Breaking Water Read Online Free

Breaking Water
Book: Breaking Water Read Online Free
Author: Indrapramit Das
Pages:
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first moments of her life, but dead.
    I touched the mother’s hand, and she gasped as if terrified. We left the cafe in silence, her cup still full, cold on the table. My heart was racing just from being in the presence of such horror. Outside, the late winter sunlight did nothing to calm it. Thankfully, there were no marchers or black vans on Lansdowne. If we could forget for a moment, it might have felt like any other day in Kolkata, in that bygone world where the dead stayed dead.
    *   *   *
    I drove the mother to Kalighat in my old Maruti, and she slept through the ride. I got the impression sleeping was the easiest way for her to escape human interaction.
    The stinking alleyways outside the temple were lined with the guru’s growing mass of followers. Many pressed their palms to the mother as we passed, and some tried to touch her feet. They knew who she was. She walked through them as if in a dream, not responding at all.
    I had come prepared this time. We both wore surgical masks, and we’d both rubbed VapoRub under our noses. The hawkers still tried to sell us both.
    Guru Yama sat in the courtyard inside, same as before. His wife sat at the altar, like a goddess of death next to her husband, who had been named after the god of death by his followers. She was covered all over in heaped garlands of sweet genda phool, so many that it looked like they were crude, thick robes. Her jaundiced eyes peered from between the petals, and a ballooning hand stuck out of the flowers, the orange circlet of a single marigold in its bulging palm. The smell of the garlands wasn’t enough to mask the stench of the festering body beneath them.
    â€œGreetings,” the guru said to us, his eyelids drooping with antibiotics, with fever, with other drugs, or perhaps just spiritual ecstasy; I couldn’t tell. It had been three weeks since I had last visited him there. He sounded more confident and much calmer. His beard, too, was longer. More befitting a guru, I suppose.
    His wife did not move, though the hand holding the flower quivered slightly, as an effigy’s straw limb might in a breeze. From under those flowers came the rattle of air passing through tissues, a soft groan. But she was unnaturally still. It made me realize how jarring it was to see a living animal that didn’t breathe.
    â€œDon’t be afraid of her,” the guru said to the mother. “She is still your daughter. She has bitten me, yes; you see the bandages. But your daughter’s bite has made me feel more alive, Mother. I have infected myself with the poison of the dead so that I may live with them. It strengthens me. It gives me visions. Oh, Mother, don’t cry. Rejoice in this miracle, rejoice. She has a second chance in the world. She can’t talk; but in my visions, in my dreams, she speaks.” These were his first words to his mother-in-law (though certainly a dubious law).
    â€œWhat does she tell you?” the mother asked, her breathing tortured.
    â€œIn my dreams she shows me the man who killed her. She tells me”—he lowers his voice—“the terrible things that were done to her. She shows me the face of the man so that he may be brought to justice if I ever see him in the world.”
    Given the smell in the air, the situation we were in, I expected the mother to throw up at the sight of the guru and his wife or react adversely. But she just seemed catatonic as she stared at her daughter sitting on that altar, buried in flowers save for her purple face and bulging eyes. It isn’t accurate to say the mother didn’t react; her cheeks were covered in tears. They dripped off her chin, soaking into the surgical mask that flapped against her mouth with each heavy breath she took.
    â€œHave you touched her?” the mother asked, very softly, and I felt a chill down my neck.
    The guru smiled. “I have touched her, but not as a husband would. I have held her, and
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