Land Where I Flee

by Prajwal Parajuly

  •

  The one advantage of having her immobile father-in-law tag along with her and her husband everywhere, besides their being able to exploit handicapped parking spots, came to light at the London airport. A surly attendant wheeled Bua everywhere, with Manasa and Himal close behind, as they averted their gaze from other passengers while bypassing them to find their seats on the plane. The decision to travel economy was in part fueled by this preferential treatment they knew would be meted out on Bua and, in the process, on them, irrespective of what class they flew. If the attendant was expecting a gratuity, Manasa wasn’t going to dispense any.

  “How much should we tip her?” Himal asked in the safety of Nepali. “She looks like she needs it.”

  “For service that bad? She deserves nothing.”

  “It could’ve been worse.”

  “That’d be pushing Bua into a wall.”

  Her father-in-law, now comfortable in a bulkhead seat, handed a one-pound coin to the attendant, whose presence was perpetually announced by regular beeps on her cell phone. She grimaced at the coin, took it, and, folding the wheelchair, left without a word.

  “The two of you argue about everything,” Bua said. “It’s a long flight ahead. In economy, it will be even longer.”

  The other Air India 130 passengers would soon filter in. It was best to feed Bua his jaulo now. Manasa steeled herself for some resistance from her father-in-law in the form of a jibe about his life being reduced to eating watery porridge every meal of the day. Once the perfunctory remark was doled out and ignored, she brought a spoonful of liquidy rice close to Bua’s mouth, willed it open by forcing the spoon against the lips, allowed him a minute to chew the food, and then repeated the process several times. By the end of the feeding, the majority of passengers were in their seats. Bua’s swallowing some colorful pills with orange juice sipped through a straw ended the nightmare, and Manasa seated herself in between her father-in-law and husband, whose role during the entire feeding process didn’t go beyond smiling apologetically at the passengers who walked by them.

  Once the plane took off and her father-in-law was fast asleep, Manasa attempted fiddling with the entertainment system. A few seconds later a loud, booming voice attributed the TV’s unavailability to some technical difficulty; she’d have to make do without the ridiculousness of a Bollywood movie. The insouciance with which her co-passengers received the news surprised Manasa. Unlike many of them, who dozed off, she found that sleep, especially when she was in motion, never came easily to her. The snoring of her father-in-law complemented the aircraft hum—louder, she was certain, on this flight than on any other—and Manasa’s request for earplugs was met with a frosty half nod by a flight attendant way past her prime. When a pair didn’t materialize even fifteen minutes later, Manasa gave up and flipped through a copy of The Hindu that was stuffed in a pouch by the window. She stopped at the obituaries, plumbing one notice after another for details on the cause of death. One, especially, caught her eye:

  Kanthamani Ramaswamy, 69 years, Retired Joint Secretary Education Tamil Nadu passed away on Oct. 15 in Chennai after a short illness. Greatly missed by his wife, son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren.

  Manasa smiled. The obituary made very little sense. First, the idea of a short illness, a non-incapacitating disease, a sickness that didn’t just bring your life to a screeching halt but also impinged upon the dreams and ambitions of your family, was unfathomable. This must have been a last-minute attempt made by the person who sent in the obituary to feel good about Ramaswamy’s wretched life. Perhaps the tribute was written in a hurry, before friends and family filed in to condole and commiserate. To Manasa, short illnesses didn’t exist—she wasn’t living in a world of benign fevers and colds anymore. Her existence was dictated by severe paraplegia—not her own but her father-in-law’s. The way it had sent her own life spiraling out of control, one would think she was the one paralyzed, and in a way she was, for her father-in-law’s condition had become her own; in her attempt at making sure his life had some movement, hers had come to a standstill.

  Sometimes she wished she had a debilitating sickness—at least then she wouldn’t have to be son, daughter, wife, live-in nurse, caretaker, housekeeper, perhaps soon-to-be-shit-wiper (Manasa had not, not yet, been subjected to the humiliation of encountering her father-in-law’s private parts) rolled into one. The obituary stated that Ramaswamy was greatly missed by his daughter-in-law. This South Asian notion of filial piety expanding to the in-laws was the most forced, hypocritical thing about their society. You were expected to develop feelings for your husband’s parents the day you got married. Perhaps the reason she enjoyed family sagas on Star Plus so much, despite being an Oxford-educated former Deloitte consultant, rested purely on the drama that played out between in-laws.

  “What’s so funny?” Himal asked earnestly, looking up from Secrets, his preferred reading at the moment.

  “Nothing,” Manasa said, still laughing. “Just reading the obituaries.”

  “How do they infuse you with so much joy?” Himal smiled.

  “I enjoy reading them.”

  “You’re morbid,” Himal said, resting his head on her shoulder.

  “This one’s son-in-law is mourning him.” She jerked his hand. “They must have been so attached.”

  “Not here, please,” Himal pleaded.

  “I’m just asking you to read the obituary, Himal. Why do you think everything I say is so snide?”

  Himal read the paper quietly.

  “I wonder if Kumaramangalam’s son-in-law washed, clothed, and fed his father-in-law,” Manasa said. “If he stopped going to work because his wife’s high-profile hedge-fund career couldn’t afford to be derailed.”

  “He can hear, Manasa. At least wait until he’s out of earshot.”

  “No, he can’t,” Manasa said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Should I tell you how? Because he falls asleep within exactly three minutes of taking his pills. He wakes up exactly six hours later, and the first thing he does is say something negative about the way he’s been taken care of. But how would you know that, Himal? You haven’t quit your job to look after him.”

  “Manasa, he’s an unwell widower.”

  “Yes, and looking after my paraplegic father-in-law is my sole responsibility. I am no different from Kaali.”

  “Who’s Kaali?”

  “The neighbor’s servant—the one with the bad lip who’s constantly hovering around your family home in Kathmandu.”

  “Do you know she’s had surgery? She looks much better.”

  “You should marry her, then.”

  Manasa felt herself get tearful but controlled the urge to weep when two aging flight attendants, apparently competing with each other on who could be more discourteous, served them drinks. The temptation to guzzle everything out of those tiny gin bottles was acute, but she settled for an orange juice. Then, drawing a connection between her father-in-law’s drink of choice and the one before her, she felt as though the juice was incomplete unless half a dozen pills supplemented it. She couldn’t drink it.

  “Why aren’t you drinking?” Himal asked.

  She didn’t answer his question. “I wonder if Bhagwati would’ve put up with all this, and she got married when she was barely out of high school.”

  “She and you are different people. I understand you do it for me. I don’t think I show my appreciation enough.”

  Himal was right. He did not show his appreciation enough. The lack of alignment in what he expected his wife to be to his father—everything—and what Manasa initially thought were a daughter-in-law’s responsibilities—nothing beyond being polite and charming—could have unraveled any marriage. She had tried to make hers work, although no amount of speaking in a clipped, upper-crust British accent and having a fancy hedge-fund career could erase the boy from Kathmandu, a boy brought up by a mother and a fleet of illiterate nannies over whom he had reigned. Himal might have trie
d to curb it, but he came from a world in which women were different from men, and remnants of this past were everywhere in his present. It was evident in the get-togethers in which men and women formed separate groups, the former to drink and the latter to whip up accompaniments; in the number of times her husband’s family marveled at her Oxford background—a degree that prestigious despite her being a woman!—while casually dismissing Himal’s Cambridge one; in the easy reception of her father-in-law’s second marriage to Himal’s mother because he had as much property in their village in Illam as he did in Kathmandu—the justification was that he needed a second wife to look after all their land in the countryside because there was no way he could concentrate on his political career when he was straddling two places.

  The Ghimirey family—that famous Ghimirey family that she had been married into in a ceremony attended by every important person from Sikkim and Nepal, by the clan’s own admission the richest and oldest Baahun family of Nepal (“We and the Ranas are about the same; they squandered their wealth, and we built up on ours until we fell out of favor with those Maoists”), claiming among their recent ancestors Gazadar Ghimirey, the astrologer who had predicted the downfall of the monarchy in Nepal fifty years before the media had—wasn’t very different in its antiquated beliefs from her driver Nirmal Daaju’s family in Gangtok.

  The marriage, now six years old, had been a source of vindication for her grandmother. “They even know about Bhagwati,” her grandmother had gleefully exclaimed. “They know of what she did to this family, they know of the caste of her husband and yet they want you and only you for their son.”

  Himal nursed a vodka and Sprite. “I’d like some,” Manasa said, and she grabbed the glass from his tray. “What’s in it that women can’t drink?”

  “You’re making things awkward, Manasa. What if Bua saw?”

  “He won’t. He’s asleep. Do you think your family was so desperate to get you married to me because they wanted an Oxbridge-educated bride? Let’s face it—I am no beauty like Bhagwati.”

  “Could be,” Himal uneasily said.

  “But the Ghimireys don’t care so much for their womenfolk’s education. Why should they have chosen me?”

  “Well, I wanted an Oxbridge-educated wife. I wanted to marry you more than they wanted me to marry you.”

  “We know your opinion doesn’t matter, Himal. It’s the family’s that takes precedence. I wonder if I’d have married you had I known it would come with having to be a governess to your father.”

  “Emasculate me, Manasa. As if you haven’t done it before by making fun of me with my cousins.”

  “Himal, I told them about that foul-smelling discharge from your ear. How’s that insulting?”

  “You took such a personal issue and made it public.”

  A stewardess threw dinner their way, accosting Manasa with effluvia originating from her armpits.

  “That’s how bad your ear smells. Worse. You need surgery.”

  “With Bua around, how’s that even possible?”

  “You keep forgetting that Bua hardly takes half an hour of your day. That’s no reason not to have an operation.”

  “Wouldn’t Bua like some food? Should we wake him up?”

  “I’ve told you, he sleeps six hours, Himal—if only you knew your father better.”

  •

  By the time they were disgorged into the shiny new T-3 in Delhi, Manasa had promised herself she’d never fly Air India again. Bua, still hurt by his request for whiskey being rebuffed by a rude flight attendant, had dictated a long letter of complaint to the CEO, which Manasa, being the dutiful Ghimirey daughter-in-law that she was, meticulously jotted down. Bua was firm that she mention all his past titles at the end of the letter. That took more than half the page.

  Once her father-in-law had grasped from Namaskaar, the in-flight magazine, that Air India was a government-owned airline, he decided that he’d have to address the letter to the president of India. Then good sense prevailed. He complained that the president wasn’t going to read his letter, so he tried flushing it down the commode when brushing his teeth, which clogged the toilet. A flight attendant used the bathroom after Bua and Manasa returned to their seats and informed all her co-workers who the perpetrator of the overflow was. Each and every attendant then glared at them as she passed.

  Bua snarled that the women’s treatment of him would probably change if they knew he was a former home minister of Nepal, to which Manasa didn’t have the heart to reply that these air hostesses, long inured to the possibility of getting fired from their cushy government jobs, would probably not care if he was the king of the damn country. Nepal meant little to India—an indigestible piece of information for those in Himal’s family, who were of the opinion that their antagonism toward the dhotis of India had to be reciprocated somehow. Her in-laws failed to see that India was too busy dealing with real problems, such as China and Pakistan, to worry about its landlocked neighbor. For the better part of the two hours after he woke up, Manasa patiently listened to Bua’s rant about the colorful Nepali hat on his head nettling the flight attendants while Himal nervously read The Hindu.

  “Should I talk to them about it?” Manasa finally offered.

  “No, you don’t,” Bua replied. “I will. What will they think of me? An invalid who needs a woman to speak for him.”

  “I think it’ll be easier if a woman approaches women.”

  But Bua was adamant about not being defended by a female.

  This was where her husband came from. A family clinging to its past because its present had become unpalatable. The son of a man self-exiled from his country under the pretext of his paralysis, when Maoists and extortion made up the bitter reality. A lineage tainted with accomplishment, making mediocrity an unacceptable facet of life among its men. A family whose sons and sons-in-law aimed to rule and conquer while the daughters and daughters-in-law supported them, pushed them, worked hard for them. A family in which women were encouraged to increase their marriageability by shrinking their educational and professional aspirations. Her husband’s voice, hollow and quivering, was his father’s voice, the family’s voice. And this family she had now become a part of, where her Oxford degree was an awe-inspiring pink lipstick—shocking and something that should adorn no woman in the great dynasty—in which the pearls that bejeweled her neck were more important than the diplomas on her wall, in which her opinions mattered only until the opinion of an older male took over. Her grandmother would have obliterated them—the old lady would have eviscerated everyone in this family into which she had so proudly married her granddaughter.

  Manasa was temporarily parting ways with the family to see this grandmother. Himal and Bua would fly to Kathmandu from Delhi while she took a domestic flight to Bagdogra. At least fleetingly she wouldn’t be a factotum to a father who wasn’t her own, a companion to a husband who wasn’t of her choosing, and a rebel in a family she had on so many occasions resisted butting heads with. After promising her father-in-law that she wouldn’t talk to the Air India people about how disrespectfully he had been treated—as if anyone would take his grievance to heart and make amends—Manasa bade good-bye to Bua and Himal, both men she had married.

  Dirty Sheet and Burberry Coat

  Manasa’s journey from Bagdogra to Gangtok culminated with a taxi screeching into the new, much rhapsodized gravel driveway of her grandmother’s house and the driver obdurately refusing to remove her suitcases from the trunk. Prasanti’s making a dash for the gate to attend to what Manasa was sure was a nonexistent errand the moment the Maruti 800—its every door dented—turned into the compound didn’t help soothe Manasa’s throbbing temples.

  The driver declared he was a driver and not a coolie, Prasanti didn’t reply to Manasa’s repeated calls, and Aamaa surveyed the scene from the terrace, constantly spitting out orange pips onto the driveway, no doubt amused by her granddaughter’s helplessness.

  “Where did Prasanti disappear to?” Manasa asked,
getting out of the car. “I saw her run away. She’s still misbehaving, it seems.”

  “I sent her to get something,” Chitralekha said. “She’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “And who will help me with my luggage?” Manasa heaved out with great difficulty three suitcases of varying sizes from the trunk while the driver made continual attempts at adjusting a wayward lock of hair that repeatedly fell to his forehead.

  “Can you give me some money for tea, madam?” the driver said to Manasa, his attention still on the rogue strand and his eyes on the side-view mirror.

  “No money for tea. First think of the number of jolts you gave me. Those bumps just didn’t stop.”

  “What can we do if the roads are bad, madam?” the driver asked.

  “Drive more carefully. How many times did I ask you to slow down?”

  “Give him twenty rupiya!” Chitralekha shouted. “Let him have a cup of tea. I’d ask him to stay for coffee, but Prasanti isn’t here.”

  The driver, now out of the car, gave a grateful look to Chitralekha.

  “Let the bags be,” Manasa said to the driver, who hadn’t made for her luggage in the first place. “You don’t help with the bags because you’re such a big, important man. No, Aamaa, he doesn’t get a rupiya. You’re exactly the reason these people have such high expectations of us. First of all, they overcharge us. Who charges seventeen hundred rupees from Bagdogra to Gangtok? They think we are all fools.”

  “But, madam, the airport middlemen keep seven hundred rupees.”