Buddha's Orphans, page 39
“How?” Raja asked.
“Maybe his parents know something.”
Raja was hesitant. “You want to go to Minister Dhakal’s house?”
“His son claimed to Ranjana that he knows you; does he?”
“We played a bit together when we were growing up, that’s all, because Dhakal also lives in Lainchour. But how would the boy learn that Dhakal knew me unless he spoke to his father about Ranjana?”
“It’s not hard to find out who is who in this city.”
“What will we say to his parents when we go to them?”
“We will tell them what Ranjana said about their son. They’re also parents—they’ll understand our pain.”
“What will we ask them to do?”
“Oooph! You’re giving me a headache. If you don’t want to go, I’ll do it alone.” With that she went to her room to change into a sari. Raja followed her, and he too got ready.
When the traffic in Lazimpat didn’t show signs of budging, Nilu said, “It’s not that far from here; we can walk.” She thrust two hundred rupees at the taxi driver and got out. In the process she nearly got hit by a motorcyclist who was trying to squeeze through. He hurled an obscenity at her; it hit her hard, as though the man had spit on her. “Machikney,” he said. Motherfucker. It baffled her, these random acts of hatred and cruelty, these vulgarities that people so easily directed at strangers but suppressed in social niceties when they needed to. The man on the motorcycle could easily be a friend’s son, who, if he was visiting in Nilu’s home, would be calling her aunty and respectfully mumbling ji-hajurs in every other sentence. Raja didn’t hear what the motorcyclist said, for he was still getting out of the taxi. But had he heard it, what would he have done? Would he have run after the man, who, she now observed, was desperately trying to find an opening through a cluster of cars two hundred yards away. Had Raja heard the young man’s word, he’d probably have stared after him, dumbfounded, as she was doing. But he wouldn’t have chased after him or sought retribution, as he’d have done when he and Nilu were younger. Maitreya’s death, now Ranjana’s disappearance—Raja looked as if he was ready to crumple to the ground right here.
Nilu had to be strong, for him, for Ranjana. She had to inject some of her own strength into her husband. She took his arm as they began walking toward Lainchour. They passed the motorcyclist about a hundred yards farther up. Trapped, he was impatiently revving his engine. She couldn’t help but cast a glance at him, and he quickly averted his eyes. Close up, you’re all cowards, she thought.
“Let’s go this way,” she said as they reached the Hotel Ambassador.
“Straight is quicker,” he said.
“I know, but I feel like going this way.”
His gaze showed that he thought it odd to consider what one felt like doing when the destination was so important, but he acquiesced, and they took an alley that ran alongside the British embassy. Soon they reached the neighborhood in Lainchour where they used to roam when they’d first fallen in love, after Nilu switched schools. This inner part of Lainchour was close enough to the Jagadamba School to be convenient, but far enough from it to ensure that they’d encounter no one who knew Ganga Da or Jamuna Mummy. “Do you remember Kapur Dhara?” Nilu asked Raja, and he nodded. “Let’s go that way,” she said, and he threw up his hands in exasperation. She clasped his arm as if to say, Just humor me today.
This direction took them farther away from Minister Dhakal’s house; they slipped into an alley that narrowed even more, allowing just enough room for a person walking from the opposite direction to pass. As teenagers they’d held hands in this very lane, their bodies pressed against each other, challenging those who looked. Their fingers entwined, their arms swinging, they’d walked this entire neighborhood.
When they reached Kapur Dhara, Raja said that he was feeling thirsty and needed a drink. He descended the short flight of stairs to a stone spout gushing with clear water. Nilu remembered it as somewhat larger than it actually was. She watched as Raja waited for a couple of women to notice him and give him room to reach the waterspout. The women were chatting away and didn’t see him, but Raja didn’t say anything, just stood with his arms limp by his sides. How different this Raja was from the one who’d mocked and taunted the royal palace guards, terrifying Nilu. Now, watching him in Kapur Dhara, she wanted to protect him from the harm—she had only a vague sense of what that harm might be—that the world might inflict on him. She recognized this impulse to shield him as something that she’d harbored since Raja first came to live in Nilu Nikunj and she’d discovered that he was a servant’s boy who could barely read.
Raja was drinking from the spout now, his palm cupped to hold the water. He was thinking about Ranjana, she knew. A memory descended upon her: the day that she and Raja went down to this very spout to quench their thirst and ended up splashing water at each other. Why was she remembering these nostalgic moments when she ought to be focused on her daughter? It was illogical, irrational, yet she experienced vividly the laughter of those years, the water sparkling in their palms, Raja’s hair wet from a recent dousing, the voices of women washing clothes nearby: “No shame!” “Whose children are these?” A middle-aged woman, her petticoat tied above her breasts to cover them, her hair in soapsuds, shouted at them, “I’m trying to bathe here, and these nakkacharas are hogging the tap.” Her eyes gleamed when they fell upon Raja. “Raja? What are you doing here? And who is this girl? Have you snatched her from her parents?” Raja blushed beet-red and motioned to Nilu to get out of there.
Now they took the longer route through Samakhusi to arrive behind the Jagadamba School. The house where Raja grew up, which Raja had sold after Ganga Da’s death, had been transformed: three more stories had been added, and the house had expanded sideways too, crowding the neighboring house. But they didn’t pause; they went farther and stood in front of Minister Dhakal’s house, which was surrounded by imposing walls. A guard asked them who they were, then disappeared inside. He returned to let them in.
The former home minister greeted them warmly, chatted with Raja about their childhood days. But he was slightly dismissive of their plight. “A young girl. First time out of the clutches of her parents. Maybe she went touring the country, driving one of those, what do you call them.” He turned toward his wife, who shook her head, indicating she had no clue about what he was referring to. “You know,” he continued, “those big vans with everything inside—bathroom, television, kitchen, bed. O-ho. What do you call them? R something. We saw plenty of them when we went to America two years ago.” He began to describe his visit.
People still came to see the former home minister, despite his having lost his position, for “source-force,” to seek his patronage, to have him pull strings on their behalf. He still knew many important people in town. So you couldn’t really blame him for thinking that Raja and Nilu wanted his help in finding their daughter. Perhaps they’d heard that his son too lived in Chicago.
But when Nilu mentioned what Ranjana had said about his son, the home minister stared at her incredulously. His wife, her lips trembling, said, “Our son is not like that. How dare you!”
“I was simply wondering if you knew anything, or if your son did.”
“It’s best if you leave this house,” the home minister’s wife said, pointing her finger toward the door.
As Nilu and Raja were about to leave, the home minister spoke, in a semi-conciliatory tone. “Our son can be difficult at times, but he’d never stoop so low. Still, I’ll ask him. Leave your phone number.”
Two days before they were to fly to Chicago, Nilu woke at night from a terrible dream, her heart hammering in her chest. She jiggled Raja, who was sound asleep next to her, beaten by worry, exhausted from getting all the paperwork ready for their departure. Umesh had advised them that they ought to bring with them every document concerning Ranjana that they could find.
“I saw something,” she said to Raja.
“What?” he said, his voice hoarse.
“She’s here,” Nilu said. “Ranjana is here.”
Raja jerked upright in the bed, and peered into the darkness. Perhaps he too had been dreaming about their daughter. “She’s here?” Then, realizing what had happened, he clasped her hand and said, “You had a bad dream. Go to sleep.”
No, no, Nilu said, but apparently she said it only silently, not aloud. “I saw something,” she whispered. Raja had already drifted off. She too closed her eyes again, but the images from her dream kept pressing against her eyes. It’s only a dream, she reminded herself. In two days we are going to America to look for our daughter. What she saw was her mind playing last-minute tricks.
Sunlight streaming through the curtains in the morning did nothing to change the sense of foreboding left from her dream. Today she had to go to the pharmacy to get enough medicine—for her various allergies, for his diabetes—to last a month, their projected length of stay in America. Umesh had informed them that medicine was expensive in America. Raja and Nilu hadn’t discussed what they’d do if, after a month, they hadn’t found Ranjana. “Let’s take enough for a month,” Raja had said, and they’d both looked at each other, leaving the unspoken question hanging in the air: what then?
As Nilu rode the microbus into town—first she had to go to the pharmacy in Jyatha, then to Thamel to buy some Nepali paper as a gift for Umesh’s family—Chicago seemed just too far away, too alien, too . . . unfruitful. Waste of time. The phrase kept repeating itself in her mind as she got off the bus at Rani Pokhari and headed toward Jyatha. She stopped at the big pharmacy where they always bought their pills. The middle-aged man behind the counter greeted her. By now, several people in the city who knew her had learned of Ranjana’s disappearance. One tabloid newspaper had somehow gotten a whiff of Ranjana’s disappearance and carried a report, filled with inaccuracies. The publicity had irked Nilu, for people had started gossiping and speculating. Ranjana’s photo, black and white and grainy and taken when she was in eighth grade, had accompanied the article. Nilu had no idea how the tabloid managed to get that photo, for it wasn’t one she’d seen before. She suspected it was taken at a friend’s house. Seeing it had mildly shocked Nilu. Her daughter looked different, more subdued than she was in real life, like a timid girl who’d ventured alone to the city, seeking shelter and solace.
After the photo appeared in the newspaper, acquaintances called to offer their own theories about what might have happened. Some phoned not to sympathize but to pontificate: this is what happens when you send your children so far away. One well-wisher said that her children didn’t go to America, despite having been offered outstanding scholarships from Ivy League schools, precisely because America was such a violent, unpredictable country, where gangsters were ready to slit anyone’s throat for a dollar or two.
The pharmacist gave Nilu the pills she wanted and said in a solicitous tone, “Now that you are going to look for her, I’m sure she’ll be found.”
Nilu said she too was confident, but as she went toward Thamel, she couldn’t see herself getting on an airplane to travel so far away when . . . when . . . She paused in the middle of the street and looked around. Ranjana is here—the sentence rang in her mind again. The crowd around her swelled, pressing from all sides; the street itself seemed to narrow, squeezing its occupants. The sun boiled in the sky. The voices around her sang loudly against her ears. Her head felt heavy as a stone, her legs went limp, and she crumpled to the ground.
There were people around her. An authoritative voice said, “Leave room, leave room, she needs to breathe,” and a hand cradled her head. Someone sprinkled water on her face, and gradually her head cleared. It was embarrassing to be lying on the street, on the lap of an elderly man whose anxious eyes were focused on her. She sat up, said that she was okay now, that she could walk by herself. Someone thrust into her hand a bottle of water, its cap unscrewed, and she drank it gladly. She stood, swaying. “Come, come,” the elderly man said, and took her to the nearest shop, where she was given a stool to sit on. Yes, it was a good idea to rest for a while here, she agreed. The shopkeeper ordered a lassi from the restaurant next door, and when it came, she drank it, grateful for these small acts of kindness. The elderly man and the shopkeeper were talking about how human and vehicular congestion in the city was likely to give even young, healthy people heart attacks, let alone people Nilu’s age. The elderly man said that that’s why he’d sent his college-age children to America, to Nebraska specifically, where they were studying. The shopkeeper also had a niece somewhere in America, and they compared notes. Nilu listened to them quietly, nodding occasionally to signal that she was listening. Her eyes roamed toward the pedestrians, pausing on young women of Ranjana’s age. Most of them were fashionably dressed; some spoke English; all were laughing and smiling and gazing admiringly at the wares displayed outside the many gift shops.
The urgency of Nilu’s presentiment that Ranjana was nearby made her heart ache; it compelled her to get up from her stool and apologize to the elderly gentleman and the shopkeeper. She explained that she had to leave; her husband was waiting for her at home. “Are you sure you’re okay to go home by yourself?” the elderly man asked. “Why don’t I see you to a taxi?”
“No, no,” she protested. “You have done enough for me already. I’ll find a taxi here, around the corner.”
At Thamel chowk, instead of boarding one of the waiting taxis, she headed straight north, not knowing where she was going. If Ranjana had indeed returned, wouldn’t someone have seen her by now? Kathmandu was a small city, after all, and someone, somewhere would have recognized her, surely? If she had returned, certainly she’d have flown in, and the airport was tiny enough that someone would have speculated, “Isn’t that Nilu’s daughter, the one who vanished in America?” Or someone would have recognized her name on the immigration or customs form. Perhaps a taxi driver would have done a double take in the rearview mirror, trying to remember where he’d seen this passenger. But even if people had recognized Ranjana, what would they have done? Gone to the police? And say what? “I just saw the girl who was reported lost in America?” Absurd. Besides, Nilu reminded herself angrily, if Ranjana through some freakish chance had ended up here in the city, she’d have come home. If something bad had happened to Ranjana and she’d been forced to return to Kathmandu, her parents would be the first people she’d seek out for comfort.
Still, every time a young woman of Ranjana’s build or hair passed by, Nilu scrutinized the face carefully, as though Ranjana would have returned to the city in disguise.
When Nilu arrived at home, she was about two hours late, and Raja hovered by the gate. He told her he was worried about her, that he’d called her repeatedly on her mobile phone, but every time he got a message about network failure. “Our entire lives have turned into a big network failure.” He’d attempted a joke but couldn’t muster a smile. She embraced him and took him inside, and for a while they stood in the living room in each other’s arms; the only sound was the ticking of the clock on the wall. Raja was not doing well, she knew. She had to be strong for him, now and throughout the trip. But the thought of travel once again troubled her. Raja must have sensed she was pondering something, for he asked her what the matter was. She shook her head. If she told him what she was thinking and feeling, the very questions that had been hounding her for the past couple of days would come flying out of his mouth: Why would Ranjana come back? If she has, why wouldn’t she come home? And Nilu wouldn’t have any convincing answers for him.
She had to decide fast. Raja was fiddling with the suitcases, muttering something about how the latch didn’t seem to be working.
Nilu took a deep breath and asked, “What if she returns here while we are in Chicago? Have you thought of that?”
Raja stopped fidgeting with the latch. “Why would she return here without telling us?”
“I don’t know. Just thinking.”
He sat down on the bed, frowning. “That’s the oddest thing you’ve said. You mean, what if she returned unannounced, after all these days?”
“It was just a thought. Don’t worry about it.”
He came and sat next to her. “No, something is going on. What are you thinking?”
“Nothing, really.”
“Nilu.”
“It’s probably my mind going in all directions. But what if she’s in some kind of trouble, decides to come home, and finds the house empty?”
“But if she hasn’t been abducted, or, God forbid . . .” He couldn’t complete the sentence. “Wouldn’t she have contacted us by now if she was free to do so? I mean, if no one had harmed her, no matter what kind of trouble she was in? It makes absolutely no sense.”
Nilu turned away from him, partly because he was echoing her own nagging doubts. “Nothing that’s happening right now makes sense,” she said.
Wrapped up in their own thoughts, they didn’t say anything to each other. Raja went out to the garden to get some fresh air, then returned after a few minutes. “So, what are you suggesting?” he asked. Obviously he had been mulling over what she had said.
“I’m wondering if you should go to Chicago, and I should stay here in case she comes home. And I’ll make further inquiries here.” She added, as an incentive, “Maybe I’ll go to Minister Dhakal again.”
“You want me to go all the way to America by myself? What further inquiries?”
She couldn’t tell him, not yet. “I’ll wait here for a while. Then, if nothing happens, I’ll join you.”
He looked out of the window anxiously. “You might have a point here. If she’s in trouble and returns home, one of us should be here.”
She went to him and stroked his chin. “I’ll be worried about you all the way to America. You’re not in very good shape right now.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “And I won’t return until I find her, I swear. Besides, Umesh is there to help me, so I won’t have to search for her all by myself.”
