Buddha's Orphans, page 7
“Why not?”
“Because I say so. Don’t answer me back; if you do, I’ll tear your mouth open.”
“Who are you to tell me not to go to school?” he said, throwing the book at her. It struck her face and fell to the floor. “Are you my mother? Are you my father?”
“I raised you,” she said, tossing the book aside. She placed the zucchinis in a bowl of water, wiped her fingers on her dhoti, and stood.
“I’m going to run away from here,” Raja said.
Fear gripped Kaki. She wanted to embrace the boy tightly and tell him never to utter those words again. But she didn’t want him to think she was giving in, so she said calmly, “Who’s stopping you? Leave. Take off this very minute.”
Raja crossed his arms at this chest. “You think I won’t do it? Once you discover that I’m missing, then you’ll know.”
Kaki began pumping up the kerosene stove. It was about five o’clock, time to prepare dinner. Ramkrishan had gone to his village to visit his family, so for the past three days Kaki had to do all the housework by herself. Muwa would soon return from the weekly visit to her aunt’s house, and although she barely ate, sometimes she demanded that Kaki bring the food to the dining room, a chilly, soulless room next to the kitchen, so that she and Nilu could have a proper family meal. Muwa drank only a peg or two in the morning before visiting her aunt; this change in habit made her complain of headache and fatigue as she left the house. But she abstained in deference to her aunt. Sometimes this self-control proved so difficult that Muwa couldn’t help but curse her aunt, wishing she was dead so this weekly charade could end. And Muwa’s dinnertime attempt at family togetherness with Nilu often failed, for she’d begin to drink in earnest as the food was being served, and halfway through their meal, she was toppling glasses and dropping food on her sari.
Kaki nonetheless carefully prepared their meal. Because of the din of the stove, she didn’t hear Raja challenge her: “You think I won’t run away from here?”
Raja glowered at her, then left the kitchen to go to the yard. He looked up to see if Nilu had come to the balcony next to her room, but she hadn’t, and he thought about calling her to come down to play. But he was still mad at Kaki, and he remembered his threat. He opened the gate and walked into the alley. In the distance, he could see people walking, cars rushing by. Things moved quickly there, so he headed in that direction, kicking the dust under his feet. He needed to teach Kaki a lesson.
At the opening to the alley, he peeked into the door of Kancha’s soda shop, a space so cramped that Kancha had to crouch inside. The man sold candy, spicy titaura, cigarettes, and other knickknacks from the window, which opened onto the sidewalk. A few times Nilu and Raja had run to the shop during breaks from their play, despite Kaki’s injunctions not to venture out of Nilu Nikunj compound, to buy candy and drinks. Their favorite was fizzy soda, which tickled their noses as they drank.
Now, as Raja walked by, Kancha said, “Eh, badmash! Eh, idiot! You need to pay me for that soda I gave you the other day.” Ignoring him, Raja walked on. Traffic zoomed by. People hurried along the sidewalk. From a shop across the street loud radio music blared. Raja and Nilu had stood at this spot before, licking their titaura, and Nilu had pointed out her school bus stop to the left, across the street from Rani Pokhari. Raja didn’t know whether Lainchour was in the direction of Nilu’s bus stop or the opposite way, to his right. He nearly asked Kancha where it was, then stopped, because Kancha would surely tell Kaki, who would come, irate, to fetch him in Lainchour. So he took a left toward Rani Pokhari, attracted by the crowd, hoping that he’d spot the Jagadamba School around the corner.
A few hundred yards away, he waited to cross the street. Scooters, tiger-striped taxis, and bicycles whizzed by. His eyes followed a man riding a gleaming new Hero bicycle, a woman on the carrier seat behind him. Raja wondered when he’d be able to ride a bicycle like that. Nilu had a small, pink tricycle, which she never rode; it sat in a corner of the yard. Once, at his request, Nilu had let him ride it in the yard. He went around in circles, loving how fast it went, but within minutes Kaki stepped outside and, glancing up at Muwa’s bedroom, snatched the tricycle from him.
An old woman was standing next to him, waiting to cross the street. At a break in traffic, the woman shuffled across, and Raja stuck close to her. She frowned and continued walking. Once they reached the other side, she vanished into the crowd. He didn’t know where to go. Traffic swirled about him. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, except the street vendors, whose wares included newspapers, roasted peanuts, clothes, and small toys. A dark man selling cotton candy slowly went by. Raja’s mouth watered.
He approached the black fence surrounding Rani Pokhari. As he walked alongside it, he slapped the metal bars with his left palm. Soon he was in the Ratna Park area, and he circled the small Ganesh shrine, even recognizing the old white-bearded priest who doled out prasad from the inner sanctum. Excitement clamped his throat: this had been his neighborhood until a few months ago. Pushing past people, he ran to the area where Kaki used to sell her corn. A shoeshine man sat there, rapidly rubbing a piece of cloth on a customer’s black boots. Raja watched. The customer had a heavy jaw and a curly mustache, and he snarled at Raja. The shoeshine man glanced at Raja’s feet, noted the slippers, and asked him to move on.
Raja crossed the street and entered the market of Asan, once again dimly recalling having come here in the past, perhaps with Kaki. As he moved farther into the market, then on to Indrachowk, the crowd swallowed him. There was no expansive field here, as in Lainchour, only narrow alleys lined with shops displaying their wares on the ledges of doors and windows: hats and caps, wool sweaters, colorful blankets and cushions, religious prints. The constant chatter of the people around him, the tring-tring of bicycle bells, and the vroom of the occasional scooter—it all became too much for him, and he began to weep. A pedestrian or two stopped and asked him if he was lost, but he feared that these strangers would lure him to their own homes, so he shook his head and continued.
He traversed the city all afternoon, becoming hungrier by the hour, but he had no money to buy food, not even cheap candy. At some point he made a turn, and suddenly the streets were wider, and the shops had large, clean windows. He then remembered that Lainchour was not too far off, and neither was Nilu Nikunj. If he stopped and oriented himself carefully, he could probably find his way back to Nilu Nikunj. But he really didn’t want to return to Kaki. He kept moving, then actually gathered the nerve to approach a stranger, to ask him where Lainchour was. The stranger pointed in the direction that Raja had taken.
By this time the sun was already beginning to set, and he grew anxious, his heart hammering at the thought that, once night fell, it might be hard to recognize Jamuna Mummy’s house. As darkness wrapped Raja in its cloak, the road seemed to stretch for miles, and the boy trudged along; the shadows that wove in and out of the trees that lined the sidewalk seemed ominous. His mouth moved automatically to a prayer he’d heard Kaki utter as she worked around the house: “O God, your miracles are beyond compare.” To avoid looking directly at the shadows, Raja studied the ground and listened to the slap of his slippers. “O God, your miracles are beyond compare.”
Then he saw it: the flat, long building of the Dairy in the dimming evening light, and then the field in front of the Jagadamba School. He picked up his pace and began to run. He crossed the field, watching as his old school came nearer; then he entered the alley behind it and finally found the gate to Jamuna Mummy’s house.
He unlatched it and entered the yard. Light shone from Jamuna Mummy’s bedroom, and he saw the figure of Ganga Da sitting on the bed. “Ganga Da,” Raja shouted, running through the front door, which was slightly ajar, then into the room.
Ganga Da’s face lit up; then he put his finger to his lips. Jamuna Mummy was lying in bed, her eyes closed, a wet handkerchief on her forehead. “She just fell asleep,” Ganga Da said. “How did you get here?” he whispered, pulling Raja out to the yard. “Where’s Kaki?”
When Raja told him that he came by himself, Ganga Da stared at him in disbelief. “You shouldn’t have done such a thing,” he finally said.
“What’s wrong with Jamuna Mummy?”
“She’s gotten worse since Kaki took you away. How long has it been now? Four months? She stayed in the mental hospital for a whole week. Now she has a high fever.”
“I want to go to her.”
“I don’t know, Raja. Maybe it’s better if she doesn’t see you.” Ganga Da didn’t tell Raja that soon after he and Kaki left, he’d found out through Vaishali that they were working in Nilu Nikunj. He had considered visiting them to persuade Kaki to allow Jamuna to see Raja once in a while. But it wasn’t such a good idea, he decided, for it would unnecessarily excite his wife, give her false hope. “You must go home,” he told Raja now. “Come, I’ll take you to Kaki.” He went to the gate and called to the next-door neighbor in a soft voice. A young man appeared, and Ganga Da, after explaining to him what had happened, asked him to keep an eye on Jamuna while he took Raja back to Nilu Nikunj. Over the past few weeks Ganga Da had had to enlist the help of all of his neighbors to keep watch over his wife.
The young man wondered if the boy shouldn’t eat something before he left.
“You’re right. He must be hungry. I’ll feed him something in the Mahan Restaurant up the street,” Ganga Da said.
Raja sat in the yard, overwhelmed by the day’s journey.
“Raja?”
It was Jamuna on the porch; the wet handkerchief was stuck to her forehead.
“You’re too sick to come out,” Ganga Da said.
“Raja?” Jamuna rushed toward the boy, stumbling.
Raja too stood up and went to her, mashing his face against her hip, tears suddenly streaming down his cheeks. She clasped him tightly. Wobbling, she knelt before him and wiped his tears, her hands shaking. “Where were you all these days? Where did she take you?” Her voice was barely audible, as if she’d not eaten or drunk anything for days.
“Nilu Nikunj.”
“Nilu Nikunj?”
“That’s where Nilu and Muwa live.”
She frowned. “Where is Kaki?”
“She’s a servant there.”
“Has she kept you in a cage there? Huh? Tell me, don’t lie. Did she keep you bound and gagged there?”
He shook his head. “But she hasn’t let me go to school.”
“That witch,” Jamuna said. “I knew she was a witch when she first came here. You’re not going back.” She stood. Pulling Raja close to her, she faced Ganga Da defiantly. “Raja is home now.”
“Jamuna, he can’t stay here. Kaki is probably worried sick about him. Let me—”
Jamuna’s grip almost suffocated Raja. “Who are you to decide that? I’ve been sick for days without him, and now you care about that witch more than me?”
The young neighbor also tried to persuade Jamuna, saying that keeping someone else’s child was criminal. Jamuna accused the man of peeking through the window while she undressed. “You are a spy for the government,” she said. “Where are your dark glasses, huh? Didn’t His Majesty give you any?”
Ganga Da signaled to the young man to leave. After he closed the gate, Ganga Da turned to Jamuna. “Okay, it’s already dark, so we’ll let him sleep here tonight. But we have to send . . . talk about this tomorrow morning.”
Remarkably, the wet handkerchief still adhered to Jamuna’s forehead, and Raja pointed to it and began to laugh. “Let’s go inside,” she said, smiling, as Ganga Da went to the Mahan Restaurant to fetch some food.
When he returned with a plate of dal-bhat and chicken, Raja was displaying for Jamuna the bruises on his legs he’d acquired from playing. She was touching the bruises, commiserating, and also asking him questions about Nilu Nikunj, what Nilu and Muwa were like. Ganga Da scooped some chicken and rice onto a plate and brought it to Raja, who ate ravenously, his mouth bulging as he answered Jamuna’s questions. Ganga Da touched Jamuna’s forehead to gauge her temperature; her fever had come down. Once in a while, Raja, who was sitting on Jamuna’s lap, would hold a piece of chicken to her lips, and she’d open her mouth and take it, saying, “Mmmm.” Watching them, Ganga Da wondered where their intimacy came from. He worried that by now Kaki must know that Raja had run away to Lainchour, and she’d come barging in soon, accusing them of stealing him from her.
That night Ganga Da slept on bedding on the floor, while Jamuna and Raja slept on the bed. The boy’s head was buried deep in Jamuna’s bosom, and he was squirming like a newborn puppy. Now and then Jamuna ran her hand through his hair, her expression blissful.
The day Kaki had abducted Raja from school, Jamuna had run around the neighborhood, asking people if they’d seen her son. Helplessly Ganga Da had tagged along, making hand signals to people behind her back to tell them to humor her. “Raja will come back, I promise,” he told her repeatedly as he led her home late that night, after a fruitless search in the neighborhood and the Ratna Park area.
All night she sat in bed, looking out the window, cursing Kaki or chuckling and saying, “Coming! He’s coming!” The moonlight made her face look ashen, and Ganga Da wondered if this was the moment when her mind would completely and utterly lose its grip on reality. Tired, she let her head fall to her chest.
“Come lie down here,” he said, but she remained in that position for the rest of the night.
The morning after Raja left, as Ganga Da was cooking in the kitchen, Jamuna walked into the yard and took her clothes off. He managed to drag her back into the house, but that night he awoke to find her side of the bed empty. He located her in the kitchen, with her back against the wall; she was holding a little knife used for peeling potatoes. She struck at him, missed, and ran into the darkness outside. Minutes later he found her by following the incessant barking of the neighborhood dogs. They had cornered her outside the closed shutters of the Mahan Restaurant. Half a dozen of the mangy creatures, who in daylight went slinking about, tail between their legs, now growled at Jamuna, baring their teeth as they closed in. Jamuna was wildly waving the peeling knife at them under the streetlamp. That night, with the help of the owner of the Mahan Restaurant, Ganga Da took her to the mental hospital in Patan, where she stayed for three days on a cot with stained sheets. The whole ward, consisting only of nine beds, with several patients sleeping on the floor, smelled awful—of antiseptic, body odor, even urine—and Ganga Da had to cover his nose with his handkerchief. He managed to arrange a proper bed, instead of the cot, for Jamuna only after he pushed twenty rupees into the hands of the head nurse. A doctor gave Jamuna several injections, which made her drowsy.
The days in the hospital were a blur to Ganga Da. A girl in the bed next to Jamuna laughed hysterically at the ceiling fan every few minutes, pointing to something only she saw; an old woman clawed the air, and a man in tattered clothes hovered around Jamuna’s bed, contorting his eyebrows until a nurse took him away. On the seventh day, Ganga Da asked Jamuna, whose eyes had begun to sink into their sockets from the electroconvulsive therapy, whether she wanted to go home, and dumbly, she nodded. The doctor advised Ganga Da against it, but the hospital atmosphere had become too much for him. Every time the girl on the next bed cackled, he wanted to leap up and clamp his hand over her mouth. Toward late afternoon, when the doctor and the nurses were away, he enlisted the relative of a patient to help him walk Jamuna out of the hospital and into a taxi, to go home.
Now Raja had somehow escaped Kaki and ended up back with them. Who would be blamed for thinking that this boy, sleeping so contentedly on Jamuna’s lap, was indeed born from her womb? Watching the two turned Ganga Da’s thoughts toward his own mother, how soft and inviting her lap had been when he was a child, how comforting the feel of her hands as she cupped his chin with her palms. His mother was now lost among the ghats of Banaras, captivated by a smooth-tongued swami who was promising her liberation from this samsaric world. Ganga Da missed her and tried hard not to begrudge her this last-minute salvation, but now, watching Jamuna and Raja, he felt in his own bones his mother’s absence, with a pang of resentment at her for vanishing from his life. Tomorrow he’d have to wrench Raja away from Jamuna because he was not her child, and tonight the woman, Kaki, who’d wiped the boy’s bottom and helped him learn how to walk, was tossing and turning, worried about where he was—a woman who had more of a claim on this boy than anyone else did.
Or did she?
Ganga Da’s eyes fell upon his wife’s face. How calm she had become since she’d been able to hold Raja in her arms. Raja was her cure, and God knew, she needed a cure. It was incredible to Ganga Da that despite all that Jamuna had put him through, when he looked at her in sleep, a feeling of intolerable compassion rose in him. Nothing mattered, not what others said, not the unpredictability of his wife’s behavior, not the fitful nights he’d spent worrying she’d harm herself, or him, in one of her episodes. Despite everything, this was the woman whose hand he was meant to hold on his deathbed.
An idea pushed itself into the forefront of Ganga Da’s mind. Throughout the night, as he drifted in and out of sleep, he pondered it, and by dawn he knew what he needed to do. He quietly changed his clothes, opened his small steel safe inside the cupboard, extracted eight hundred rupees, and left the house. His destination was only a short distance away, a house near the incline that opened onto the Thamel market.
He spotted the house owner, Bhimnidhi, in his garden, taking a bath, with a lungi wrapped around his waist. Bhimnidhi worked as a midlevel administrator in Prasuti Griha, the maternity hospital in Thapathali. “Ganga Da, what an honor,” he shouted as he splashed water on his chest. Ganga Da waited until the man was done bathing, then they both went inside.
Bhimnidhi’s wife brought them tea. Ganga Da shut the door behind her and told Bhimnidhi what he wanted.
“But that’s impossible,” Bhimnidhi said. “This early in the morning, you come to talk about such a difficult matter. It’ll be a paap to do such a thing.”
