The City of Good Death
Priyanka Champaneri
Reviewed by Lucy Shapiro
Banaras, India, a city on the banks of the Ganges, is a sacred place for Hindus, where the souls of the dead may pass on, released at last from the cycle of reincarnation. It is here that Pramesh Prasad has lived for ten years, an outsider who escaped the family farm for the city, and who serves as manager of Shankarbhavan, a hostel that houses the dying. Pramesh lives a life of focus and routine with his wife, Shobha, and his daughter, Rani, tending to the needs of the families who accompany their ailing loved ones, until the day a body is found in the holy river that looks uncannily like Pramesh. What follows is an astounding mystery in which nothing cooperates as it should—not even the dead.
In his daily duties at the bhavan, Pramesh has always marveled at how the souls around him “would soon slip out of their bodies as easily as he slipped out of one shirt and changed into another.” But in Priyanka Champaneri’s debut novel The City of Good Death, nothing is so easy, and memory proves as persistent as a lingering spirit “determined to be heard,” holding tight to the living until fulfilling its purpose.
This novel could be seen as one cleaved in two, with mysteries unfolding discreetly in the realms of women and of men, and Champaneri deftly balances the weight of expectation and introspection, of skepticism and faith, and what is sought out and what is hidden. As the city stirs with gossip and intrigue, Pramesh and Shobha deal with hauntings of all kinds, their stories weaving around one another to reveal the intersection of love and grief, and perhaps even illuminating some of the mysteries of the Land of the Dead.