Arresting God in Kathmandu (18 page)

Jaya’s parents barely spoke to her, not because they disliked her but because they seemed unaware of her presence. Sometimes Kanti felt inadequate, as if she were a poor cousin, and she clung to Jaya.

At a party one evening, while the monsoon rain sounded like a riot outside, she was standing alone in a corner, watching Jaya talk to his friends across the room, when a middle-aged woman she recognized as Jaya’s cousin came over and spoke to her. “You take him seriously, don’t you?” the woman asked, and before Kanti could respond, she warned, “Be careful, Kanti. You don’t know these people. Don’t get attached to Jaya.”

Kanti wanted her to say more, but the woman gave her a knowing look and moved away.

Kanti thought of her early years in America, how, away from the scrutinizing eyes of her mother and her relatives, she’d initially felt she’d broken free. She went to parties all the time, even smoked pot. She told her American friends how, when she was seventeen, her uncle had seen her walking the streets of Kathmandu holding a boy’s hand. Her friends laughed as she mimicked the way he looked her up and down, then did the same to the poor boy. And when she added that her mother hadn’t spoken to her for three days, they said, “You’re kidding!”

By her fourth year in college, though, she began to pine for home, for the smell of garlic on her mother, the gossip with childhood friends with whom she’d already lost touch, the taste of hot-hot momos, spicy Nepali dumplings. Her American friends didn’t understand why she stopped trudging across the campus to go to classes, why she stayed in her room all day with the curtains drawn, why she stopped answering the phone unless the call was from her mother. On the day a friend, Susan, brought her a carrot cake, Kanti said, “I don’t feel like eating.”

“What’s happened to you?”

Kanti couldn’t tell her that she hated this country—the way people smiled too much, how everything was always “wonderful,” how she didn’t feel close to anyone. All she said was that she had a mild bout of homesickness.

“But you’ve been like this for months now.”

Kanti took a small piece of the cake and told Susan she had a headache and needed to sleep.

The day she finished her last exam, she flew back to Nepal not even waiting to get her diploma. But two weeks after she arrived, she wished she were back in America. She couldn’t understand why everything in Kathmandu had changed. So much dust, so many houses with their ugly television antennas shooting into the sky, the way people spat on the streets, phlegm shooting out of their mouths, the way they bragged about how much money they had, the way her relatives constantly asked when she was getting married, the way her mother arranged for her to be “viewed” by dull-looking men, the way old men and women stared at her when she walked down the street wearing pants, the way her married friends carried babies in their arms, the way their husbands wore expensive but ill-fitting suits and ordered their wives about in sweet voices. She felt eyes following her everywhere, watching her every move, ready to pounce if she made a false step, didn’t speak properly, or addressed someone the wrong way. She became convinced that she couldn’t live here, and she despised herself for this, for her consistently critical attitude toward her own people. I live in two worlds, she thought, perched halfway between them. In her restlessness she applied for the master’s program at New York University and was accepted.

And now Jaya. He and his friends were playing cricket, and he was giving instructions to one of them who was ready to bat. She caught his eye, and he winked at her, just as he had in New York. She imagined them touring around Europe, or going back to New York to visit old friends, and then, later, back in Nepal with a couple of kids. She wondered where they would live in their old age. In Nepal? It didn’t matter. With him, the city had become pleasant. The only thing that worried her was Jaya’s drinking. He always had a glass of something in his hand. He was indiscriminate when it came to alcohol: wine, beer, whiskey, rum, even the strong local liquor. Right now he had a glass of gin on the table where she sat.

Jaya and Kanti often went on excursions to the countryside. On his Kawasaki motorbike, he’d come by her house, sometimes deliberately having taken out the muffler so that the noise of the engine shook her quiet neighborhood. As the raucous motorbike stopped outside, Kanti held her breath, a faint throbbing in her throat, and opened the gate. Initially she’d wished Jaya wouldn’t do that, but when she saw her neighbors watching from their windows, she gained a sense of satisfaction. Frowning, her mother came to the porch and nodded at Jaya, who gave her an exaggerated greeting, hands held high above his head in namaste. On the next day, her mother would inevitably mutter to her: “These Ranas. The way they flash their money, you’d think they still rule the country. Someone needs to tell them that the Rana rule was over when the people revolted centuries ago.”

One afternoon Kanti and Jaya went to Gokarna with a picnic basket. They sat to eat under a large tree. Jaya drank beer and, after two bottles, stroked her face and said, “I haven’t felt like this with anyone else.”

She called him a liar.

“Seriously,” he said.

“So what does it mean?”

He shrugged. “It just means what it means. What are you looking for?”

She shook her head. She already felt too vulnerable.

“I have thought about a life with you,” he said.

She waited.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” he said.

“It’s a serious matter.” She swallowed so that her voice wouldn’t break.

He reached over and touched her breast.

A voice said, “What is this?” Three men stood a few yards away.

“What do you think this is? Your bedroom?” one of them said.

“What do you want?” Jaya said.

“Who is this?” the man said, pointing to Kanti. “Your sister?”

The other two laughed. One of them said, “Sister fucker.”

Jaya got up, enraged.

“Jaya, please,” Kanti said.

“We like your sister, donkey,” another man said. “She’s sexy.”

Jaya lunged at him. The three men pummeled Jaya, who was trying to protect himself and strike back at the same time. A car appeared in the distance, on the unpaved road that led to the gate. The three men ran off, laughing, shouting, “Your sister is sexy!”

Jaya’s mouth was bleeding, and his lower lip and right eye were swollen.

They went to the park’s office, where an official took out a first-aid kit and applied iodine to Jaya’s wounds. “Those hoodlums,” the man said. “Uncontrollable. Two months ago someone was murdered here.”

“I remember their faces,” Jaya said. “I’ll take care of them.”

Later, as they walked to the motorcycle, Kanti’s heart was still thumping. “We’re lucky that car came when it did. Why did you have to fight? And what was that about taking care of them?”

“Hey, I have to protect my sister, don’t I?” he said. “My sexy sister.”

As summer drew to an end, Jaya brought up the idea of not returning to America for another year or so. He had one more year before completing his graduate degree in business, but, as he said, “I am absolutely in no mood to go back to the books now, Kanti.” He wanted to stay in Kathmandu for another three or four months and then maybe go to Europe or even Africa before heading back to the United States. But Kanti had just received word from Duke that she was to be granted an assistantship while working for her Ph.D. in economics. So when Jaya told her he’d decided to stay, Kanti became depressed. She really didn’t want to live in Kathmandu any longer. Her mother was becoming more and more critical of her relationship with Jaya. Kanti knew that her mother had in mind another boy, a Brahmin from the city who had just come back from England with a degree in medicine. “You two can get married, then go to America for your Ph.D,” her mother said. “Just have one look. You’ll like him. I don’t know what you see in that hoodlum.” The word
hoodlum
touched a nerve in Kanti, and she shouted back at her mother, “He’s not a hoodlum. His life is more interesting than yours, you with your ‘what will the neighbors say, what will the neighbors think.’” After several minutes of silence, she said, “I want to marry only Jaya, Mother. I won’t look at anyone else.”

Her mother didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day. In the evening, they ate in separate rooms, and Kanti felt a pang of guilt. She had never before shouted at her mother. She went to her mother’s room and found her reading the Bhagavad Gita. She gently took the book from her mother’s hands and put it aside. “I will see your man,” Kanti said, “but you have to give me the option of refusing.”

“I know you won’t refuse,” her mother said. “He’s very attractive. Here, let me show you his photograph.”

The man had a faint mustache that ran all the way down to his chin. His eyes had a serious quality that she immediately liked, and she had to admit he was not bad looking. “He’s okay,” she said.

Her mother squeezed her shoulder, saying that she knew her daughter would come around.

“Mother,” Kanti warned, “I told you—I might refuse.”

“All right, all right,” her mother said. “Just a look. After that, it’s your decision.”

Kanti told her then that she was thinking about taking a year off before starting school again, and staying in Nepal. Her mother said this was a good idea, for she thought that Jaya would be leaving soon to resume his studies. “Once you get married to Prakash—” her mother started, then corrected herself. “If you get married to Prakash, then maybe both of you can go to America.”

Kanti walked into a bar in the tourist district of Thamel one afternoon to find Jaya kissing a woman wearing gaudy makeup and a skirt that revealed her thighs. The woman’s hand cradled Jaya’s neck while Jaya’s right hand fondled her breast; their lips were glued together. There was no one else at the bar except the bartender, who was a friend of Jaya’s and also knew Kanti. He was polishing a glass, and when he saw Kanti, he froze. Kanti’s eyes focused on Jaya’s hand, the very hand that she had held, inspected, kissed, and traced with her finger. Dumbfounded, she walked out. She expected to feel angry, but she didn’t. She walked the streets of the city for the rest of the afternoon, her body light with shock.

The next day news spread among the people who knew them that Kanti had caught Jaya with another woman. In some versions of the rumor, the woman was a prostitute. Talk of the incident also reached Kanti’s mother, who pounded on Kanti’s door when she locked herself in her room, “Kanti, open the door. You need to be with someone.” Kanti ignored her.

Jaya called later that evening, but she wouldn’t speak to him. He came by, this time silently on the motorbike, and her mother shouted at him from the gate. Kanti could see him from the window; his face was grim. What was he thinking? In a short while he left, rewing the engine and drowning out her mother’s voice.

Kanti avoided everyone for a few days, stayed in her room, listening to music or reading novels she’d already read. She took out her old photo albums and went through the pictures, remembering friends she’d forgotten. One morning, she told her mother that she wanted to go away. Her mother understood. Her daughter needed time, some breathing space, to get over this unspeakable thing, and then she might agree to marry Prakash.

Kanti spent two weeks in India. First, she went to Delhi, visited the Taj Mahal in nearby Agra. She thought of Emperor Shah Jehan, grief-stricken by the death of his beloved queen and wanting to create a grand tomb, which, legend said, engaged the skills of twenty thousand craftsmen for more than twenty years. Kanti sat in the garden by the oblong pool that reflected the tomb. But the dust and the dry, scratchy heat of Agra soon made her want to leave, so she took a train to Bombay. There, she met a high school friend, Sushma, in a girl’s hostel near Juhu. Sushma was surprised to see Kanti, especially when she learned that Kanti was traveling by herself. “What? You think you’re an American now?” Laughing, Sushma added, “You want to stay in an ashram here? Search for your spiritual self?” The next day, as Kanti was on a train to central Bombay, she saw a couple kissing passionately while the other passengers watched with amusement. A man standing near her prayed, his eyes closed, his chin lifted toward the ceiling. By the time she got off at the bedlam of Victoria Terminus, she was drenched in sweat. She spent the day by the oceanside in Marine Drive, smelling the ocean, and in the evening stopped to observe a street artist draw chalk portraits of gods and goddesses on the sidewalk. Watching the delicate movements of the artist’s fingers, the care with which he sharpened the curved trunk of Lord Ganesh, she understood that if she wanted clarity in her life, she’d have to force herself to move beyond Jaya.

Back in Kathmandu, Kanti pushed herself to find a job. Eventually, through an uncle who was with an engineering firm, she found work in a dilapidated office right in the center of the city. The salary was not large, but at least she no longer had to ask her mother for spending money. She started mingling with people again, going to a party in a hotel or attending an afternoon tea on a friend’s balcony. Now her mother wanted her to marry as quickly as possible. One night, as Kanti was about to go to bed, her mother told her that Prakash was coming to the house the following week with his two uncles. Kanti didn’t protest.

She did sometimes think of Jaya and his self-absorption, his sense of grandeur, and wondered what made him kiss that woman in the bar. How can you be sure, Kanti asked herself, that there isn’t something like that in every person, an ugly facet that will at some point reveal itself? How could she be sure, for that matter, that this doctor, this Prakash, did not also have a defect that would surface once they were married?

She did see Jaya twice on social occasions, once at a party in a friend’s house, and once in the lobby of the Soaltee Hotel, the very hotel where they’d spent long afternoons. They smiled at each other, self-consciously. Each time it was a different, heavily made-up woman draped around him. Jaya had lost weight, and he looked haggard. She had heard that he was drinking more heavily. At the party, she found him looking at her forlornly from across the room when he probably thought she wouldn’t see him.