Buddha's Orphans, page 2
When he was three years old, Raja sat under the tarp, watching the rain. Lightning streaked the sky. The thunder was so loud that it threatened to crack open the earth. The rain hit hard, and some of it dribbled under the edges of the tarp, wetting the ground beneath it. Bokey Ba was lying in the corner, coughing, with saliva oozing down his chin. “Ba, pani,” said Raja, pointing at the sky. Bokey Ba’s chest heaved; phlegm shot out of his mouth and landed on his shirt. He lifted his head, looked at his spit in the semi-dark of the shelter, and saw streaks of blood. Just then, Kaki appeared, holding a black, beat-up umbrella. “Here, Bokey Ba, drink this,” she said, and handed him a bottle of cough medicine. The old man sat up, lifted his chin, and drank. Kaki noticed the blood and said, “I think we need to take you to the doctor.”
Bokey Ba shook his head, said something Kaki didn’t understand.
“You will die here, Bokey Ba,” she said. “Let’s go.” The old man didn’t move, but Kaki was adamant, and soon she had him standing, leaning against her, and the three walked out into the rain, crossed the street, and entered the office building where Vaishali and her husband, Dindayal, lived.
Kaki had been staying here too since her son kicked her out the year before. The building’s ground floor had housed a printing press, now closed; a legal battle prevented the space from being occupied by another business, though the location, in the heart of the city, was indeed desirable. So Vaishali and Dindayal, with the building owner’s express permission, had been living there comfortably for months, and in return Vaishali acted as custodian for the entire three stories. A restaurant and bar took up the second floor; a tailor’s shop was situated on the third. When she learned that Kaki had been turned out of her son’s house and had been sleeping in the temples, Vaishali had invited her to live there. But now, when Kaki, Raja, and Bokey Ba entered the building together, Vaishali grew alarmed. “I can’t possibly let all three of you sleep here,” she said to Kaki, who found a towel among her belongings and began to wipe Raja’s head and face. Coughing fiercely, Bokey Ba had slumped to the floor against the wall. “The owner will kick all of us out,” Vaishali said. “Then where will Dindayal and I go?”
Kaki told her that the old man would die if he slept outside that night. Finally, after some persuasion, Vaishali relented.
The rainstorm raged, and for a long time none of the group could sleep. The wind howled like a pack of wolves, and now and then a loud rattle or clatter sounded from the street as gusts hurled and banged things about. Raja clung to Kaki as he snored. Finally, at around three or four in the morning, the storm subsided, and everyone drifted off.
In the morning when they awoke, Bokey Ba’s spot in the corner was empty.
“I’ll keep an eye out for him,” Dindayal said as he got ready for work. Employed as a peon for a merchant who owned several spice and sweets shops in the city, Dindayal rode his boss’s bicycle all day, transferring packets of goods and cash between shops.
Throughout the day, as Kaki sold corn dabbed with her irresistible green chutney, she remained alert for signs of Bokey Ba. Many young people, especially students, stopped to buy her corn that day. They were on their way to the Supreme Court to listen to a former prime minister, known for his bellicose and eccentric ways, who was expected to defend himself against accusations of treason and sedition. Meanwhile, in his undershirt and underpants, Raja played in the dirt next to Kaki, sometimes crawling at breakneck speed toward other vendors along the street.
Briefly, Kaki became distracted by a couple of fussy customers; when she looked up, Raja was at the edge of the sidewalk, headed toward a small truck, its engine revving, alongside the street. Kaki shouted Vaishali’s name and, ignoring the money the customers had thrust at her, she rushed toward the boy. Vaishali followed instantly. But Raja was fast, and by the time Kaki reached the three-wheeler truck, the child was in the middle of the street. A few Padma Kanya College girls across the way spotted him and screamed. A small truck swerved to avoid Raja, a Bajaj scooter nearly rammed into him, and Kaki, her heart thudding, hurled herself into the heavy traffic after him.
One college girl ran and tried to grab the boy. He slipped out of her grasp and soon was at the entrance of Tundikhel. Kaki ran at full speed after him, the object of honks and drivers’ curses as she crossed the street. But the boy was already inside, near the shelter where he’d been living for the past few months. There he stopped, staring wide-eyed at the tarp. It had been ripped by the storm; the poles had buckled under the strong winds. “Ba, Ba?” he asked.
Kaki stopped to breathe, her chest heaving. “You’ll be the death of me,” she told him.
“Where is Ba?” he asked.
His clear speech startled her, and she responded as if he were an adult. “I don’t know. Maybe he ran away. Let’s go.” She lifted him. He felt heavier, and his face now seemed more solemn. As she approached the sidewalk, Kaki’s eyes fell upon an object glistening on the ground. She bent to pick it up. It was a button; it featured a photo of a balding man with small eyes, a foreigner. “Here,” she said, handing it to Raja. The Padma Kanya girls who’d been alarmed over Raja now congregated around him, touching him, reprimanding him. One of them spotted the button in his palm and said, “Where did you get this Mao button? Thinking about becoming a communist?” The girls laughed. Later in the day, Kaki noticed a student sporting the same button, with the balding man’s broad face. The word communist came to her, and although she didn’t know what kind of people were communists, something about the way the Padma Kanya girl had uttered the term made Kaki uncomfortable. Maybe Mao was a rabble-rouser, connected to the conspiracy against the king.
During the night when Raja slept, Kaki stole the Mao button from under his pillow and threw it out the door. It rolled down the sidewalk, then clanked into a gutter, where it vanished.
Bokey Ba didn’t return to the building that night, or the next night, or the next week. Kaki cursed the old man. He couldn’t wait to leave, she fumed to herself, as she fanned the coals in her makal. But as weeks passed and it became obvious that Bokey Ba was gone forever, Kaki’s resentment was replaced by a slow, sweet happiness, which enveloped her whenever she looked at Raja.
Off to Ganga Da’s
RAJA GREW TO BOYHOOD by Rani Pokhari, close to where his mother had committed suicide. At about the same time, the city built a park across the street, at the northern edge of the parade ground, and named it Ratna Park, after the queen. Suddenly fishponds appeared, and large stone umbrellas, which shaded people as they sat and shelled peanuts and took long afternoon naps. Bright flowers sprung up from the ground. In the evenings families flocked to the park and took leisurely strolls; parents used their new cameras to snap black-and-white pictures of their children.
Although by the age of six he did not remember the tarp shelter where he and Bokey Ba had slept during the monsoons, Raja learned about it from Kaki, and sometimes when he crossed Ratna Park to that spot near the Juddha Sadak Gate, he was certain he could see his baby footprints in the mud. At age six, his imagination ran wild, and at night, when he saw wide-mouthed ghosts salivating near his feet, he curled his toes under the blanket and clasped Kaki so tightly that she pushed him away, saying, “Let me breathe!” Raja often said he dreamt of a young woman with a gaunt face. When Kaki asked him if the woman spoke, Raja said no, that she only looked at him sadly. The boy acted out the dream, mimicking the woman’s expressions; his eyes became large and misty, and his serious performance left Kaki stifling her laughter. “It must be your mother’s spirit missing you,” she told him, even though privately she wondered whether a mother who’d abandon her baby was capable of such an emotion.
Raja often pestered Kaki with questions. One day he demanded to know whether Bokey Ba, whom he didn’t actually remember, could tell him where his mother was and whether she’d come back to play with him.
“You mean in your dreams?” Kaki asked.
Raja said, “No, in real life.”
When Kaki said no, he petulantly asked why, and Kaki slapped him lightly on the head and said that no one, not even his real mother, would play with him if he continued his bratty ways. Then she kissed Raja on his forehead and coaxed him to sleep. After he finally closed his eyes, she sang a lullaby he liked when he was younger, one that she hadn’t sung in a while: Aijaa chari kataun kaan, laijaa chari Gosainthan. Soon he slept, snoring a little with each exhalation. Watching him, Kaki realized that she hadn’t thought of her own son for quite some time—so completely had she given her attention to Raja. What would happen tomorrow if suddenly Raja’s mother were to appear and demand that Kaki return her son? The unlikelihood of this, especially after six years, made her smile. Yet she couldn’t sleep; her mind was engaged in an imaginary argument with Raja’s mother, telling her the boy was hers now. She saw herself pleading with the woman, who then left, only to reappear with a couple of policemen. The mother’s face was stern, unrelenting, and Kaki saw herself crumpling to the ground as the police pulled Raja from her arms.
During the day her eyes lingered over the faces of certain women who came to buy corn: those who looked unhappy, or emaciated, or troubled in some way. At those moments Kaki made sure that Raja remained within her sight, and she watched the suspected woman carefully to make sure that she didn’t make any moves toward the boy.
Once, as Kaki returned from the Asan market after buying some vegetables, she spotted a woman holding Raja’s hand and bending down to talk to him at the edge of the park. Kaki’s heartbeat quickened, and she rushed toward them. “Who are you?” she asked fiercely as she pulled Raja away from the woman. “Why are you bothering the boy?”
Startled, the woman said, “I was just asking what his name was, where he lived.”
“What business is it of yours?”
“I was only talking because I thought the boy was cute. What kind of a person are you?”
“You want to talk to cute boys, why don’t you go and give birth to your own son?”
Out of the woman’s earshot, she admonished Raja not to talk to strangers, particularly women.
“Why?” Raja asked.
“Some women are really bad,” Kaki said. “They know hocus-pocus and will lure you away with their magic.”
Raja pondered this for a while, then asked, “Was my mother bad too?”
“Yes.”
Now making a living was becoming more difficult for Kaki. Every year more and more people migrated to the city. They cited hardships in the village—farmlands gone dry and unyielding, backbreaking work from dawn to dusk—and they swarmed to the capital. Consequently, every month or so, some poor villager opened a tiny portable shop in the Rani Pokhari area. Nothing much: just a nanglo, a basket, filled with Bahadur cigarettes; or titaura, or candy. The more entrepreneurial offered pencils and thin, poorly made notebooks for schoolchildren. Two more corn sellers had also appeared, and though everyone agreed that their corn was not nearly as delicious as Kaki’s, these competitors still diverted customers from her.
On rainy days, when people didn’t venture out, Kaki barely made a few paisa, and she then had to borrow rice and dal, and sometimes even oil, from Vaishali. Raja loved meat, and Kaki wished they could afford it once a week, or at least once a fortnight. Every Saturday, folks went to the meat shops and haggled with the butchers for choice pieces of goat, or chicken, or buffalo. Dindayal was also very fond of meat, and Vaishali managed to cook for him a few pieces of meat every weekend, even though they were more bone than flesh, bargained from the butcher at a nominal price. As Dindayal sucked out the marrow of a bone or chewed a piece of fat, Raja watched him, salivating. Occasionally, taking pity, Dindayal gave him a piece. Raja would hide it under the heap of boiled rice on his plate. This way the meat would be the last item he would eat, and the aftertaste lingered for hours.
Despite Kaki’s injunctions to avoid talking to strangers, six-year-old Raja roamed the Ratna Park area on the lookout for a woman with a sad face, like the one in his dream, and since plenty of sad women lived in the city, he couldn’t settle on a single one. He’d find a woman sitting by herself on the grass, doodling on the ground with a stick, and he’d perch a few yards away. He’d wait for the woman to look up and perhaps recognize him; then, as he imagined it, with tears filling her eyes, she’d run to him and claim him. But before that woman looked up, another would glide past, gesticulating with her fingers as she carried on a silent conversation with herself. Then Raja would abandon the first woman and follow the second. And during this pursuit, he’d spot one or two other women who didn’t look any less sad, and he’d feel confused and go to a bush and pee.
When this search for the dream woman overwhelmed him, Raja looked instead for an old man with a pointed beard who could direct Raja to his mother. So he hunted for a man who matched Kaki’s description of Bokey Ba. Because of Kaki’s strict instructions not to venture too far, his pursuit of a promising-looking candidate stopped at the periphery of the park, where he watched the prospective Bokey Ba disappear into the crowds headed for Baghbazar, or Mahabouddha, or Kantipath.
Once he spotted a middle-aged man wearing the official national dress, daura suruwal, with a black Nepali cap on his head; he was peeling an orange in a corner of the park. The man had a small, closely cropped beard, and although it was not pointed, it gave Raja hope. The man looked up and saw Raja, and he ate a slice of the orange. Raja’s mouth watered. The man smiled, motioned him over. Thinking that the man might tell him something about his mother, Raja went to him. But the man merely offered him two slices of orange. Raja gazed at the ground and shook his head. “Take it, take it,” the man said. “Don’t be so bashful.” Raja took the slices from him. “Sit,” the man said, and Raja sat down next to him but didn’t eat.
“Where are your parents?” the man asked.
“I don’t have parents,” Raja said.
The man, about to eat another slice, stopped. “No parents? Who looks after you?”
“Kaki.”
“Your aunt?”
“She’s not my aunt.”
“Well, Kaki means ‘aunt.’ If she’s not your aunt, who is she then?”
The boy shrugged. “Everyone calls her Kaki.”
After a moment the man asked, “Where is she now?”
Raja pointed behind him. “She sells grilled corn. Do you want to buy a cob?”
“No,” the man said. “I have to get back to my office.” Then he appeared to change his mind and asked, “Is her corn tasty?”
“It’s famous,” Raja said. “Everyone calls it Kaki’s corn.”
“I’ll buy her corn if you eat my orange slices.”
Raja inserted a slice into his mouth. The man stood up, smoothed his tie, and offered Raja his index finger. Raja took it and led him to the park’s exit. “Do you know a man named Bokey Ba?” Raja asked.
“Bokey Ba? Is that his real name? Like a goat?”
“He has a pointed beard.”
They crossed the street and approached Kaki. She was balanced on her haunches in front of her makal, chatting with a customer. To keep up with her competitors, she now also sold cigarettes and toffees and titaura, all neatly arranged on a nanglo beside her. Vaishali had also set up a small tea stand next to her.
When Kaki spotted Raja with the man, she asked, “Eh, badmash. Who did you bring?”
“He wants to buy our corn.”
Kaki lathered some chutney on a corncob and handed it to the man.
“Quite a clever boy you have here,” the man said as he paid her.
“Too clever for his own good,” Kaki said.
As he munched Kaki’s corn, the man asked where they lived and what had happened to Raja’s parents. He listened thoughtfully while Raja fidgeted by his side, craning his neck to watch the man’s face, then looking around at the pedestrians, his eyes especially drawn to children in bright clothes, out with their parents.
“Do you make enough to survive by selling corn?” the man asked.
“It’s never enough,” Kaki said. “But life’s always like that for us around here.”
“If you keep saying it’s not enough, it’s never enough,” Vaishali said, pouring tea for a laborer whose callused hands resembled the bark of a tree. “If you say it’s enough, then it’s enough.”
“Does he go to school?” the man asked, placing his hand on Raja’s shoulder.
“Where would I get the money for his uniform and his books and pens?”
“I can work,” Raja said. “But no one gives me a job.”
Kaki and Vaishali tittered.
The man bent down to face him. “I’ll give you a job. But to do my job, you’ll have to live in my home.” He turned to Kaki. “I’m serious. We’ve been looking for some household help for a while now, and I’m thinking that you look like a decent type. Only me and my wife in the house, so the work is easy. This boy is also smart and needs to go to school, and he can attend the one near my house.”
Kaki’s fingers deftly turned the cobs over the hot coals. “I’ve never worked as a servant in anyone’s home, unless you count how I lived with my own son and daughter-in-law. I don’t know whether I can even do the job.”
The man gnawed through the last bit of the corn and threw the cob to the gutter. “I’m saying it more for the sake of the boy than anyone else. It’s up to you. If you want to come and see what the job entails, we live in Lainchour, right behind the school. Everyone knows me as Ganga Da.”
