Buddha's Orphans, page 6
Nilu kept turning the pages, then said, “What does it mean to be a tuhuro?”
“It means you don’t have parents.”
Nilu put down her book. “What happened to them?”
“I don’t know. Someone found Raja in Tundikhel.”
“I’ve been to Tundikhel, but only once. Muwa said that the riffraff hang out there, so we never went back.”
Kaki wiped the headboard of Nilu’s bed with the end of her dhoti.
Nilu propped herself against a pillow, her arm behind her neck, and asked, “How did you find him?”
Just then Muwa walked in, and, seeing the two of them, said to Kaki, “After you finish your work, make me some tea, okay?”
“I was about to tell Nilu how Raja was found in Tundikhel.”
“Call her Nilu Nani. All of our servants have called her nani.”
“Muwa, Raja was born in Tundikhel,” Nilu said to her mother.
Muwa’s face showed a trace of a smile. “He wasn’t born there. He was found there.” She turned to Kaki. “Well, are you just going to stand there? What did I tell you a moment ago?”
“Muwa, she says Raja doesn’t go to school,” Nilu said.
Muwa sat next to her daughter, caressed her chin, and said, “Isn’t my Nilu baby hungry? Do you want to drink a glass of warm milk?”
Nilu shook her head and told Kaki, who was about to leave, “Raja could come to my school, but it’s a girls’ school.”
Nilu and Raja hadn’t yet talked, although they’d run into each other around the house. Once, just back from school, Nilu had come into the kitchen and found Raja on the floor, lying on his stomach, crawling like a snake. Both Kaki and Ramkrishan were out in the garden, uprooting weeds. Nilu watched the boy from the doorway. He was snarling and growling, clawing the air in front of him as he slithered forward. When he became aware of her presence, he stopped, his arms frozen in the air. She turned and walked upstairs to her room, from where she shouted at Kaki to fetch her a glass of water. Kaki in turn called to Raja to get Nilu Nani some water. Raja poured a glass from the container in the kitchen and took it to her room upstairs.
She was sitting on her bed, still in her blue-and-white school uniform, twirling a long stick she’d picked up on the way home from the school bus, which dropped her off around the corner from the opening of the alley. Raja’s eyes widened at the sight of the dolls. As he approached Nilu, she scrunched her eyebrows, made her face stern to look like her mother’s, and said, “Why are you so slow?”
Raja didn’t answer. He offered her the glass, but instead of taking it, she lightly tapped the stick on her palm, like a schoolteacher. “Put it there,” she said, indicating the bedside table. She watched him as he obeyed, and when he was about to leave, she said, “Wait.” She tapped the stick on the floor at the foot of the bed and said, “Sit!”
Raja abruptly sat down and crossed his legs. Nilu stared at him, and she took a few gulps of air as if she was about to make an important announcement; but in the end all that came out of her mouth was “Are you a tuhuro?”
Raja nodded, expecting her to say something bad about it.
But Nilu only tapped the stick on her palm while gazing at him. They looked at each other like this for a while. Then Nilu’s eyes softened. “Do you remember your mother?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Do you remember your father?”
He shook his head again.
She sighed. “Is there anyone you remember?”
“I remember Jamuna Mummy.”
“I remember my father a bit, sometimes.”
“But you are not an orphan, like me,” Raja said grudgingly. He then stared at Nilu’s dolls, clearly admiring them.
“Do you want to play with my dolls?” she asked.
He shook his head, a bit afraid that Muwa would learn about it if he did such a thing.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “No one will know.”
He hesitantly went to the dolls and picked one up. He stroked its hair. Nilu demonstrated how to hold the doll properly in the crook of the arm, like a baby. “And this is how you talk to it,” she said, and cooed to the doll.
He smiled shyly. They passed the doll back and forth for a while; then Kaki called Raja and he left the room. Nilu drank her glass of water and lay down in bed, wondering what it might be like to not know one’s own mother.
Every day Raja waited for Nilu to return from her school, which was called St. Augustine’s, and as soon as she wolfed down some bread and eggs and drank a glass of milk, they’d run into the yard. They played hopscotch, erected mud castles in the garden, and once a week, when Muwa was not home (she had an aunt in Kupondole whom she visited every week), the two went up to Nilu’s room, where Nilu dressed Raja in one of her frilly frocks and applied lipstick and rouge to his face; then together they danced or enacted silly, childish skits.
Raja abided by her rules, for Nilu had made it clear that she made the decisions. “No, not like that,” she chided him when his feet didn’t move correctly to the dance steps she’d learned at school. She changed her mind frequently, without notifying him, so that the routines he’d learned yesterday she’d deem wrong today. But there was no questioning her; she didn’t like to be challenged. But he didn’t mind this because he himself couldn’t come up with ideas for play as quickly and creatively as she could, so he happily followed her lead. She didn’t smile much when they played together, but her eyes were gentle and soft when they fell upon him. Even after she reprimanded him for a flub or a blunder, she’d put her arm around him and say, “Come, let’s try it again.”
One day they stole sand from the yard of a neighbor whose house was under construction. The laborers had left early that afternoon, and Nilu decided that they too would build a house. They found a couple of buckets and began to haul the sand to a corner behind the shack where Kaki and Raja slept. Ramkrishan and Kaki were resting in the kitchen, and Muwa was up in her room, so the children carried on their task uninterrupted until they had piled up a fairly large mound of sand. By mid-afternoon they had stolen a number of bricks from next door as well, and they stacked them into a cubicle that they could slide into. They dumped the sand along the base for a foundation, and they found a cardboard plank to serve as the roof. Only after they were done did they realize that they had neglected to make a door for their house.
Nilu scolded Raja: “The man of the house is supposed to think of such things.” Glumly, he accepted the blame. “No matter,” she said. “You’re still my husband. I won’t leave you.” The two then took a few bricks from one side of their cubicle, stepped in, and stacked the bricks behind them, so it became dark inside. It was cramped too, but Nilu pronounced it a good home. She gave it an English name: Private Palace. “I’m tired after a hard day’s work,” she declared, and suggested that the two go to bed. They both tried to lie down, but the space was too narrow. “We’ll sleep while sitting,” Nilu said, and she and Raja sat with their backs against each other. Raja kept giggling, and Nilu had to hush him. “Be quiet, so we can make a baby,” she told him.
They were still inside Private Palace as the sun went down, and the small amount of light that seeped in began to wane. Raja whimpered. “I am scared,” he said.
“Lie down on my lap,” Nilu suggested, so he rested his head on her lap and she sang a lullaby to him. Like a baby, he fell asleep in that position, and when, a few minutes later, Kaki called them for dinner, Nilu didn’t respond. After half an hour, both Kaki and Ramkrishan stepped out of the house, shouting their names. Kaki’s voice became frantic as she and Ramkrishan roamed the yard and the gate area. Kaki went to see if the two had gone up the alley to Kancha’s shop. Ramkrishan checked the back of the house. Through gaps between the bricks, Nilu saw that the light in Muwa’s room was on, and soon the woman opened the window and asked Ramkrishan what the matter was. When he told her that the children were missing, she didn’t say anything. Will she come down? Nilu wondered. She waited. Muwa stayed on the balcony; then, as Kaki’s calls grew hysterical, Muwa emerged at the front door.
Muwa was the one who discovered Nilu and Raja. She lifted the cardboard and laughed at Nilu. All the clamor never woke Raja. “Chee!” Muwa said. “Sleeping with a servant boy. You are a dirty girl.” She must have liked the sound of her own words, for she laughed; then she picked up the bricks one by one and, tottering, threw them into the neighbor’s yard. Once Muwa went back upstairs, Kaki pulled Raja to his feet, conked him on the head, and twisted his ears. She threatened to strike him with nettles the next time he did anything like this. Then she embraced him and cried.
Nilu dismissively referred to all her friends at school, with the exception of a girl called Prateema, as girls with “no brains.” Raja loved hearing her say that phrase, and he started silently repeating it to himself at night, like a chant. He expected that at some point she’d call him the same, and he mentally braced himself for it, but she never spoke those words to him, even when she was dissatisfied with his performance at play. “That Smita has no brains,” she announced abruptly as they dug a hole in the garden to bury worms that they’d held as prisoners. Nilu talked to Raja frequently about school: the strict teachers versus the easy ones, the blind woman who sat by the school gate and begged for coins, and the new playground, which featured a large swing and a tunnel shaped like an alligator that you entered through its toothy, cavernous mouth and exited by squeezing yourself out its narrow arsehole. Raja listened attentively and marveled at this wonderful, strange world of Nilu’s. The school building, he imagined, was a magnificent castle with thick pillars and long, quiet corridors; the teachers were old women wearing somber gowns; and students gathered daily for something called morning assembly during which they sang a song praising the king and the principal offered bits of wisdom about God, hard work, and good morals. St. Augustine’s was nothing like the Jagadamba School, and at times Raja felt ashamed that he had nothing exciting to report about his experience there, which was already becoming fuzzy in his mind. Kaki, fearful that he’d go back to Jamuna, had stopped his schooling altogether.
One day, drinking a glass of milk in the kitchen, Nilu asked Raja, “Why don’t you go to school?” Kaki was cleaning the bathroom upstairs.
He shrugged and said that Kaki wouldn’t let him.
“Well, why not?” she asked.
He had no answer for her.
“Do you know how to read?” she asked him.
He’d heard her read from her English books, stories about the hare and the tortoise, about the poor servant girl who stole the heart of a prince. Embarrassed about his illiteracy, he nodded, avoiding her eyes.
“Okay then, read me a story,” Nilu said. “Come.” She led Raja by his hand up to her room, where they sat on the floor. From her bag she withdrew a book, and he became anxious when he saw that it was in English. She placed it in front of him and said, “Read.”
He gazed at the marks on the page and said, “I don’t know English.”
She looked at him in disbelief, her face stern. Then she took out another book, in Nepali, and flipped to a page. “Read this,” she said. And he labored over the words, his tongue becoming thicker as he moved his finger across the first line. “That’s wrong!” she shouted, and he feared that she might pick up her stick and ask for his palm, to strike it. That’s what the teachers at her school did, she’d informed him, to punish unruly girls. Raja tried again, but every time he pronounced a word, Nilu shook her head. Tears formed in her eyes. She stood, then threw herself on the bed, turning away from him. She muttered something under her breath, and his heart seemed to stop with dread as he waited for her to indict him as a boy with “no brains.” But she turned to him, her cheeks damp, and said, “Don’t you know how important it is to read? Mother Stevens says if we don’t know how to read, then we’ll be fools for the rest of our lives. We’ll have no brains. Don’t you know that?”
He shook his head. She’d mentioned Mother Stevens before, and he now pictured her as a woman with an unyielding, judgmental face.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
He stood by her bed, his palms pressed against his sides, at attention. “I don’t know.”
She shook her head sadly. “You will be a servant until you die.”
Raja wished he could comfort her. With Kaki cooking and cleaning all day, and their living in the small shack in the garden, he was beginning to understand that his status in this house was that of a servant. But he was incapable of extending that idea all the way to the moment of his death or connecting it to his lack of reading skills.
He was baffled, but not for long. Nilu soon said words that came from deep inside her. “You have to learn how to read. I’ll teach you.”
From then on, once she returned from school in the late afternoon, Nilu pulled Raja from the kitchen, ignoring Kaki’s warning that Muwa would get angry. The two sat on the porch or in Nilu’s room, and the girl flipped open her old Nepali Barnamala with a drawing of the goddess Saraswati on its cover. She read aloud the big letters in the book, enunciating carefully, then asked him to repeat them. Kaki brought Nilu her snacks, a boiled egg or a buttered toast along with a glass of milk, and after Kaki left, Nilu asked Raja to share her food, or she simply pushed her egg or toast toward him, saying she’d eaten some candies from the shop at school.
By late afternoon Muwa was in a booze-induced stupor in her room, and if the children were loud in their recitations, they disturbed her; she’d call Nilu, sounding as though she had a rock under her tongue. On occasion Nilu simply ignored her mother. But Muwa’s voice made Raja stumble over his words. He worried that Nilu would be punished for spending time with him, although he’d never seen her disciplined for anything. Once Muwa, after Nilu ignored her calls, appeared at the door, surprising them. With a crumb of egg yolk on his lips, Raja froze. Nilu kept her eyes on the book. “What, you’re a big man now?” Muwa said to Raja. “Go down.” He jumped to his feet and stumbled down the stairs. Normally, however, Muwa didn’t emerge from her room until late in the evening, after her afternoon daze had worn off; then she ate dinner with Nilu and later sat in the living room, listening to Radio Nepal, with a glass of whiskey by her side.
Whenever Raja saw Muwa, with her dry, sunken cheeks and her harsh words, his throat turned dry, and he felt that he became stupid, a boy with no brains. Since he and Kaki had arrived at Nilu Nikunj, he’d understood that the best way to deal with Muwa was to avoid her gaze, lower the head, and nod yes or no to her questions, which were often sharp when directed at him. When Muwa spoke to Nilu, however, her voice acquired a lilting, loving quality that reminded Raja of Jamuna Mummy, making a lump rise in his throat.
He missed Jamuna Mummy’s caresses, missed sitting in her soft lap and being fed sweets, missed her lullabies and the funny words she made up as she went along. Every few days he asked Kaki whether they’d ever visit Jamuna Mummy or perhaps even chance upon her on the streets, although Kaki hadn’t let him venture beyond the opening of the alley since they moved. Each time, Kaki crushed his hopes, telling him he ought to consider his Jamuna Mummy as good as dead. Then, realizing that she was being too cruel with the boy, she ruffled his hair and said, “You have me, Raja. You don’t need anyone else.” She stroked his chin, but he winced because her palms were callused and rough, unlike Jamuna Mummy’s.
For her intrusion, and her banishment of Raja from her daughter’s room that day, Muwa received a sound tongue-lashing. Nilu threatened to report the incident to Mother Stevens, the principal at St. Augustine’s, who would be clearly unhappy with Muwa’s efforts to snuff an orphan’s education. “Mother Stevens says education uplifts mankind,” Nilu informed her mother tearfully. The sisters ran another school near Patan that served village children at virtually no cost, didn’t Muwa know?
Muwa told her daughter to shut up, that she wasn’t going to raise her child to befriend servants. So Nilu didn’t speak to her mother, or anyone, for days, and stayed shut in her room before and after school, refusing to eat, until Kaki and Ramkrishan appealed to Muwa to talk to her child, to compromise.
Muwa, who’d begun drinking more since Nilu’s tantrum, finally relented and made her way to her daughter’s room. Nilu was lying in bed, reading, the radio softly playing near her head. She didn’t glance at her mother, who sat down on her bed, her loud exhalations filling the room with the stench of alcohol. Nilu kept her eyes glued to her book. Muwa gazed at her for a while.
“Why aren’t you eating?” she asked.
Nilu didn’t answer.
“How long are you going to remain like this?”
Nilu didn’t answer.
“So you want to spend your life cavorting with a low-class boy?”
Nilu’s eyes, fiery with anger, fell upon her mother briefly; then she turned to face the wall.
“What do you lack in this house, huh?” Muwa said. “Ever since your father died, I’ve fulfilled each of your demands. What have I not given you?”
Nilu didn’t answer. The soft chatter of the radio floated gently across the room. Muwa sighed, then lay down next to her daughter, making the bed creak. “All right, if what you want is to teach that stupid boy how to read, who am I to stop you? Just don’t come crying to me if he doesn’t learn anything. You don’t know these people—there’s only so far that they can go.”
It took him a few weeks, but finally Raja was able to falteringly navigate the pages of the big-lettered Nepali Barnamala, recognize words, and sometimes even read passages from Nilu’s schoolbooks. He ran to Kaki, shouting out the words from the book he held in his hands. Kaki, who was sitting on the kitchen floor, skinning zucchinis, looked pleased, but when he said that now he wanted to go back to the Jagadamba School, her face tightened and she said, “You’re not going back there.”
