Buddha's Orphans, page 41
When Bhairavi thought along these lines, her attitude toward her children softened. Maybe she should reconsider the businessman’s offer. They could split the money three ways, and that would make Keshav and Seema happy. Bhairavi could look for a small house far away, maybe near Bhaktapur or Godavari, and spend her time reading the scriptures, which had begun to interest her lately. The possibility of giving up this house in Thamel brought a lump to her throat, but perhaps it was time to let go.
The girl opened her eyes. She seemed embarrassed to find Bhairavi sitting on her bed, for she attempted to sit up, carefully shielding her belly with the blanket. “No, no,” Bhairavi said. “You keep sleeping. You need to rest.” She was about to add that she needed to conserve her energy for the baby, but she didn’t want to spook the girl by letting on that she knew.
Bhairavi ended up cooking for both of them in her room upstairs and bringing the food down. Perhaps because her fever had come down, or because she’d not eaten well for days, the girl ate ravenously, and Bhairavi experienced an odd pleasure in catering to her, asking whether the meat was well salted, whether she wanted more dal.
The girl finished her food, let out a small belch, and then gave Bhairavi an embarrassed smile.
“It’s good to see you smile,” Bhairavi said. “You haven’t smiled since you’ve come here.”
“That was the best food I’ve eaten in days. As good as my—” A shadow came over her face.
“Go on, as good as whose?”
“Nothing,” the girl said. Her hand was still unwashed, so Bhairavi brought a carafe of water and poured it for her while the girl rinsed her fingers. Bhairavi handed her a towel. The girl wiped her hands and mouth.
“I don’t know much about you,” Bhairavi said. “You haven’t even told me your name yet.”
The girl hesitated, then said, “Ranji.”
The Return Home
SHE HADN’T MEANT for it to be this way. She kept saying it to herself, to Papa, to Ma: I hadn’t meant for this to happen. But it did happen, and she ended up returning to Nepal, to bear the child of someone whose face she had to try hard to remember.
The guilt she’d felt over her pregnancy had, just once, made her contemplate suicide: slashing her wrist in the bathroom, overdosing on sleeping pills—methods of snuffing one’s own life that she’d read or heard about. They all sounded alien to her. They won’t work, her mind had told her, and it was then that she began to experience sensations of drowning: at first in two-second flashes, then for longer stretches, as the pregnancy progressed. She’d be sitting at her desk in her room as Angela and Yuko watched television in the next room; then, abruptly, she’d find herself transported—she was immersed in water, gasping for breath, flailing; small schools of fish darted about her; larger ones watched her as their mouths slowly opened and closed. Even while it was happening, she knew she was living someone else’s experience.
Ranjana hadn’t felt much for Amos. She’d met him at the post office one early December day, when she’d gone to mail a letter to Papa and Ma. She was in a hurry; her math exam would begin shortly. He graciously allowed her to go ahead of him in line, and that’s when they began to talk. They conversed about how cold it was getting by Lake Michigan already. He hosted an international program at a community radio station in Chicago. When he found out she was from Nepal, he said that he’d been there, “in my younger days,” and backpacked at the foothills of the Annapurnas. He wore an overcoat and a nice scarf around his neck; the scarf looked so soft that she wanted to run her hands over it. Then she looked at his dark skin, the cleft in his chin, and thought that it’d be nice to stroke that face too. The thought had surprised her, for she’d barely been interested in boys here, so busy had she been with academic life. But this man, probably in his late twenties—exactly thirty years of age, she learned later—was self-assured, with a trace of laughter in his eyes that made her want to smile for no reason. She exchanged e-mail addresses with him before they departed into the freezing Chicago air.
She kept him a secret from everyone; she didn’t know why. She didn’t tell Angela and Yuko just because they’d get overly excited, start calling him her boyfriend. She liked him, but her thoughts didn’t dwell on him when she was away from him: when she took walks in Evanston as the school closed and snow blanketed the streets and glistened on the treetops, or when she went to a little Christmas gathering at Yuko’s aunt’s house deep in the suburbs, or when she attended a bash organized by the Nepalis to celebrate the New Year.
Later she wondered if she had ended up sleeping with Amos because she’d been disturbed by how blacks were spoken of at the Nepali gatherings she’d attended so far.
“These kaleys,” she’d heard several Nepalis say. “They are dangerous.” During the New Year’s party, one skinny Nepali girl had said, “I get so scared when they come near. I feel like they’re going to rob me or rape me or something.” Ranjana was informed that blacks were lazy and prone to violence. Yet here was Amos, more gentlemanly and intelligent than most Nepali men she’d come across so far.
What Ranjana heard from the Nepalis made her angry, and when, early in the New Year, Amos told her that he was interested in having her as a guest on a radio show focused on Nepal, she said yes. He wanted to play Nepali music, discuss the Maoist rebels and how they managed to get into the government after years of mayhem, converse about the culture in general. She told him that her knowledge of Nepali politics was minimal, and they’d better stick to the culture. “Only what you know, Ranji,” he said. “I never feature experts on my show. I’m interested in real people, not talking heads.”
The program had gone well, and she’d been pleased with how she’d spoken with both coherence and real feeling. A couple of people had phoned in during the half-hour, asking her about her experiences in America, wanting her to contrast it with life in Nepal.
That evening Amos took her to a Thai restaurant. He praised her performance, then invited her to his apartment for some wine. She said that she was underage, and he said that they could pretend they were drinking in Kathmandu. In his flat they ended up kissing—her first kiss. She stopped him when his hands began to roam over her breasts, but the next time, a few days later, she didn’t. He was gentle with her, talked to her about her aspirations and her family as they cuddled in his apartment, and so when, after a few meetings, their kisses grew more passionate and he picked her up—he was a tall man—and carried her to his bedroom, she found her resolve weakening. She thought about Ma and Papa, briefly, but they seemed far away.
Amos made her dinner and fed her in bed, laughing as he told her stories about the eccentric guests he’d hosted on his show. He told her about the environmental activist who had received an on-air call from his wife, who accused him of cheating on her with a colleague of his. He described a local councilman who had leapt across the table at Amos because he’d been offended by the radio host’s provocative questions.
“You lead an interesting life,” she’d told him. “All I seem to do is study.”
“Whenever you need a break from your books, come visit me.”
She remembered Ma and Papa later that night and vowed to herself to consider this occasion a one-time thing; she’d not return to Amos. But she did, three or four more times, finding in his soft, measured voice a degree of relief from the loneliness of being so far from home. He was intelligent, deeply knowledgeable about many things—how the city was run, the science of the brain, the controversy over climate change. He cooked well, and his apartment was always filled with intoxicating aromas.
Spending time with him was easy; she didn’t notice the days, the weeks go by—until she discovered that she was pregnant. She got angry at herself for being so foolish, for not taking more precautions; she got angry at him, for she thought that he’d somehow duped her. But he hadn’t; she’d seen him put the condom on every time.
Initially she thought she’d have an abortion, for that would solve everything. Ma and Papa wouldn’t get a whiff of what had happened, and she too would soon forget her lapse with Amos and refocus on her studies. But every time she picked up the phone to call Planned Parenthood, her hand trembled. She didn’t understand why: she wasn’t opposed to abortion. But when she put her palm on her belly, she thought she felt something remarkable there, a movement, a signal, a transfer of emotions. Every time she braced herself to make an appointment at a clinic, a voice inside her mind said, Not yet, not yet. As days turned to weeks, the impulse to end her pregnancy weakened. Guilt prevented her from telling Amos that she was pregnant, as though what was growing in her was only hers, not his.
Now Ranjana felt it was even more important to hide Amos from everyone: from Angela and Yuko, from the local Nepalis, from whom she’d distanced herself a while ago anyway, especially after that home minister’s son began to harass her. Still, Amos wanted to see her more often, sent her e-mails expressing hope, saying that they had something “special going on.” She evaluated her emotions then, but discovered that apart from a mild interest, she felt nothing for him, and now that another life was growing inside her, Amos seemed to recede to the back of her mind.
She stopped responding to his e-mails. Gradually, she began to skip classes, finding instead a quiet spot under a tree on campus from where she could observe the other students. It was already the middle of March, and the air was hinting at warmer days to come. She didn’t yet show, but to be sure, she had begun to wear, on top of her winter jacket, an extra-large, misshapen black overcoat. She’d found it on the heavily discounted rack at the Burlington Coat Factory.
Sometimes she sat in a theater by herself, her mind hardly registering what was happening on the screen. Memories of a faraway past came to her, a past that was not hers:
She carries her baby in her arms, out on the streets, the hot sidewalk burning her soles. A small pile of rice, along with some coins, rests on a piece of cloth in front of her. She’s trying to nurse the baby, but the frantic movements of his cheeks produce just a dribble of a pale creamy substance, more water than milk. Hunger has hollowed her stomach, so occasionally, after lifting her palm for a coin, she picks up a grain of rice and inserts it into her mouth. She wishes someone would simply take her baby away, so she could crawl to a corner and die. Or go to sleep right here, in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the Durbar High School, with its screaming children, with Rani Pokhari in front of her. Her eyes are drawn to the water, its glitter under the sun, the ripples raised by a breeze.
Ranjana saw more:
The mist swirls around her as she walks into the parade ground in the half-light of early morning. The baby cries as she lowers him behind a bush. She’s aware that the homeless old man with the goatlike beard, the one who keeps to himself and looks away furtively when he meets a person’s eyes, is sleeping under the khari tree nearby. She straightens up and, casting a last look at her baby, walks north toward the pond. When she reaches it, she finds an opening in the bars, and slips through. In her mind’s ear she hears her baby crying, and for a second she considers making a mad dash back to the infant boy. But she jumps in, then thrashes her arms and legs about, in the hope that the motion will buoy her back to the pond’s surface. But she is descending deeper, and water quickly fills her lungs. She keeps whipping her arms and legs, and in the last minute before her world turns completely dark, with feeble awareness, she flings out a prayer. And her prayer shoots up through the churning water, breaks the surface, and jets into the air, soaring through the sky then down toward the khari tree, where it lands on the forehead of the goat-bearded derelict, who hears a baby crying in his dreams.
The last day before spring break, Ranjana was walking back to her apartment from the university when she saw Amos coming from the other direction, on Church Street. Her first impulse was to run, for she didn’t want him to even suspect that she was pregnant. But he’d already seen her, and as he approached, it struck her that he had, by this time, become an absolute stranger.
“You could have just said no,” he told her, with a slight smile. “I would have left you alone. But not even answering e-mails?”
She didn’t know what to say.
He waited, then said, “All right, you don’t need to answer.”
There was a brief, awkward silence; then Amos asked her whether she’d join him for a cup of coffee at the Starbucks nearby.
As she and Amos drank their Frappuccinos, which he bought, they indulged in small talk, punctuated by long silences. Finally with a deep breath he informed her that he was moving to a new job at a public radio station in Boston. She congratulated him, wished him the best in his career. Outside, as they said goodbye, his expression registered disappointment, but he continued to smile, told her he’d keep her updated. Clearly he hoped she’d encourage him to keep in touch, but she had nothing else to say.
By April Ranjana stopped attending classes completely, and by early May she’d moved to a tiny studio apartment in Skokie whose address she didn’t divulge to anyone, not even Angela and Yuko. The apartment cost six hundred dollars a month, and she had about seven thousand dollars, money she was supposed to use toward next semester’s tuition; that would help her survive for a while. “Don’t tell my parents I’ve moved out, please!” she said to her roommates, unsmiling, as she stood in the doorway, wearing her overcoat. The temperature outside had already climbed to sixty degrees Fahrenheit. “Just tell them I’m studying somewhere.” Before she left, she added, “And send me an e-mail if they call.”
By this time she knew that she was going to give birth to the baby. Thoughts of abortion appeared ridiculous. Yet she also felt an urgent need to hide her baby; the world would pounce upon it if she didn’t. To shield her baby, she stayed in her room most days, eating a banana here, some nuts there, ramen noodles, scrambled eggs, and Swad-brand microwave packets of alu bhaji, eggplant curry, tofu, and potatoes.
She worried about Ma and Papa, and when Angela sent her e-mails saying they had called from Nepal, she went down to the pay phone a block from her apartment, under the awning of the Chinese store. Its owner, a lady not more than four and a half feet tall, always put in a roll or two of seaweed for her, free. “Good for your health, hanh!” she said as she handed Ranjana her bag of groceries.
On the phone with her parents, Ranjana pretended that she was exhausted because she was juggling three intensive summer classes. Just tell them what’s happening, a voice in the back of her mind exhorted her. They’re your parents, they’ll understand. But of course she said nothing of the sort. “I’m fine, Ma,” she said. “Just tired, that’s all. Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me. Once these summer classes are over, I’ll be so relieved. I miss home, Ma.”
In the sultry evenings of July, as she poured soy sauce onto the noodles left over from lunch, she tried hard to remember whether she had brushed her teeth that morning. When the confinement of the room became too much, she’d board the city buses and ride them all day, traveling from Skokie to Des Plaines to Northbrook. She wouldn’t meet the eyes of South Asians she saw on the bus, in the streets, or outside the newspaper stands, fearing that they might be Nepalis she’d met at a party. They’d ask her what she was doing, how her classes were going; their gaze might travel to her belly, note how big she’d become. But the oversized coat was more than adequate to camouflage her pregnancy—it turned her body into one shapeless mass. If anything, she appeared to have no fashion sense, someone who didn’t know what suited her and what didn’t, someone who might even be a bit absent-minded, not all together in the mind department. And she lived up to that image. For minutes she could look out of the bus window and see nothing; out on the street or in her room, she’d find that she was whispering to herself.
She wondered if someone at the university—a professor, a student from one of her classes, a secretary, perhaps someone at the international center—had noted her absence, had been troubled by her failing grades for the spring semester. She worried that Papa and Ma might call the university, then she dismissed that fear—they wouldn’t know whom to talk to. I should pick up the phone and call them and let them know I am all right, she thought, but she knew that if she did, her voice would break, and Ma would sense that something was terribly wrong. In any case, Ma and Papa must have sensed that something was amiss. Why wouldn’t they? For days now she hadn’t gone down to the public library to use the computer, to check her e-mail, afraid of the panicked messages from them that she’d find.
She was sitting in her apartment, listless, her palm over her belly, when she was seized by the idea that there was nothing for her in America anymore. She’d already fallen off her academic track, she didn’t have any friends she could, or wanted to, talk to about her situation, and Amos, even if she wanted to see him, was somewhere in Boston. Logic told her that it was here, in America, that she could give birth to the baby and lead a secluded life, just she and her child, at least for a few years before she came out of hiding. Her remaining money would probably last her until the baby’s birth, after which she could find a job, perhaps in the Chinese grocery store owned by the tiny, kind lady, or as a cook or a waitress in some restaurant. She could lose herself in this country, maybe even move to another state, another town, disappear forever, with her baby. A bit of romance colored this scenario, she realized, and every time it ran through her mind—she, a working mother with a child in America, hiding from everyone—it rang false, as though she was pondering the life of a woman she didn’t know. Besides, she could not imagine doing that to Ma and Papa.
There’s nothing for you here anymore, the voice inside her kept insisting. She opened her window and looked out. Outside her apartment building was a park. An old Indian couple sat on a bench near the children’s playground, the man in his safari suit and a baseball cap, the woman in her sari, with a large tika on her forehead; the two watched the children swing and slide. The facial features and the dark complexion of the couple told Ranjana that they were most likely South Indians. The woman had something bundled in her lap, which she kept passing on to the man, who would fumble with it, then toss something into his mouth. Peanuts. The couple had bought some unshelled peanuts from the Chinese grocery store and carried them to the park, just as they’d do back in India. They didn’t talk. The woman passed the peanuts to her husband, and they both shelled them and popped them into their mouth, as their eyes followed the antics of the children, none of whom were dark enough to be their grandchildren. Ranjana watched in fascination, tears forming in her eyes.
