Land Where I Flee

by Prajwal Parajuly

  Agastaya’s friend—Chitralekha still couldn’t pronounce his name—gave Manasa an expectant look.

  “He must be feeling left out,” Chitralekha said to Manasa. “Why don’t you translate what you just said to Prasanti for him?”

  Thankfully, Manasa complied without argument.

  An exchange occurred between the white man and her rude granddaughter. This one was speckled with laughter on both sides.

  “He likes the lights,” Manasa explained to Chitralekha. “He thinks they are important for a festival but even more fitting for a birthday that falls on a festival.”

  Ruthwa whispered to Bhagwati, and they both laughed.

  “Ask him if they have something like this in America,” Chitralekha said. “I don’t know how to say his name.”

  Manasa and the friend tossed words at each other.

  “He says American festivals are boring, and he wants you to call him Nicky. All people who like him call him Nicky.”

  “Nicky, Nicky,” Chitralekha practiced while Nicky beamed. “That’s not difficult at all. It could even be a Nepali name.”

  Manasa did what she had to.

  “Nicky wonders if you’ll give a speech tomorrow,” Manasa said to Chitralekha.

  “A speech? Now, why?”

  Words were swapped between Manasa and Nicky.

  “It’s like stones rattling in a plastic bottle.” Chitralekha described what she thought of the give-and-take in English to Manasa, who was still mid-dialogue with Nicky. Only Ruthwa heard her and smiled.

  “I know,” he said.

  Chitralekha looked in the direction of Bhagwati and Ruthwa, who were playing some puerile card game. “Playing joot-patti like five-year-olds,” she said.

  Once the babble of English voices died, Manasa said, “He thinks you should deliver a speech tomorrow. It is a very big occasion. It’s a very important birthday. All those invited need to be inspired by you.”

  “Is this an election rally?” Chitralekha asked. She thought for a moment. The idea made sense. A roomful of people—well-wishers, VIPs, dignitaries, jealous neighbors—would hang on every word that came out of her mouth. And it would be a novel thing to do. No one delivered speeches during personal celebrations.

  “People in America give speeches,” Agastaya, even quieter today than his usual self, said.

  “Maybe I could do it,” Chitralekha said.

  “Please don’t,” Manasa begged. “No one does that here.”

  “That hasn’t stopped me from doing things no one has done before,” Chitralekha replied. “Had I not done things that hadn’t been done before, I am sure I’d have been able to give you the best of everything.”

  “Embarrass the whole family if you want,” Manasa said. “Do it. I’ll hide when you give the speech.”

  “Nicky—Nicky has good ideas,” Chitralekha remarked. “What else should we do?”

  “He thinks you should also dance,” Manasa said after an exchange with Nicky.

  “I am not a cheap dancer.” Chitralekha waited for a response.

  “He thinks you should dance.”

  “That I won’t do. Prasanti will do the dancing for me.”

  “I only dance for Aamaa these days,” Prasanti said, untangling a knot of wires. “You unlucky people will not have me dance on your birthdays. And I give up on these condo lights. Two men in the family, and I have to do this alone.”

  “I am a guest, so I shouldn’t be expected to help,” Ruthwa said.

  “You helped me yesterday, condo—and I thought you were a changed man,” Prasanti huffed. “Now I know it must be because you wanted to ask me about my past.”

  “Wait, he asked you about your past?” Manasa said. “What did he want to know?”

  “Oh, this and that. My father and mother’s story. Made me cry. This man isn’t a good man.”

  “Wait a second—you told him everything?” Manasa asked.

  “Yes, everything—even about my operation. He was the most interested in that. Do you also want to get a surgery, chakka?”

  “He’ll write a book about you now,” Manasa said. “Everyone will know your story.”

  “And then I’ll become famous,” Prasanti retorted. “And people will make a movie about me.”

  “Did he promise you that?” Manasa asked.

  “No. I know. I know these things. I know. And you will be even more jealous of me than you are right now. Don’t think I’ve forgotten the slap.”

  “Isn’t it time for the puja?” Bhagwati asked.

  “It is,” Prasanti said. “Will this gorey also come?”

  “Let him watch it from the outside,” Chitralekha said.

  “Do I also have to watch it from the outside, then?” Bhagwati asked.

  “You and your siblings have already defiled the entire house—what would it matter if you were to degrade one more room?” Chitralekha responded. She was very pleased with her answer.

  The puja ushering the goddess of wealth had always been a short affair in their house. It defied tradition in almost every way—the brevity, the absence of incantations, and the general lack of knowledge of what precisely was to be done on a puja, any puja. Participants would stand in front of the altar, pray in silence, and Chitralekha applied a red dot of a tika on each one of them. They’d then light the lamps, gamble, and welcome the Bhailo singers. This one was no different, but again, this one was different—the entire family was celebrating the festival under one roof after eighteen years.

  And it was her birthday that enabled that. This was a singular affair.

  When Chitralekha offered tika to Bhagwati, Bhagwati might have been crying. When she applied it on Manasa’s forehead, Manasa stuck out her tongue and made a monkey-like face. When she put tika on Agastaya, he touched her feet with his head. She looked away when she gave Ruthwa his tika. After she applied the red dot on Nicky, he hugged her. She turned red.

  Outside, the first group of Bhailo girls chorused:

  Blessed be he who gives us a handful of gifts with a roof of gold

  Blessed be he who gives us a bagful of gifts with a golden shed

  Blessed be he who gives us a quintal of donation with a golden mansion . . .

  May this house be blessed with a lot of cattle

  May this family flourish and prosper

  May the elderly have long lifelines like those of banyan trees

  May the stone the elderly touch turn to gold

  May the mud they touch turn to paddy

  May the water they touch turn to oil . . .

  Nicky took pictures. Manasa and Bhagwati changed into blue saris, which did nothing to accentuate the appearance of the former yet immensely flattered the latter. Agastaya and Ruthwa played cards. Prasanti lit a sparkler near a nervous Nicky. Chitralekha asked Prasanti to double the offering for the young girls who had just finished their singing.

  “Give them three hundred rupees,” she said. “They’re the first to come—they’ll bring us luck. This has been a good year.”

  SEVEN

  At the ungodly hour of six in the morning, Aamaa’s Toyota Innova snakes its way through the many curves north of Chandmari to get to Hanuman Tok.

  We whizz by a stuttering jeep, hanging from the back of which are three standing men.

  Nicky dives into his backpack for his camera. By the time he removes its lens protector, the jeep is far behind us.

  “We usually don’t have people hanging from cars in the capital these days,” Agastaya says with a hint of hometown pride. “Gangtok is pretty strict about these things. You don’t see fifteen passengers populating seats meant for nine.”

  Prasanti, Manasa, and I are packed in the rear of the vehicle.

  “His camera is the size of a TV.”—Prasanti.

  “Even I have a camera that big,” I say.

  “But I am sure you don’t know how to use it.”—Prasanti.

  Manasa and I burst out laughing.

  Manasa then screeches, trying not to
fall off her seat when the vehicle turns at one particularly sharp bend.

  “What’s so funny?” Aamaa asks from the front seat.

  “It’s Manasa and Ruthwa being idiotic,” Bhagwati, sandwiched between Nicky and Agastaya in the middle seat, informs her. “They need no reason to laugh.”

  It’s D-Day. The grand old lady of the house turns eighty-four today. She wants to make early-morning visits to the temples and the monastery. That’s what these special days do—they force nonreligious types to embrace faith for a day. The two-temples-and-a-monastery trip is a Gangtok tradition. The temples don’t have much history or significance but have become tourist destinations on account of their beautiful locations—the Hanuman one is swaddled in greenery while the Ganesha temple looks out to the length and breadth of my city. Both temples are clean—I don’t mind going barefoot in them. Of all the monasteries around Gangtok, the Enchey Monastery, our third stop, I think, has the least tourist appeal.

  Alpine vegetation abounds as the altitude escalates. It’s a beautiful part of Gangtok—undeniably lush and unspoiled—but Nicky’s camera likes the stray dogs better.

  “One of those dogs will jump on him.”—Prasanti.

  “You want to jump on him.”—Manasa.

  “Did you chug a bottle of vodka this morning?” Agastaya asks Manasa.

  “The priest didn’t come yesterday. He said he’d be there early this morning.”—Aamaa.

  “Let him wait.”—Manasa.

  “Yes, let him wait.”—Prasanti.

  “Yes, let him wait,” I say.

  Manasa laughs. Bhagwati turns back and sniffs Manasa’s breath.

  “It’s begun getting chilly.”—Aamaa.

  “I love the way you guys speak. Maybe I should learn Nepalese. I wonder how long it’d take me.”—Nicky. Click. Click.

  “How many languages do you speak?”—Manasa.

  “Half of one—English.”—Nicky.

  “You can easily learn how to speak Nepali,” I joke.

  “Speak and write both.”—Nicky. Click.

  “Writing is even easier.”—Manasa.

  The four of us siblings laugh. Despite being somewhat proud of our written Nepali, we have no fond memories of maneuvering our way around the raswa-dirgha dichotomy that causes so many people of my generation to detest the language—I have, for instance, never figured out when to use the small ee as opposed to the big eee and the shorter oo in place of the longer ooo. Disentangling the verb-gender enigma and suffixing the cases are even more complex. The obsession with English has atrophied our Nepali reading and writing skills.

  “It’s a beautiful language,” I say.

  “It is.”—Agastaya.

  “So expressive. I love that slash on top of every word.”—Nicky. Click.

  “That’s Nepali,” I say.

  “That’s Nepali.”—Manasa.

  We have now become a family of Nepali-speaking people from everywhere.

  Kalimpong, in the troubled Darjeeling district, where hope should have reigned supreme in “Jai Gorkhland” but has over the years been edged out by desperation.

  Nepal, where my mother was from and where Manasa was married.

  Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, our home.

  Bhutan (well, sort of), where Bhagwati married.

  We now are from America, from England, from everywhere.

  People from different places speaking the same language across seven seas.

  I: citizen of the world? Not quite. Nepali-speaking Indian. Indo-Nepalese. Indian of Nepalese origin. Gurkhali or Gurkha or Gorkha—terms gaining rapid popularity to describe the Nepali in India, words embraced to chisel out our identity, to distance ourselves from Nepal. Old words with new meanings. Words meant not to confuse our ethnicity with our nationality. Hoping the association that comes from sharing our new name with those valiant soldiers doesn’t spawn a different kind of identity conundrum.

  Agastaya: an NRI, a Non-Resident Indian. Indian about to leap over. Insufferable green-card holder—poster boy of upper-middle-class South Asian aspirations. Impatient bearer of an Indian passport that will soon be replaced by an American one, the former to be hidden but promised to be turned over to authorities, to be flashed on trips to Bhutan, where being non-Indian means having to shell out a pretty penny.

  Bhagwati: Nepali-speaking Bhutanese. Lhotshampa. Nepali-speaking former Bhutanese. Nepali-speaking refugee. Formerly Nepali-speaking Indian. Now Nepali-speaking-refugee-who’s-almost-American-and-travels-on-Refugee-Travel-Document.

  Manasa: Nepali-Nepali. Formerly Nepali-speaking Indian. Now Nepali. Nepalese. Anglicized or Sanskritized, one and the same thing. The holder of a nonelectronic passport. But almost a Brit—soon to be owner of the powerful, powerful burgundy passport with the fancy, fancy coat of arms.

  And Aamaa: with no passport but voter’s IDs in Gangtok, in Kalimpong, and in Darjeeling. One person who votes in three places, two states. Just in case.

  It’s only taken eighteen long years for all of us to be together in one vehicle.

  Aamaa wants to know if we are explaining the significance of everything to Nicky.

  “There’s nothing to say about the temples. The royal cremation ground has more history, and I haven’t ever been there.”—Manasa.

  “Tell him Ganesha is the remover of obstacles.”—Aamaa.

  Manasa translates that for Nicky.

  “And Hanuman is the monkey god, the bachelor god.”—Aamaa.

  Manasa does what she has to.

  “Oh, yes, Agastaya, remember on our taxi ride to the airport? He was right there—on the dashboard.”—Nicholas.

  “Isn’t that where we met? These shared cabs to airports are such a boon.”—Agastaya.

  “Whatever.”—Nicholas.

  We get off outside the Enchey Monastery. Nicky can’t stop himself from spinning the series of prayer wheels lining the path to the monastery.

  “This is where I brought my husband on our first date.”—Bhagwati.

  “That’s so romantic. Wait, you didn’t have an arranged marriage?”—Nicky.

  “No, we eloped—sort of.”—Bhagwati.

  “That’s even more romantic.”—Nicky.

  “If you say so.”—Bhagwati.

  “Ohmygahd, we need pictures of this place.”—Nicky.

  “Aamaa, this is where Ram and I came on our first date,” Bhagwati tells Aamaa in Nepali. “Remember he had come to interview you?”

  Aamaa stiffens.

  “You don’t want to talk about it, do you, Aamaa?” Bhagwati asks.

  Nicholas clicks away.

  “No.”

  “Well, here’s something you should know. I didn’t run away to get married. I ran away because I had failed the boards.” Click-click-click.

  Aamaa stares at Bhagwati, unbelieving. This is news to all of us.

  “And it later turned out I hadn’t failed.”—Bhagwati.

  “You ran away because you failed?”—Agastaya.

  “Yes, so don’t think I ran away to get married, Aamaa. I ran away because I was afraid of the consequences of being a failure who was also Chitralekha Neupaney’s granddaughter.”

  “But you eventually married him.”—Aamaa. Click. Click. Click. She breaks into a forced smile for one of the clicks.

  “I haven’t regretted a second of it—so neither should you.” Click. Click. Click. “I never want you to bring up the issue of his caste again.”

  Aamaa opens her mouth to say something. Click.

  “No, Aamaa, it’s your birthday. That’s your promise to me.”—Bhagwati.

  Sometimes, Bhagwati delivers the biggest surprises of us all.

  Click. Click.

  •

  It is a good day to be Aamaa’s birthday. It falls on the most unimportant day of a most important festival, right between the Lakshmi Puja and Bhai Tika, so all the invited guests will turn up. Today is the Goru Puja—the day for the worship of oxen. It is a dull day until late at night, when th
e Deusi “players,” whose female counterparts sang the Bhailo yesterday, will go from house to house singing Tihaar carols and assaulting people’s sleep.

  The first of the three hundred guests who have been invited for the Chaurasi start trickling in as early as ten in the morning. Neighbors and close relatives, halfway between immediate family and formal guests, are here to run errands. They’ll mingle, eat vegetarian food (because we are, technically, a vegetarian family and also because the Chaurasi is more or less a religious event—one that involves a priest), and drink tea, coffee, and orange juice while secretly lamenting the absence of alcohol.

  Celebrations in Sikkim are big affairs—community affairs, public affairs. A wedding is judged by the number of people who attend it.

  Throw intimacy out the window.

  Invite the street, the neighborhood, the town, and the entire damn state—that’s what makes a proper party.

  As the Chaurasi graduates from a sedate religious function to a full-blown networking event, Nicholas’s prominence soars. He could be an uneducated charlatan, a sex offender, a murderer, but he outshines everyone at the party.

  It’s been decided that he will stay with us for the next few days. The inroads one makes as a Westerner in the East! Right after he surfaces from his car, a cousin’s cousin relieves Nicky of his suitcase, and the priest—one moment deep in incantations around his fading fire and the next, hovering by the foreign guest’s side—asks him questions in his tutey-futey English.

  “Tell me about the American visa for holy men,” the pundit implores Nicholas.

  “I am just an ignorant American,” the charmer replies. “I know nothing about visas. You may want to ask Agastaya.”

  The uncomprehending priest returns to his domain and chants mantras while breaking twigs to throw into the crackling fire.

  Fathers of women of marriageable age hunt for Agastaya.

  Women of marriageable ages eye me.

  Aamaa’s birthday, according to the lunar calendar, coincides with October 24, her birthday on the solar calendar. The overlap is a rarity, the priest declares. He also predicts that this—along with the alignment of a few stars—will keep malefic events at bay.