Buddha's Orphans, page 16
“It tastes delicious.”
“Delicious like how? Does it taste like a goat’s ear, burned over the fire?”
“Not that good, but it is kind of salty. I can just imagine how great it’d taste, how hot and flaming, if you sprinkled on some khursani.”
“Nilu.”
“What?”
“Are you a man-eating woman?”
She bared her teeth and growled, then lightly bit into his arm. “I’m going to eat you, Raja. I’m going to devour you, from head to toe. I am Kali, and I love human blood, and human flesh.”
“Can we do this tomorrow, this eating-drinking business?” he said. “Don’t we have another important activity to perform?”
“Do we?”
“Yes,” he said, and kissed her. His mustache tickled her, making her laugh. Slowly, they unbuttoned each other’s clothes. The moon had cast a white glow into the room.
“Do you have a condom?” she whispered.
“I’ve come well prepared,” he said, and reached to the floor to find his pants pocket.
“Is it going to hurt?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
That night they lost their virginity.
The taxi stopped at the Guheswori Temple. Nilu watched Raja as she paid the taxi driver and they got out, but his expression was relaxed, as though nothing was amiss, as though only one road led away from the Kathmandu Guest House, and it always ended up here at this popular goddess’s temple next to the Bagmati River. The last time they’d visited this area was at the start of their first year at Shanker Dev Campus, when the entire class had come for a picnic in the hills between the temples of Guheswori and Pashupatinath.
They climbed the steps into the Guheswori Temple, but midway up, Nilu veered right, into a doorway to a house. Inside it was pitch-dark, and the two held hands as they groped their way up the stairs. Nilu led him. “Where have you brought me, mitini?” Raja asked, laughing. At the top, where a miniature window cast some light, a woman was standing, and she peered at the two of them.
“Is bajé in?” Nilu asked. The woman said that bajé was taking a nap. Should she wake him? “Yes, please do,” said Nilu. The woman disappeared inside.
Raja looked at Nilu. He seemed to be in some kind of a blissful state. He stroked her chin, then leaned over and kissed her on the lips. She gently pushed his face away, in fear that the woman would reappear.
“You know what’s going to happen, my dear?” Nilu asked.
He grabbed her arm and placed it on his heart. “I think I do. Do you feel my heartbeat?”
The old man appeared. He wore a thick pair of glasses whose bridge was held together with tape. His eyes appeared large behind them; he had a stubble of a beard, and some white hairs stuck out of his ears. He peered at Nilu, then said, “I don’t think I recognize you.”
“We haven’t met before, bajé,” Nilu said. “But you need to do something for us.” She leaned over and whispered into the old man’s ear.
“Do your parents know, nani?”
Nilu reached into her purse and took out five ten-rupee bills, which she waved in front of the man, then stuffed them into the pocket of his waistcoat. “You do a good job, bajé, and I’ll give you more, all right?”
“How did you know about me, nani?”
“Everyone in the city knows about you, bajé. Aren’t you known as Shortcut Bajé?”
Shortcut Bajé laughed. The woman was glaring at him, and he hastily reached into his pocket and took out the money, which he then handed over to her. “Let me get some things ready, okay?” he said, then disappeared with the woman.
Raja was gazing at Nilu. “How did you become so bold? Where did you learn this courage?”
“I have nothing to lose anymore, do I? Except you.”
The priest came down shortly, having changed into a clean white dhoti, which showed his thin arms, and bearing a tray of rice grains, colored powders, and other religious knickknacks, including glass bangles, a necklace, and vermilion powder for Nilu’s forehead.
He led them to the temple, where he asked them to descend a short flight of steps into the shrine of Guheswori, ask for the goddess’s blessing, and come back out. They did so, and on the way back up, Nilu said to Raja, “Are you going to back out now, Raja? Are you going to flee?”
He whispered into her ear, “If I’m fleeing, I’m taking you along.”
At the top of the stairs, surrounded by chattering monkeys, Shortcut Bajé was waiting to unite them in matrimony.
Thamel Days
THEY FOUND A FLAT the day after their wedding. The ceremony, true to Shortcut Bajé’s reputation, was short, with the priest chanting a few key mantras, sprinkling on the bride and the groom holy water from the nearby Bagmati, placing small morsels of sweets on their tongues, and making them circle the temple a few times. Raja was half tittering, half weeping. Toward the end, when the priest had them face the shrine and chant hymns that solidified their marriage for multiple lives to come, Raja grew solemn, which made Nilu giggly.
On the way back to the hotel, she leaned against him in the taxi and said, “How does it feel, hubby?” She kissed him on the cheek, which made the taxi driver frown through the rearview mirror.
“So what now?” Raja asked as the taxi sped toward the hotel.
“Well, we’re married,” Nilu said. “What do newly married couples do?”
“Go on a honeymoon.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Let’s go to Nagarkot. Great mountain views there, I’ve heard.”
“You can even see Mount Everest from there,” the taxi driver chipped in.
Raja and Nilu looked at each other. “Dai,” they asked him. “Can you take us there?”
“Now?”
“Yes, when else?”
In Nagarkot early the next morning, as they sat on the balcony of their small hotel, watching the rising sun paint the sky and the mountains a glowing, shimmering red, they soaked in the realization that their new life together had already started and that they didn’t need to return to their respective houses. The giddiness from yesterday’s ceremony—Shortcut Bajé, the monkeys and their babies that circled them as they were wed, the taxi driver who, even as he disapproved of their kisses in his vehicle, was thrilled to be driving them up the winding road to the hilly resort—had given way to a sobriety. They felt that they had aged five years overnight. On the way back down to the city they were quiet, and by the time the taxi driver dropped them off at the Kathmandu Guest House, they knew they had to find a home of their own.
The next morning they came upon it, their home, near the corner by Amrit Science College, a flat whose TO LET sign had been turned into TOILET by someone’s paintbrush. They could have searched for a better place: the house was old and crumbling and their flat was just a small room. But they liked the Thamel area, and the rent was reasonable, a mere two hundred rupees per month. By the evening they’d moved in, and the landlady’s daughter-in-law, Bhairavi, came to chat with them. She was a sweet woman, interested in the fact that they’d married yesterday but had no possessions to furnish their flat. When she learned that Raja’s home was right next door in Lainchour and Nilu’s close by in Jamal, she put her hand to her mouth. “Did you two elope?” she asked.
Nilu and Raja smiled at each other. “You could say that,” Raja said. “Although we’re the kind of elopers unafraid of getting caught.”
“To tell you the truth,” Bhairavi said, “my mother-in-law is a bit suspicious of you. She is wondering if you are even married, but this room has been without a tenant for so long, she didn’t want to let this opportunity pass.”
With Bhairavi they formed an immediate bond. Her husband had a slight limp in his right leg. A gunshot wound, they learned that first day, that he’d acquired during the riots in 1979, the year Raja had been jailed in Hanuman Dhoka. Manmohan Dai had gone looking for a neighbor’s child and caught a bullet in his leg. He showed Raja and Nilu the scar, and Nilu could tell that it sparked something in Raja, for his expression turned dark, and he said, loudly, pointing in the direction of the palace, which was only a block away, “That man is directly responsible.”
With Raja’s tryst with the palace guards still raw in her memory, Nilu couldn’t help but imagine his voice traveling over the treetops, over the backpacking tourists of Thamel chowk, with their foreign-printed maps, over the grand library of Keshar Mahal, its ancient books gathering dust as its lethargic caretakers sunned themselves in its elaborate garden, and finally into the ears of the men protecting the palace. Nilu could just picture the guards shouting, “Who is that?” then strapping rifles to their shoulders and checking their guns for bullets. While shouting incomprehensible words, they’d rush toward Thamel, their boots thundering on the pavement; after shoving aside grandmothers, who carried baskets of offerings, and low-level officers on their way to work, at last the guards would break down this house’s front door with the butt of their rifles and rumble up the stairs, their barrels pointed at Raja.
Raja ran his finger over the man’s scar, which was shaped like a crescent moon. “While the bullet struck you,” Raja said, now in a low, slightly shaky voice, “our king was probably sipping his wine and playing billiards and smoothing his mustache, and his wife was adjusting her bouffant hairdo for a party.”
But Manmohan Dai displayed no outrage, no sense of injustice about what had happened to him. He merely smiled at Raja and said, “That’s the way it is.” Then he changed the subject, asking about their marriage. Raja appeared mildly taken aback by Manmohan Dai’s easy acceptance of the fact that he’d been marred for life. Because of Nilu’s frequent exhortations, Raja had mostly kept away from student groups at Shanker Dev, although Nilu could tell that at times he wanted to get out on the streets and protest whatever the crowd was protesting. He read the newspapers and seethed. He listened to the radio news intently as though he’d find answers to life’s questions there.
He and Ganga Da carried on low-voiced debates about what was good for the country, and for the most part Raja scoffed at Ganga Da’s views. But these days the debates, although intense, also tended to end abruptly, with both father and son seemingly recognizing the futility, the impossibility of reaching agreement. Raja would turn away and begin fiddling with the radio, or say to his father, “How long are you going to blather on about the same thing?” And with Manmohan Dai, Raja’s disappointment with his acceptance of the status quo didn’t last long, and soon he began to talk to him about other topics. He noticed, as Nilu did, how amorous Bhairavi and Manmohan Dai were toward each other. Like young lovers, Bhairavi and her husband frequently exchanged affectionate glances, always speaking about each other in endearing terms.
“This is our world, Raja,” Nilu said that first day, after they returned to their single-room flat. One corner served as kitchen, and their toilet, located in the courtyard, was shared by families living in the surrounding houses. Nilu embraced Raja, rested her head on his chest, and wrapped her arms around him. “The larger world is outside. But this small world is the one that’ll nurture us.” He teased her about her poetry, then kissed her and said, “Haven’t you heard what our great poet Devkota said?” Waving his hands in the air, addressing the window as if he were speaking to the bicyclists, motorists, and pedestrians in the street, Raja launched into a dramatic rendering of Devkota’s famous lines:
A pouch filled with gold
is like the dirt on your palm—
what is the use of wealth?
Eat greens and nettles
with a heart full of bliss—
now that’s true happiness.
“We’ll certainly have more to eat than greens and nettles,” Nilu said. “How about some mutton tonight to celebrate our new flat?” They bought half a kilo of goat meat from the nearby butcher shop. As they didn’t have a stove, or pots or pans or dishes, they borrowed a pressure cooker from Bhairavi, who also gave them an old stove to use, and they sat on their haunches in the kitchen corner and watched the cooker hiss and whistle. The anticipation of their new life together, the mild anxiety over the looming confrontation with their families, had made them hungry, and they attacked the meat—it had turned a bit spongy—with gusto, their fingers scraping the inside of the cooker as they scooped up the gravy. They licked their fingers and their palms and loudly sucked the bones for the marrow. Overstuffed, numbed with food, Raja burped, and Nilu scolded him, then let out a burp herself; they had to hold their stomachs as they rolled with laughter on the bare floor. That night the two crawled into a narrow sleeping bag that Bhairavi had thrown into their room as they were eating. Squeezed tight against each other, their stomachs so bloated they could barely move without groaning, they became drowsy and abruptly fell into a deep sleep.
It only took a few days for Ganga Da to find out where they were living. One early morning he came knocking. When bleary-eyed Raja opened the door, Ganga Da stood on the threshold, staring at him. “What have you two done?”
Nilu had barely managed to put her jeans on and was sitting on the bedding.
“Am I going to get an answer?” Ganga Da asked.
“How did you know we were living here?” Raja asked, as though this was more puzzling than what he and Nilu had done.
“What does it matter?” Ganga Da said, red-faced, almost shouting. “People know me in this area. They know you, Raja. Our house is merely a block away. People have seen you in Thamel, they’ve seen you go in and out of this flat.” He paused. “At first I didn’t believe it. But it is true. I was never against your union, but I have also never been so disappointed with you both. Why did you have to do everything so secretively, as though I was your enemy?”
“It has nothing to do with you, Ganga Da,” Raja said.
“Then why behave like this? Why live together like this without the benefit of marriage? Do you know what people are saying?”
Raja glanced at Nilu. “We did marry. In the Guheswori Temple. Maybe you need to fire your sources.”
Ganga Da appeared speechless, then shook his head. “That’s not what people are saying. They’re saying you two are living together without the benefit of a marriage. Your Muwa,” he addressed Nilu, “thinks that I have a hand in all of this, that I’ve somehow incited you two.”
“Ganga Da, will you please at least come in and sit down?” Nilu said.
Ganga Da stepped in and looked around, then sighed heavily.
“I’ll arrange for some tea,” Nilu said.
He snapped at her. “Tea is the last thing I’m worried about. Why couldn’t you two have come to me? How could you take such a momentous decision into your own hands like this, so casually? You’ve slapped me—that’s what I feel like this morning. Look at this.” He pointed to the bare flat. “You have to come and live in this unbearable place while down the road a perfectly fine house is sitting empty. And why did you decide not to let anyone know? First, I get Raja’s call from the hotel—hotel! Whoever thinks of seeking shelter in a hotel when both of you have your own houses to go to? Then I hear from others that you’ve shacked up together in a flat.”
“Well, what’s done is done,” Raja said. “Now your shouting and screaming isn’t going to solve anything.”
Ganga Da, looking at him in disbelief, appeared ready to strike him. Then his shoulders drooped. “Your Jamuna Mummy has gotten worse since you left the house.”
“I can’t let Jamuna Mummy’s moods dictate my life,” Raja said. “Otherwise, my life too would be, you know?” He drew circles near his head with his finger.
“Raja!” Nilu scolded him.
“You see how he talks to me?” Ganga Da said.
Bhairavi appeared with a glass of tea. She must have heard Ganga Da shouting. Ganga Da looked slightly embarrassed, and he took the tea like a docile cat. After Bhairavi left, he said that he was obliged to let Muwa know the situation. He moped around for a while, then trudged down the stairs.
Over the next few days a small part of Nilu remained anxious that Muwa would barge into the flat, create a scene, and try to humiliate Raja. She frequently glanced out the window to see if her mother was on her way. But Muwa didn’t come, and eventually Nilu felt both relief and disappointment; for her mother the news of her daughter’s wedding didn’t occasion a visit, even in anger. Attuned to Nilu’s mood, Raja consoled her. “She’ll come, just give her some time.”
Instead of visiting, Muwa somehow got hold of the phone number at Bhairavi’s drawing room below and called one morning for Nilu. “You’re living in a real nice joint, I hear,” Muwa said, her voice raspy and wavering. “A real palace.”
“It’s enough for us,” Nilu said quietly. She could hear Muwa take a drag from her cigarette.
“Who would have thought that you, Nilu, of all people would turn out like this. I had higher hopes for you. Did you know what my aunt—”
“Muwa, I have more important things to do than listen to what your aunt thinks of me.”
“What important things? What could you possibly have to do?”
“I have to go to my school. I’ve started teaching.”
“Oh,” Muwa said. “You’ve become very independent—is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
Nilu decided to ignore that question. She wondered if Sumit was in the room. “How is Kaki?” she finally asked.
“She’s been pestering me about where you’ve gone. She won’t leave me alone, saying I should bring you home.”
“Tell her I’ll come for a visit soon.”
“When?” After a moment Muwa said, more gently, “You left without a word.”
But Nilu wasn’t deceived by the trace of sorrow in her voice. “I’ll talk to you later,” she said, and hung up.
On her way out she peeked into Bhairavi’s kitchen. Bhairavi was cooking the morning meal. “Everything all right?” she asked Nilu.
Nilu nodded, though tears were filling her eyes.
Bhairavi wiped her hands on her dhoti and came over. “She’ll come around, don’t worry. They always do.” She paused. “Why don’t you eat here this morning? You won’t have time to cook before school.”
