Land Where I Flee

by Prajwal Parajuly

  “All three of you encouraged me to write it.”

  “Oh, now, we are to blame?”

  “I swear, I had no intention of causing this.”

  “You failed. Whatever your intention, the end result was damage. That’s you—you destroy everything you come close to.”

  “Think she’ll forgive me?”

  “No, she won’t. Nobody will. I know it’s not my place, but I think you should get the hell out of here and go wherever the hell you can go where your family will not be destroyed by you.”

  “C’mon, Manasa, I didn’t know that the nothing article would result in a fire.”

  “You’ve been gone too long, Ruthwa, and you’re better off gone. You don’t understand this world.”

  “For God’s sake, Manasa, nobody, no-fucking-body, knows it was Aamaa’s rape I described. No one besides our family.”

  “You won’t convince me about your good intentions, Ruthwa. I consider myself to be the most evil person in the world, but I think I am slightly less evil than you.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.” I bitterly laugh.

  “Nothing that doesn’t cause damage makes sense to you.”

  •

  Nicky is on his way out of the hospital. He nods at us, but we don’t exchange words.

  Aamaa is in a private ward—weak, small, defeated. Her sclera is watery, her pupils dilated. She isn’t wearing the robe the hospital wants her to. She doesn’t open her mouth as wide as the doctor asks her to. She can’t talk. Or she won’t talk. The doctors say she’s in shock. She has suffered a mild stroke.

  Prasanti stands guard, her eyes swollen from crying. I ask her if she is okay.

  “What will happen to all that sel-roti now that the Chaurasi was canceled midway?” she sobs. “I thought she was going to die. What would happen to me if she died?”

  Prasanti tries feeding Aamaa some jaulo. Slowly, Aamaa chews on the rice. She looks at no one.

  “It was half truth,” Aamaa says with effort. She appears smaller when she talks. “It was half lie.”

  “Aamaa, you don’t have to talk now.”—Agastaya.

  “The rape story was half a lie—do you think I’d have allowed him to?” She looks tiny when she confesses—more so than when she first spoke.

  “Why would you?” Manasa asks, shrugging off Agastaya’s signals not to stress Aamaa out. “Why would you burden us poor children with a half-truth so heinous?”

  “He tried. He tried very hard. But I wouldn’t allow him to. I kicked him. I nearly stabbed him. He was no match for me.”

  “We know. No one is a match for you.”—Manasa.

  “It’s my story, my suffering—I can tell it any way I like.” Aamaa coughs and asks for a bowl to spit into. Agastaya tells her it is okay to stop talking.

  She needs to rest. We all wait for what is to come next.

  “Everyone who read the book knew I was the person described in it.” She speaks in labored tones. “Everyone. People actually thought I was raped. Now my factory is useless. You all used to make fun of my driveway—had I not replaced those pesky steps with it, you’d have had to carry me all the way to the main road. It’d have taken fifteen minutes. I’d have been dead.” She’s falling asleep.

  “We know. We should never judge your acumen.”—Bhagwati.

  “It was the factory owner—my childhood neighbor,” Aamaa whispers. “We called him Mama. My mother put Bhai tika on him—that’s how close he had been to my family, to me. He had seen me as a baby. I had my revenge. I bought the factory from him at a quarter of what he wanted. He deserved it—he deserved every bite, every scratch, every kick he got when he tried undressing me. It destroyed him. It killed him. It served him right. I killed him. And now the factory is dead. It’s gone.”

  “I killed the factory,” I say. “I am sorry, Aamaa. Nothing I do is right. Nothing.”

  My grandmother is falling asleep.

  “I am leaving,” I say. “You look beautiful, Bhagwati, even when you’re sad.”

  “Thanks.”—Bhagwati.

  “Don’t write a book about me, you murderer.”—Prasanti.

  “I won’t, Prasanti—you’re too boring to write a book on,” I reply.

  “So, this is good-bye?”—Manasa.

  “Where are you going?”—Agastaya.

  “Fleeing—like I always do,” I say.

  “Like we all do.”—Bhagwati.

  I leave. Nobody stops me.

  EIGHT

  Life

  After bidding good-bye to Nicky, which Agastaya tried to make bittersweet but which only left him feeling bitter, and trying to summon tears on command, at which he didn’t succeed, Agastaya walked the circuitous loop from the taxi stand to the town square and headed for Baker’s Café. There, he ordered a coffee and looked at his watch.

  Nicky had summed it up simply: “We are just from different worlds, Agastaya. I have seen your world, and you’ve seen mine—we can never belong in each other’s life.”

  Nicky said he’d have moved out of the apartment, along with Cauffield, by the time Agastaya returned to New York. Agastaya wondered whether Nicky would provisionally move in with Anthony and Anthony Two and if he’d rekindle his romance with Anthony Senior. Nicky canceled the Agra-Jaipur trip. Agastaya would stay in Gangtok another day or two to play nurse to Aamaa while she, a vegetable version of her dynamic former self, conspired against the world.

  Shivani was late arriving, but then, she hadn’t lived in the West. And she was female. She perhaps didn’t want to appear overenthusiastic. He had decided to see this woman because no one asked him to anymore. Shivani was a doctor and the daughter of two doctors. She had gone to Tashi Namgyal Academy when the Gorkhaland insurgency in the eighties had forced her and many like her to switch from St. Joseph’s Convent in Kalimpong.

  She was a petite woman. The length of her nails unsettled Agastaya. There was no way those nails didn’t scratch or hurt babies when the pediatrician handled them.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Oh, hi.” He put his hand forward, which she loosely took.

  This was a meeting that the elders had coordinated with the explicit purpose of marriage in mind. She knew it. He knew it. It seemed the world around them knew it, too. Tomorrow, the entire town would be bustling with talk about Chitralekha Neupaney’s grandson drinking coffee with Dr. Dhakal’s daughter.

  “Have they been forcing you to see men?” Agastaya asked, in Nepali, as Shivani took her seat.

  “They’ve been pretty understanding—meh,” Shivani said, in English. “It’s the relatives who are the instigating type. They talk about the ticking clock like there’s nothing else to talk about. My parents are the understanding type.”

  “I am sorry if you didn’t want to see me,” he said, genuinely. In Nepali.

  “No, that’s okay.” She asked the waiter for a glass of Orange Crush in English-accented Nepali. “I don’t mind it. Do you?”

  “A little bit.” He sugared his coffee. “I mean, I don’t know what the woman is thinking. I am afraid she’s been forced to see me by her parents.”

  “We aren’t living in the forties,” Shivani said, finally in Nepali, and then quickly switched to English: “If a woman doesn’t want to see you, she will tell her parents so. No one’s being forced here. Sikkimese parents aren’t the forceful type.”

  “Still.” Agastaya stirred his coffee gently and hoped Shivani’s drink would arrive soon.

  Silence—the kind that amplified the swishing of doors, tinkling of spoons, and the shuffling of waiters—followed.

  “So, you gave the USMLE, right?” she said.

  “Yes, I took it,” Agastaya responded, emphasizing the correct verb and feeling like Ruthwa. The medical licensing exam had been easy after the rigors of a degree from JIPMER.

  “Would you recommend it for me? I am already specialized. It will be a step behind—backward type—don’t you think?”

  Her Orange Crush finally arri
ved, and he gulped his coffee right after she took her first sip. It was cold.

  “It depends on what you want,” he said.

  She asked him to elaborate.

  “If you want to live in America, you have to take the medical licensing exam even if you’ve specialized—you probably already know that. Would you like to settle down in America?”

  She looked at him, and he at her. It was a question with too many layers, too many implications.

  “I don’t know. At twenty-seven, I thought I’d have it all figured out, but I know nothing. I sometimes feel I am still the teenage type.”

  “Is type your favorite word?” He smiled.

  “Do you mean my English isn’t good?” she asked.

  “No, you speak excellent English. How do you like your job?”

  “It’s a job—am I supposed to be passionate about it?”

  “Wouldn’t it make a difference if you were?” he asked. He liked his job.

  “I work at the STNM government hospital. I do my thing. I don’t find it rewarding or anything. It’s work. I am not the devoted doctor type.”

  “Someone’s a cynic.”

  “I’ve done this so long. I want to take a break from it all. Perhaps paint. I am the creative type.”

  “Can’t you do that on the side?”

  “No. I want to be a hundred percent committed to painting. But you know what the world will say—‘If she didn’t want to become a doctor in the first place, she shouldn’t have claimed the Sikkim quota for a medical seat. Someone else could have gone in her place.’”

  She said the world’s part in a squeaky voice, which provoked hushed giggles from the teenagers at the table next to theirs.

  “Why do you care about what the world says?” Agastaya asked.

  “This isn’t America. It’s society.”

  “We are such different people,” he said, his eyes on the ant that was drowning in a sea of ketchup by the window.

  “I know,” she replied. “By the way, I am not a virgin.”

  He. Didn’t. Need. To. Know.

  “I never asked you if you were.”

  “I’ve read that all you America-returned types want virgin brides because you find none there,” she said offhandedly. “I am not one of those Sati Sabitri types. I have a past.”

  He, too, had his.

  “I don’t expect girls to be virgins—not in this age. Have you had a lot of serious relationships?”

  The waiter hung around them in the expectation that their order would go beyond two drinks.

  “Two serious ones. You?”

  “Yes. I am just recovering from one.”

  “Indian? Nepali?”

  “Neither.” He was speaking the truth.

  “A foreigner? Dream conquest?”

  “It was more than simply conquest,” he said. “We lived together.”

  “Live-in?” she said, with the shock that was the preserve of the Indian bourgeois. “You’re totally American. What happened?”

  “We broke off recently. There were too many fights. Different worlds.”

  “That’s what I keep hearing from all Indian men who go abroad.”

  “The breakup was hard. It still is. But life goes on.”

  “How’s your grandmother, by the way?” she asked.

  “She’s all right. She still doesn’t talk a lot, which is not very characteristic of her at all.”

  “We were all dressing up to go to the Chaurasi. We were late.”

  “Yes, we couldn’t even celebrate Bhai Tika the next day. You still haven’t told me about your relationships.”

  “Let’s keep it for some other time—maybe tomorrow,” she said. “It’s boring to share everything at the first meeting.”

  They exchanged numbers and said their good-byes with handshakes. Agastaya offered to walk her home, but Shivani refused, stating that she had to stop by a friend’s.

  A little dazed, Agastaya strolled around the square, hoping he wouldn’t run into anybody who knew him. In this town of well-wishers, there would be plenty of people inquiring about his grandmother’s health. He needed this alone time to mull over life. In the past forty-eight hours, he had gone from being committed to single. He had just met the woman Aamaa hoped he’d get married to.

  At Supriya’s Bookstore, on his way back home, he purchased a Debonair, that Indian magazine that had introduced him—and thousands of boys of his generation—to the world of breasts. Prabin Uncle, the owner, was absent, but the manager glared at him—the stare of a man who couldn’t believe that the scion of such a respectable family would read smut—and gave him a copy, which Agastaya, as he did in his youth, rolled into a tube and stuffed into the back of his waistband.

  He ran down the stairs of the overpass and down the steps of Zongri, the every-purpose store of his childhood, half of which was now a liquor shop. Before ascending to his grandmother’s house, he retraced his steps to the store and purchased a bottle of Smirnoff.

  Once the crowd thinned on the non-liquor side, he asked for a pack of condoms, praying the shopkeeper of his childhood wouldn’t recognize him.

  Condoms, a bottle of vodka, and a Debonair in hand, Agastaya returned home.

  Thankfully, everyone was upstairs, attending to Aamaa. He slipped into the room of his childhood, where he had smuggled his first condom, his first Debonair, and his first vodka.

  He undressed, checked himself out in the mirror, tried not to pay attention to the breasts he was sprouting, thought of Prasanti, dismissed her, thought of Nicky, dismissed him, thought of Shivani, dismissed her, uncorked the vodka, took a gulp, grimaced, took another one, opened a sachet with his teeth, put the condom on his flaccid penis while avoiding a look at his groin, and leafed through the pages of Debonair.

  A photo of a big Indian woman with breasts the size of melons. Her vagina hidden but suggestions of hair down there. Hairy armpits. Hairy woman. Big hair. Hair above her lip carefully removed.

  He resisted the temptation to read an erotic story and kept flipping, the condomed dick in the right hand and the bottle of vodka in the other. The condomed dick he let go when a page needed to be turned. Another spread—this one of a blonde. Legs crossed. Breasts covered. Milky-white skin. Blue eyes. Another one—same woman, pointy nipples, staring at him, mocking his refusal to get it up.

  When he was fourteen, a few nights after his younger brother informed him about the Disney World that was pleasuring himself, he had tried it for the first time. Now, vodka forgotten on the nightstand, he rhythmically did what he had to, closing his eyes and opening them. At fourteen, while he tried swallowing the vodka that had made him vomit a little, he had rubbed the head of his member with his palm. Now he pinched his nipples, made patterns on them, and inserted a finger into his rectum. At fourteen, he had put his fingers into his mouth, then bitten them one by one. Now, he looked at the blond woman and invoked an image of her moaning and groaning and crying. At fourteen, he had looked at the picture of a different blond woman and imagined the combined nudity of all the girls in his class.

  Finally, Agastaya accomplished his purpose. At fourteen, an almost-battered dick and a bleeding foreskin later, he had known something was wrong because the thought of all the girls in his class parading naked around him hadn’t done the trick.

  He sent a text to Shivani—“Great time today. Fun types. When do I hear all about your relationships? I leave the day after tomorrow”—and added a smiley.

  “Snr or ltr.” Double smileys followed.

  As he cleaned up and redressed himself, he laughed sardonically at having purchased a magazine in this age of Internet pornography, and also at the audacity of every so often dreaming about a life with Nicky.

  Outside, workers cleared away detritus of the Chaurasi celebration that wasn’t to see its end.

  •

  Bhagwati would tell herself all her life that right before she left Gangtok, she stepped into Prasanti’s room so she could have one last look at it, that a co
mparison between her kind of poverty and Prasanti’s poverty would inspire her to get out of the financial doldrums she and Ram found themselves in, that she went into the servant’s room to say good-bye.

  The truth was that she walked into Prasanti’s room with the intention of stealing.

  Bhagwati placed three pairs of gold earrings in her purse. And a necklace. And twelve gold bangles. She could have even pilfered the money, but the gold would be sufficient.

  She then said her good-byes—to Aamaa, who feebly asked her to be safe; to Agastaya, whom she reminded to cash her check and who wouldn’t divulge what had gone on at his meeting with the doctor; and to Manasa, who said she’d likely see her in Colorado, right before declaring that getting away from her father-in-law would be tough. She wanted to say good-bye to Nicky, whose CPR skills suggested that he wasn’t simply an anthropologist Agastaya had met in a taxi to JFK, but he had abruptly left.

  Bhagwati’s farewell lingered the longest with Prasanti, whom she thanked for taking such good care of Aamaa and to whom she gave a big bundle of bills.

  “But everyone says you have no money,” Prasanti said.

  “I may not have as much money as they do, but you deserve this.”

  Prasanti accepted the envelope, visibly moved. “I feel guilty taking your money.”

  “You shouldn’t,” said Bhagwati, and she got into the waiting taxi.

  “How’s your grandmother, madam?” the taxi driver asked.

  “Fine,” Bhagwati replied. “Recovering fast.”

  “And the factory in Kalimpong?”

  “Not recovering at all.”

  “Fucking scoundrels—whoever did it,” the driver spat out. “Thieves, all of them. Has the culprit been found?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “But we know who did it. It’s always the politicians who stir trouble. Thieves—that’s what they are. Who sets an entire factory on fire?”

  “I know,” Bhagwati said. “But they aren’t thieves. They didn’t steal anything.”

  “They are thieves—no better than thieves.”

  “So, in your book, thieves are worse than robbers, murderers, and rapists?”