Buddha's Orphans, page 40
But a short while later Raja began to wonder aloud if he’d be able to do it alone, without Nilu, and she told him that he had to be strong for their daughter’s sake. Raja looked baffled, unsure, and she held him, then gave him instructions, wrote down important phone numbers for him on a piece of paper, and repacked one suitcase just for him. By the time they went to bed, she was impatient for him to leave so she could have more room to move, to do whatever she needed to do without having to explain anything to anyone. A feeling of strength had come into her limbs. She was ready to turn the city upside down to find her daughter.
Part II
* * *
A Young Woman in a Black Overcoat
EVEN IN THE HEAT of August the young woman was wearing a large black overcoat, which hung to her knees when she first appeared on Bhairavi’s doorstep. She asked if a room was available, as indicated by the TO LET sign on the outside wall that a ruffian, long ago, with the insertion of an i, had changed into TOILET. The young woman, pretty and intelligent looking, with somewhat familiar features, had eyes that indicated she’d done some crying. Her cheeks were slightly puffy. She held her body carefully, turned and moved with a slowness that made Bhairavi wonder if she was ill. “Only you?” Bhairavi asked. Bhairavi’s husband had died a few years ago, and her children had married and lived separately; she rented rooms on the first and second floors and lived on the third floor; the young woman had knocked at her third-floor door. One room had remained empty on the second floor for months now, probably because it was fairly small, with a window that overlooked the street and a ceiling marred by a large crack resembling a river delta, which oozed during the rains. Interested tenants glanced at the room and scrunched their noses. This girl too would most likely reject the room once she viewed it.
The girl nodded.
Where’s your family? Bhairavi wanted to ask. Then she thought: Who cares? I have a family, but they no longer visit me unless they want something.
But the girl said yes, even before inspecting the room completely; then she sat on the floor.
“Here, let me get you a cushion,” Bhairavi said, and ran up to her room.
When she returned, the young woman was looking out the window. Bhairavi placed the cushion on the floor. “It’s only noisy during the day. At night it’s quiet.” But she suspected that the girl’s mind was on something other than the clamor that rose from the street below.
A cot lay in the corner, bereft of a mattress or bedding. In another corner stood an old pumping stove that was still functional, Bhairavi knew, because she had cranked it up a couple of months ago. She’d left it there, hoping that some poor soul might consider it an attractive feature of the room. And although the girl too, like the other tenants, barely glanced at the stove, it dawned upon Bhairavi that apart from the large black bag the young woman had brought with her, she carried nothing else. Had her parents kicked her out? Was she a refugee of some sort? The young woman’s speech showed that she was well educated, and her face indicated she was from a good family, although it was very hard to tell these days. Daughters of respected families no longer hesitated to appear half-naked in dance bars and casinos.
The young woman met her gaze and asked how much the rent was.
Normally Bhairavi quoted a slightly high rate, to leave room for bargaining, but with this young woman she didn’t. “Six hundred.” The girl reached into her bag, took out an expensive-looking purse, and opened it. She grabbed a handful of money and began to count, separating what looked like foreign currency—dollars?—from the Nepali bills, which she then handed to Bhairavi.
Bhairavi wanted to ask her many questions: Where are you from? Why are you alone? Why do you have foreign money? But she refrained; it was none of Bhairavi’s business. She no longer even knew her own children. And the strangers who occupied her rooms stayed for a few months or years and then moved on; another person’s story replaced theirs. Still, the blown-away, exhausted look on the girl’s face seemed to indicate that she had traveled from afar and hadn’t eaten or slept well for days, and Bhairavi couldn’t help but feel some concern for her.
Bhairavi did ask the young woman whether she had any bedding and when she planned on occupying the room. The young woman asked whether it would be a problem if she stayed here starting now. “That mat will be sufficient,” she said, pointing to a straw mat in the corner. “And this will be my pillow,” she said, gesturing toward the cushion.
Later Bhairavi brought the girl some bedding and an old blanket. Dusk was approaching, but the girl still lingered by the window, still wearing her overcoat; beads of sweat clung to her forehead. She’d scarcely moved. This one is in another world entirely, Bhairavi observed. She turned on the light, fixed the bed, then told the girl that though cooking was allowed in the room, Bhairavi expected that stale food and dirty dishes would be taken care of. “I have a fridge upstairs that you can sometimes use if you wish,” Bhairavi said, surprising herself because she’d never offered this to a tenant before.
Back upstairs, as Bhairavi ate her dinner—nothing grand, leftovers from this morning, consisting of rice, dal, two pieces of chicken, and some spinach—she wondered if the girl had gone to the restaurant Bhairavi had recommended, where the food was relatively cheap, fresh, and tasty. Somehow she knew that the girl hadn’t done so; judging from her pallor and her dull eyes, most likely she was a halfhearted nibbler. Bhairavi set aside a piece of chicken and some spinach, mixed them with rice from the cooker, and took the plate down.
The girl had moved from the window to the bed, where she had fallen asleep. Apparently she’d unbuttoned her overcoat before lying down, for it was now open, revealing her red shirt. The girl’s stomach protruded—she was pregnant.
Bhairavi didn’t sleep that night, worried about what she should do. Propriety dictated that she ask the young woman to leave: such a tenant couldn’t be allowed to live in her house. Her other boarders would protest; also, Bhairavi’s own reputation was at stake. Her son and daughter, now married with their own children and living elsewhere in the city, would eat her alive. “What’s she to you?” they’d ask. “Why are you bent on cutting our nose among our friends and relatives?” They’d see this as another instance of their mother’s harebrained approach to life, her willful disregard for simple propriety and how flouting it could lead to unpleasant consequences for the whole family. Yes, they’d feel free to insult the young woman in the second-floor room; they saw themselves as respectable people. People of culture, of class. Even Bhairavi, their own mother, they considered uncouth and, yes, stupid.
Her son had actually called her that recently, when he sensed that she wasn’t going to sell this old house where they’d grown up. “Where else can we find a woman more stupid than you?” he’d yelled.
Her daughter had added, “Exactly so!”
This interchange took place in front of their own spouses, their own children, Bhairavi’s grandchildren. One of them chanted, “Stupid, stupid, grandmother is stupid.”
If Bhairavi allowed this girl to stay here, it would give her son and daughter one more reason to be angry with her. As it was, they were furious that she’d not caved in to their demands to sell the house, and the valuable plot that went along with it, to the businessman who was willing to pay a hefty price for it. Over the years they had become critical of everything she did. When they visited, they commented on how shoddy her dhoti looked, or what sorry-looking tenants she had in her building, the smell of which made them feel nauseated.
But of all the houses in the city, this girl had chosen Bhairavi’s to seek shelter in, and there was a reason for it.
Don’t be a fool, Bhairavi told herself. Don’t be duped by your heart. This girl means nothing to you. Once she leaves in two days, you’ll forget about her, and things will be exactly as they should be: your children will be their normal, grumbling selves, and your tenants will go back to complaining about the paucity of water in the building, the electrical outlet that doesn’t work, the noise from their neighbors. But this thinking made her laugh. Why grow so quickly afraid when something a bit out of the ordinary happens? At least Bhairavi should first learn of the young woman’s situation. Maybe she had no place to go. Maybe she was impregnated, then abandoned; maybe the girl came here as a last resort, after being trampled upon by the outside world. Find out her story, then decide what to do. Or, at least let the poor girl catch her breath, until she finds some other place, perhaps with a sympathetic relative or a kind friend. What better use for that stupid room, which, perhaps like the girl, had remained unwanted for so long? Bhairavi knew she could be inviting trouble by letting her heart rule on this matter, but it had been a while since she’d experienced such softness toward anyone.
The Kick
IN THE MORNING when Bhairavi went down and knocked, the girl asked her to come in. Sitting on the bed, her overcoat fully buttoned, the girl was looking out of the window. “I left you some food last night,” Bhairavi said. “Did you eat it?”
The girl said that she ate it this morning; where should she wash the plate? Bhairavi said that there was a tap in the courtyard below. “But there’s a faucet on my balcony upstairs if you don’t want to use the courtyard tap, which the first-floor families use; their children can be quite rowdy. And rude, if you ask me. It’s incredible to me how undisciplined some children are these days, and how their parents let them run wild, do what they wish, say what they want, to whomever they want to say it!” A picture appeared in Bhairavi’s mind of this young woman being teased and poked and prodded by unruly children, so she said, “Yes, why don’t you just come up when you need to wash, or when you need to use the fridge. This stove should work. Try it. If it doesn’t, I’ll loan you another one until . . .” She didn’t want to say “until you buy one” to this girl—it might be too much for her. “Here, let me see right now if it works.”
And Bhairavi sat on the floor and dusted the stove, then pulled out its lever and began to pump it. She worked on the stove for a while, and the girl remained silent. Questions swirled in Bhairavi’s mind: Whose baby are you carrying? Are you desperate, suicidal? Is that why you’ve come to my house—you think this might be a good place to die?
Bhairavi got the stove to work. She found its sound soothing; it reminded her of her dead husband. They’d purchased the stove after she’d come into this house as a bride, before she gave birth to her children and was sucked into endless days of feeding them and wiping their bottoms and singing them lullabies. Whenever Bhairavi thought of her husband, tears welled up in her eyes. He’d been diagnosed with cancer soon after their children got married, and she’d tried to take care of him as best she could. But he’d lost weight within months and had turned frail and gaunt. What had saddened her the most, however, was how her children had failed to show kindness and consideration to their ailing father, the very man on whose lap they’d learned their ABCs and their two-plus-twos, the father who’d gone into debt to get them wedded. Bhairavi remembered that she’d passed on the old stove to Nilu after she and Raja started living in this flat. Bhairavi had lost touch with Nilu, especially after Nilu’s young son died. Her son’s death had broken her heart, poor Nilu. The last she knew, Nilu and Raja had given birth to a baby girl, but that was ages ago. Over the years Bhairavi had contemplated trying to renew contact with her old friend. But she couldn’t think of anyone she could call to find out Nilu’s whereabouts. They didn’t have friends or acquaintances in common. After Nilu had moved to Chabel, she and Bhairavi slowly lost touch, despite Nilu’s pleas that Bhairavi remain an aunt to Maitreya.
Time and again Bhairavi had pondered going to Nilu’s house in Chabel, where she’d visited after Maitreya died, but for that she’d have to go all the way across the city, fighting the traffic, especially in the madhouse streets of Gaushala and Chabel. And who knew whether Nilu and Raja still lived in that house anymore? It was not like the old times, when folks stayed put in one place. These days everyone seemed to be constantly moving, to bigger or better houses, to sleeker and shinier condos. No one continued clinging to their family’s old, crumbling, disintegrating house, as Bhairavi did.
But the more her children badgered her to sell the house, the more Bhairavi adamantly refused, not only because she was disgusted with their greed but also because she treasured this house: it was the one in which her husband had grown up. That courtyard was where he’d played marbles and hide-and-seek, where he’d drunk water from the tap after an afternoon of running through the streets. This house was where Bhairavi’s mother-in-law, the kindest woman she’d ever known, had begun her married life. That was so long ago; the black-and-white photograph that showed the young bride in her wedding regalia, her head slightly bowed in modesty as her husband shyly inspected his fingers, seemed to belong to another era entirely. It reminded Bhairavi of the daguerreotypes that she had once seen at a museum: grainy images of kings and queens wearing their crowns and their gowns and holding their silver canes; their faces were composed and solemn.
Bhairavi glanced at the young woman, who was still wearing her ridiculous overcoat. She wouldn’t be able to keep her pregnancy hidden for long, for soon her tummy would push against even that bulky outerwear. The largeness of her belly would soon be unmistakably apparent. She must be at least seven months pregnant, Bhairavi suspected. More like eight.
“Here, do you want to cook something?” Bhairavi asked the girl.
“I don’t have anything to cook.”
“Well, why don’t you go shopping for vegetables then? The market is right around the corner.”
The girl said that she might do so later in the afternoon.
Bhairavi turned off the stove and left the young woman alone. She went back upstairs and lay in bed, her mind filled with memories of her husband. After he died, the silence in the house overwhelmed her, and she began to have crying spells. Despite the grudge she held against her children, she did try to reach out to them, but they remained wrapped up in their own lives, their own children, and their cars and parties. She couldn’t understand how something like this could happen: children she devoted her life to wouldn’t call for weeks to see how their widowed mother was faring.
Bhairavi decided. She would not to ask the girl to leave. Even if her children chanced upon the girl and noticed that she was pregnant, Bhairavi would defend her. The girl was on the brink of something dangerous, Bhairavi felt.
In the afternoon she went down again to check on the girl. The door was shut but not locked, and she gently pushed it. The girl was lying on the bed, sleeping in her overcoat, which was unbuttoned, but she had placed the blanket on her belly. Bhairavi sat on the bed; the girl didn’t wake up. Bhairavi watched her: such an innocent face, so beautiful. But her eyes were scrunched tight, as though she was battling the visions in her dreams.
With her palm Bhairavi touched the girl’s forehead. It was hot. To compare, Bhairavi touched her own forehead. The difference was obvious, and it was not just heat from wearing the overcoat: the girl was running a fever. Bhairavi went up to her own flat, poured water in a bowl, found a hand towel, and brought them back down. Wetting the towel, she made a cold compress and placed it on the girl’s forehead. The girl’s lips were twitching. As Bhairavi applied the towel to her forehead, the blanket slid off the girl’s body and fell to the floor. Bhairavi stared at her belly. Then, instinctively, she placed her hand on it, wondering if she could feel the baby. Given the bulge, there was no doubt that the baby was alive and kicking. Bhairavi tried to remember when she was pregnant with her own children, how it had felt, but it was such a long time ago that the only thing she remembered was the pain of the latter stages of pregnancy and childbirth itself; without the help of her mother-in-law and her husband, she couldn’t have survived them.
Bhairavi lowered her head and put her ear to the girl’s belly. It felt like the natural thing to do, to see if she could hear the baby. There was no movement. And then, suddenly, she felt a push against her ear. The baby had kicked! Bhairavi felt a thrill of excitement. It was as though the baby had sensed her presence and sent her a signal. I’m here, I’m alive, it was saying. I’m ready to come out. Inexplicably, a wave of pleasure washed over Bhairavi. Why? She wasn’t related to this young woman, and in a few months, like her other tenants, this young woman too would most likely disappear from her life. Yet this happiness reminded her of the time when she and her husband were young, before the children came along. Could a person derive such great pleasure from the unborn child of a complete stranger? What else in this world don’t I know about? Bhairavi asked herself. What else is in store for me? And, strangely, this thought buoyed her.
Bhairavi covered the girl’s belly with the blanket and continued to apply the compress. After about twenty minutes, the temperature came down and the girl’s lips stopped twitching. Bhairavi smoothed the young woman’s hair. The innocence of her face reminded her of her own children when they were younger. Her son had had great ambitions of becoming a doctor and used to run around the house with a toy stethoscope, making diagnoses and offering prescriptions. But Keshav turned out to be an average student, not up to the rigors of medical school, and had to settle for the job of an accountant at a medium-size firm, which, he complained, was filled with petty, backbiting people. And her daughter, who used to be a sweet child, offering other children her toffees and lollipops, had changed after she got married. Her husband’s family was quite traditional, with strict notions of how a daughter-in-law should conduct herself. Seema was under the thumb of her mother-in-law, a severe-looking woman with eyes that narrowed in response to even small infractions; everyone in the house craved her approval. Maybe Seema thought that the kind of money she’d inherit from her mother after the sale of the house would weaken her mother-in-law’s grip on her.
