Ramesh pressed through the dense crowd of Chabel. Hardly any room to walk. It was as if the whole of humanity had descended upon this road: starving children and poop on the street and counterfeit clothing and exhaust fumes—and of course the fruits and vegetables that would go bad if not sold by the end of the day. The footpaths were so clogged by vendors that shoppers were forced off the pavements. But a second level of vendors had already spread their wares on the curb, and people had no choice but to walk in the center of the road. The irate drivers yelled at the pedestrians, who cursed the vendors, who in turn blamed the police and the government, who accused the migrants.
Ramesh elbowed people, and people elbowed him. Two young high school boys his age approached, arm in arm, jabbering away. One boy made a funny remark, along with “Hoina?” and the other boy let out a gleaming smile. As they passed him, something was exchanged between the boys and Ramesh: a challenge, a taunt, a bit of condescension that didn’t fully register until Ramesh was already a few yards away. He looked back, and above a sea of heads he saw that the boys had also stopped and were staring in his direction, their eyes dark and dangerous.
He moved on. He seemed to be having this type of encounter more and more, and it convinced him that he needed to do what he had been thinking about doing. A soft, tightening tremor passed through him every time he pictured it. He didn’t know when exactly, but he’d know when the time came: He’d walk into the bank and pull out his revolver, then wave it into the air. There would be gasps. The fat teller with the enormous lips would be there. He’d go to her window and gently rub the tip of the revolver on her lips.
Would his mother come to visit him in jail after he was captured? Would she feel remorse for what she’d done? He pictured her weakened by guilt, holding the bars of the cell where he’d been kept with other hardened criminals, tears streaming down her face. “It’s all my fault,” she’d say. “I should have never left you. It’s because of me that you’ve ended up here.” He’d console her. He’d clasp her hand between bars and tell her that she shouldn’t take all the blame upon herself, that these things happen. “It is my destiny.”
It is my destiny. He didn’t want to think like this. It sounded as though he was deluded—destiny!—but there was no other way to put it. His mother needed to know what he was capable of. She had to be put on notice.
What happened at the bank with the fat teller a few days ago had further persuaded him that he was being propelled toward an act that would change things forever. She had given him a hard time about his signature. He’d gone to the bank because his father had phoned from The Hague, asking him to withdraw twenty-five thousand rupees and give it to the head servant. Some months ago, Ramesh’s father had opened an account for Ramesh, and sometimes when the old man was away for days—he was a well-known diplomat—he asked Ramesh to take out money and hand it over to the head servant for household expenses. Ramesh didn’t even know how much there was in the account, except there always seemed to be enough at the time of the withdrawal. His father had also said Ramesh could use some of the money for himself.
But the money didn’t mean much to Ramesh. He didn’t have friends he could spend it on, and he didn’t have extravagant tastes. Once in a while, he liked to go to fancy restaurants, order the most expensive and unheard-of dishes, but he quickly got bored with the food and most of the time ended up watching the other patrons. One time in a Vietnamese restaurant, he ordered a duck egg that still had the embryo inside it, but instead of eating he merely stared at it. Another time, a Japanese fish dish (which he couldn’t finish because it stank) cost him nearly three thousand rupees.
That day at the bank the fat lady had taken his check made out to “self” and scrutinized it for a long time. Then she’d consulted a file she had on him. “Your signatures don’t match,” she’d finally said.
He took out his checkbook, wrote another check, and signed it.
She inspected it and said, “Not the same.”
He signed two more, but each time she shook her head. She even stuck out her fat lip.
“Well, it’s me,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”
“If the signatures don’t match, then it’s not you.”
“I’m here, and I need the money.”
She said slowly, “What do you need such a large amount for? A young boy like you?”
“It’s me. It’s my signature.”
“Do you have permission from your father to take out this money?”
Did she know his father? “It’s my account.”
She shook her head. “Nope,” she said.
“Show me how my signatures don’t match.”
They were talking in low voices, but Ramesh felt as though everyone inside the bank was watching.
“That’s not possible,” she said.
“Then I’m going to raise my voice.”
She stared at him. Her eyes were big. “You think I’m afraid. Afraid of a schoolboy?”
“Where is your manager?” Ramesh looked toward the cubicles to his left, where the other bank staff worked.
She flipped open the folder, pulled out a paper, and thrust it toward him.
Ramesh studied the signature on his account application, then the signature on his check. “They look exactly the same.”
She stabbed the check with her index finger. “In this signature, the Y has a loop.” Then she stabbed the application. “In this signature, the Y has no loop.”
“So I’ll make a loop. Or not make a loop.”
“Without matching signatures, how do I know you are who you claim to be?”
“I also don’t know you are who you claim to be.” What he really wanted to ask was, Are you a fat lady with enormous lips?
“I’m not the one cashing a check.”
“Show me your identification paper so I know you are an employee of this bank.”
“I don’t have to show you anything.”
Ramesh went toward the cubicles and said loudly, “That fatty over there isn’t letting me cash my check. Where’s your manager?”
The manager came stumbling out of his cubicle. The fat lady was summoned. There were questions and answers and explanations and rebuttals. Ramesh was asked to write his signature on a piece of paper. He did, making sure it had no loop. “Problem solved,” the manager said.
The fat lady said nothing, but Ramesh could tell she had become filled with anger. They returned to her station, where she counted the money and handed it to him. He took out a hundred-rupee bill and slid it under the glass partition. “Your tip for a job well done,” he said and left.
The gun belonged to Ramesh’s father. It was in the cupboard next to the safe in his father’s study. Ramesh didn’t know where his father bought it, why it was in the house. He didn’t talk to his father much, especially since his mother’s departure, and he didn’t want to ask questions now to arouse suspicion. A silence had descended upon the big house once his mother left. His father had not uttered a single sentence about her. The day after she left, a truck appeared at the big house, and some men came inside and hauled all his mother’s things away.
He’d gone to visit her about a year ago, at her behest. She’d called him on the phone and, perhaps feeling guilty, had asked him to come. Driven by his father’s chauffeur, he’d gone all the way to her house, where she’d clasped his hands and cried, given him incoherent sentences about why she was in her mediocre house and not in the big house with Ramesh and his father.
A child had appeared from the shadows in the living room where they sat, and Ramesh’s mother had pulled her close and told her, “This is your brother. Say namaste to your daju!” Ramesh had instinctively reached out to pat the girl on the head, then recoiled. The girl was older than what she’d have been had she come out of his mother’s womb. So she was his stepsister.
Another figure half-emerged from the shadows. A man, her mother’s husband. “Hello,” he said to Ramesh—in English, as though he fancied himself a foreigner.
“Hello,” Ramesh responded. The man was still in half-shadow, so Ramesh couldn’t see his face completely, but the body and voice suggested someone much younger than his mother.
When Ramesh first discovered the gun, he had thought that his father had acquired it to shoot his mother. The gun was longer and slimmer than what Ramesh thought a gun would be, at least longer than the ones he’d seen in movies. Its barrel seemed to go on forever. When Ramesh put the gun flat against his cheek, it stretched across his entire face. His father might have bought it when he discovered her affair. Was it an affair? Ramesh didn’t know. Until the day she left, he didn’t even know she had someone on the side. Where did she find the time? Where did she meet her lover? Ramesh often wondered if his father, too, was hounded by similar thoughts.
On occasion when Ramesh passed by the study, he glimpsed his father staring at the wall. On his desk sat about a dozen tiny bottles of whiskey, the kind they served on airplanes. In Ramesh’s mind, there was a melodramatic scene involving him and his father: One evening Ramesh passes by his father’s study, but instead of continuing on, he pauses. His father’s gaze falls on him. Ramesh’s eyes water. “Aren’t you going to come in?” his father asks. Ramesh gingerly steps in. His father observes him and says, “Well, it’s just the two of us now, isn’t it? In this big old house?”
It’s been the two of us for a while, Ramesh thinks.
His father asks him whether he wants whiskey. Ramesh nods. He drinks straight from the bottle, slowly. The whiskey tastes bitter, but it also warms his throat and belly. It’s not the first time he’s tasted alcohol. He’s stolen a few of these bottles before, and one time he went to a local bar to drink with his classmates after school. “We will survive, son,” his father says. “We will survive.”
The big house sat on a lane that branched off the raucous main road of Chabel, where the bank was located. Some months ago, a murder had taken place on the lane leading to the big house. No one had witnessed the murder, but there had been bloodstains on the gravel. Ramesh had seen it on the way to the school bus stop one morning. The bloodstain, along with a clump of hair, had sat there for a few days. Dogs lapped at the spot until all that remained was the shape of the stain. The servants—there were five or six servants to take care of the big house’s two residents, Ramesh and his father—had talked about what might have happened. Then Ramesh’s father made the wall higher and placed big coils at the top. That was the view that greeted Ramesh when he looked out of his room.
The big house had close to ten rooms, and most of them were empty now. When his mother lived here, her laughter echoed across the hallways into the rooms. The house hadn’t felt empty. Besides, the servants were always inside the house, talking, quarreling, cackling, complaining. Now they did all this in the servants’ quarters, which was a separate building.
Often Ramesh sat in his room in the afternoon, listening to the sounds from the servants’ quarters. He pictured himself with them: He is playing cards, drinking tea, and chomping on pakodas. They are all very fond of him; they consider it a privilege that he prefers to hang out with them in their meager quarters rather than in the big house. He dismisses their fawning and says that he is no different from them, that if it weren’t for the craziness of fate, he would have been born in the servants’ quarters. “I feel more comfortable here,” he tells them.
“Really, babu?” they say, their hearts filled with happiness.
“Am I not like your own son?” he asks a middle-aged servant who is about his mother’s age.
“Of course you are,” she says. “When I look at you, I don’t doubt that you are my very own son. Look, even our facial features are the same.” She puts her cheek against his.
The others comment, “Indeed! There is a striking resemblance. The same shape of the head. The same chin. Look at the similar eyebrows! My god, how could anyone doubt that these two are related by blood?”
He eats with them; he plays hide-and-seek with their children in the small vegetable garden adjacent to their quarters. He takes his afternoon naps in his servant-mother’s bed. It has a thin mattress, but he sleeps soundly on it for an hour or two, until his servant-mother wakes him with a glass of tea. She watches, her eyes saturated with love, as he slurps his tea loudly.
Ramesh’s mind had become a source of much fascination for him lately. Some time ago in Chabel, he’d seen a small, pretty girl who was not more than eight or nine and wearing a purple dress, a new purchase from her not-from-the-city parents. The father’s shirt was buttoned all the way to the top, the mother wore excessive, cheap jewelry, and the little girl was dressed gaudily: purple frock, shiny plastic earrings in tiny ears, and swathes of kohl around her eyes. Sexy, he thought. Sex-ai, he mouthed to himself, and his breath whispered sex-ai right in front of the parents and the girl, who was sucking on a lollipop as the family stopped in front of a stationery shop. Ramesh didn’t find the small girl sexy, so he didn’t know why he was saying it. He wasn’t attracted to small girls, or girls his age, for that matter.
What disturbed him more was that in subsequent days he’d pictured himself being wedded to the little girl in a village ceremony. His bride is put in a large doko, with her legs hanging over it, and a man carries her in that basket with a strap resting on his forehead. Ramesh wears a daura suruwal, holds a bidi in his fingers, and sends the smoke twirling up in the sky. There are a band, crying relatives, excited children climbing walls of houses to watch. Then he sees a group of protestors, led by a well-known bearded human rights activist, standing on the side of the path as Ramesh takes his child bride home. They shout against child marriage, say he should be jailed.
Ramesh was amazed that he could fantasize about marrying a child when he had no sexual interest in children. For days he played in his mind a scene of him with his child bride on the wedding bed adorned with flowers. Both sit crossed-legged and play snakes and ladders. He feeds her cake, then puts her to bed with a kiss on her forehead. “Sleep well, okay, nanu?” He goes to his window. “Go home,” he tells the human rights activists picketing outside. “Return to your family.”
Until recently, until the bank idea came to him, Ramesh had wondered if he should go to a psychiatrist to sort out his thoughts. Suresh, his classmate who also came from a wealthy family and whose father knew Ramesh’s father, had advised him to go to one. Suresh had a know-it-all attitude that irritated Ramesh. Whenever Suresh talked to Ramesh, he seemed to be pitying him, especially when other boys were present at school. You have no other friends besides me, Suresh seemed to be conveying. That their names were similar-sounding led the other boys to refer to them as twins.
Recently his classmates had teased Ramesh that he and Suresh had different fathers but the same mother, which was meant as a dig at Ramesh’s mother’s supposed promiscuity. Suresh had pretended to be offended by this dig, but Ramesh could tell that he was secretly pleased. “What’s it to you?” Suresh told his guffawing classmates. “Yes, we are twins, both of the same mother. Why don’t you go fuck your own mothers?” He put his arm around Ramesh and led him away from them. He spoke to Ramesh in a muted, cajoling voice, as if he were looking out for the well-being of a younger sibling. “You should not take all of this too seriously. Such things happen. We cannot all have the kinds of mothers we want. What your mother did was very bad. My father tells me that your mother had no right to abandon you. It is abandonment, isn’t it? What else would you call it? I know your father is devastated. He might not show it, but my father says that your father has taken it really hard.”
Suresh lowered his voice even more. “My father says your father had seen it coming for a long time. Your father told my father that as soon as he married your mother, he knew she wasn’t the type to stick around, that she’d leave him after she’d given him a child, which turned out to be you, Ramesh. Isn’t that uncanny? My father says ever since your mother left, your father’s drinking has increased. What a shame. And how unfortunate for you. Your mother ditches you to go gallivanting around with a younger man, and your father turns incommunicado. Incommunicado. Life is incommunicado, isn’t it, Ramesh? People no longer communicate with one another. Look at our country. If only we talked with one another, we wouldn’t be in the state we’re in today. You know you can communicate with me, right, Ramesh? I am your friend, you understand that, don’t you?”
Ramesh nodded, but he knew that as soon as Suresh left his side and joined their classmates, there would be much chortling and thigh-slapping mockery.
Suresh gave him a long look. “You shouldn’t really feel ashamed about going to a mind doctor, like a psychiatrist or someone. One of my father’s friends is the most famous psychiatrist in the country, Dr. Gopal Man Singh. You must have heard of him.”
Ramesh hadn’t.
“He’s usually booked for six months in advance, but if I make a call, he’ll see you today.”
“I don’t need to see anyone.”
“Just a thought. No need to be alarmed.”
“I’m not alarmed.”
Suresh observed him. “I want you to come to my house,” he said. “It’ll be just you and me.”
“Sure,” Ramesh said.
“We need to strengthen our friendship,” Suresh said. “We can’t do it at school with all this riffraff around. When are you free?”
“Well, I’m—”
“One of these Saturdays. I’ll let you know.”
A couple of days after that, Ramesh had stopped going to school, partly to avoid Suresh and his gang, but mostly because it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Last week when the school called in concern over his absence, Ramesh had pretended to be his father, who was still in Europe. Ramesh adopted a grave, thick voice and said, “Yes, yes, I am aware. Ramesh has simply not been well for a while, especially since his mother left me. Yes, yes, I am heartbroken, too, but I have to be strong for my boy. He will return to school once he recuperates.” He had spoken in English, to lend gravitas to his words. The administrators at his school went gaga over English. Even the school sweepers greeted the students in a chirpy Americanized accent: “Gooood morningggg.”
When the school called again after a couple of days, Ramesh said, “My son Ramesh has been diagnosed with a serious psychiatric disorder. I will be taking him to Singapore for treatment. Pray for him.”
His father returned home Friday night, and on Saturday afternoon he called Ramesh downstairs. “Why aren’t you ready yet?” he asked. When Ramesh expressed confusion, his father said, “We’ve been invited to the Sapkotas. Didn’t Suresh tell you?”
“Oh, yes,” Ramesh said. He had to be careful here, as he didn’t want his father to know that he hadn’t been to school lately. But when Suresh had invited Ramesh, hadn’t he said it’d just be the two of them?
• • •
It was a grand party, with more than a hundred people mingling on the Sapkotas’ lawn, which was bigger than the Thapaliyas’ lawn. A long buffet table offered a variety of steaming food. Waiters in white uniforms carried trays of drinks and appetizers and glided in and out of the throng of guests. A large fountain in the middle gushed water. A band was off to the side, playing traditional Nepali folk songs but with a hint of jazz, perhaps even reggae. Men in tuxedos and women in glittering saris laughed and conversed. Some were dancing ballroom style. Ramesh thought of a scene from a movie starring Robert Redford about people dancing and partying in America in the 1950s, based on that famous novel whose name he couldn’t remember.
Ramesh was the only one in jeans, and he wondered why his father, who went off to greet his friends as soon as they entered the gate, hadn’t told him to dress more appropriately. He figured his father didn’t care enough. Ramesh stood near the gate, his hands in his pockets, wondering what would happen if he left. He could later tell his father that he had developed a headache and had to return home. Suresh would think that he never came, or that he left early. In any case, he didn’t owe Suresh any explanation: Suresh had lied to him when he’d said there’d be just the two of them. But this was a full-fledged party, with half of Kathmandu’s elites. Ramesh recognized a popular actor who was surrounded by women. In another group was a well-known socialite, a model-turned-interior decorator who called herself the Martha Stewart of Nepal. Ramesh caught a glimpse of a famous banker who was recently in the news for his ruthless acquisitions. Then he spotted a writer who had written one lousy book but who was being lionized as the Himalayan Hemingway for his clipped sentences. Plastic people, he thought. But he didn’t leave, as he was spellbound by this world-unto-itself appearing before him while the city raged incoherently outside.
“I was looking for you all over.” It was Suresh, standing before him. “I saw your father, and he said you had come with him, but I couldn’t find you.”
“I was just enjoying the view,” Ramesh said. Just you and me, eh?
“Isn’t it something?” Suresh said, standing next to Ramesh and observing the party. “The glitterati and literati of our society.”
“The pisserati.”
Suresh clapped him on the back. “You have a fine sense of humor, you know? You should display it more often. Why hide it? It’ll bring out your personality.” He put his arm around Ramesh. “And why haven’t you been to the school lately? You forgot about me, eh? Come, I want you to meet some people.”
Suresh broke into groups, into conversations, introducing Ramesh as though he were his girlfriend, exuding an air of confidence that Ramesh couldn’t help but admire. Suresh punched a popular actor in the shoulder and said, “Are you going to talk only about yourself, Pravin dai? You’re no Tom Cruise. There are other people in this world, too, you know? My friend Ramesh here, for example.”
Suresh tapped young, pretty girls on their cheeks and told them how ravishing they looked. He briefly discussed politics with a former minister, who listened to him attentively, then told the others, “Where does this young boy get his cleverness, I don’t know.” He pointed to Suresh’s father. “Certainly not from his old man, that much is certain. Suresh, you thinking about a career in politics? This country needs an astute dimag like yours.”
It was exhausting, and exhilarating. It’s all a big show, only a show, thought Ramesh.
Yet there was a magnanimous quality to Suresh’s social performance. He was not daunted by the big shots at his party—it was as if he owned them, knew who they really were, and could dismiss them with a wave of his hand. In conversations with his guests, Suresh constantly made references to Ramesh such as, “At school, Ramesh and I . . .” Or, “As I was telling Ramesh some time back . . .” He put his arm around Ramesh while talking, or placed his hand on the small of Ramesh’s back. Once he even squeezed Ramesh’s hand.
By the time they finished doing the rounds, Ramesh felt weak. When Suresh suggested that they go upstairs to his room, he gladly accepted.
Suresh’s room was on the other side of the house, in a corner, with windows overlooking a high wall on the back that blocked the view of the neighborhood. “Nice and quiet in here,” Suresh said, and he latched the door behind them and turned to Ramesh with a smile. “I told you it’d be just you and me.”
Despite the high walls and the barbed wire, the din from the road could be heard in the big house, like a distant yet continuous and unmistakable cry of the country. In between the barbed wires, Ramesh could glimpse the tops of the other neighborhood houses with their satellite dishes and telephone lines running close to their windows. These houses served as the second line of fortification against the racket of the main road.
The phone downstairs had rung a few times since the party, and Ramesh knew that it was Suresh. Once, a servant who was dusting the living room had picked it up, and Ramesh had gone to the landing to observe her. The servant had talked in a low voice—since his mother’s departure, the servants talked in hushed tones inside the house, as if his mother had died—and, putting her palm on the receiver, had looked up at Ramesh.
“Who?” Ramesh asked.
“He says he’s a friend.”
“What’s his name?”
“He didn’t give it. Shall I ask him?”
“No, just tell him I’m not here.”
After the incident with Suresh, Ramesh thought more about why he was in this opulent house with its chandeliers and two living rooms and even a theater room. What made him so special that he was born to this privilege when many boys his age had to wash dishes in restaurants and get whipped for jobs badly done?
One time he’d read about a young Tharu girl who’d been sold as a slave to a doctor’s family in the capital. They’d kept her locked in a tiny room for minor infractions, hands tied behind her back with a rope, not giving her food for days on end. Ramesh had tried to imagine being that girl. He put himself in her tiny room, his wrists chafing because of the tight rope, his eyes straining against the dark, his stomach cramped with hunger.
It didn’t make sense, Ramesh thought, that he’d be bored with himself in this big house while children scrounged among garbage piles outside. He wondered about the life of the poor, began to fantasize about being poor. He imagined himself as part of a large family that lived in the shantytown next to the Bishnumati River. His parents collected scraps for a living; his brothers and sisters—and he had many of them—played naked on garbage piles.
To accommodate his fantasies, and in preparation for the momentous thing he was going to undertake, Ramesh thought he ought to wear a poor man’s clothes. But where would he go to find such clothes? He could find poor people on the streets and pay them to sell their clothes to him. But they would think he was crazy. Or they would think that he was teasing them. He could show these poor people his money, perhaps even hand it to them to gain their trust before they gave him their clothes. He wondered if he could simply buy the clothes from one of his male servants. The problem was that the servants in the big house wore clothes that were cheap but clean and well-maintained. If Ramesh were to wear them, they would neither depict him as poor nor make him feel poor. He wanted clothes that, once he put them on, would immediately thrust him into his new reality of poorness.
He considered going to a tailor’s shop to have them sew a poor-man’s clothes, but even a tailor serving the poor people would sew new clothes for them. After all, poor people didn’t have a tailor sew them rags. But one day he came upon a tailor’s shop in the market with the sign: “alterations, button-sewing, mending, rafus, and such are done here at reasonable prices. thank you!” He stepped up to the counter.
In a cramped space inside, a solitary man was bent over a sewing machine. He didn’t look up but said, “Yes?”
“I was looking for some clothes.”
“Had you dropped them off recently?”
“No, I mean, I want to buy some clothes.”
“Well, I don’t sell clothes here.” The man stopped sewing. “Except these.” He pointed to a handful of clothes on hangers, presumably finished clothes his customers had neglected to pick up.
“I’m looking for somewhat older clothes.”
“Older?”
“Yes, the older, the better.”
Confusion marked the tailor’s face.
“I’m looking for clothes that are torn and dirty.”
The tailor returned to his work. “Have you come here to joke? Majak gareko?”
“I’m serious. I’m looking for poor-type clothes.”
The tailor rummaged through a pile of clothes next to him and showed Ramesh a pair of trousers. “Like this one?” The legs were torn, as though they had become entangled on a bicycle chain. But the rest looked new. The tailor held up a shirt, which had a frayed collar but otherwise looked fine.
Ramesh shook his head and left the shop. He walked toward the Pashupatinath temple. On the way, he saw many beggars sitting by the side of the road, their palms held out for scraps. Now these were the real poor.
As he slowly strolled toward the main temple gate, he scrutinized all the male beggars, especially their build and height. He noted three or four who’d suit his purpose. Once he reached the main gate, from where he could glimpse the back of the giant golden bull that faced Lord Shiva, he made an abrupt turn, not bothering to genuflect.
The beggar he selected was a bearded young man, perhaps ten years older than him. He was wearing a pair of boxer shorts and a tatty T-shirt that had turned brown because it hadn’t been washed. The young man sat crouched in front of a dirty towel, where there lay three or four coins of such small denominations even the monkeys who roamed the temple complex would have been mortified to admit them as their day’s wages. This beggar’s attention was not on his earnings but on a spot inside his own mind. His arms were wrapped around his knees, and he was gently swaying. Ramesh gagged at the filthiness of his clothes, but those were precisely what he needed. As soon as Ramesh began talking to him, however, the beggar became frightened and ran away. The woman who sat nearby asked Ramesh to throw the coins on the towel toward her, “for safekeeping,” she said.
Farther up, a boy about his age and build was standing, his palms up for alms. He was wearing trousers that were too small for him, and the zipper apparently didn’t work because his underwear was peeking out. The shirt he wore was missing a collar, crumpled, and stained at the front.
Ramesh stopped in front of him. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Naresh.”
“Ah, my name is Ramesh. We’re practically like twins.”
Ramesh was struck by how closely this beggar boy resembled him: the same angular face, the same dull, defeated eyes, the same darkish features and unruly black hair.
“Do you live around here?” Ramesh asked, then realized that the boy, since he was a beggar, probably slept on the streets.
“Here and there,” the boy said warily.
“Do you have parents?”
The boy let his arms hang loose and said, “Why are you asking these questions? Are you from a charity?”
“No, no,” Ramesh said. He pulled out fifty rupees and handed them to Naresh, who took them sullenly. “Just talk to me for a while, that’s all I’m asking.”
“I have a father,” Naresh said. “But I don’t see him that much because he travels to do manual labor around the country. My mother—khoi.”
“Tell me. Tell me about your mother.”
“She left us a few years ago.”
“Where did she go?”
“She went with another man, a young man. I hear he already has a child from a previous wife.”
It was difficult for Ramesh to get the words out, but he did. “Is she now carrying a child by this young man?”
Naresh gave him an odd look. “Yes, I hear that she’s pregnant with his child.”
“I need your clothes, Naresh.”
Naresh observed him. “Are you a bit ill? Perhaps touched in the head?”
“I’ll give you money for them so you can buy new clothes. I’ll give you good money. Plus you can have these clothes I’m wearing. Can we go someplace to swap?”
Naresh took him to an abandoned hut by the Bagmati River. They went to the back of the hut, where Naresh said, “You give me your clothes first, just in case you’re playing some kind of sick game.”
Ramesh stripped down to his underwear and handed his clothes to Naresh, who inspected them before he took off his own. “Your underwear also,” Ramesh said.
“Then what will I wear?” Naresh asked.
Ramesh took off his bright white underwear and handed it to him. Naresh glanced at Ramesh’s penis, seemed to become embarrassed, then took off his own underwear, which stank, and gave it to Ramesh, who put it on promptly with his eyes closed. The two boys then finished dressing and faced each other. “You look good,” Ramesh said to Naresh, who said, “And you look like me.” Ramesh gave him a few hundred rupees from his wallet. Naresh accepted the money with an expression of disbelief.
The guard at the big house nearly didn’t let Ramesh in that day, thinking he was a street urchin trying to get in. “What happened, Ramesh babu?” he asked. “Why are you wearing such clothes?”
Ramesh didn’t answer him and went up to his room.
In the privacy of his room, every day for a few hours, he turned into a poor boy. He put on his poor clothes and practiced begging. “Please, sir, can I have some more?” he said, paraphrasing the famous line from Dickens’s Oliver Twist. He also turned into his father, a rich man on the street who came upon the beggar boy.
“Shameless,” his rich man father says. “A healthy boy who should be working. Why can’t you go find a job instead of lazing around like this?”
“But sir, I have lost my mother.”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
The poor boy becomes silent.
On occasion the rich man turned into someone from Suresh’s party: the actor, the politician.
“How did you lose your mother?” the rich actor asks disdainfully. “Did she die?”
“No, sir, she left my father for another man. For other children.”
“For other children?” The rich actor laughs. “Why? Were you not good enough for her?”
“That I can’t answer, sir.”
“Maybe she doesn’t love you.”
“But sir, I came from her womb. How can a mother not love a child who comes from her own womb?”
The politician slaps the poor boy. “Shameless!” he says. “Begging on the streets. You are the cause of this country’s downfall.”
“I am so sorry, sir, so sorry, but I can’t help that I am poor.”
“Of course you can! Lift yourself up by your bootstraps!”
“But sir, I don’t own any boots.”
Some nights Ramesh slept in his poor-boy’s clothes. It seemed to him that those nights he slept a deep, anxiety-free sleep.
Ramesh made sure that he practiced his poor-boy routine only during the afternoons when his father wasn’t around, or when his father was traveling, or late at night when his father was asleep. One evening he was practicing when he heard footsteps outside his door he recognized as his father’s. The old man must have come home early from a trip. Ramesh held his breath. His father also seemed to hold his breath on the other side of the door.
One afternoon Ramesh dozed off, then awoke, a voice inside him telling him to go to the market. He argued with the voice: it was a hot day, and he was feeling cool under the ceiling fan. But the voice was strong, adamant, so reluctantly he put on his poor-boy’s clothes, wore his poor-boy’s shoes—his chappals—and left the big house. The servants were in the back, banging away in the kitchen, or dozing in the quarters.
The guard opened the gate and gave him a salute. Ramesh saluted back. He knew the guard thought of him as an idiot, the lonely boy—Richie Rich!—who wore a poor man’s clothes to go mingle with the masses. The guard probably had a wife and kids back in the village, plus arthritic parents he needed to buy medicine for. Ramesh thought he could detect the disdain and anger in the guard’s eyes, even though his face was impassive.
It shouldn’t have surprised him when he saw his mother as soon as he entered the market. Immediately, he knew why the voice had told him to venture out. This was another thing that was happening more and more: his thoughts and inclinations merging with the outside world, a seed in his mind turning into reality. The gun, for example. As soon as he’d held it in his hand, he knew that he was going to do something with it.
Still, when he actually saw his mother at the market with her family, Ramesh took in a sharp breath. The family stood in front of a shop that had kites and balloons hanging above its door. The girl, his stepsister, had grown, and she had a know-it-all look on her face as she addressed her parents in a querulous voice. The young husband was holding a baby who was wearing a tight-fitting bonnet. Even from the distance—Ramesh was a few yards away, across the street—he spotted the black tika on the baby’s forehead. Ah! To ward off the evil eye!
His mother was laughing, and her young husband was pointing to a balloon and urging the baby to look. It was a plain blue balloon; there was nothing to look at or laugh and get excited about. And the baby wasn’t looking at the balloon but at Ramesh.
Were they actually going to buy something? Or were they merely dillydallying? What was his mother doing so far away from home and so close to the house she’d left behind? Was she on a dare? Was the next step for her new family then to stroll over to the big house, her former family’s abode?
Ramesh moved closer, now directly across the street from them, only a few yards away. The baby’s eyes followed him, and the father was gently nudging the baby—with the bonnet and its baby face Ramesh couldn’t decipher its gender—to look at the balloon. Ramesh wondered if the baby, through some sixth sense, recognized Ramesh as its half brother.
I’m wearing a poor boy’s clothes, Ramesh thought, so I might as well do it. He lowered his head and held out his palms in supplication. “Please spare a few coins,” he said in a pathetic voice to the passersby. “Haven’t eaten for three days.” The tenor and the tremble of the voice came to him naturally, as though he was a veteran at it.
A coin dropped onto his palm, then another, and after the third coin, he remembered that he ought to be grateful for the alms, so after every clink he mumbled, “May God bless you and your family.” The coins kept coming, at first slowly, then rapidly. The more people saw the coins accumulated on his palms, the more they gave.
The coins filled his palms so quickly that he had to empty them in the pockets of his trousers. When he thrust out his palms again, the coins at first trickled, then multiplied. His mother’s family was still across the street, still engaged with the balloon. After his palms filled for a second time, he emptied them into his pockets and crossed the street. The coins jangled as though he was wearing anklets and dancing across a stage. He bowed before his mother’s family, head down, palms held high. “A coin or two. May your beautiful family be blessed.” His voice was muffled because his chin was touching his chest.
“A beggar,” the young husband said.
“Look how bowed he is,” Ramesh’s mother said. “Look, children, look at that young boy, begging. If you don’t listen to your mother, you’ll end up like him.”
Ramesh waited for her to recognize him.
“Hello, beggar boy,” the young husband said happily.
“Scat!” Ramesh recognized the voice as that of the young girl’s. “Aren’t you ashamed to be begging?”
“Some money for food, please,” Ramesh said. He raised his head a bit, then waited for his mother’s exclamation, her cry of distress at seeing her son in this state.
“Don’t scold him,” the young husband said in a kind voice. “He must not have any parents.”
“Young men these days—lazy!” his mother said.
Ramesh raised his head even more.
“Here, baby,” the young husband said. “Give the beggar boy this coin.”
Ramesh felt warm breath on his head: the young husband had brought the baby close. A cold coin dropped onto his palm. He lifted his chin even more, then moved his eyes up in their sockets so he could see them. But his mother’s family had already moved on.
He straightened and scanned the street. They were strolling leisurely, away from the market, down the hill, moving in the direction away from the big house. Watching them, he wondered what his mother would think of what happened with Suresh. His father most likely would not care, or if he did, probably think that it was a one-time thing. His father might conclude that the boys had smoked some pot and fooled around a bit. He might then recall his own boarding school days in the hill station of Dalhousie in India, when things happened in the bunk beds at night that were spoken about only with winks and dreamy smiles the next day. His father would think that there was no harm in that.
When he wondered how his mother would react to what had happened in Suresh’s room, Ramesh was flummoxed. He didn’t know whether she’d be angry or filled with concern for him. One moment he pictured her furious about what he’d done; the next moment he saw her gently caressing him and telling him that it was okay, that he ought not worry.
That night Ramesh couldn’t sleep, even in his poor-boy’s clothes. Throughout the night, his mother’s face continued to switch from anger to love to distress.
He opened his eyes in the predawn light, triggered into alertness by a pinprick in his consciousness. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked out of the window: the sky had barely begun to be illuminated. In the servants’ quarters, a servant was sweeping the floor of the veranda. He watched her. He needed to do something for her. He also needed to do something for Naresh—for his state of existence, which couldn’t be allowed to go on. In the greyish light that was now beginning to seep into the room, Ramesh looked down at his poor-boy’s clothes. I need to do something for myself. The time had come.
He saw himself waving the long revolver in the bank. He saw himself walking out calmly with a couple of sacks stuffed with crisp banknotes, money that he’d then distribute to his servants. He’d then go over to the temple, locate Naresh, and hand him a few thousand rupees. “Here, I want you to start a new life. I want you to forget about your mother. She doesn’t deserve you.” Then he’d return home and put on his poor-boy’s clothes and wait for the police to arrive. The national media would be on the case: The rich boy who dresses in poor clothes. The rich boy who robbed a bank. His photo would be plastered all over the newspapers. The TV reports would probably show clips of him in handcuffs, being escorted out of the big house in his poor clothes into a police van. Across the city, his mother, while feeding her youngest child by hand, would glance at the TV, see his profile, and cry out in alarm, “Why, that is my very own son!”
The bank was in a row of commercial buildings across the street from another row of commercial buildings. It was a popular bank, one that ran radio and TV commercials day and night, and its advertisement jingle was also a hit:
Sano Bank
Our Own Bank
Warm like a home, this bank
Always in service, like a riverbank
Ramesh scoped out the bank. He walked back and forth in front of it, but not so much that it aroused the suspicion of the guard, who stood at the entrance with an old rifle. The guard had an ancient mustache, thick and drooping. He was not scary. The trick was to get the gun in. Customers had to go through a metal detector, but Ramesh knew the metal detector didn’t work. On his previous visit, when the fat lady had given him a hard time, he’d been behind a man from whose bag the guard had extracted a small khukuri after the man went through the metal detector. The knife was about a few inches long, the kind one buys as a souvenir, a smaller version of an actual khukuri. The guard had questioned the man, who had become annoyed. “This piddling knife—do you think I’m going to rob your bank with it? If you’re that worried, why didn’t your metal detector catch it?” Faced with the man’s anger, the guard had become apologetic and said that the metal detector didn’t work. It needed to be replaced, but the bank didn’t have any money. The man and the guard had a good laugh about a bank not having money.
But to this day the metal detector hadn’t been changed. The guard still carefully inspected the customer’s bags before letting them through. How to get the gun past him? Ramesh finally came up with a solution.
Tuesday was a hot day, with the forecast that it was going to get hotter. Ramesh went to the bank. He carried with him a bag, and wore a tracksuit and tennis shoes. He also carried a tennis racket. The guard patted him down, then sifted through his bag. He extracted a towel, a lotion, and a T-shirt. “What is this?” he asked, his fingers digging deeper into the bag.
“Oh, my tennis balls are in there.”
“But why can’t I take them out? I can feel them.”
“It’s a secret compartment.”
“I need to see them.”
Ramesh turned the bag inside out, unzipped the secret compartment and extracted a tennis ball. The guard took one, sniffed it, squeezed it, then bounced it on the floor, repeatedly, to verify its bounciness. “How much do these cost?”
“They’re about a hundred rupees each.”
The guard raised his eyebrows. “How much does the bat cost?” He picked up the racket and slammed it against his palm.
“About three thousand rupees.”
“How many more balls do you have in there?”
“Five or six.”
The guard again dug into the bag. His fingers spent some time there, like he was fondling his own balls. “Why do you keep them hidden?”
“People steal them.”
The guard handed him the bag and indicated he could go in.
Ramesh feigned anger. “I come to this bank often after my tennis practice. Will you be harassing me every time I come, waste my time like this?”
“It’s my job, babu.”
“Well, now that you know what’s hidden in that bag, will I have to show you its innards again?”
The guard looked around and whispered, “Now I recognize your face. It’s no problem.”
Ramesh adopted a pleased expression and took out a hundred-rupee note and slipped it to the guard. “The issue is, dai, I don’t have time, so please. Okay? Next time no search, okay?”
Except that on Ramesh’s next visit, there would be a gun in the secret compartment.
The guard indicated for him to go in and winked.
Inside, there were four tellers behind the glass partitions at the counter. The fat lady with the enormous lips was there. When their eyes met, something shifted in the fat lady’s face. Her expression became focused, like she’d spotted an enemy. Ramesh noticed something else: another guard inside, standing against the wall, watching customers. This second guard hadn’t been here the last time. Then Ramesh remembered the recent string of bank robberies in the city. This second guard was sure to put a crimp in Ramesh’s plan when he came here on the big day. Ramesh might end up in a struggle with him, which wasn’t how he wanted to perform this. This guard was not mustachioed, which Ramesh read to mean that he had no false bravado. He was the real deal. He was lean and thin, with a tough-looking chin. The type who didn’t suffer fools gladly, who despised inefficiency, who left no mess. The man didn’t drink or smoke—Ramesh knew this instinctively. And judging from his eyes that roved from customer to customer, he took his job seriously.
The guard’s eyes landed on Ramesh, then flitted toward the fat lady. Something passed between them. It was as if she’d already talked to the guard about him, given him Ramesh’s description.
Ramesh stood in line. There were about five people in front of him. Ramesh felt a change in the air at his back, and without turning he knew that the guard had moved away from the wall and had come closer. There were only three bank tellers today, including the fat lady. Although she was open, she had her eyes fixed on Ramesh instead of the customer at the front of the line, who was looking at her expectantly.
One of the other two tellers left his station, so now there were only two tellers. The customer at the front of the line finally called out to the fat lady, “Aren’t you open? May I come?” Without taking her eyes off Ramesh, the fat lady gestured toward the remaining teller, who was engaged.
The customer who’d addressed her turned to others waiting behind him. “Even when they’re open, they’re not really open. There’s a limit to laziness.” He was supported by a chorus of voices—“It’s craziness, not laziness,” “The customer is not a king here but an untouchable”—that became quiet once the third teller returned to his station. Then the line rapidly moved forward, and Ramesh was at the front.
The fat lady called to him, “Please come here.” He pretended not to hear and kept his eyes focused on the teller next to her. “I said, please come here.”
“She’s open now,” the customer behind Ramesh said. “Go, go!”
“I thought you were not open,” Ramesh said.
The guard was at his elbow. “Please go to her.”
Ramesh reluctantly approached her window. The guard went with him and stood a couple of feet behind.
The fat lady was looking at him impassively. “For what purpose have you come?”
“I need to take out some money.”
An internal smile passed through her face, like a small breeze that, unless one was a vigilante and knew what to look for, could go undetected. “How much?”
“Five lakh rupees.” He didn’t know whether the account had that big an amount—he assumed it had—but right now he wanted to throw her off guard.
At his mention of five lakh rupees, he heard an audible sucking of breath behind him from the guard.
Through an image that zipped inside his mind like lightning, he saw them: the fat lady and the teetotaler guard embracing in a dingy flat, he sucking on her enormous lips. These two were lovers. How could Ramesh have missed it? She’d told the guard about the boy who gave her a hard time on what was most likely the guard’s day off. “Some Richie Rich,” she told him, caressing his bony chest, and he must have said to her, “I will break his mouth.” Then they made love. There was a physical connection between the two, the guard and the fat lady—Ramesh could smell it in the air between them, a whiff of animal sex. He’d smelled something similar when his stepfather had emerged from the shadows during his visit to his mother’s house.
“Five lakh rupees?” the fat lady said. She looked past him to the guard.
Just let her try to do something funny again, Ramesh thought. I’m going to bring the house down. I’m going to create such a ruckus that it’ll be written up in the papers. Ramesh might, if it came down to it, even announce that the fat lady and the guards were lovers. Do you allow sexual relationships between your employees? he’d loudly ask the manager. Perhaps you even encourage it?
“Have you brought your check?”
He took out his checkbook, wrote one to “self,” and quickly signed it on the counter in front of her, then pushed it toward her. She picked it up with both hands and lifted it up, even higher than eye level, as though she were scrutinizing it for some invisible ink. She didn’t speak. He then understood that she was showing the check to the guard behind him.
“There’s no loop in the Y today,” Ramesh said. “But it’s me.”
“No problem,” she said. She put down the check and smiled at him. “How is your father?” she asked.
“My father?”
“Yes, how is he?”
“Do you know him?”
“Let’s say I do.”
“What does that mean? Either you do or you don’t.”
“He’s a big man. He might not remember me. But we used to work together a long time ago.”
This woman working together with this father. Fat chance. “Where?” he asked.
“Oh, you wouldn’t know. This all happened before you were born. Your father and I . . .” She looked at him meaningfully.
“Yes, please tell me.”
“Let’s say your father and I—how shall I put it?”
“Put it well.”
“Let’s say we spent some fun moments together. A looong, looong time ago.”
This woman was half his father’s age, and Ramesh couldn’t ever imagine his father having fun with a woman, let alone a woman like her. She was goading Ramesh. He couldn’t let himself be ruffled.
“How’s your mother?” Her voice was softer, lower now, only for his ears, but not too low for the guard, who’d stepped closer to catch her words. Anyone looking from the door would probably see three people in collusion, the teller with her incredible lips, a troubled young man with an impossible amount of money, and a guard bent forward, breathing down the young man’s neck.
Ramesh didn’t respond to the fat lady’s query about his mother.
“So sad,” the fat lady said, as though intuiting his emotions, “what happened with her.” She looked at him kindly. “Now I hear she has a child of her new beau.”
That child wears an evil eye tika, he thought, probably to ward off bad gazes from people like you. He wondered if his mother ever put a talismanic tika on his forehead. For some reason he thought she didn’t.
“But we knew this was coming a long time ago, didn’t we?” the fat lady said.
“We?”
“Your father and I. During our heyday. He’d just married your mother then. You were yet to be born. One evening we were drinking in the lobby of a hotel after an event. Like I said, your father and I—well, what’s the point in dwelling on that? But that evening, he said, ‘She’s not a keeper, this one.’ It took me a few seconds to understand whom he was referring to. Your father looked despondent. I prodded him about why he was speaking like that about his wife, and he said, ‘Something about the way she laughs when she’s with other men. She laughs for no reason. When she’s with me, she never laughs for no reason.’ I asked your father whether she already had a lover he’d seen her with, and he shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘But she’ll get herself someone soon. Maybe she’ll even give me a child, a boy, before she moves on.’” The fat lady paused. “And here you are.”
“Can you cash my check, please?”
“You know you can talk to me.”
“Please give me my money so I can go home.”
She lowered her voice. “You know, you shouldn’t walk around with so much cash.” She beckoned him closer with her hand, and foolishly he leaned into the window so his chest pressed against the counter. “We’ve had cases,” she whispered, “where ruffians loiter outside the bank, sometimes even inside, watching our customers stuff large amounts of cash into their bags, then rob them on their way to their home or office. What you are doing is dangerous.” She brought her face very close to him, and for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him with those huge lips. With dismay he realized that a part of him wanted to taste those lips.
Breathlessly she continued, “There has even been a case of murder. A young man. Like you. Throat slit in that alley. The same alley that leads to your house.”
Then things happened very quickly. She reached under the counter and pulled out four stacks of banknotes. She endorsed his check with multicolored stamps in rapid succession: clack, dyab, bhyat. “Give me your bag,” she said, and like a dolt he did. She stuffed the money into his bag, tightened the strings, then called the guard, who didn’t need to be called because he was right behind Ramesh. “Birendra, could you escort this babu home? He’s the son of an old friend.”
Before Ramesh realized what was happening, his bag with the money was in the hands of the guard, who said, “Follow me,” and strode toward the door.
“My bag,” Ramesh said weakly and hurried after him.
“Give my regards to your father,” the fat lady called after him.
By the time Ramesh exited the main door with its metal detectors, the guard had disappeared into the crowd. “Where did he go?” he shouted at the mustachioed guard.
“Birendra? He went that way,” the guard said, pointing toward Ramesh’s house.
Ramesh ran down the street. The sun was intense in the sky. He finally saw the guard’s head bobbing in the distance, among a sea of heads. Without looking back or breaking his stride, the guard raised his arm and waved him forward. Sweating, Ramesh chased after him.
The guard had disappeared into the chaos of Chuchepati. Ramesh half-ran all the way to Bouddha looking for him, then all the way back to the Ganesh temple. The man had vanished. Ramesh turned around to go to the bank and raise hell.
But as he waited for a break in the traffic to cross the street, he stopped. What did it matter? The phrase a drop in the ocean came to him. That money was nothing to him. It was not his money; it was his father’s money, and it was a drop in the ocean for his father. His father might not even notice the money gone. Or if he did, he might think that Ramesh somehow spent it. Five lakh rupees! Ramesh could tell him that he lost the money gambling in the casino. His father might get mad, scold Ramesh for being so casual with his money, lecture him about how he, Ramesh’s father, became rich only because he conserved every penny he received. Or Ramesh could tell him that he spent the money on a party he threw for his friends, a party like the one he attended at Suresh’s house, except it was held in a hotel. “I’d always wanted to throw a big party for my friends, Dad,” Ramesh would say in the lazy voice of a rich, spoiled kid, and his father, although outwardly disapproving, would be secretly pleased that his strange son had finally understood what money could do and the moneyed legacy he had inherited.
His father might say, “Son, why didn’t you tell me that you wanted to throw a party for your friends? I would have thrown a grand party for you right here in our big house.”
“Would it have been something like the Sapkotas’ party, Dad, with liveried servants and a live band?”
“Arre! I would have thrown a party even bigger than the Sapkotas’. I would have thrown a party that would have been the talk of the town for weeks.”
Let the guard and his fat girlfriend enjoy the loot, Ramesh thought, as he stood across the street from the bank, human traffic swarming around him. He wondered if the fat lady was still inside, or if she’d already joined her lover somewhere. Perhaps, breathless and giggly, they were already on a bus headed out of town, the bag with the money held tight between them, stunned at how easily this fortune had landed in their laps through the courtesy of a Richie Rich fool. Enjoy, Ramesh told them in his mind. It was never my wealth to begin with.
Never my wealth to begin with, he repeated to himself as he went home. At home, in the spaciousness of the hallway and the empty rooms, he reiterated, Never my wealth to begin with. As if to prove to the world what he’d just said, he put on his poor-boy’s clothes. He thought of his mother. Maybe there was a good reason that she left. Maybe things had, for some reason, become unbearable for her, just as—he contemplated his big, cavernous house—they were becoming unbearable for him. Perhaps she was really a poor woman at heart, and had to go away to find her poor-woman’s ways.