Arresting God in Kathmandu (12 page)

“So, how is your wife?” the friend asked, chuckling.

“She has a lover,” Ganesh said, attempting to be grave, but somehow laughter rose from his throat. His friend stared at him for a moment; then he, too, broke into a smile. They both fell into a fit, stamping their feet and spilling drinks on the table. And suddenly, as if the laughter had been a necessary prelude, Ganesh found himself crying. The customers stared in his direction, and the owner came over to ask whether he was all right.

Ganesh simply shook his head and repeated, “How could she do this?”

After he calmed down, he and his friend talked about the festival of Dashain, only a few weeks away, when they would slaughter goats as sacrifice to appease the Goddess Durga. “I wonder how many of them I can slaughter,” Ganesh said. “The last time, I killed four before I had enough.”

The friend called for more drinks.

“I can’t drink anymore,” Ganesh said. His stomach was burning, and the room had become hazy.

“Mama’s boy,” his friend said, laughing. “I thought you were stronger than this.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What? You’re a mama’s boy.”

“Really?” he said. “You want to see how much I can drink?” He asked the owner to bring another jar of the local liquor, and he drank, his eyes on his friend, who was now having a hard time keeping up with him. “So, who’s a mama’s boy?” he said. “Huh? Tell me, bastard.” His throat and his belly were on fire, but he kept drinking and needling his friend, who finally said, “All right, all right. I take it back.”

The hours passed, and they were the only customers in the bar, so they staggered out, clapping each other’s back and singing songs of friendship. The street lights shone on them, exposing their delirious faces. When they saw a wedding procession on the way home, they joined the crowd, dancing behind the band.

His wife didn’t bring him tea the next morning, and Ganesh staggered to the window. There she was, in the courtyard, talking to the bald man, whose back was turned toward him. Ganesh waited, his head throbbing from last night’s alcohol. The man laughed and his wife followed suit, covering her mouth with her hand. She called to one of the kids playing in the courtyard and pointed at the man, who shook his head vigorously and laughed again. Ganesh retreated. He went to the bedroom, where he found some aspirin, and swallowed them without water.

Later, when she came inside, he was lying on the bed, his face toward the wall. She sang in the kitchen, and he listened, trying to detect a new tone, a foreign melody.

She appeared with a glass of tea. “Isn’t it time to wake up now?” she asked him.

He glanced at his watch; it was nearly time to go to the office.

On the bus his mind kept replaying the courtyard scene, and with each repetition he felt tiny stabs in his stomach. He tried to tell himself that she had merely been talking to the man, but an aura of secrecy, of deceit, surrounded the scene, and he could picture them kissing on the bald man’s bed, her fingers feeling his muscles.

At work his friend approached and said, “It was fun last night, eh? I haven’t drunk like that in a long time, not since last year’s festival.” He paused. “What happened? Was your wife angry?”

Ganesh shrugged his shoulders.

“She’ll be all right,” the friend said. “By the time you get home.”

That evening Ganesh went by the pond on the way home. He shivered; it was hard to believe that he actually dived into that dirty water the other night.

It was dark when he reached his house. Walking through the courtyard, he nearly bumped into someone. It was the bald man, his muscular arms shining in the light coming from one of the windows. Ganesh thought, He’s going to kill me. The man’s voice floated toward him in the dark: “I know your wife.”

Ganesh couldn’t see the man’s face; it was half in shadow. “I saw you together,” Ganesh eventually said. “Laughing.” He walked up the stairs to his apartment.

His wife met him at the door. “Who was that man? Was he drunk?”

He answered, “Your lover.”

“Don’t joke. Who was he?”

“No joke,” he said. “You should have told me.”

She turned and walked to the kitchen, and he followed her. “How long has this been going on?” His breath was stuck high in his throat.

Her back to him, she began slicing tomatoes.

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said, his hands shaking. “I won’t get angry. I won’t shout at you. I’ll let you do whatever you want. That way, I may get some peace.”

She uttered a sharp “Aiya” and put her index finger in her mouth. He went to her, pried out the finger, and inspected it. The cut was small, right above the second joint. He fetched the rubbing alcohol and patted her wound. She didn’t look at his face but watched the cut with growing dismay.

“Here. I’ll slice the tomatoes,” he said.

“You are jealous, suspicious. You think I have a lover?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.” He waited for her to say something.

“Would you kill him if you thought he was my lover?”

“Who? The man downstairs?”

She seemed exasperated. “No, no,” she said. “My lover, any lover.” Something occurred to her. “Who was that man downstairs?”

He didn’t answer her and finished cutting the tomatoes.

Dust rose inside the bus, tiny particles glittering in the afternoon sun. The bus lurched toward its destination, the temple of the Goddess Durga on the outskirts of the city. His wife was asleep, her head resting against the window. In front of them sat a man with four hens, their feet tied together. With every jolt, the hens tried to rise in the air, cackling insanely, sending feathers floating up and down the length of the bus. The kohl on his wife’s eyelids trickled down her cheeks. Ganesh smiled and stretched his legs. He looked forward to the ceremony at the temple, where his relatives would ask him to kill goats because he was good at it. And Ganesh would hoist the khukri knife high in the air, its sharpened edge glinting in the dusk, amid the appreciative cries of the onlookers.

Another vision came to him. He was sitting in the middle of a field, his mother in her petticoat leaning over him, smiling and whispering. Blood was running down his nose, soaking the front of his shirt, trickling down his thighs and into the earth, where his friend was waiting with an open tongue. Then his wife leaped out of a photograph and shook her finger at him, and the dancing bald man had a face that looked much like his own. Everything grew silent, a bird cried—and he opened his eyes and looked around. The bus had stopped, caught in a traffic jam.

He was tired, as if he’d been walking for a long time. He woke up his wife.

“What?” she said, her eyes bleary, sweat like dew above her upper lip.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“About what?”

“Whether I can kill a goat today.”

She searched his face. “What’s the matter? You’ve never complained before.”

The hens once again rose in the air and sprayed them with feathers.

“Look,” he said. He lifted his hands. They were shaking.

She picked a feather from his head and ruffled his hair. Then she dabbed the sweat on his cheeks with the end of her sari. “You don’t have to kill a goat if you don’t want to.”

Her hand on his face felt good. “But what will everyone say? They will laugh at me.”

“Who cares?” she said. “What can it do to us?” His eyes dosed; he felt her lips brush against his cheek. “My mama’s boy,” she whispered. “My sweet, sweet mama’s boy.” Now her lips were nibbling at his ear, and he opened his eyes. The man with the hens was staring at them, and he felt embarrassed, but he didn’t stop her; her words were soothing.

The bus came to a stop. They got out, dutching the bundles of rice and fruit they had brought to offer the gods. In front of them was a large field filled with cars and trucks, and, in the distance, the temple’s pagoda.

As they joined the crowd moving toward the temple, some of Ganesh’s fatigue vanished. He stopped to take off his shoes; the grass felt good beneath his feet. He shifted the bundle of rice he was carrying, and as they walked on, he touched his wife’s hand with his free hand. She looked at his face quizzically, then took his hand in hers. The sky was bright blue, and the sun shone on their faces. The temple bells sounded, a dear
ding-dong
that reverberated inside his body, then expanded into their surroundings.

As the crowd around them chanted songs praising the Mother Goddess, he briefly thought of his wife’s lover, but in this crowd, with its fervent devotion, the man had become inconsequential, faceless, dissolving into the crowd in which Ganesh was moving.

T
HE MAN
had been squatting for hours on her front veranda, a besotted smile on his face as he squinted at the sun, but Mohandas, Aunt Shakuntala’s husband, had not yet turned up. Aunt Shakuntala had told the man, “Come back some other time. My husband is not here.” The man merely looked at her, smiled, and did not budge an inch. What kind of a husband was she married to, Aunt Shakuntala thought, who asks people to come, for whatever reason on earth, and vanishes for hours, leaving her with the burden of taking care of them, especially on a Saturday, when everyone else is relaxing? God knows she didn’t have time for this.

Aunt Shakuntala had been raised by parents who doted on her, told her repeatedly that the man she’d marry would be the luckiest husband on earth. Yet here she was, stuck with Mohandas, who was not only indolent but didn’t appreciate her. Hadn’t she given him two fine children, a son and a daughter who were bright, hardworking, and obedient? Didn’t she keep an immaculate house? Hadn’t she gained tremendous respect from neighbors and relatives for the way she handled the household and the way she reared their children? To everyone, old and young alike, she was Aunt Shakuntala.

She brought the man a glass of tea. By this time, his head was in his hands, and he was dozing. “Here.” She set down the glass. “You may as well drink this.” He woke up. She hoped her tone had made it clear that catering to strangers was not exactly what she’d been born to do. The man smiled obsequiously, an ugly mole on his upper lip stretching with his mouth, and raised a hand in gratitude. She told him, “After drinking the tea, you leave.” He beamed.

Mohandas was an irresponsible man. He was lazy, absent-minded, obstinate—an idiot. Yes, he is an idiot, repeated Aunt Shakuntala to herself. A few days ago, he brought home a sadhu, a Shiva devotee, whom he’d found wandering around, and put him up in the living room for a week. The sadhu, smelling of old clothes and ashes, lay sprawled on the sofa all day, stroking his long black beard. He asked Aunt Shakuntala for tea and sweets, and when she confronted Mohandas, all he said was: “The holy man has no place to live. What’s the harm in giving him a roof for a while?” She replied that she wasn’t born to cater to strangers, and he told her, “You need some compassion in your heart.” Last year, when it was announced that three clerks in the government bank where Mohandas worked were to be promoted, he did not go to the local district officer, a distant cousin of hers, who could have exerted influence in the matter. He kept putting it off, making excuses like “Today I have a headache” or “I think he’ll be very busy today.” When the final announcement was made, and Mohandas wasn’t one of those promoted, he merely commented, “Oh, well, my time will come,” stretched, yawned, and went to the local tea shop to talk with the idlers who stayed there all day, smoking their cigarettes.

This man on the veranda had shown up at her house a few days ago, speaking very little but smiling profusely, and Mohandas had given him a few rupees. In answer to Aunt Shakuntala, Mohandas explained that the man came from a few towns over, that he was one of those fixed features of the street you find in every small town. His nickname was Lamfu, which meant
stupid,
a name someone had cruelly thrown at him in childhood because he showed signs of being retarded.

Lamfu was one of the numerous jobless men her husband befriended on the streets, invited to the house, and tried to find a job for, as if all he had to do was raise a finger and work would appear. His own job as a clerk in the government office did not carry prestige (it would have, Aunt Shakuntala thought, had he hustled to get that promotion), but his name, bestowed on him by his ancestors, did. The famous Bhandari Brahmins had owned land all over town only twenty years before, until the government decided to change the laws. Now they had only a tiny strip of land on the east side of town, where some farmers made their living. For Aunt Shakuntala, however, her husband’s family name was one of his few virtues.

Mohandas was different when they’d first married, or that’s how it seemed to her now. He had been hardworking and ambitious, and he’d listened to her advice. But gradually a change had come over him, like a disease. He mocked her words, her attitude, and told her that she was too controlling, that she cared too much about what society thought. By the third year of their marriage, after both the children were born, he had stopped talking to her softly in bed at night about the events of the day. He would read a book and then fell asleep, his back to her. It hurt her, this indifference, and she grew bitter. She took to sleeping in another room. Sometimes she did wonder whether something in her character had caused this change; she asked herself whether she tried too hard to control everything around her. But she believed that unless she did so, things would become worse, and Mohandas, who was casual about many aspects of life, would let their lives slide. As for caring too much about what society thought, Aunt Shakuntala reasoned that she lived among other people, not in an isolated world, the way Mohandas did, and in order to gain respect, she had to care about what relatives and neighbors thought of her.

The August afternoon, with its still air and heat, made Aunt Shakuntala lazy. This was the time for her daily nap, but with Lamfu sitting on her veranda, it was out of the question. And when Aunt Shakuntala didn’t get her nap, she became irritable.

She took several deep breaths and decided she would wait for the mailman to see whether there were any letters from her children. Sanu and Shanti were attending separate colleges in Kathmandu city, which was a day’s bus ride from the village, near Pokhara, where Aunt Shakuntala and Mohandas lived. Three weeks earlier, Aunt Shakuntala had received a letter from Sanu telling her about his seventeenth birthday, how he and his friends had gone to Bhrikuti Mandap amusement park, where they rode carousels and ate pistachio ice cream. It was the longest letter he’d written—a full two pages. Her daughter, Shanti, had not written for nearly two months. At night, Aunt Shakuntala lay awake, unable to sleep, worrying. When she did manage to sleep, she dreamed about ugly things happening to her daughter. Three nights ago, she dreamed that Shanti had fallen into a well and was shouting for help.