The Royal Ghosts, page 5
“No, no,” we protested. “You know she meant our individual weddings,” I said.
But it was too late. Umesh donned the self-important face of a priest, and in crowded Ganabahal, in front of a small shrine of who knows what god or goddess, he chanted some Sanskrit-sounding words and joined Gauri’s and my hands. “It’s a marriage made for seven incarnations,” he declared. I felt a rush of something, embarrassment maybe, and a tingle at the back of my neck. Gauri laughed.
“Let’s discuss my handiwork over tea, shall we?” Umesh said.
We slipped into a nearby shop and sat in a corner. On the wall next to us was a movie poster of a starlet with seductive eyes. I stole a glance at Gauri, who was seated next to me, and a young waiter in shorts and a torn vest came to take our order. He sauntered off singing a raunchy song that was popular on the radio. Gauri turned toward me and rolled her eyes.
“You two are mad at me for no reason,” Umesh said. “Don’t you see that those children need Kanyakumari? And you’re going to let a few thousand rupees deprive them of a mother?”
“A few thousand?” Gauri said. “By anyone’s standard, sixty thousand is a lot of money.”
She sat there in her embroidered blue sari, her large eyes bright, her pink lips full. What was I thinking—she was my friend! I tried to ignore my longing thoughts and addressed Umesh. “Why didn’t you at least think about it for a couple of days beforehand?”
“Listen,” he said. “Life is too short. God has given me more money than most people have. This is just my way of balancing the wealth. Besides, did you see the faces of those children? How they adored Kanyakumari? Don’t you think they need a mother like her?”
We thought about it, and we knew Umesh was right.
Over the next few days, Umesh grew busy with the wedding preparations. He made endless phone calls at work about clothing for the groom, religious paraphernalia for the priest, the printing of the invitations. I don’t know how he managed to get his work done, because he always seemed to be badgering someone on the phone, whispering details with Tikaram, or asking me or Gauri a question about some aspect of the wedding we had no clue about. “We’ve never been married before, remember?” we teased him, and he said, “Oh, yes, you have. I married you two in Ganabahal.” Though I laughed him off, I felt my face fill with heat.
Our manager started watching Umesh from his office, but Umesh was unfazed. “Do you think I care about what he thinks?” he said. “I’m getting my job done, so he can’t fault me for anything.”
Umesh was right. Incredibly, his work had not suffered a bit since this madness over Tikaram’s wedding began. On the contrary, Umesh seemed to have more energy than before, and he frequently performed several tasks at once—approving a customer’s loan, for example, calling the tailor about the groom’s suit, and redrafting the personnel manual for bank employees.
At times we snickered at him. “It’s as if he’s marrying off his own son,” we joked. Other times we scolded him for his bothersome questions. Often he couldn’t make it to our after-work tea because he had to rush off and take care of some wedding matter. We missed him, and we resented him a little for neglecting us in favor of Tikaram.
And then something did seem to start happening between Gauri and me. At five o’clock we left the office, never saying much but usually walking close together, and usually with silly smiles on our faces, and whenever our shoulders brushed, our eyes met and our smiles deepened. We sat in the tea shop, and from the silence an intimate conversation would emerge—something that had never happened in Umesh’s presence—and we’d get lost in talk about our lives. When Umesh had been with us, the conversation was more energetic, jumping from one topic to another, from laughter to sighs. With just the two of us, though, the conversation was quieter, more reflective, punctuated by long but easy silences. Gauri eventually revealed to me a secret she’d never told anyone: she had been molested by her uncle when she was a young teenager. This had gone on for almost a year, and no one in her immediate family had a clue. Her face turned dark and sad when she spoke, and later she told me that her uncle was one of the reasons she’d left Janakpur, even though she’d have preferred to stay with her family. “I couldn’t stand being near him at family gatherings,” she said.
The next afternoon, I told her about my lonely childhood. I had often been sickly, and my parents had to take me to the doctor every few weeks. My relatives called me Lurey, the Weakling, and this name had stuck with me throughout my childhood into my early teens. Since playing with other children meant being taunted by them about my thin arms and weak stamina, I often played by myself. Only after entering college had I been able to shed some of these painful memories.
Soon thereafter, Gauri and I kissed in her flat. I had coaxed her into showing me her paintings, and one painting in particular, of an old woman’s leathery face with a glinting ring in her nose, caught my attention. “Her features are remarkable,” I said, and turned to her. We were sitting on her bed, our bodies touching, so it didn’t seem unnatural when I moved my face closer and pressed my lips against hers. She responded softly. After a while I whispered, laughing, “I wonder what Umesh will think of this.” I could tell from her face that she, too, felt a pang of guilt, but all she said was “Let’s not think about him right now.”
As the wedding day approached and Umesh grew even more busy, he enlisted us to help him. In fact, he persuaded us to take a couple of days’ leave from the office. At first we were hesitant, because we didn’t want to upset our manager, but eventually we realized that Umesh desperately needed our help in handling the numerous last-minute details. “Now all three of you are skipping out of work?” the manager said when we submitted our letters requesting the days off. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Nothing,” Umesh said, beaming. “Come and enjoy the feast with us.”
In his magnanimity, Umesh had invited not only everyone from our office but everyone from the head office in Thapathali, which meant that the number of guests from Sagarmatha Bank alone approached fifty. By this time it had become obvious that the cost of the wedding had greatly surpassed the budget we had originally discussed. But whenever I asked Umesh about it, he said, “Everything’s under control. Don’t worry about it. Just enjoy the festivities.” Those days he never got a full night’s sleep, so his eyes were red. He badly needed a haircut. We were worried, but nothing we said or did could slow him down.
In the end, the wedding was, by all accounts, fantastic. A large tent, covering every inch of the sky, had been set up in the courtyard of Tikaram’s house. Petromax lamps lit the entire area, and a band, dressed in red, yellow, and black, played Hindi movie tunes. Small colored lights blinked around the periphery of the tent. Attending the wedding were close to three hundred people, not to mention the several passersby who slipped in to take advantage of the feast. At least four varieties of meat dishes and ten vegetable dishes had been laid out on a long serving table, and the desserts included not only ice cream but rasgulla, lalmohan, barfi, and kalakand. We were stunned—only the upper-class people in the city could afford a feast like this. Later I learned that although the food was catered by a small company, Umesh had hired a famous chef from a luxury hotel to supervise everything.
At one point in the evening, amid the hustle and bustle, Gauri and I found ourselves alone upstairs in Tikaram’s flat, where Gauri had gone to fetch some coconuts for the priest and I had gone to get a handkerchief for Tikaram.
As we held each other, my heart beat loudly in my chest at the thought that someone could easily walk in on us. The golden bangles on her wrists clinked as she adjusted her arms around my back. Umesh’s laughter rose above the conversations of the guests, and I whispered to Gauri, “Shouldn’t we tell him about us soon?” After all, it’d already been two weeks since we first kissed.
“Hmmm?” Gauri said dreamily.
“Umesh. Shouldn’t he know?”
“He’ll find out soon enough.”
Someone shouted from downstairs, “Coconuts! The priest needs the coconuts!” I reluctantly let Gauri go, and followed her out a few seconds later. Umesh stood with one of the executives from the bank, and when he spotted me, he called me over. As the three of us chatted, I considered taking Umesh aside and telling him about Gauri and me. I saw myself asking for his priestly blessing, reminding him that he’d already married us the day he’d fixed Tikaram’s wedding. But before I could say anything, Umesh was whisked away to the buffet table, where the kalakand was in short supply.
Around seven, the wedding band slowly led the crowd through the narrow lanes of the city center to call upon the bride. Along the route, people watched from the windows of their houses. Tikaram sat in the hired taxi with a couple of his relatives while the children rode in Umesh’s car; the rest of us followed on foot. Gauri stayed back at Tikaram’s flat so she could help his aunts prepare a customary welcome for the bride. As we walked, the evening crowd parted to let us through. Umesh was beside me, and I put my arm around him. “I salute you today, your highness,” I said.
The reception at Kanyakumari’s house was modest by comparison, since her family earned a meager income and had rejected Umesh’s offer to help. Their tent was patched in places, the buffet table spare, but we were not there to pass judgment, only to fetch the bride, which we did eventually, after hours of wedding rites and rituals. The procession returned with Tikaram and Kanyakumari in the taxi, she in her bright red wedding sari, her face hidden by a veil, and he in his suit and embroidered cap, looking dapper and, for once, young.
For days afterward we talked about the wedding and what a success it had been. Our colleagues congratulated Umesh, and some, even those who were married, jokingly suggested that they wanted to be married, or married again, by him, if only for the obvious financial perks involved. Umesh took it all in with the air of an exhausted father who had just witnessed the birth of his first child. “I did what I could do,” he said modestly “The rest is up to them.” Tikaram, who came back to work beaming a couple of days after the wedding, also gracefully absorbed jokes from our colleagues about the wedding night, some of which were quite vulgar.
When the excitement died down, Umesh came back to our fold and we resumed our after-work tea. But now, in his presence, Gauri and I became self-conscious when we looked at each other. We still hadn’t told him about us—the right moment just never came. In order to compensate, I suppose, we laughed louder and harder at his jokes, listened to him more attentively.
But it was clear that he sensed something was different. Sometimes, in the middle of talking, he would stop abruptly, stare at us, then say, “I forgot what I was saying.” Whenever I spoke, he focused on Gauri’s face more than mine, as if to gauge what she was feeling about what I said. I guess a part of me was afraid he’d think that by becoming a couple, Gauri and I had betrayed our larger friendship.
Gauri approached my desk one morning. Umesh hadn’t come in yet, and in the past few days we hadn’t spoken about him because he’d always been with us. Now, judging from her face, I knew something was wrong.
“What’s the matter with Umesh?” she said. “He came to my flat last night at ten o’clock, drunk. I was getting ready to go to bed.”
“Really?” I asked. “Has he started drinking again?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He kept saying he needed to tell me something, but he never did. Then he held my hand and cried on my shoulder. He kept saying he was so sorry, but he didn’t say about what. It was so strange.”
Despite myself, I winced at the image of his head on her shoulder. I grew annoyed with him, then annoyed with myself for becoming annoyed in the first place. Was he having some problem he hadn’t told us about? Deep inside, I suppose I knew he’d sensed what was going on between Gauri and me, and I resolved to talk to him. But he didn’t come to work that day. At around eleven, I called his house but there was no answer. The manager approached my desk a short while later, inquiring after Umesh. “I think he’s very sick, sir,” I said. “He wasn’t feeling well yesterday. Maybe he’s too sick to call.” The manager shook his head and left.
That evening Gauri and I found ourselves alone as we walked to Ramey’s tea shop. She suddenly said, “Let’s go somewhere else for a change, someplace we won’t be thinking about . . . just someplace different.”
We ended up taking a taxi to the Soaltee Hotel, where we walked through several hallways and found a restaurant with plush chairs and tables made of mahogany. Large glass chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and soft sitar tunes drifted from speakers.
The waiter seated us at a table very close to a small stage, where, I discovered, some musicians would soon be playing. Candles in gilded holders burned at our table. We could hear the murmurs of tourists at a table nearby. I had never been inside the Soaltee, let alone such a posh restaurant, and when I asked Gauri how we’d pay for all this, she said, “It’s my treat. I just feel like celebrating.”
The musicians arrived, and so did our food—chicken chili, lamb kebab, mutton in peanut sauce, naan. It smelled and tasted heavenly, and we chatted as we ate. Neither of us mentioned Umesh. Once the music started, I shifted my chair next to Gauri’s and wrapped my arm around her. A harmonium player sang a ghazal in a melodious, almost feminine voice:
Yesterday was a night of full moon.
Everywhere there was talk of you.
The light in the room grew softer, the music even sweeter.
At the office the next day, Umesh avoided us until I confronted him and insisted on a talk downstairs.
“What’s happening, Umesh?” I asked when we were outside.
He appeared flushed. “Did Gauri say anything about me?”
“About that night? Of course she did. She’s worried about you.” His eyes were pink, slightly swollen. “Have you started drinking again?”
At first he vehemently denied it, then admitted that he’d been drinking “a bit” at night, before bed.
“What’s eating you?” I asked.
“Nothing, nothing.” He looked at me helplessly. “Gauri must think badly of me.”
“No,” I said. “Listen, why don’t you join us for tea today? Everything will be all right.”
He stared at me for a moment, then asked, “I won’t be interfering?”
“Nonsense,” I said, feeling myself blush. “What are you talking about?” I should’ve confessed to him right then and there.
That evening Umesh walked with us to the tea shop. Initially the conversation was awkward, with long stretches of silence, and Gauri and Umesh kept trying to avoid each other’s eyes. By the time we finished our first glass of tea, however, we were all a little more relaxed, and soon we were laughing and joking about work. After a while the topic turned to Tikaram. “I think they’re having some problems,” Umesh said, taking a bite of a samosa. “He doesn’t look happy. The other day he told me that he and Kanyakumari were fighting.”
Since the wedding, Tikaram had spent more time with Umesh than with Gauri or me. Now that Umesh mentioned it, I realized that Tikaram had been looking down lately. “So soon?” I asked Umesh. “Over what?”
“Over the children, over money, he wasn’t clear.”
“A husband and wife arguing—what’s unusual about that?” Gauri said.
“I get the impression they argue all the time,” Umesh said.
“So much for all your . . . ,” Gauri said.
“What do you mean?” Umesh asked.
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head.
After a silence, Umesh said, “Maybe you can talk to Kanyakumari. Maybe that’d help.”
“Why should I get involved in their marital problems?” Gauri said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t feel right.”
“It’s obvious they’re meant for each other. They’re just having difficulties.”
“Maybe they weren’t meant to be together, Umesh,” Gauri said. “Maybe it was only you who thought they were.”
I didn’t like where the conversation was headed, so I said, “It’s been too long since we’ve had tea together. Let’s talk about something else.”
But Umesh said, “You don’t have to act so high and mighty, Gauri. All I said was that maybe Kanyakumari will listen to you, woman to woman.”
Gauri laughed. “High and mighty? Look who’s talking. Who is the one going around distributing his parents’ wealth?”
“Stop it, you two!” I said.
But the damage was already done. Umesh leaned back against his chair, his jaw clenched. Gauri stared at the table.
“All right,” Umesh said. “If that’s what you think of me. Anyway, I know what’s going on.” He looked at me, then at Gauri.
“Umesh, don’t talk like this,” I said.
“I didn’t mean it that way, Umesh,” Gauri said. “I’m just a little tired of Tikaram this and Tikaram that.”
“You’re tired of me, I think,” Umesh said, getting up.
“Umesh,” I said, but he walked away from us and left the shop.
Gauri and I sipped our tea in silence. Despite myself, I resented her for arguing with Umesh. She could have easily agreed to talk to Kanyakumari, and the conversation might not have been so uncomfortable. My feelings must have shown on my face, for she asked me, “You don’t blame me for this, do you?”
“Maybe that argument wasn’t necessary.”
“I might have spoken a bit harshly, but don’t you see? He was trying to wheedle me into something I didn’t want to do.”
“So, he knows about us,” I said, defeated. “He probably feels hurt that we didn’t tell him earlier.”
“Did he give us the chance to tell him?” Gauri said. “Besides, he could have been happy for us instead of acting like a child.”
That was true, and some of my resentment toward Gauri dissolved. Umesh, too, could have handled it differently. Still, I felt bad about the whole thing. Only a few weeks ago, all three of us occupied such a different world, sitting around a table in Umesh’s garden, humming songs, reading passages from novels. I remembered the three of us laughing—a beautiful thing.
