Blowing thick, circular smoke that mirrored the slowly accumulating cirrus clouds in the sky, Chitralekha surveyed the scene unfolding before her from the balcony. Her choice of cigarette—the kind that found favor among the servants, coolies, and construction workers of Gangtok—confounded her doctor as much as the way she smoked it: she puffed on the tobacco wrapping held in an O of her forefinger and thumb. Her technique may have been considered uncouth, and the tobacco flakes in the beedi might pose more harm than those inside an ordinary cigarette, but Chitralekha preferred relishing her poison the way she did. Like the ring that for more than seventy years had swung between her nostrils, stretching the septum, the beedi represented the familiar. With so much change imminent, she found comfort in the familiar.
Her grandchildren, who lived in various countries whose names she could barely pronounce and whose shores she had no intention of visiting, would be here soon for the Chaurasi, her eighty-fourth birthday, the preparations for which were in full swing. The garden around her cottage was abuzz with activity. The priest was not satisfied with the length of bamboos that would be used for the sacred kiln and expressed his discontent in a nasal voice together with a perpetual thudding of his walking stick. The eunuch servant, who swept the driveway more for Chitralekha’s comic relief than to actually contribute to the bustle around her, wasn’t happy with the priest and made her disdain known with loud, off-pitch singing that drowned out the old man’s drone. A few painters, mostly oblivious to the disagreements surrounding them, lazily splashed the walls with vertical patterns that often became zigzags. Chitralekha did not like the look of the walls now. The chipping layer of red the workers were trying to paint over was too strong for a coat of white to dilute it; they’d have to paint twice, maybe three times. A jeep tottered a few days prematurely into the driveway with a thousand marigolds that the eunuch would soon have to sew into garlands to be festooned from the roof and to deck the windows.
“We need competence around here,” the Brahmin priest whined. “We all talk too much.”
“Aye, the Brahmin thinks we all talk too much,” the eunuch retorted. “A Brahmin thinks we talk too much. Soon he will tell us we eat too much sugar.”
“It’s useless talking to your kind of people, Prasanti,” said the priest while squinting at the terrace to lock his eyes with Chitralekha’s. He failed because she looked away. “All you do is talk, talk, and talk.”
“Oh, and I sing and dance, too!” Prasanti shouted. “Sing, dance, and clean while you stand there and order everyone around. Don’t forget I am of the Brahmin caste, too, Pundit-jee.”
“You should be out on the streets singing and dancing with your kind. Were it not for the generosity of Aamaa here, you’d not have a home.”
“And were it not for the kindness of Aamaa here, you wouldn’t have a rupiya to feed that bulging stomach of yours, Pundit-jee. We’re both the same.”
The priest looked up at Chitralekha again. She knew he expected her to intervene, but she was enjoying the exchange too much to put a stop to it. She had taught Prasanti a lot of things, but the eunuch had taken it upon herself to puncture the Brahmin’s ego on a regular basis, and to mediate just when a performance this flawless had been delivered would be a shame. It was important that the priest be put in his place because every festival brought about a resurgence in his belief that he was irreplaceable. This translated into a general disregard for the opinion of everyone around him—he found fault with matters as trivial as the height of the pedestal on which he was to be seated during ceremonies and made purchases Chitralekha seldom authorized.
“What has the world come to?” The Brahmin shook his head. “A half-sex thinks she and a priest are one and the same.”
“Yes, this half-sex has to prepare for the arrival of Kamal Moktan now,” Prasanti said. “I am a hijra who knows important people—unlike you, Pundit-jee.”
“Yes, to be sure, he must be coming all the way from Darjeeling to see you.”
“To see Aamaa, but at least I get to greet him.”
“He must be looking forward to that.”
“As much as I am to seeing you leave.”
It was time for Chitralekha to make her presence felt.
“Prasanti, show some respect to Pundit-jee,” she said. “He will leave only after you’ve served him tea.”
This would do it. The hijra had done well. The priest’s self-importance was sufficiently deflated. He would not insist on seven-hour-long ceremonies and outrageous donations. With this minor issue taken care of, Chitralekha could now prepare for her meeting with Kamal Moktan, who headed the new political party that promised the residents of the neighboring Darjeeling district their beloved Gorkhaland, a separate state from West Bengal, of which they were now an ill-treated part. Moktan had infused the Gorkhaland movement, largely stagnant since it hit its crescendo in the eighties, with new hope. He probably needed to talk to Chitralekha about making the movement bigger and better.
Chitralekha would have preferred to meet with Moktan up on the terrace, but it would be too noisy. Prasanti had already laid claim to a makeshift storeroom in the west corner of the rooftop that now housed a huge cauldron of rice-flour batter prepared by her voluble recruits—two miserable, pitch-dark girls from the neighborhood—that they would soon fry into sel-rotis, those crispy doughnuts that Chitralekha had no great fondness for and from which she could seldom escape during festivals and celebrations. It’d be interesting to see how the politician would react to his earnest solicitation for donation being punctuated with guffaws from the trio inside the storeroom, but the rare October drizzle that looked as if it would arrive in a few minutes was as much a deterrent to a meeting on the terrace as the clanging of utensils and the giggling fits that had already begun.
Her office was a mess. Prasanti had wiped clean all the pictures on the walls but had conveniently ignored the hillock of paperwork that had built up on the desk. The ashtray was overflowing with beedi butts. The cleanliness of the office didn’t matter much to Chitralekha as long as the photos on the walls—two of her with the governor of Sikkim, one with the chief minister and a few with various important people—were spotless. She noticed with consternation that a picture she had long before relegated to the cupboard, the one with the ex-chief minister whose chances of coming back to power were as high as those of Prasanti’s giving birth, was enjoying pride of place between the photo in which she was shown receiving an award from the governor and another in which she and the tourism minister smiled gaily into the camera. Prasanti could be so useless.
“Prasanti!” Chitralekha called out, her voice echoing through the house. She repeated the servant’s name a few times, aware that the eunuch feigned deafness when she felt like it.
“These sel-rotis are so round.” Prasanti walked in, coughing, a few minutes later. “Even rounder than my head. But the smoke is killing us.”
“Don’t talk too much, Prasanti. Why have you hung this picture up?” Chitralekha rapped at the offending frame, almost knocking it down and wishing it would fall when the picture managed to stay put.
“Was it not to come out?” Prasanti innocently asked.
“Why would it, fool? Why would you find a picture from the cupboard and hang it up?”
“All these photos you’ve taken are with ugly men. I wanted a picture of you with a good-looking man. He is the only handsome man with whom you’ve been shot.”
“And why would I, an eighty-three-year-old widow, want a picture with a handsome man, Prasanti?” Chitralekha could feel her fury abate.
“They are better than these ugly men. Some have no hair, and this one has more hair sprouting from his ears than he does on his head. This one could braid his nose hair with a rubber band.”
“So, you hung the other picture up?”
“Yes,” Prasanti answered impudently. “I want pictures with handsome men, so must you.”
“But Basnett will never come to power. How would a picture with a loser like him make me look good?”
“Good for you, then—at least other women won’t take pictures with him.”
Chitralekha stifled a smile, ordered Prasanti to consign the picture to where it belonged, had her abort the task midway, and asked for the photo to be propped back up in its new home.
“See? You like his handsome face, too, don’t you?” Prasanti giggled.
“No, I don’t. Go make sel-roti. You’ll waste a few hours putting that silly picture back in the cupboard.”
Moktan was late. The meeting was scheduled for three, and Chitralekha had specifically told the politician’s jabbering assistant that she didn’t like to be kept waiting. It would be another fifteen minutes before a fleet of cars slithered into the driveway carrying Moktan and his entourage, their black Nepali hats perched pharisaically on their heads.
The bell chimed. Prasanti had been instructed not to open the door until she counted to sixty twice. Chitralekha walked to the foyer so she could hear better.
“Is Chitralekha Aamaa there?” one of the men asked.
“She’s in a meeting,” Prasanti answered.
“I am Kamal Moktan,” Moktan said.
“I am Prasanti.”
She had been trained well. The men laughed. Prasanti giggled with them.
“I have a meeting with Aamaa.”
“She had a meeting with you at three. She waited until 3:05, but when you didn’t come, she took another meeting. She’s busy. Why don’t you wait in the garden?”
One of the men was quick to quip, “The rain has stopped, sir. The sun might be out at any moment. It’s better to wait out in the warm than inside.”
Five minutes lapsed, then ten. Prasanti brought the men tea and Good-Day biscuits. “She will be out in another five minutes. She told me she was meeting with only you,” she told Moktan. “The others will have to wait here.”
Prasanti had done her job, once again redeeming herself in her mistress’s eyes. Kamal Moktan would be malleable now.
“Namaste, Aamaa,” Moktan said sincerely, straightening his jacket at the entrance of Chitralekha’s office. “Sorry I was late. The roads are bad because of the landslides in Rangpo, you know.”
“Yes, I know. The last time our chief minister was here, he told me he always started an hour early to see me because he didn’t want to keep me waiting. Starting an hour early even when he lives in Gangtok is practical.”
“I’ll take note of that,” Moktan said, taking a seat. “I am sorry if I was late, but we enjoyed the tea and biscuits outside.”
“So, why did you want to meet me?”
Moktan rubbed his hands together as though warming them. The action bored Chitralekha even before all the verbosity tumbled out. She had had enough experience with politicians to know that this one had a long speech planned, and she’d have to find her way out of it. The Nepali-speaking people of Darjeeling were stupid to rest their hopes on this man to get them a separate state.
“You know the Gorkhaland movement sometimes needs elderly people to encourage the youngsters, especially an elderly person as respected as you in society.” There’d be a lot of repetition, a little flattery, allusions to her old age and the wisdom that came with it, her generosity, and how important she was. “You haven’t given us your full endorsement since we started. I understand that you are from Sikkim now, but we all know your roots are in Kalimpong, and that’s where you own your first and most symbolic factory. Unlike most people in Sikkim, you haven’t chosen to distance yourself from the great cause of Gorkhaland. We would be highly obliged if you’d give a speech about the importance of Gorkhaland and how I’d help achieve it because of my devotion to its people.”
“Why me?” she asked. “It’s interesting that you should ask me.”
“I have a cousin’s cousin called Rajeev.”
“I am glad I know his name.”
“He completed his engineering degree from Manipal in Rangpo. All his friends from Sikkim already have government jobs. He was among the top students in his class—got better scores than even the Bengalis. He’s yet to find anything. We just have no jobs in Darjeeling—no prospects, nothing.”
“I can’t find him a job in Sikkim if he’s not from Sikkim.”
“No, no, that wasn’t what I was going for. If in this speech you could ask people like him—educated and unemployed—to support the movement and tell them that they will find jobs when Gorkhaland happens, which we can attain only if we receive their full support, I’d be really grateful. There is too much cynicism among the educated.”
Sizing up the man before her, Chitralekha concluded that he wasn’t worth inviting to her Chaurasi—he wasn’t a long-term politician like Sikkim’s Subba was. He’d probably be blinded by power, do something stupid, and spend his life absconding or rotting in jail. But at almost eighty-four, she didn’t need to think long-term. She was already the oldest member of her extended family on all sides—her father’s, her mother’s and her husband’s—and she was conscious of her mortality. At the most, she had ten years to live. Currying favors with Moktan wouldn’t get her anywhere in the long run; from now on, she was all about immediate gratification.
“What do I get out of it?” she asked.
“What would you suggest? We keep hearing rumors that you’ll stop being directly involved in your business, that one of your grandchildren will take over, but aren’t they all abroad? I have a lot of respect for your decision not to step down even at this age. You are an inspiration to all of us, you see. But please do not ask us for money because we rely on the blessings of people like you to keep ourselves financially afloat.”
“Just two months ago, I gave two lakhs to your organization. I am not donating any money unless I see a return on that.” She lit her beedi. It was a habit no amount of amassed wealth would help her get rid of. She also understood that it intimidated most men of power when she smoked in front of them. Her white sari, the loose end of which demurely covered her white hair, and smoking just did not go hand in hand.
Kamal smacked his lips. “Do you have any suggestions on how we could help you?”
“This Gorkhaland movement is going nowhere, Kamal-jeeu. We have waited long for something to happen. There’s too much vandalism, too much hooliganism. We need to inspire the people, inflame them. Ask any person from Kurseong or Kalimpong if they have faith in Gorkhaland, and they say no.”
“Now, even if someone like you says that, we are doomed. We have been doing our best. Just last month a meeting with the West Bengal minister of—”
She cut him short. “Meetings don’t achieve anything. Look at us right now. We have met for the past five minutes, but we haven’t talked about anything useful.”
The politician’s forehead furrowed. “Do you have any suggestions, then?”
“Yes, we need to instill a sense of oneness in our people. Why don’t you mandate that everyone should wear the Nepali costume—daura-suruwals and gunyu-cholos and topis—certain days of the week, especially during festivals and important national holidays? Look at you—you wear a Gurkha hat, but where’s your daura-suruwal? You, more than anyone else, need to set an example. Let’s declare one date—how about the first day be during Tihaar, say, sometime next week?—as the date for everyone to wear only Nepali clothes in solidarity.”
“That’s a good idea. We would like to do that.”
“Yes, another time for dressing up could be the day of the conference. And I’ll come to it, too.”
“It’s a good plan—but perhaps next week is too early.”
“It’s not. This movement requires urgency. It has to start now.”
He looked at her as though surprised at the lack of caveat. “Is that it, then?”
She glanced at the clock and then at her watch. “That’s it, but by now you know that my factory in Kalimpong will be the supplier of all the Nepali clothes to the stores. The clothes are ready. All you have to do is make your announcements. We even have custom-made daura-suruwal—no other factory has manufactured the outfit before. Your men will take care of all those stores that don’t buy their clothes in bulk from my factory, right?”
Moktan’s eyes lit up—Chitralekha couldn’t make out if it was in indignation or admiration. She procured a package from under her desk and unwrapped it. In it lay a set of cream-colored daura-suruwal.
“Yes, I can do that,” he said.
“Good,” she said, wiggling the outfit out of its package. She untied all the four pairs of strings, even those on the inside, of the top. “And ten percent of our profits will be donated to your cause—whether your cause is killing people or getting them their state, I don’t know.” Next, she focused her attention on the pants.
“It’s Gorkhaland,” Moktan said. “A few casualties occur along the way, which is unfortunate, but what revolution didn’t have people die for it? Those who die are either villains or martyrs.”
“Yes, and you are the hero.” She chuckled while holding up the suruwal for her guest to inspect. “Your men down there make too much noise. The next time you come to visit me, can you come alone? Let’s plan a meeting three months from now. You could also pick up your donation then.”
Moktan brought his hands together in supplication and perhaps as a precursor to a long-winded speech that Chitralekha would have to prohibit.
“Look at these photos, Moktan-jeeu—what do you see?”
The politician turned around. His eyes fixated on the picture of her with the ex-chief minister, but he was quiet.
“That’s who I am, Moktan-jeeu,” Chitralekha said. “I am your friend for a lifetime if you’ve earned my trust. I don’t care if your party is not in power. I don’t care if you will never be reelected. I’ll forever be faithful to you.”
Moktan listened in silence.
“You’ll give yourself an opportunity to earn my trust, will you not?” Chitralekha looked him in the eye. And then she broke into a smile, one that birthed a multitude of lines on her face. “You will see to it that your picture will be standing there among these, won’t you?”
Moktan nodded and told her he would have to rush to a meeting with I. K. Subba, the chief minister of Sikkim, who had publicly announced his support for the separatist movement. “We Gorkhaland people have so much to be thankful for in people like you and him, Aamaa,” he said. “For too long we’ve been under the oppression of the Bengalis. Gorkhaland as a state has to happen. We have to have a separate state just as you people in Sikkim do. Thank you so much for giving us hope.”
Once Moktan left, Chitralekha summoned Prasanti to banish Basnett’s picture to the cupboard.
“She now doesn’t want to see a mere picture after she saw such a macho man in person,” Prasanti teased, tying her shoulder-length hair, receding around the temples, in a chignon. “How old is he? Are you sure his caste is Moktan? He looks like a Newaar to me. His eyes aren’t small enough to be a Moktan’s eyes. By the way, the fatty priest is still around, retching poison into anything within reach.”
Chitralekha smoked another beedi. The meeting was a success. She would turn eighty-four in a week. For most of her life, age had meant nothing. In fact, like most women of her generation, she did not even know when her actual birthday was. But this was different. It was a slap in the faces of those diseases that killed you before you reached your prime. Eighty-four was special, for she was now among the very few who had survived that far. To most people, like her pathetic husband, living to that age was an unattainable dream. It was time to go now—maybe stick around for a few years and then die peacefully. Her biggest fear was of outliving one of her grandchildren, and, going by the surgeries, aches, and pains they complained about, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if she lived to see at least one of their deaths. She didn’t want that. She had witnessed too many people dying—her husband, her son, her daughter-in-law. She wouldn’t be able to withstand another tragedy. She had bargained with God that at least this quarter of her life would be devoid of sadness. And she’d see to it that he kept his promise.
•
Bhagwati could have prevented the pot from toppling over, but her wandering thoughts had betrayed her.
“Help!” she screamed. “The spaghetti water spilled on me.”
She braced herself for the generous sprinkling of innuendos that would come her way in the distance that she had to limp between the dishwasher and the kitchen entrance. Brian, the busboy whose presence triggered in her the same reaction as did the peccadilloes of the ruffians outside the refugee camps, was nowhere to be seen, but Bhagwati had become skilled at discovering creepy figures lurking inside walk-in freezers or behind bulky kitchen equipment, and even in her pain, she looked over her shoulder, lest someone jump at her. Two weeks before, when she allowed her thoughts to compare somewhat unfavorably the Dashain festivities in Bhutan to those in Gangtok, a mouth had come dangerously close to breathing hot, putrid air against her shoulders and neck. That’s what she got for daydreaming about Hindu festivals in Christian America. She had to constantly be on the watch, or she’d find her body parts and the busboy’s coming together in unwelcome interaction.
The cook rushed to her as she fell to the floor. The pain was unbearable.
“Good thing the water hadn’t come to a complete boil,” he said, grazing his hand over the burn. “Brian, could you get me a Band-Aid?”
“It’s a burn.” Bhagwati winced. “I think I need a cream—something with aloe—more than I need a Band-Aid.”
“I don’t know where the fucking first-aid kit is,” Brian said with a snicker, and he swaggered outside, only to emerge a few seconds later with a box. “I don’t know how to open this damn thing. She only works here like us, and now we’re all becoming her damn slaves.”
By now, a substantial crowd of kitchen staff had gathered around the reclining Bhagwati and the gently comforting cook, and each offered his own diagnosis and prescription. Between a suggestion to rub toothpaste on the affected area and another to use a pack of ice arose an idea that a long, passionate kiss from the cook might help alleviate Bhagwati’s pain. Raucous applause signified approval from the bystanders.
The cook handed her a tube from the box. Bhagwati concentrated on squeezing the cream out of the small tube and applied it to her ankle. The burn didn’t seem as severe as the pain was.
“It’s just a first-degree burn,” someone said, before the manager commanded the crowd to disperse. “She’ll be fine.”
“Damn, refugee,” the cook said to her softly, ignoring her grimace. “Damn, you can only be happy you weren’t hurt by a pot of fully boiled water.”
“Thank you,” Bhagwati said. “Could you please ask Brian not to bother me today?”
“Don’t worry about him. You be careful around boiling pots. Be thankful I was here. The last time someone from your world burned himself, he applied some butter. Crazy man.”
Bhagwati still had a stack of dirty dishes to negotiate, but the story about this other person from her world intrigued her. She wanted to ask the cook, whom she was still hesitant to call by name because of its numerous silent letters, if that burned man had been treated as badly as she was. The manager—suited, limp-wristed, but otherwise a kind man—was already looking at her with impatience, so she dashed off to tackle the plates, which, in between the accident and its treatment, had trebled in number.
Days like today took her on an endless question-and-answer session about whether life had actually changed for the better since she’d left the refugee camps of Nepal. When she and other Nepali-speaking Bhutanese were herded out of Bhutan because they weren’t Bhutanese enough to be Bhutanese, they wouldn’t let go of the hope that Nepal would take them in, but their ancestors had been gone from Nepal and been in Bhutan too long for them to be Nepalese.
Life in the refugee camps of Nepal was supposed to be better than living in fear of persecution in Bhutan, but it wasn’t. Day in and day out, she and the other refugees struggled as noncontributing members of society, loathed by the Nepalese outside the camps—the Nepalese from Nepal; the real Nepalese—because the refugees’ desperation had attracted enough Western attention for countries such as America to come to their rescue. The campers had survived years clinging to a thin reed of hope that someday America, Australia—any country where life was better than in the camps—would whisk them away. When America finally did, life didn’t get any better.
“All that beauty wasted on a Damaai,” her grandmother had said about her in more than one phone conversation, adding a colorful word or two to describe her husband’s low caste. But she was used to her grandmother’s barbs—they didn’t hurt her the way people’s behavior toward her at work did. In the kitchen of Tom’s Diner in Boulder, Colorado, she was often invisible, which was preferable to being the recipient of uninvited caresses. The first female dishwasher, the waiters and cooks had cheered the minute she walked in. All this she bore for the low-caste Damaai husband of hers—a nameless, identity-less, stateless Damaai.
Refugees didn’t belong anywhere, but she especially belonged nowhere. Who was she? Born: a Nepali-speaking Indian with a dead father from Sikkim, a dead mother from Nepal, and a live grandmother from Kalimpong who was married into Sikkim. Post-marriage: a Nepali-speaking Bhutanese who had lawfully relinquished her Indian citizenship so she could belong. Post the ousting of 106,000 Nepali-speaking people from Bhutan: an inhabitant of a state of statelessness in the refugee camps of Nepal. Post America’s magnanimity: a refugee now in America with a shiny green card that would probably never land her a job commensurate with her expectations.
She could have gone back to Sikkim and exploited her grandmother’s connections to reestablish her Indian identity, but her husband was too proud to give in. In the beginning, he, like thousands of others, had languished in disbelief that his country would actually turn him away, but Ram had done enough harm to the monarchy with his column in an underground Nepali newspaper. Incredulity gave way to expectation, which was gradually usurped by hopeless resignation. After living that way for a decade and a half, Bhagwati had stopped questioning the purpose of life.
At least in Boulder she was making a wage and trying her best to become a functional part of society. Despite efforts ranging from picking up Dzongkha, that Bhutanese language so different from Nepali, to cultivating reverence for the king, Bhutan had never felt like home, and these days even Gangtok seemed alien, as though it had decided to grow up and old without her. The shiny new city with the pedestrianized square, like Pearl Street here, wasn’t what she’d left behind. Now, when she saw pictures of her hometown on Facebook, she felt no familiar stirrings. It was like staring at a photo of her long-dead parents.
Brian placed a new stack of plates beside her. The dishes had been piling up, and she was woefully behind. She’d have no time to drink her coffee, and she willed the bitter pangs of remorse stemming from the looks the manager flung at her to go away. She wasn’t about to peg the accident to her negligence, to her drifting mind—not today, at least.
“Hey, refugee, what’s going on?” the line cook yelled. “Why are the dishes so slow?”
Bhagwati didn’t answer but hurried along to scour off a plate some breadcrumbs that an excess of maple syrup had rendered immobile. The old Christian busboy, who usually scraped the plates before he brought them to Bhagwati while extolling the virtues of Christ, manned the counter today. She’d have to deal with Brian’s handiwork, and that entailed getting rid of every uneaten morsel of food left on the dishes.
“Plates not coming fast enough!” someone shouted. “No food if no plates. Where do we put what we fucking cook?”
Bhagwati loaded some dishes into the washer, wishing someone would turn down the heat.
“Damn, refugee, are we okay?” Brian said. “We are running outta plates.”
She paid him no attention. Brian would probably do what he’d done three days before—tell the manager that she had been painting her nails. To corroborate his story he had obtained a bottle of nail polish that he claimed to have heroically confiscated from her.
But he hadn’t.
“Damn, at this rate, you’ll be fired,” he hooted.
A grain of rice clung stubbornly to a plate. Had Brian been doing his work instead of breathing down her neck, her workload would have been reduced by half.
“Damn, girl, the rice don’t want to leave you.”
She stayed silent. And then, as he turned to leave, Brian’s hand touched her back, as if by accident. But Bhagwati knew better. She slapped him.
“You!” she shrieked. “Stop touching me with your filthy hand!”
Brian winced and yelped. A waiter, the line cook, and the Christian busboy came by to inspect the scene. Just the day before, Brian had gone past her, deliberately brushing his arm against her behind. She had said nothing then. Last week, it was something else. She looked around, hoping at least the Christian busboy would cheer her on, as he, too, had on numerous occasions complained about Brian’s disrespectful ways. But the old man’s face reflected disbelief, and his revulsion—like everyone else’s—was not directed at Brian.
“Bitch.” Brian walked away. “What’s this country come to, taking in immigrants like you? You can’t take jokes, man. You don’t understand the language; you don’t do jokes.”
The next batch of plates arrived surprisingly well-scraped, and complaints about the dishes not coming out soon enough abruptly stopped.
If this was how things worked around here, maybe she should continue behaving the way she just had. She wondered about how difficult life was for a barely educated refugee in this country. She had, at least, received an excellent English-medium education in Gangtok. Her husband had gone to a government school in Bhutan and was nervous about his English, so she forgave him for not being able to hold down a job for more than a few days. Often, she, who was confident in her language abilities, didn’t understand the way Americans spoke—did they really have to twist and turn their tongues all the time? Hardly had she celebrated the victory of having understood something when off they’d go, curling their tongues, making incomprehensible whatever little she had gathered until then. Fifteen years at the camp had rusted her brain.
“These seem to be the last plates of the day,” the cook said. “The boss wants to see you in his office after this.”
She looked up in surprise at the calm tone and found the absence of any epithets strangely jarring. That’s what her life had become: she thought something was amiss when she wasn’t summoned as a refugee.
The manager treated her well, but his consideration toward her was always obscured by the others’ hostility. Perhaps he had called her in to apologize for Brian’s behavior. Maybe he’d even get rid of the devil.
“There’s been a problem,” the manager began, maintaining negligible eye contact.
She said nothing.
“There were reports that you were violent with him, B. We’ve a zero tolerance policy toward violence. Here’s a message for you: do not come back. You can return your uniform shirt when you pick up your last paycheck.”
If she were to look at the positive side of things, at least she didn’t have to disclose her profession to everyone she would meet at her grandmother’s Chaurasi. She wouldn’t be lying when she declared to relatives that she didn’t work.
The apartment complex where Bhagwati, Ram, and their sons lived at Thunderbird Circle housed enough Nepali-speaking people to shatter the myth about Boulder’s monochromatic personality. The other Nepalis resented people like Ram and her: the Bhutanese refugees who had decided to uproot themselves from Denver, where they were originally settled by America, to Boulder for better opportunities. Hated almost as much as the refugees were the Diversity Lottery winners from Nepal. Then came the professionals—diligent graduates of American universities, working harder still to climb the immigrant ladder one visa status at a time—who maintained a safe distance from the first two categories, guided in no small part by a mixture of scorn and envy. A handful of South Asian students with the resources to afford the state university’s private-school-like fees or the brains to lend themselves to the school’s teaching-assistant workforce comprised the remaining residents. Rumor had it that the two couples sharing the one-bedroom in 208 were illegal.
Bhagwati waved at the allegedly illegal wives sunning themselves in the courtyard and bolted for the mailbox before they could approach her with a question about her sons’ braces, which were paid for by some NGO. Today was the last day she needed to be reminded how lucky her family was for having so many things done for them by America. In the last few weeks, the tone of the letters from Chase and Citi had grown especially aggressive, so Bhagwati decided against opening her mail.
In 213, sprawled on the flowery bed sheet that covered the carpet was a headphone-bedecked Ram repeating, “Thank you for calling Doe-mino’s. How may I help you?” over and over again. When he noticed her, he removed his headphones and smiled.
“Got the Doe-mino’s job,” he said in halting English, and then, moving to the comfort of Nepali, he added, “I am practicing how to answer the phone.”
“That’s nice.” Bhagwati faked enthusiasm. “At least one of us will be working.”
“You’re back early,” Ram said. “Did you take a half day?”
“No, I quit,” Bhagwati lied.
Ram was quiet.
“It was getting too much. The man had begun touching me.”
“What will you do when you get back from India?”
“Look for a new job—something that requires more qualification than the kind of jobs illegals do.”
“A hotel?” Ram asked. “Front desk?”
“Reservations, perhaps. No standing up required. When do you start?”
“This afternoon. ‘Thank you for calling Doe-mino’s. How may I help you?’”
“That’s fine. Now change the ‘doe’ to ‘da.’ It’s not Doe-mino’s but Da-minos.”
“Da-da-da,” Ram repeated. “I’ll have to end practice soon. Aatish will make fun of me if he hears.”
“You should tell Aatish you’re doing it all for him and Virochan. You didn’t have the good fortune to go to school in America the way they do.”
“I’ll stop now. Will you join me to pray before I head to Doe-mino’s?”
How ironic it was that her husband, an untouchable, the lowest of the low castes, an upsetting by-product of the heinous system that her ancestors had helped create and propagate, should be so full of piety. He knew the shlokas, memorized elliptical Sanskrit mantras, read the Gita, and understood what festival was celebrated for what reason. He was combative when she, a Brahmin, dismissed Hinduism’s many superstitions, made her analyze and reanalyze these beliefs, and furnished her with the scientific reasoning behind them, which she grudgingly acknowledged. And yet, he could never become a priest. He’d never be allowed near the altar of most Hindus. He was a casualty of Hinduism who had chosen not to be a victim. An untouchable who had no shame about his low caste as much as he did of robbing his Baahun wife of hers on account of her marriage to him. A bigger Hindu, a better Hindu, than she or anyone she knew. Ram Bahadur Damaai—whose kind the Christian missionaries had been targeting for centuries and whose family had stood firm in their devotion to Hinduism, naming their child after a Hindu god; Ram Bahadur Damaai—of the tailor caste, the father of her half-caste children who would, thankfully, not be taunted in this country for carrying in their bloodline accusations of incest and consanguinity; Ram Bahadur Damaai—responsible for the biggest blemish anyone had brought on her family, for belonging to a family of tailors, of alterers and cutters, for altering family dynamics in a way that could never be unaltered, for ripping grandmother from granddaughter in a way that could never be re-hemmed; Ram Bahadur Damaai—who gave her two sons in whose DNA were Damaai blood and Brahmin blood, one infiltrating another, poisoning another, the two sons her grandmother would never touch, whose presence would desecrate her ancestral house; Ram Bahadur Damaai—the untouchable kicked out of Bhutan along with Brahmins, Chettris, and Newaars, the man for whom she had given it all up and never regretted it—was a better human being than any of her family members would ever be.
And as her husband stood in front of the makeshift altar—a shelf in their closet on whose surface sat a motley arrangement of colorful gods and goddesses—sonorously reciting the Gayatri Mantra, the Hanuman Chalisa, and the Ganesha Mantra, chants coined by the very Brahmins who had determined his legacy and the identity of his sons and grandsons—Bhagwati Neupaney Damaai, with a bell oscillating in frenzy in one hand, prayed the hardest she had in her thirty-seven years. For a long period she had put off thinking about the enormity of the impending reunion, but it was here now. She’d be seeing her grandmother after eighteen years—for the first time since the elopement—and she needed to fortify herself with all the prayers of all the religions in the world.
•
The love of Agastaya’s life hardly fulfilled the requirements that an ideal match was expected to satisfy. First, the person he desired to spend the rest of his life with wasn’t a Brahmin—not the upper-echelon Upadhyay Baahun, nor belonging to the lower orders. Second, as the first son and grandson of the Neupaney family, Agastaya, it was understood, would marry a Nepali, no matter from which side of the border. Nicky, even after all these years together, was still prone to Nepal-Naples/Nepali-Napolean malapropisms and was easily the most American American Agastaya had come across. And third, it was important that whomever Agastaya intended to bring into his clan be from a prestigious, well-known family. Nicky belonged to a broken one from rural Ohio, a descendant of a line of rednecks who could barely trace their ancestry beyond two generations and among whom the divorce rate hovered precariously close to one hundred percent. A less important requisite that the freckled, pale, and skinny Nicky fulfilled overwhelmingly was the fairness criterion.
Despite being from his family and being witness to what his sister’s inter-caste marriage had done to it, Agastaya was sure that most of the issues that disqualified Nicky from being the perfect life-mate could be worked around. In the face of the big problem, this insurmountable problem, the mother of all problems, Nicky’s race, nationality, and questionable family background were hardly worth losing sleep over. No one in the family knew about Nicky. No one among the Neupaneys knew that Agastaya was in a relationship. Registered Nurse Nicholas Zachary Wells, you see, was a man, and the man had just threatened his boyfriend with the effective termination of their relationship if they didn’t somehow adopt a baby soon and if his own concealment from Agastaya’s world continued. That Nicky should choose to drop the dual ultimatum five minutes before Agastaya was to leave for the airport was a quintessential Nicky trait. In the three years that they had been together, Agastaya had noticed with growing awe his lover’s scheming skills evolve and expand. The silent treatment hadn’t yet begun. It would once they neared the airport.
“I’ve never been in a relationship where I was hidden for so long,” Nicky said, getting into the waiting cab. “I feel like the other man. Even Mormon Rob’s crazy family knew I existed.”
“It’s just my grandmother’s birthday, Nicky. Even if you were to go to the party, it’d be boring.”
“We can’t even fly together.”
“We will fly together when we return. And before that, we shall see the Taj Mahal. Doesn’t that get you excited?”
“I’m not sure the stupid king who built the Taj Mahal would have built it had he had to keep his wife hidden from everyone.”
The Indian cabbie, while making a turn, stole a furtive glance at them in the rearview mirror. “Indian?” he asked.
“Napolean-Indian,” Nicky answered for Agastaya and bitterly laughed.
The driver nodded, as though he comprehended the frustration behind the hyphen. The spirited shaking of his head could have convinced anyone that the driver had long been a willing audience to Agastaya’s many rants on the unfairness of having to stress his nationality every time he mentioned his ethnicity.
To leave New York was to leave an identity behind. And Agastaya had many identities. In Gangtok, he was the pressured orphan grandson of a woman who considered her other grandson long dead. In Pondicherry, he was the medical student proving that his belonging to Sikkim—a state still favored by the education god, for she endowed on its residents one precious medical-school seat after another—wasn’t the only reason he had found his way into the prestigious Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research. In New York, he was the high-flying oncologist in a clandestine three-year relationship with a nurse who he sometimes suspected had gossiped about their affair with other nurses. Shedding one cloak and donning another as he traveled from place to place was second nature to Agastaya. He was now mentally preparing himself to give up his New York self for several days—at least until Nicky joined him in Delhi after his grandmother’s Chaurasi. He hated the compulsion to be that supple.
“What are you mostly looking forward to?” Nicky asked, his mood lightened by the taxi driver’s deep understanding of Agastaya’s Napolean-Indian existence.
“Eating barely edible oranges on the terrace.”
“And I thought you’d say you’d enjoy spending time with the family.”
“It’s family. You can’t do with them, and you can’t do without them.”
“What about the nephews?”
“You know I love kids as much as I love snakes. Bhagwati isn’t bringing her sons.”
“You also hated animals, but once we got Cauffield, you liked him. I now think he likes you better than he likes me.”
Agastaya was nervous about where this conversation was meandering. He’d have to nip the topic before tempers flared, although he was thankful that his boyfriend had decided to temporarily drop his favorite issue of being nonexistent to Agastaya’s family.
“What will you do while I am gone?”
“Oh, you know, cheat on you, foolito,” Nicky said. “Go to Splash, pick up a hot Brazilian who possibly wants children.”
“We’ve talked about that.”
“Your stupid grandmother doesn’t know about me. Okay. I can’t attend her stupid eighty-fourth birthday—I can accept that. Even your stupid siblings don’t know about me—I can live with that. I can’t upload a harmless picture of us on Facebook—I haven’t complained about it. I’ve one desire, one burning desire, and I can’t even have that?”
“I’ve told you time and again that we aren’t adopting kids not because I don’t want anybody to know about us but because I can’t stand them.”
“You couldn’t stand dogs, either.”
“Yes, had I not liked Cauffield, we had the option to return him. We can’t do that with a child.”
“Think about it. Spend time with your hundred different cousins and their children. You’ll have a different opinion.”
“I don’t want a different opinion. The kid will grow up with no mother. I grew up without one. I hated it. It was embarrassing.”
“You also grew up without a father.”
“Yes, it sucked, and you know it.”
“You grew up in a different culture than our child will. Sikkim and New York are different places.”
“Yes, let’s call attention to the cultural differences between us, as if your friends don’t do that enough.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Of course, you didn’t.”
This should have been a ride full of chitchat, of bittersweet good-byes, of plans for Agastaya’s thirty-fourth birthday in the palaces of Udaipur, of excited last-minute changes to the itinerary they had meticulously planned for after Nicky joined Agastaya in Delhi in a week. It’d be Nicky’s first visit to India. Agastaya hoped that his boyfriend would gain a deeper sense of where he came from out of this tour. Maybe Nicky wouldn’t be so upset anymore when Agastaya reprimanded him for never finishing anything on his plate. Nicky would perhaps be more understanding of why Agastaya was just not comfortable holding hands in public. All these, however, were trivial issues. If Nicky didn’t bounce back and forth between the very private nature of their relationship and the desire to start a family, Agastaya would gladly settle for a lifetime of his lover’s letting half his $33 carbonara go to waste. He’d even be swayed to give Nicky a peck in a semi-deserted alley.
Nicky’s paternal instinct, latent all the while Agastaya and he had been together, had suddenly surfaced since one of his many old lovers adopted a Belarusian boy. A few months before, when Nicky volunteered to babysit the child, Agastaya had been forced to spend a Saturday night in the toddler’s sniveling company, and he’d found in the baby’s abundant demands, cries, and screams a reiteration of everything he disliked in children. With children in the picture, your life was no longer your own.
“You could babysit Anthony’s child all you want with me gone,” Agastaya said in a spirit of generosity, although he’d have preferred for Nicky to stay far, far away from father and son.
“I’ll see him and Anthony Junior the day after,” Nicky said. “It’s Tony’s twenty-ninth birthday and Tony-the-Second’s third. How cute is it that they have the same birthday?”
“You didn’t tell me anything about that.”
“I would if the talk about the child’s cuteness didn’t make your eyes go glazy.”
After all the words Agastaya had minced, the concerns he didn’t voice, and his effort at civility, he and Nicky were back to where they’d started.
“How about we talk about the child once we get back?” Agastaya asked, compensating for the insincerity of his intentions with a softening of the voice that he found pathetic.
“That’s fine, but promise me you’ll be less cynical of kids.”
“I’ll try, but wouldn’t I be lying to you if I said I’d do that? You know I’m incapable of feeling that way.”
Once their car reached the Triborough Bridge and they found the Manhattan skyline loom imposingly beside them, they both fell quiet. During their initial dates, they had often walked the Brooklyn Bridge and stood in silence, hand in hand, staring in wonder at the majesty of the city they called home. They hadn’t needed words, which could only diminish those moments. New York had the capability to render them both mute, as it did right now in its sun-setting glory, and sights such as this one made Agastaya feel that his problems were insignificant, that even if the car crashed and he died, the city would go on, the world would go on, life would go on. It was so easy to embrace the notion that difficult times would pass, just as everything did, when you were overcome by such emotion. Impermanence was a beautiful thing.
“I’ll miss you,” Nicky said, hugging him, when the buildings became dots behind them. “I’ll miss your stinky socks and the disgusting hair on your back.”
“I’ll miss you, too,” Agastaya replied, genuinely moved. “I’ll miss your abs and the awesome hair on your head.”
“I’m thinking of cutting it.”
“Don’t. For me.”
“I’ve already done so many things for you. I think it’s time my needs took priority.”
“You’re right—you should do what you want,” Agastaya said with a sigh, trying to distract his irritation by looking at the puffy cheeks in the pictures of Hanuman, the monkey god, that adorned the car’s dashboard.
“I also don’t have to take orders from you.”
“You don’t, and I don’t expect you to.” Noting that his tone, too, had mimicked Nicky’s, Agastaya added, “You’d look good no matter how you wear your hair. You’d look good bald.”
“That’s what Anthony used to say.”
Feeling his temper escalate, Agastaya pointed at the dashboard and asked Nicky, “Are my cheeks bigger than Hanuman’s?”
“They probably will be in India. All that greasy food—ew. Who is this fellow, anyway?”
“Our monkey god.”
“With a face like that, I hope to God he found his goddess.”
“He didn’t. He was a Brahmacharya.” Agastaya stopped himself before the grind of explanation pushed him into dangerous territory—quagmires that he had until now managed to pull himself out of with minuscule success.
“Oh, now I am supposed to understand what that means?”
“He was a bachelor.” It was just Agastaya’s luck that his attempt at humor should somehow come down to nuptials and commitment.
“Like we will be, thanks to your principle that I should be hidden under your bed forever,” Nicky said.
In response, Agastaya verified that his passport was in the laptop case. A mixture of guilt and relief enveloped him as they pulled up outside Terminal 1 at JFK. Nicky had been insufferable the last few hours, and the idea of a week with his grandmother and siblings didn’t seem as unpleasant as it had yesterday. Agastaya would shrug off taunts about being past his prime, brave judgment on his singlehood, and fake curiosity in matches that would never come to fruition. After the few hours of hell he had been through with Nicky, he’d breeze through them all.
•
The one advantage of having her immobile father-in-law tag along with her and her husband everywhere, besides their being able to exploit handicapped parking spots, came to light at the London airport. A surly attendant wheeled Bua everywhere, with Manasa and Himal close behind, as they averted their gaze from other passengers while bypassing them to find their seats on the plane. The decision to travel economy was in part fueled by this preferential treatment they knew would be meted out on Bua and, in the process, on them, irrespective of what class they flew. If the attendant was expecting a gratuity, Manasa wasn’t going to dispense any.
“How much should we tip her?” Himal asked in the safety of Nepali. “She looks like she needs it.”
“For service that bad? She deserves nothing.”
“It could’ve been worse.”
“That’d be pushing Bua into a wall.”
Her father-in-law, now comfortable in a bulkhead seat, handed a one-pound coin to the attendant, whose presence was perpetually announced by regular beeps on her cell phone. She grimaced at the coin, took it, and, folding the wheelchair, left without a word.
“The two of you argue about everything,” Bua said. “It’s a long flight ahead. In economy, it will be even longer.”
The other Air India 130 passengers would soon filter in. It was best to feed Bua his jaulo now. Manasa steeled herself for some resistance from her father-in-law in the form of a jibe about his life being reduced to eating watery porridge every meal of the day. Once the perfunctory remark was doled out and ignored, she brought a spoonful of liquidy rice close to Bua’s mouth, willed it open by forcing the spoon against the lips, allowed him a minute to chew the food, and then repeated the process several times. By the end of the feeding, the majority of passengers were in their seats. Bua’s swallowing some colorful pills with orange juice sipped through a straw ended the nightmare, and Manasa seated herself in between her father-in-law and husband, whose role during the entire feeding process didn’t go beyond smiling apologetically at the passengers who walked by them.
Once the plane took off and her father-in-law was fast asleep, Manasa attempted fiddling with the entertainment system. A few seconds later a loud, booming voice attributed the TV’s unavailability to some technical difficulty; she’d have to make do without the ridiculousness of a Bollywood movie. The insouciance with which her co-passengers received the news surprised Manasa. Unlike many of them, who dozed off, she found that sleep, especially when she was in motion, never came easily to her. The snoring of her father-in-law complemented the aircraft hum—louder, she was certain, on this flight than on any other—and Manasa’s request for earplugs was met with a frosty half nod by a flight attendant way past her prime. When a pair didn’t materialize even fifteen minutes later, Manasa gave up and flipped through a copy of The Hindu that was stuffed in a pouch by the window. She stopped at the obituaries, plumbing one notice after another for details on the cause of death. One, especially, caught her eye:
Kanthamani Ramaswamy, 69 years, Retired Joint Secretary Education Tamil Nadu passed away on Oct. 15 in Chennai after a short illness. Greatly missed by his wife, son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren.
Manasa smiled. The obituary made very little sense. First, the idea of a short illness, a non-incapacitating disease, a sickness that didn’t just bring your life to a screeching halt but also impinged upon the dreams and ambitions of your family, was unfathomable. This must have been a last-minute attempt made by the person who sent in the obituary to feel good about Ramaswamy’s wretched life. Perhaps the tribute was written in a hurry, before friends and family filed in to condole and commiserate. To Manasa, short illnesses didn’t exist—she wasn’t living in a world of benign fevers and colds anymore. Her existence was dictated by severe paraplegia—not her own but her father-in-law’s. The way it had sent her own life spiraling out of control, one would think she was the one paralyzed, and in a way she was, for her father-in-law’s condition had become her own; in her attempt at making sure his life had some movement, hers had come to a standstill.
Sometimes she wished she had a debilitating sickness—at least then she wouldn’t have to be son, daughter, wife, live-in nurse, caretaker, housekeeper, perhaps soon-to-be-shit-wiper (Manasa had not, not yet, been subjected to the humiliation of encountering her father-in-law’s private parts) rolled into one. The obituary stated that Ramaswamy was greatly missed by his daughter-in-law. This South Asian notion of filial piety expanding to the in-laws was the most forced, hypocritical thing about their society. You were expected to develop feelings for your husband’s parents the day you got married. Perhaps the reason she enjoyed family sagas on Star Plus so much, despite being an Oxford-educated former Deloitte consultant, rested purely on the drama that played out between in-laws.
“What’s so funny?” Himal asked earnestly, looking up from Secrets, his preferred reading at the moment.
“Nothing,” Manasa said, still laughing. “Just reading the obituaries.”
“How do they infuse you with so much joy?” Himal smiled.
“I enjoy reading them.”
“You’re morbid,” Himal said, resting his head on her shoulder.
“This one’s son-in-law is mourning him.” She jerked his hand. “They must have been so attached.”
“Not here, please,” Himal pleaded.
“I’m just asking you to read the obituary, Himal. Why do you think everything I say is so snide?”
Himal read the paper quietly.
“I wonder if Kumaramangalam’s son-in-law washed, clothed, and fed his father-in-law,” Manasa said. “If he stopped going to work because his wife’s high-profile hedge-fund career couldn’t afford to be derailed.”
“He can hear, Manasa. At least wait until he’s out of earshot.”
“No, he can’t,” Manasa said.
“How do you know?”
“Should I tell you how? Because he falls asleep within exactly three minutes of taking his pills. He wakes up exactly six hours later, and the first thing he does is say something negative about the way he’s been taken care of. But how would you know that, Himal? You haven’t quit your job to look after him.”
“Manasa, he’s an unwell widower.”
“Yes, and looking after my paraplegic father-in-law is my sole responsibility. I am no different from Kaali.”
“Who’s Kaali?”
“The neighbor’s servant—the one with the bad lip who’s constantly hovering around your family home in Kathmandu.”
“Do you know she’s had surgery? She looks much better.”
“You should marry her, then.”
Manasa felt herself get tearful but controlled the urge to weep when two aging flight attendants, apparently competing with each other on who could be more discourteous, served them drinks. The temptation to guzzle everything out of those tiny gin bottles was acute, but she settled for an orange juice. Then, drawing a connection between her father-in-law’s drink of choice and the one before her, she felt as though the juice was incomplete unless half a dozen pills supplemented it. She couldn’t drink it.
“Why aren’t you drinking?” Himal asked.
She didn’t answer his question. “I wonder if Bhagwati would’ve put up with all this, and she got married when she was barely out of high school.”
“She and you are different people. I understand you do it for me. I don’t think I show my appreciation enough.”
Himal was right. He did not show his appreciation enough. The lack of alignment in what he expected his wife to be to his father—everything—and what Manasa initially thought were a daughter-in-law’s responsibilities—nothing beyond being polite and charming—could have unraveled any marriage. She had tried to make hers work, although no amount of speaking in a clipped, upper-crust British accent and having a fancy hedge-fund career could erase the boy from Kathmandu, a boy brought up by a mother and a fleet of illiterate nannies over whom he had reigned. Himal might have tried to curb it, but he came from a world in which women were different from men, and remnants of this past were everywhere in his present. It was evident in the get-togethers in which men and women formed separate groups, the former to drink and the latter to whip up accompaniments; in the number of times her husband’s family marveled at her Oxford background—a degree that prestigious despite her being a woman!—while casually dismissing Himal’s Cambridge one; in the easy reception of her father-in-law’s second marriage to Himal’s mother because he had as much property in their village in Illam as he did in Kathmandu—the justification was that he needed a second wife to look after all their land in the countryside because there was no way he could concentrate on his political career when he was straddling two places.
The Ghimirey family—that famous Ghimirey family that she had been married into in a ceremony attended by every important person from Sikkim and Nepal, by the clan’s own admission the richest and oldest Baahun family of Nepal (“We and the Ranas are about the same; they squandered their wealth, and we built up on ours until we fell out of favor with those Maoists”), claiming among their recent ancestors Gazadar Ghimirey, the astrologer who had predicted the downfall of the monarchy in Nepal fifty years before the media had—wasn’t very different in its antiquated beliefs from her driver Nirmal Daaju’s family in Gangtok.
The marriage, now six years old, had been a source of vindication for her grandmother. “They even know about Bhagwati,” her grandmother had gleefully exclaimed. “They know of what she did to this family, they know of the caste of her husband and yet they want you and only you for their son.”
Himal nursed a vodka and Sprite. “I’d like some,” Manasa said, and she grabbed the glass from his tray. “What’s in it that women can’t drink?”
“You’re making things awkward, Manasa. What if Bua saw?”
“He won’t. He’s asleep. Do you think your family was so desperate to get you married to me because they wanted an Oxbridge-educated bride? Let’s face it—I am no beauty like Bhagwati.”
“Could be,” Himal uneasily said.
“But the Ghimireys don’t care so much for their womenfolk’s education. Why should they have chosen me?”
“Well, I wanted an Oxbridge-educated wife. I wanted to marry you more than they wanted me to marry you.”
“We know your opinion doesn’t matter, Himal. It’s the family’s that takes precedence. I wonder if I’d have married you had I known it would come with having to be a governess to your father.”
“Emasculate me, Manasa. As if you haven’t done it before by making fun of me with my cousins.”
“Himal, I told them about that foul-smelling discharge from your ear. How’s that insulting?”
“You took such a personal issue and made it public.”
A stewardess threw dinner their way, accosting Manasa with effluvia originating from her armpits.
“That’s how bad your ear smells. Worse. You need surgery.”
“With Bua around, how’s that even possible?”
“You keep forgetting that Bua hardly takes half an hour of your day. That’s no reason not to have an operation.”
“Wouldn’t Bua like some food? Should we wake him up?”
“I’ve told you, he sleeps six hours, Himal—if only you knew your father better.”
By the time they were disgorged into the shiny new T-3 in Delhi, Manasa had promised herself she’d never fly Air India again. Bua, still hurt by his request for whiskey being rebuffed by a rude flight attendant, had dictated a long letter of complaint to the CEO, which Manasa, being the dutiful Ghimirey daughter-in-law that she was, meticulously jotted down. Bua was firm that she mention all his past titles at the end of the letter. That took more than half the page.
Once her father-in-law had grasped from Namaskaar, the in-flight magazine, that Air India was a government-owned airline, he decided that he’d have to address the letter to the president of India. Then good sense prevailed. He complained that the president wasn’t going to read his letter, so he tried flushing it down the commode when brushing his teeth, which clogged the toilet. A flight attendant used the bathroom after Bua and Manasa returned to their seats and informed all her co-workers who the perpetrator of the overflow was. Each and every attendant then glared at them as she passed.
Bua snarled that the women’s treatment of him would probably change if they knew he was a former home minister of Nepal, to which Manasa didn’t have the heart to reply that these air hostesses, long inured to the possibility of getting fired from their cushy government jobs, would probably not care if he was the king of the damn country. Nepal meant little to India—an indigestible piece of information for those in Himal’s family, who were of the opinion that their antagonism toward the dhotis of India had to be reciprocated somehow. Her in-laws failed to see that India was too busy dealing with real problems, such as China and Pakistan, to worry about its landlocked neighbor. For the better part of the two hours after he woke up, Manasa patiently listened to Bua’s rant about the colorful Nepali hat on his head nettling the flight attendants while Himal nervously read The Hindu.
“Should I talk to them about it?” Manasa finally offered.
“No, you don’t,” Bua replied. “I will. What will they think of me? An invalid who needs a woman to speak for him.”
“I think it’ll be easier if a woman approaches women.”
But Bua was adamant about not being defended by a female.
This was where her husband came from. A family clinging to its past because its present had become unpalatable. The son of a man self-exiled from his country under the pretext of his paralysis, when Maoists and extortion made up the bitter reality. A lineage tainted with accomplishment, making mediocrity an unacceptable facet of life among its men. A family whose sons and sons-in-law aimed to rule and conquer while the daughters and daughters-in-law supported them, pushed them, worked hard for them. A family in which women were encouraged to increase their marriageability by shrinking their educational and professional aspirations. Her husband’s voice, hollow and quivering, was his father’s voice, the family’s voice. And this family she had now become a part of, where her Oxford degree was an awe-inspiring pink lipstick—shocking and something that should adorn no woman in the great dynasty—in which the pearls that bejeweled her neck were more important than the diplomas on her wall, in which her opinions mattered only until the opinion of an older male took over. Her grandmother would have obliterated them—the old lady would have eviscerated everyone in this family into which she had so proudly married her granddaughter.
Manasa was temporarily parting ways with the family to see this grandmother. Himal and Bua would fly to Kathmandu from Delhi while she took a domestic flight to Bagdogra. At least fleetingly she wouldn’t be a factotum to a father who wasn’t her own, a companion to a husband who wasn’t of her choosing, and a rebel in a family she had on so many occasions resisted butting heads with. After promising her father-in-law that she wouldn’t talk to the Air India people about how disrespectfully he had been treated—as if anyone would take his grievance to heart and make amends—Manasa bade good-bye to Bua and Himal, both men she had married.