Buddha's Orphans, page 18
A Job for Raja
RAJA FINALLY FOUND a job at an advertising agency through a friend, close to a year after he finished his bachelor’s in commerce, but he didn’t survive more than three weeks. “I just can’t sit still at a desk,” he said. “My boss doesn’t let me design an ad or do anything creative. I get bored answering phones and filing papers.” Nilu wanted to tell him that he needed to give the job some time, perhaps a year or so, before he’d be assigned more responsibilities, that this was his first job. But when she pictured him fidgeting in his chair, drumming the desk with a pencil, responding to rude, dismissive clients, she felt that he had a point. Still, she was about to ask him to stick with the job for another week or two when he said, “That’s it. I’ll submit my rajinama at the end of the week.” The way he said rajinama, she had a feeling that this decision was empowering to him; it was a way to tell the world that he was unwilling to live by its rules. But she did nothing more than embrace him and say, “Something better will come along. I’d also have gone crazy if I had a job like that.”
Raja checked the job listings in Gorkhapatra and The Rising Nepal, speculating on the pros and cons of the advertised positions. But either he failed to submit his application or neglected to follow up. Nonetheless, one day he received a letter inviting him to an interview at a well-known Japanese car dealership. Raja borrowed a suit and a tie from Nick, the only man they knew who matched his height. Looking like a young executive, Raja hailed a taxi to go to Maharajgunj. Nilu waved goodbye from the window. She thought Raja looked handsome in the British tweed jacket and pants. The prospect of this job, assistant manager of sales, with a monthly salary of nearly eight hundred rupees, had excited both of them; when Nilu adjusted his tie, he said, “It’s a good company, Nilu. It has long-term prospects.”
That day at Arniko Academy she remained anxious about Raja’s performance during the interview and whether he managed to convey his eagerness for the job. At the ad agency, he’d apparently not only felt bored but also appeared to lack interest in the place throughout the weeks he’d worked there. Nilu had discovered this information when, at the market, she’d run into the ad agency’s manager. “Most of the time I found him doodling at his desk,” the manager said. “He didn’t even pick up the phone half the time. Still, we thought he’d gradually come around, but then he himself decided to quit.” When Nilu heard this, hopelessness engulfed her, and she had to fight it off. All Raja had to do was to try, she thought. True, she couldn’t expect him to stay at a low-level job for long, as several of their peers were unhappily doing because the competition for better positions was so high. But Raja had thrown away a good opportunity with the advertising company. What went through his head when he sat there at his desk and doodled? She could only suspect that his thoughts took him back to his mother—the woman who had betrayed him yet somehow wouldn’t leave him alone. This made Nilu’s disappointment evaporate a bit and increased her fondness for Raja. Poor Raja. He suffered, and she was the only one who alleviated some of his sadness.
Yet the car dealership was a growing company with diverse areas of business; its factories produced noodles, powdered milk, and shoes at different locations in Nepal. If Raja performed well, there’d be opportunities for advancement. Perhaps he’d rise to the rank of senior manager, with a separate office, his own staff. He’d be chauffeured to his office in the company car while he read some important document on the way. He’d call her from his desk and say that he was going to be late that evening, so perhaps they could just meet in a restaurant for dinner? She’d say that since he now sold Japanese cars, perhaps they should eat at the Japanese restaurant Kushi Fuji in Durbar Marg, with its large glass windows affording a pleasant view of the people and the traffic on the street below?
These fleeting fantasies made Nilu shake her head: she was turning into a regular Kathmandu wife, imagining promotions for her husband and the creature comforts of middle-class existence. The very things that she’d rebelled against, she thought, when she decided to write that Jonathan Swift parody no matter what the consequences, when she’d left Nilu Nikunj and checked in to the Kathmandu Guest House, when she’d dragged Raja to the Guheswori Temple and married him.
When Nilu reached the flat in the evening, Raja was at the window. She stood in the doorway, watching him. He turned to her and told her he didn’t think he’d get the job. No matter, she said as she walked in. She began changing into the lighter dhoti she wore around the house. She talked about her day at Arniko Academy as she dressed, as she put the kettle on for tea. Raja continued looking out the window. The kettle whistled. Nilu poured the tea into two steel glasses and carried them to him. Raja accepted the tea gratefully. She sat next to him and they both looked out. Across the street stood a vegetable shop, where shawled women were haggling with the shopkeeper. A boy on a bicycle darted by, both hands dangling by his side instead of clasping the handle.
Close to twenty people had shown up for the interview, Raja said. One man had an M.B.A. degree from America; another boasted five years’ experience at the Tata car factory in the Indian city of Lucknow. “I thought they’d invited me and maybe a couple of others,” he said, hiding his dejection behind long slurps of tea.
“Obviously they saw something in you to ask you for an interview,” she said. “You have to remain positive.”
To lift his mood that evening, Nilu took Raja out for dinner with Nick and Roger, who, when told about the interview, offered their sympathies and said that these big businesses in third-world countries were corrupt to the core anyway. The interviews were fake, Nick and Roger declared, and a senior manager’s relative most likely already had the job. “This is Nepal, for God’s sake!” Roger guzzled his beer, then, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, and looked pointedly at Raja.
Raja pretended to be offended and, impersonating his own typical tirades, launched into a mock speech that defended the virtues of his country against “you khaireys, you imperialists, you colonialists with your funny rotten potato smell and your drinking-beer-instead-of-water habits, your awful-looking freckles.” Then Nick produced his “Doobie Brother,” a delicious Afghan, he said, and they passed around the ganja-filled cigarette. Since they’d moved to Thamel, Nilu hadn’t smoked ganja, but today she took several drags, to keep Raja company. The world soon became soft and spacious, and the friends ordered plates of chicken chili and ate ravenously.
Nilu watched Raja, whose face, when there was a lull in the conversation, looked sad, and she reached to stroke his cheeks. He turned to her and told her she was his loving wife, that he loved her and he wouldn’t know what to do without her. “You won’t leave me, will you, ever, for being such a loser?” Raja cried then, sobbed on Nilu’s shoulder, and Nick and Roger laughed, thinking that he was faking it, but it turned out he wasn’t; all three of them, Nick and Roger and Nilu, especially Nilu, were amazed at this display of emotion. They looked at one another to confirm that he was indeed crying, and even as they watched him, in soft-hearted fascination, they expected he would lift his head and grin. But he kept weeping on Nilu’s shoulder.
Ganga Da visited now and then, still resentful, after two years, of how the couple had ignored their families’ feelings and gotten married on the sly. “Why couldn’t you have waited a bit? Maybe allowed Muwa to come around?” he asked. “Wouldn’t everyone have been happy then? Now look at what has happened, Nilu. Your mother seems to have completely severed her ties.”
Somehow Ganga Da had decided that the new couple needed Muwa’s blessing—surprising thoughts from a man whose own mother, once Jamuna Mummy’s madness was exposed, suggested that he abandon his new wife. By now Ganga Da knew well enough about Muwa’s drug habit, her muddled brain, her lover; still he insisted that Raja and Nilu ought to have waited. He had envisioned a grand wedding for them, he lamented, with a sumptuous feast, a brightly dressed band playing music all night. He would have invited everyone he knew, even long-forgotten friends and colleagues. “Besides,” he said to Raja, “that’s what your Jamuna Mummy wanted. That’s what she tells me in her saner moments. Do you know how many times I’ve had to take her to the hospital since you left the house? Four times already. Her brain is half fried from electroconvulsive therapy. Your wedding would have given her a morsel of happiness. Now she’s cursing Kaki again, saying that Kaki stole her boy. She thinks Kaki has imprisoned you in the Nakkhu Jail. These days she sits on the kitchen floor, spreads all the spoons and the forks and the ladles around her, then chants gibberish so you’ll be released from your shackles there.”
Nilu and Raja had also come to know by now that Ganga Da was building a house elsewhere in the city, although he’d not been forthcoming about it. The money, Raja surmised, came from what Ganga Da had inherited from his mother.
Raja sat by the window, wearing a wistful smile and watching the activities on the street. “Old man,” Nilu declared him, like the boodhas in the city who, their thick dirty shawls wrapped around them, haunted their own windows all day long, observing meticulously the happenings on the street below. “And you’re only twenty-two,” she said as she fastened the folds of her sari with a safety pin.
He said that the details of the world outside might reveal to him how the world really worked. “Look at that woman,” he said, urging Nilu to come to the window, even though her bus would be arriving within minutes at the corner (he no longer accompanied her to the stop). When she bent to watch, all she saw was a middle-aged woman standing in the street, her finger on her chin, lost in thought or perhaps figuring out what to do next.
“What’s there to see?” Nilu said. “She’s just on the verge of a decision.”
Raja nodded. “Don’t you find that incredible? That woman is out there, in the middle of a busy street, exposing her thoughts to the public. You can almost hear them, can’t you?” Raja also put his finger on his chin, and imagined the woman’s thoughts: “I should have bought those radishes at one rupee a kilo. Should I go back? But that’d be admitting defeat with the vendor. Then again, my husband likes radishes so much. If I cook those radishes, he’ll be in a good mood all day, and maybe he’ll take me to see that film I’ve been wanting to see for so long, the one with Rajesh Khanna as the jolly chef. On the other hand, why should I always have to be the one to put him in a good mood? Why can’t he put me in a good mood for a change? Just the other day, when I was complaining to him about his mother, how she always manages to make me feel small, he brushed aside my concerns as though they were petty grievances. But I shouldn’t think like this about my husband. He’s my husband. I should feed him well.” Incredibly, the woman was still standing in the same position, seemingly frozen in time, as if corroborating Raja’s version of how her mind worked.
“You’re going to end up like Jamuna Mummy, in an asylum soon,” Nilu told Raja. “Why don’t you try going for morning walks? It’ll clear your mind. You’ll meet people and talk to them instead of letting your mind rot like this.”
He stretched, then said that he’d become too lazy for walks but that he’d do it if she kept him company. She usually had her students’ homework to look at in the morning. But for Raja’s sake she started getting up earlier, around five o’clock while it was still dark outside, and lit a candle, instead of turning on the switch, in a corner of the room where she reviewed her students’ work. Raja got up at around six, and they both went down to the courtyard to use the bathroom and to brush their teeth and gargle and wash their faces at the tap, before heading out.
During these walks they saw the city waking up. Street dogs stretched and yawned amid garbage piles. A few elderly men in jogging suits were walking unnaturally fast, their arms swinging wildly. They said, “Good morning,” to Nilu and Raja, and after a few days when Nilu and Raja saw them approach, with their funny strides, they exchanged glances with each other and mouthed “Good morning” before presenting their public faces to the men and shouting their greetings. All winter long they walked. Some days the streets were shrouded in a heavy fog; once, in Chhetrapati, it thickened so densely that they couldn’t see each other. When Raja stopped to pee against a wall and Nilu waited a few yards away, out of nowhere a swirl of thundercloud-like fog encased them, completely obscuring their vision.
“Are you there?” Nilu asked.
As he zipped up his trousers, Raja said, “I’m here.” Then, to tease her, he did not respond again.
“Raja!” she cried out.
“I’m here,” he said, then circled her, judging his distance from her voice.
“Where?” she said, swinging her arms. Her heart hammered in her chest, and she remained petrified until he wrapped his arms around her from behind.
Gradually, Raja began to show less interest in these hikes. At first, he insisted on returning after only fifteen or twenty minutes. Soon, he was reluctant to leave his bed. “I’m just not in the mood, mitini,” he said. “You go. It’ll be good for you.” When she told him that she’d gone only because of him, he smiled lazily. All day he stayed in the house, sometimes writing poems, sometimes reading. Every other week he visited the city’s libraries, all on one day—the morning at the Indian Library in New Road, then the one in Tahachal run by expatriate American women, and finally the British Council Library in Kantipath. The books he brought home ranged widely: thrillers by Robert Ludlum and John le Carré, biographies of Jawa-harlal Nehru and Golda Meir, history books about South America. He’d gotten into the habit of reading three or four books simultaneously, so that when Nilu reached home he’d be describing the plot of an espionage story in one breath and in another, what Nehru said to Chou En-lai when the Chinese premier visited New Delhi.
Raja’s obsession with Jung Bahadur Rana—the architect of Nepal’s Rana dynasty, the fearsome prime minister who grabbed power in the mid-1800s—came out of nowhere. “You know how Jungey inserted himself into the political machine of his time?” Raja asked. But he did not wait for Nilu’s answer. “By jumping into a river—that’s how crazy our country is. Picture this: The year is 1842. Loony Crown Prince S is traipsing over the Trishuli Bridge. An officer on a horse coming the other way doesn’t recognize him, doesn’t dismount and do his two hundred genuflections, so Prince S orders that he be thrown off the bridge. The officer, in tears, says that the only person who could live after such a leap would be Jungey, who was already becoming known for his crazy feats. So, Jungey appears, and lo and behold, he jumps off the bridge on his horse. And survives. This solidifies his reputation as a daredevil, which makes people afraid of him, which allows him to engineer the Kot massacre a few years later. The rest, as they say, is history.”
For weeks on end, Raja kept saying Jungey this and Jungey that. “Doesn’t Jungey look like Danny Denzongpa?” he asked as he admired an image of Jung Bahadur in a coffee-table book. This portrait (it was hard to tell whether it was a photo or a painting) showed the man in full regalia: the elaborate silver-jeweled costume, with a long gown that spilled to the floor. His right hand, clasping the top of a chair, displayed huge glittering rings. But his thin, ruthless-looking face and piercing eyes formed the most remarkable features of the portrait.
“Poor Danny Denzongpa,” Nilu said. “Why are you comparing our famous Nepali actor to Jungey?”
“Well, a handsome face is a handsome face,” Raja said.
Then, somewhere, Raja happened to glimpse a photograph of Jung Bahadur wearing a sombrero, and a few days later, when Nilu returned home in the evening, there was Raja, wearing a hat with a brim so wide that it touched the sides of the window where he stood. “Where did you get it?” she asked.
“At the cap shop in Indrachowk. How does it look?”
“It looks . . . silly,” she said. “But it suits you. What’s the occasion?” She wanted to ask how much it cost, but she didn’t.
“No occasion.” He told her that Jungey wore a sombrero when a foreign delegation visited Nepal. Holding his hat’s brim, he did a short jiggle, singing, “Sombrero, sombrero.”
She cautioned him against disturbing Bhairavi’s mother-in-law, whose room was directly below. “What? Your life’s aspiration is to turn into a bloody dictator now?”
Raja unsheathed an imaginary sword and slashed the air in front of him.
Nilu drew the curtains and began to change her clothes, but as soon as she’d discarded her work sari, he grabbed her and pressed himself against her. “Jungey needs some love.”
“Raja,” she said wearily. “Not now, please.”
“But Jungey is tired from plotting conspiracies and thwarting conspiracies, from accusing his brother of being weak, and from eliminating his enemies one by one.”
“Jungey is hard,” Nilu said, feeling his penis strain against her crotch, becoming aroused even though she was mildly irritated.
“Jungey loves wifey.”
“Is quick relief all that Jungey wants? Or does Jungey actually want a long, elaborate dance?”
“With the youngest, most lissome of his wives, wifey number seven, Jungey can imagine a quickie.”
And they tumbled into bed, careful not to rock it too much, lest ceiling dust powder Bhairavi’s mother downstairs. Raja kept his sombrero on as he peeled away his clothes, and Nilu kept referring to him as Jungey, which appeared to excite him.
Afterward, she dozed in his arms as he spoke softly, close to her ear, “When Jungey went on his England tour, he charmed the British, especially the women. Are you listening, Nilu?” he said.
