Buddha's Orphans, page 19
“Hmmm?”
“Jungey paid a hundred and fifty thousand pounds to sleep with London’s well-known prostitute Laura Bell.”
“And how do you know this, my friend?” Nilu asked drowsily. “Are you Jungey’s soul, reincarnated in this life as Raja?”
Gently, he disengaged himself and went to the window, slid aside the curtain. Children’s cries from their evening games penetrated the air. “When I visited Paris,” he said, adopting a low, gruff voice, “I was so impressed with a ballerina’s performance that I presented to her on the spot the diamond bracelet I had on.” Nilu couldn’t see his face under the huge hat; he could have been a stranger. It sent a chill down her spine. “In Paris,” Raja continued in the same gravelly voice, “I gifted thousands of francs to a ballet troupe.” He paused. “Back home I turned the king into an imbecile, kept him locked in the palace.”
“Raja, stop.”
He did, but he hesitated to look at her; when he did, his face was serious. Darkness had begun to fall, and the room was getting dim, hiding the contours of his face. When he came toward her, she became afraid. But he took off his hat and said, “It’s only me, Nilu.”
She grabbed him by the back of his head and pulled him toward her chest, where he buried his nose between her breasts and stayed there, breathing.
Raja donned his sombrero for a few days, until rumors circulated around Thamel that he was becoming touched in the head, like his mother. “Handighopté!” some people called him, likening him to a homeless madman who roamed the streets of Kathmandu in the late 1960s. The man was famous for his hat, which was completely black with dirt; often he’d walk into the middle of traffic, gesticulating. Soon after Raja found out who Handighopté was, he lost interest in Jungey, and the sombrero was slipped under the bed, to gather dust.
To stay close to Raja, after dinner Nilu would read the same books he did. When her eyes began to shut during these evening sessions, Raja prodded her with the eraser of his pencil. “Sleeping Beauty, utha! Awake, and behold the wonders of this world.” She smiled sheepishly and opened her eyes wide to look at the book Raja was holding: an English translation of a Hindi novel. The book was mildly interesting (“The plot is simply fabulous,” Raja declared), but after a paragraph or two, the letters began to blur. Her body was humming with fatigue. Lately she’d had to substitute for a teacher who had fallen ill with tuberculosis, and all day long she ran from one class to another, with only brief breaks for tea, then hurried home to cook dinner.
Because he was so engrossed in his reading, Raja often forgot to prepare dinner. “Oh!” he’d say when Nilu asked him why the vegetables hadn’t been cut and rinsed. She’d suppress her disappointment, for he’d look so beautiful, a lock of hair falling on his forehead, as he sat by the window in the dusk. So she’d change into her house dhoti, pump the stove and put water to boil for tea, then sit on her haunches on the floor and slice the vegetables. When she needed some ginger or garlic, Raja didn’t mind fetching it from the store, but he’d take the book with him and read it as he descended the stairs and all the way to the shop. Sometimes he brought home a packet of salt instead of turmeric, and scratched his head when she pointed out his mistake.
“With the amount of reading you do,” she told him, “you’d make a better teacher than I do.”
“Is that why you have a teaching job and I don’t?” he answered back.
One evening when she came home, the door was locked from the outside. With her key she opened it and went in. None of Raja’s books were lying around. Was he at one of the libraries this late? She contemplated starting dinner, but without him in the house, she didn’t feel motivated. She sat by the window, waiting for Raja, wondering whether they’d go out to eat at the new thukpa place in the main square of Thamel, or, once he arrived, whether she’d muster the energy to prepare dinner. She fell asleep for a few minutes and woke with a jolt. An ambulance raced past on the street below. She glanced at her watch: six o’clock. She decided to head out to look for Raja.
She first tried the Kanchanjanga Café, where Nick and Roger now spent their evenings. It had been weeks since she and Raja had seen them, so he could have sought out their company today. But they were not at Kanchanjanga. Reluctant to return to the empty flat, Nilu began to check the restaurants and bars in Thamel, even though some of them, she knew, were not places Raja visited. She drifted in and out of them, greeting some of the managers and waiters, ignoring the pointed stares of men who sat on bar stools. Music sounded all around her: Bob Dylan, the Eagles. When one shopkeeper tried to entice her, in Hindi, to buy his masks, she remembered those times when she and Raja spoke in exaggerated Hindi to fool the shopkeepers into thinking they were Indian.
She found him at the edge of Thamel, a block away from Chhetrapati, in a dingy Japanese restaurant, with dirty tatami mats and broken bamboo curtains. He was sitting in a corner. Judging from his half-closed eyes and the pungent smell in the air, she knew he’d been smoking hash. A bottle of beer, half empty, sat in front of him. If he was surprised to see her, he didn’t show it. “Come, come, my wife, the love of my life,” he said loudly as he spotted her. The other guests, a European couple, glanced at them.
“How did you find this place?” Nilu asked.
He put his arm around her. “I just wanted to get away from the hullabaloo there.” He pointed in the direction of Thamel.
“And here I was, thinking that all you did was read at home.”
He poured a glass of beer for her, and although she didn’t feel like drinking, she took a sip for his sake.
“All that reading is rotting my brain,” he said. Then he added, in a low voice, his cheeks sagging, that he had been reading a Leon Uris novel when suddenly everything got dark and he felt that he would suffocate. He felt that he was going mad. “Can you believe it? All those years my crazy mother raised me I never felt like this, and then, when I move away from her, I too start to begin to feel as if I’m going crazy.”
Nilu wanted to console him but couldn’t think of what to say, so she merely squeezed his hand. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips, ignoring the scowl on the face of the Nepali restaurant owner, who stood at the counter. Nilu returned his kiss with fervor. Then she said, “But smoking hash will make it even worse, will make you even more anxious.”
“Today I needed something to calm this tumult inside,” he said.
She pressed his head against her shoulder, making soothing sounds. With her palm on his temple, she could feel a muscle twitch.
“You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you, Nilu?” he asked. “I’ve let you down.”
“Stop saying such things,” she said. “Disappointed by what?”
His face was close to her breasts, and for a moment she felt as if he were her child; his voice vibrated through her. “I can’t seem to do anything. I don’t have a job, can’t seem to find one or hold on to one. What is wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, sweetie. Why do you think that way?”
“It’s not only me, Nilu; you also think so. I see it in your eyes.”
“You are imagining things.”
The stereo in the restaurant was playing the Cat Stevens song about a hardheaded woman. “I sense her presence when I’m alone,” he said. “Right here inside me.” He pointed to his chest, not at his heart but at his sternum. “As if she’s been living inside me all this time. I feel her in my body.”
It didn’t surprise Nilu, his awareness of his mother. Children can sense the presence of their mother, no matter how far apart they are, how distant in time, she thought. It made her queasy, this notion, as if it had a direct bearing on her life. A picture traveled through her mind: a young child, a boy, roaming the streets, pursuing her, following her every move, pausing when she paused, looking away when she observed him, disappearing when she approached him. He was a serious-looking boy, and his face was one she knew well, but when she reached out to touch him, he disappeared, only to reemerge at another point, another juncture, as if he was playing hide-and-seek.
Muwa Visits Maitreya
IMPENDING FATHERHOOD galvanized Raja. As the delivery date drew near, he sprung into action, leaving the house at sunrise to search for jobs. A look of controlled desperation had entered his eyes. The idea of Raja’s swallowing his pride and knocking on doors for jobs, for the sake of their baby, endeared him to Nilu.
Ganga Da wanted to take Raja to some people he knew who’d be able to help with a job, but Raja didn’t want to be obligated to anyone, especially Ganga Da. Whenever Ganga Da asked his son to accompany him to the home of a bureaucrat who could pull some strings, Raja made excuses. Ganga Da, still mildly resentful because the couple continued to live in Thamel although rooms were available in the Lainchour house, was further hurt when Raja hemmed and hawed instead of accepting his father’s offer to help him.
“What is the matter with you?” Ganga Da said one morning. “Why are you so intent on being a murkha?” Nilu knew he didn’t mean to yell, but he did, and Nilu, sensing an argument looming, shut the window.
“Don’t call me a murkha,” Raja said. “I am not a child anymore.”
“You are merely twenty-three,” Ganga Da said.
“So what?” Raja said. “I no longer live under your tutelage.”
Ganga Da’s eyes moistened, and Nilu thought, Here we go again. “Yes, yes,” Ganga Da said. “I keep forgetting, dimwit that I am. You’ve become a big man now. Thulo manchhe. You don’t need a guardian, you don’t need a father.”
Raja picked up a book and began to read. Ganga Da looked helplessly at Nilu, who, ignoring her own irritation toward him, said, “Ganga Da, maybe some other day. Maybe Raja is not in the mood today.”
“All right,” Ganga Da said. “You two have your own life now. What can I do?”
He slunk down the stairs like a bedraggled cat.
Nilu went to the bed and pushed Raja’s book away. “Just be a little nice to him, okay? Even if you don’t do as he says.”
“What is the matter with him these days? One word, and his eyes begin to tear.”
“He’s suffering too, Raja.”
“He was never like this while I was growing up.”
“Age is also catching up with him, isn’t it? So just be a bit kind.”
“And who’ll be kind to me, Nilu mitini?” Raja said, his hand reaching for her breast.
During her pregnancy, their lovemaking seemed to become even more pleasurable. All Raja had to do was touch her, on the neck, on her thighs, and she’d become engulfed with desire. She’d grab Raja and whisper in his ears as she unbuckled his pants. Her extended belly seemed to adjust itself easily to the curves of his body.
But today, perhaps because of the tiff with Ganga Da, Nilu wasn’t aroused, so when Raja clasped her hand and placed it on his hardening penis over his trousers and said, “Who will take care of my sensitive needs?” she lightly slapped his penis and left the bed to open the window.
“Have you no shame?” she said, with a stern face. “This early you’re making improper advances on a woman who is nine months pregnant?”
His penis strained in his trousers. “All right, then,” he said, standing. “If you want me to roam the streets with my giant lando for the whole world to see, that’s what I’ll do.” And with that he abruptly left the room and went down the stairs, which shocked Nilu. She shouted his name, then rushed to the window, and there he was, swaggering as he walked away. Luckily, Bhairavi’s whole family had gone on an outing, so they were spared this mortifying display. But Nilu couldn’t help but smile at the thought of Raja facing prospective employers with a bulge in his pants.
That evening he returned home jubilant: he’d secured a job at a well-known bookstore. He told Nilu that he’d walked into Fishtail Books in Thamel chowk late that afternoon, looking for a secondhand book by the spiritualist Krishnamurti, and began to chat with the owner, a certain Shakya-ji, who, over the course of the conversation, became quite impressed with Raja’s knowledge of books. Nilu had no reason to doubt this, but she was a bit skeptical when Raja told her that the man had offered Raja a job on the spot, without his asking for it. Most likely Raja had in fact approached Shakya-ji for a position in the bookstore, just as he’d pitched himself to numerous businesses across the city for the past few weeks. His salary, Raja admitted, wasn’t much—a mere five hundred rupees a month, three hundred rupees less than what Nilu made at school. But they didn’t dwell on the difference between their salaries. A job is a job, they both thought silently, and this one was in a bookstore, a “repository of knowledge,” Raja declared. She was about to concur when he added, laughing, “For tourists.”
“Are you suggesting, my dear hubby, that somehow the knowledge purveyed to tourists is less worthy than the higher forms of knowledge that we natives have access to? Didn’t you yourself go there to find Krishnamurti?”
“That I did,” Raja said. “But Krishnamurti is different. The tourist knowledge I’m referring to is . . . well, fabricated knowledge.”
“You better toss away that thinking if you want to survive in that place,” Nilu said, her palm stroking her belly. The baby’s kicks and punches had increased over the past week.
“All right,” Raja said. “I’ll stop making such distinctions. All knowledge is knowledge. Or rather, all knowledge is fabricated. But, my dear mitini, if all knowledge is fabricated, then what is the truth? How will we ever know the truth?” He held his temples in mock exasperation.
Nilu conked him on the head and said, “All right, Mr. Krishnamurti-in-the-making. You want to know the truth?” She took his hand and placed it on her tummy. “Here is the truth. Feel it. The truth will come out any day now, then wail and demand that we wipe the goo on its butt.”
Nilu was sitting on the bed. Raja knelt in front of her and rubbed her belly. “How I love this truth,” he said and closed his eyes.
Within a few days he’d read all the tourist guides to Nepal and could talk to his customers with authority about places he’d never visited. “This fascinating hike takes you north of Pokhara to the Gurung settlements of Ghachok,” he recited as he massaged Nilu’s lower back, which ached more as the big day neared. She lay on her side on the bed, while he knelt on the floor to reach her back easily. She placed one hand protectively on her stomach in case Raja kneaded her back a bit too strongly and toppled her. “Please remember that some Nepali men think Western women want nothing other than to fornicate,” Raja continued, in an exaggerated version of the tourist guidebooks’ cautionary advice to women travelers. “So, in order not to incite them, wear a sari when you go trekking.”
They’d begun to refer to the baby as their “Third Person.” When Raja told her how he’d cursed an arrogant tourist who’d shouted at him in a thick French accent because Raja hadn’t been able to grasp the kind of book the customer wanted, Nilu shushed him. “You can’t use such language in front of our Third Person,” she said, and Raja had dutifully bit his tongue, grabbed his ears, and performed sit-ups as penance.
“Sorry, Third Person,” he repeated each time he sat up.
Late into the night they talked about their baby. “What do you think our Third Person will grow up to be like?” Nilu asked. Because their flat was a bit removed from the tourist hotels, it tended to be fairly quiet at night. Occasionally a motorcycle thundered by, but there were no shouts from drunken revelers or bursts of foreign language in the middle of the night.
“He’ll grow up to be like me,” Raja declared nonchalantly. Somehow over the past few weeks they had concluded that the baby was a boy. Nilu had told Raja that she’d always felt it was a boy, and Raja concurred, saying that a boy was what he saw when he imagined his child.
“Where will he go to school?” Nilu asked worriedly. When Raja said that the Jagadamba School would be the most convenient, Nilu made a face.
He laughed. “Why turn up your nose? It was good enough for me, and you too. Remember how you kept saying how much happier you were there than at St. Augustine’s?”
“That’s because you were with me at Jagadamba.”
“Now you’re changing your story. There were things going on at St. Augustine’s that you didn’t like.”
“True,” she said, lightly massaging her belly. “But the education was pretty good. You saw how quickly I got a teaching job at Arniko.”
“Well, he’ll go to Arniko then.”
Nilu made a face again. “No, I want him to attend a better school, then go to America or England to study.”
“What if he turns out to be the nonstudying kind, or even a nincompoop? Like me?”
“You’re not a nincompoop,” she said. “Nincompoops don’t love to read. They don’t get jobs in bookstores.”
He snuggled close to her. “Are nincompoops allowed to be happy? We’re happy, aren’t we, Nilu?”
“Yes, we are,” she said. “I was getting worried about you, but now you’ve also found a job you like.”
With satisfaction about Raja’s employment and some nervous anticipation about the approaching birth of their child, those nights Nilu and Raja felt a happiness that was exuberant, expansive, seeping into the nooks and crannies of their small flat and radiating into the streets, into Thamel chowk, which pulsated with travelers and peddlers, with music as varied as Bob Dylan’s nasal “Just Like a Woman” and the Nepali folk song “Resham-firiri,” with the sounds of flute and saxophone and electric guitar. That happiness embraced everyone.
A few days later they rushed to the hospital, where soon enough they were startled by the piercing, demanding cry of their newborn son.
Not too long after Maitreya was born, Muwa visited the new parents in Thamel. Nilu was in the process of trying to feed the baby. Leaning against the wall near the door, she held him in her lap. Raja was on the bed, watching anxiously, for Maitreya had problems latching on to his mother’s nipples. Nilu was trying to direct her son’s mouth to her breast when she saw Muwa at the door. Nilu returned her attention to her son.
