The Royal Ghosts, page 13
It didn’t wholly surprise her when she found out, two days later, that Sukumaya had left Ananda and the baby. Janaki took the news calmly, even tried to console Ananda, who was weeping on the phone as he told her. Early that morning they had returned home from the hospital, and since Sukumaya refused to nurse the baby, he carried his son with him to the market to fetch formula. When he returned, she was gone. “How could she do this to me?” Ananda said. “To her own child?”
Janaki had to restrain herself from reminding him of what he’d done to her and Bhola, and when he asked her to come to him, she reluctantly agreed.
When she got near the front door of his house, she could hear the baby crying. She rushed in and saw Ananda on the phone, talking frantically. She picked up the baby from the sofa, and instantly he stopped crying and searched her face. The bottle of formula was on a table nearby, so she picked it up and slipped it into the baby’s mouth. Ananda hung up. “She’s left the city.”
“How did you find out?”
“Someone saw her at the bus station, boarding a bus to Chitwan.”
“Who lives there?” Janaki asked, vaguely recalling Sukumaya saying something about Chitwan.
“I don’t know,” Ananda said. “Wait, I think she has a friend there. Listen, I’ve got to go find her. I’ve got to bring her back.”
The baby’s eyes were closed now, and he was breathing heavily. Janaki met Ananda’s gaze and knew instantly what he was thinking.
“No, no,” she said, handing the baby to him. “Take him with you. He’ll need his mother when you find her.”
He pleaded with her, saying traveling with an infant would be a nightmare. “And what if I don’t find her?”
Janaki began walking to the door, but Ananda grabbed her arm. The baby, shaken by his move, awoke and began to cry again. “Janaki, I swear to you, it’ll only be a few days. If after three days I can’t locate her, I’ll return. I wouldn’t ask this of you, of all people, if I had anyone else to go to.”
“Inform her parents,” Janaki said. “They are the immediate kin, after all. Tell them they have to accept the baby, whether they like it or not.”
“You don’t know what kind of people they are, Janaki. They’ll slam the door in my face.”
The baby wailed, and she couldn’t help but take him from Ananda. She sighed. Ananda’s parents lived halfway across the country, in Biratnagar; he couldn’t possibly take the baby there.
“I’ll be forever grateful to you, Janaki, please,” Ananda said. “I have to leave now. Maybe I’ll find her in Chitwan by tonight.”
Back at home, Janaki held the baby until he fell asleep, then set him down on her bed. She looked at him. He was adorable, with his nose the size of a little button, and after all, he knew nothing. She watched his curled fists as he slept, and she touched his arm. Briefly he opened his eyes, gurgled happily, then closed them again.
After a week, Ananda hadn’t returned or called. The baby got used to Janaki, and he seemed to smile whenever she hovered over him. Sometimes he played with her nose, just as Bhola did when he was that small. Before long, she remembered exactly how to clean and change a baby, and all the work that was involved in tending to a newborn. The thought lingered at the back of her mind that the boy’s mother should be doing this, but she didn’t feel so resentful when she was playing peekaboo with him and laughing.
One evening after dinner, as she watched the baby sleep on her bed, she gave in and cried. So much sadness had seeped into her bones. The baby opened his eyes and watched her, and weeping, she stroked his hairy scalp. She reached for him, took him to the open window, and showed him the outside world. Darkness was approaching. Shops had turned on their lights, and people hurried home. The evening breeze felt good on her face, and she talked to the baby, saying, “A nice evening, isn’t it? When I was a young girl, you could see the stars, but now it’s impossible to glimpse the sky through this smog.”
Someone was climbing the stairs in her building. The heavy thumps made her hold her breath. It was certainly not Ananda, who had a lighter step. Had Bhola returned to her after all these days? With a thudding heart she went to open the door, but found she couldn’t move. Who knew where he’d been? Who knew what crazy thoughts now cluttered his mind? Who knew how he’d react to the baby?
Quickly she bolted the door and, clasping the baby tighter to her chest, told him not to be afraid.
Chintamani’s Women
AS HE APPROACHED his office building in Lazimpat, Chintamani grew apprehensive. He glanced up at the third floor, where Buddha Publishing was located. Normally his boss, Mr. Somnath, could be seen from here, sitting in his chair, but today the chair was empty. Beginning to sweat a little, Chintamani walked inside and climbed the stairs. Sushmita met him at the top. “Where were you?” she whispered. “Mr. Somnath is in a state.”
“I had to take Buwaba to the hospital,” Chintamani said, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. “He had heart palpitations earlier this morning.”
“Is he okay now?”
“Yes, but it took up my entire morning.”
Mr. Somnath was leaning against Chintamani’s desk, his arms crossed, and it looked as if he’d been in this position for hours. As Chintamani approached, his boss said, “Listen . . . ,” then he clearly made the decision not to accost him in front of his colleagues, who were all watching. He motioned for Chintamani to follow him into his office. Once inside, Mr. Somnath said, “This is too much. You’re late again.”
“What’s too much, sir?” he asked, exasperated. “You know I have a very ill father. You know his situation is unpredictable.” He told Mr. Somnath what had happened that morning. “Thankfully it was nothing big and he’s resting at home now. I hurried to work as soon as I could, sir.”
“I’m sorry about your father,” Mr. Somnath said. “But just this month you’ve missed eight days of work. Coming in late has become normal for you. You’re not getting your work done, and I can’t sit back and allow this to go on. Maybe you can find another job more suited to your situation.”
“Sir, where would I find a job like that?”
“I don’t know. That’s something you’ll have to figure out for yourself. I’m sorry to be doing this, but I’m your manager, and you have to understand.”
Chintamani pressed his lips together. “I’m a very hard worker. But people have families, and sometimes family members get sick. You are a human being, you should understand that.”
“A human being! A human being!” Mr. Somnath seemed at a loss for words.
“Yes, a human being,” Chintamani said, strangely fortified. “A human being should understand other human beings.”
“What do you want me to do, Chintamani?” Mr. Somnath said. “What will the others think if I don’t do something? What will happen to this office if everyone starts behaving like you do, missing days of work, arriving late, leaving early?”
“I’ll stay late today to make up for this morning.”
Mr. Somnath shook his head.
Chintamani grew desperate. There were hardly any jobs in the city these days, let alone one that would accommodate his life. And this job was good: it paid as much as any work at this level would, his duties as a junior accountant were easy, and his colleagues were mostly pleasant. After he finished his intermediate degree five years ago, Chintamani had been without a job and miserable for several months, and the thought of returning to that state, with Buwaba’s medical expenses now increasing, was unbearable. “Sir, I swear I’ll be on time from now on,” he said, “and I won’t miss any more work.” An idea came to him. “Listen, I’ll put myself on probation. For the next six months, if I don’t come in at nine and leave at five, you can fire me.”
The man looked at him.
“I just want to prove to you what a committed worker I am.”
“Probation, eh?” Mr. Somnath said, lingering on the word. “That’s not such a bad idea. Actually, everyone in this office should be on probation. Maybe we can adopt it as an official policy.”
“Sir, don’t punish others when they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s my problem and should be my solution.”
“All right, all right,” Mr. Somnath said. “But I want to put something in writing that you’ll need to sign. That way there’ll be no misunderstanding later.” He turned to his computer and typed up a contract, reiterating what Chintamani had suggested. Chintamani signed it, and Mr. Somnath slipped it into a folder.
“May I also request that none of this gets revealed to the others in the office?”
“Why? I think it would set a good precedent for people here.”
“Please, it’s a little humiliating for me.”
Mr. Somnath looked at him hard, then said, “All right, but if you violate this probation, I’ll have to announce it.”
Chintamani agreed, went straight to his desk, and began working. He suddenly started to worry what would happen if Buwaba needed to go to the hospital again, but he told himself not to think that way—after all, he had no choice. Sushmita, who sat a few desks away, kept trying to make eye contact with him, but he ignored her. She had always shown an interest in his life, and sometimes, when he was feeling anxious or down, he welcomed her attention. But at other times she made him feel claustrophobic. Some of his colleagues confirmed that she had a soft spot for him, but he wasn’t attracted to her. She wore black-framed glasses too large for her face, she was a touch pudgy, and she breathed a bit too heavily. She also had the habit of staring at him when he spoke, which he found unnerving. She certainly didn’t come close to the kind of beauty he envisioned spending his life with. He knew enough to realize that a pretty woman didn’t necessarily make a good wife, yet he had to be physically attracted to the woman with whom he shared his bed, ate meals, raised children. Chintamani was willing to wait until he found someone who’d make his heart warm, his pulse quicken, every time he looked at her.
The problem was that he’d had little luck in finding such a girl. He used to be friendly with one pretty girl in college, and he was on the verge of confessing his romantic feelings for her when one day she began talking about a new boyfriend she had, someone who soon asked her to marry him. Since then, he’d asked out a couple of other girls, but both told him they were already seeing other people. He worried that his shyness put them off, or that they couldn’t see themselves with a lowly accountant who had to take care of his ill father, or that—and this was the hardest thing to acknowledge—they didn’t find him attractive. He wasn’t bad-looking, he knew, but there was nothing striking about his appearance or personality. He was a fairly small man, with thin hair and a downturned mouth. He’d tried to change this by practicing wide smiles in front of the mirror, but after weeks of practice, nothing happened: when he caught his reflection in shop windows, he found that he looked as glum as before.
After repeated failed attempts at attracting a girlfriend, he’d resigned himself to daydreaming about good-looking women he happened to see on his way to and from work, and lately, to his dismay, even actresses and models he saw in magazines or on television. Too often he found himself fantasizing about the Indian actress Manisha Koirala—he saw himself in a hotel room with her, languishing on the bed, running his fingers through her dark, wavy hair. These were foolish thoughts for a twenty-five-year-old man, he knew, but he couldn’t help it, and these fantasies tended to intensify when he got bogged down with worries about Buwaba.
His father’s heart palpitations were the latest in a series of illnesses. Soon after his mother’s death two years ago, Buwaba was diagnosed with diabetes. It took months to get that under control, and then he began to suffer from acute diarrhea, causing him to lose weight rapidly. Lately he’d been struck with so many ailments that Chintamani could hardly keep track of them. The chair by Buwaba’s bed was covered with bottles of syrups, pills, tablets, and syringes, and in the past few weeks he’d remained mostly bedridden. Sometimes he needed Chintamani’s help to go to the bathroom.
Now Chintamani thought about calling Sarla, the neighbor he had hired to check in on his father, to find out how he was doing, but Chintamani was acutely aware of Mr. Somnath’s gaze from inside his glassed-in office, and didn’t want his boss to overhear him making any personal calls.
At two o’clock that afternoon, Sushmita came to his desk. “Isn’t it time for tea?” she asked, her eyes large behind her glasses. “Shall we go downstairs?”
“No tea for me today.”
She leaned against his desk, breathing audibly. “What happened?” she whispered.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’ll tell you later.”
He sensed her watching him, but he kept his head down, and soon enough she went with other coworkers to the tea shop downstairs.
He was still working after everyone had left the office that evening. Mr. Somnath, who was always the last to leave, stopped by his desk. “Aren’t you going home?”
“I’m making up for this morning, sir.”
“Right, right,” he said, and then he too left. After about an hour, the office attendant who was responsible for locking up became impatient with Chintamani, so he decided to leave.
When he stepped out onto the street below, he was surprised to see Sushmita leaning against the lamppost there. “I thought you went home,” he said, and began walking, and she caught up to him. They’d left the office together before, and they usually parted ways in Ranipokhari, Sushmita heading toward Putalisadak and he toward Tripureswor. Now he walked quickly, and she too quickened her pace, and asked, “So, what happened with Mr. Somnath?”
“What do you think happened? He’s fed up with me, and he lectured me.”
“Something else had to happen,” she said. “You look so worried. Why don’t you talk to me about it?”
“What’s there to talk about? You know my father’s situation. You know how Mr. Somnath is.”
“He’s not that bad,” she said. “He is our manager, so he has to say something.” It was known in the office that Sushmita was Mr. Somnath’s favorite employee. He sang her praises to the other workers, and had once taken her home for dinner with his wife and kids. For a few minutes Chintamani and Sushmita walked quietly, then she said, “When will I ever get to meet Buwaba? You always say you’ll bring me home with you soon, but you never do. I’ll probably never get to meet him.”
She had at times mentioned her own father’s death, when she was a teenager, and how it had left a big hole in her life, but Chintamani feared her meeting Buwaba would give him the wrong idea. “He’s too ill right now for anyone to visit,” he said.
“That’s what you always say,” she said.
“Be patient,” he said. “One of these days I’ll arrange it.”
“How about I come this Saturday?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to ask him first.”
“I’ll plan on coming unless your father says no.”
“Let’s just see how he’s feeling then.”
After they parted ways in Ranipokhari, he changed his mind—it might not be such a bad idea for Sushmita to meet Buwaba. Lately his father had been complaining about the lack of a “feminine presence” in the house, and Sushmita’s visit might rejuvenate him. But Chintamani would have to make clear that her visit didn’t signal anything significant, that she was merely a coworker who’d become a friend. Not even a close friend, he’d tell Buwaba. And it was true—after all, he and Sushmita rarely talked about personal matters. He did know that she had an elderly mother who sewed clothes for women in her neighborhood, and he knew about her father, but that was about it.
Though Chintamani wasn’t attracted to her, he didn’t always mind spending time with her. Sushmita was quite intelligent, that much he had gathered quickly. He liked to listen to her argue with their colleagues about politics, discuss books, or explain the latest technological developments in America or Japan. Once, after work, the two stopped by an electronics store because she was thinking about buying a camera. She didn’t know what type to buy or which brand would be best for her, but within minutes after the store clerk had explained the basics of two or three cameras, she began discussing such complicated details that the clerk gazed at her in admiration. “Your wife could run an electronics shop all by herself,” he told Chintamani. This embarrassed him, and after they left, Sushmita said, “People just jump to conclusions.” At any rate, Chintamani wondered why she held this modest job as a junior accountant—she seemed capable of so much more. He guessed that, like everyone else, she clung to her job because decent jobs were so scarce.
Chintamani lived in Tripureswor, in a flat on the second floor of an old house. He stopped by Sarla’s tea shop across the street from his house to ask how his father’s day went. Chintamani paid Sarla three hundred rupees a month to check on Buwaba while he was at the office—to give him his daily medicine, make his afternoon tea, and see that he was comfortable.
“He’s fine,” Sarla said as she poured steaming tea from a large black kettle into glasses set out on her counter, filling them to the brim. Sarla’s shop was poorly lit and stuffy, but she attracted regular customers because of her warm personality and her fragrant, milky tea. “But he was asking me why you were late. I was upstairs just fifteen minutes ago.”
Chintamani mumbled that his workload had been heavy at the office today, and went up to his flat. Buwaba attempted to sit up in bed as he entered. The flat had only one large room, which served as a bedroom for both of them. There was a small, separate kitchen off in one corner and a bathroom in the other. “Son, why so late?” Buwaba asked.
“Too much work at the office,” he said. “Sarla gave you your medicine?” He rearranged his father’s pillows.
“She talks too much,” Buwaba said, his eyes on the floor. It was clear that his father still missed his mother, and at times Chintamani suspected that many of the man’s ailments were more mental than physical. One of Buwaba’s doctors had told Chintamani, “Be prepared to hear these complaints about his aches and pains until he passes away. It’s common for old folks who lose their spouses.” In fact, it seemed to him that his father’s problems ran deeper than simple grief—some days Buwaba appeared to be gradually giving up on life. He had begun talking about his own death, and snapped at Chintamani whenever he tried to change the subject. Buwaba resisted being shaved anymore, a task Chintamani had to do for him because his hands shook too much, and he no longer played solitaire, a game he’d loved all his life, even when his wife was alive.
