Freak Street

Sofi

Sofi found a room on Freak Street. She practiced saying the street’s real name, Jhonchhe, as the locals called it, but couldn’t wrap her tongue around it, and people didn’t understand what she was talking about. One person even thought she was speaking Chinese, so she gave up on “Jhonchhe.” The hotel was not really a hotel. It was an upstairs room rented out by a family, two alleys away from the street that was the main drag.

The year was 1978, and pot and hashish had already been illegal for a few years now. The American government had paid millions of dollars to the Nepali king to ban them. Gone was the Eden Hashish Center, where hippies used to flock to buy quality hash and grass and receive the gift of a calendar with blue-colored Krishna and Shiva with a snake around his neck. The hashish business had moved underground, and one had to be on the lookout for the cops who roamed the streets, and who on occasion took the especially long-haired and unshaven hippies for an overnight trip to the station. Many hippies had stopped coming to Kathmandu, and restaurant owners in Freak Street bemoaned that the tourist hub had shifted to Thamel, where cleaner, more athletic-looking foreigners with money and trekking gear stayed before they went on their long hikes to the Annapurna and Everest region. The new tourists flew into the city, in contrast to the hippies, who used to travel by land in their beat-up colorful Volkswagens, passing through Turkey then Iran into Afghanistan, from Pakistan into India and, finally, Kathmandu. Still, every few months, a psychedelic hippie van could be seen parked at Basantapur Durbar Square, at the mouth of Freak Street, where peddlers sold statues of gods and goddesses, bells and dorjes and pipes and hookahs for smoking, and where some pot and hashish still passed through furtive hands.

Sofi wouldn’t have found the room had she not been looking for something very cheap, and thus away from the main area adjacent to the square. “Hotel, hotel,” a man had said to her, pointing down the narrow alley with his cigarette, and she had asked, “Where?” then saw the sign for Buddha Eyes Hotel, and underneath it: “welcome to hippys.” The woman who ran it charged only five rupees a day, a real bargain.

Sofi loved the place. She loved the round, pockmarked face of her landlady, whom she called Sahuni. Sahuni ran an eatery on the ground floor, basically a kitchen, with two tables and a few stools, that opened for business in the late afternoons. The eatery, also the family kitchen, was adjacent to the sleeping quarters where Sahuni slept with her old husband and a son who was about twelve. She sold spicy meat, momos, fritters, and strong-smelling raksi and jaand to the locals and occasionally to a drugged-out-of-his-mind hippie who happened to stagger in instead of going to a pie joint on the main street. Sometimes Sofi helped out in the eatery, boiling tea, carrying food and liquor to the customers, and in return Sahuni let her eat for free. The customers, almost always men, loved the idea of being served by a kuiriney with her flowing skirt, her bare stomach, and a phuli in her nose. They commented on her pale skin, her dirty-blonde hair, her smell of patchouli, and joked about her in their native tongues.

Sofi loved the narrow alley leading to the hotel that usually became filled with puddles during the rains so she had to sidestep them when she walked back and forth. She loved the patch of garden with its radishes and spinach which Sahuni tended to with care. Her room overlooked a neighbor’s yard where children played and chanted, “Hippie, hippie,” when they spotted her.

She loved Freak Street. She loved hearing the name from her own mouth and from the mouths of the other hippies. The name, the sound, the syllables evoked a place that was more than the neighborhood where she now stayed, the street with its pie cafés, its curio shops, and music stores from where guitar riffs by Jimi Hendrix, who had hung out here some years ago, pierced the air. Freak Street was also a sweet spot in the imagination, a far cry from the colorless town in Ohio where she’d grown up, a town with the impossible name of Coshocton, where her doctor father and housewife mother lived on a cul-de-sac, or a “dead end,” as she liked to call it. By the time she finished high school, the town had become for her a miserable hole. Oberlin College was a big relief, and the first step to liberation. Now at the other end of the world, this country, this neighborhood of Freak Street, was so open and free and pulsing with life. The mix of the locals and the hippies, the restaurants with their spicy Nepali food and brownies filled with hash, the temples—ah, the temples!—with their gorgeous carvings and their gods and goddesses that actually seemed to be living with the people. There was something sweetly natural about this city.

One night she dreamed that she was wearing a traditional jyapu dress, typically worn by farming women in the valley. She spoke in Newari with Sahuni, who turned out to be her mother. The dream moved her so deeply that for days Sofi wandered about feeling that she was indeed a native, if not in this life, then certainly in a past one. Her solar plexus radiated an energy that transmitted images to her brain, images she thought were about her past life: working in the fields, cooking on a woodstove, scolding her children lovingly. She remembered that the solar plexus harbored a chakra, either the third or the fourth chakra—she wouldn’t be surprised if it was related to one’s reincarnated self. She smoked hash to deepen her experience. She climbed to the top of the monkey temple, Swayambhunath, where she and other hippies passed a chillum around while seated cross-legged in front of the main stupa. A young Danish man with rotting teeth and an emaciated face and body played the madal, the Nepali drum. Most days she meandered through the city, sometimes all day, braving neighborhoods where no foreigner stepped foot, pausing by stone taps to splash her face and drink the cool water and to chat with local women in her rudimentary Nepali:

 

Tapai sanchai? Are you well?

Ma kuiriney keti. I’m a gringo girl.

Pani mitho. Sweet water.

Aakash garmi chha. The sky is hot.

Tapaiharu sundar chha. You all are beautiful.

 

She rested at roadside stalls, drinking milky tea, saying, “Mitho, mitho” to the shopkeepers, feeling that she must have been born saying mitho because the word came to her easily—she couldn’t do the hard “th,” but she was happy with the soft “th.” Besides, the locals understood her; their faces broke into smiles. The word itself seemed to fit this country, its people. Everything was indeed delicious here: the dust that rose around her feet as she traversed the streets; the way unkempt and snot-covered children happily followed her and called her hippie and kuiriney; the sudden, exhilarating glimpses of sky-touching white mountains; the torrential rains; the shouting and haggling in smelly, colorful markets. This was a mitho country.

She asked Sahuni to give her a Nepali name. At first, Sahuni demurred, saying, through her school-age son who acted as an interpreter, that Sofi was a good name. But Sofi didn’t give up. She told Sahuni about her dream, and insisted that as her new mother, Sahuni must give her a Nepali name. The son haltingly and bewilderingly translated, often pausing to understand Sofi’s accent, and after a few tries Sahuni understood. Sahuni’s family spoke mostly Newari, but lately they had started using Nepali because they were worried that their son needed to be well versed in Nepali, the country’s official language, in order to succeed in school and in life. Since Sofi also picked up Nepali from the streets, this worked out well.

Sahuni lightly tapped Sofi on the cheek and said, “Tan ta paagal nai raichhas.”

“You are . . . mad,” the son translated.

“Kaasto naam chhaiyo?”

“What name you want?” the son translated.

“A good name.”

“Okay, okay,” Sahuni said. She had picked up a smattering of English from her tenants over the years. “I give you, okay? Good name, okay?”

That evening Sahuni had Sofi dress in a red sari, applied some makeup to her, and took her to the Maru Ganesh temple. People stared at the white girl in her fiery brilliance as she was escorted through the Basantapur Square to the shrine of the elephant-nosed god who loved mitho sweets, especially the round laddoos that devotees placed under his rotund belly. Sahuni crouched down, whispered some mantras, then put a tika on Sofi’s forehead and said, “You now Sukumari. You! Sukumari!” The boy was with them, in his school uniform because he had just returned from school.

“Why are you laughing?” Sofi asked the boy.

“Sukumari!”

“Name not good?” Sofi asked.

“Very good, very good,” Sahuni said adamantly.

Spectators had gathered to observe the naming ceremony for this kuiriney, and a chorus of voices said, “Good! Good name!”

“Sukumari!” the boy tittered.

Sofi whispered the name to herself. “I like it,” she said. “Mitho chha.”

That drew chortles from the crowd.

Sahuni pushed her son. “Tell her what it means. Tell her it means ‘a soft, delicate girl.’”

The boy told her.

“Like Kumari?” Sofi asked, pointing in the direction of the house that was a stone’s throw away, where the Living Goddess resided. Kumari meant “a virgin,” Sofi knew, a requirement for the young girl chosen as the Living Goddess.

“Yes, yes.” Sahuni nodded enthusiastically.

“Tara ma virgin chhaina,” Sofi said. I am not a virgin.

But the boy wasn’t sophisticated enough to catch the nuance, so he translated that Sofi said she was not a goddess.

From then on Sofi started calling herself Sukumari. When her hippie friends called her Sofi, she corrected them with, “I’m Sukumari now.” They smiled and nodded, a couple of them saying, “Far out.” When her friends couldn’t say her full name, she accepted their nickname of “Suku,” which was fine, since Nepalis frequently truncated the names of their loved ones to demonstrate affection. There were awkward moments when she was introduced to new people at Yin Yang, where she often hung out in the evenings. Yin Yang was in Basantapur Chowk, opposite the old palace with its tall tower. It was a popular joint, always packed, and a large metal yin-yang sign welcomed customers at the entrance. The reaction to Sofi’s Nepali name was initially confusion: people thought it was an Italian name. Once understanding dawned, some chose to mock her, some told her it was a put-on. “Sounds phony,” an English girl said.

A bald, muscular man who worked at the American embassy—he was rumored to be a spy with the CIA—was argumentative. One day over beers in Yin Yang he asked what she hoped to accomplish by rejecting her American identity.

“I just love this country,” she said. A former Marine, this man’s biceps were pronounced as his elbows rested on the table. Every now and then, he clenched his fist so that his muscles bulged more. He was a contrast to the thin, weak-looking men in long shirts around them. He was not well liked among the regulars here, as he was loud and aggressive. “Establishment,” they called him, but he appeared to relish frequenting Yin Yang, and occasionally he bought food and drinks for everyone at his table.

“What is wrong with you?” he asked, then paused to accept the chillum someone passed on from the next table. There were low tables scattered throughout Yin Yang, where customers, both local youth and hippies, sat on the floor. He took a deep drag and offered it to Sofi, who shook her head. She tried to recall how she ended up with him: She had smoked some ganja in her room, then had meandered through the streets, stopping for coffee in the Cosmopolitan, which was on the second floor with windows that overlooked the Basantapur area. She’d watched peddlers try to sell their small trinkets to cash-strapped hippies, followed the movements of a cow with a bell hanging from its neck. A lone dog trotted by, briefly paused for some thinking, then resumed his gait. Across the square, she saw people in the small windows of the tall temple whose name she couldn’t remember.

She didn’t recall how long she sat at the window of the Cosmopolitan—Stevie Nicks’s raspy voice on the stereo filled her consciousness—then she was downstairs and now in Yin Yang with the bald man. He’s a drag, she kept thinking about him—Mac? Mitt?—and there was no reason why she should allow herself to be bullied by him. She looked around the room. A low hum rose from the other conversations, occasionally punctuated by laughter. Today no one she knew was here.

“Sofi,” Mac or Mitt said with emphasis. He reached out to grab her hands across the table. “You need to get a grip on yourself.”

“My name is Sukumari, man,” she said. She tried to pry her hands away, but his fingers were thick as cucumbers.

“I will not call you Shuka—whatever.” He lowered his voice, part threat, part caress. “I like your real name. Sofi. It’s American, with a European flavor. You should be proud of your heritage. Why are you so bent on going native on us?”

“What is it to you what I do?” she asked, helpless and angry. “Stop trying to be my father, dude.”

Not letting her hand go, he stared at her. “Sofi, Sofi, what should I do with you?” He arose and came over to her side and slid next to her, his body quickly pressed against hers. She looked around to see if she could call anyone she knew. She was familiar with the owner, but today he wasn’t around. Mac or Mitt put his arms around her and clasped her tight. “I can’t simply let you waste away your life among these—these filthy—wastes of humanity.” By now he was whispering in her ear. She felt his hot breath and a quick lick on her earlobe. No one in Yin Yang was paying attention to them. A cloud of smoke twirled in the room—a pungent mixture of hash and thick incense. A couple slowly swayed to Cat Stevens in the middle of the room, the girl’s hair hiding her face. A bearded man was slouched against the wall in the corner, eyes closed, his mouth half open. A uniformed waiter was standing in the corner, looking bored.

Sofi was caught in the man’s grip, and there was nothing she could do. Inwardly she cried out for Sahuni, and the fact that she didn’t think of her mother in Coshocton made her realize how far she’d traveled from who she was. She was not even a part of this— Yin Yang’s—world anymore. These people were lost in a Shangri-la that didn’t exist.

“I’m going to fuck you today,” Mac or Mitt whispered. He pulled her up with his arm, threw some money on the table for their beer, and nudged her out of the restaurant. In the glaring sunlight outside, he sniffed her and said, “You’ve even begun to smell like a Nepali.” He hailed a taxi and gently pushed her in. “Maharajgunj,” he told the taxi driver, then spoke to him in rapid Nepali. Sofi caught the word hippie and something that sounded like chick but was not an English word, she could tell. It sounded more like chickney. The driver grinned at her in the rearview mirror.

Mac or Mitt lived near the embassy in a gated house with two Nepali servants, young, good-looking, soft-faced boys. As he took her to his room, she knew that these boys were a part of his personal harem.

She trudged back to Freak Street in a daze that night, her hair in disarray and her clothes smelling of sex. It’s rape. This thought crossed her mind, but she wasn’t sure it actually was. At any point in the evening she could have left: when Mac or Mitt began talking to her aggressively in Yin Yang, when he slid over to her seat, when they stood to leave that hashish den, even when the taxi stopped in front of his house opposite the embassy. But she hadn’t left. When he pulled down her underwear and mounted her and began to rock to and fro, she swayed with his rhythm, as though urging him on. She gasped and whimpered and cried out; she might even have had an orgasm.

But she knew that she’d gone along with Mac or Mitt only because she wanted to be done with it. Quickly. She wanted Sofi to be a thing of her past.

Sukumari

She didn’t emerge from her room for three days. She didn’t smoke. In fact, she made a vow that she was not going to smoke again. It was all this nonstop smoking that was screwing with her mind.

Sahuni was worried. Every few hours she rapped on Sukumari’s door. “Suku, Suku, what is going on? Are you ill?”

The son translated, “Suku, Suku, health okay?”

On the second day of Sukumari’s self-imprisonment, Sahuni and her son heard a faint answer to their queries. “I am fine,” she said. “I just need to rest.”

The son translated for his mother, and Sahuni said, “A crazy girl she is. She hasn’t eaten for days.”

But on the third morning, Sukumari did come down, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, her eyes thoughtful, unsmiling. She wore a dhoti given to her by Sahuni a while back, one she hadn’t worn until now.

“La hera,” Sahuni said. “She looks like a pukka Nepali girl now. Only the skin is white. You must be hungry! What happened to you? Did someone do something to you? Bad news from home?”

Sukumari put her head on Sahuni’s shoulder, which was slightly awkward as she was half a foot taller than Sahuni.

“Ke bhayo?” Sahuni asked. “What is wrong with my chhori? Everything all right?”

Tears streamed down Sukumari’s face, and Sahuni wiped it. She made Sukumari sit at a table in the eatery. “What would my chhori like to eat? You must eat something. Otherwise you can’t go.”

“Sahuni,” Sukumari said. “Ma maas ko bara khanccha.”

Sahuni laughed. “It makes me so happy to hear my chhori speak Nepali. But you are my daughter now, so what is this ‘Sahuni, Sahuni’ business? Am I still a shopkeeper to you? You have to address me as Ma.”

“Ma,” Sukumari said, unable to stop her tears. “Maas ko bara khanchha.”

So Ma cooked the lentil fritters for Sukumari, who ate them hungrily. The boy came from inside the sleeping quarters, and he started laughing.

“Idiot!” Ma said. “What’s so funny?”

The boy pointed at Sukumari. “She! She’s funny! Look at her. She a kuiriney hippie, but she thinks she’s Nepali.” He did a brief dance and sang, “I am a kuiriney hippie keti, but I like to act Nepali.”

Both Sukumari and Ma laughed. The boy, whose name was Rajesh but who called himself Rajesh Khanna after the screen superstar, rubbed his belly and said, “I’m hungry, Ma. What are you cooking?”

“This is maas ko bara for your sister.” Ma asked Sukumari to hold out her plate for more, but as soon as she ladled a steaming bara onto Sukumari’s plate, Rajesh Khanna snatched it and ran out the door.

“Stop! Thief!” Sukumari shouted in English and chased after him. Speedily, Rajesh Khanna ran through the alley, and with equal vigor Sukumari chased him, the boy biting on the bara whenever he could. The boy took a left on the main street, toward Basantapur, and the early morning shoppers looked at the duo in amazement: a chubby Nepali boy being hotly and breathlessly pursued by a kuiriney wearing a stay-at-home dhoti and shouting, alternatively in English and Nepali, “Thief! Thief! Chor!”

Sukumari avoided Freak Street. She mentally divided the neighborhood into Freak Street, where all the hippies and the tourists hung out, and Jhonchhe, which was a little bit inside and where she lived with Ma and Baba and Rajesh Khanna. This was not accurate, she knew, because the main street that opened to the chowk and the tower, was actually Jhonchhe in the Newari language. But the geographical division inside her own mind provided her some solace. She practiced saying “Jhonchhe” with determination until it stopped sounding odd, and the locals no longer looked at her in confusion. When she had to go to the Maru Ganesh vegetable market, she took a circuitous route through Jaisedeval and avoided Freak Street. If she encountered tourists or hippies, she kept her gaze averted, or didn’t smile if her eyes met theirs. When she needed to go to New Road or Indrachowk, she circled around through Pako.

One day a former Yin Yang friend meandered into her path near where she lived. James from Minneapolis had spent a few months in jail in Indonesia for smuggling drugs and had now opened up a chakra studio in Thamel. He was an incredibly thin man, with shoulder blades that jutted out of the loose kurta he wore. He was startled to run into her, and although she tried to pretend that she hadn’t seen him, he leaped in front of her, blocked her path, and exclaimed, “Sofi! Sofi! Man, what happened to you?” And he laughed, slapping his thighs and hooting.

“Nothing happened to me,” she said in a clipped voice.

“But . . . but . . .” James searched for words.

“And you know very well that my name is Sukumari now.”

James turned somber. “I’m sorry, I apologize. I shouldn’t be laughing, but dude, this is a drastic change.”

Sukumari didn’t want the attention on herself, so she asked him how his chakra work was going, and the two chatted about James’s “healing” practice.

“You should come by,” James said. “I’ll align your chakra, man. I have some good bud from Thailand.”

“I no longer smoke.” She had fought off the urges. There were days when she would have killed for a high, but she reminded herself that she was no longer Sofi, reminded herself of what happened to Sofi with Mac or Mitt, and gradually, over days, her cravings diminished. Whenever she experienced cravings, she popped a betel nut into her mouth, which Ma also relished and chewed on all day.

James seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. “You live around here somewhere, don’t you?”

Sukumari became anxious that he might invite himself to her place, so she said that she was now living and teaching in a school in Jawalakhel.

“But I heard that you are living above that restaurant.”

“I gotta go,” Sukumari said, and moved away from him. She slipped into an alley, then took narrower alleys until she was out of his reach.

The encounter with James left her depressed. It was as though her stupid past was determined not to leave her, no matter how hard she tried to leave it. She thought about her parents back in Coshocton—the name of her hometown sounded even stranger to her now, like the name of a distant galaxy. Her mother must be wondering what had happened to her. Sukumari hadn’t been to the post office in Dharahara to send her a postcard for weeks now. Her mother was not the worrying kind; one of her favorite songs was, “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be.” She began humming it once she began on her gin and tonic every afternoon, a ritual that lasted late into the night. When he was not with his patients, Sukumari’s father spent most of his time on his boat on Lake Erie.

The memories of her parents came to Sukumari as though they were characters from a novel set in a remote culture. When Rajesh Khanna plied her with questions about America, she was increasingly unable, and often unwilling, to answer them. It felt like such a long time ago since she’d left America, even though it’d only been about six months since she’d boarded the plane to Amsterdam from Detroit. She now found her previous name odd, and when she whispered it to herself, it sounded like the name of a furniture brand. She tried to remember what her childhood was like, but all she saw was a blonde girl whose emotions and concerns appeared unreal to her.

• • •

Ma had her move into the room below where the family slept and lived. The room was next to the eatery and was the same size as her previous room, except upstairs it had been only Sofi, and downstairs in the same space it was the four of them: Ma, Baba, Rajesh Khanna, and now Sukumari. She had wanted to continue living upstairs so she could pay Ma the monthly rent. But Ma said that Sukumari was her daughter now, so she couldn’t accept lodging expenses from her. “It’s simply not done in our society.” Ma was adamant about this, so finally one day Sukumari moved downstairs, fully recognizing that she was adding to the cramped living conditions below. But it would also mean that Ma would be able to rent the upstairs room to someone else, and there was solace in that.

Ma put down a mattress next to their existing mattress on the floor, and now the four of them slept together, the two males at the ends and the females in the middle. Rajesh Khanna was delighted to be sleeping with Sukumari nearby but was not happy when Sukumari tickled him in the morning to wake him up.

Sukumari’s Nepali gradually improved; now she was able to converse haltingly with Ma without Rajesh Khanna’s help. The mother and the daughter, when the restaurant closed in the afternoon, talked for long hours. Ma told her stories about her past, her own mother who had passed away when she was a young girl, how her father brought in a stepmother who mistreated Ma and her siblings. Ma especially talked at length of one of her sisters, the oldest one, now dead, who had remained strong and protective while they lived under the abuse of their stepmother. Ma shed a few tears, and Sukumari wiped them away. “It’s very hard for me to let go of people I love,” Ma said. “And now that I have a daughter in you, I pray that nothing will keep us apart. I want to take care of you, I want to see you get married, I want to hold your babies and play with them.”

Sukumari blushed.

“What?” Ma said. “Don’t think that you’ll be able to avoid the marriage question for long. No daughter of mine will remain a budhi kanya.”

“Budhi kanya?”

It look a while for Ma to get the concept of “old virgin” across to Sukumari, who laughed once she understood. But she secretly cherished the idea of remaining an old maid in Ma’s house. In this culture, old people stayed with their children and often were taken care of and loved, and she looked forward to spending time with Ma and Baba as they aged, making sure that her brother Rajesh Khanna became college educated and married a nice girl from a good family. She was already beginning to think like a Nepali, but she couldn’t imagine herself getting married and going to live in her husband’s house, living apart from Ma and Baba and Rajesh Khanna. This was her home now, this small house in this narrow alley in Jhonchhe. She had not known that this type of happiness was even possible, this deep belonging. She was already twice removed—twice reincarnated! There was the Sofi who grew up sulkily in Coshocton, then the carefree hippie Sofi who lived in a cloud of smoke in Yin Yang, who pumped her body full of acid and hash, and now the clean Sukumari who spoke Nepali and performed household chores with Ma and tutored Rajesh Khanna in English and served customers chhoila and kachila and raksi. It was as though she had moved to a space that made her former lives empty and superficial, like they were fascinating but ultimately useless dreams.

The guest who ended up moving into Sofi’s previous room was not a hippie but a Nepali man by the name of Manandhar. Sukumari soon found out that it was not his first name but his last, that somehow he had always been called Manandhar. He was a relative of Ma, her aunt’s sister-in-law’s brother, and he had returned to the city after working on a highway in the east. “I don’t like him one bit,” Ma said. “But what to do? He’s a relative, and he says he wants to stay close to the family as he builds a house in the city.”

“So he’s staying for free?”

“I told him that I couldn’t take him because that room is only for foreigners, and that I couldn’t charge rent to a relative, but he has insisted on paying rent. And he’s insisted on paying me more than the regular rent.”

“Eh, ramro!” Sukumari exclaimed. It was a favorite word of hers now, ramro—good, beautiful, nice—as it bestowed approval on everything.

“I don’t know, Suku. I bet you it’s not honest money. I bet you that man didn’t work honestly wherever he was. The sooner he leaves this place, the happier I’ll be.”

Manandhar came down to eat twice a day: in the morning when the family ate in the eatery, and in the evening with the customers. Ma served him with great strain on her face. He was polite, didn’t speak much except to say a word or two to Rajesh Khanna, and quickly returned upstairs. He barely acknowledged Sukumari. He appeared aware of Ma’s disapproval of him. Most of the time he was not in his room, but occasionally Sukumari saw him smoking a cigarette at the top of the staircase, gazing into the distance. It was hard to tell how old he was. Judging from his years of work on the highway, he should have been in his early thirties, yet he appeared younger, with a lock of hair boyishly covering his forehead that he didn’t bother to brush back.

Rajesh Khanna brought the news one morning that Manandhar was gravely ill. The boy said he had gone upstairs for something (Sukumari suspected that the man gave him money for candy) and found him hacking and coughing and delirious.

“I guess I should go up,” Ma said. It was the day of the Shivaratri festival, and she had just bathed and put on fresh clothes to visit the Pashupatinath temple.

“Ma, why don’t I go up so you can go to the temple?” Sukumari said.

Ma didn’t think it was a good idea, but Sukumari said that it’d be okay.

“All right,” Ma said. “Just see what’s wrong with him, and maybe take him some soup. Don’t linger for too long.”

After Ma left, Sukumari went up and gingerly opened the door, wishing that Rajesh Khanna had accompanied her and not disappeared to play with his friends. Manandhar was lying in bed, his head propped up on the pillow behind him. His eyes were squeezed shut, and his face was red. He didn’t show awareness at her entry, but when she sat next to him, a soft moan escaped his lips.

“Ke bhayo?” Sukumari asked, and realized how silly it was to ask what had happened to a feverishly ill man. So, she asked a question that sounded more logical. “Are you hungry?”

Manandhar opened his eyes, only slightly, and a word escaped his lips that she took to mean paani.

She found a jug with water on the table that was against the window, but it was old water, with a fly floating on the surface. “One minute,” she said and, suddenly hot and in a hurry, ran down to the kitchen, where she poured some water from the large gagro into a jug, then had a second thought, and boiled that water before she took it up. But the water was too hot, so she blew on it to cool it, then fed it to him with a spoon.

Still delirious, he called her “Auntie,” obviously thinking she was Ma. She touched his forehead: he was burning. She didn’t have a thermometer on her, and she wasn’t sure there was one downstairs, but she knew that she needed to administer cold presses on him immediately. She fetched some cold water along with a handkerchief and applied the wetted handkerchief to his forehead until his body began to cool. When he fell asleep, she went down to make soup.

When she came back up, he was sitting up, propped against the pillow. “Where is Auntie?” he asked weakly.

“She has gone to Pashupatinath for Shivaratri. You must be hungry, so I brought some soup.”

She set the bowl of soup on the floor, hoping he’d pick it up. When he didn’t, she said, “You should have the soup. It’ll make you feel better.”

He winced as he shifted; it was clear that even sitting up was hard for him, and after a while he started breathing heavily.

“Shall I feed you?” she asked.

He closed his eyes.

She sat near the bed and began to feed him the soup with a spoon. “La, aan gara!” she commanded him to open his mouth, like she’d seen Ma command Rajesh Khanna, who was still fed by his mother. Sukumari found it endearing how in this culture even kids who were seven or eight years old were fed by their mothers. On the street Sukumari frequently stopped to observe mothers feeding their children in the sun, asking them to do “aan” and inserting dal-bhat into their wide mouths. In the US, even as early as elementary school, she had to come home and make her own sandwiches. On those days her mother was too tired or drunk (or both) to cook dinner, Sofi would find a note posted on the fridge: Fend for yourself.

It occurred to Sukumari now that it was more about the attention than about the food.

In between feeding Manandhar, she wiped his chin with the end of her dhoti. When he didn’t open his lips, she gently coaxed him. He soon became tired of eating and closed his eyes, falling into a somnambulant state. Yet his right hand clasped hers, unwilling to let her go. She watched his face. He had a mustache, like many Nepali men, and a stubble of beard because he hadn’t shaved recently. His eyebrows were thick (bushy, she thought), and yet he had a long, slender face. His lips, even in sickness, were rosy and full. Before she knew what was happening, she leaned over and kissed him. She quickly unclasped his hand and stood, holding her breath to see if he’d open his eyes. When he didn’t, she exited the room.

Once downstairs, to calm herself she began to tidy up the restaurant, which she usually did after the morning customers left. I could use a hit right now. This thought possessed her for about ten seconds with an aggression that made her tremble a bit. She closed her eyes and squashed the thought—she had no intentions of bringing back Sofi—and swept the floor of the shop with renewed ferocity.

Ma returned in the early afternoon, sweating. It was an unusually warm day for February, she said, and the crowd at the temple was large beyond belief. The line to get a darshan of shivalinga crawled at a snail’s pace, she complained. She put the prasad tika on Sukumari’s forehead, inquired about Manandhar. Sukumari told her about how she’d nursed him.

“Now I guess we’re expected to bring him back to health?” Ma said.

“He’s very sick, Ma.”

Reluctantly Ma went up, then returned in about half an hour and busied herself in the sleeping quarters. After some time, Sukumari approached her and asked, “How is he, Ma?”

“He still has a fever. If he doesn’t get better by evening, I’ll go fetch the compounder.”

Manandhar didn’t get better by evening, and Ma, muttering, went to get the compounder. Throughout the time that the compounder and Ma were upstairs, Sukumari stayed below. She’d wanted to go up with them, but had received a warning glance from Ma. Her arms wrapped around herself, Sukumari waited anxiously for them to come down. She didn’t understand her emotions. As Sofi she had known enough men in her life, slept with several of them at Oberlin, then throughout her travels, and now she was acting like a truly Nepali girl, untouched, with a tender heart.

“No need for you to go upstairs now,” Ma told her after the compounder left with his medicine bag. The compounder had given Manandhar, who was diagnosed as having caught the flu, an injection and some medicines. “He’ll be fine now, so no need to administer to him.” There was a hint of warning in her voice. Did Ma have sensors? Did she know the pleasurable thoughts that were cruising through Sukumari’s mind when she focused on Manandhar?

The next morning when Ma wasn’t home, Sukumari sneaked upstairs, her heart thudding. His eyes were closed, but he opened them when he heard her enter. “Sukumari,” he whispered when she went to him. Her name sounded good on his lips—the lips she’d kissed. His eyes, she thought, conveyed to her that he knew what she’d done.

“Come, sit here,” he said, patting the floor beside him.

“I came to check how you were.”

“I’ll be better once you sit here with me.”

She sat next to him, and his hand searched for hers, found it, and clasped it. “I was sure I was dying.”

“You shouldn’t say such things.”

“Are you from America?”

“Ma Nepali keti.”

He observed her. He was not afraid to simply keep looking, and she couldn’t counter his gaze, so she looked down. When she glanced up again, she noticed how full and rosy his lips were. “Yes, you are a Nepali,” he said. “So beautiful. So . . .” His finger reached her face and stroked it. “So—fair and angel-like.” He fingered her hair. “Like gold.”

Whenever an opportunity presented itself, Sukumari crept upstairs to be with Manandhar. It took him another week to recover fully, but by the end of that week they had already made love. It had startled her, the quickness with which she’d allowed it. She’d never experienced anything this intense. It was as if all the light of this world had gathered to bathe them together. With Manandhar she couldn’t separate her body from her emotions, couldn’t separate their limb-to-limb entanglements from the cry that seemed to emanate from her depth. Sukumari was reminded of the city temples that showed carvings of couples in various carnal positions, in a union that was both physical and spiritual, a spiritual merging. She understood this art now, further convincing her that she was indeed Sukumari who belonged to this culture, this thinking, this worldview.

One day as she was tiptoeing down the stairs from Manandhar’s room, she was alarmed to find Ma at the bottom, glaring at her. It was inevitable: she was actually surprised at how she’d been able to hide her liaison with Manandhar from Ma for weeks. She’d tried to be very discreet, had even acted dismissively when Manandhar’s name had come up, as though she shared Ma’s disapproval of him.

A big argument ensued, her first fight with Ma and her first fight entirely in the Nepali language. Luckily the quarrel took place behind closed doors in the sleeping quarters below, so Manandhar couldn’t hear what was being said. Ma demanded to know what Sukumari was doing in Manandhar’s room. At first Sukumari denied anything was happening. “I was only checking on him to see if he needed anything,” she repeatedly said, her face red with shame. Had her American mother in Coshocton confronted her like this, Sofi would have lashed out, told her to fuck off.

“I know all about it,” Ma said. “Rajesh saw you two.” Ma was the only one who refused to call her son Rajesh Khanna. He didn’t need to be anyone else, movie star or sweeper, she said.

Gradually, in tears, Sukumari admitted that she and Manandhar were in love. She used the Nepali word prem, which was slightly formal.

“Prem?” Ma asked. “How can you be in love with someone in two weeks?”

“I know what I feel, Ma.”

“That bastard! I knew he’d pull a stunt like this.”

“Ma, he didn’t do anything!”

But Ma was already out of the room and bounding up the stairs.

Sukumari sat in the sleeping quarters. Rajesh Khanna approached her fearfully. “I didn’t want to tell Ma anything, didi, but she slapped me.”

“You scoundrel!” Sukumari twisted his ear, then, seeing that he was in tears, embraced him. “What did you see?” she whispered.

“You and Manandhar dai, in bed, kissing.”

“Okay, okay.”

Ma came down in about fifteen minutes, but she refused to speak to Sukumari and began sweeping the eatery. Sukumari addressed her a couple of times, but Ma didn’t look at her, and with a helpless sigh, Sukumari sat in front of the stove to cook. That evening the shop was especially busy, and Sukumari kept hoping that Manandhar would come down to eat. But he didn’t. After the shop closed, she considered going up, but it was too risky. Ma’s anger hadn’t subsided; she still refused to look at Sukumari.

That night, squeezed between Ma’s broad back and Rajesh Khanna’s scrawny body, Sukumari wondered whether Manandhar, who was right above the ceiling, was pining for her like she was for him. She recalled their sweat-filled lovemaking—it was hot upstairs in his room—and felt an arousal that was clearly inappropriate with Ma and Rajesh Khanna next to her. Yet her hand danced down to her belly. She remembered Manandhar’s breath in her ear. “Mero gori Sukumari,” he called her. My fair virgin.

She kept her hand on her belly. There was something growing inside her, a seed of some sort, deep in her stomach. Manandhar’s seed, she was sure of it.

The next morning when she went up, Manandhar’s room was empty. Panicked, she informed Ma, who refused to meet her gaze. Tears came to Sukumari’s eyes. “Why did you do it?” she asked. “Don’t you love me anymore?”

Ma finally stopped sweeping to look at her. “I love you more than a girl born out of my own womb.”

“I bet you if I was your real daughter, you wouldn’t have betrayed me.”

A flicker of something passed through Ma’s eyes, a wounding, which was exactly what Sukumari wanted. She couldn’t help what came out of her mouth next: “You did this because you are not my real mother.”

Ma dropped the broom on the floor and walked out of the restaurant into the alley. Rajesh Khanna, who had been watching the entire exchange, asked, “Where is Ma going? Now who is going to open the shop?” He turned to Sukumari for answers, but Sukumari silently went in to fetch her purse. Baba was sitting on the bed, his shawl wrapped around him even though it wasn’t cold, and he waved Sukumari over. He was usually bedridden, and his speech had slowed down the past month or so. “Ke bhayo?” he asked. “Ama chhori kina jhagada gareko? Jhagada garnu hunna.”

She found herself unable to speak to Baba, so she picked up her bag, which had her sunglasses, some money, a lipstick, and a comb, and she left the house.

• • •

She needed to find Manandhar. Where could he be? She knew he didn’t have any friends in the city—he had told her so. All of his friends had scattered, he’d said, to different parts of the country or even abroad. “You’re my only friend here, my kuiriney.” She had liked the idea of being his only friend. She, too, didn’t have any friends anymore.

She remembered a name Manandhar had mentioned, Ramesh Khatry, a contractor he knew from the east who had invited him to live with him. “He has a big house in Baneswor,” Manandhar had said, “but now I have my kuiriney here, and I don’t want to leave her.”

In Baneswor it was not hard to locate Ramesh Khatry’s house. He was a well-known figure, “moneyed,” as a man at the nearby shop where she inquired told her in a tone of disapproval. The house was gated, with a guard who asked her what her business was. She told him she was looking for Manandhar. The guard spoke on the phone, and shortly Manandhar appeared at the balcony, looking sleepy. When he saw her, he told the guard to send her up.

A large, shaggy dog came sniffing as she entered the front door, frightening her, but she squelched her fear and climbed the stairs. Manandhar was lying on a sheetless mattress on the floor upstairs. The room was bare except for the mattress and a Bruce Lee poster on the wall, the one with finger scratches on the actor’s tummy. The entire house felt kind of big and . . . empty. “Hello, my love,” Manandhar said in English, smiling at her as she stood in the doorway. A bottle of vodka was next to the bed.

“I am sorry for what Ma said to you.” Sukumari went and sat with him in the bed, leaning against him.

“Poor Auntie. She’s so wrapped up in her tiny world.” He was slurring. The vodka bottle was nearly empty. “Her little shop, her small family, her little Jhonchhe. I can only wish the best for her.”

She lay her head on his lap. “I will persuade Ma. Once her anger dies down, she’ll listen to me.”

He stroked her head. “And what will my kuiriney hippie say to her ma?”

“I’ll tell her that you and I are meant to be together, that we want to—” She regarded his face, his glassy eyes, the trace of a smile on his luscious lips. He was waiting for her to complete her sentence. “I’ll tell her that we want to be together, that I want you back in Jhonchhe, in that room upstairs.”

He continued to smile.

“I’ll persuade her to allow me to live with you upstairs.”

“And we can pretend we’re in America. In Coshi . . . Cosho . . . in Kashikoton.” He chuckled.

“I no longer think about America.”

“Why don’t you think about America?” Manandhar asked. “Everyone thinks about America. New York, ‘Hotel California,’ Robert Redford, Saturday Night Fever.” He finished drinking the remainder of the vodka, then said, “You really think your ma will allow you to live with me?”

“Maybe not immediately, but given time, I can persuade her. She has a soft heart when it comes to me.”

A look of mischief passed over his face.

“Manandhar!” she said. “It’s true. She loves me. I am her chhori!”

“Do you really believe that? Do you really, really, really believe that you are her daughter?”

“My name is Sukumari. I am born and raised in Jhonchhe. I am Ma’s daughter. I have a brother named Rajesh Khanna.”

“You must be a white pari who’s dropped down from heaven.” He extracted a cigarette from its pack and lit it. He blew the smoke to the ceiling and said, “There can’t be any talk of me returning to Jhonchhe now.”

“Why not?”

“Khatry wants me to live here. I had been planning on moving anyway, even before Auntie discovered our little thing.”

For a moment she couldn’t speak. Then she said softly, “You never said that you were thinking about leaving. You said we were meant to be together.”

He smoked.

“So,” she said. Her throat had filled up, and she eyed the vodka bottle, wishing there was a mouthful left for her to swallow, even though she’d never been too fond of alcohol, especially hard liquor.

“Stay with me here,” Manandhar said, waving his arm to indicate the large room.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Then, a loud voice boomed in English, “So the guard tells me we have a special American guest.” Khatry appeared at the door, carrying a briefcase. He was a short, stocky man in a safari suit. He took off his shoes at the door, placed them neatly to the side, and entered. He sat next to Sukumari and Manandhar with an ease that suggested that he’d known both of them for ages. “Sukumari,” he said. “Beautiful name, beautiful name. The delicate virgin.”

“Ramesh is an old friend of mine,” Manandhar said, waving this cigarette.

“You said you had no friends in the city,” Sukumari said.

“I’m his friend, but only when he needs me,” Khatry said. “Otherwise, I’m his servant—no, no, what’s the word? A butler.”

“No, he’s Richie Rich, and I’m his butler Cadbury,” Manandhar said.

Khatry opened his briefcase and removed a plastic bag filled with chunks of hash. “Now this is a friend that’ll never betray you.” He took out a few cigarettes from Manandhar’s pack and with expert fingers emptied them of their tobacco. Quickly he began stuffing them with the hash. Its smell was sharp, dangerous. “Sukumari, are you here to live with us?”

“I will return to Jhonchhe shortly.”

Khatry spread his arms wide. “Why? I have plenty of space here.” He paused stuffing the cigarettes and flung open his suitcase. “And plenty of bread.” The suitcase was filled with cash. “Isn’t that what you hippies call money? Bread? Pauroti.”

Manandhar laughed. Khatry finished rolling, and handed a cigarette to Manandhar, who took it, and another to Sukumari, who refused.

“Arre!” Khatry said. “What’s wrong? This is the best stuff around. From the mountains of Pakistan.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“I thought all hippies smoked.”

“I am not a hippie.”

Khatry smiled a kind, repentant smile, then stroked her bare arms and said, “Of course, you are our delicate Nepali virgin girl. Sukumari.”

Smoke filled the room, occupying every available space, reminding her so much of Yin Yang, where the music on the stereo always sounded like it was part of her own consciousness—Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Janis Joplin. Something was beginning to vibrate inside her, as though a bone in her chest was on its way to becoming loose. She closed her eyes. The hash smelled good, really good. But I won’t, I won’t, she told herself.

She felt Manandhar’s face near hers, and, her eyes still closed as she parted her lips to receive his kiss, he injected her with a dollop of smoke he’d been holding in his mouth. Before she knew what was happening, she’d swallowed more than half of it. The sweetish taste of the hashish seeped into her throat, her gullet, and sputtering, she was about to protest when his lips sealed hers. And she just let him, just let him kiss because it seemed to her that this was what she’d been missing all along.

Manandhar placed the joint to her lips, and she sucked on it, thinking, Only this time, it won’t hurt, just once, just today, then once I return to Jhonchhe, everything will be all right. Ma, I miss you, Ma, I swear I won’t do it again, Ma, I’m sorry, Ma. And she sucked on the joint deeply so it went straight to her belly, to her solar plexus, her chakra. I’ll have James, poor, sweet hippie, do chakra work on me so that I am perfectly aligned, so I am clearheaded, so I won’t fall into this trap again. A trap! A trap! Yes, this was a trap. Some of the earlier hurt had now dissolved, but there was still something, a pit of melancholy into which she’d fallen.

“So fair, isn’t she?” It was Ramesh Khatry’s voice. He was lying next to her, running his finger gently on the surface of her arm. “Like cream, like milk. Dudh jasto gori.”

Her throat was parched, so when Manandhar lifted her head a bit and put a bottle to her mouth, she thought it was water and drank, but it was vodka. Where did it come from? Did Khatry’s briefcase have more surprises?

Khatry was speaking to her, in a soft voice from far away. “Delicate virgin, delicate virgin, where are you? Are you with me, angel? Are you here on this earth?”

Someone laughed. It could have been Manandhar, or it could have been her. The lap on which her head rested now was smaller: Khatry’s lap. She forced her eyes open. Manandhar wasn’t in the room. But he was in her mind, wasn’t he? He was in her soul. Her soul.

Ramesh Khatry didn’t have any shirt on. His chest was like a jungle, and she could see each hair and thought she could even detect each hair follicle. It’s a jungle out there—this thought, in the shape of a grinning monkey, floated by lazily through her consciousness.

Ramesh Khatry leaned over her, his moving mouth inches above hers. “I have never tasted a kuiriney before,” he was saying.

Sukumari sat in Cosmopolitan restaurant, watching the Basantapur chowk. Her mind was still dull from last night’s smoking and drinking. She didn’t recall how she got to Basantapur; she remembered an altercation with the guard at Khatry’s place because he was trying to prevent her from leaving. Then the next thing she knew, she was in Freak Street in the early hours of the morning, even before the sun was out. A fog had enveloped the area. She must have vomited once or twice by the side of the road, but she didn’t return to Ma. She wandered around the Durbar Square area, took a small nap in the Kasthamandap temple, where an old man was playing the harmonium and singing some hymns.

Around eight o’clock, she trudged back toward Jhonchhe, but she was too weepy to return home, so she walked up to the Cosmopolitan. She was aware of how she must have appeared to the man who had just opened the restaurant: smelling of pot, her hair uncombed, her face unwashed, wandering through life in a daze, like any other hippie who passed through Freak Street on a journey from somewhere to somewhere.