The City of Good Death

by Priyanka Champaneri

  “Oh Shobha-behan,” she said laughing, “If you only knew! We tried so many times to guess between us what you had brought for him! He knew from his brother you’d done something. I told him it must have been pura. All these years, he would have been so mad to know I was right.” She laughed, a full peal as pure as the tone of a bell, and Shobha joined her, the two women hunched over their rolling pins.

  They finished the roti and Kavi walked in, setting himself down next to Shobha with an ease that warmed her and made the hollow in her heart ache for Rani. Kamna handed a jar to her, and when she looked inside and smelled the sweetness within, she smiled. She scooped out a chunk of jaggery and placed it in the boy’s palm. “For you,” she said, smoothing the child’s hair. “For being especially good today.”

  ***

  After the evening meal, Pramesh wandered out the back door. Even as the sun set, he continued to stand there. And as the sky darkened and the chorus of insects rose, he felt a small hand on his own, and he looked down to see the boy, Kavi, beckoning him to come inside.

  “Taya, will you tell me a story?” He gestured at the back of the house, where the manager saw the old man waiting near the door. “Nana said you would, if I asked. He said you know different stories from the ones Bapa told.”

  “I don’t think I can remember any,” he said. “I don’t think I have the same memory that your bapa had.” The child released Pramesh’s hand but remained standing there. Pramesh breathed out and looked at the fields, at Sagar’s land. He had accused Sagar of lying to him, yet he knew Sagar would have only told the boy the truth, just as he had only told Pramesh parts of it, to protect him. He thought of what Kamna’s father had said to him about remembering. “Perhaps,” he turned back to Kavi, “if you tell me a story first, I might be able to tell you one back, nah?” He held his hand out to the child to take again.

  “I can tell you about the girls at the well,” Kavi said. “And how they used to laugh at you, and the trick you and Bapa played to get them to stop!”

  The girls, the well.… The child’s words created a hazy picture in Pramesh’s mind: of Sagar filling the pots and then handing Pramesh a pocket-knife to cut the well rope with, of the girls laughing at them and then shrieking as the pot they sent down in the well plummeted to the bottom, the weight snapping the frayed rope.

  “Yes,” Pramesh said, leading the boy back to the house. “Tell me that story first. And then tell me the others.”

  45

  What power did a holy man have? The question occupied Narinder’s thoughts as he sat in the corner of the priests’ quarters with his prayer beads. The mantras had been replaced by circling thoughts. Ever since that failed tripindi shraddha, the gates in his mind had collapsed, like the ones formerly protecting the bhavan. All the hidden fears and doubts that he’d always kept at bay now crept in and drowned out the holy words he’d fed his mind on for so long.

  And the bhavan, that place of refuge that his soul thrived in, now wearied him. His heart felt smothered at the sight of the open hole where the gate once was, of the people sleeping outside in bedrolls on the street, of those crowds standing two men deep, trying to look over each other’s shoulders for open room where none existed. In the few days that the manager and his wife had been gone, a constant stream of people arrived.

  He closed his eyes and felt for his prayer beads. He grasped one wooden bead between his thumb and forefinger, ready to push it aside for the next, when he felt Mohan at his side. “Something has happened,” the assistant said with cautious quiet. Indeed, the entire bhavan, which had taken on the atmosphere of a raucous tree of monkeys or a common guest-house, was still. Narinder followed the assistant out of the room and found all eyes focused on a family who’d overtaken the center of the courtyard.

  “Dead,” Mohan said. “Their young man, the son. Just some minutes ago. Loknath checked as well, after I confirmed it.” He spoke the last sentence with loud deliberation.

  Narinder squeezed the assistant’s shoulder and strode forward. He leaned down and checked the man’s wrist. The veins were slack, the hand he held to the young man’s nose came away cold. “Dev,” he called, and the younger priest poked his head out of Sheetal’s room, where he’d kept up a constant stream of mantras at the feet of the boy’s still lingering father. Without asking, he fetched the things that Narinder would need. The family cried silently. The women covered their faces while the men sat on their haunches and rocked back and forth in a listless rhythm. The man was young, barely nineteen. He’d arrived with a large and bulbous lump beneath his jaw that made it impossible for him to eat. His mother and aunt had spoon-fed him lentils cooked to a melting softness and fruits mashed into pulp. The pain must have been terrible; his body was emaciated and he’d moaned when anything touched his skin.

  Narinder changed into a clean white dhoti. He emerged from the priest’s quarters with his prayer beads and a brass lota of river water. He stood over the body, ready to pronounce the mantras and sprinkle the corpse with water. “Om—”

  A piercing shriek interrupted him. One of the crying women moved to cover the body with hers, her arms creating a protective barrier between the dead man and Narinder. “You will not!” she sobbed. “We have come so far, you will not take his last chance from him!” A fistful of holy water dripped from Narinder’s upraised hand, and one of the surrounding men quickly moved the dead man’s leg away from the falling drops. The water fell to the ground, and Narinder took an instinctive step back to avoid stepping on that holy substance.

  “Narinder-ji knows the proper way to send the soul onward,” Mohan intervened. He knelt next to the man’s father. “You must let him continue so that your son receives a proper end.”

  “No one is to touch my son. No one, you hear?” The man threw Mohan’s hand from his shoulder. His mustache bristled; his eyes scanned the crowd with a crazed paranoia. He pushed his clinging wife aside and gathered his son in his arms. All eyes followed him as he walked with the withered body toward the washroom. Just inside, he laid the body down with care. He straightened the limbs, stroked the disfigured cheek. He squatted next to his son and glared outward.

  Narinder released the water in his fist back into the brass lota. He curled his prayer beads around his hands and returned to the priests’ quarters, Mohan following behind. “Narinder-ji, don’t listen to them. Complete the rites as you always do. They are country people; they must not realize how these things go.” Narinder said nothing. The assistant lingered at the door before turning back to the full room. They both knew that neither of them had any purpose there. The man did not want death rites for his son. He wanted what the washroom could give him. He was waiting for the pots to sing.

  ***

  “There is something bothering you,” Bhut’s wife said. The circle officer had been silent for many days. He occasionally went to his office, but mostly he stayed sitting in the kitchen with his wife and sisters.

  His sisters had tolerated this for a day, but soon the older one could not hold her tongue. “A man in the kitchen with the women. In his uniform, no less. Or perhaps I am wrong; is it truly a man? Or perhaps still a boy, even after all these years?” She had been sifting through a pan of black lentils as she spoke, and the tray was almost free of stones and ready for soaking, but it never got its chance. Bhut rose, ripped the pan from her hands, and threw it across the room. He then resumed his seat on a stool. His sister sat frozen, palms still upright from holding the pan. Then she lowered her hands and seemed to shrink within herself. She did not look at Bhut, nor did her sister.

  “Did you know?” he asked. The question had been burning him from the inside for days. “Did you know she walked in her sleep? Did she do it before she was married, when we were children?”

  Neither of his sisters blinked; neither moved. A slow and deathly sigh escaped from his second sister. His older sister’s mouth quivered. Two tears left her eyes and
ran rivulets down her cheeks to the corners of her mouth. “We always thought she would grow out of it,” she whispered. “Ma, Bapa … they thought marriage.…” Her voice faded, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

  That was all the answer Bhut needed.

  His wife knew the signs, and she kept out of his way and warned their children to stay clear of their father. He would not receive any of his deputies, who’d come to the house several times, and who reported back to the station that the man was ill and would not be back for some days. Formerly a restless man, Bhut now remained still. His mind, however, was active. He thought only of Mrs. Chalwah’s story. And the part that troubled him, the thing he could not figure out, was how was it possible that after all these years, when he laid her version on top of the version he’d always known to be correct and connected the joints between where his story ended and hers began; how was it that those two versions fit together perfectly, as if both were equally true?

  46

  The hours ticked by. Children tossed in their beds. Men rubbed bloodshot eyes. Women rolled prayer beads between their fingers and recited the mantras over and over. Night fell. The hours passed; the children still tossed; men stared sightless at the walls; women trembled and prayed.

  Midnight struck. The man sitting at the washroom door adjusted the shawl he’d flung around his shoulders. He’d spread a blanket across his son’s shrunken chest. His own mind was blank. Two hours remained.

  ***

  Bhut had not intended to come to Magadha. He had not intended to go anywhere, in fact, but the combination of a still body and racing mind had driven him mad over the past few days. His family avoided him, even his youngest daughter, his favorite, had flinched when her hand accidentally brushed his during the evening meal. The sight of his sisters disgusted him. His house felt filled with a poisonous air that took him many hours of thinking to identify.

  Lies. The house—once his childhood home, now his adult dwelling—was full of lies. He smelled it in the bedding, in his clothes, on the cotton towel his wife brought for him to dry his hands on. The sisters reeked. Even the food stank of lies, so much so that he’d spit out a mouthful of eggplant and roti during the evening meal, right on the brass plate with the rest of his uneaten dinner. In that moment, even his wife seemed terrified of him. Her hands trembled when she brought the brass lota that he demanded; she looked away as he gargled and spat out the window to rid the taste from his mouth. The action was useless: the water carried the same stink, as did all the vessels in the house.

  That was when he’d left. He stopped at the first chaat stand he saw and ordered two bowlfuls, neither of which carried the smell. He ate quickly, only to fill the aching cavern of his stomach. Then, he walked. “Officer-sahib! Oh, Officer-sahib!” Someone spotted him, but Bhut ignored the call. He walked for hours, the low ache in his knee fast growing into a burning throb, then a sharp pain that felt like glass scraping the bone. Still he pushed on, his footsteps leading the way as night fell and blackness blinded him. By the time his legs brought him to the ghats and down to the river, the hour was late.

  He knew why he was here. Menaka—his Mini—had taken her last steps here, had danced on this ghat. What was she thinking? What Hari had she been so eager to see? He thought of her body, sprawled out on the stone. He stretched out on the ledge to see how it must have felt, groaning as he straightened his legs, unmindful of the straggling folk who tittered at him. Had she lost all feeling by then? Had her soul fled instantly, or was it instead a slow and dreadful pull from the body?

  The cold seeped up from the hard surface and pierced his skin. His skull ached. Sleep came slowly, but it came. Once, in his dream, he thought someone was yelling at him. Bhut-sahib, get up! Bhut-sahib, you must not rest here! But when he woke, the sky was black, the stars had been blotted out, and he was alone. Mini was not here; this was the spot where her soul had fled, and in spite of the stories that warned otherwise, she had not returned.

  But the land of ghosts waited on the other side of the river.

  It was hard work moving against the grain of the current, and the boat traveled a diagonal path. His arms pumped, his heart heaved; several times he had to stop, and then the river carried the boat further downstream, further down Magadha’s shore. At last, the boat bumped up against the cursed place. He stepped onto the hard sand searching for—what? He did not know.

  Mini-behan, your little brother has come. Chhoto-bhai has come. He was searching not for a thing, but for the spirit of a person who had lived, because for what other reason do you come to Magadha? Mini-behan—why did you never tell me?

  He remembered her sitting in his room. She shared a space with their other sisters, but those two often squabbled, and in those times Mini sought him out. He would sit at his desk, drawing with the colored pencils their father had given him. She would sit on his bed and run her slim fingers over the thick braid of her hair. Her eyes were always on something he could not see. “Did you know,” she’d say, looking away from the window or waking from her dream, “that a dog visits the house two lanes over sometimes, and every time he visits, someone in that house falls ill?”

  “How do you know that?”

  She laughed, a laugh of pure amusement, pure joy. “You will be smarter than me, one day, Chhoto-bhai,” she said as she returned her eyes to the world outside the window. “But not today, not yet.”

  Mini-behan, who was this Hari? “When you marry, will I still see you? Will you visit?”

  “Every day, Chhoto-bhai. Even in your dreams, you will see me.” She seemed to him then the most marvelous thing in the world; this girl, this dreaming woman who was his sister.

  Mini-behan, you lied. I never see you. I look and look, but you never come.

  The night blended in with the river, and the sacred city across the water made a strip of light between the two blacknesses. They’d dressed her as a bride and given her to a man; they’d dressed her as a bride again and given her to the Ganges. What was the difference? Everyone seemed to know what happened to a person dying a good death in Kashi. No one would say what happened to his sister.

  “Mini-behan,” his voice cracked, his breathing labored, his chest tight. “Where are you?”

  The night made no reply.

  ***

  Not much time remained. The steps to the lower level of the house were much steeper than Mrs. Chalwah remembered, the concrete hard and unforgiving. No matter. She had given up comfort long ago. She gingerly bent her knees and sat on the topmost step, rested, then moved forward and down until she hit the next step. The shock of movement vibrated through her body. She had learned to navigate staircases in this way when she was a child. Then, she’d used the same method to go up the staircase; now, she was going down, in one of the last acts she would take. There was satisfaction in such symmetry.

  She did not know how long it took to reach the bottom, but no one in the house woke. On the ground floor, the old woman breathed out the great God’s name and tried to stand. With the wall’s support, she managed it, her back curved forward.

  Once standing, she walked in a shuffling gait, her steps slow enough to be quiet, her hand on the door equally silent. In the street, the night air enveloped her, and she breathed in deeply. The smell was different from what she could glean sitting by the open window, but it was also familiar. It smelled of That Night: dark and rich with dirt and river and stone, but tinged sweet with the perfume of some evening flower.

  The journey was slow, but she enjoyed it. The world seemed to her reborn, though she could hardly see for the dark and her own diminishing eyesight. She crossed lanes she’d journeyed through as a child, a schoolgirl, a maiden, then a married woman. The ribbons her mother had tied on her braids came from a stall that once lingered down that side street. Her father had worked as an office clerk in a building a few lanes over. She remembered seeing him walking home, his stride so familiar that she cou
ld pick him out from a crowd of men when she watched from an upstairs window. There was the neighbor’s house where her future husband had first seen her; she’d carried her older son to that shop over there for his school uniform. Every Diwali she’d bought boxes of sweets from the shop that she now passed, and she brushed her fingers against the windows, as if to conjure up that time, those smells, the happy crackle of butter paper, the sweets tucked into boxes like an array of sugar-soaked jewels.

  Onward, to places she had rarely traveled. In the pitch dark of an alley she tripped over some discarded boxes, and when she leaned against the wall for support her sari was instantly wet and cold, soaked through with whatever foul liquid the building was awash in. Her head ached. She was chilled and could no longer understand the scents she took in or the sights before her eyes. But she continued; she knew she was nearing her destination.

  At last, she arrived. Everything was as they said it would be: the soil felt different beneath her feet, the air was thinner in her lungs. She found a spot of earth and crumpled slowly to the ground, like an oil wick depleted of all its fire.

  She had always maintained that she was a fair woman. Even in those beginning days after it happened, when women would see her and turn away, when schoolchildren would run alongside her and sing awful songs in their high-pitched voices, through all of this, she remained firm in the person she was. Things had occurred in her life that had not been in her control, and she had done the best she could.

  This, at least, was in her control. This death, this end. She knew what she wanted. All those years of watching the bhavan—she’d envied those folk who filed into the building and died their good deaths, never to return. She could not allow herself that same, exalted fate. The act of unburdening herself to the circle officer had cleared the path for her. Perhaps she had wronged Menaka—she did not know, and it was not for her to decide. If she had, at least now that girl would have a chance at balancing the scales. That was why she had been so careful with the spot she’d chosen, careful about where her skin touched the ground. Every part of her lay outside the holy city. Outside of Kashi, Mrs. Chalwah ensured that she would die and come back. Outside of Kashi, she submitted herself to whatever fate in rebirth the laws of karma promised. And if fate decided to reincarnate her in a position that helped Menaka avenge herself, so be it. Perhaps Kashi would be hers in the life after that. Perhaps not.