Arresting God in Kathmandu (11 page)

He had recently told a friend at work that he did not understand his wife. He had said it casually, as if it were a joke. His friend blew into his cupped palms, as he always did when considering a serious matter. “Do you think your wife has a secret life?” he asked.

“There’s something about her,” Ganesh said, shaking his head. Lately he had been studying her; he watched her while she slept, tried to imagine her thoughts when she stirred eggplant or beans in the kitchen. He also wanted to know what she thought about when he wasn’t around, what areas her mind lingered on. He suspected that her thoughts excluded him, and this possibility filled him with dismay, with pain.

They’d been married for three years, and Ganesh had not worried this way the first two years. Before he married, he lived on the second floor of a small house in Chhetrapati with his mother. Ganesh barely remembered his father, who died of a brain disease that no doctor or shaman had been able to cure. And there were rumors that Ganesh was really not his father’s son; that he was the son of the man who had been his mother’s lover for many years. It was his mother who had arranged Ganesh’s marriage. She’d sung the praises of his future bride—“She has the most beautiful eyes”; “She’s known in the neighborhood for her faultless manners”—until he too began to think she would make a wonderful wife, even though he’d not yet met her. When she first came into the house, he had been surprised by her beauty. He’d seen pictures of her, but in person she was ten times more striking. Her jet-black hair made a lovely contrast with her fair complexion, and she had a long, slim nose from which a diamond glinted whenever she smiled. A mere glance from her made his heart beat rapidly, and when she laughed, the tiny gap between her two front teeth made her irresistibly charming. “Your daughter-in-law’s face glows like the sun,” he heard relatives tell his mother, and everywhere he and his new bride went, people commented on how his wife’s beauty would usher in good luck for the rest of their lives. He had basked in the warmth of these comments, but later, that pleasure had given way to wariness, for he couldn’t believe that such beauty could be enjoyed at no cost.

He tried to recall the exact moment when he first had doubts about her; it was, he thought, when they were at the eastern wall of the temple complex of Lord Pashupatinath on a sunny day, looking down at the dirty Bagmati River. A young man standing near them said to Ganesh’s wife, “Look how filthy the river is. Look there”—he pointed to a couple of women washing themselves contentedly, letting their soap suds drift into the blackened water—“how uncivilized these people are. Look there”—he gestured to a mass of garbage on the river’s edge—“our holy Bagmati River.”

The man laughed, and Ganesh’s wife laughed too, with an abandon that Ganesh had found disconcerting.

“No one is doing anything about it,” she’d told the young man. “The politicians are more interested in their fat wives.” And then her laughter seemed to ring throughout the temple complex, mixing with the bells, reverberating with the chants of the priests. When they left the temple, Ganesh asked her, “Do you know that man?” And she said no. As they walked home that day, he compared his body with hers, and decided that he was a tight man, with muscles that were closed, restricting. He realized that he hardly moved his arms when he walked, whereas she constantly swirled her arms, sometimes scratching an itch on her face, at other times playing with her sari. Suddenly a phrase that had plagued his childhood echoed in his mind: “Mama’s boy.” That’s what his friends called him whenever they saw him cling to his mother, his fist clutching the end of her sari. “The boy needs a father,” he’d heard his relatives whisper among themselves. “Mama’s boy,” they’d called him, although they did so with affection. That day, walking away from the Pashupatinath Temple with his wife, he wondered whether his muscles were so constricted, and his body so closed, because he’d watched the world for so long from behind his mother’s sari.

On his way home from work the next evening, he saw women in brilliant saris walking with their husbands, strolling down the street or rushing to keep appointments. It was the time of Indra Jatra festival, the eight-day festival in honor of Lord Indra, the ruler of heaven. Eons ago, Lord Indra had come down to the valley in disguise to steal scented white parijat flowers for his mother’s annual fasting ritual. The powerful god was apprehended by the people of the Kathmandu Valley, bound with rope, and thrown in jail. Only after Indra’s mother descended from heaven in search of her missing son did the valley inhabitants realize what they had done. As an apology, they initiated a great festival in his honor. They donned masks and danced, acted out folk dramas, and marched in celebratory processions. Everywhere around him, Ganesh saw people’s faces filled with joy and excitement. He knew he should have enjoyed that excitement; instead, he felt as if a giant bird had descended from the sky and spread a shadow over the city.

Ganesh was in bed by the time his wife came home, and her cool skin startled him. Her petticoat brushed against him, her perfume wafted around him. Humming a tune, she played with his hair. After her breathing slowed, he slid out of bed and quietly went downstairs.

In the kitchen he turned on the lights, opened the cupboard, and poured himself a shot of the strong local liquor. The drink burned his throat. Under his breath he sang the song she had been humming. The warmth of the liquor spread to his thighs. He put on his coat and trudged down the stairs to the street. The knowledge that she was upstairs, unaware of his absence, filled him with excitement. The cloudless sky, the cold, shimmering stars, granted him a strange freedom, an expansion that came to him as a release in his lungs.

Just as he was walking beneath the clock tower in the city’s center, it began to chime. Looking up, he discovered that it was three o’clock in the morning.

He climbed over the fence surrounding the Queen’s Pond, took off his clothes, and dived in, not caring whether a police squad would approach. The chill of water invigorated him as he waded through the lilies floating on top. He wondered how long it would take, if he allowed himself to sink, for the water to fill his lungs. He thought of monsters with long tentacles that supposedly lived at the bottom, and he imagined them tearing into his flesh. Would his wife be able to recognize his body?

He heard the clock tower ring out four times, and he swam to the edge. When he reached his house and slipped under the bed covers, she murmured but didn’t wake up.

Sunlight assailed his eyes when he woke the next morning. The late-morning heat on his bed had made him sweat, and his pajamas were sticking to the hairs on his chest. He reached for his cigarettes and lit one, propped up a pillow, and leaned against it. The light of day made last night’s swim seem almost unreal.

When he turned the latch to the balcony door, he heard a steady
thump-thump-thump.
His wife was down in the courtyard, near the tap, beating a bundle of clothes against the cement slab. A few women stood close to her, talking, waiting to fill their pitchers. A small girl, her thumb in her mouth, watched his wife’s movements while clinging to her mother, a widow who lived in the house opposite. He suddenly imagined climbing over the railing and letting himself fall down the four stories, his clothes swirling upward as the air pressed against them, the sensation of dropping underneath a clear, well-lit sky, the little girl spotting him in midair and excitedly reaching for her mother, her mother slowly turning her head, and, finally,
splat,
his consciousness fading, his wife’s horror as the tap water steadily gushed into a brass pitcher.

Now his wife looked up and, seeing him lean against the railing, shouted, “The railing is weak!” He moved back a step and noticed the bald man across the courtyard watching them, the muscles on his arms protruding as his elbows rested on the window bar. The man smiled and nodded.

Ganesh quickly left the balcony.

He went to the cupboard and found a large black-and-white framed picture of their wedding, his wife looking directly at the camera, as if trying to stare it down. He looked happy; his head was tilted to one side, the beginning of a smile on his lips. It occurred to him that she may not have been happy on their wedding day; perhaps she had secretly wanted to marry another man, someone with more money, better looks, a prestigious family.

As he set the wedding picture back in the cupboard, his fingers brushed against another picture, one of his mother. He took it out. She was standing on the footsteps of a temple, which he recognized as Boudhha, the city’s Buddhist temple, where hundreds of pilgrims congregated each day. It was an old photograph, probably taken right after he was born; the paper had yellowed at the corners. His mother was looking directly at the camera, the same way his wife had done. Maybe that’s what women do, he thought. The photograph of his mother reminded him of people in the neighborhood whispering, when Ganesh was young, that he was the child of her union with her lover, not with his father. Throughout his childhood he had been haunted by an image of this so-called lover: a thin man with stick-like arms, sad eyes, and an aloof manner. One day when he was seven, he’d asked his mother whether she knew a tall man with sad eyes, and she had, with curiosity, scanned his face, then ruffled his hair and said no. He watched for such a man in his neighborhood and at the carnivals his mother took him to, carnivals with games and swings and giant wheels, but no one resembled the image that returned to him, again and again.

His wife cooked lunch, and while they ate, she brought up the wedding. “The tent was huge,” she said. “It could have held a thousand guests, but there were only about a hundred. A woman was wearing a necklace with thirteen—no, twelve—big diamonds. Imagine wearing that! What a burden on your neck, and the fear you’d have while you wore it. A man there asked about you, said his office is down the hall from yours; he does the revenues or something like that.”

She talked of the evening as though assured of his interest. Her words filled his mind so that his own thoughts clamored for room. In time, he grew angry and shifted his feet. “I’m not hungry,” he said and walked out of the room and down the stairs.

His head throbbed with anger. She hadn’t even asked what he’d done while she was away last evening. He felt humiliated. Outside, he took to the small road and alleys, with no direction in mind. He imagined going to his friend’s house, standing beside the bed, where his friend would be reading a silly magazine, and declaring, “My wife is having an affair.” Of course he didn’t know whether that was true, but he wanted to reach the truth, no matter what it was, even through a lie.

The streets were crowded, and brightly dressed children chased one another through the throngs of people. In Durbar Square, Ganesh came upon a group of people playing drums and cymbals. A small boy, his face painted white, taunted a large man wearing a mask with wide, thick lips and large, glaring eyes. Peacock feathers rose from the back of his head, and frills on the seams of his vest flew in every direction as he waved his arms in circles. The little boy danced near the man and made faces at him. The masked man, also dancing, attempted to strike the boy—whether as an act or in real anger, it was hard to tell—at which point the music reached a crescendo and then resumed its normal beat. The masked man swooned with the powers of a deity, and the onlookers gave him wide berth.

Ganesh leaned against the side of a house and watched. People appeared at windows, and the crowd around the performers thickened. Every time the boy’s darting figure came close to the masked man, the spectators let out a collective gasp, and drums threatened to crack the narrow sky above. And every time the boy approached the man, Ganesh clearly saw the boy’s apprehension, the danger, the thrill of being so close to a deity whose slap could send him sprawling across the brick street. When the boy escaped punishment, however, Ganesh watched the masked dancer, saw his humiliation, the lack of appreciation from the crowd, the maddening fury of his not being able to silence the teaser.

At one point the masked man, his legs apart for a second’s break in rhythm, threw a wild look right at Ganesh, who flattened himself against the wall like a shadow, a thrill running through his limbs.

She waited for him, circles under her eyes, at the front of the house and demanded to know why he’d walked out like that, where he’d gone. “Everything is all right,” he said. “It’s just that lately my heart’s been restless.” He went inside and lay on his bed.

She came and set a serving of dal-bhat on the side table, then put her hand on his chest, as if to calm his heart. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is everything all right at work?”

He nodded and closed his eyes. Her hand on his chest felt good, but he feared that if he let it stay there, he would feel even weaker, so he got up and rubbed his eyes. “I’m hungry,” he said and lifted the plate. He ate quickly, and realized only after he’d finished that she was not eating with him.

That night, after he was sure she was asleep, he draped a shawl around his back and moved to the balcony. The big moon hung above the courtyard. There was a light in the bald man’s window, but the curtains were drawn. Ganesh could see a figure, fading and reappearing, and he sat on the cold floor of the balcony. The figure moved about the room, its silhouette becoming clear, then disappearing.

He awoke, just before dawn, with the chirping of birds, to discover that his feet were cold. Shivering, he went back to bed.

In the morning, she asked for some money so that she could go to the market. He reached into his pocket and quietly handed her a fifty-rupee note. She said, “But I also need to buy rice and kerosene.” He pulled out another fifty-rupee note.

That evening, when he came home from work, the stove was empty, and she was nowhere to be found. There was a musty smell in their bedroom, as if someone else had been there. His body grew limp, and he sat on the bed.

Ganesh went to a bar with his friend. They squeezed themselves onto a bench in a corner, ordered rum and spicy minced buff, and talked of work, colleagues, the city, and food. The other conversations in the room buzzed like flies near their ears. Soon, Ganesh’s head started to float.