Breaking Water by Indrapramit Das Page A

in prayer, wondering how he might take her to the cremation ghats. Did the priest expect him to call a hearse, pretend to be a husband, and have her driven there? He shook his head and thought some more.
    The priest had disappeared, but Krishna stayed there and thought and thought. Then he shook his head, got up, picked up his bucket and walked away. The sun had risen higher, and the crowds were beginning to gather like flies by the golden water. They looked at the woman lying there on the bank, but, blinded by her nakedness, by the ugly bruises that painted it, they all looked away and went about their day. They ignored her until the moment she got up and started walking across the shore, clumsy but sure, water-wrinkled soles sinking into the trail of footsteps Krishna had left in the mud.
    Even then, they didn’t look for long, save for one man, who cried out in surprise from afar. An unsurprising reaction, since he’d just seen what he had presumed to be a dead body crawl a few paces, stand up and totter across the mud like a drunk madwoman. But no one else reacted, and he refused to let people think that he too was mad, so he pretended his cry was a prelude to his singing while he bathed, and tried to ignore the sight of the naked woman. Some others left the ghat in haste. The rest of the men took the first observer’s cue, looking away from the woman on the shore as they bathed, just as they would look away from a beggar with stumps for limbs hobbling across the ghat. She had gotten up, so she couldn’t be dead. Simple as that. Whatever her problem, naked women didn’t belong here, where men bathed, parading their lack of shame.
    In the morning air, flies clothed the woman. Hesitant crows perched on her shoulders and head forming a feathered black headdress, bristling with flutter. She gave no regard to her beaked guests nor their violence as they haltingly pecked at her flesh, somewhat confused by her movements, but not enough to keep from tasting her ripe deadness.
    The spectators stole quick glances at the woman while studiously ignoring her, horrified. This was a very mad woman. Undoubtedly sex-crazed, too, judging from her lack of modesty. Probably drunk. Crazy, for sure. And a junkie, and homeless, and a prostitute. So filthy that the birds were pecking at her. So high, she couldn’t feel the pain. Surely someone would call the police.
    Carrying her hungry crows unwitting, she staggered on down Babu Ghat, wandering by the slimy stone steps that led to the rest of the city, as if unsure of how to climb them. She eventually found the garbage dump down the ghat and started eating from it.
    *   *   *
    Next morning, when Krishna heard that the dead were waking up all over the city—maybe even the state—his first thought was of the dead woman he had left behind on the ghat. He was at a paan shop on Gariahat, near the apartment building where he cooked meals for a few middle-class families in their posh homes, in their fancy kitchens with ventilation fans and shining tiles and big fridges. He was idly spitting betel juice at the footpath when the paanwallah mentioned history happening elsewhere in the city, pointing to a tiny television on top of his little Coke storage fridge.
    The paanwallah seemed bemused by the news on the TV, not quite believing it. “No wonder traffic’s hell today,” he muttered, scratching his whitening moustache. “All morning, this honking, I’m going deaf.” He waved at the street and its cacophony of cars, buses, lorries and auto rickshaws stuck bumper-to-bumper like so many dogs sniffing each other’s exhaust pipes.
    Krishna believed the news instantly. It couldn’t be coincidence that he’d discovered a corpse during his morning bath the week corpses started getting up and walking.
    His second thought—accompanied by a bit of guilt for it not being the first—was of his mother; then, with some