Manjushree Thapa is a Nepali author, translator and editor. She grew up in Nepal, Canada and the United States and began writing after completing a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. She later graduated with a Masters in English from the University of Washington. Manjushree’s essays and editorials have appeared in the New York Times, London Review of Books, Newsweek and other publications in the US, UK, Canada, India and Nepal. She has written several non-fiction titles including Forget Kathmandu, which was a finalist in the Lettre Ulysses award in 2006, The Lives We Have Lost and A Boy from Siklis. Her novels include The Tutor of History, Seasons of Flight and All of Us in Our Own Lives. She lives in Toronto.
Kathmandu. One day after another in a lifetime of rambling. One day after another, as though they had some order. Rishi followed a set routine, but it was a routine that lacked purpose. Every day he walked the city’s tortuous alleys to the house of a student. There he reviewed the student’s homework, made corrections and assigned the boy textbook pages to study more carefully. The student’s mother brought him tea. Sometimes she also brought two slices of bread. Most days she didn’t. Biding his hunger, Rishi watched the boy struggle to understand simple facts. In the background he could hear family members in the inner rooms, which he had never been let into. A scrape. Creaks. Footsteps sliding on the linoleum floor. The easy rhythmic sounds of bodies at home.
From there Rishi headed to the house of another student, who was richer, and to another. At both houses he was fed snacks. He stopped at evening time to read papers at a pavement stall, and then at the end of the day he made his way through the halogen-lit city to Hotel Tanahun. That was his day. That was his drift.
Hotel Tanahun was a street-side diner owned by a couple who had migrated from Rishi’s home district. Many of their clients were also from the district, but Rishi didn’t know them. He sat apart in a corner, watching everyone through the steam that rose from his tea: men holding out plates for second helpings of sour rice and vegetables oversalted to hide their staleness. He eavesdropped on the exchanges that took place around him.
“I Work as a peon at a factory.” “I’m a driver at a hotel.” Entire lives compressed into short sentences. “I arrange visas for boys to go to Korea.” “I have a farm in the district.” Some sentences were longer: “I didn’t weigh enough to qualify for the army, but I’ll try again next year.” All these people who thought they knew who they were.
He was, himself, unwilling to respond to queries about what he was doing in the city. He no longer felt he needed to know. When anyone asked he said he was a tutor of history. “A teacher?” No, a private tutor. “Eh.” People assumed he was in between jobs on the way to a more stable position. The truth made them uneasy: he was cut off from his family and he had no friends in the city. He had no connections and couldn’t find a job. Since he left the UML party’s student wing, he had no political patrons to look out for him. He’d been working five years as a tutor, and this life wasn’t leading him anywhere.
Sometimes Rishi would lie. “I teach at a local school,” he would say. When people asked why he was still unmarried, he would say, “I’m already engaged.” And he had been, once. But now he couldn’t imagine starting a family with the pittance he earned. When he was pushed for more detail, he extended the lie. “My family adopted a Bahun name, but we’re actually from the lower castes,” he would say, deriving a sharp pleasure when people shrank from him. Casually, he steered himself into the bare jutting walls and cold corners of his pariah’s place. “Actually, my father died in a landslide,” he would say. “My mother took up with another man whose name is Parajuli.” Why not? In the city he could shrug off identities or wear them like a shawl to cloak himself. This was the mobility he’d sought when he had decided, years ago, to leave home.
Heading back at night to his boarding house on New Road, Rishi was all eyes. A man with ropes strapped to his back: a porter waiting for work. A child washing dishes in a restaurant. Three men talking in Gurung tongue. He stopped and watched an auto-rickshaw driver arguing with a customer. He watched a man come out of a house reading an air-mail letter. He mimicked the hand gestures of a teenage girl and adopted the rolling gait of a foreigner. This was what it meant to live unnoticed in the gaps of Nepal’s history: to grow unrecognizable, unknowable to others and to himself.
*
Yet every now and then Rishi felt overwhelmed by the hardness of his life, its objection and lack of charity. On such days he felt tugged by untenable desires. Unlike his college friends he didn’t want to go to Osaka to wash dishes, or to Kuwait to tend gardens. He didn’t want to earn vast sums of money. What he wanted was a modest life which would let him live with his mind in flight. At times he thought he might return to Khaireni Tar and work as a teacher there. But for what? Home. The accusation of his father and reproach of his mother. The tenacious orthodoxy of village society –. He couldn’t return. He could neither move backward nor could he spring forward. All he could do was lose himself.
To commit himself to his straying, Rishi had hewn a map onto the city of Kathmandu, with one constant path leading from his boarding house to Hotel Tanahun. The shifting community of the diner’s customers – villagers coming to Kathmandu on errands – was his only link to home. Sometimes he even recognized people there – family acquaintances, friends from childhood, shopkeepers he had bought grains from, long ago, in Khaireni Tar bazaar. He kept his distance from them. One evening he spied his old schoolmaster from Khaireni Tar, and he turned away to avoid him. The next night the schoolmaster was in the diner again, surrounded by other men. The following evening, Rishi stayed away from the diner. When he came back the day after, he found the schoolmaster there, sitting with someone. It was as though the man had never left.
Rishi took his place in the corner of the diner, facing his old high school teacher. The schoolmaster was probably in his sixties now, and he looked hard, whittled with age. His silver hair was unkempt and his eyes were narrowed onto the man he was talking to. He exuded the same aura of heedlessness that had impressed Rishi as a boy, with his steeled look of someone who’d survived disaster intact. It was he who had recruited Rishi into the UML party. The schoolmaster glanced up, scanned the room, seemed not to recognize Rishi, and looked back at the man he was with.
Rishi lowered his head and listened to the clatter of steel plates and spoons, and the distant moaning of radio songs. A mosquito whined near a light bulb. The man with the schoolmaster was talking about the elections. The UML must win a majority this time. The woman who ran the diner put a plate of rice and daal in front of Rishi. Some men sitting by the door guffawed. The schoolmaster mentioned Tanahun district’s third electorate. Rishi leaned in to hear what he was saying. “The People’s Party will make it a three-way race.”
“They’ll cut votes from the Congress.”
“We need sixteen thousand.”
“If they were to cut three, four thousand...”
The schoolmaster’s words rustled beneath the din of the city, and Rishi remembered late meetings in a dark room in Khaireni Tar, lectures on Bolshevism in this voice at once forceful and hushed. He remembered a distant blue moon, crickets rapping at night and the schoolmaster’s steps pattering behind him.
The schoolmaster looked up several times during that evening, but his eyes always swept past Rishi, who puzzled at his own taut spine, at his disappointment in not being recognized. When he finished eating, he left feeling empty. It was raining outside. The city flickered behind a sheen of reflected halogen. It didn’t look real. Rishi submitted to the nostalgia welling up inside him. He was a boy caressed by the warm rains of the hills. He was running barefoot with pebbles grinding into his toes. Swallows flitted above. Marigolds grew thick along the path. He came to a hillside. He was stumbling on rock steps, his pants were torn. Steep slopes. He was sliding home.
*
The next evening, Rishi walked up to the schoolmaster and introduced himself. Almost as soon as the schcolmaster’s eyes steadied in recognition, another man joined them. Before turning away, the schoolmaster said to Rishi, ‘I thought it was you.’ He slid aside to make place for him on the bench, then turned to the other man. They seemed to be resuming a conversation they were holding earlier, about the Minister of Agriculture.
Rishi settled into his seat. The bench was warm with the schoolmaster’s heat. Even though the conversation had nothing to do with him, he felt included in it by the way the schoolmaster sat, their shoulders touching. There was allowance in that contact. The older man’s voice vibrated against Rishi’s arm. The Minister of Agriculture was to be watched, the schoolmaster was saying. Who came from and went to his house: it could be useful to know.
The other man glanced uncomfortably at Rishi.
“We can talk freely,” the schoolmaster assured him. “This comrade is my former student. He was with us during the protests. He was – weren’t you? – one of those jailed during the democracy movement.”
“I was.”
Rishi settled in and listened to the two of them plotting for scandal. The woman who ran the diner brought three plates of food and they ate in silence. Afterwards, when the other man left, the schoolmaster turned to Rishi, casually. He didn’t inquire about Rishi’s present life but asked instead after his parents, as though he didn’t know that Rishi hadn’t been back to his village or even to Khaireni Tar in all these years. Rishi responded to his queries as best he could: “They’re probably in good health.”