The City of Good Death Read online

  Winner of the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing

  Judges’ Citation

  The City of Good Death is an expansive novel about the proprietor of a death hostel, Pramesh, in India’ s sacred city of Banaras, where Hindus come to die a holy death, and the sweeping journey of discovery he embarks upon after finding his cousin and childhood best friend drowned in the Ganges. Priyanka Champaneri beautifully explores the sacred and the afterlife in this cinematic and emotionally gripping work about living and dying with dignity.

  A first-generation immigrant who was born and raised in the United States, Champaneri draws on her personal navigation of identity and culture, reconciling her Indian heritage and Hindu faith with her Western upbringing. The City of Good Death confronts family, religion, and belonging in ways that reflect Champaneri’s cultural dualities. It’s a novel full of compassion, as Champaneri deftly navigates Pramesh’s relationships with his dying patrons as he himself struggles to understand the ramifications of his cousin’s death. Introducing readers to an unforgettable cast of characters who all cross paths in Pramesh’s hostel on this holy pilgrimage, this ambitious novel offers readers a unique insight into the Hindu concepts of the afterlife and the sacred, and the universally recognizable desire for empathy and understanding.

  —Téa Obreht and Ilan Stavans

  The City of Good Death

  A Novel

  Priyanka Champaneri

  Restless Books

  Brooklyn, New York

  uncorrected proof • not for sale

  check with publisher before quoting for review

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents herein are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 Priyanka Champaneri

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

  without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  First Restless Books hardcover edition June 2020

  Hardcover ISBN: 9781632062529

  Galley ISBN: 9781632062550

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957750

  Cover design by adam b. bohannon

  Cover lettering by Patrick Knowles

  Cover photo by Adnan Abidi © Reuters. Used by permission.

  Set in Garibaldi by Tetragon, London

  Printed in Canada

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Restless Books, Inc.

  232 3rd Street, Suite A101

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.restlessbooks.org

  [email protected]

  We all owe death a life.

  —Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

  The wave behind calls to the forward waves, “I will not let you go.”

  No one listens to the call and no one heeds.

  —Rabindranath Tagore, trans. Humayun Kabir

  Characters

  Residents of Shankarbhavan, a death hostel:

  Pramesh: the hostel manager

  Shobha: Pramesh’s wife

  Rani: Pramesh and Shobha’s three-year old daughter

  Dharam: Shobha’s father, the former hostel manager

  Mohan: the manager’s assistant

  Narinder: the head priest

  Loknath and Dev: junior priests

  Sheetal: a teenage guest of the hostel who cares for his dying father

  Residents of Kashi:

  Mrs. Mistry: elderly neighbor and friend of Shobha

  Mrs. Gupta: neighbor of Mrs. Mistry and Shobha

  Bhut: circle officer (deputy superintendent) at

  Dashashwamedh

  Police Station

  Raman: a love-sick boatman

  Maharaj: resident vagrant and drunk

  Thakorlal: a metal shop owner and illegal purveyor of homebrew

  Mrs. Chalwah: elderly widow living across the street from the

  bhavan

  Kishore: a prominent ghaatiyaa (river priest)

  Pramesh’s family:

  Sagar: Pramesh’s cousin, often referred to as his ‘twin’

  Kamna: Sagar’s wife

  The Elder Prasads: brothers who are the fathers of Pramesh and

  Sagar

  The Mothers: Pramesh and Sagar’s mothers

  Bua: Pramesh and Sagar’s widowed paternal aunt

  Characters

  Pramesh’s home village:

  Jaya: childhood friend of Pramesh and Sagar

  Champa: neighbor of Pramesh and Sagar

  Hardev: farmer and husband of Champa

  Divya: daughter of Champa and Hardev

  Nattu: goat herder

  The City of Good Death

  Prologue

  For ten years, since he arrived in this city, Pramesh followed a morning routine. Wake before the sun’s ascent. Walk to the ghats. Descend the aged stone steps to dip into a river even more ancient. Bathe, breathe in gulps of morning air, make his salutations to the great God. Only then, as he walked back to his home—to his hostel, his wife, his child—could his day truly begin. Only then did he feel part of the current of life that hummed through the city’s streets, vibrating up from the ground, and surrender to the flow of hours, days, and years along with the other denizens of Kashi. They said this was the city where time did not exist, and on most mornings he truly believed it, that here, in this holiest of cities, he was suspended without past or future, no story trailing behind him and none unfurling ahead.

  But this was a lie. He had a past. And sometimes, in the middle of his morning prayers, with the water dripping from his shoulders and into the waist-high river, or when haggling in the woodcutter’s lane over a bed or chair for the hostel, or even while rocking his daughter to sleep, a voice would rise out of his memories and remind him of the thing he had allowed himself to forget.

  You cannot go without me. You cannot leave me behind.

  There is one place in Kashi that everyone avoids. It is easy to find: walk to Mir ghat, descend those stone steps. Push through the crowds of people and drift toward the right as you go down, down, down. Stop just as you reach the final step before the stone dips into the river, and mark the place where the ground is clean, where the stone seems newly carved next to the worn and crumbling rock surrounding it. Even better: sit some paces away and watch. See how all folk avoid stepping there, how even those in deep throes of gossip or prayer direct their feet elsewhere. The youngest children know to jump over that clean stone; men cross on tip-toe; and women take the widest circle around it, hems held in hands so that no single thread of their saris will touch that cursed spot. Most don’t question why they cannot cross. They obey an internal order, the action as instinctive as turning the ear toward the sound of a new story.

  But for those who do know, who never come near that place without the great God’s name on their lips, the reason is absolute: a ghost wanders there. A woman swollen with child crossing that path might suddenly find her belly hollow. Men setting a wrong foot begin to weep without control. Careless children lose their smiles or the ability to speak. Old folk lose their sight or the last of their senses.

  There is no pattern, no rhyme or reason to the ghost’s actions—simply its thirst for malice. The only thing common to these tales of calamity is what you hear, what you see just before the spirit is upon you.

  The chime of silver anklets.

  A song that the wind winn
ows down to a sob.

  And the rustle and flash of silk, of a parrot green that glows in the night.

  Part I

  1

  When the boatmen found the body in the river, they should have thought nothing of it. There was nothing unusual in steering past floating arms and blackened buttocks, in putting an oar into the river and having to reposition it when you found a soot-streaked foot barring your way. Everyone knew the Doms were cheap folk with no respect for proper funeral rites, greedy for the few rupees they might save by snuffing a pyre before the fire had claimed an entire body, dumping the charred corpse into the river, and selling the half-burnt wood to another gullible family too grief-stricken to know the difference.

  The two boatmen had been out early, before the veil of morning fog lifted from the river. They shared a boat, one man at each end, and passed a bottle between them. They steered themselves to the middle of the river, to a spot shrouded in dense fog between the holy city of Kashi and the cursed far shore called Magadha.

  Their spot was well chosen. Every man in Kashi knew three basic facts: dying in the holy city promised freedom from rebirth, bathing in the Ganges washed away the sins of a lifetime, and dying on Magadha guaranteed that you would come back as one of the lowest of the low, a donkey destined to bear burdens and insults until a merciful death started the cycle anew. Here, the two boatmen hid their early morning libations from Kashi’s wandering tongues even as they kept a firm hand on the oars when the boat threatened to drift over to the cursed land. They sat and passed the bottle in silence, comfortable in a cocoon of mist, and they would have remained that way for some time if not for the interloper looming quietly in the distance.

  An empty boat emerged from the fog and floated with unhurried purpose toward them. It thudded against the side of their craft and bobbed in a gentle rise and fall against the current, as if breathing, and the two men looked at it as they continued to pass the bottle, which they soon emptied. One boatman grabbed the side of the empty vessel and hoisted himself in while his friend held their own boat steady.

  “This is Raman’s boat,” the first said as he rummaged through the scattered belongings. He held up a packet of mango beedis, which Raman was famously partial to, a pocket knife, a ball of jute twine, a glass bottle, some plastic envelopes of chewing tobacco.

  “Anything in the bottle?” his friend asked. The bottle was as empty as their own, but the beedis were excellent consolation, and the two men shared the packet, musing over Raman’s negligence in allowing his boat to wander. The story currently making the rounds in Kashi through the mouths of beggars to the ears of merchants and housewives was that the young boatman spent his nights and early mornings in the dancing alleyways of Dal-Mandi to see his beloved Chandra.

  Smoke curled from both men’s nostrils and melted into the grayness that clotted the air. Ghostly shades of sound reached them: hollow knocks on wood, a barking dog, a bell clanging. When the beedis shrank to stubs too small to fit between their fingers, the men flicked the ashy remains into the river and readied for their return to the holy city.

  The first boatman pulled at the fickle anchor that lay over one side of Raman’s boat.

  “Pull harder, Bhai,” his companion said, laughing when the anchor refused to rise out of the water. “And perhaps limit the pakora during chai this week, nah?”

  The anchor dislodged from some obstruction deep below, and the rope crawled upward, though slowly and with considerable effort. As the wet rope coiled into the open boat, what emerged from the water was not the customary iron weight, but a fist. That hand was attached to an arm, and the rope knotted around that arm was tied in a neat double knot. While his companion sputtered, the first boatman kept a firm grip on the cold arm, steadied himself, and pulled the rest of the body up and into Raman’s boat.

  The man’s life had flown long ago, and the body that remained was dark and swollen. His mustache, made thin with water, framed his parted lips, and the hairs of his wet eyelashes clung together, the long tips reaching toward his cheekbones like thick drips of kohl. A gold chain spooled around his neck. His bare feet had hardened soles and talon-like toes, and his thick black hair released a steady stream of water onto the boat deck, as did his soaked cotton pants and shirt.

  “The liquor has taken your wits—put him back!” the companion hissed. “Before anyone sees, before his ghost sticks to you—where do you expect you’ll get the money to banish it?”

  “Yes, but look, he is wearing clothes.”

  “Nothing good enough to steal, if that is the thought dancing in your idiot skull. Dump him over.”

  The first boatman wiped his brow and leaned back as he considered the body. “He still has his gold necklace.”

  “Take it if you will. I will say nothing. But you’ll have to melt it down to rid its affiliation to the corpse, and that will cost just as much as the necklace itself; the goldsmiths are worse cheats than the Doms.”

  “His skin isn’t burnt,” the first boatman continued, as if his companion had said nothing. “Did you see how the rope was tied to him?” He spoke the truth in a calm and unhurried manner. The body bore none of the talismans of cremation, of funeral rites. Every other charred and singed body in the river had endured an end that the two boatmen knew as well as the final scenes of a familiar story, but this body was like a tale with no ending at all.

  “Bhaiya,” the first boatman said from his perch on Raman’s boat. “Think. How did this man die?”

  “Rama knows. Dump him over, I say.”

  “Where did he die?”

  “Stop being foolish. He is dead.”

  “On land? On water? And by whose hand?” His companion refused to answer. A sigh bloomed from his lips in a white wisp that disappeared into the fog. The first boatman grabbed the oars, took his position in Raman’s boat, and directed the bow toward Kashi. “Don’t be blind to what is placed before you,” he said to his friend. He pumped his arms and glided back to the holy city.

  ***

  As the sun broke free of the horizon like a balloon slipping from a child’s grasp, the light lifted the veil of fog from Kashi and beyond. The white sands of Magadha winked with the allure of crushed pearls. Birds skated along the air above, traveling in perfect circles over the land, dipping toward a pair of dogs that snarled and fought, spiraling above a tented barge that trundled along the river on an aimless journey.

  The Ganges, calm and composed in the absence of the monsoon, gathered the early morning pink over its expanse like a sari laid out to dry in the sun, the edges curling against the many carved stone steps leading up to the city. The buildings towering above the ghats gleamed iridescent in the halo of light washing over the water. The bells rang in the temples; the monkeys watched with indifferent faces from their perches atop the roofs.

  Men bobbed in the water, dunking themselves once, twice, holding their noses closed with one hand while the other directed the holy river over heads, arms, bellies. Women wrung out their wet saris and crowded near each other as they changed into fresh clothing. The ghaatiye—priests who sat on snug platforms with large umbrellas fanning behind them like cobra hoods—collected coins from the bathers, passed a cracked mirror to one man, said a blessing for another, listened to the dilemma of a third. A perpetual stream of people flowed down to the river and back up the steps, hurried feet side-stepping the drunk stretched out with an earthenware pot clutched in his arms.

  Funeral pyres crowded a stone platform at the bottom of the steps, flames crackling, the surrounding men looking like cotton spindles from a distance with their shaved heads and sheer white dhotis. Chants laced the air, each word crisp and new as if emerging for the first time from the lips of red-eyed priests. Black smoke spangled with the occasional swirling orange spark rose up and over the stairs, where the walls bordering the alleyways and lanes drew closer, cinching all who passed through in a concrete embrace that blocke
d out all light and sense of direction.

  Four men shouldering a bier navigated tight corners and crowded alleys. Wrapped in coarse white fabric that rose in crisp lines over the nose, the shoulders, the knobby toes, the body had become nameless, an insect tucked and tightly wound with spider’s silk. Their voices, frozen in a monotone chant, echoed in the lanes. Rama Nam Satya Hai. Rama Nam Satya Hai. Rama is truth. God is truth.

  The chant chased after the feet of a delivery boy, an old woman walking with quick steps, a white dog trotting out of the open mouth of an alley. The dog sniffed at a discarded tobacco wrapper and paused to scratch behind its ear. It looked back and then raised its nose into the air and disappeared into the alley, its tail held upward like a sail, intent on an errand whispered by the breeze.

  The news traveled quickly, and speculation trailed after to fill the holes that remained. The note found in the dead man’s pocket could have pointed to suicide … but the rope tied around the wrist suggested an accidental drowning. And what of the two boatmen who dragged the body back, who certainly could have been murderers?

  All the other boatmen at Lalita ghat stuck up for the pair except for Raman. Annoyed that his craft required exorcising and purification by priests, who insisted that it would take an entire day and a hefty sum of rupees, Raman sat on the topmost steps of the ghat cursing his luck and smoking beedi after mango-flavored beedi. The others sat around gossiping or shouted theories as they passed each other on trips up and down the river. All focused on one detail. “They found a note, didn’t they? Has anyone read it?”

  “A love letter, most probably,” a priest called out from the middle of the ghat as he scratched his chest. “Always a woman to blame,” he added to no one in particular as he labored up the stairs.

  “Debts, more likely.”

  “Perhaps he had a curse on his head.”

  “Or he was looking for Yamraj—see how close he was to Magadha?”