Breaking Water Page 3

  “I don’t think so either. I interviewed a lot of people who were at the ghat, both when he found the body and when he came back. Everyone confirms he was among the morning bathers when the body washed onto the ghat.”

  She let out a long and heavy breath. “I don’t think it should be burned.”

  I don’t know why, but I was relieved when she said that. I remembered those horrible, deformed hands lifting a flower to that rotting mouth, and my chest ached.

  “All right,” I said, nodding too hard. “Whatever you feel is right, ma’am. And please, call me Paromita.”

  She placed her fist against her forehead, her bangles jangling. Her eyes closed, she said, “He can keep it. You know”—she opened her eyes, looked at me—“my daughter never seemed interested in marriage. I know I asked her about it too much. I wanted grandchildren very much, a son-in-law. To fill up our family, you know? It was so empty when my husband left, even though he was just one person. So, I pestered her all the time to meet a man. She was still young, after all, but had no interest in weddings and children. Such a good student, always career-minded. She was so happy to go to college. Really, she wanted to go abroad to study. I didn’t have the money. I don’t know how much that hurt her, but she never, ever used it against me, even when we fought about things. And we did fight. College was good for her. She needed to live apart from me. But I missed her so much. She’d say, ‘Ma, that’s ridiculous; we live in the same city,’ so I didn’t tell her, but I missed her all the time. Honestly, I was grateful she didn’t go abroad, so that she could still visit me. And she did. She did, until she was missing. And then that was that. Now I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “Nobody does,” I said. I put my hand, very lightly, on her arm, before returning it to the steering wheel.

  “You’re not as young as my daughter,” she said. “But you’re young. You have so much energy, to be doing all this, figuring out who she was, finding me, when the police should be doing things like this. All this work, all this energy, when the whole world’s going mad. You should be very proud.”

  “Thank you,” I said, my ears going hot. I felt suddenly ashamed to be alive in front of her, despite her kindness.

  She took a crumpled handkerchief from her handbag and wiped her nose. “The person who killed my daughter, that person was unkind to her. Horrible to her. I don’t know … whatever animal her body has become, I don’t know what it feels. If it’s walking, eating, maybe it’ll feel the flames. I won’t be that unkind. I won’t, in my daughter’s honour. That man can keep the body, or whatever it is now. You’ll tell the police?”

  “I will. They’ll call you and probably ask if you identified her. You’ll probably have to talk to your lawyer and get a death certificate. But I’ll tell them.”

  I smiled, though she didn’t look at me, instead staring straight ahead through the windshield. “Thank you, Paromita. For everything you’ve done, are doing, for me, and for my daughter.”

  I nodded, but found myself too choked up on my words to reply at first. I barely managed to say “You’re welcome” before she took her handbag and got out of the car. I’ve talked to her a few times on the phone since, to organize a meeting with her lawyer and the police, but that was the last time I saw her.

  4. Notes on Death

  I saw Guru Yama and his wife one last time at Kalighat. I went there to tell him he had the mother’s consent to keep the body. I had ad hoc legal papers from her lawyer giving the guru “official” custody of the walking cadaver. The guru thanked me, but his enthusiasm had turned to sadness, because his wife was on the verge of falling apart. She was attracting rats and other vermin into the temple, and dangerously close to liquefying. “I do have to burn her,” the Guru told me, dishevelled and weak, scratching at his bandages.

  “You can give her to the hospitals, the research institutes, if you want to keep her from the police,” I said. “They can put her in cold storage.”

  He shook his head. “No, Miss Sen. Maybe if she was younger. The dead have short lives. This I know now. She would suffer a lot if they tried to freeze her now.” He had decided. Perhaps because of his meeting with the mother. Perhaps not.

  He used her rope leash to lead her from the altar to a hired lorry. By now, she was barely able to walk, waddling slowly and leaving a trail of dark brown droplets that her garlands dragged into smears. Men with mops swept the trail away as she was led across the courtyard. The walk took half an hour. The guru draped a cloth over her face so all the people they passed didn’t panic her. Dragging her flower garlands, she was lifted into the back of the lorry in a large blanket, five sweating men heaving at its sides and rolling her in with no dignity. I followed the lorry to the Garia crematorium.

  I waited in the crematorium’s cold, shadowy halls as the guru’s wife was taken in for incineration.

  The worst thing I have ever heard in my life was the brief scream that rang out through the crematorium, sharp and human, before being lost in the hum of the ovens. I went outside to find a dog barking furiously in the courtyard, drool flying into the dirt. I leaned against the yellow walls of the building and waited.

  The guru emerged and thanked me again.

  “That scream—was that her?” I asked.

  He nodded. “It’s good. It’s good that her mother wasn’t here.” I saw his hands shaking like the mother’s had.

  “What’ll you do now?” I asked.

  “I’ll find more of the dead who need my help. Other people want to give me their dead, to take care of, to speak to in my visions. I have followers. I’ll never let one of the dead down like this again. One day, Miss Sen, I’ll be a big guru, like the ones you see on TV, in the newspapers. I’ll have money. When I do, I’ll buy one of those resorts, those hotels in the mountains, high up. In the Himalayas or”—he paused, then spoke carefully—“Switzerland. I saw them in magazines. It’s always cold, and they’re huge. There, my dead can roam free, and live longer. You watch; you’ll see. Away from all these people trying to take them, away from police. They’ll be happy there.”

  I wished him luck as he walked back to his followers, looking strange without his wife by his side. In my car, I cried quietly for that walking corpse, as if I were crying for the woman who had died in its body.

  * * *

  Guru Yama doesn’t yet have a Swiss ski resort for his dead. He does have an ashram in Uluberia, with refrigerated chambers for his “children” (no more wives or husbands, to reduce the accusations of necrophilia). He keeps himself in a perpetual state of fever, allowing his children to bite him every month, staving off death and resurrection via antibiotics paid for by his followers and clients. Detractors of dead-charmers say that the visions and dreams through which they talk to the dead are nothing but delirium brought about by fever and drugs, including heroin and hash taken for the pain. I plan, one day soon, to do a book of photo essays with my friend Saptarshi about him and his flocks, dead and alive.

  I still don’t know whether he’s a charlatan, or deluded, or a prophet.

  Perhaps because I’m an atheist, I’ve never trusted charismatic religious figures who use their influence to gather wealth. I don’t quite recognize the man I see in videos and pictures now, covered in ash, turmeric paste and bandages, cloaked in hash and incense smoke, beard hanging down to his hollow stomach, surrounded by veiled corpses like a true lord of death. But I remember the man who walked out of Garia crematorium, his shaking hands, his shocked stare. His grief for the creature he called his wife was so very real. We both heard her scream as she died a second time.

  The thing about the reality of the undead is that we can now see the afterlife. We live in it. And we share that afterlife with its dead inhabitants, who walk among us. But we can’t talk to them, and they can’t talk to us. That truly is the most exquisite, atheistic hell.

  5. Notes on Afterlife

  Visiting my parents is different now. Now, when I drink tea with them on their veranda, tea that s
omehow tastes of my childhood even though it’s just plain old Darjeeling, I watch them age gently next to me. More than ever, every new wrinkle, every new wince of bodily pain, every glimmer of sun off a newly silvered strand of hair catches my eye. And I can’t help but think of the future.

  In this, should I say, apocalyptic future, I have to sign a form by their deathbeds. The form asks if their death is to be final, if I want to authorize doctors to sever their brain stems and puncture each lobe right after their hearts stop beating, to make sure they won’t rise up again in undeath. There are two other options: I can illegally have them bitten by a corpse belonging to a dead-charmer before they die, to increase their chances of resurrection. Or I can take a cosmic gamble and let the universe decide between two terrible things by checking the other box on the form that says my parents should be left untouched after death, to see if their bodies naturally choose undeath. The undead will not be allowed in homes because of numerous health hazards including dangerous, often lethal, bites. So if my parents rise into undeath it will fall to me to hand them over to the government or a private scientific institution, or a dead-charmer.

  This is the future. Governments are already trying to figure out appropriate legislation for the realities of dead people waking up and creating an entirely new kind of life.

  I think about simply losing my parents forever, once the only choice. Then I think of them undead. And I think of Guru Yama’s wife, grotesque and alien, death itself personified as a gigantic, corpulent infant, crooning to itself and eating a single marigold as I struggled to understand whether its painfully corrupted form caused it pain. I think of it screaming in an oven.

  I see myself, pen hovering over the forms, not knowing which box to check.

  Who am I to deny someone I love a second life, however incomprehensible, however different from the first? And then, with both relief and panic, I realize it’s not even my choice, but my parents’. One day, I’ll have to have a conversation with them about whether or not they want to risk becoming a fucking zombie. I haven’t asked yet.

  And one day, when I have a child—if I have a child—I’ll have to have that conversation again, when they ask me.

  When these thoughts creep into those evening conversations with my parents, tinting them with dread, I think of two corpses shambling up a snow-clad mountain in Switzerland, their flesh preserved in a fur of frost that glitters under a high, clear sun, their thoughts unfathomable.

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  Copyright © 2016 by Indrapramit Das

  Art copyright © 2016 by Keren Katz

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  1. Breaking Water

  2. Notes on Infancy

  3. Notes on Maturation

  4. Notes on Death

  5. Notes on Afterlife

  Copyright