The City of Good Death by Priyanka Champaneri

Author:Priyanka Champaneri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction—India / Family Saga
ISBN: 9781632062529
Publisher: Restless Books
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Standing at the edge of the courtyard, Pramesh rubbed his wrists and looked at his palms, flexed his fingers. He felt the heat within him dissipate. Moments before, he’d been so angered that, had Sagar been there before him, he might have done some violence to the man. But what harm could a living man do to a ghost?

The next morning, Pramesh was up early waiting on Narinder to rise. The head priest closed the office door without a word and sat in a chair opposite Pramesh, his hands looking frail and naked without the prayer beads he usually held. He listened as the manager made his case for performing tripindi shraddha early, starting that very day, if possible. He sat and stared out the window for some time after Pramesh had finished speaking, and the manager waited, trying to discern from Narinder’s blank face what he might be thinking. “You remember our chat with Govind-bhai a few weeks ago?” Narinder asked at last.

“I do,” Pramesh said, wary.

“He advised you to try and find what the man wanted so badly that caused him to linger as a ghost to begin with,” Narinder said, eyes still on the window. “Well? Have you thought more about why he was here?”

The rains had begun again, and a heavy patter of drops sounded. Pramesh felt a rising desperation engulf him. “There is nothing to think about. He had a bottle with him.”

“You believe he’d been drinking?”

Sagar raising that bottle to his lips, speech slurred, eyes rimmed with red—Pramesh shook the thought away. “He could have intended to use it as a vessel for river water. Perhaps it was late at night when he arrived here, and our gates were closed. Then … then he went to the river.”

“But that cannot be it. What else did he do that day? What was he doing on the river?”

The boatman’s tale returned to Pramesh. Sagar may have been ill, but would illness alone have driven him to travel all that way to see someone he hadn’t spoken to for a decade? He tried to picture Sagar in a boat, discarding a lifetime of skepticism to chase after a city myth. He could not see it.

“The only person to know those answers is someone who is dead—and he isn’t telling us, no matter how loudly the pots bang every night,” he said instead, his voice rising against his will. “What good is asking? Why should I continue to think about him when I must detach? The body is burnt and so should the memory be—we tell our guests this. Why should I be any different?”

“And yet, you are different,” Narinder said, turning his piercing gaze on Pramesh. “Those who come to Shankarbhavan are old; they have completed all the hurdles of life and are here for that one final step. They are not young, like your cousin, nor do they have any reason to linger. We can tell those grieving families to detach because we know that their dead have already done so, have released themselves.

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