Buddha's Orphans, page 13
“Wait,” Ganga Da said. “This is the first time Nilu has come to our house, and we haven’t even offered her anything to drink. Let me bring some tea and biscuits.” He went to the kitchen.
Nilu elbowed Raja and whispered, “Do you have to tell him today who I am? Couldn’t it wait?”
He seemed not to share her worry. “Why not get it out in the open?”
“He might not like who I am.”
Raja’s arms were stretched out over the back of the sofa. With his right hand he began to stroke her face just as Ganga Da entered with a tray of tea and biscuits. Raja’s fingers moved away and began drumming the sofa.
“Nilu,” Ganga Da said. “Forgive me. We don’t have a servant in this house, so I have to do everything. The tea might not be to your liking.”
“I’m sure it’s tasty,” Nilu said, then braced herself for Raja’s revelation.
“Take the tea, please,” Ganga Da said, handing her a cup. “And tell me about your family.”
Nilu mumbled a few vague statements, expecting Raja to interrupt and reveal who she was, but he didn’t. He had decided to comply with her urge to wait.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that your father passed away while you were young,” Ganga Da said. “In that case you must have a close relationship with your mother.”
Nilu didn’t bother to illuminate him. Instead, she asked where Ganga Da worked.
“I worked for the National Planning Commission for years, but now I work at Nepal Rashtra Bank.”
Jamuna Mummy entered the room.
“Come, drink some tea,” Ganga Da said to his wife.
Staring at Nilu, Jamuna came to the sofa, sat next to her husband, and picked up a cup of tea. She sniffed at it, then peered into the cup. She said something that sounded like “jadumantarfufufu,” and out of nervousness Nilu softly giggled.
“What? You think we’re going to poison you, Jamuna Mummy?” Raja asked.
Jamuna Mummy slammed down her cup, sloshing some tea onto the coffee table. She said something about day and night.
“Don’t say such things, Raja,” Ganga Da said. “Don’t further inflame her paranoid mind.”
Jamuna Mummy pointed her index finger at father and son, back and forth, until Raja reached over and grabbed her finger. But Jamuna Mummy didn’t pay attention to Raja. She fixed her eyes on Nilu, then said, “What about this Kali Mata here? Why is she in my house? I’m watching you, Kali. I know you. You’ve come here to suck my blood.”
“The only things that’ll suck your blood are the leeches from our garden, understand?” Ganga Da said. “Eh, Jamuna, why don’t you do that little twist dance that you like? Show our guest here what a good dancer you are.”
“I’m not going to dance in front of Kali,” Jamuna Mummy said.
Raja chimed in. “Come on, Jamuna Mummy.”
Ganga Da said to Nilu, “Jamuna here was apparently a great fan of the twist before she married me.” He stood and began to do the twist in front of her. “Here, Jamuna,” he said. Jamuna Mummy’s eyes shifted from Nilu to her husband. Then she slowly stood, tucked the end of her dhoti into her waistband, and began to dance, jiggling her hips, her arms swinging and her elbows jutting—her face contorted to match the movements of her body.
Sleeping Dogs Can Lie
RAJA DIDN’T REVEAL Nilu’s identity to Ganga Da that day, but he did two weeks later. When he informed Nilu, she held her breath. “How did he react? What did he say?” They were sitting on a hillock at the western edge of the neighborhood, an area not yet crowded with houses. Legend had it that until a few years ago, when this area was just being settled, foxes howled and barked here at night.
“He said nothing.”
“But he must have said something!”
“Nothing at first. Later he came in while I was studying in my room and said that I shouldn’t tell Jamuna Mummy because she might have memories of Kaki that could trigger things for her.”
“Is that all?”
“Well,” Raja hesitated. “He said something about his sin, that it had come back to haunt him, or something like that.”
With her finger Nilu began to doodle on a patch of dust. “I’m sure he wishes that we two hadn’t come together.”
“Now where did you get that idea, mitini? Really, Ganga Da isn’t bad. He’s stupid, old-fashioned in his ideas of loyalty. That’s why he’s remained devoted to Jamuna Mummy, that’s why he thinks criticizing our raja-maharaja is bad for the country.”
“So you think he’s stupid because he did not abandon Jamuna Mummy? You have a very soft heart.”
“I just don’t understand him sometimes. It’s like everything around him is changing, but he wants to remain stuck in a previous century.”
“Do you think loyalty cares which century it’s in? If I were to go crazy tomorrow, like Jamuna Mummy, you wouldn’t remain loyal to me?”
He put his arm around her, squeezed her. Then he nosed her neck and, moving his mouth up, bit her gently on the cheek. Aware of a small boy playing with a bicycle tire nearby, she turned her face away. “Ganga Da liked you, I could tell,” he said.
“Do you always fight with him?”
“Not always, but sometimes he doesn’t leave me alone.”
She took his hand. “Tell me what it is you are feeling.”
He thought for a while, then said, “Something is missing in my life.”
They stung her, his words, even though Nilu knew that he meant his mother, not her. She wanted him to say that something had been missing until she came along, and now his life was complete. But that was foolish.
As though realizing the effect of his statement, Raja put his head on her shoulder and said, “But now you are with me. Now everything—”
She put her finger on his lips and said, “Shhh.”
I’ll tell him later, Nilu kept telling herself, at a more appropriate time. I’ll tell him later that the man whom Raja now considered his father had used forged documents to snatch him away from Kaki. But as she began to spend more time with Raja, in and out of school and at his home, and as she became aware of the tension between Ganga Da and Raja, she couldn’t bring herself to divulge this secret. She could easily see Raja going home and giving Ganga Da a piece of his mind for what he’d done to Kaki. As far as Raja knew, the servant woman who’d initially raised him had surrendered him to Ganga Da—surrendered him for his own good because she knew that he’d get a better life in Lainchour. If Nilu told Raja the truth, she could forever rupture this family, and she had no interest in doing so.
One day, however, she couldn’t resist asking him whether he had any desire to see Kaki.
He appeared startled by her question, as though he’d never considered it before. He ruminated on it for a few moments, then said, “What good would that do?”
“Well, at least you’ll make her happy. So happy that she probably won’t stop crying.”
“She might not want to let me go.”
Nilu considered it. “No, she’s not that selfish. She’d understand that you have your own life by now.”
Raja turned thoughtful, then slowly shook his head. “Sleeping dogs can lie,” he said in English.
She was too quick to correct him. “You mean, Let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Yes, yes.” He continued after a moment. “Nilu, I can’t even recall her face. What is the point in my visiting her? It’ll only inflame old wounds. Let it just go.”
She didn’t fully understand his reasoning. She’d thought he’d want to visit Kaki, embrace her, thank her for saving him from a life of destitution. After all, he could have ended up in a cold, uncaring orphanage with no one to love him. At the same time, what he felt was what he felt, and it was foolish to expect him to fit a mold, to think what she wanted him to think. She couldn’t begin to fathom what it was like not to know the identity of the woman who gave birth to you, and although it surprised her when Raja expressed fidelity to a woman who’d discarded him in the park, where he could have died if Bokey Ba hadn’t woken to his cries and if Kaki hadn’t fed him milk, she decided she wasn’t going to judge him. Maybe sometime in the future he could be persuaded to pay Kaki a visit.
Every day, happy after spending time with Raja, Nilu abruptly turned sober once she reached home and had to face Kaki. Half-blind, Kaki would be fumbling around the kitchen. Every day Nilu thought about telling her, “Kaki, guess who I spent time with today?” But she couldn’t even hint at knowing something about Raja, couldn’t inflict such cruelty. One time, however, her own emotions overwhelmed her, and after spending the afternoon with Raja, she went to Kaki and put her arms around her from behind.
“Nilu Nani, what’s wrong?” Kaki asked. With her arthritic fingers she patted Nilu’s cheeks, felt the dampness there, and asked, “What’s wrong, my daughter? Did something happen? Did someone say anything?”
Nilu shook her head and thrust her face against Kaki’s shoulder.
“Everything will be all right, dear,” Kaki said. “God will make everything all right for you.”
Nilu lifted her face. She couldn’t help but ask, “Kaki, do you still think about Raja? Do you still miss him?”
At the mention of Raja’s name, Kaki became alert. “Why? Have you seen Raja?”
With great self-control Nilu said, “No, just asking. I haven’t heard you mention his name in a long while.”
Kaki’s face sagged again. “Not a single day goes by when I don’t wonder what he’s doing now. I wonder what he looks like. He must have grown tall. He was tall for his age even then. Who can tell me what he is like? Who can tell me whether he even remembers me?”
“Kaki, he grew up on your lap. He must have turned out really well. You ought to be happy with that thought.”
“Do you think he misses me?”
“How can he not? You are his mother, aren’t you?”
A tiny flicker of a smile appeared on her lips. “He must be a really handsome boy. He was always so good-looking. Did I tell you, nani, when he was about three years old and used to follow me around at Rani Pokhari, people used to come up to me and jokingly ask whether they could take him home, so good-looking he was. At that time I used to laugh. I was tickled that people wanted to take him away from me.”
“Look at the sky,” Raja said, sitting with Nilu at the mound at the edge of the neighborhood, where they liked to meet. The sun was setting behind the giant hill of Nagarjun to the west, painting the entire sky kaleidoscopic pink and red and blue and orange and purple. “Ganja colors,” he said. The first time he’d likened the evening sky to ganja, she’d prodded him, forcing him to admit that yes, he did smoke pot every now and then. He’d asked her whether she’d smoked, and she’d shaken her head, and the next day after school he brought, in a small tin container that he’d lifted from Jamuna Mummy’s dresser, what looked like dried leaves. He held one to Nilu’s nose, and she inhaled the pungent smell. “It’s good, isn’t it?” he said, and the assured manner with which he ground the leaves on his palm with his thumb told her that he smoked this stuff regularly. After pulverizing the leaves, he poured the dust onto a piece of paper. Then he took out a cigarette and emptied it of its tobacco. Expertly, he began to slide the ganja dust into the hollow cigarette.
She watched his manuevers with a mixture of fascination and, yes, distaste; his smoking pot reminded her of Muwa’s drug habit. But she also knew that Muwa, with her pills and her cocaine and her occasional needles, was a full-fledged addict. This, on the other hand, was only youthful experimentation—she hoped. So, when Raja held out the smoke, she accepted it. He lit it for her. She took a deep drag and coughed, and he encouraged her, and she took drag after drag, and for a while nothing happened. Then the air turned lighter and syrupy at the same time, and things slowed down so much that she could hear the shrill whistle and cries of a boy all the way down the field below, and he seemed to be shouting for her. Then she began to laugh because the pores of Raja’s nose appeared as big as craters.
“What? What?” Raja asked, merely smiling, not laughing crazily like her because he was accustomed to ganja. He offered the cigarette to Nilu again, and, hysterical because the craters on his nose undulated as he spoke, she buried her face in his shoulder, leaving a wet imprint of her lips on his sleeve. He kept saying “What? What?” as he finished the cigarette. Darkness had begun to fall, and he spoke about life in his soft, unhurried voice: how you thought life was under your control, but it had other things in store for you. Occasionally a silky laugh escaped Nilu’s mouth because he was so serious, but gradually his words mesmerized her.
“I want to live in a different age,” he said. “I want to live during the days of the Ranas.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why do you want to live during the days of the Ranas?”
“I like old times,” he said. “All those palaces, all those servants bowing down to you.”
Nilu laughed and said that maybe what he really wanted was the dozens of concubines that the Ranas had.
He squeezed her tighter. “No, it’s not that. I want to experience what it was like to live in your grand palaces as the citizens around you walked about in tattered clothes. What it must have felt like. Did it really feel good? How good? How good it must have felt to sleep in your luxurious bed at night when more than half of your country slept on hard floors, with their roofs leaking.” Raja’s eyes were staring into the distance, as though he were already living those times.
The question came to Nilu like an apparition appearing out of fog: why is Raja talking about those despots of those bygone days? Despots. Her mind swirled around the word for a while, unable to relinquish it, so delicious it was.
“What must it have been like,” Raja said, “to have the power to punish common citizens who didn’t bow their heads as you walked by, to command your soldiers to flog them until they cried out for mercy? How good it must have felt”—Raja’s words entered Nilu’s bloodstream, vibrated in her bones—“to force your own soldiers to pay you levies out of their pathetic salaries. I want to experience all of that, Nilu,” Raja said.
“No, you don’t,” she said.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “I want another life, not the one I have. I want to be born differently.”
“You are perfect the way you are,” she said, but something was getting caught in her throat, and she couldn’t tell whether she was about to cry or had already started crying.
“This ganja is spinning my head,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” she said. And now she was indeed crying. “Don’t say that, Raja.”
He turned to her and wiped her tears from her eyes. “Don’t cry, Nilu.” She looked at him and in his pupils she saw a woman, wearing a tattered dhoti, walking on pavement close to a body of water. Your mother, your mother, she cried, but only her mind, not her voice, spoke those words. The woman stopped, looked around, and allowed herself to be swallowed by the water. Stop her! Something in Nilu panicked, but then she noticed that Raja’s lips were soft and innocent and kissable, and because they were kissable she leaned over and kissed them. He closed his eyes, making the woman disappear from Nilu’s mind, and he kissed her back, and such sweetness passed through the front of her chest, straight into her heart.
Muwa found out, eventually, through acquaintances and distant relatives who’d seen Nilu around the Jagadamba School, that she’d switched schools and that she’d been seeing Raja. “That servant boy,” Muwa said. “That nathey. You are interested in him? Thukka!” Nilu spun out of Muwa’s room.
A short while later, Sumit came to Nilu’s door and said, “Nilu, your mother is very upset. Why are you so bent on giving her such headaches? Don’t you have any feelings for her?” Nilu was sitting on her bed, and he entered the room and sat on the bed too, making it creak. Both he and Muwa had been drinking, and now his breath assaulted her. “Don’t you have any feelings for me?” he asked, smiling.
“Do you mind not sitting on my bed?” she said.
“Why? We get tired too, don’t we? Or do you think we don’t get tired at all?”
She chose to ignore him and picked up the Charles Dickens novel she was reading.
He moved a bit closer to her, and probably would have reached out and touched her, either on her hair or on her cheek—so many times in the past he’d come close, and she’d moved away before he could do anything—when Muwa appeared at the door. In her right hand was a cigarette, one of the 555s she liked to smoke, and she said, “So, all this time you hid everything from me. Why didn’t one of the sisters inform me? Why wasn’t I sent a notice? Hiding in some local school! With that Kaki’s boy!”
Nilu kept on reading.
“Nilu, answer your mother, please,” Sumit said.
Nilu stood and stepped toward the door, but Muwa wouldn’t let her pass. “Show him some respect,” Muwa commanded. “Who do you think you are? He’s been coming to this house for a long time now, and you still treat him like he’s a stranger. You hurt him, that’s what he tells me. He cares so much about you. Nilu this, Nilu that.”
“Muwa, let me go.”
“Where are you going?” Muwa shouted, then coughed.
“Downstairs.”
“Why? To talk to Kaki? Does she know you’ve been seeing that Raja?”
“She doesn’t need to.”
“Why not? He’s her boy, isn’t he? What—you think you have more of a right over him now than she does? Hasn’t Kaki been longing for him all these years?”
Nilu said nothing.
“I had higher expectations of you, Nilu.”
“We had higher expectations of you,” Sumit said.
Muwa fought with Nilu over Raja for a few weeks, then gave up and returned to her cocoon, now speaking even less to Nilu than she did before. It was actually Sumit who attempted to converse with Nilu, pretending he was trying to make up for Muwa’s withdrawal. But by now Nilu had become an expert at ignoring him as she entered and exited the house, or when he was in Muwa’s room on the rare occasion that she had to go there for something. As she headed for a combined study session with Raja for the School Leaving Certificate exam, which was coming up in a few months, she paused outside Muwa’s door, hoping her mother would hear her footsteps and call her in, ask how she was doing. It didn’t happen.
