Buddha's Orphans, page 24
The phone rang again.
Nilu moved to the window. Her neighbors directly across the lane, a family that had moved to the neighborhood only recently, were seated at their dining room table. The son, who was about Maitreya’s age, was standing on the chair and gesturing dramatically, perhaps rehearsing for a performance. His younger sister gazed up at him, and his father, a man with a bulging stomach who always spoke to Nilu outside his gate in the morning, was smiling, nodding, occasionally saying something Nilu couldn’t hear. Although Nilu couldn’t see the mother, she knew the woman was there, probably also encouraging her son. The boy finished his performance, and the family clapped. The father embraced his son, his face beaming. Then he saw Nilu and folded his hands in namaste. Nilu nodded curtly and closed her curtain.
The way her neighbors—not just the family across the lane but others in the surrounding houses—gazed at her from their roofs and balconies and windows, it was clear that they sensed something had gone wrong with her marriage after her son’s death. One neighbor, a nice woman two houses down, someone who’d even looked after Maitreya a few times, had asked Nilu, on the day Raja had taken some belongings away in the truck, whether everything was all right. “Everything is indeed all right,” Nilu had said, and from then on only curtly smiled at the woman when she saw her. Her heart had closed to everyone around her. No wonder Raja too had moved.
Tonight would be typical of the other endless nights since Maitreya died: either Nilu would fall asleep soon after she returned home from work, only to wake up a few hours later, or she would be terrified by a dream at some point in the night, then unable to return to sleep again. She’d become used to these patterns, and even though she felt tired most of the day as she taught, she’d stopped fighting her sleeplessness. These days, especially in the afternoon, she’d re-sorted to assigning exercises to the students because she didn’t have the strength to stand in front of the blackboard and lecture. As the students bent over their work, she’d doze off in the chair, waking when she heard the students giggle. Before, she used to devise new ways to get the students interested in the material she taught. To prepare them for the annual citywide spelling contest, she’d found jingles that would help them with problem words: Write I before E except after C, or when sounded like A, as in neighbor and weigh. The jingles were still on display on the classroom wall. A teacher last year had received a written reprimand for napping in the classroom, and Principal Thapa had delivered a stern lecture in the staff room, saying that parents didn’t pay an exorbitant amount of money for their children to be taught by sleeping instructors. The accused teacher, a man close to retirement, had sat next to Nilu, shamefaced, and Nilu had pitied him.
Nilu wondered if one of these days a student would report her behavior to Principal Thapa, or if he himself would walk by her classroom and find her dozing. Although the principal had gone out of his way to be nice to Nilu since Maitreya’s death, he wouldn’t hesitate to put her on notice. But, Nilu thought wearily, it didn’t matter—her heart was no longer in teaching. She had started moving through her class periods perfunctorily, her mind barely registering what knowledge she was imparting to the students. She couldn’t conjure up the exact words she wanted, and kept saying “that thing” instead. Frequently, she had to ask them to repeat their questions. Every few days she remembered her role and tried to perk up, imbue her voice with a false enthusiasm, as she talked about history and English: how the Rana rulers built Victorian-style palaces while the public walked around in tatters or how to concoct compound and complex sentences. But the façade wouldn’t last, for soon her voice would lose its energy, and a fog would envelop her mind. The students noticed her distractedness, and they whispered, or shot paper balls across the room, or made unnecessary visits to the bathroom.
Nilu’s stomach was beginning to cramp, and she knew that it was hunger, so she decided to force herself to eat. In the kitchen she checked the refrigerator and found a box of Bengali sweets that Prateema had thrust into her hands a few weeks ago. She could possibly prepare rice and dal, but the thought of cooking only for herself so late at night amplified her sense of loneliness, so she settled on the sweets.
Sitting on the living room sofa with the lights on, she began to eat. At first, her throat tight, she could take only small bites. She started with the barfis, which, to her surprise, still tasted good. Soon, she began to sample the varieties of sweets in the box: laddoos, cham-chams, kalakand. Her nibbles gave way to mouthfuls, and in no time she was devouring the sweets as if they were a meal. Over the next few hours her stomach would punish her for this indulgence, but for now all that mattered was the sweetness on her tongue.
In the morning when she went to the veranda to water her plants, she saw Maitreya, kneeling by the tap in the yard in his blue shirt, cupping his palm to drink the water trickling down. Something clambered up rapidly through her spine, and instinct told her to return inside, shut the door, and crawl back into bed, wake up again to a different morning. Then he was gone.
Fear remained with her as she went to Arniko Academy that day. In Bhotahiti the other day she’d wanted to run after the boy, grab him if that was possible, ask him questions about where he was, whether he was happy there, whether when he died he’d been in pain or if he’d just drifted off to sleep, whether he missed her. But today she found herself asking further questions about his appearing to her. Why was he coming to her? What did he want? Was he going to do this for the rest of her life? It frightened her, the notion of her son’s ghost haunting her without her being able to shake him off.
Perhaps because of the fear, which kept her alert, Nilu found herself more energetic than usual and taught her students reasonably well that day. Then, in her last class, she turned after writing something on the blackboard, and she saw him, briefly, sitting in the back of the room, chin on hand, looking at her.
In the staff room, as she collected her things to go home, Prateema said, “Your face looks kind of ashen, Nilu. Are you not feeling well?”
She said she was fine. She only needed to go home and lie down.
“Let me take you to my home for dinner today,” Prateema said. “That way you won’t have to worry. You can just lie down on my bed.”
“No, no, I don’t want to give you any trouble.”
“What trouble? Nonsense.”
Nilu gave in. Besides, the prospect of encountering Maitreya again was making her sick.
Prateema lived in New Road, in an impressive seven-story building her grandfather had started constructing when he first came to the country in the late 1940s. The Ganguly family occupied the top two floors, and the bottom five floors were leased out to various businesses. Prateema had married, divorced, and then returned to her parents, who, even though the street had become impossibly crowded and noisy, had continued to reside in their ancestral home for sentimental reasons. Apart from summarily dismissing her previous husband as “a very bad man,” Prateema didn’t say much about why her marriage had collapsed. She didn’t have any children.
It was nice to be high up in busy New Road, watching the traffic and the bustle below, for it took Nilu’s mind off Maitreya. “When my grandfather built the first floor of this house,” Prateema said, “hardly any cars used to ply through here, only pedestrians and bicycles. The street was partially paved with asphalt, for Prime Minister Juddha Shumshere Rana wanted half of it left as gravel, for his horses. When my father was growing up, he used to hang out in Bhugol Park right there”—she pointed to the west—"shelling peanuts, watching cinemagoers in Jana Sewa Hall. He told me that those days you could even see the snowy mountains to the north from Bhugol Park. Imagine that! Try seeing past your nose in New Road now, with this smog and this crowd. My grandfather didn’t mind how this road rapidly filled with banks and airline offices and newspaper stands, how the noise level increased year by year. What aggravated him was the hippies, who began arriving in Nepal in the late 1960s, with their long, matted hair and their colorful vans; they passed through New Road on their way to Freak Street. I can still hear him complaining about them. ‘Filthy foreigners,’ he called them. ‘They’re going to destroy our culture,’ he said. ‘Their loud music and their uncouth ways.’
“I remember one time I was sitting at the window—I must have been six or seven—when I saw a couple of hippies, a man and a woman. And they were kissing each other in traffic as they crossed the street. It was a deep, penetrating kiss, and they walked very slowly. My grandfather came up behind me and slammed the window shut. I remember the fury in his eyes. When I think about it now, it’s strange that he hurled some of the same labels at them that were hurled against him as a foreigner in Nepal throughout his life, especially when he first began to set up his business. Dhoti, he was called. Thieving Indian, with his conniving ways. But he was never deterred, and he was the most patriotic Nepali I ever knew. He didn’t like it when my grandmother spoke Bengali to her children at home. ‘Speak Nepali!’ he used to exhort them. ‘You’re Nepalis now.’”
Even after Nilu and Prateema went inside and shut the door to the balcony, the clamor from below didn’t taper off. Once in a while, a loud honk from a car would startle Nilu. “I still can’t believe you can sleep with this kind of racket,” Nilu said to Prateema, who responded that the only nights she didn’t sleep well were during those years when she was married to her ex-husband.
“What happened in that marriage, Prateema? Are you ever going to tell me about it?”
Prateema shook her head, her face sour. “I should have followed my instinct about my sweet Nepali language tutor. Remember him? I was so much in love with him, but then I decided to listen to my parents. Big mistake.”
Sensing that Prateema didn’t really want to talk about her ex-husband, Nilu changed the topic to their school days. The servant brought their dinner to the room, and as they ate, they recalled incidents from St. Augustine’s. After dinner they lay in bed, feeling full and lazy, and that’s when Nilu told Prateema about seeing Maitreya, in the market, in the yard.
Prateema put her hand to her mouth.
“I could be imagining things,” Nilu said, “but today was the third time. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what he wants from me.”
“Do you think it’s Maitreya’s ghost?”
“Don’t say that, Prateema. That’s what I find scary. I don’t believe in such things, but there’s no doubt in my mind what I saw. I’m just hoping that somehow my depression has made me hallucinate.”
“I completely believe in such things, baba,” Prateema said, and she told Nilu about the ghost of her aunt, which used to haunt her grandfather in Bengal before he migrated to Nepal.
“As it is, I am frightened, and you want to scare me more?”
“What’s there to be frightened of?” Prateema said. “He’s your son. But why is he coming to meet you? That’s what’s interesting. And that’s what we need to find out.”
“I don’t want to find out anything,” Nilu said, playing with a long strand of thread that had come loose from the bed sheet. “My son is gone. There’s nothing in this world that’ll alter that fact.”
“Nilu, you have to stop thinking like that. They say that death is just a continuation of our reality, that it’s not different, that we should embrace death, instead of becoming afraid of it.”
“I should be going home,” Nilu said, and stood, arranging her hair at the mirror.
“Listen,” Prateema said. “I want to take you to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“Someone who is very wise, who might be able to help you navigate this difficult period in your life.”
Nilu laughed. “Prateema, who are you talking about? A psychiatrist? I just need time; I’ll learn how to live with this on my own. Raja is also trying to do the same, I know.”
“It’s not a psychiatrist. It’s a person with a great deal of knowledge.”
It finally dawned on Nilu whom Prateema was talking about. She’d heard Prateema mention, in reverent terms, a soothsayer type of person, but Nilu had never paid it much attention, dismissed it as the preoccupation of a divorced woman. “Are you talking about your janne manchhe?”
“Yes, everyone calls him Lama-ji.”
“How can he help me?”
“Lama-ji knows many things about this world and beyond, things you and I don’t.” She paused. “He’s helped me understand things about my own life, especially about that man I was married to.”
Nilu put her shoes on. “I’m in no mood to meet any Lama-ji Fama-ji, Prateema. This is a temporary thing. It’ll go away. I just have to try harder. That’s what Raja said.”
“Lama-ji can also shed some light on Raja, I’m sure.”
“Uffho!” Nilu said, exasperated. “Let’s talk about this some other time. You’re giving me a headache.”
Downstairs, as she saw Nilu off, Prateema pinched her friend’s cheek. “Nilu, when am I going to see a smile on the face of my best friend, huh? Every day I see you like this and my heart breaks.”
Nilu walked toward the New Road Gate. All the taxis hurtling by had passengers, so she moved toward Putalisadak, where she might find one unoccupied. As she crossed the parade ground of Tundikhel, she saw Maitreya again, this time playing football with other kids his age. Dusk had already fallen in the city, and the figures chasing the ball were blurry, but it was her son, in possession of the ball, pointing his arm and shouting.
Lama-ji
“YOUR SON IS UNHAPPY,” Lama-ji said. He was dressed in an old suit, the shoulders and elbows of which shone, and he even had a tie around his neck. He had a broad face covered with indentations like tiny craters. He was also big boned, so that he dwarfed Nilu and Prateema as they sat in a small room in Bouddha.
Nilu still wasn’t sure why she’d come. She had a hard time believing that this man, who didn’t know her, would be able to tell her anything about Maitreya. But Maitreya hadn’t stopped coming to her, and every time he did, she felt like crying. When Prateema told her that she’d called Lama-ji in advance and told him they were coming, Nilu had said no, she wasn’t going. But Prateema had been persuasive. “If you don’t like what he says, just ignore him. Okay?”
Lama-ji’s phone, which sat on the floor next to him, kept ringing throughout their consultation, and he answered it each time, granting appointments, dispensing medical advice, issuing instructions regarding a construction job. Next to him stood tiny statues and framed images of deities, along with half a dozen head-clearing incense sticks embedded in a bruised apple.
First, Lama-ji asked for Maitreya’s photo, which, it turned out, Prateema had conveniently brought along in her bag. It showed Maitreya standing with one leg on a soccer ball, his hand on his hip, his somber eyes looking at the camera. Nilu remembered giving the photo to Prateema some time ago. Lama-ji took the picture and put it on the floor amid the gods and goddesses and began sprinkling it with red power from a box. He threw a few kernels of rice onto the floor in front of him, studied them, and said that Maitreya was unhappy.
“Saying unhappy is not enough, Lama-ji,” Prateema said. “You have to say what he’s unhappy about.”
Smiling, Lama-ji said something to the effect that Maitreya was trapped in the netherworld, a state of transition between this life and the next one he was going to inhabit. He mentioned a word that sounded like “bardo,” but Nilu couldn’t be sure. “But he is unhappy with you,” he said, looking at Nilu.
“Why?” Prateema asked.
This time instead of divining from his rice, Lama-ji closed his eyes in meditation. He sharply drew in his breath, then opened his eyes and said, “I can’t be sure.”
“Then what good is your insight, Lama-ji?” Prateema said, exasperated. “People like us come to you so you can give us answers, not confuse us with I-don’t-knows.”
“I’m not a god,” Lama-ji said tersely. “Sometimes these spirits are not that forthcoming. Looks like your son was quite sad while he was alive too, correct? Even when he was small, he had an old man’s way about him.”
Nilu was a bit startled by this revelation, for that’s exactly what she herself had thought of Maitreya. The boy had been such a devoted, affectionate son that during the exam season, when Nilu became overwhelmed with marking student papers, he always offered to help. “You’re too young, chora,” she said to him, but he wouldn’t leave her side until she told him that she couldn’t concentrate well with him sitting so close and observing her every move.
“Then I’ll make some tea for you,” he said, and he went to the gas stove, turned it on, and put some water on to boil. Then Nilu couldn’t concentrate because she was worried he’d burn or scald himself, and she had to abandon her work and go into the kitchen to take over. One time when she was sick with pneumonia, he’d refused to go to school and stayed with her all day, applying cold compresses to her forehead, running to the pharmacy down the road to purchase aspirin and cough syrup, and washing the dishes while Nilu slept in the afternoon; he did all this because the servant hadn’t returned from a visit to her home village. At that time Raja was in Chitwan National Park on an assignment for Nepal Yatra, and she had no one else to take care of her. Seeing her son worried about her and doing all the household chores, she nearly picked up the phone to call Ganga Da so he could come over to help. But Ganga Da had his own worries: Jamuna Mummy’s mental hospital had been vandalized, traumatizing the patients, so he had to go there every day to be by his wife’s side. Nilu had even contemplated calling Muwa, but then she couldn’t stand the thought of being in the same room with her, smelling her booze-breath, hearing her braying voice, watching her face break into a smile to reveal her missing teeth, her overdone makeup, her wig. She didn’t want to subject her son to Muwa’s influence, so she never made the call. Maitreya refused to go to school even after Raja arrived home three days later. So, for his sake, Nilu had to mask her chest pains with smiles until he finally agreed to return to classes.
