Breaking Water by Indrapramit Das Page B

measure of fear, his father. But his parents were cremated and gone, safe from this mass resurrection, unless ash itself was stirring into life to fill the wind with dark ghosts. He also had to look up at the sky to make sure there were no clouds of ashen ghosts raging across it. Thankfully, there was only sunlight suspended in winter smog, pecked with the black flecks of crows.
    The realization that his parents couldn’t return came as a relief to Krishna, since he didn’t know exactly how he’d have dealt with such a thing, especially after they’d been gone for two decades. The surge of elation and dread that rose from that thought filled his chest so powerfully that he had to steady himself against the counter of the paan stall.
    Then he thought, I have to find the woman. That his parents couldn’t possibly come back to life only bolstered this thought. Surely his employers wouldn’t hold it against him if he missed a day, under the circumstances. In fact, Krishna suspected they’d be more preoccupied than most by this turn of events. He suspected that nobody living in those apartments really believed in God, despite their indoor shrines, and what better evidence of Bhagavan than this? It would throw them into confusion. Money and work be damned. For a day, at least.
    â€œI found a dead woman. I left her; I have to find her,” Krishna said to the paanwallah, who was fiddling with his paan leaves, as if proud of their very appetizing green. Then Krishna ran off. “Hai-oh, that fellow’s looking in the wrong places for a wife,” the paanwallah mumbled.
    *   *   *
    As Krishna bussed across the city and back toward Babu Ghat, he saw the world as it always was but now a different place. The air you breathed felt different when you knew the dead walked around you. The traffic was even worse off than usual because of the confusion. The police were everywhere, their white uniforms ubiquitous among the crowds on the streets. Krishna heard snatches of conversations in different languages, all talking about the same thing. As sunlight shuttered across the smeared minibus windows, Krishna held his breath against the stink of sweaty passengers pushing up against him and listened. He heard wealthy students and youngsters babble incomprehensible English with unholy excitement, repeating one word, “zambi,” which was clearly what they were calling the risen dead. Krishna heard how bodies were rising out of the Hooghly and shambling in diverse but slow-moving crowds across the ghats of Kolkata. How they were falling—half-eaten by birds—from the Parsi Towers of Silence like suicides jumping to their new lives. How the Muslim, Christian and Jewish cemeteries were filled with the faint thumps and groans of the trapped dead, too weak to escape caskets and heavy packed earth. How medical schools and hospitals and police morgues were now dormitories for live cadavers kicking in their steel chambers. How these places were reporting the highest number of corpse-bites in the whole city because of staff convincing themselves that the chilled bodies they were freeing were poor souls mistaken for dead and frozen to drooling stupidity. He felt like he was having a panic attack, so filled was his head with this confusion of voices.
    *   *   *
    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