RAJA’S TALK of his mother unsettled both of them, throwing them into a pensive mood. They hadn’t discussed her in years, and when they had, they’d mentioned her only in passing, usually prompted by Ranjana’s pesky questions. When Ranjana was a child she was unwilling to believe that her father didn’t know anything about her grandmother, and she threw tantrums when Raja told her he had been raised by two surrogate mothers. As she grew up, Ranjana expressed more interest in the grandmother she’d never known than she did in Muwa, who lived in the same city.
Yes, Muwa, incredibly, was still alive, still drinking, still living with Sumit. After Nilu Nikunj went to Sumit, the house survived in his hands only for a few years, after which it was sold to a philanthropist who wanted to set up an orphanage. Most of the money from the sale went to the repayment of Sumit’s own debts, Nilu had learned. He did have enough remaining to afford a modest home in Bhainsepati, where he and Muwa now lived. Sumit hadn’t kicked Muwa out onto the street, as Nilu had expected. In fact, Nilu could tell that in his own way he was fond of Muwa, made sure she ate well and took her medicine, dusted seats for her and brought her a sweater on chilly evenings in the garden, even though he did nothing to prevent her from drinking. Muwa was approaching age seventy-five, and she’d begun to stoop; every few months she had to be rushed to the hospital. Years of drinking had corroded her organs, but she still walked by herself, and still spoke, albeit in a voice so raspy that it sounded as though she had chronic laryngitis. Every day Nilu expected a call from Sumit, telling her that her mother had passed away. Every few months she went to visit Muwa. The bitterness she’d felt toward Muwa all her life was replaced by a mild contempt, alternating with unexpected surges of compassion. Perhaps it had to do with age, a sense of resignation that certain things in life, in people, remained the same. Muwa walked around the house with a cane, wrapped in a shawl, a cigarette between her fingers. Some days Nilu found her in the garden, inspecting the flowers with trembling hands.
Raja went for a stroll, and Nilu begun to think about what he had said—that his thoughts turned to his real mother when he looked at Ranjana. Nilu was filled with a sense of foreboding, as if Raja’s mother, after all these years, had decided to infiltrate their lives by laying a claim to Ranjana to compensate for the claim she had forfeited—her own son. Nilu faulted Raja for having mentioned his seemingly unstable mother and Ranjana in the same breath; Ranjana was the most levelheaded daughter anyone could ask for. She had been absolutely no problem, even during her early teenage years. Now she was already nineteen. Still, she was far from home, and lately she did sound as if she was carrying a weight that was hard to balance on her delicate shoulders.
The more Nilu attempted to dismiss her anxieties, the more a sense of doom pressed upon her. She opened the window and let in some fresh air, took deep breaths to fill her lungs, to drive away the pressure settling on her forehead. And swiftly, as though it had never left, the familiar heaviness swooped down on her—the anguish that had been her life in the aftermath of Maitreya’s death. Except this feeling had nothing to do with Maitreya, with whom she’d made her peace; it concerned her daughter, the pragmatic, loving Ranjana whom both Nilu and Raja knew would be a solace for their old age, someone who had already healed not only their heartbreak over Maitreya but also their marriage. All of this had vanished in an instant because of Raja’s silly comment, which he had likely already forgotten along his walk, as he paused to chat with neighbors. When he returned, Nilu was going to tell him how annoyed she was. “For twenty years I haven’t felt like this,” she’d say to him. “And you go and say something that you yourself cannot make sense of. And here I am, broken in pieces about it.”
But it wasn’t Raja’s fault; she knew her vexation at him was misplaced. He was merely expressing something that had been bothering him lately. She was overreacting.
Nilu went to her room and opened her big steel cupboard. She took out the metal box where she kept her daughter’s letters and sifted through them to see if she could spot any cause for concern, any passage that had made her pause when she first read it. Nothing. All the letters spoke brightly about Chicago, the apartment she shared with two roommates, her classes, the university, the great body of water nearby. She mentioned that she missed Nilu’s cooking, but which child living far away from home wouldn’t?
Nilu rearranged the letters in the box and put it away in the cupboard. She went down to the garden and sat in a chair, waiting for her emotions to change. As the sun began to set, she heard Raja at the gate, back from his walk. He had a hint of a smile on his face, perhaps from having joked with the neighbor next door. Her speculation that what he’d said affected him less than it affected her, turned out to be true.
“How far did you go?” she asked.
“Oh, just up to the mound.”
He began recounting the dog problem of Satyalji, their loud, guffawing neighbor, but she cut him off. “We need to call Ranjana. Urgently.”
The panic in her voice startled him. “Why? What happened?”
Nilu had to look away and feel her breath in her chest before she could respond. “Something has happened to Ranjana. We need to call her.”
Now it was Raja’s turn to be filled with dread. “What? Did you hear something? Someone called from America?”
Her eyes fell on the flowers she’d planted and admired only yesterday—a batch of bright yellow roses that appeared to have lost their luster overnight.
“Nilu! Why are you not speaking? Something bad happened to Ranjana?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and stood up and went inside. It seemed she was punishing him, but for what, she didn’t know.
Raja followed. “Hoina, why are you acting like this? Why are you keeping me in the dark?”
As she went to the kitchen and poured water in the kettle for tea, she controlled the shaking of her hands. She felt Raja’s presence behind her, and she didn’t know what to say to him.
“Tell me what happened,” he asked again, this time a bit more gently.
“Let’s call her,” she said, turning to face him.
“Did someone tell you something?”
She shook her head and moved to the living room, where she sat on the sofa, picked up the phone, and began dialing. The number to Ranjana’s apartment in Chicago, which she shared with her two roommates, came to her easily. Raja stood next to her, watching. The phone rang three times before one of the girls answered, in a drowsy voice—it was very early there. Nilu asked to speak to Ranjana. The last few times she’d called, one of the roommates would pick up the phone and tell Nilu that her Ranjana was at the library. Nilu still couldn’t tell these girls’ voices apart, even though one of them was a red-headed American and the other was a Japanese girl who had immigrated there when she was a child.
“Who is this?” the girl asked.
“This is Ranjana’s mother, from Nepal. Is this Angela speaking?”
“Oh, hello.” Her voice was suddenly alert. “Ranji isn’t here.”
Nilu had never liked the shortening of her daughter’s name to Ranji, and now in the roommate’s American accent it seemed even stranger. When Nilu had asked Ranjana why she allowed her roommates to call her that, she’d responded that it was an easier name for them, and that it really didn’t matter, did it, what she was called? “Where is she, then?” Nilu asked Angela. “She’s never home when I call her.”
“I need to . . .”
“Is she at the library again? What is she doing so early at the library?”
“Mrs. Basnet, I need to tell you something. Actually, it’s been nearly two months now since Ranjana moved out of here.”
“Moved out? To where?”
“I don’t know. She’s never told me.”
“Two months? But that can’t be true,” Nilu said. “She’s never mentioned anything like it, and she’s been calling me.” Was this roommate making a fool out of her? Was Ranjana in on the joke, instructing the girl? “Let me speak to Ranjana!”
“I swear I’m telling the truth, Mrs. Basnet.” The girl was pronouncing it Bassnyet. “She asked me not to tell you, and I went along because we all love Ranji here. But we’re all worried about her.”
“What do you mean worried? She asked you not to tell me? Why?”
“I have no idea. I wish I could tell you more.”
“Is she still in Chicago?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Basnet. The last couple of times you called, I sent her e-mails to inform her, but I don’t know whether she’s still in Chicago.”
Nilu’s world swam. Her own voice seemed to come from a distance. “But how did it happen so suddenly? Was there a problem?”
“There wasn’t any trouble with us,” the roommate said. “She paid us a month’s rent so we could look for a new roommate.”
Raja was making hand signals, inquiring what had happened.
“But something must have happened!” Nilu said. “Otherwise why wouldn’t she leave a phone number with you for us? That’s not like Ranjana at all. You aren’t hiding anything, are you?”
The roommate grew defensive. “I have told you everything I can. Why would I have any reason to hide anything from you?” She then said that she had to go to class and that if she learned anything more about Ranjana’s whereabouts, she’d call Nilu.
Nilu stared at the phone after the roommate hung up. But Raja was bursting at the seams, so she told him what the roommate had said.
The color drained from Raja’s face. “But she’d have told us if she was going to move. This doesn’t sound like Ranjana. Maybe the girl is mistaken.”
“She didn’t sound like she was joking.”
“I’m going to call Umesh and see what he knows. It’s possible that she got fed up with her roommates and moved back to Umesh’s house.”
But Raja’s conversation with Umesh soon revealed that he didn’t know that Ranjana had moved elsewhere. The last time he spoke to Ranjana, Umesh told Raja, was several weeks ago when he invited her home for some Nepali food—but she couldn’t come because she was busy writing papers. Unfortunately, Umesh himself was struggling to meet the deadline for a book he was writing, and thus he hadn’t called Ranjana, except for one time, when he was told that Ranjana was at the library. He’d left a message, but Ranjana never called back.
Raja seemed about to cry as he spoke into the phone, “For goodness’ sake, where could she have gone? This is so puzzling.”
Nilu took the phone from him and spoke to Umesh. She told him that he must go to Ranjana’s apartment right away and find out from her roommates what exactly had happened, especially the one named Angela, with whom Nilu had conversed earlier. The roommates were hiding something; Nilu was certain of that. “Please, Umesh Babu, this is an urgent matter.”
Umesh said something about an important committee meeting he was scheduled to run that afternoon, and perhaps he could just phone Ranjana’s roommate. Nilu said that she was worried sick about her daughter, and if Umesh didn’t go there immediately, she wouldn’t know what to think of him. As Ranjana’s guardian in America, it was his responsibility to make sure that nothing happened to her. Nilu was about to add, in her anger, that he’d already failed his duties as their daughter’s guardian by not keeping a close eye on her, but she only said, “Put yourself in our shoes. How would you react if she were your daughter?
Raja was making desperate hand signals, advising Nilu to calm down.
“Bhauju, you are panicking for no reason,” Umesh said. “She could have found new friends to live with.”
“I know my daughter,” Nilu said. “She’s not like that. She’d have told us.”
“America is a different place, bhauju. People get busy here, so maybe she’s just too swamped in her studies to call.”
“For us Nepalis, this is where your own kith and kin come in handy, Umesh Babu. Busy or not busy, you’ll need to go to her apartment today.”
She thrust the phone toward Raja, who spoke in a more placating voice with his cousin, suggesting that Umesh go to Ranjana’s apartment just to satisfy a mother’s heart. Umesh said that he’d have to make a few phone calls to his colleagues to cancel his meeting and that they’d not be happy, but he now was worried about Ranjana as well. He would try to drive to Evanston by late morning to determine Ranjana’s whereabouts. “Expect my call later in the day,” he told Raja.
Nilu leaned her head against the sofa and closed her eyes. Ranjana had asked her roommates to deceive her parents, to give them the impression that she still lived in the apartment. Why? Why was she hiding? More important, where was she? Pictures of Ranjana’s body, mangled on a Chicago sidewalk, flashed through her mind. Oh God, not again, she implored. Not again. For the past six months she and Raja had talked about visiting Ranjana. They’d really wanted to escort their daughter to Chicago when she’d left a year ago, but Ranjana had argued that the few thousand dollars spent on their airfare would be put to better use elsewhere; they were already spending a lot for her travel and living costs in America.
“We just want to make sure that you adjust to the place properly,” Nilu had said, “that you face no troubles.”
“But Umesh Uncle is there,” Ranjana said. “And it’s better you come after a few months when I can show you around. Right now I don’t see the necessity. It’ll just be extravagant.”
And since Ranjana had always been persuasive, even in small matters, they’d finally come to see her point, especially after Umesh too assured them that he would make sure she adjusted well, that she would lack nothing as she began her studies in a new country.
After Ranjana’s departure for Chicago, the house became so quiet that within weeks the two were discussing a visit to Ranjana, which became even more compelling when she moved closer to the university. Nilu and Raja pored over a map of the midwestern states, which they’d bought in a store in Thamel; they tried to determine the distance between where Umesh lived and where Ranjana’s university was. Raja was of the opinion that the two places didn’t look far apart on the map. “Maybe the distance between Balaju and Patan,” he estimated. “Nothing that she couldn’t manage if she wanted to.” Nilu said that maps were deceiving that way, that they needed to trust their daughter’s judgment. Every other week, particularly after a phone conversation with Ranjana, they contemplated their trip across the ocean. Raja got on the phone with a travel agent he knew, and one time even booked tickets, but Ranjana complained that they’d be visiting in the middle of the semester, when she’d be neck-deep in studies and would feel guilty because she couldn’t show them around or spend much time with them.
“But we won’t get in your way, we promise,” Raja said with a laugh. “We’ll stay with Umesh, and you can come over when you’re free.”
“But with you so close, I’d want to visit you all the time, don’t you understand?”
“So, now you’re saying Umesh’s house is close to your university.”
“Papa!”
Nilu intervened, telling Ranjana that they wanted to visit, but if Ranjana didn’t think it was the best time, they’d wait until her summer vacation.
“Papa sometimes doesn’t understand,” Ranjana said.
Later Nilu had mildly chastised Raja, telling him that he had to stop treating his daughter as though she were a child. “She’s all grown up now, and we have to respect her decisions.”
But what had Ranjana done now? Or what had happened to her? “We should have gone to visit her last year, middle of the semester or not,” she said to Raja, then realized it was only a thought that had floated across her mind, like a balloon; she hadn’t actually spoken it.
The next idea that flashed through her mind Raja expressed out loud before she could. “Maybe Ranjana has been hiding something from us all this time?” Raja said. “Maybe that’s why she didn’t want us to visit?”
“She’d never do that,” Nilu quickly said, trying to suppress this idea before it became convincing. “There has to be a simple explanation. Once she gets in touch with us, then everything will be clear, and we’ll end up laughing at ourselves for being so suspicious.”
But Raja wasn’t listening; he appeared to be tracking a trajectory of his own mental events. Nilu called his name, and he held up his palm, witnessing something in his mind. “No, something is wrong, I can feel it.”
Neither of them slept a wink, expecting the phone to ring at any minute, Umesh at the other end, or Ranjana herself, upset at her parents for overreacting, then perhaps realizing her error, offering a flurry of apologies, a perfectly logical explanation that’d turn into a source of laughter for Nilu and Raja for years to come, the kind of tales they’d tell their grandchildren: “Listen to what your mother did when she was studying in America.”
At around four o’clock Raja jumped out of bed. “I’m going to phone Umesh. My head is about to explode.”
“Don’t call now,” she urged. “It’s only late afternoon in Chicago now. He’s probably not back home yet. You call, he won’t be there, and it’ll only increase our worries. Come, I’ll make some tea.”
She took him by his hand, and they shuffled down the stairs without turning on the lights. His hand was clasped tightly in hers as though he were a little boy. I have to get hold of myself, Nilu thought. If I allow it, he will simply fall apart. How defeated he looks. Defeated and depleted. If something had indeed happened to Ranjana, Raja wouldn’t be able to take it; he’d simply collapse. She wouldn’t be able to take it either, but she had to be the stronger one. She’d let her control slip once; she couldn’t allow the same to happen again.
She patted his hand in the dark as she led him down, the phrase “blind leading the blind” popping into her mind. She turned on the light in the kitchen, sat him at the table, boiled some tea, and asked if he wanted to eat toast or an egg, just as she used to ask Maitreya, ages ago. Raja looked at her as if to say, Have you lost your mind? Here I am, worried to death about my daughter, and you want me to swallow eggs? But all he said was “No,” and she realized that he’d sensed the odd tone of her voice, a trace of solicitousness, of maternal concern, that had less to do with him and more to do with memories of Maitreya. Raja wouldn’t tolerate it if Nilu ushered the presence of Maitreya back into their lives; he wouldn’t let her fixate on the boy. “Don’t pollute our love for our living, breathing daughter with a son long past dead,” he’d say.
Nilu handed Raja his tea and sat at the kitchen table with her own. The two sipped in silence, their ears alert for the phone’s ring. Six o’clock in the evening in Chicago now, she calculated.
“We’ll go crazy waiting this way,” Raja said.
The tea calmed Nilu a bit, but Raja remained pensive. Worry lines had deepened on his forehead. His eyes fell upon her and he asked, “How did you sense that something was wrong without even phoning? You were fine when I went for a walk last evening.”
“A mother’s instinct,” she said, unwilling to divulge anything further.
But Raja was onto something. “It’s that thing I said, isn’t it?”
The stridency of his voice told her that she’d better handle this calmly. “What thing? It was just a misgiving I had. Soon Umesh will call, or Ranjana, and all of this will amount to nothing. Now finish your tea, and maybe we should get back to bed.”
“Nilu, please, don’t hide things from me,” Raja said. “You don’t tell me, it’ll fester inside you. Look what happened with Maitreya, and how long it took us to get back together.”
“I’m not hiding anything, sweetie,” she said, her voice about to crack. She realized that she hadn’t called him sweetie in a while, especially as Ranjana grew up, as though the word was inappropriate for an aging couple. She went to him, put her arms around him.
“It was what I said,” he repeated, his voice shaking. “I put a curse on my own daughter by comparing her to my mother.”
Nilu laughed, scoffing the outlandishness of his idea. She explained that his thinking was irrational. “You mentioned your mother and Ranjana yesterday evening, and Ranjana’s roommate said she moved out a few weeks ago. So your curse traveled backward in time? Don’t be foolish.”
The sky turned lighter, and the neighbor’s rooster cried.
“Too late to go back to bed?” she asked him, and he nodded. “Do you want another cup of tea?” He shook his head.
Memories of her dead son, his sad, intelligent face, were once again returning to Nilu, and she wondered whether she was losing control. What would happen to her and Raja in this old age if she never heard a peep about Ranjana? She recalled glimpsing photos on CNN—the faces of American girls, pretty and young, who went missing. And when found, they had been raped, their bodies mutilated. If Umesh couldn’t locate Ranjana, would she and Raja fly to America to search for their daughter?
Of course they would, and the thought terrified Nilu: she and Raja, at their age, on the streets of Chicago, carrying the photo of Ranjana that she herself had sent to them soon after she reached there, close to a year ago. With the Sears Tower in the background, Ranjana stood with her fingers held up in a V, her hair flying in the wind, and her backpack slung over her shoulder—her favorite backpack from her school days in Kathmandu, the one she said was perfect for lugging her books around the Northwestern campus. “Have you seen her?” Nilu imagined asking pedestrians on the streets of the city. Ranjana had sent pictures of famous Chicago sites, so Nilu could visualize the Navy Pier, with its festive atmosphere; the large, slowly turning Ferris wheel, which lifted passengers high up to view the skyline; Millennium Park and its glass screens, where children’s astonished faces would appear; the Hindu temples, with their intricate carvings, in the suburbs.
People would brush her and Raja aside, Nilu imagined. Americans are cold-hearted people, she sometimes heard Nepalis say; Americans think only about themselves, their individual needs, nothing else. But Ranjana’s letters had indicated otherwise. “My friends here are so warm and supportive, Ma,” she’d written. Her classmates and her roommates, Angela and Yuko, had helped her with everything, Ranjana had told her on the phone.
“Aren’t there other Nepalis at the university?” Raja had asked. “Don’t you spend time with them? With them at least you’ll have your own food, your own language.”
Raja’s exhortation had set off a small dispute between him and Nilu after he’d put down the phone. She told him that if all their daughter wanted was her own food and own language, she’d have stayed in Nepal. “What is the point of spending so much money to travel all the way to America if all you ever did was fraternize with your own countrymen? She’s going there to study, not to immerse herself in Nepali culture, which she knows well by now.”
“You look like you’re ready to chew me up,” Raja said. “All I’m suggesting is that one shouldn’t forget one’s culture and language, no matter where one goes.”
“Who’s speaking of forgetting?”
“All right, no one,” Raja said. “Calm down now.”
But Ranjana had deliberately shied away from gatherings organized by Nepalis because—Nilu remembered this abruptly, catching her breath—a boy had begun to make her uncomfortable. This boy, Ranjana had told Nilu over the phone one day when Raja wasn’t home, appeared at every party, every gathering, and stared at her. “Don’t tell this to Papa,” Ranjana said. “He’ll want to jump on the next plane and come over to beat up the boy. You know how Papa is.” And so Nilu hadn’t mentioned anything to Raja, although Ranjana’s words had hovered in the back of her mind. In another conversation with Ranjana she’d asked her, after making sure that Raja was in the bathroom, whether the boy still acted the same way. Ranjana said that the boy had cornered her one day during a momo party to confess his love. He wanted to marry her, he said, and his father, a former home minister by the name of Narayan Dhakal, knew Raja and would soon speak to him about joining the two families.
Nilu had been aghast, but Ranjana had only laughed. “Don’t worry, Ma. In a way that boy has made it easier for me. Now I have a very good excuse not to go to those Nepali parties. I mean, the people are nice, but mostly they just gossip, or brag about their sampatti, their SUVs, and their property back in Nepal. I’ve just got too much work to do anyway.”
Nilu had been relieved, and she felt right about defending Ranjana when Raja had gone off on his tirade about language and culture.
Now, as their neighbors began to wake up and cough and sputter, Nilu’s first impulse was to blurt out to Raja the information about the Dhakal boy. But she stopped herself. He’d jump up from the chair and call Umesh, or even call Minister Dhakal’s house and demand that they contact their son in America this very minute to see if he had done anything to Ranjana, or was involved in her absence in any way. A vision flitted through Nilu’s mind: the boy had harassed and pursued Ranjana until she had been forced to do his bidding, forced to move with him into his apartment. But Ranjana had never been a wilting, whimpering kind of girl. The idea that she’d wither under intimidation or psychological pressure was inconceivable.
Still, Ranjana was in a foreign environment.
The more Nilu thought about it, the more she became convinced that the Dhakal boy, the one who stared at Ranjana from across the room, who told her in a slurred voice that he was going to marry her, had something to do with this mystery. These creeps, thought Nilu. Weren’t they always like this? Hadn’t she seen enough of them when she was young, when she and Raja lived in Thamel? The way their beady eyes undressed her, the way their lips glistened as they made lecherous remarks.
“My daughter’s disappeared.” The sentence floated across her mind. “Meri chhori harai, Ranjana harai,” she pictured herself saying to friends and neighbors, and watching their eyes, their expressions, grow incredulous.
“What do you mean harai? Impossible! America is a big country. She’s probably gone somewhere for a few days with her friends. She’ll come back. They always do. The pull of parental love is too strong. Have patience. We simply can’t believe that anything bad would happen to our Ranjana.” And they’d go on and on about how beautiful she was, what social skills she possessed, how she was always thoughtful about everyone’s needs, had kind, praising words for everyone she met. “A girl like her God will protect wherever she goes. Rest assured.” And they’d offer to make calls to people they knew in America, sometimes confusing Chicago with California, assuming every Nepali in America would know other Nepalis scattered across the vast country.
We won’t have to go to America, Nilu firmly told herself as she heard the sound of the water vessel being filled in the neighbor’s front yard. But lack of sleep was making her mind take flight against her will, and soon she imagined trudging with Raja along Chicago’s congested streets, its wide avenues, displaying Ranjana’s picture, entreating people on the sidewalk for help, and walking into shops where the clerks would shout at them as if they were indigents.