“You turned it into a joke.”
“You accuse me of being insensitive to rapes. Believe me, I am not. I cannot see someone as formidable as Aamaa being raped.”
“I am not convinced.”
“Tell me this: do you believe it actually happened to her?”
“No.”
“See? I don’t either. Yes, women get raped. Yes, strong women get raped. It’s tragic. It’s infuriating. It’s fucked-up. But I know Aamaa wouldn’t get raped. She’s too . . .”
“What? Ugly?”
“No. Fuck that. Strong. She’s too . . . It’s Aamaa. She exudes power. Who’d dare do it to her?”
“I know. But why would she keep insisting it happened to her?”
“Again, it’s Aamaa. Probably to let us know that setbacks happen? To prove how hardy she is? It’s Chitralekha Neupaney—anything is possible. Gives more punch to her rags-to-riches story.”
“Let’s talk about other things.”
“How’re you doing financially?”
“Why does everyone think I am so poor?” Bhagwati says, exasperated. “If you want to catch Aamaa, now might be a better time to do it than later. At least no one is awake.”
With that, she covers her pretty face with the ugly quilt.
It’s my cue to leave her alone.
•
Downstairs, in the sitting room, I accost Agastaya, who’s half asleep, about his opinion on my career. He echoes Bhagwati’s sentiments regarding my writing about the Gorkhaland movement.
He then staggers to the bathroom. That reminds me—I have to pee.
He doesn’t close the door. I follow him.
“What the hell?” he inquires, his penis half out of his drawers.
“My bladder is about to burst.” I flick my dick out; it anoints the sink with a sprinkle of urine.
“I have no idea what’s happening,” Agastaya says, shoving his junk back into his briefs. “Couldn’t you use the upstairs bathroom?”
“This is like the good old days.” The jet doesn’t stop. “Like Aamaa will open her door so I can pee in her bathroom?”
“This is awkward.”
“How the hell?”
“Because we are grown men.”
He leaves the bathroom.
I let the tap run and spit into the sink.
Agastaya waits for me to finish, enters the bathroom, looks away from the sink, and locks the door.
Once he comes out, I ask him if he will listen to something I’ve written. He says no.
“So, then, I should write about the Gorkhaland movement?” I ask him again.
“Fucking write about whatever the fuck you want.” He closes the door to his room with a bang.
Who is he now? Manasa?
•
I try coaxing the door to Aamaa’s room open. I knock at it insistently. I push it with all my might.
No one knocks in this family. No one has boundaries of privacy. No one has a sense of space.
The door is locked from the inside. She who scorned privacy, who always maintained that there was no need for it, is now clinging to it.
“Aamaa, can you hear me?”
“Aamaa.” Once, twice, three times.
The red door opens, creakily, uncertainly, reticently.
Inside, through the small opening, looks out Prasanti, a man in a woman, a woman in a man. “It’s still dark, you ghost,” she whispers. “She’s in bed.”
“I’m hungry. Can you give me something other than strawberries to eat?”
“At this time in the morning?” She is still whispering, as if Aamaa is actually asleep.
“Yes, stones in the stomach,” I whisper, too.
“Go down. I’ll be there in a minute.”
I wait by the door. God, the Neupaney Oasis needs a paint job.
Prasanti emerges, covering whatever is on her chest with a scarf. Quickly, before I can figure out what she is doing, she inserts a key into the keyhole and locks the door. The key, along with its family of jangling siblings, goes into the vicinity of the eunuch’s bosom—that sanctum sanctorum where all is safe.
Inside, the snubber of privacy is locked in her private sanatorium.
My plan to sneak in is thwarted. I’d have to find some other way to see the old hag.
Someone snores.
“I can’t make anything elaborate,” Prasanti says. “Can you do with noodles?”
“Wai-Wai?”
“No, Maggi.”
“No Wai-Wai?”
“No.”
I pull a chair from the dining room into the kitchen.
“What? Will you watch me cook?”
“Just want to talk.”
“No one wants to talk to you. I am surprised those people did. Aamaa wasn’t very happy.”
“You haven’t aged a bit.”
“I know. I am a beauty queen.” Prasanti pours some water into a saucepan, breaks the Maggi in half, and throws the two pieces into the vessel with the same gracelessness that I vividly remember. “What happened to your dara?”
“Went to a dentist, got braces—they fixed my teeth.”
“Your gas must like your repaired teeth.”
Gas, where I come from, in addition to being the kitchen equipment you use for cooking and the cylinder on which said equipment works, of which there is forever a scarcity around here, is also your girlfriend. Don’t ask me why. The educated use it mockingly, disparagingly. The masses say it with solemnity, as if no other synonym would do justice to the love of their lives.
“Don’t you say condo these days?”
“No, I’ve grown up.” Prasanti smiles. “I don’t use bad words anymore.”
“I don’t believe you. Condo was your favorite word.”
“Now it is laro.”
I laugh in shock at her brazenness, at the lowliest word for penis she just used.
“Wow,” I say, because I don’t know how else to convey my delight. “Wow. Wow.”
“What wow-wow?” Prasanti chides. “Wow-wow-wow—like an Angrez who doesn’t know any other word. Will you make me your topic now?”
Ah, topic. A word I come across every day but whose meaning now was so far removed from the connotation it held in my adolescence. Your topic was the object of your sexual affection.
“Topic of your chattisey, huh?” Prasanti asks.
I am slack-jawed.
Chattis is thirty-six, the number.
Chattisey, with the suffix, somehow means thirty-six strokes of the penis for the purpose of self-pleasuring. The number of strokes it is purported for your member to spit semen out. Chattisey is the most creative—if substandard—Nepali word I know, but it is just one of the many clever words we have concocted. We Nepali-speaking people use our language ingeniously. We are lovers of neologism.
“I have some sel-roti,” Prasanti remembers. “I made them all a few days ago. Would you like some?”
“Nah, not this early in the morning—we’ll eat them later. For now, Maggi is enough.”
“You loved sel-roti as a child.”
“I liked all food as a child.”
“Has that changed?”
“Nah, still like all food.”
“Then why did you say no to my sel-roti?”
“Because I’ll be full with all that Maggi.”
“You just said you were very hungry.”
“All right, give me a sel-roti.”
“No sel-roti for you now. My sel-roti isn’t for picky people like you. I am dispatching half of what I made to those idiots at the Kalimpong factory. They say it’s the best sel-roti they have ever eaten.”
She is behaving like a woman difficult to get into bed.
“Do you still dance?” I ask. A showman recognizes another showman. We know better than to let go of an opportunity to perform.
“I dance only for special people like Aamaa.” She hands me the soupy Maggi in a bowl. “It’s hot, fool. Be careful.”
“So, you won’t dance fo
r me?”
“You’re Aamaa’s enemy. You’re my enemy.”
“Entertain me while I eat.”
“All right, I’ll sing.” She can’t keep the desire to perform suppressed even for a minute.
Prasanti clears her throat a few times, holds her balled-up fist to her mouth, and sings “Deusi,” a carol sung by groups of men during Tihaar. “Jhilimili, jhilimili,” she sings softly and bellows: “Deusurey.” The words preceding the Deusurey are barely audible, but the Deusurey, the chorus, rumbles out several decibels louder and keeps getting louder and louder until at the door stands Manasa and the Deusurey becomes softer and softer.
“Stop it.” Manasa is furious. “Stop it. I am trying to sleep.”
“He asked me to,” Prasanti says with mock fear in her eyes.
“Does that mean you have to do everything he asks you?”
“Yes, I am a servant.”
“You’re a servant only when you feel like it. When you have real work, you’re a Maharani.”
“Or a maharandi,” Prasanti says. The clever play of words, by which she relegates a queen to a whore, makes me laugh uncontrollably.
“You, too, stop, Ruthwa,” Manasa says in English. “Don’t encourage her. She’s not one of your whores.”
“Maharani, maharandi, who knows?” Prasanti says. “Deep within even a Maharani could be a maharandi. Randi, Rani. Rani, Randi.”
This is too much. I have to set aside the bowl of Maggi somewhere so I can laugh without spilling any soup on myself.
“Look at him—laughing galala.” Prasanti points at me, using an onomatopoeic deliciousness whose English translation—maybe uproariously—would do zero justice to it. “Here, give your bowl to me. Laugh freely. The wrinkles don’t show on you like they do on this one.”
Which is when Manasa loses it.
It is one of those slaps—perfect in its thunder, in the four-finger imprint it leaves behind, and in the shock it causes the slapped. Had baby slaps preceded it and pinches trailed it, the slap would have lost some of its perfection. No words trivialize the slap. No justification adulterates it. It is a swift slap, a half-a-second slap, and the venue where it is delivered will smart for hours. Hell, every part of the body of the slapped will throb for hours.
The dispenser of the perfect slap heads back to bed, whereas the perfectly slapped hurries to her room.
“Aamaa, can you hear me?” I shout from downstairs, then laugh to myself at the absurdity of the question, the absurdity of the situation.
It isn’t even six a.m.
This is going to be one long day.
THREE
Prasanti Paradise
Prasanti had stopped spitting into people’s food a long time ago. She did not feel any satisfaction in her victims not knowing what she had done to their food, so these days, she threw stones into their rice. Choosing these pebbles was an art, for she had to pick out barely visible, tiny white stones and hide them in mounds of rice only after the food had been apportioned onto the plates. She couldn’t throw the stones into the rice cooker because they would swim everywhere when the rice boiled, and those people she didn’t want assaulted by her weapon of choice would inadvertently end up crunching on one.
A foil to this otherwise foolproof tool of revenge was not knowing which seat and plate the recipient of her evil designs would select. Prasanti, thus, set aside the pebbles for second helpings. When someone she wanted dead demanded more rice, she’d serve this person a mound with the tiny bowl she sometimes used as a ladle and into which she would have already introduced a few pebbles.
Prasanti usually stuck to a plan. She would not follow through with her plot the very night someone ill-treated her but wait a day or two, play nice with this person, pretend she had forgotten everything about the mistreatment meted out on her, and then strike. Today, though, she wasn’t going to delay her payback. Her cheek still stung, and the humiliation of a slap at this age was too painful to swallow.
After the showdown at dawn, Prasanti had disappeared into the darkness, retreated beyond the garage, and cried. The encounter with Manasa gave rise to one unpleasant memory after another. She, therefore, did what she always did when she felt defeated: she had her dialogue with God.
“How dare she treat me that way?” she asked God.
“You shouldn’t have made fun of her,” Prasanti answered as God.
“But she is horrible. Treats me like I am a servant.”
“You are a servant, and you have to put up with her only for a few days. She will be gone.”
“I hate her.”
“And she hates you.”
“Why am I made this way?” she asked God.
“Because you’re special,” God replied.
“Is this how special people feel?” she demanded of God.
“Yes, sometimes even special people feel misery,” God answered.
“Why couldn’t I be one—man or woman?”
“Because you’re special.”
“Sometimes I feel you say that only to make me feel happy.”
“Think of it this way—how many people in the world can claim to be like you? How many people in Gangtok are like you?”
“Perhaps two.”
“Yes, of the lakhs of people in the city, it’s just you and the dancer who has run away to Siliguri.”
“And she’s the butt of all jokes.”
“That she is,” God replied.
“Why are we such jokes? Why do they always laugh at us? Why does no one take us seriously?”
“You could be serious. They’d take you seriously. But you are always laughing, always dancing, always jumping. You want to be taken seriously, behave differently.”
“I try doing that. Sometimes, I never smile. But it makes me miserable. I want to be my own self again. Am I really special?”
“You are special. I wanted you to experience life as very few humans can. You are living a good life.”
It was a mechanism that had always worked. It would work forever.
Today, the day of the worship of dogs, Prasanti would give that little bitch called Manasa the best meal of her life.
Manasa was a light eater and seldom asked for second helpings, so Prasanti would have to slightly tweak her regular plan of action. The tiny stones the eunuch had picked up were so delightfully shaped, sized, and colored that they didn’t look very different from grains of rice. They wouldn’t even jangle on the plate. All she had to do now was figure out where Manasa would sit.
Manasa was the first to arrive when Prasanti let everyone know with a squeal that lunch was ready. As her mistress’s daughter turned to the sink to wash her hands, Prasanti surreptitiously sprinkled some stones into the rice on the plate closest to Manasa’s back. Feeling more self-congratulatory now because she was certain Manasa would perch herself at her usual spot, right in front of which was the stone-laden plate, the eunuch stirred the stones into the rice a bit. They blended perfectly with the grains.
Manasa sat in her usual chair, made a face at the barely disassembled cauliflower florets in the curry, studied the plate in front of her, and asked Prasanti if she had portioned out rice for elephants and not humans. She moved the plate to the place to her left and ladled a tiny amount of fresh rice from the cooker into an empty bowl. Aamaa, who had voluntarily exiled herself to her bedroom for breakfast with no resistance from her family members, came in at the same time as Agastaya and sat next to Manasa.
“How was it?” Aamaa asked, adding cauliflower and daal atop the hill of rice on the plate intended for Manasa. “The monastery? Did you find God there? What do you find in monasteries that you don’t find in temples? This daal looks too thin.”
“I go to monasteries to look at paintings, Aamaa,” Agastaya said as he scooped out some yogurt and added it to a mix similar to Chitralekha’s. “Buddha, Kaali—I believe in no one.”
“That’s how I brought you up—to question your own religion and be cynical about everything, marriage
included.”
Bhagwati trailed in after Agastaya as though still unsure of her place in the dining room. Prasanti was unbearably uncomfortable. She had never subjected Chitralekha to a stone treatment. Her mistress didn’t deserve it. Worse, she had once admitted to Chitralekha—in one of those moments of mistress-servant bonding—that she had mixed some pebbles into the food of the minister next door when he came to discuss with Chitralekha his plans of vertically expanding his building. Aamaa had lightly reprimanded her but seemed more amused than offended at the breach of hospitality. Chitralekha would probably know what was going on.
Ruthwa swaggered in and sat opposite Aamaa. It would be nice if the tension between grandson and grandmother made Aamaa forget that she had food in front of her.
“The entire family is here,” Ruthwa said.
No one else said a word.
“Silence?” Ruthwa continued. “That means I am forgiven. Ah.”
For a while, things worked as Prasanti hoped they would. Aamaa would make little balls out of the rice, cauliflower, and daal and then break them. She repeated the process a few times. She was too distracted by Ruthwa’s presence to eat.
“For no fault of mine, everybody stopped talking to me,” Ruthwa said. “Now, everyone seems fine with me. Aamaa, I have missed out on a few years of your life. Fill me in—what has happened since the prodigal grandson elevated this family from obscurity to fame?”
Prasanti heard Manasa laugh. The fool would have been grimacing had Prasanti’s plans not been foiled.
Bhagwati cast a look at Manasa and asked Prasanti for a glass of water.
“Do you still eat rice for all three meals, Aamaa?” Bhagwati asked. “What a bhaatey you’ve always been.”
“All Nepalis love their rice,” Aamaa said, suddenly chirpy. “All Brahmins love their rice. Doesn’t your family love it, too? Bhutanese and Damaais don’t? I thought they did.”
“Bhagwati will become an American soon,” Manasa said. “She will then eat bread—did you know that’s what they eat in America, Aamaa? How would you? You haven’t been outside India, yet you think you know everything.”
“Yes, I know,” Aamaa replied. “I know what it is like to be the grandmother of a thirty-three-year-old who’s yet unmarried.”
Land Where I Flee Page 13
