“Do what?” Michael finally said.
“You know—convert people.”
“Have we tried converting you?” Christa asked.
“Not really, although you did ask me to read the Bible.”
“We also prefaced the Bible-reading request with a no-conversion-intention guarantee,” said Christa.
“Okay,” Rajiv said. “But why do you convert people? What’s in it for you?”
“You make it sound like we kill people,” Christa said. She was flustered.
Michael was calm. Rajiv knew he would never see Michael lose his cool.
“You do kill people’s faith in the religion they were born into.”
“People aren’t born into a religion.” Christa was shifty.
“But you still haven’t told me why you do it.”
“What’s your favorite movie?” Christa asked.
“It’s a Bollywood one.”
“All right, did you insist all your friends watch it?” she continued.
“Yes, I wanted them all to watch it.”
“Your favorite book?”
“I like The Alchemist.”
“Did you want all your friends to experience the book?”
“Yes, I did.”
Michael took over. “Christianity makes us happy. We want our friends, all the people we meet, to experience what we experience. It’s like you want your friend to watch a movie that made you happy so he can become happy, too.”
This was the first time Michael had openly talked about Christianity. He looked so content.
“That’s a ridiculous reason.” Rajiv laughed bitterly. “You think I am so glib.”
“We think you are being disrespectful, Rajiv,” Christa said. “You haven’t been yourself since the news of your relatives’ arrival.”
“Yes, and probably reading the Bible will help make me better, right, Christa?” It was the first time he had called her that.
“It’s easy to transfer your anger from them to us, from family to religion, Rajiv,” Christa said, slightly tearful and looking to Michael for support. “I think we should talk next when you’re back to your senses.”
“That’s a good idea,” Rajiv said, with mock respect. “Raju next door will be easier to convert than me. And please continue eating the parshad. You’re different from other Christians after all.”
The Scotts put down their burfees and walked out. Michael gave Rajiv a look he had often seen on his mama’s face—that of pure, undisguised disgust.
But Rajiv had little time to worry about that. Niveeta and her party would arrive soon. He shopped for groceries, checked that the floors were not sticky, organized the books on the sill in a variety of arrangements, and readjusted the crumpled sheets on whichever bed his grandmother lay. Intermittently, he thought about what happened with the Scotts and wondered if he’d ever see them again. He wasn’t going to apologize to them. His father had been right all along. Rajiv wouldn’t let them bother him—thankfully, Niveeta’s presence was enough to make him temporarily block the Scotts from his mind.
She looked just like his cousin Sona—both were about twenty-one and had the same big eyes uncommon among Rais, three moles on the right cheek and a complexion the color of chalk. Niveeta was slightly taller than Sona, but otherwise they were mirror images of each other. In fact, Rajiv was sure people mistook them for twins. He was so taken aback by the similarity between his cousin and his cousin’s cousin that he couldn’t help himself from looking at them over and over again, which Niveeta caught him doing several times.
Rajiv wheeled their suitcases into the bedroom, all the while hoping they wouldn’t ask where the sitting room was. An aunt had once made the mistake of inquiring about the sitting room, and Rajiv hadn’t known how to answer. She understood his jumpy silence and didn’t pursue the matter further, but Rajiv, to this day, remembered the humiliation he suffered at the insensitive query. But again, he was sure these people wouldn’t ask him embarrassing questions because the aunt had probably already briefed them on what his house looked like and which topics to avoid.
“The three of you could have a bed each with Boju in this room, and I’ll sleep in the next room,” he said.
He hoped they wouldn’t ask him what the next room was.
“Can I sleep in the next room instead?” Niveeta asked. “I am habituated to sleeping alone.”
“You’d have to sleep on the floor.” Rajiv rubbed his left shoe against his right shin.
“I don’t mind the floor as long as I am alone in the room,” Niveeta said.
Rajiv looked at his aunt for help. She was carefully studying the uneven ceiling and the shelf of books.
“There are cockroaches on the floor,” he said.
“Psst, like I care about them,” Niveeta said.
Finally, realizing he had no other way out, he said it: “The other room is the kitchen.”
Three incredulous pairs of eyes stared at him.
“Let me go get you some tea,” Rajiv said, excusing himself.
On his return with three glasses of tea, the threesome halted their conversation.
“This tea is delicious,” Niveeta said.
“Delicious,” his aunt echoed.
It was overcompensating. Fortunately, his grandmother was out at some neighbor’s.
“Because she can’t sleep by herself in the kitchen, we’ve decided to book a room at Andy’s Guest House next door,” his aunt said nonchalantly. “It will be close to here, and we won’t disturb your grandmother’s sleep.”
“But you don’t have to,” Rajiv spluttered. “I could move her bed into the kitchen.”
“No, don’t worry about it,” Sona said. “We’ll just stay at Andy’s. They have a bucketful of hot water per person in the morning. We stayed there during our school trip last year.”
And she didn’t even call me to let me know she was in town, thought Rajiv. The fool didn’t even know she just blabbered something she shouldn’t have said.
“She was in a school group, and no one was allowed to contact relatives,” her mother instantly said.
It was a feeble lie.
“Shouldn’t we at least call them first?” Sona asked.
She did, and was told the guest house had one last room left.
“Some Spanish girls canceled at the last minute because one of them was too sick to leave Delhi today,” she said with a laugh.
“Let’s go, then,” Niveeta said.
“Will you be back for dinner?”
Rajiv had shopped for paneer and kinema earlier in the day and had even asked Sandeep to come home early to help with the cooking.
“We need to go put on tika at mama’s,” Sona said. “We might just eat there. That’s where everyone is.”
With great effort, he dragged their suitcases through the terrace, carried them down the stairs, wheeled them up the road and lugged them up the staircase at Andy’s. No one helped him. When they checked in, no one bothered thanking him for getting a hundred-rupee discount, offered to those the owner at Andy’s knew.
His aunt booked just one room, nullifying Niveeta’s claim that she couldn’t sleep unless she was alone. Niveeta sat down on one of the beds in their room, exclaiming with delight at the quaintness of the guest house. Rajiv shot her a look. She saw him look at her and subconsciously ran her hand over her side and back to see if her underwear band showed. She pulled her T-shirt down a bit, pulled up her pants slightly and brought her hand to her hair.
Rajiv told his aunt he was leaving. She handed him a 500-rupee note for Dashain, but Rajiv wouldn’t accept it despite how unyielding she was.
His grandmother was slowly negotiating the stairs to their place when he returned home. She was wondering where the guests were.
“They were stuck in Guwahati,” he said. “They might just head back home instead.”
“Silly people—your mother’s family,” she said.
“I think I’ll go to bed early today,” said Rajiv.
“Also, Tikam called,” his grandmother said. “He won’t be coming back. He says he’ll stay home and learn farming.”
“I’ll go to sleep. Have Sandeep cook you something.”
“He’s not coming home, I am sure,” she said, leaving the room. “Just my luck to starve to death the day after Tika.”
He stared at Tikam’s empty bed, put out the light, and lay down. He wondered what might transpire at mama’s place tonight. Would they all be horrified at the idea of Niveeta’s sleeping in the kitchen? He speculated about what the Scotts would have said. He thought of what his father would have done in a situation like this, what his mother would have had to say at the end of the day. Through the dark, he looked at where his parents’ pictures hung, saw their faces in his mind’s eye, and said a prayer over and over again. It was a Christian prayer he had been taught at St. Paul’s.
NO LAND IS HER LAND
Anamika Chettri kicked off the tendrils that stubbornly clung to her feet as she stopped every fifty meters along the dirt trail to collect kindling. With the kerosene ration halved in the refugee camps and the coal briquettes aggravating her aging father’s cough, the sticks available outside her camp in Khudunabari appeared to be her best option. Some of her neighbors said her father probably had TB and that Anamika should ask a camp doctor to have a look at him—a suggestion she paid no heed to, for she had too many things to worry about. There was no telling, anyway, what further problems a diagnosis would unravel.
Anamika rolled up her summer shawl, placed it on her head as a cushion and balanced the heavy bundle of wood on it before hiking down the trail with a tightrope walker’s gait.
The college men were at the singara shop, their usual spot. Anamika’s pace quickened. She steeled herself for what was to come by saying a silent prayer to God and mentally rehearsing suitable comebacks. Fear wouldn’t paralyze her tongue the way it did many years ago. She had become adept at giving back the men what they deserved.
“Wah,” one of the four exclaimed. “Look at her walk—she goes swish, swish, swish, swish.”
“Her hips swing like the clock’s pendulum.” It was the long-haired rascal whom she had slapped in public last month.
“Is that why you keep staring at them?” Anamika snapped without looking back. “To tell the time? Because you can’t read the clock, you illiterate fool?”
“Go back to your damn country.” Another voice, shriller than the rest, brought applause and hoots from the crew. “Go to Bhutan. No one wants you in Nepal.”
“Wait, I want her here. I want her all to myself.”
“Yes, shake your condo back to Bhutan. We don’t need the likes of you to torture us with your looks here.”
“Stop bothering me, you mangy dogs.” A twig from her bundle fell. “Go back to your mothers and wives, but they are too busy dancing with the Maoists, aren’t they?”
“Lyaa, Lutey, she called your wife a whore,” shouted the man she slapped. “It can’t be my wife. I have no wife.”
“A whore calling a decent woman a whore.” Peals of laughter.
“She’s thirty-five and has the mouth of a fifteen-year-old bitch. Who would think of a mother having such a filthy tongue? Her older daughter must have picked up all the good words by now. She looks just like her.”
“Yes, she looks just like me, and she’s more of a man than you all will ever be.” The retorts today were better and faster than last week’s.
“She looks so young—how can she have children?”
“Want me to show it to you?” Loud moans followed while Anamika tried to keep her face wooden.
“There are two of them.”
“No, three.”
“No, five.”
“She’s a factory, a baby factory.” Loud laughter.
“Yes, except she likes changing the raw material to make babies with. Different fathers for different babies.”
“I learned that from your mother, kukkur,” she shouted.
She was inured to it all, hardly enraged. It was almost over. She had already turned the corner and was out of sight.
Anamika ran home, stopping only when she reached her hut and hurled the bundle in one corner. Her father was sleeping. At his feet, her daughters were writing Dzongkha letters on a notebook-sized blackboard—the camp school had recently introduced Dzongkha studies in hopes that the children wouldn’t find the repatriation process so difficult when Bhutan eventually allowed them in. Her neighbors, who lived in the adjoining hut and shared the outhouse with them, were slicing, dicing, pickling, and bottling raw mangoes behind the kitchen. The skies were overcast; she’d have to bring the clothes in before the rains came.
Anamika considered the refugee camp at Khudunabari her home. She wasn’t the kind to stare into the open space and sigh longingly for Bhutan. Her theory was simple: if her country (she still referred to Bhutan as her country even after all these years) didn’t want her, she didn’t want it back. She had long ago learned to let go—of the eight acres of land her family owned close to Phuntsholing, of the cousins left behind who scraped through the citizenship test that, thanks to her husband, she had failed, and of the food, anointed with copious amounts of cheese and hot peppers, that she had never quite succeeded in replicating since she came to Nepal as one of the 106,000 ethnic-Nepalese refugees forced out of Bhutan.
Khudunabari wasn’t all that different from Phuntsholing. The people looked alike, spoke Nepali with the expected variance in inflection, and followed the same religion and customs. The Bhutanese refugees at the camps often declared that they had done a better job of preserving the Nepalese culture than the Nepalese people themselves. Despite living in such familiar surroundings, most refugees she spoke to were hoping for repatriation, unlike Anamika. She had had it with Bhutan. Her daughter’s repetition of Dzongkha letters should have brought back memories, but it didn’t. It was as though the girl were parroting English nursery rhymes, nothing more. Anamika felt no stirrings in her heart, as the camp folks often claimed, no sentiment for a country that was once her home.
“What did you learn at school today?” she asked neither of the girls in particular. Anamika had studied up to eighth grade in Phuntsholing.
“What would you understand, Aamaa?” Shambhavi, the ten-year-old, whispered. She could have shouted. Anamika’s father could sleep through anything—even the agitation in Bhutan.
“I am not uneducated like our neighbors, Shambhavi, and you’ll get a slap for talking back to me that way.”
“We talked about settling in some foreign country.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you know?” twelve-year-old Diki asked, shifting positions to avoid being hit by drops of water trickling through the roof.
Anamika asked her to place a bucket where the water had formed a small puddle on the mud floor. Some stray drops landed on the sleeping old man’s toes and made the girls giggle.
“The America story? It’s been going on since we first arrived here. At your age you believe everything they say, Diki.”
“But they say it’s true this time,” Diki said. “America will take some of us.”
“Even if it is true, how do they choose who goes and who doesn’t?” Anamika asked with a dismissive hand motion. “And what about those left behind?”
“They said in class that America would take those who are fit, not very old, and can speak English,” said Diki.
“Speak English?” Anamika said. “That means almost all of us cannot go.”
“But the teacher said we shouldn’t talk about it too much,” Diki continued. “Some people do not like the idea of America taking us. They think that will make Bhutan happy, and they don’t want Bhutan happy.”
“They’ve been talking about it for seventeen years, long before I came here,” said Anamika as she rubbed a handful of ash at the bottom of a burned pot and ran water over it. “One day it was London, and the next day it was Australia. I’ve stopped believing it.”
“Wil
l we still get rations in America, Aamaa?” Shambhavi asked.
“Probably.”
“And will Baajey join us if we get to go? He is not young, not fit, and barely knows an English word.”
“If I knew all the answers, wouldn’t I be God? Now go back to your studies. You take every opportunity to waste your time.”
Anamika had wasted a dozen years of her life at the camp. Back in Bhutan, she had at least been working, contributing to her family. Even after her marriage, she regularly deposited small amounts of money into her father’s new Bank of Bhutan account. Her husband probably didn’t notice because he was too busy enticing every Nepali-speaking Bhutanese within reach to join the revolution. For her husband, the passion for the cause of the ethnic Nepalese in Bhutan came belatedly—years after the Bhutanese government had silenced the first murmurs of dissent. He had changed in a short time, not in his behavior toward her, for he was still affectionate, but in the way he interacted with people around him. He was constantly organizing, had little by little cut off the few non-Nepali-speaking Bhutanese acquaintances from his life and stopped working altogether.
Their dream of starting their own business in partnership with an Indian Marwari from Jaigaon was just taking shape—the hardware store would technically be theirs, for the Marwari couldn’t acquire a license as a foreigner in Bhutan. He’d run it, and they’d learn as much as they could while sharing the profits before finally going at another venture alone. Anamika would resign from her government job in a few weeks while her husband carried on working until the enterprise generated a profit. It had all been perfectly mapped out.
But the business planning halted, and her husband stopped going to his job as a typist in the court at Phuntsholing. If the new people’s hero did show up at work, it was at odd hours, brandishing an antimonarchy pamphlet and dressed in daura suruwal, the Nepali costume for men, despite the Bhutanese government’s having just mandated that only traditional Bhutanese attire be worn at offices. From a belt around his waist dangled a sheathed khukuri, the curved Nepalese knife, with his hand often resting on the wooden handle. Half a dozen men, most of whom dressed like him, always accompanied her husband.
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