Sushma Joshi is a writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. Her other published works include The Prediction and Art Matters. Her non-fiction reportage has appeared in Utne Reader, Ms. magazine, Z Net, The Irrawaddy, Himal Southasian, Bertelsmann Future Challenges, The Kathmandu Post, Nation Weekly magazine and other publications. In 2004, she was part of the staff at the Nation Weekly magazine (Kathmandu). Since 1997, Joshi has worked and consulted with international organizations working in social change and human rights, including the Harvard School of Public Health (Harvard University), UNDP, UNICEF, Integrated Center for Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Chemonics/USAID, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
AFTER THE FLOODS
Jethi died on one of those monsoon nights when the rains come with such force ordinary people give up any hope for salvation and wait for the end to come. Sometimes the rains just raise the heat and the sting of mosquitoes and bright green shoots of rice. At other times, they raise the wrath of the rivers that lie like somnolent snakes over winter, which are awakened by the monsoon to rage over the voluptuous folds of the Mahabharat hills in a heavenly tantrum of destruction.
For Jethi, the monsoon brought clouds with black undersides, streaked with innocent silver looks of eventuality. Then the clouds erupted into a storm that went on for three days, sweeping down through the river that swallowed her house, the firewood in her rafters, her children and with it, also herself.
Kamala was in Kathmandu when she heard the news. A stooped, weary man, wearing a patched waistcoat and carrying a dusty green army bag, arrived at her doorstep one morning. Kamala caught a glimpse of him through the marigold bushes. She had seen his face before, but she couldn’t remember who he was. She ran to unlatch the gate.
“Are you Kamala from Seto-Khola?” he asked in a gruff voice, peering at her with penetrating eyes set under white bushy eyebrows. “Daughter of Habaldar Saila?”
“Yes, that’s me.” Kamala brought the palms of her hands together in a namaste. As soon as he spoke, she recognized him. How could she forget! It was the Old Man himself, Damar-Bahadur. Kamala had spent days climbing his trees and stealing his guavas.
He set down his ancient green Army bag, and extended his hand. Kamala looked down at the envelope he held out. A neat and cursive hand had written “Kamala” with a big flourish in the middle.
“Your grandson used to walk to school with me. Please come in.” Kamala took the letter from him. The old man smiled, revealing missing teeth.
“And you and Jethi used to steal guavas from me,” he said, arching his brows and looking at her with shrewd eyes. “Don’t think I didn’t know it was you and your sister. I saw you all the time climbing the trees.”
“We were bad children,” Kamala said, smiling. To her relief, the old man seemed to harbour no grudges. The old man had had a large number of guava trees on his land. He had, to their young eyes, appeared to be a rich man. “Here, please sit down on this mat. I’ll get some tea.” The old man lowered his body on the small concrete steps, unwrapped his waist-cloth and extracted his beedi. A puff of acrid smoke followed Kamala as she went back into the kitchen to make tea.
“And how is everybody in the village?” Kamala asked, setting down the hot tin glass. She had lived in Kathmandu since the flood nine years ago. Unlike Jethi, she had never gone back.
The old man did not reply. Kamala wondered if he had become senile, or if he was losing his hearing. “Everybody’s well,” he replied after a moment. He watched steam rise from the tea. He picked up the glass with caution, blew on the hot liquid, and took a long, leisurely slurp.
“Did you come to visit Maila Dai?” Kamala asked. Maila was his second son, a soldier in the Royal Nepal Army.
“I came down to visit Maila. Your brothers, those twins, they asked me to bring this letter to you. Had a tough time finding you too, with all these directions. But after all that walking, here you are.” He spit a stray tea leaf from his mouth.
“Is there enough sugar?” Kanchi asked. She wanted to take away his tiredness, give him a drink that would make him feel at home.
“Enough,” the old man replied. Kamala looked at his familiar profile. Life had taken its toll on him. Almost a decade had gone by since she saw him. Ten years later, he had a stoop in his shoulder and a thick nest of lines on his face. Wrinkles radiated in long arcs from the corner of his eyes into his leathery, brown cheeks. There was a look of sorrow in his eyes she could not remember.
“How were the crops this year?” Kamala had an intuition that he came carrying bad news.
“There were no rains last year, Bahini. This year, the rains carried away everything,” the old man replied, sighing. He blinked, put down the glass that he was cupping with both hands, noisily blew his nose between two fingers, and flicked snot on the grass. He wiped his hands on the grass. Kamala felt dread gather in a tight knot inside her stomach. She could tell, without opening the letter, what it would say.
“I remember the floods. I was nine years old then.” Kamala was stalling for time. She did not want the Old Man to tell her anything. She did not want to open the envelope.
The old man nodded, “I remember. We lost many people in that one. But people never learn. We should have planted the entire hillside with trees after that landslide, we knew those hills were fragile. Instead, there was cutting, and more cutting. Then the lumber people came, and they took half the hillside with them. Last year, there were no trees left.”
*
Kamala remembered the day of the flood as if it was yesterday. She had spent the day with Jethi, her sister, stealing guavas from the Old Man.
“Kamala! Now! The Old Man has gone down the hill to get his hoe. Go now!” her sister’s urgent voice sent her slithering up the trunk with gecko-like speed. Kamala swung on the branches like a monkey, shaking the fruit free for her sister to collect before the Old Man could wind his way up the curve of the hill again. Kamala was nine, thin and wiry. She ran around the hills with skinned knees and tangled brown hair, climbing trees as well as any of her five brothers. Jethi was fourteen, but she might as well still be a child, the way she behaved, leading her little brothers and sister on to childish pranks. The Old Man stood there, shaking his hands in impotent fury as he watched Kamala scamper down the tree, and run down the hill with the stolen treasure. Jethi and Kamala never let the guavas ripen. They didn’t know what could happen to the fetal green fruit the next day: an entire season’s worth could be wiped out in a day by the crows, or the hail, or the little boys down the hill.
The two girls looked at each other as they ate, and ate, all the raw possibilities out of the guavas. The slivers of astringent rind, the slippery, hard seeds, the pungent forbidden taste. The difficulty lay in knowing when to climb the tree to get the raw guavas before they were claimed by others. After that, the hardest thing was to extract the fragments of white seeds that sank like soft pebbles to their hiding places between the teeth.
Jethi and Kamala, after eating half the loot, hid the rest on their waistcloth, and rejoined the other children in the forest. The clouds gathered above them, thick and black. It had been raining hard for the past week. They sang as they chopped the firewood, thinking more rain meant a better harvest.
Jethi led the chorus, “pani paryo, asina jharyo.” Because Jethi was Jethi and she couldn’t resist, she made her voice as gruff and solemn as Dambar Bahadur until they were all laughing, even Dambar Bahadur’s sons.
“You better watch out for Kamala, Didi. She was caught stealing guavas again,” the women warned her mother as they stopped to fill their pots at the spring. Her mother, who was trying to bathe the twins at the small spring, clipped Kamala in the ear. “Aiya!” said Kamala, skipping out of the way. How come the women always saw her, not Jethi, committing these crimes? But unwilling to implicate her sister, she did not say a word.
The twins slipped in and out of her mother’s hands with the slippery speed of naked seven-year-olds, screaming and beating their hands on their chests, soaking everyone in the process. “Jethi, you bathe these devils,” her mother said, giving up in disgust. She stooped to squeeze the water out of the ends of her dhoti. “I have to help with the planting.” The two sisters winked at each other as they felt the round fruit, wrapped securely in folds of cloth, pressing into their stomachs. That was the last time Kamala ever stole a guava.
That night, the rain erupted, beating down with a force beyond comprehension. It was the force that Kamala had always known was out there but was not prepared to meet with such suddenness. Who had woken her up that night in the confusion of warm bodies and anguished voices? All she could remember was the sudden panic, chaos, the hands pulling her from her bed towards the door. The sound of thunder and hail was deafening, but above it she could still hear her mother. “Kamli? Kamleeee!” her mother shrieked. “Wake up right now! We are going!”
“Ama!” Kamala wailed. Blinded by the rain, she stumbled up the muddy, narrow path. But the rain was lashing down and her mother was already far ahead in the distance, holding the twins’ hands. “Walk carefully, Kamli. I know you are careful, Kamli. Be careful,” her mother yelled out to her, her voice lashing in and out of the rain, until it sounded like: Kamli, careful, careful... and then she saw the mother shape disappearing around a bend in the hill.
Kamala gasped for breath. Her heart thudded like a stone inside her body as she ran to keep up with the shapes in front of her. The path was made treacherously slippery by the rain. A path that lay like a liquid red snake winding upwards towards the invisible sky, and downwards towards the pebbled, stony hardness of the riverbed. One slip of the foot, one loose root, one moment of indecision and her body could hurtle towards the crashing sounds and the white froth of the Seti river.
The rain was blinding. She felt the plants on either side of her, and she clutched at them, pulling herself up without seeing where she was going. Weeds, stinging nettles, brambles all pulled her up as she frantically clutched at them. She made her way up, the tears falling and blinding her as much as the rain, her breath in ragged gasps, her legs whipped and bloodied by the branches, instinctively following the shadow of her sister before her. She knew at the top of this steep wooded hill was a pine forest where her family was headed. At the moment, she could not imagine if she would get there.
The moment was so uprooted, blowing in the wind, whipped by the rain, freezing in the cold, that she almost wanted to give up and sit down on the path and let go of her grip. She saw herself washed away, like a leaf, down the hill into the frothing river, where the crest of waves, and the spirits hiding in them, would jump to pull her in. Then she would become a small fish swimming in the white foam. That is when the cry had been torn out of her, a thin wail: “Jethi!”
“Aija, Kamala. Come on!” Jethi yelled to her from inside the rain. She was scrambling up with all the wiry strength of her fourteen-year-old body. “It’s only a bit farther away. Come on!”
So she climbed a bit more. Climbed, and climbed, until her legs started trembling with red-hot pain. “Jethi!” she cried again, in the sudden terror of knowing one is nine years old, and only a few feet ahead of death. “Jetttttttthiii!”
The voice of her older sister came down from the greyness above, with all the urgency of sisters who are caught in the conspiracy to steal raw fruit from the neighbour’s tree. “Come on, come on. I see a guava tree over here. Come on, we can pick a few!!”
The voice of her sister floated out of the dream-like unreality of the rain. She was singing! “Pani paryo, asina jharyo...” Its raining, the hail is coming down.
Jethi sounded so solemn, imitating her Dambar Bahadur’s gruff voice, her voice only occasionally fading in the rain, that Kamala gave a tired little giggle in between her sobs. Her sister could always make her laugh with her clowning, but now she just wanted to sit down and rest. As she started to look around for a rock to sit on, she saw the flash of her sister’s head turning back.
“Gham pani, gham pani, syal ko biha, kookur janti, biralo
bahun,” Jethi’s voice rang out.
Sun and rain, sun and rain,
it’s the fox’s wedding.
The dogs lead the procession,
the cat is the priest.
Jethi’s voice was cheerful, as if she was on an adventure on a sunlit day, as she walked ahead with the sack of rice on her back.
“Jethi, I can’t go any farther, you go ahead, I’ll come meet you later,” Kamala heard herself say, before she lay down in the blessed coolness of mud, and sighed. Her voice was instantly lost in the deafening sound of the rain. When she felt the hands of her sister on her body, she knew she had almost made it.
Kamala was told later than Jethi, abandoning the rice that she was carrying in her basket, put her sister inside it, carried her up for the rest of the way up the hill.
Their old grandmother, eighty years old and brittle as a winter branch, told them: “Go, all of you. I’m going back to take care of the deuta.” She had walked back, slowly, towards the family shrine when Kamala’s father picked her up and put her over his shoulders, carrying her up the hillside. She died, three days later, from the shock of the cold.
The rest of the family survived. They had been one of the few lucky families who had managed to get up on higher ground on time. Most of the people living below had been swept away before they could walk halfway up the hill.
It rained for the next five days, as if the rain was hell bent on washing them out from under the pine trees, where they ran for shelter. The rain was ferocious, and the pine trees swayed and creaked oeeeee, ooeee, mournfully, as if all the ghosts of the hillside had come to taunt them in their misery. Her father and uncles knew from the scramblings of their own childhood that there was an overhanging rock in the middle of the forest that would take a hundred years of rain to wash away, and that’s where they stayed for the next fourteen days.
They ate nothing but mushrooms, scavenged from the ground, for two weeks. Just raw mushrooms, straight from the ground, like animals. She could still recall that humid-grey, earthy taste in her mouth when she thought about it.
At night, the big gaping scar in the hillside came alive with mournful cries. Sounds multiplied and echoed, and the family, stuck on top of the hill, almost went mad at night trying to sleep. Hundreds of people must have died in the flood, they knew. This meant that they were right next to the spirits of the dead who had never been properly cremated. They must be wandering, howling with rage and misery, in the chasm between the hilltop where they rested, and the base of the next hill, where their village used to be. Bir Masan, the keeper of cremation grounds, was out there somewhere, prowling through the dead bodies. Meeting him would bring death and destruction. Even meeting his shadow would make a person deathly sick. So Kamala’s family huddled in a frightened cluster, listening to the echoes and whisperings, the muted screams and the forlorn crying of those who had been swept away.
The rain abated two weeks later. With the brightness of the blue sky had come the knowledge that half the terraced hillside that they had lived on for centuries had been washed away. There was a big jagged hole, as far as the eye could see, tearing like a scar across the surface where their village once used to be. The only thing that remained out of those hillsides full of corn, twenty-three houses, and the two hundred and sixteen people, was that big hole, mud and emptiness.
“We’ve lost all our land.” Her eldest uncle had been the first one to say it. The others sat in silence around the fire, which they had finally managed to light out of the wet pine branches, studded with globs of resin. The smoke rose into the light blue of the early morning sky. “What are we going to do?”
“The women and children can go stay in their maita,” Kamala’s father suggested. The last time Kamala had visited her maternal grandmother, the old woman had fed her delicacy after delicacy, from fried goat liver to rice pudding, from sel doughnuts to fresh persimmons, all of which the old woman had set aside in anticipation of the visit of her daughter and two granddaughters. Kamala felt her mouth watering as she remembered the food. The old lady had been delighted to see her daughter’s youngest girl for the first time. So much so that she had even given Kamala a pair of gold earrings, made of heavy gold, from her old, battered trunk, whispering to her not to show the other children because they might be jealous. The earrings, big ovals of solid gold, had never left her earlobes. “Yes, lets go!” Kamala said delightedly, when she heard her father suggesting another visit to her mamaghar.
“But we can’t stay there for long, not with nine children,” Kamala’s mother reminded him. Her face was drawn with worry. Kamala, watching the fear in her mother’s face, felt her momentary glee disappear. She felt the adults’ worry press down on her.
“We can sell our gold,” Kamala’s aunt said in her soft, melodic voice. Her heavy gold bracelet clinked against the glass bangles as she raised her arm to show it. The only thing of value that they had been able to carry out of their homes was the heavy gold jewellery that lay on the body of the women – earrings, septum rings, nose-rings and bangles, attached to their bodies like permanent organs. “We don’t have a lot, but if you sell it well, it will bring money.”
“Perhaps we can buy a small plot of land with it,” Kamala’s eldest uncle said. “And we still have the pastureland.” There was silence. Nobody said that the pastureland would hardly feed them like their farmland had done.
“All the cattle are gone,” Kamala’s mother, who did not shy away from unpleasant topics, reminded. The old people’s mournful voices went on and on, talking all morning. This was not the funny conversations they had around the fire in their home – the cold, the rain, and the exhaustion had all taken a toll. Everybody sat there, huddled, with black circles around their eyes.
As they talked, her mother motioned to Kamala to come nearer. When Kamala sat down on her lap, her mother crushed some leaves in her hands and dribbled the herbs over the places where she had been stung by nettles. The dark red welts turned black, mixed with the green sap. Kamala felt her skin burn. She bit her lips to stop from crying out aloud. “You won’t have a mark in two days,” her mother assured her.
As Kamala sat on her lap, her mother unscrewed the earrings that her grandmother had given her from her ears. Kamala felt her ears lighten as the earrings were lifted. She felt naked, as if she were sitting in front of her family with no clothes on. Her lips trembled, and she felt the tears rolling down her cheeks. “Why are you crying? You’re a big girl now,” her mother scolded. Kamala, looked at her mother’s face through a blur of tears, and saw that her mother was also crying.
Jethi, whose earrings had also been removed, wiped Kamala’s face with her rough palm. “Come with me. I am going to show you something,” Jethi whispered. Behind the pine forest was a huge meadow full of alpine flowers. As they ran across the grass, the sudden vastness of the space exhilarated Kamala, after the claustrophobic darkness that had surrounded the adults only a moment ago. When they came across a clump of small ferns, Jethi stopped.
“This is called a rani sinka,” Jethi said, picking a lime green frond.
“Why?” said Kamala, sniffing, her breath still broken in uneven sobs.
“Because it is fit for a queen, that’s why.”
The fern had a shiny black stem, thin as a polished needle. “Will it hurt?”
“No. Give me the back of your hand.”
As Kamala put out her hand, palm facing down, Jethi put the fern on it, and slapped hard. “Aiya!” said Kamala. Jethi removed the leaf to reveal the delicate design of the fern traced on the back of her hand in white powder. As Kamala looked at the design – exquisitely wrought in her hand down to the most minute detail – with awe, Jethi broke off a small section of the black stem, and inserted it through the hole in her earlobe. “This will keep your piercing open until we find you new earrings,” Jethi said. Kamala put her hands up, felt the tiny twig where her earring used to be, and ripped it out of the lobe. “What are you doing!” Jethi said, vexed. Kamala slapped Jethi’s hand away and stamped on the rani sinka, saying: “You wear those stupid sinka earrings! I want real ones!”
Kamala ran down the meadow and started to pick mushrooms. Jethi yelled: “You leave your earlobes empty, and your piercing will close up! Your ears will become stubby and ugly!”
Kamala ignored her and bent to pick up a large brown mushrooms. The floor was studded with all kinds, grey ones with long stems, white circles resting on stubby stems, bright red ones. Kamala had to learn fast which mushrooms were edible, which ones poisonous. “And don’t you collect anything that will kill the entire family,” Jethi shouted, as she saw her younger sister grabbing the mushrooms from the field. “I know better than you which ones to eat. I used to go and collect mushrooms with Mama,” Kamala said haughtily. They picked in silence for a while, Kamala working one end of the field, and Jethi supervising her sister’s work from a discreet distance. Soon, they had enough for the whole family.
Then, feeling like she had worked enough, Kamala dropped her pouch of mushrooms, and gave a hiccuping scream and ran up the hill. She had spied a goat grazing on the rocks. Kamala tried to grab the goat’s tail. The goat, startled, sprang up the hillside and disappeared.
“Kamali!” Jethi said. “We could have eaten that animal, and now its gone!”
“Who was going to catch it? You?” mocked Kamala.
“You just come down from those rocks, and I am going to beat you for your insolence,” Jethi threatened, waving a spindly stick. Jethi could scramble up the rocks as fast as her little sister. But on the night of the flood, she had caught a big splinter on her big toe in the rush to reach the hilltop, and she walked around with careful, measured steps since. Not heeding her sister’s reprimand, Kamala turned her attention to dragonflies. It wasn’t dragonfly season yet, but once in a while a bright blue one flew by.
“Don’t scream and scare them, Kamali,” said Jethi. “Here, stand still.”
Kamala, mollifed, came closer. The dragonfly, a brilliant blue one, opened and closed its gauzy wings like a fan over a pink cluster of flowers. Then it settled on a big green leaf, sunning itself in a motionless daze, unaware of the two girls looking at it. Jethi’s hand sneaked up to it. She clamped two tips of her fingers right over the top, swiftly, until the dragonfly was caught. It fluttered in her hands, rustling like paper. She brought it closer to Kamala so that she could take a look and see the two globular eyes. “See,” said Jethi. “You have to sneak up on it and catch it when it is not looking.” Like death, thought Kamala, as she felt her own fingers pressing down on the gauzy wings and felt the panicky flutter inside her palms.
“Gimme, gimme!” The twins, carrying switches of yellow alpine flowers, pounced on the two girls from their hiding place behind a rock. The twins had returned to their usual level of destructiveness after a few days of despondency. “I want it!” “No me!” In the scuffle the dragonfly lost a wing and fell down frantic and fluttering on the ground. “See what you have done, you fools!” said Jethi. “The dragonfly is going to die now, because it won’t be able to fly.” Both the twins got a punch over their heads from their elder sister, and were dragged down the hillside howling in protest. Kamala bent down and picked up the alpine flowers they had abandoned, then sat down on a flat rock, and looked at the fluttering dragonfly. A trickle of tears crept from underneath her eyelids, and she brushed it away. But the tears continued to come, and she cried briefly – for the dying dragonfly, for her lost earrings, and because the sores on her legs were starting to hurt her again.
A day later, Kamala’s father, along with his brothers walked down the hill to the bazaar. The bazaar was full of people whose home had been swept away. People in muddy clothes clutched their few possessions: a cooking pot, a household deity, a red plastic box containing sindoor.
The shops, held together by branches and plastic tarpaulin, overflowed with sacks of rice in quantities never seen before. Sacks and sacks and sacks piled up towards the sky. Small brown, jute bags plump and splitting with rice. They walked around the bazaar, dazed by what they saw.
A small man with a fresh, bloody gash down his face, pointed to the white grains scattered on the ground. “What good fortune for these shopkeepers, huh, Dai. They got all this rice at dirt cheap rates from Kathmandu. It’s sent by the government for the people affected by the flood.”
They returned three days later, carrying sacks of rice on their backs. They were weary from walking. Her father had bought it on credit from the shopkeeper with whom he had a long-standing relationship, with the promise to pay it back within a year. He had put half of what remained of his land, the farmland he had on higher ground, as collateral.
Kamala’s uncles, who had friends at the Bazaar, heard how the rice was sold by the relief workers, and how people in the district headquarters were stocking up, enough to last them for a year. This was the most rain to have fallen in the Mahabharat mountains in seventy years. A thousand, three hundred and thirty-six people have died, the government announced. Five lakh people were affected. This was the biggest flood, and for relief workers, the most lucrative.
“Wasn’t that rice supposed to be distributed free to families affected by the flood?” the brothers asked, but the shopkeepers shook their heads and said: “Were they supposed to? We bought it with our own money.” And all the bureaucrats and officials shook their heads in bafflement, pointing from the local politicians to the Home Ministry, from the Central District Officer to the Police, until at last there were so many people who were supposed to be responsible it became impossible to blame anybody. And nobody, of course, knew who was to blame.
*
Nine years later, Kamala continued to remember the flood each time the monsoon arrived. It was during the nights when the rain poured down, bringing no coolness to the heat, that Kamala found it hardest to fall asleep. Two weeks before the old man arrived at her door, a thunderstorm had taken place. Lightning, a flash of bright white electricity in the wet sky, had illuminated her room for a brief instant. Her body tensed in anticipation. The thunder, when it came, sounded like wooden houses collapsing in the rain.
She lay awake, sweat beading her upper lip, listening to the rain slam on the tin roof. She hated being under a tin roof. Then she remembered that the sounds, even under concrete roofs, had not gone away – the cyclical predictability of rain, cloud, water, and time culminating in an awesome moment that reminded her of the inevitability of death.
She closed her eyes, hoping that would drive away the sounds. Bright green spots slowly grew larger and larger, blossoming like shoots right inside the lids of her closed eyes. Her husband, Mani, was on her left. They had met and fallen in love two years ago. She was working as the baby-sitter for a wealthy business family. He was their security guard.
Mani had saved enough to put in an application for a visa to go to Korea. He had been accepted, and spent a year working in a packaging plant in Seoul. After his return, he carried a cellphone. He went to the STD-ISD booth every evening and made long-distance calls to his employers, with whom he spoke in Korean. He had worked in their factory, and they had liked him so much they had asked him to manage their Korean food restaurant, which they had started in Kathmandu. He had agreed, but with reluctance. Seoul was where his heart was. Sitting in the dusty restaurant in Thamel, he dreamt up elaborate entrepreneurial ventures for his future – an export-import business, a factory that would manufacture plastic, a packaging plant. He talked about how Kamala would accompany him to Korea once the baby could be put in a boarding school. Her son, now one and a half, had recently started to walk.
Kamala didn’t want her husband to know how much the rain haunted her. She knew she was in Kathmandu, in the middle of a valley, and that there was no possibility of a flood. Her children would never wake up in the middle of the night, hear the roar of nature that has swelled to breaking point and then have to run up the hillside, leaving all possessions, all clothes, all firewood, all gods behind. They would never die, as Kamala almost did, trapped in a wooden house that collapsed under the weight of mud and debris brought along by a hillside denuded of trees, the soil as loose as if there was a giant anthill below.
The thunderstorm continued throughout the night. Kamala woke up in the middle of the night, and felt an excruciating pain in her head, as if she had been grinding her teeth so hard, and so long, the jaws had started to grind into the soft part of her brain. A piercing, needle-like pain throbbed near her ear. Blue dragonflies swarmed by her half-awakened consciousness, pushing her awake. She had dreamt that Jethi and her entire family were swept down the hillside in a deafening chaos of mud and timber. That’s when she knew with certainty that Jethi was about to die.
It was impossible for Kamala to go back to the sleep. Midnight. Later. Even later. Time slipped by while Kamala lay there, pretending to sleep, hoping that her pretence would lull her to unconsciousness. She lay there, enmeshed in a bright haze of half dreams when she heard a mosquito whine, persistently, right next to her ear. She got out of bed and skirted the sleeping bodies, quietly switched on the light, inspected the round red mosquito bites, and then walked around the silent room.
Everywhere she went there was the presence of death, the smell of warm air and strange shapes of light showing the dusty crevices of night in a way that she had never seen before. Frightened of her own mortality, Kamala stood there, feeling the presence of Jethi who was sleeping in the village as if she was in front of her. Kamala had known then that her sister was dying. Those about to die have the power to touch people thousands of miles away in a way that is impossible for the living. Kamala understood this as if somebody had come and told her.
Kamala opened the front door and felt a blast of rain enter the room. The trees bent in the wind. She sat down by the doorway and felt the spray from the tin roof reaching her in a fine mist. The wind was gusting hard. A branch broke off and landed inches off her feet. The hair on her body stood on end from the cold wind.
Across the mossy courtyard, past the triangular brick borders, on the old brick wall, leaned a guava tree. As Kamala watched the rain beat on the leaves and slid off the wet trunk, she saw a single fruit fall. She walked out and towards the tree, her feet squelching on cold mud. The rain pelted on her with the solidity of hail. Rain slashing down her neck, she stooped and picked up the fruit. It felt like a talisman inside her closed fist.
Kamala limped back to the house. She was soaked, so she did not bother to run. She sat on the steps, her thin cotton blouse and sari clinging to her skin, and raised the guava to her mouth. Her teeth sunk into the hard green rind, through the astringent green rind to the white flesh, from the soft whiteness to the ochre crunchy seeds. She sat there, eating the fruit, breathing in the astringent smell, saying, under her breath, over and over again: Hurry, hurry. Climb the guava tree. Why had the universe spared her, but was now taking her sister?
She knew, even as she played this nine-year-old ritual in her mind, that she was fooling herself. This time, the tree was not going to offer its salvation.
Kamala returned to bed and lay down. She was shivering, but she did not change her clothes. She listened as the rain came splashing down, in miniature rivulets and streams, in tiny floods on the garden path. The cock from Sukumel Bajai’s house crowed around four a.m. The earth exhaled the smell of wet earth. The smell of crushed leaf and bark floated into her room. By the time the sky lightened with the pale blue ink of dawn and the silence was broken by sparrows and temple-bells, she knew her ritual had failed. This time, the tree was not going to offer its salvation.
The Old Man laid down his empty tea glass with a sigh. He lit another beedi, and it glowed inside the tunnel he made with his fingers.
Jethi, he said, was a beautiful woman, too young to die. But die she did, on one of those monsoon nights when the rains come with such force ordinary people give up any hope for salvation and wait for the end to come. Sometimes the rains just raise the heat and sting of mosquitoes and bright green shoots of rice. At other times, they raise the wrath of rivers that lie like somnolent snakes over winter, and then are woken by the monsoon to wash away entire hillsides in a heavenly tantrum of destruction.
For Jethi, the monsoon brought clouds with black and silver undersides, the tears of the ocean borne on an unstoppable current from other continents, other places, foreshadowing death. Then it erupted into a storm that went on for three days, dumping silt and gravel of a disintegrating hillside into Sungdel village. The entire hillside slid down, a treacherous sludge of mud and debris, and swallowed her house, the firewood in her rafters, her children and with it, also herself.
The Old Man told her thirty-five houses, including a health-post, were swept away by the landslides. More than ninety houses were damaged. Forty-three people were dead, a hundred and fifty missing. But even in apocalyptic destruction, there are stories of miracles. The telecom tower in Udaypur had been destroyed by Maoists, and nobody knew about the flood until days later. When rescue workers arrived on the scene a week later, they found a miracle – two men alive in the debris. Everybody else in their village had been buried by the hill that slid down three hundred meters into the valley. Guided out by a capricious fate, those two had been left to live.
Jethi was not one of the lucky ones. She, with her youngest child tied to her back, had tried to hold on to the beam of the kitchen when she heard the water coming. They found her, three days later. The log, along with other detritus, had floated down and landed on the banks of a river further downstream. Jethi’s hands were locked around the beam, as if she were holding on, even in death, to the spiritual centre of her dismembered home. The body was battered beyond recognition.
Then an ear-stud had caught one of the twins’ eyes. The two boys, now sixteen, had been working in Diktel. They returned to the village when they heard about the flood. They couldn’t find the area where their house had been. The entire village was covered over with a mountain of silt. They had dug through the area but didn’t find any bodies. Then bodies had been recovered downstream, and they had gone down to see. They did not recognize their sister, but one of them saw the small ornament embedded in a corpse’s ear. The tiny golden studs had been sent as a gift by Kamala for her sister’s wedding a year ago. Brought over by her husband Mani from Korea, the studs were golden, with outstretched wings and bulbous eyes – two exquisite, machine crafted dragonflies.