Prawin Adhikari lives in Kathmandu where he teaches and writes fiction and screenplays. He has translated A Land of Our Own by Suvash Darnal, and Chapters, a collection of short stories by Amod Bhattarai. He is an assistant editor at La.Lit.
THE BOY FROM BANAUTI
Grandfather would read one book here and another scroll there through the year, but only in November – after consulting his astrological chart – would he spread the contents of his father’s old almirah in the palliative sun to drive the moisture and must out and to renew the mild poison in the hemlock that yellowed the pages. It was also the day of the year when we, the children of the extended family, were reminded of how much there is to learn, how much there is to inherit by way of words. Great-grandfather had collected or written with his own hand all of these obscure or pedestrian Sanskrit texts, boiling black angeri berries for the ink, sharpening nibs from bamboo and reed (because a quill, which originates in flesh, would have been profane), splitting bamboo to collect the thin film within to layer into paper. I hated the sight. It was a taunt, I knew it even then; I knew it was meant to burden the youngest boys in the family with guilt for not following the family trade, for packing their bags and going to an English-medium school instead of learning Sanskrit.
I hated that I was expected to learn, to memorize, to know. To remember details, causes and consequences, descriptions and explanations, names, genealogies, salutations and shortcuts to salvation. Examine the back of my head and you’ll see scars from falling from heights, or objects falling on my head from heights: roofs, branches, low bluffs along a stream, low walls, high walls. It is a miracle that I can remember anything at all. Yet, on such days in November, I was expected to kneel by Grandfather’s side and examine the past that my generation was meant to inherit: prayers, puran, commentaries and poetry. On such days, my schoolbag seemed extra heavy, doubly annoying.
*
“Come here,” Grandfather called me on that particular day and made me take off my shoes before I could kneel on the straw mat and yak-hair blanket on which he sat. “Read this English,” he said.
It was dated March, 1915. A dedication to Great-grandfather, in a neat hand, written by the Chief Engineer, Allahabad Bridge, Allahabad, on the title page of a handsomely produced copy of the Amarkosh, a thesaurus of Sanskrit. Grandfather smiled. I couldn’t tell what he seemed more satisfied by: his father’s adventures or his grandson’s ability to read letters with a third-grade education. I hastily slipped on my shoes, picked up my bag and walked away.
School was a mile away in the bazaar. A handful of us walked from our neighbourhood in Panchayat Bhavan to the bazaar every day. It was easier to walk along the highway, but Mother considered it too dangerous: each year, dozens died in motor accidents on the dirt shoulders of the highway. She thought everything was designed to kill her youngest child: trees, ponds, rivers, lorries and buses, wasps and hornets, berries, foreigners. So we walked through paddies laid bare after the harvest, dotted with stubble, dew-mulched and yielding underfoot. We jumped nimbly over muddy irrigation ditches and raced between fodder trees or houses along the way. Malla’s steam-engine rice mill announced nine o’clock with puffs of black smoke and a toot-toot-toot. That was our signal to run to school, racing to be the first to cross the mill-yard, to be the first to cross the highway to Gorkha, be the first to jump through the gates at Sun Shine English Medium.
But on that day, I didn’t want to run; I didn’t want to reach the school where each day I was punished during the morning assemblies in the yard – for forgetting the national anthem when it was my turn to lead the school, for nails hastily chewed down just before inspection, for reading Surendra Mohan Pathak thrillers in Hindi or smuggling in Nagraj comics for the boys who lived in the hostel. I didn’t want to face Mr Hansen from Goa, who taught social sciences and loved to pick on Rajendra, Bir Bahadur and me for not doing our homework. I ran ahead, slipped behind a hedge near my cousin Ishwor’s house, and crouched to urinate as my friends walked past. They must have thought I had raced on, trying to breach the school gates before the nine-fifteen bell rang, before the principal’s brother Amshu fetched his cane to whip the latecomers.
After rolling my socks into tidy balls to stuff into the shoes, stuffing the shoes into the school bag and burying the bag under banana-leaf mulch by the guava tree behind Ishwor’s home, I sniffed the air and smiled to the sun. What a day! A clear sky, the sun mild on the skin, shades cold as they ought to be in November, and six whole hours languidly spread before me.
I wandered aimlessly, ducking to hide from elders who might know me or my parents or my teachers, stealing through kitchen gardens, crouching to watch buffalos tethered to stakes to soak in the sun, letting cactus thorns scratch the shin that itched, picking, sniffing at, and then flinging away, a dead bluebird. I wandered to escape rote and recital, to inspect closely how spit forces touch-me-nots to fold and to hide from the foliage long enough to fool it into unfolding, run a finger along the saw-edge of waxy pineapple leaves, pick beetles from cow-patties, squeeze between bamboos to squat on new shoots, eat wild kauso seeds and dig for fern roots, listen to the hoots of owls that perch on jackfruit trees and don’t sleep, chase the howls of sly jackals that haunt the edge of the forest, forget lessons in arithmetic of yesterday, the past week, the entire year.
Ram Shah Madhyamik was quiet for the time of the morning. I marched right through the school grounds, in through the west gate, out through the east. None of the teachers who came to their doors tried to stop me. This wasn’t my school, these weren’t my tyrants. Here and now, I could walk unmolested by authority. What a world!
Then it was past the jalebi shop with the soot-faced boy, past Arjun’s mother’s hut, down the crumbling chalk-hill behind Koirala’s Veterinary and Agriculture Shop that always smelled of poison, but on its board showed seeds and an egg and a hen and a cow all of the same size, life growing outwards, out to the downhill road to Gorkha, all the way to where the bridge across Marshyangdi stretched a full hundred metres, a crawl along the rails, spitting over the side, measuring the arc the wind made with the glob of spit before it became one with the river’s foam, letting the river reel in my head, stepping back just in time to say, “Wah! Marshyangdi almost sucked me down!”
Daraundi met Marshyangdi by a corner stained with charcoal-strewn pits. Even during the day, even from afar, the corner had a strong, tidal pull, like being sucked into a separate world. The crippled babaji in the Shiva temple was awake, unusually early for him: it was common knowledge he dived to the depths of the rivers during the night to collect human bones, breaking the churned surface of the waters with his withered, shrivelled arm. He sat combing his long hair with his one good hand, fanning its oily grey length over one knee, out over the stone threshold of the small, squat temple. Like always, he called me with the shrivelled arm he normally kept in its wooden box, pointing up to the Sun God to whom he had offered the limb many years ago.
I ran down the chalky path to the river that curved along the base of the bluff with the Shiva temple. Daraundi carved pockets of still water or shallow pools where long beards of algae and clear pebbly floors alternated. If the sun lasted an entire day the shallow pools would become warmer than the snow-fed currents of the river. By my favourite wading spot was Pushpa, an equal delinquent, sitting on the reddest, smoothest rock. He wasn’t wearing his uniform. When he saw me, he came bounding over rocks, leaping over the kids in the wading pool. We shook hands like men: Pushpa stark naked, me in my Friday uniform. He led me back to the rock where he was cooking his crayfish caught in the paddies by the river. Pushpa’s catch was impressive: thirteen, plump, sun-roasted to a pink hue, soon curling to sniff their tails like dogs, soon crunchy and sweet. Pushpa leaped from rock to rock to the bush where his clothes sat under a stone, and I surveyed the world.
It was the usual crowd of truants. Shankar, Binod, Sujan, Kishor, Kumar, Omkaji, Amrit, Rupesh and Sudip Malla were diving and swimming. Sujan was only a year older than me, but he could swim clear across Marshyangdi during the floods, without getting a hair on his head wet, never once cutting his arms out of the river, jumping near Dadim Dhik near Ram Shah Madhyamik, floating all the way across as easily as if he were strolling through a wide meadow. I couldn’t swim, and most of the boys were my uncles from my mother’s side, an entire village of cousins and second cousins, who would gladly beat me up any excuse they found. Mother would take their side, too – she’d interrogate me on why I was wherever I happened to be apprehended by one of those thugs. So I sat on Pushpa’s red rock until he called me to Hari-Hara.
Hari-Hara were two rocks, each the size of Bagaley Ba’s smaller teashop near Narayan Malla’s rice mill. Where they leaned into each other they made a short tunnel with a cold heart. Pushpa lit the cigarette he had brought for me. He pulled at it, puffed his cheeks out, and exhaled with a convulsive gathering of the chest and stomach. I took the cigarette. I didn’t smoke it right away. I scratched the tip of my nose with my thumb, but didn’t put the cigarette in my mouth. I spat through the gap in my teeth and rubbed the spit into the sand with the big toe. I whistled a little. I pulled at the cigarette and held my breath.
It felt like I had gathered all the dry leaves around the bamboo grove in Kunduley, all the brambles between Narighat and Khanikhola, all of last year’s mustard stalks after harvest and lit a fire somewhere under my throat, above my stomach. My chest heaved; pellets of air hit my ears from the inside. Something like a snort or a giggle or a belch or a sneeze or a cry escaped from a corner of my mouth. I exhaled. The smoke had gone thin and black.
“Good!” I said as Pushpa puffed up his cheeks to keep the smoke captive. He opened his mouth, letting curlicues of smoke rise on their own. Pushpa pinched the cigarette, wrapped it in a syaula leaf and put it away. He made a whooping yell and jumped into the wading pool. Syankanchha and Rakesh and Keshav and Marichey and Gajaley’s son waited for Pushpa to finish splashing around before dipping themselves up to the chin and thrashing with their legs.
I was still seeing tiny sparks of light – stars – just around my eyes, the part of life that is usually grey and invisible. Pushpa’s stone felt too hot. I slid down the length of its smooth face, still wearing my uniform, and splashed into the pool. I slept in the water, looking up at the boys who came close to yell and laugh until another distraction took them away. I really could hold my breath: nothing seemed distinct, not even my hands, and any pebble held before my eyes seemed round and shiny and money-like. Riches. When I sat up, sputtering the little water that had gone in through the nose, gasping for air, I saw the boy from Banauti pointing, laughing at me.
Although he pointed at me, nobody else was looking. He laughed soundlessly, without a pip or a squeak. His head was shorn, perhaps because of the sores and scabs that mottled his scalp. He was related to me, if you drew a line that wormed six generations back and wormed forward again until it tied me to him. Properly, the boy from Banauti was an uncle from my father’s side. His blind father sat outside their house to sell yogurt and walking sticks to people from Kathmandu trying to climb to Manakamana. His sister had thrown herself from the suspension bridge over Marshyangdi the day her friends told her that she had failed her SLC exams. Her friends had been joking, trying to scare her. She never got to know. The boy from Banauti now lived with Keshav’s family, away from his blind father who still milked the buffaloes and polished walking sticks in his spare time, but also cried and cursed in angry fits, swinging his sickle and stick at anything that moved, until the foaming spit dried to salt and tore open the skin of his mouth.
“Why are you laughing?” I said. I knew why he laughed.
He thought I had done something funny.
“You’re wet! Everything is wet!” he said.
“You’re in the water. You’re wet, too,” I said.
“That is your school uniform,” he said. “Your mother will be angry.”
“And you don’t even have a mother,” I said. I plugged both ears with my fingers and plunged my head underwater. Small, slow bubbles through the nose. Continuous. Hold your breath until you are sitting upright. Wipe your face with your palms before exhaling. The boy from Banauti raised his head to look at me before concentrating on his hands. His lips and brows twitched.
“And your father is blind,” I said. He didn’t look up. I knew I would next tell him that his sister threw herself from the bridge. There was nothing else left to throw at him. Sujan was jumping on Kishor’s shoulders, trying to keep him in the water, while Shankar was pulling Sujan’s leg. The wading pool was still because everyone had chosen a rock each and was warming their ears to bring the water out. It is easy. Find a large, sun-cooked rock. Embrace it, facedown, with your ear glued to it. Close your eyes, and drift into warm, sticky dreams.
The boy from Banauti looked up. His chin quivered and the large, dirty-brown eyes turned wet and trembled. I sat by him. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Nests,” he said, “swallows’ nests.” He dug into the wet sand until water seeped from all sides into the rut. He dipped his palm, let the wetness run down to the fingertips and drip: solid, wet beads of sand. He arranged the beads, every drop placed with deliberation. Streets. Spires. Hedges. A temple with a dome that rose in two concentric spirals, like the domes in the books which Singapore Lahure kids brought to school. He stopped and pointed at my hands.
I scooped water and sand, but my beads fell in uneven sizes. The boy from Banauti laughed at first. I drew outlines on the sand for the layout of my village, patted down sand for the foundations, then started over. Now the boy from Banauti watched intently, added his own drops to augment, once using a crooked finger to scoop and transplant a bead to perfect effect, changing a hut to a sentry-box by piling up a pyramid of cannonballs on the roof. Then he started laughing. I laughed with him.
“Who works here?” He pointed to the newly finished sentry-box.
“I don’t know,” I said, “it is a sentry-box.”
“I know what it is,” he said. He was annoyed. “I said, Who works here?”
It is a stupid lump of stupid wet sand, I wanted to say. Everybody else was busy shouting or jumping. Pushpa and Sujan appeared by Hari-Hara. Sujan tried to blow smoke rings. Sujan could do anything a grown-up could. “I said, Who works here?” The boy from Banauti brought a finger too close to my sentry-box with the cannonballs on the roof.
You have to know. That is the whole point. Knowing. Exactly. Who, where, what, when. That is the point. Why. That is the point also. Otherwise you are just a stupid kid playing with wet sand. Just a stupid kid.
The boy from Banauti was raving now. I tried to imagine his blind father’s rage. The last time we climbed to Manakamana, Mother had taken me to their home and had made me eat yogurt prepared by his father. The old man had insisted upon reading my fortune. His coarse fingers attentively hovered over the thin lines of my palms. He said good things. Then he cried. He said, “I wish my son had half the good fortune you have.” He took my face in his hands, gingerly rubbed his hand over my forehead, said I had a wide forehead, one for fortune and fame.
The boy from Banauti knew – exactly who, where, what, when. Even the why. He was becoming more and more agitated. He had a name for each intersection of each neighbourhood, each face of the temple, the person sitting or absent from each window, everything being sold by each vendor in each derelict corner behind large warehouses. His was not a village, but a city, with a park where the king’s younger son played with his vast army of retainers while the king did what? Hold jousts and chases to find an eligible prince for his daughter. Anybody speaking calmly would need a year to finish inventing and detailing everything the boy from Banauti knew and jabbered on and on about, but it took him less time than it took for me to work up a temper.
I kicked sand into his face. The stupid wet sand he had been playing with. I trampled down his vast city. I killed the sentry in my own sentry-box with the cannonballs on the roof. The sentry poked his head out of the tiny window, dull bayonet leading, trying to prop my foot up with a pin-prick. Then I kicked the double-spiralled temple to the face of the boy from Banauti. Although he sat there dumbstruck, his chin quivering, one hand on his throat to either stifle a scream or to bottle his breath, I knew he knew the where, when, who, how. I was the marauding why. I spread my arms wide, faced the sky and laughed maniacally.
I quickly picked one of Pushpa’s shrivelled crayfish and chewed on it. Another. The boy from Banauti walked away. “I’ll tell your mother,” he said before disappearing behind a rock.
*
I left my clothes behind Pushpa’s rock and admired my toes peeking out of the water. I slipped underwater and blew bubbles, holding each pearl of air at the cusp of my mouth, watching it pull its shape from within me, leave me to rush to burst against the sky. None of the boys had returned into the pool when I sat up to breathe. Back underwater, to the place where everything was indistinct and therefore looked like bright coins. Blue and black and beige and white pebbles like coins. There is a country somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, a place which Yuva Manch Monthly writes “Did you know?” facts about, where these pebbles are riches, precious as diamonds and malachite. Malachite. The World Cup is made of gold and malachite. Did you know?
Somebody grabbed my hair and lifted me out of the water. It was Binod, Shankar’s twin.
“What did I do?” I screamed at him. He looked at me, puzzled, but didn’t let go of my hair. I had to use my knees to stand. Pebbles and coarse sand scraped my kneecaps.
“Don’t sit like that in the water, you ass,” he said, “I thought you were drowning. That you’d drowned.”
“I can hold my breath,” I said. He grabbed me by the nape and threw me to the bank.
“Don’t go back into the water,” he said. Nobody else was around. He climbed Pushpa’s rock. I climbed after him. One roasted crayfish fell into the river when my wet toes nudged it loose. A line of pale naked buttocks jumped from rock to rock, running downriver to where Daraundi met Marshyangdi. Babaji screamed from the temple, running from one corner to another, his atrophied hand still pointing to the gods.
“What happened?” I asked. Binod put a hand on my shoulder and rubbed the nape he had roughed but a moment ago.
Sujan and Shankar bobbed over Daraundi’s water, racing fast towards Marshyangdi. Daraundi brought clear water, fed by glaciers, or mountain springs filtered through thousands of paddies, while Marshyangdi descended furiously, intent upon grinding together the rocks in her belly. Where Daraundi met Marshyangdi, Daraundi recoiled. Sujan was thrown back by that recoil. Shankar dived into the seam, came up for air thirty paces downstream. Everybody else ran along the river, shouting, screaming. A line of people stood on the suspension bridge and pointed this way and that, made noises that didn’t carry to where we stood. My toe slipped an inch and I lurched slightly; Binod caught me by my arm and steadied me on the rock without taking his eyes off Sujan and Shankar.
“What is his name?” Binod asked. Whose? “The boy. You were making swallows’ nests with him. The boy from Banauti.”
“He is my relative,” I said. I didn’t know his name.
“He fell,” Binod said.
Sujan and Shankar could be seen, diving, coming to the surface, riding the white water of the rivers to propel them to whirlpools that swallowed bodies. Amrit and Omkaji shouted to Sujan and Shankar. Sujan dived once more, but Shankar came to the bank. He floated on his back in a corner, one hand grabbing the rock behind him. Sujan finally climbed out of the water, but stranded himself between two granite ledges with water on either side. He crawled to a narrow bar of sand and hid his face in his hands.
Pushpa climbed his rock, teetered with one hand on my shoulder. He brushed off the remaining crayfish into the river.
“What was his name?” Binod asked Pushpa, who shook his head.
“We should have asked,” Binod said sombrely. He put his hand on my shoulder and rubbed my neck. “Go home,” he said. “Go home, but don’t talk about this. Don’t mention you were here.”
Pushpa and I buttoned our shirts in silence. I hadn’t yet learned how to tie shoelaces quickly. It took me a while. Up the hill, in the temple, Babaji was locking his arm into a wooden box suspended from the roof. “Go home,” he said perfunctorily. Pushpa threw away what remained of the cigarette, still wrapped in the syaula leaf. I wanted to stand on the edge of the bluff and read the rivers in both directions, as far as my eyes could see. Who knows when the boy from Banauti will call for help, I thought. But it felt like it had been a very long day. The most recent minutes were interminable, like the yarn on my mute uncle Madhav’s dhaka loom, looping around something not very far, anchored to the weight inside, and each thread returning, over and over, to the same place, just a slightly different spot.
Pilgrims on the suspension bridge continued to peer into the current long after it made any sense for them to. What a day! Not even noon yet, the sun still mild and pale, and a boy disappeared even as dozens of people watched. Six generations ago, there had been a man who worked in the jungles along these very rivers, tended to his cows, gathered fodder and firewood, read fortune for a small fee. From him came hundreds, including Grandfather who sunned his yellowed pages of scriptures while his distant cousin groped blindly at the air in Banauti for his son’s return; from the first astrologer came the sister who jumped into the river, and from him came I: truant, delinquent, ignorant. I knew nothing of those who had passed before me. There was one who could have known, who could have conjured their faces and voices through an act of will and invention, but the river took him before I could ask his name, before I could ask him how his mother had died, or if he remembered her at all. And it made me melancholy to understand that I didn’t know enough about the boy from Banauti, or about myself.