept through the paces of her feet. She felt the chilled night air on her face, felt the river open itself before her. Despite the black ink of night, she followed the smooth currents with her eyes. She looked closer—there was something new there, or perhaps it was something old, something she’d never bothered to notice.

  Each drop of water followed the next, jostling against its brethren, hurrying after some unnamed goal. All of them, intent on something, traveling from such far-off places, some reaching their goal, some not.

  That was it. She was like those droplets. She had been following this thing, this need, for many lifetimes. And so had everyone else around her—they simply didn’t know it as she did. If she did not find the answer now, she would find it in the next life, and if not then, with the one after. On and on, the hole would follow her. But there was also this: She was bound to fill it, one day.

  The relief was immense. She’d comprehended something at last, and that was enough solace to bring a smile to her lips. She was ill-suited to this life, but she felt she only had to wait. She would go back home, play her part as assigned, run out the hours and years on her clock. Her joy sent her running up the steps, then back down again, the light jingle of her anklets sending sparks of happiness into her heart. She repeated the steps, a dance on the stone. The river caught her eye. Back down she ran, then further still to touch her feet to the water, to show the river she understood, her toes reaching to feel the cool the wet the—

  Part V

  39

  All of Kashi swelled with one new thing.

  In the apartments above the chaatwallah’s establishment: “Wrap him in many blankets. And if anyone asks, tell him the doctors have advised us to get him into the air.”

  At the top of the old Singh bungalow: “Wait until we come back to tell the Kapurs. The place is filling up. We must make sure there is a spot for Dhani.”

  Behind the closed doors of a fabric shop: “Yes, I saw it with my own eyes. I heard it as well. The stories are true. It is the miracle we prayed for. We mustn’t delay.”

  For a week, the building contained those who came, but then a newspaper featured a story about this former Death Bhavan turned Life Bhavan. The article included a detailed account of the local legend of Magadha and the tragic consequences for all the men who had gone there, seeking the Bearer. It ended with a quote from the prominent ghaatiyaa Kishore Chandne, whose praise of the bhavan’s newfound properties ended with an endorsement: “Why chance a journey to Magadha when the dying can come and find new life here?”

  This was all the revenge the ghaatiyaa took on Pramesh, but it was enough.

  People came from everywhere; the rooms filled, the walkway gave refuge to squatters, and in the courtyard people spread out throws or used their clasped palms as pillows. Mohan’s room and Pramesh’s office became prime territory snatched up by two families who always left someone to guard the space lest others attempt to poach the rooms. Shobha’s kitchen, once protected and organized with such pride, was raided for its pans and pots and spices. The upstairs bedroom was the jewel of the place, hotly discussed, but no one managed to pick the lock, a testament to the new key plate from Thakorlal. Few were Banarasis; most were strangers to the city, and these folk shared the stories of all the other places the
y had tried before hearing of the bhavan and its miraculous healing properties.

  “The linga outside of that village? Yes, I have been there. Also the banyan tree where you tie the red fabric.”

  “Holy water mixed with honey. Every day, for ten days. And it did nothing, nothing.”

  “He said she would have to sleep in the same room with him, and his presence would leech out the illness. But our only daughter, in the same room as this baba? He took us for fools, so when we heard of this place—”

  In the beginning, Pramesh had tried to reason with them. “You must understand, there is no more room. We have people even where no people should be, two families in every room, and the entire courtyard occupied.”

  “There is always room,” whoever was at the doorway huffed, and shoved past Pramesh with no further regard for the manager’s authority. Pramesh allowed each by. What else could he do? What difference could one more make?

  The bhavan was a mass of people. There was relief during the day, when some folk left to procure supplies or take the air, but during the night, everyone sprawled out on blankets across every available inch of space, creating a carpet of people stretching from the open entryway to the priest’s quarters. Only the washroom remained empty, out of fear that human interference might dampen the specter’s power. They gave the pots a wide swath of space even as they sent their injured, ill, and dying, their stricken, cursed, and feeble folk into this bhavan that promised to bring those loved ones back to a state closer to living than dead. Each day, they bickered and prayed and cooked and prayed and ate and prayed. At night, they waited for the hour when the ghost would make its presence known. After that initial miss on the day the mob broke down the gates, the pots returned to sounding at two hours past midnight.