Breaking Water (2 page)

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By the time Krishna got back to Babu Ghat early in the evening, the riverside was packed, like it had been during the immersion of idols after pujas. A column of crows towered above the ghat. The birds wheeled over the parade of the dead, taking turns swooping down and pecking at them. The police were keeping the walking corpses within the ghat by tossing lit (and technically illegal) crackers near their soggy feet every time they tried to wander up the steps. That seemed to do the job, sending the dead staggering back towards the water, though never back inside. Strings of bright red crackers hung from police belts like candy. Some of them held riot shields. In their hands were lathis that they swung in panic if the dead came near their barricade of live bodies. Their hatred for these creatures, these once-humans, was immediate and visceral. After all, every walking corpse on that ghat was a remnant of crimes they'd never solved or missing persons they never found.

Krishna witnessed the resurrection with nauseous excitement.

The Hooghly had disgorged the dead as if they were its children, all wrestling into the sunlight from a giant, polluted birth canal. They shone like infants fresh from the womb, swollen not with fat but water and gas. All stripped naked as the day they were born by water and time. Fifteen, twenty? Could they swim? Had they simply walked on the river's bottom till they came upon this bank, all the while breathing water through their now-amphibious mouths? He was shocked that there had been that many unknown people lying murdered, drowned or mistakenly killed at the bottom of the Hooghly.

Some were only days old, looking almost alive but for their slack faces like melting clay masks, their lethal wounds and bruises, their paled and discoloured skin, their jellied eyes and the sometimes lovely frills of clinging white crustaceans in their hair, the tiny flickers of fish leaping from their muddy mouths. Others were black and blue, bloated into terrifying caricatures of their living counterparts, who watched in droves from behind the lines of fearful policemen at the top of the ghat steps. Fresh or old, all these dead men and women wading back to the world were united by the ignominy of their ends, un-cremated and tossed into the tea-brown waters of the Hooghly to be forgotten. Most, Krishna noticed, were women. All had crows as their punishing familiars, which clung to shoulders and heads as they tore flesh away with their beaks.

Krishna searched for a familiar face amongst the dead. He felt uneasy, not at the sight of the resurrected dead but at the roiling crowd he had to push through to witness this miracle, the street dogs biting and barking amid them to try and get to the corpses, only to be beaten back by the police. Some people lowed like animals, spoke in tongues or pretended to, blabbered prophecy; priests and sadhus and charlatans chanting to eager flocks of potential followers, many calling for the immediate destruction of these men and women who had been reincarnated into their own bodies—a sign, surely, that they were evil, condemned to rebirth as creatures even lower than the lowest of animals because of some terrible karmic debt. It made Krishna uneasy, scared, even angry. Clearly, these people rising from the waters had been wronged, had suffered the injustice of the earthly world, not caused them.

It was a miracle,
Krishna told himself. It had to be.

Why, then, did this feel like the end of the world, with the police in their cricket pads and riot shields, the crowds coagulating into a mob, these terribly wronged souls blessed with new life being herded like cursed cattle?

The loud braying of horns and the glare of headlights swept across the crowd as two police vans with grills on their windows ploughed slowly through the crowd, nudging the spectators aside. Men in toxic yellow hazard suits got out. They held long poles with metal clamps, which Krishna had often seen dogcatchers use to grab strays off the streets. They were going to shove the resurrected into vans and drive them away, quarantine them somewhere. And then what? They could do anything to them: destroy them, imprison them. If the world knew about them from the news, they probably wouldn't burn them, however much these policemen might want that. But if they took them away, they would be subject to any and all injustices that scared people could dream up.

As he was thinking this through, Krishna's eyes caught the woman he had found yesterday. She was right there on the ghat. She was a little worse for wear, having spent a day doing whatever she'd been doing. But she was here and still … well, alive, he supposed. Walking with her resurrected sisters and brothers. Clearly, she had gotten away with being dead and walking around before the rest emerged from the water, perhaps because she'd looked somewhat alive when she washed up. No different from any wretched, broken beggar wallowing in garbage, to the average bystander.

The catchers made it through the crowd and neared the dead. Their plastic visors smudged them into faceless troopers, their poles spears shoved ahead of them, parting the howling people of Kolkata.

“Oh, god,” Krishna whispered, pushed from side to side by other sweaty shoulders. “God, thank you. I'm sorry I left her. I won't again. I won't.”

He shoved and struggled through the crowd, and shouted as loud as he could from behind the line of police. “My wife!”

Several policemen turned their heads and forced him back into the churn of people. He rebounded off the mob, back onto the officers. “I see my wife! Let me through!” he cried out.

They didn't, but he pushed under their reeking armpits and broke through the line. He felt the sticks lash his back, bruise his shoulder blades, explode over his skin like crackers at the feet of the dead.

My wife.
He heard himself. A decision made.

He ran down the crumbling ghat steps, stumbling as the sun sank and sloshed into the waters of the Hooghly. The baying of street dogs and the horns of a million cars stuck on the roads of B.B.D. Bagh rose into the evening, a trumpet sounding the end of an age.

And there she was, her long black hair threaded with garbage, crows on her shoulders. She looked at Krishna. Was there recognition in her eyes? No, she hadn't even awoken to new life when he found her. And yet. For a moment, Krishna hesitated as all the corpses turned their numb gaze upon him, and the cloud of flies surrounding them surged against him, biting like windblown debris. But his fear of the police behind him was far stronger than his fear of the unknown. They would not follow him into this hell, so he ran forward, not back, his feet sliding on the filthy mud. He ran straight into the outreached arms and lizard-pale eyes of the resurrected, towards the woman who was to be his wife.

They embraced him as if he was one of their own, the flies crawling all over him as if they too had agreed to mark him as dead. Most importantly, she embraced him, peeling back her cold, heavy lips to bare teeth that still clung to purple gums.

2. Notes on Infancy

I first met Guru Yama when he was taking refuge with his “first wife” at the Kalighat Temple. This was just days after the resurrections became public, and just as it was becoming clear that they might be global, with cadavers reported to be rising up in countries all around the world, including our neighbours Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

The guru was sitting in the courtyard where goats are sacrificed to Kali. They had closed off the altars from the public, and people were being allowed in one at a time to see him. No cameras. At that point, “Guru Yama” was just a nickname given to him by the news media, but it had caught very quickly. The corpse he'd claimed at Babu Ghat squatted near him. He'd publicly refused, over and over, to hand the cadaver over to the police or any other organization, claiming that it was his wife.

He seemed utterly stunned by the world when I saw him, clinging to the frayed rope tied around the purple neck of his wife as if it were a lifeline. Pierced into the skin of his other arm was an actual lifeline: an IV antibiotic drip on rubber wheels. Twenty-nine people around India had reportedly died from corpse bites left untreated. Each of the bite victims had also consequently become undead. The guru had been bitten but was given rabies and tetanus shots right after. He was younger than I'd expected, maybe even my age—mid-thirties at the most.

Covered in sweat, bandages over the bites his wife and the other corpses had given him, shivering with fever, eyes bloodshot, the guru told me both his life story and the story of his dead wife with stunning candour. For one thing, I didn't expect him to confess that she wasn't really his wife, or hadn't been when he found her. The priests at the temple had conducted an impromptu ceremony after he arrived, though no one was willing to say what that meant. Most temples in the city, the guru said, wouldn't let them in, declaring the risen dead abominations. He was lucky Kalighat Temple had offered to house him and his wife, as he couldn't keep her in the basti where he lived. He told me how grateful he was for their help, and also thanked the lorry driver who had transported him and his wife from temple to temple, trailed by crowds looking for something to focus on in this bewildering time.

Though there were no laws in place for the risen dead, the guru considered himself legally bound to the woman he held by a rope leash, who had been dead for at least a week now. Because of that very lack of laws addressing this new world, the police or government couldn't really dispute his claim, and they had other things to worry about right now, anyway.

Throughout the interview, I watched the guru's wife with barely suppressed horror as she ate out of the opened rib cage of a goat that had been sacrificed, not for Ma Kali but for her. Or perhaps for both of them. The guru noticed the look on my face.

“She is a woman, just like you,” he said, which made me very uncomfortable. “Don't be scared of her. You know what it's like in this world. She asks only for sympathy.”

I tried to hide my unease. The corpse was squatting, much like her human companion, and using her swollen hands and darkening teeth to eat the entrails. It hurt to see the infantile clumsiness of those slowly bloating fingers. I was ready to run, but she never approached or even noticed me. She looked very blue-green, very inhuman, different from what she'd been in the footage from the ghat, embracing and then biting this man who called himself her husband. She looked—as much as I hated to apply that term to a real person who had lived and died—like a zombie. The people outside the temple had told me to wear a surgical mask and rub Vicks VapoRub under my nostrils (and readily sold me both on the spot), but I could still smell her, see the flies around her and the maggots in her nostrils and eyes and mouth.

“It's good that it's winter, no? She'd probably be falling apart by now if it were summer,” the guru said, looking at her. He stifled a shudder, wiping cold sweat from his brow. “We also have to make sure the street dogs don't eat her. Usually, the dogs come in here when the goats are sacrificed, to lick up the blood. Not now, not now; we keep them out. They'd rip her up in minutes. Birds, also—they're always trying. But humans are the worst.” He shook his head.

“She can't protect herself anymore. All of these waking dead have been raped, beaten, strangled, stabbed, killed, thrown away. They deserve someone to help them, to take care of them in this new life they've been given by God. I've told all the news people, and I'll tell you, that I'll take care of them if no one else will. Everyone's calling me Guru for that,” he laughed, eyes wide. “Guru Yama, they're calling me. I don't know about that. I don't want to take the name of a god. I'm just a man.”

“But your parents already gave you the name of a god, Krishna. Is this different?” I asked him.

He seemed startled by this, and I felt bad for bringing up his dead parents. To my relief, he changed the subject.

“It doesn't matter what they call me, I suppose. What matters is, I'm not afraid of these dead people. When I find somewhere to keep them, I'll make sure they're alright. When I am better, I'll go looking for more before the police take them away and punish them again. Tell everyone. Bring me your dead, and I'll care for them,” the guru said to me. From the fervent darting of his eyes, I couldn't tell if he was a charlatan, if he was just looking for fame or up to something more sinister. I didn't shake his hand, but I did smile at him, maybe in encouragement. I wondered about the rest of those dead people he had left behind at Babu Ghat, later taken away in those vans. It wasn't the guru's fault; how many dead could he walk around with?

Before leaving, I asked if I could use what he'd told me to write a story or an article. He gave me his blessing. I left to let his next visitor, whether journalist or would-be follower, see him. I managed to wait till I was out on the streets before vomiting, just a little, into a gutter. I'm not sure anyone in the crowd gathered around the temple even noticed.

I wrote in the midst of a global paradigm shift. I wanted to try and understand one man at that moment, as opposed to the impossibility of an entire world made new. Like anyone and everyone who would fixate on him in the days to come.

It was only afterwards that I thought to look for the identity of that poor dead woman by his side.

3. Notes on Maturation

The second time I saw Guru Yama, it was to identify his wife and return her to her mother.

I met the widowed mother, who requested I not include her name, at the Barista on Lansdowne. I bought her a plain coffee. As I handed her the cup, I marvelled at the fact that we can still enjoy the privilege of overpriced lattes and mochas while black government vans roam the state for the risen dead. Every time I saw those vans, some shining with the words W
EST
B
ENGAL
U
NDEAD
Q
UARANTINE
fresh-painted on them, I stopped to wonder whether I was remembering something from a movie or actually looking at something real. The cafe was relatively quiet—just a few afternoon customers chatting amid the burbling of espresso machines. But elsewhere in the city, people were striking and rioting to throw stones and claim their own religions and ideologies as responsible or not responsible for this cosmic prank. That very day, there had been a march on Prince Anwar Shah Road, by South City Mall, with fundamentalists of one or many stripes demanding that movies filled with immoral violence and sexuality be removed from the mall's multiplex immediately in order to end God's wrathful plague of the waking dead. The puritanical thrive in apocalypses.