Buddha's Orphans, page 31
Won’t you help me, Raja? She pictured herself asking him this question. And yes, she could see him melt before her, because he was her Raja, and he loved her, and she suspected that tonight he’d wanted to say a lot more than he could. She had to give him another chance, and he had to give her another too.
The minibus to Chabel arrived. The boy-conductor leaned out the back door and, thumping the bus’s side, shouted, “La, la, la, Chabel, Chabel, Chabel. Chabel-Bouddha, la, Bouddha-Chabel.”
She waved at the bus, then glanced at Shiva’s face. He was looking at her expectantly, waiting for her to ask him to come along.
“Chabel?” the boy-conductor asked her as the bus halted.
She nodded. Turning to Shiva, she said, “You go home now, okay, Shiva?” And she boarded the bus. He stood there, gazing at her as her bus pulled away.
Book Two
Part I
* * *
A Daughter in America
YEARS LATER, after their daughter Ranjana had left for America, Raja occasionally teased Nilu about Shiva. “So, whatever happened to that Shiva of yours, mitini?” Raja would say as they went out for their evening walks in Budhanilkantha, where they’d moved a few years after Ranjana was born.
“How would I know?” she said. “And what about your own Jaya? What did you do with her?” She knew what had happened to Jaya, but she went along with the ritual bantering, even took pleasure in it—making fun of their transgressions made both of them equally guilty, therefore equally exonerated.
“You know she got married soon after you and I got back together,” Raja said, a bit sheepishly.
“I bet she’s still pining for you. She probably thinks of you at night when her husband is snoring next to her.”
“And what about poor Shiva, eh? You were all over him in those days, weren’t you? Poor, unhappy Shiva. I wonder what he’s up to now.”
Nilu didn’t know. Over the years she’d anticipated running into him, but every year Kathmandu’s population burgeoned, making its streets narrower and more constricted. She could be out all day without seeing the face of anyone she knew, not even distant acquaintances. Nearly two decades had gone by since she’d bid a goodbye, which turned out to be final, to Shiva at that Baneswor bus stop. He could be anywhere in the city, or even out of the country, for that matter, as so many Nepalis were leaving these days. He could have gone back to Gorkha to his brother and sister-in-law. Perhaps they’d reconciled; perhaps Shiva had forgiven his brother.
How absolutely crazy it had been in Raja’s flat that day—she with Shiva, Raja with Jaya, but both she and Raja yearning, as they’d admitted in the intervening years, for each other. And as if their wishes were combining forces in the air above the city, she had run into Raja in New Road two days later. By that time something had already begun to change inside her. It was subtle, but she felt it: her mind felt lighter than it had in a long time, less crowded, more spacious. She’d catch herself smiling as she lay in bed because of a sweet feeling of anticipation that reminded her of the days when she and Raja began to talk, shyly and hesitantly, in Birey Dai’s shop long ago. Where was this tiny bit of happiness coming from? It didn’t make sense, for Raja was still with Jaya.
Then she glimpsed Raja in an eyeglass store in New Road, trying on a pair of sunglasses. She was on her way home from a visit to Prateema, who’d taken to bed with jaundice. For a moment she simply stood outside and watched him. He was looking at himself in the mirror, trying on different styles. His eyes were slightly puffy—he mustn’t be sleeping well, Nilu noted. The shop was too small for her to step into, so she called to Raja, loudly, from the sidewalk, “Who are you preening for?”
Startled, he’d turned toward her. “Nilu? What brings you here?”
She told him about Prateema’s jaundice, then asked him what he was doing.
“My eyes have been hurting in the sun lately,” Raja said.
“Did you see a doctor?”
“Not yet.”
“You might need glasses.”
“That’s why I am here.” He was smiling.
“No, I mean glasses prescribed by a doctor.”
So, that’s how it was for a while. Nilu stood outside the shop, watching him while he tried on different frames and turned to her for advice, just like the old times. She watched his face, the circles under his eyes, his sad chin. She stifled the urge to touch his cheek.
Soon he settled on a pair that she endorsed, and he took out his wallet to pay, but it turned out that he had less money than he thought he had. Typical Raja. Nilu dug into her purse for the three hundred rupees he needed. And it didn’t seem unnatural, once he emerged from the shop, that they’d walk together, and he’d ask her whether they should have tea, and they’d slip into a restaurant inside a hotel next to the Juddha Shumshere statue—the very restaurant, Nilu realized, once she was inside the revolving door, where she’d written her Jonathan Swift essay. The place still looked the same, except everything had become a bit rundown: paint peeled off the wall; a dank smell hung in the air; the waiters’ uniforms looked faded. She could even remember the table where she’d sat that day, and she led Raja to it. Nearby, that long-ago afternoon, a few government workers had sneaked away from an official rally, then bolted back to it out of fear of repercussions. There was no one else in the restaurant today.
At the table, Nilu and Raja looked at each other. The silence reminded Nilu of their Lainchour days, when they could spend long hours without speaking. But they were adults now, having lived apart for nearly a year, and a kernel of unease had grown between them. Still, for Nilu it felt good to be with Raja. She enjoyed just looking at his face in the brand-new sunglasses, which he hadn’t taken off.
Raja broke the silence. “Why are you smiling?”
“Nothing. I was thinking you should keep a servant.”
“Just for a single person, it’s a bit too much.”
“But surely you don’t wash your own clothes?”
“A washerwoman comes to the building every week to collect the laundry.”
The waiter brought their tea.
“The flat is maintained very well,” she said, and watched his face carefully.
“And you know the reason.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Don’t act naive.”
“Jaya? Is she the reason?”
He smiled. “I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t know either. She seems like a very sweet girl. I don’t blame you for liking her.”
“And I don’t blame you for liking Shiva.”
“What I am to Shiva is not the same as what you are to Jaya.”
He read the accusation in her voice. “I don’t want us to sit here and blame each other, Nilu.”
“I’m not blaming you, Raja,” she said. “Just clarifying. I treated Shiva like a brother.” Sometimes like a son, she nearly said. “Shiva is not a happy soul.”
“Who is?” Raja asked.
“You look like you’re happy now.”
For some reason Raja looked upset. “You don’t know what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling.”
“What are you feeling, Raja? Why can’t we talk to each other anymore?”
He averted his gaze, then reached across the table to clasp her hands. “I worry about you every day, mitini.”
“Do you?”
“How you’re eating, how you’re sleeping. Every day.”
“You never come to visit me.”
“I want to. I’m afraid that you’ll start on about Maitreya again, and forgive me, Nilu, but I’ve already grieved for my son. It has to end.”
Their tea, murky brown, was getting cold. Holding hands felt good, their smiles felt good. Once more, the silence stretched. Then, out of nowhere Nilu said, “In just the past day or two I’ve felt a lift, a lightness.” She didn’t know what more to say, and he watched her face. Finally, she asked him about his work.
He had nothing new to report, except that he was getting tired of traveling and was taking on more desk assignments now. “How is Muwa?” he asked. “Have you heard from her?”
She told him about her visit to Nilu Nikunj, Muwa’s squandering of the property, how she wanted to transfer the house to Sumit.
Raja shook his head. “You did well to get out of that house when you did.”
“I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“No, I had nothing to do with it, Nilu. You did it because you’re strong.”
She mulled over what he said. “Well, I’m not so strong after all, given how I wasn’t able to move past Maitreya for so long.”
“That has changed now, hasn’t it? Our son wouldn’t have wanted you to grieve over him forever.”
She realized the truth in what Raja was saying. Maitreya hadn’t haunted her for a while now, and she had a feeling that he wasn’t going to come back. She felt a sharp ache at that thought, but it soon subsided when she fixed her gaze on Raja’s face.
They talked well into the evening, as customers drifted into the restaurant for dinner. Nilu and Raja ordered some finger foods, but the chicken chili and the pakodas sat cold as they held hands—he had moved to her side of the table—and leaned against each other.
They stayed together until about eight, then left the restaurant. “Shall we walk?” Raja said. She nodded.
They walked for a full hour, all the way from New Road to Chabel, where the lights were out because of load-shedding. “Do you want to come in?” Nilu asked, as though they were just exploring the initial stages of courtship.
“Just for a little while,” he said. “Don’t ask me to stay the night, though.”
“I won’t.”
She was aware of someone’s eyes on her as she opened the door. It was the boy next door, at his window, his face shrouded in darkness. A candle burned on a table behind him, and Nilu saw his father by the door to their room. “Don’t sit in the window in the dark, son,” the father said in a reprimanding tone.
Inside, as she hunted for matches, Raja grabbed hold of her and pulled her toward him. He cupped her cheeks with his palms and kissed her, deeply, hungrily. Then they held each other, the darkness around them strangely calming.
As Ranjana grew up, Raja and Nilu teased each other and laughed about that period in their lives. “You wrenched me away from Jaya,” he said to her.
“I did orchestrate that walk down your lane, but the rest, you’re to blame for it.”
Intermittently, well into their middle age, when Nilu became the principal of Arniko Academy and Raja was promoted to the position of chief editor at Nepal Yatra, when the house became quiet after Ranjana left for America, they bantered like this. And now, nearing fifty years of age, in this nice, quiet house in Budhanilkantha, one of the few places in the city where people could escape the crowd and the smog, Nilu was no longer haunted by Maitreya. Some days when Raja went to a friend’s house to play chess and she was alone at home, she stood still in the kitchen, listening to the sounds around her. Or when in the garden, reading, she lifted her eyes from the page and scanned the shrubs and house, to see if she’d feel her son around her, hovering, demanding her attention. Sometimes, on the bus going into town, she simply closed her eyes to find out if he’d come to her in her mind’s eye. But he didn’t.
They’d all—Nilu, Raja, Ganga Da—reveled in the arrival of Ranjana, a vivacious little baby. Ganga Da especially doted on his granddaughter and saw her as a symbol of the reunion of Raja and Nilu. Ganga Da was the one who had given Ranjana her name. Rejoicing. “She’s going to grow up to be something, you just watch,” Ganga Da frequently said.
But Ganga Da himself wasn’t able to see whether his prophecy would come true. When Ranjana was two years old, Ganga Da was hauled off to jail on charges of accepting bribery. The government alleged that he’d received ten lakh rupees in exchange for approving a loan application for the construction of a mega hotel. It happened quickly, and before Nilu and Raja could figure it out, Ganga Da was imprisoned. At first he denied the charges, saying his enemies were behind this. But on Nilu and Raja’s third visit to the jail, Ganga Da broke down and admitted his guilt. He said that he was only thinking of Jamuna Mummy and how he wanted her to get into a nice private clinic where she’d be taken care of properly. “My thinking was muddled,” he kept repeating. “Something was moving fast inside my mind, like a train.”
“Why didn’t you simply sell the Chabel house?” Raja asked, confounded. “The one where we live? That would have been more than enough to pay for Jamuna Mummy’s clinic.”
“Then I’d have had to ask you to leave,” Ganga Da said. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“That’s extreme foolishness!” Raja said. “We could have simply moved to another flat. It’s not as if we can’t afford it. As it is, we are paying you some rent.”
Ganga Da hung his head in shame. “It’s not that easy. I put the Chabel house in Ranjana’s name last year.”
Raja and Nilu stared at him. When they told him that they could worry about Ranjana later, that they’d still need to sell the house now to pay for his growing legal expenses, Ganga Da would not let them. “That property belongs to my granddaughter,” he warned them. “Don’t you dare touch it.”
When Raja and Nilu went together to see Ganga Da, he appeared tough, even laughed and cracked jokes, but when Nilu went to him alone, he wept. “How is my Jamuna doing?”
Nilu told him that she went to see Jamuna Mummy in the mental hospital every two weeks and that she was the same as usual. She hadn’t become any worse, if that was what Ganga Da was fearing.
“Did she ask about me?”
Nilu couldn’t tell him that Jamuna Mummy referred to her husband as “that gadha,” had told Nilu that he was in cahoots with the royal palace to have her hanged from the ceiling of the mental hospital. “He thinks I don’t know,” Jamuna Mummy said. “The news-people on television tell me everything.”
That was the year that the director of the mental hospital had started allowing the patients one hour of Nepal Television in the evening. Otherwise, the condition of the hospital hadn’t changed from when Nilu had visited it with baby Maitreya. Now it was Ranjana she carried with her to the hospital.
Nilu had promised Ganga Da that she’d try to visit Jamuna Mummy every week, but with her teaching and taking care of Ranjana she hadn’t been able to keep her commitment. Then, within a few months of Ganga Da’s imprisonment, Jamuna Mummy died in the hospital. The prison officials didn’t allow Ganga Da to attend his wife’s funeral. The next time Nilu and Raja went to visit him, he looked so frail and malnourished that he could barely stand up behind the bars. In moments of incoherence he asked about Jamuna Mummy, what she was doing. Then, a few days later, the jail warden called Raja in his office and informed him that Ganga Da too had passed away, in his cell.
Nilu and Raja soon came to terms with Ganga Da’s death, for they had Ranjana to focus on. And how fast their daughter had grown. One day she was catching the bus to kindergarten and returning home to sing them the do re mi‘s she’d learned, and the next day Nilu had to buy her sanitary napkins because she’d suddenly bled at school.
Ranjana’s birth had helped heal their marriage, Nilu felt, for their joy at their newborn daughter gradually dissolved any remnants of the pain of that one year when they’d drifted apart. Raja had missed her terribly during that time—that much had become clear to Nilu, and she also knew that his short association with Jaya had been nothing more than an attempt to nurse his wounds, to drive away his loneliness, the hurt he felt when Nilu wallowed in her own grief, excluding him.
Now when she looked back, her grief over Maitreya seemed to verge on insanity. Could she have willed his ghost into her life? That soothsayer, Lama-ji, had said that her son’s spirit was unhappy about something, and over the years she had wondered, although she hadn’t told Raja this, whether he’d been sad about his parents’ separation. Otherwise why had he stopped coming once she and Raja reunited? The entire thing remained a mystery to her.
But so much had happened since Maitreya’s death that his short life seemed deep in the past. When Nilu contemplated the mind-numbing sickness that crippled the country a few years after they’d burned their son’s body, the trauma of her son’s death paled by comparison. Within months of burning Jamuna Mummy’s and Ganga Da’s remains at the ghat, the Maoist rebels unleashed their violence. They seemed to come out of nowhere—with their old, clunky rifles and their unforgiving eyes. The countryside became awash with blood: policemen butchered, the throats of villagers cut, husbands shot in front of their wives and children.
“I don’t care,” Raja said, as Nilu pointed out, on the television screen, the rows of bodies strewn across a hillside. “It’s kaliyuga in Nepal. It’s hell. Let them butcher one another until none are left alive. I don’t have faith in anything anymore.” But that was not true. Of course, Raja cared. How could you not be affected when you had to take care at the vegetable market, lest the garbage bag lying in the corner explode in your face? How could you not be moved by the photo of the village teacher whose throat had been slit, his head hanging low as he remained tied to a stake? The mayhem sweeping across the country, the ineptitude and idiotic arrogance of the several governments in handling the crisis, stunned all, and although Raja tried to remain aloof from it, Nilu could tell that it was becoming hard for him. When he played with Ranjana—even until she was eight or nine Ranjana liked to play hide-and-seek inside the house, ducking behind furniture, squeezing herself into closets—he stopped abruptly in the middle of the living room, transfixed by the news of, say, how a family of innocent peasants had been gunned down by the army because they were suspected of hiding the rebels.
