“What are they saying?”
“‘Fulfill our demands,’” the driver informed me.
“And what are their demands?”
“No one knows.” He shrugged. “Even they do not know.”
Even so, it was wonderful, amazing, to see the well-ordered procession, composed not only of men but also women and children, making its way down the road without fear of reprisal.
MY FIRST AFTERNOON in Kathmandu was a riot of logistics: organizing my flat, finding a new didi (Laxmi had moved into the service of a German diplomat), reclaiming my motorcycle. By early evening I succumbed to jet lag and dropped into a poppy-sleep of utter exhaustion.
The next morning, my first full day back in Nepal, I phoned Coal. Neither he nor Clarice was remotely aware of what I’d been through the past two months. Few of my friends in Nepal, I realized uncomfortably, even knew I’d had a brother.
“How’s Grace?” I asked. “Have you seen her?”
“Have you not called her yet?”
“I’m anxious about talking to her, for some reason.”
“Oh, I think you have a very good reason. She told us she hasn’t had a word from you.”
“Coal . . . believe me . . . I tried. Right now I just need to let my brain catch up with my body. I’ll call her tomorrow and invite her for dinner.” I added, too quickly, “You, I can see tonight.”
“Why, that’s a lovely invitation. Very hard to resist.”
“I’m sorry. I really do want to see you. And Clarice. If you can do it. It’ll help me get grounded.”
“As you like.” He suggested we meet at the Ghar-e-kabab, a posh Indian restaurant managed by the Annapurna Hotel.
ROUNDING THE CORNER onto Durbar Marg I was struck by how ordinary, how business-as-usual, everything appeared. Cars were double-parked along the curb. Nirula’s Ice Cream was open, filled with tourists and well-to-do Nepalis. My eyes canted downward, looking for bloodstains, but the faded red blotches on the sidewalk were probably pan juice.
Arriving a little after seven, I shivered with a full-body thrill. A uniformed doorman let me in, and I took the narrow steps two at a time. Strains of an evening raga filtered down to meet me. The restaurant, with its plush seats and low-wattage chandeliers, was dim and crowded, but Coal called out my name. He and Clarice sat in a semicircular booth, below a Mughal-style painting of a princess feeding a deer. Grace sat with them. She greeted me first.
“Hi, asshole. Thanks for calling.”
“Welcome home,” Coal smiled. “Isn’t it lovely to be back?”
Clarice stood up. “It seems you were never gone.” She kissed me chastely on the forehead.
I slid in next to Grace and moved to kiss her on the cheek, but she turned peevishly away. I felt a pang of resentment toward Coal for bringing her here and forcing our encounter before I was ready. But here we were: another reminder that life in Kathmandu was a continual process of improvisation.
Coal poured me a glass of beer and asked how things had gone back home. I drew in my breath, considering how to answer. There was no need to be cagey, or apologetic.
“Not as one might wish.” Slowly and precisely, I narrated how the past two months had unfolded on my side of the world: from the phone call that had interrupted my birthday party to the funeral in New York; from my search for meaning in Jordan’s journals to the unexpected assignment from the adventure travel magazine. It took a while. I spiced the narrative up with funny anecdotes, so they’d know I wasn’t an emotional cripple.
Mostly, they were quiet. Grace felt along the bench seat and found my hand. Coal discreetly ordered dinner. When I finished my story, it was clear there was a gulf between us—as if our scattering in early March had been a shipwreck, and the currents of the spring had washed us up on different islands.
Grace’s hand kneaded mine nervously. “I’m sorry about my comment,” she said. “When you first came in. But I do wish you had written to me.”
“Me too. I’m sorry,” I said, meeting her eyes. “I missed you. I just didn’t know where the whole thing was taking me. I didn’t know how to fit this life in with that one.”
Our appetizers arrived: vegetable samosas, shaped like miniature throw pillows. The mood picked up. Grace talked about the wild anticipation, and ceaseless activity, during the days leading up to revolution. It seemed that, for both of us, the spring had been a pivotal chapter.
“I saw you on TV,” I told Grace. “On CNN. You looked like a wild woman.”
“You did?” She seemed stunned by the news. “During the marches?”
“No, it was in Bir Hospital, afterwards. You were helping the doctors.”
“Oh my God. What was I wearing? Did they show my brassiere?”
I remembered vividly, but managed a merciful lie. “I think it was a head shot. Why?”
“No reason.” She traced the rim of her beer glass. “Well, welcome back to Nepal. Jai democracy!” Coal and Clarice joined the toast. We clinked glasses, careful to make eye contact.
Three waiters delivered our feast: tandoori chicken; eggplant curry; round, savory onions; sweet mango chutney; hot buttered naan. All for the price of a Big Mac and fries. The blind sarod player looked like a South Asian Ray Charles, his dark sunglasses reflecting the small, hot spotlights as he sweated and nodded on his dais.
“What was this about your brassiere?” Clarice asked.
Grace shook her head. “It’s not as interesting as you think.”
“On the contrary,” said Coal. “Anything about the female breast is of immense interest: to men in general, and myself in particular.”
“Can you believe,” Clarice interjected, “That it’s nearly May? Come June, we’ll have been in Nepal five years.”
I tried to remember where I was five years ago, but my mind drew a blank. Coal, however, lit up.
“Imagine that,” he said. “And to think that, five years ago, I was an aspiring mystery writer. It’s astonishing, isn’t it, how the finger of fate has its way with us. Who could have predicted that, by 1990, I’d be the Ralph Lauren of Nepal’s fashion industry?”
Grace snorted. “Come on, Coal. Give yourself a little credit.”
“But it’s so very true. I wrapped up a sale today; a big one, too. The great continent of Australia. Land of boomerangs and Vegemite. An amazing coup, I bashfully admit. But I’m sure you’d be bored by the details.” He allowed a beat for protest, then turned to me. “So you’re back at Snake Lake?”
I shrugged. “It’s fine. It’s not as idyllic as your place, of course. But the Shresthas moved to Fiji. So I don’t have a rabid dog on my roof anymore.”
Clarice turned to face her husband. “Have you heard? There’s talk of load shedding. No electricity from 5 until 11 p.m., beginning the first of June.”
“Jesus! No. You’re kidding. Fuck. Well, I’d better pick up one of those 100-watt generators when we’re in Hong Kong. I’ve got to keep the sewing machines running until half-nine. And the lights! Fuck! The lights! That’s 250 watts at least . . .”
“You’re going to Hong Kong?”
“In a few weeks.” Clarice paused, tore a handkerchief from her purse, and sneezed violently, three times. “Ucch. Excuse me. We’re actually going to Beijing, by way of Hong Kong. Coal’s idea of a vacation.”
“Come on, it was your idea as well.”
“It was not.”
“Anyway, what could be more restful? Bicycling along the avenues . . .”
“With millions of Chinese.”
“. . . and touring the great silk factories, namesake and inspiration for the legendary Silk Road.”
“Exactly. It’s a business trip; don’t pretend otherwise.”
“Coffee?” The waiter gathered our plates, as obtrusively as possible.
“Yes, please. With milk.”
“No, thanks,” Coal said. “Not for me. Anyway, boys and girls, we have to go if we’re to make it home by nine. Ah, curfew. Another of the many pleasures, the innu
merable pleasures, of life in Kathmandu.”
“I’m going to the loo,” Clarice said. “Don’t leave without me.”
Grace picked up her bag. “I’m going, too.”
We watched them cross in front of the sarod player and disappear behind the bar. The waiter brought my coffee. It was strong and sweet.
Coal coughed. “May I ask you a personal question?”
“Of course. You can ask me anything.”
“It’s been less than two months since your brother’s suicide. I gather you were quite close. Your story about what happened was fascinating, of course, but it seemed a bit—and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way—perhaps a bit removed. Aloof. Have you really come to terms with his death?”
I found this touching; Coal had waited for the girls to leave before stepping out of character.
“No. I haven’t. That’s one of the reasons I came back here so quickly. I need spiritual counsel. But I haven’t seen Chokyi Nyima yet.”
“It’s a bit of a crapshoot, seeing these lamas.”
“That’s true. The problem is, I don’t really know what I want from him. I don’t know what I expect. Coddling and reassurance aren’t exactly Buddhist specialties, as you know.”
“Is that what you’re looking for?”
“Maybe. I just want to know that Jordan will be all right, somehow. That he’ll find his way.”
My answer was evasive. There was a deeper, more personal reason for my reluctance to visit the lama. It had to do with the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. In an irrational but irresistible way, I truly believed I’d meet my brother again—that I’d find the new being he had become. But what if suicide really did overturn the apple cart? My brother’s selfish, destructive act might have cast the germ of his consciousness so far down the ladder of rebirth that I would never see him again, during this lifetime, in any recognizable form. If his mental state at the instant of death was angry, or selfish, he might not be reborn on this Earth at all. He could end up in the realm of hungry ghosts: pathetic, emaciated creatures who can never satisfy their gnawing appetites. The fact that I didn’t believe in ghosts, hungry or otherwise, was immaterial. Hearing such news from the Rinpoche might be too much for me to bear.
Grace and Clarice returned, and began collecting their things. “You know,” Grace said, “you should come over soon and see my pictures from Nag Bahal. They’re the best photos I shot since Shivaratri.”
“What about the revolution itself?”
She shrugged. “We can talk about that later.”
My shoe was off. I put my foot on Grace’s ankle and curled my toes. “If it’s not too late, I can come over now.”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
THE EVENING WAS crisp, and foggy enough to seem mysterious. Coal and Clarice rode away on their Bajaj motor scooter, helmets winking as they passed beneath the amber streetlights near the Royal Palace. The fall of the king had given the palace a clumsy, uninhabited look, like a back-lot prop from an old Basil Rathbone film. Grace and I unlocked our Hondas. A pack of dogs slept in a tight circle near a sewer along the curb.
Durbar Marg seemed alien and forlorn. There were no rickshaws. A few taxis waited, their engines muttering, outside the main gate of the Annapurna Hotel. The ragtag street urchins who usually haunted the sidewalk outside the fancy restaurant were nowhere to be seen. It had never occurred to me that even beggars had to obey the curfew. Where had they gone?
“Look over there.” Grace raised her chin, pointing toward the southern end of the boulevard, where the statue of King Mahendra stood vigil behind a trampled fence. Tumbleweeds of barbed wire were piled in the middle of the street, forming a semicircular nest. As we watched, armored personnel vehicles drove up from a side road and parked by the statue. Soldiers jumped into the street and set up a machine-gun post. They worked in silence.
“Do they do this every night?”
“Every night, since the lynching on Kalimati. You missed all the fun.”
I’d read about the incident in the Los Angeles Times. Two weeks after the revolution, bands of hooligans—mandaleys in local slang—had roamed through the city. They’d smashed windows, burned shops, and created general havoc, giving the impression that the interim government couldn’t maintain order. When the Nepalis learned that these thugs were mercenaries, on the Palace payroll, they mobbed the mandaley hideout. Six of the thugs were dragged out onto the street. The crowd beat them to death, tied their corpses to a pushcart, and wheeled the bloody mess toward Singha Durbar.
We revved our bikes and took off. Grace led the way. It was 8:45, and the streets were all but deserted. Clumps of army troops monitored the intersections, the tips of their cigarettes neon in the dark. Russian-made machine guns squatted on the platforms of their ATVs. As we approached Nag Pokhari a couple of soldiers, no older than twenty, watched us ride by. “Good night!” they yelled in English. “I love you!”
Every dog in the neighborhood began to bark as Grace opened her gate. We locked our motorcycles in the front yard. Grace filled an aluminum dekshi with water the minute we entered her flat, before she even took off her scarf.
“Chamomile or peppermint?”
“Half of each.”
I looked around the apartment, remembering the mandalas and cane furniture, the subliminal smell of Grace’s lair. It was such a comfort, being back in Kathmandu.
“Any requests?” She stood at the bookshelf and looked through her tapes. I came up behind her, slid my hands under her scarf, and kissed her neck through the cloudy pashmina. One dog, a hoarse metronome, continued to bark in the distance.
Grace turned around. “Did you bring any condoms?”
“You’re so romantic. To tell you the truth, I didn’t expect to end up here. Is that a deal breaker?”
“It means we can’t fuck.” She slid her hands to the small of my back and looked up at me with real excitement. “You can look at my slides, though.”
31
Grace Under Fire
GRACE MELTED BUTTER and cracked two eggs into a nonstick pan from which the Teflon surface had long ago been scoured. She even had a toaster, big enough for bagels (should any materialize), bequeathed to her by a departing U.S. intelligence officer. During the night the wind had changed, clearing out the pall of dust. We could see the tip of Langtang from her kitchen.
Before bed we had in fact spent a solid hour standing at the light table, looking through her portfolio of images. They led right up to, and ended one day before, the revolution. After the last slide—taken through a burning tire at a mass demonstration in Patan, on April 5—Grace turned off the switch. “That’s it,” she shrugged.
“Come on.” This seemed a strange kind of teasing.
“I’m not kidding.”
“I know you were there. I saw you on CNN, remember?”
“I was there, alright,” she said. “Can we talk about it in the morning? It’s kind of a long story.”
Now it was morning, with the smell of hot butter and toast, and a bar of sunlight on the wall behind me. Grace took a kettle off the second burner and filtered coffee into a thermos. “There’s only powdered milk . . .”
“That’s fine. Listen, I want to hear what happened on April 6. How’d you end up in the hospital?”
“I was pretty much everywhere,” Grace said. “But the Curse caught up with me.”
“Not that nonsense again.”
“Yep.” She filled my mug and positioned the thermos between us. “With a vengeance.”
THE AFTERNOON OF April 6 had felt different from the start, the morning unusually warm and hazy. The mountains were barely visible, brushed like tentative clouds against the northern horizon.
All of the shops and galleries along Durbar Marg were closed, their windows hidden behind the corrugated metal shutters that had been rolled down the previous evening in anticipation of the next day’s bandh. There were no bicycles in sight; not a single taxi patrolled the streets. Every now
and then a bewildered dog would cross Durbar Marg, loping cautiously across the normally crowded boulevard to join his companions in the parking lot of the Annapurna Hotel. Employees and tourists, meanwhile, had gathered in the five-star hotel’s posh lobby. They watched apprehensively through the double glass doors as Durbar Marg filled with soldiers.
The situation was ambiguous. That morning, a few thousand demonstrators from Kathmandu’s northern suburbs had seethed down Lazimpat and paraded, chanting prodemocracy slogans, past the western entrance to the Royal Palace. They’d milled past the high iron gates without incident, then continued peacefully down the broad boulevard toward Ratna Park.
But those marchers soon joined forces with larger and livelier demonstrations that originated in Asan Tole, Bagh Bazaar, Bhaktapur, and Patan. By afternoon over a quarter of a million Nepali citizens had massed on the Tundhikhel Parade Grounds, waving flags, punching the air, and roaring their approval as Ganesh Man Singh hailed them from a hastily erected podium.
Grace had jogged up Tridevi Marg toward the palace, alone and on foot. A point-and-shoot Minolta, two Canon bodies, and a lens case bounced against her rib cage. Her canvas vest was loaded with film.
It had taken her twenty minutes to get from her Hadigaon flat to the head of Durbar Marg. As she arrived on the scene, she mouthed a brief prayer of thanks. Her personal nightmare had not come to pass. They had not started the revolution without her.
HALF AN HOUR earlier, making the trek downtown had been the furthest thing from her mind. She’d been drinking Darjeeling tea and editing her Patan slides when the phone rang. Grace ignored it for eight rings, then peevishly snatched up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“If you got yourself an answering machine, like every other professional in this town, you’d be doing all of us a big favor.”
Christ. Larry Prince would only be calling for one of two reasons: to request an inconvenient favor, or embarrass her with another one of his endless, and endlessly futile, romantic propositions.
Snake Lake Page 28
