The City of Good Death ... Where the Past Haunts Everyone
Review by Lauren Woods
The City of Good Death opens with the discovery of a mysterious body by two boatmen on the Ganges river, in the holy Indian city of Kashi, where everyone knows three basic facts: dying in the holy city promises freedom from rebirth, bathing in the Ganges washes away the sins of a lifetime, and dying on Magadha—the far bank—guarantees that you come back as one of the lowest of the low. Rituals, traditions, and beliefs shape lives and often distort them in Priyanka Champaneri’s debut novel.
Kashi is a city where pilgrims travel to be released by the cycle of reincarnation to a good death. Pramesh, the manager of a death hostel in Kashi, cares for the dying pilgrims who come to stay with him, his wife Shobha, and three-year-old daughter Rani. At the start of the story, Pramesh, who has lived for ten years in Kashi, thinks he has left his village life firmly behind, but the death of a man who looks almost exactly like him, his cousin Sagar, will upend that. It’s a lyrical novel, with Kashi as the backdrop.
“As the sun broke free of the horizon like a balloon slipping from a child’s grasp, the light lifted the veil of fog from Kashi and beyond. The white sands of Magadha winked with the allure of crushed pearls. Birds skated along the air above, traveling in perfect circles over the land, dipping toward a pair of dogs that snarled and fought, spiraling above a tented barge that trundled along the river on an aimless journey.”
Kashi is a city in northern India also known as Banaras or Varanasi. As Champaneri writes in her author’s note, Kashi’s death hostels are real, although the book’s main hostel is fictional. Champaneri, who was born and raised in the United States and grew up in a Hindu household, writes that she portrays the rites and beliefs of the novel based on her own direct experience, which includes travel to India. The real city of Kashi sits on the Ganges river too, and serves as a spiritual capital of India, one of seven sacred cities for Hindus and Jains. It’s also one of the oldest living cities in the world.
Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. Photo by Tejal Shanbhag on Unsplash
Champaneri received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University, and the novel won the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Her parents immigrated from India, but she grew up in Virginia.
Because the novel introduces an entire city of characters at once, the book started slowly for me. It takes time to get up to speed on so many individual lives. Pramesh and Shobha are the main characters, and beyond them, there is an entire cast in the city and beyond—Pramesh’s cousin Sagar, the dutiful assistant at the death hostel, the head priest, gossiping neighbors, a vagabond, and a police officer who roams the city and returns home to his wife and quarreling sisters. The book includes a list of characters, which I consulted frequently at first and then not at all as the book went on.
The prose is lyrical and sharp, but the stakes are slow to come into focus, in part because so many characters require the reader to spend a bit of time getting to know all of them. They have rich pasts, and at first, the past appears to be more compelling than the present story.
But that changes when a mysterious visitor comes, who lodges in the death hostel and refuses to leave, setting off a mystery that will consume the death hostel and ultimately the city too. This visitor is the link between the past and present, and as the stakes rise for Pramesh and Shobha, the threads of the city and all its inhabitants, their pasts and present, coalesce in unexpected ways. What I appreciated most as the tension built were the small, painstaking details Champaneri leaves for the reader—like a woman watching everything from her window—and the way the story rewards the close reader by building on these small details as the story develops. The work of getting to know all these characters pays off as their lives intertwine on the page.
Author Priyanka Champaneri. Photograph by Lauren Brennan.
The worse things get for Pramesh and Shobha, the deeper the story goes, the more their pasts threaten to upend the lives they have built—the past like a ghost of its own. Pramesh remembers Sagar, his twin, who were inseparable, until one fateful day when their paths diverged. And the mysterious visitor in the death hostel refuses to leave, in a turn of events that forces many in the city to contend with their pasts in their own ways. By the midpoint of the story, minor characters are deepened, and even the ghost stories people tell become integral to the story.
As Pramesh contemplates his own childhood in the village where he grew up and all the ways in which he and his twin cousin shared their early lives together, it is a beautiful combination of nostalgia and heartbreak.
“A golden day. The Mothers laughing, and Sagar flexing his thin arms, showing off, willing the tiny muscles to pop. The air as hot and tight as today, but tinged with a clean smell, of dirt and water and green things springing up and waving in the rare breeze.”
I found myself too thinking about these scenes and others in the weeks after I finished the book, a sign of a poignant story and one that had gotten its hooks into me.
By the end, an unexpected theme has emerged, one about stories and rumors, how they function, taking on personalities of their own, building people up or destroying them. As Pramesh and Shobha travel back to Pramesh’s childhood village, they find themselves questioning the stories they have told themselves about their lives and their families. This introspection about our pasts and the way we make sense of our early lives is one of the most compelling parts of the novel and one of many ways in which The City of Good Death is a deep and reflective story.
Some of my favorite scenes of the book explore the past lives of the characters, Pramesh’s village childhood, and the memories of Kashi’s many other residents who must find ways to reckon with the traumas of their own pasts before they can move forward. Despite the name, The City of Good Death is also very much a book about the living.
Priyanka Champaneri received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts numerous times. She received the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for The City of Good Death, her first novel. You can find Priyanka on Instagram as @priyanka.champaneri and on her website at https://www.priyankachampaneri.com.
In addition to being a writer, Priyanka is also an avid and experienced knitter. View her projects on Ravelry, or follow her knitting account on Instagram, @priyanka.knits.
Lauren Woods is a Virginia based writer. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in journals including The Antioch Review, Wasafiri, The Offing, The Washington Post, and others.