“She’s like that always,” Ramchandra said, trying to calm her. “Pay her no attention.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
“You mustn’t think about yourself,” he said. “We don’t want to upset Mrs. Pandey more.” He sat with Malati, mollifying her by saying that the old woman was in shock and was uttering nonsense. He gave her some money for a three-wheeler, patted Rachana’s head, stood up, and turned to go back inside. Malati threw the money on the porch and walked away, and didn’t look back when he called.
Goma was holding her mother, who had begun to wail, rocking back and forth beside her husband’s body.
10
MR. PANDEY’S BODY was cremated on the banks of the Bagmati River. As he had no sons, his closest nephew, a man Goma and Nalini barely knew, performed the rites. He lit the fire that quickly engulfed Mr. Pandey’s body on the funeral pyre, made of fresh wood. Ramchandra watched the smoke drift up to the cloudy Kathmandu sky, and tried to formulate some wisdom about the nature of death, but the words became entangled with the memories of how Mr. Pandey had treated him. He looked at the windblown face of his wife, and he tried to gauge her feelings. He’d never heard Goma speak fondly of her father, although there was no question that she respected him, perhaps was even in awe of him. Did she love her father? Was it a dutiful love rather than a genuine one? But—and here Ramchandra’s heart sank—did Sanu feel the same way about him? His daughter, standing near him, appeared to have grown into a woman in the past few weeks, a wise young woman with a sad understanding of how the world worked. Sanu caught his eyes and smiled faintly, and Ramchandra’s doubts vanished, just as Mr. Pandey’s body was turning into ashes at the bottom of the pyre.
Goma and Nalini had insisted on attending the funeral, even though women traditionally were not allowed to. “He had no sons, so we are his sons,” Goma said when Mrs. Pandey objected. “And who has the right to tell us that we can’t see our father off?” In the end, Mrs. Pandey herself came to the banks of the Bagmati, drawing criticism from the relatives, who said that such behavior would displease the gods, that perhaps the old man’s spirit would find no peace. Mrs. Pandey merely pointed to her daughters and said, “I tried to convince them, but this is what they want.”
Ramchandra had had to shave his head, as had the other male members of the family. At first he’d resented this intrusion on his body from a man who had not shown him one iota of respect while he lived, but within hours he got used to it and took pleasure in running his fingers over his smooth scalp. His ears caught the wind easily now, and sometimes they tickled for no reason. Mrs. Pandey had said that he had to wear white clothes, but Goma intervened and said it was not necessary for a son-in-law to be dressed completely in white; only one article of clothing had to be white. So Ramchandra wore a white cap.
The mourning period lasted for several days. The children returned to Pandey Palace with Goma. Malati was on the last leg of her exams. She seemed to have lost all interest in studying; she didn’t even look at the books anymore. Often she’d be in the kitchen, cooking and singing. She had a sweet voice, Ramchandra discovered when he first heard her. He stood in the doorway, holding Rachana, listening. “Where are all these songs coming from?” he asked. Since he now went to Pandey Palace right after he’d finished teaching, and returned to the apartment only late at night, he felt that he’d lost touch with Malati. He felt awkward with her. She hadn’t mentioned Amrit again, but he suspected that when he was at Pandey Palace in the evenings, she went to see him. The day Mr. Pandey died, he’d been at Pandey Palace all day, making the funeral arrangements, notifying relatives, and in the evening he’d called the shopkeeper with the telephone and asked him to fetch Malati. But the man came back shortly to say that no one had answered the knock on the door. When Ramchandra later asked her where she’d been that evening, she’d replied testily, “What does it matter where I was? I was kicked out of someone’s house, wasn’t I? It’s my fate to be kicked out of everyone’s house. Who knows when I’ll get kicked out of this one.” Her face changed when she said such things, when anger made her words acidic.
In bed, she didn’t respond to his touch as eagerly as she had, and he saw her eyes become glazed when he entered her. One time, when he started caressing her, she turned away and said, “I’m tired,” and he was left with his hand on her hip.
On the morning of her last exam, he told her that he’d take her to a restaurant later to celebrate. He wasn’t supposed to do this during the mourning period—eat food with salt, let alone have meat. But he was tired of the restrictions, and he figured no one would know. When she asked him where they’d go, he said, “There’s a restaurant with umbrellas in Ranipokhari. Three stories high. A rooftop.” He liked the way the word sounded; he’d heard people call it that. He’d often seen the restaurant when he walked by Ranipokhari, and he used to speculate about the people who ate there. When he’d looked up, he’d seen the heads of people, talking and enjoying the scenery below, as if they were the lords of the city.
“Have you been there before?” she asked.
“Never. That’s why it’ll be a good place to go.”
“It must be expensive.”
“For today, we’ll not worry about that.”
Ever since Malati had entered his life, he’d been saying variations of this. The meal at the restaurant would probably cost around eighty rupees, and with no tutoring fees for the next few months, that was a large sum of money. But they had to celebrate, he rationalized, and perhaps this moment of rejoicing would once again bring him close to Malati.
“Aren’t you supposed to go to Pandey Palace?” she asked with a smile, as if she already knew the answer.
“I’ll make up an excuse,” he said, also smiling. He liked the idea of their having a secret.
The excuse that he came up with, when he called Goma from the school, was that he needed to go to the school to work out some details about extracurricular activities for the next academic season, which would start soon. Goma seemed to have forgotten that it was the day of Malati’s last exam, because she didn’t mention it; she talked only about how her father had apparently left her mother with more debts than they’d thought he had. “Now the creditors are already banging at the door. Can you imagine that?” she said. “In a matter of days. These people have no morals.”
He asked to talk to the children, told Rakesh not to give his mother any trouble, and asked Sanu how she’d done in the school spelling contest. “I came in first,” she said nonchalantly, and he laughed with pleasure.
Actually, he did have to go to the school that afternoon. Bandana Miss had called in a panic, saying that Khanal Sir had become gravely ill and would not return next year, so they had to discuss how to cover his classes until they found a replacement. Ramchandra found that the death of his father-in-law had served to lessen his colleagues’ disapproval. They sympathized with him, even though some knew that Mr. Pandey had treated Ramchandra badly. Only once during the meeting in the staff room did Shailendra make a reference to second wives, but he got no encouragement from the others, so he kept quiet for a while. Bandana Miss was making preparations for her son to go to America, and between their discussion of the classes and the budget for the coming year, she talked about him at every chance she got. “You should think of sending your children to America, Ramchandra-ji,” she said, and Ramchandra merely smiled and said, “America is a distant dream for most of us, Bandana Miss.”
“That’s precisely the sort of attitude,” Bandana Miss said, “that makes Nepalis so hopeless. They never learn to dream.”
“We dream of feeding our family and sending our children to a school, any school,” someone said.
“Unless you dream of something higher, you’ll never move toward it,” Bandana Miss said.
“So, what’s your dream?” Shailendra asked Ramchandra.
Ramchandra was daydreaming about Malati, about the evening on the rooftop, and he replied, “I dream of a house of
my own in Kathmandu.”
“And who will occupy that house? All your family members?” Shailendra said, emphasizing all.
“Yes, all my family members,” Ramchandra said. “You don’t expect me to ask you to occupy the house, do you?”
Everyone laughed, and Shailendra became quiet again.
Malati wasn’t there when Ramchandra got home that evening. He made himself a cup of tea and waited by the window. It began to drizzle, the cold rain of winter, and he worried about having to spend more money on the three-wheeler they’d need to go to the rooftop restaurant. He finished his tea, went to the bathroom in the courtyard, then came up to sit by the window again. It was nearly six-thirty. The rain was falling harder. The tea shopkeeper had no customers and was standing in the doorway, watching the rain. A crow landed on an electric wire right in front of Ramchandra and started making its raucous noise. Ramchandra shooed it away. The shopkeeper looked up, and, after making some small comments about the rain, said, “She went in a taxi. Around three o’clock.” Ramchandra pretended he didn’t hear, and the shopkeeper stood there, smiling.
Not long after that, a taxi pulled up, and Malati got out from the front seat, holding Rachana. She rushed to the entrance of the courtyard and stood there, waving to the taxi driver. Ramchandra strained his neck trying to see the man, but his view was obstructed. He moved away from the window and picked up one of his school textbooks from the floor. When she stood in the doorway, he pretended not to see her.
“Is it too late for us to go to that restaurant?” she asked.
“It’s raining.”
“I am sorry. I had to visit someone.”
“You don’t need to be sorry. No one should be sorry in this world.”
“We could take a taxi.”
“I can’t spend money like that all the time.”
“I have some money.”
“How?”
“An old friend gave it to me.”
Ramchandra felt his chest twist, but he forced himself to say, “Do you need to change?”
She said she was fine.
By the time they reached the street, the rain was letting up, and they decided to walk. All the way to the restaurant, Ramchandra’s chest remained constricted. They walked through Basantapur, into Indrachowk, where the evening shoppers clogged the streets. They stepped into puddles and got their feet wet. In Asan, a bull came charging at Malati, and with a loud “Ama,” she dashed to the side, clutching Rachana tightly. Ramchandra bravely waved his arm to shoo the bull away. Some pedestrians laughed.
Once at the restaurant, Ramchandra and Malati climbed the narrow staircase to the third floor, where the city opened out to them. Below was the Ranipokhari Pond, with the small white Temple of Shiva in the middle. On the horizon they could see the tip of the Dharahara tower, pink in the light of the setting sun. A steady cacophony of traffic noise rose from the crowded street. Ramchandra and Malati stood in front of the counter, expecting the man behind it to guide them to a table. But he gestured, without looking, and said, “Sit anywhere you want.” They chose a table that gave them a good view of the pond. A waiter approached with a menu. The prices were high, higher than Ramchandra had expected.
“What would you like?” he asked Malati.
“I’m not all that hungry,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have tea.”
“I plan this big dinner for you, and you’re not hungry?”
“My stomach’s been upset since this morning.”
He ordered chicken chili for himself, and Malati, probably aware of his disappointment, asked for a plate of samosas, which she shared with Rachana. An uneasy truce hovered between them. Ramchandra tried to make small talk, and Malati said that her last exam, an optional one on history, had gone well. Now there would be the long wait for the results, which sometimes took six months or more. She said that she’d run into Malekha Didi in the market the other day, and her stepmother ignored her and talked only to Rachana, who became frightened and cried. Ramchandra talked briefly about what was happening at Pandey Palace. Then there was a lull in the conversation, and they looked at the street, now glistening with lights from the shops.
“What’s that?” Malati said, pointing to the horizon.
In the dark it was hard to tell, but it turned out to be a crowd heading toward Ranipokhari. As the crowd came closer, they could hear a soft chant, although Ramchandra couldn’t make out the words.
“There are police vans,” Ramchandra said, pointing immediately below them.
When the throng reached the mouth of Kamalacchi, men got out of the vans and merged with the crowd. Ramchandra heard some shouts that sounded almost like shouts of joy, and for a moment it seemed as if the policemen were dancing with the people. “What’s happening?” others on the rooftop whispered. And then the shouts turned into cries of pain, and Ramchandra saw people being hauled into the vans. As abruptly as the crowd had appeared, it disappeared, and the next moment, the police vans took off. Within a few minutes, it was as if nothing had happened.
The customers in the restaurant talked about what had happened. “The government’s going to squelch this even before it begins,” someone said.
“I don’t know,” one waiter said. “There’ll be a bloodbath tomorrow, Democracy Day.”
The chanting of the protesters echoed in Ramchandra’s head as he paid the bill and they headed down.
This time they avoided the alleys and took the main street of Ranipokhari. As they were walking past Bir Hospital, it started to rain again, hard, and they ran for cover under the awning of a shop. It was the first floor of Mahankal Temple, right across from the military hospital.
The rain clattered loudly on the awning, accompanied by thunder and lightning that ripped open the sky. Other pedestrians squeezed against them, seeking shelter, and Ramchandra’s body pressed against Malati’s. The sensation didn’t give him the pleasure it used to, although his heart still raced and he could still smell the mustard oil in her hair. Soon Rachana began to squirm in Malati’s arms, then started crying, which brought disapproving looks from the others. “So much noise in here,” said a woman wearing expensive-looking clothes.
A taxi stopped on the street before them, and the woman rushed over to it, but the driver didn’t let her in, and there was an argument. Malati’s face brightened, and Ramchandra immediately knew who the driver was. By then, he’d also recognized the taxi, with its sharp streak of silver on the side where the paint had peeled off.
“Shall we go?” she said.
“You go. I’ll wait for the rain to die down.”
Rachana, impatient, was trying to wiggle out of Malati’s arms. “Please. She’s becoming difficult.”
“You don’t need me. Why do you need me?”
“But you’re stuck in the rain here.”
The others were listening intently to their conversation. The woman had come back and was muttering curses under her breath. Malati insisted, and Ramchandra said no and looked at the sky, which was getting darker now that night was falling. Finally he thought, What do I have to lose?
They rushed to the taxi and got in, and the driver said, “Why did you take so long?” He said this to Malati, but it seemed directed at Ramchandra. He was a strikingly handsome man, Ramchandra had to admit, like a movie star, and Ramchandra suddenly felt ugly. Malati didn’t introduce him, and the driver pretended that nothing was unusual. He didn’t speak during the short drive, although Ramchandra caught the driver appraising him in the rearview mirror.
In Jaisideval, Amrit said to Ramchandra, “That’ll be twenty rupees.” And he laughed.
Ramchandra took out a twenty-rupee note, threw it at him, and got out. Amrit protested, saying he was joking about the fare.
Ramchandra climbed the stairs in front of Malati, too angry to speak to her. In the bedroom, after she’d set down Rachana (who had quieted down in the taxi and was now asleep), Malati said, “Why are you like this?”
“Don’t talk to me,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “He was only giving us a ride. Was that so bad?”
He looked at her as if she were crazy. “He treated you like an animal. And you take him back as though he’d done nothing.”
“He didn’t treat me like an animal.”
“He lied to you and left you pregnant. That’s your story, not mine.”
“But he’s changed. He regrets what he did.”
“He regrets. And that’s enough for you?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing.” He went to stand by the window. Darkness had taken over the street, and the lights had gone on in the shops. A bicyclist pedaled his way through the dark, weaving in and out of traffic.
“Do you think I’m happy here?”
Her words stung him, and he turned around and glared at her. “What? You’re not happy? Can you imagine anything better for you than what you have right now? You sleep with a woman’s husband, and she takes you in and treats you as if you were her sister.”
“I never wanted pity from you, and I don’t want it now.”
“No one’s pitying you. You’re an ungrateful little wench, that’s all.” He regretted his words even as he spoke them.
“Go ahead. Why don’t you call me names too, the way everyone in this city does.” She picked up Rachana, who squirmed but went right back to sleep in her mother’s arms. When she made a move to leave the room, he said, “What? Is your lover waiting for you outside? To take you away with a wedding band?” At that thought, he strode over to the window. The car was still there, in the shadows, the silhouette of a man leaning against it, smoking a cigarette. “You made plans with him, didn’t you? That’s why you picked a fight with me.”
“I made no plans with anyone,” she said. And as though the whole thing had exhausted her, she sat down near the door, holding her head.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” he said, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Please, just leave me alone for a while.”
The Guru of Love Page 21
