Arresting God in Kathmandu (17 page)

She went to the bathroom and brought back another towel for Nirmal. Now she looked at him more closely. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, finally recognizing him. She glanced at Aditya with some irritation, then asked Nirmal where he had found her husband. When Nirmal explained what had happened, she scolded Aditya. “Who asked you to be the hero? And why did you go to see the play again?”

Aditya was surprised by her tone of authority. “We have such a great actor in our house,” Aditya said with a laugh, “and all you can do is harass me.”

“I don’t care.” She turned to Nirmal. “I guess I should thank you. Do you want tea?”

Nirmal said that he ought to get going and pack for the next day, as the theater company was moving to a different town. Aditya placed his hand on the actor’s and said, “Please, just one cup. There’s time.”

When his wife went to the kitchen, Nirmal whispered, “You’ve got a nice wife.”

Aditya smiled. “Usually she’s very shy.”

“You never can tell with women,” Nirmal said.

“Are you married?”

“No,” Nirmal said with a mischievous smile. “I can’t stay with one woman. I tend to like all of them.”

“Why can’t you stay with one?”

“Who knows? Maybe it’s just my nature.” He loosened his hair from the rubber band, deftly combed it with his long slim fingers, then tied it back again.

Aditya wanted to talk to Nirmal about his own self-consciousness, but didn’t know how to broach the topic. Instead, he went to the cupboard and took out the family album. He sat down and flipped through the pages. The pain in his knee and face began to fade. “See,” he said, pointing to a family picture that showed him in the city park, holding his parents’ hands.

“Is that you?” Nirmal said, laughing.

“Who else?” Aditya said.

Shobha came back with tea and said, “What’s this? Looking at pictures at this hour?”

Nirmal said to her, “Tell me something. Would you have married him had you seen these pictures before your wedding?”

For a moment she blushed, but when she spoke, her voice was firm. “What kind of a question is that? Of course I would have married him. It was written in our fate.”

Aditya was surprised at Shobha’s confidence in front of a stranger.

The rain was letting up, and they could hear conversations on the street.

Nirmal drank his tea in quick gulps and got up. “Well, you should still have a doctor check you out in the morning.”

“Are you coining back to the city again?” Aditya asked.

“Not for a while,” Nirmal said and, bidding them good night, left.

The next morning Aditya sat by the window. The cast and the crew of the play appeared on the street corner, laughing and joking. Nirmal was last, walking alone, carrying a suitcase. When he passed Aditya’s apartment building, he glanced up at the window. Aditya waved at him, then shouted, “The next time you’re here, come for tea in my house.”

Nirmal nodded and moved on.

Aditya’s wife came and stood next to him. “Who is it?” she asked. When she saw Nirmal walking away, she said, “Good riddance.” She had just come out of the bath, and he could smell mustard oil in her hair. He moved closer and breathed her in. Then he licked her ear, and she jerked away from the window with a giggle. She blushed. “People will see. What has come over you this early in the morning?”

T
HEY MET
in New Jersey at a wedding party. Jaya knew the bride, a young Brahmin woman of twenty-four from Kathmandu, and Kanti was taking a course in economics at New York University with the bridegroom, a Nepali professor twenty years older than the bride. It was an arranged marriage, and Kanti had heard that the bride’s parents had given away their daughter to the older professor in order to get their green cards.

On the professor’s lawn, Kanti was in line at the buffet table, wondering whether she could slip away soon after eating, when she noticed the man in front of her. He was tall, with an appealing face, and he was fair, so fair that she thought he was European. He had bushy eyebrows, with two strands of white hair growing out of each in perfect symmetry. He saw her looking at him and said, in Nepali, “Yes, yes, I am a Nepali.” The words tumbled out thickly, as if he didn’t speak the language often. “Did you come here with someone?” he asked, with a familiarity that made it seem he already knew her. When she answered, “By myself,” he said, “Then we should eat together. Over there.” He pointed to a secluded corner. Their bodies touched as they scooped up the food.

She joined him in the corner, and they ate, standing. After some silence, he said, again in English, “Well, aren’t you going to tell me about yourself? I thought that’s what this is all about.”

“This?” she asked.

“Yes, you and I are going to be lovers.”

She laughed. “You are very arrogant.”

“You’ll come to like that about me.”

She realized that they were conversing entirely in English, but it didn’t seem odd, as it often did when she talked in English with other Nepalis in America. It was as if he thought in English.

He brought her a glass of wine, then another, then another. Each time, she told herself this was the last one, that she’d leave his company and go talk to someone else, or leave the party, as she’d originally planned. But as the evening progressed his face became even more arresting, and the conversation unlike conversations she had at Nepali gatherings, which she dreaded attending because they were laden with nostalgia, incessant political chatter, and one-upmanship, with people vying to talk about how much land they owned back home. Talking with Jaya, Kanti could laugh and not worry about how loud it sounded, or whether some senior Nepali gentleman, a professor at a university or a consultant at a firm, would frown at her, or whether the women, with their dark, critical eyes, would talk about how she acted like a loose woman. She couldn’t remember how many glasses of wine she’d had, but it didn’t matter. She told him how alienated she felt in Kathmandu; how, when she went there two years before, she was like a stranger. She liked the sound of the words and repeated them: “I was a restless ghost in my own country.” He put his arm around her and said, “Poor baby,” and she thought—her mind floating with wine—He is like me.

She saw him several times that evening in different groups, his long arm visible in the brightness of the fluorescent lamps placed strategically throughout the lawn, his white shirt shining. Once, he winked at her and rolled his eyes at the Nepalis around him, as if in exasperation. She kept wishing he’d come back, talk to her more, but he was laughing with some people he obviously knew. She went to the bride and groom, seated on a couch inside the house, and said goodbye.

A few yards from the house he called her. “I thought we were lovers.”

“But you abandoned me,” she said.

He came closer. “Never again,” he said, then brought his mouth so close to hers that she thought he was about to kiss her. If he had, she didn’t know what she’d have done.

He gave her a ride to her apartment in his Volkswagen, his arm waving near her cheeks as he talked. He was born in Nepal, he said, but grew up in Boston, then moved to New York when his parents returned to Kathmandu a few years ago. “But tell me,” he asked her, “what’s so great about Nepal except for the fact that it’s our home country?” He visited Kathmandu every year, hung out with his cousins and friends. “I don’t even like the place that much.” He smiled at her. “But I love to party there.” The word “party” came out of his mouth like a celebration itself. She told him that she was going to Kathmandu that coming summer because her mother was insisting. Occasionally the car drifted to the side of the highway, and in the Lincoln Tunnel he nearly rammed into a truck coming down the other side.

Outside her apartment he took her hand, and her heart thumped. She thought he was going to make a move, but she didn’t want to sleep with him, not yet. She found the American sexual mores a bit intimidating. She’d had only two boyfriends during her years here, a German guy she liked but who soon lost interest in her, and a Midwesterner from Ohio, who said he loved her “exotic” eyes. She had had sex with both of them, but not with sufficient passion. In fact, she had a feeling her German boyfriend got bored because she didn’t show enough excitement while making love.

But Jaya merely said, “Call me when you reach Kathmandu—I am also going there in May. We’ll party together. My father is Somnath Rana.” She recognized the name, as he’d meant her to: a minister who’d been involved in a bribery scandal during the Panchayat era, had absconded to the United States, and was now back in Nepal, working for a human rights group. He wrote down his New York phone number. “For rainy days.”

The next morning she couldn’t find the slip of paper. She looked for his name in the phonebook, but it wasn’t listed. She got in touch with a few acquaintances from the party, but none knew him, and the bride and groom were already honeymooning in Hawaii. Gradually, she began to see his face in the subway in the faces of other young men who were also fair and lanky—and arrogant. Once a young Italian, who saw her staring at him, swaggered up to her and said, “Hey, you’re cute. You Indian?”

In May she got her master’s degree in economics and made preparations to go to Nepal. She left most of her belongings in the apartment with her roommate. “I don’t think I can stay there too long,” Kanti said. When her roommate asked how she was going to get a new visa, she said, “I’m applying to Duke. Let’s see what happens.”

When her feet touched the tarmac of Tribhuvan International Airport, in Kathmandu, the wind, coupled with the sight of her mother waving frantically from the terminal, brought back memories of how lonely she’d been the last time she was here, two years earlier. As soon as she and her mother reached the house in Paknajol, she looked up Jaya’s father’s name in the directory. There it was: Somnath Rana, Jawalakhel. Her finger lingered on the name. Her mother, who had set something to cook in the kitchen and come back, asked whom she was looking for.

“Just a friend,” Kanti answered.

Her mother talked incessantly, as if she had been holding her breath until her daughter came home. Kanti noticed new lines in her face and the way her eyes seemed smaller.

They agreed to meet at a bar in a hotel.

She found him at a table, drinking Jack Daniel’s. “I hate this country,” he said. “I don’t know why I came.” Because he laughed as he said this, she heard no bitterness in the comment. “Look at them; just look at them. Pathetic.” He shook his head as he surveyed the bar, full of Nepali men in business suits and young men and women in jeans. Later, on the dance floor, he kissed her impulsively, his wet lips nearly suffocating her, and she wondered whether she should have come to the bar to meet him. But he danced wildly, and soon she found herself matching his movements, laughing, enjoying the way the colorful revolving lights cast patterns on his face.

He didn’t drink anymore that evening, and they left the hotel in his Suzuki to roam the city. They drove toward Ring Road, and he parked the jeep in a secluded spot. “I knew you would call me,” he said. When she asked how he knew, he replied, “You’re a lonely soul.” And when he embraced her and kissed her again, she didn’t resist; when he started caressing her breasts, she let him. They made love in the back seat, giggling when the headlight of an occasional car shone on them.

They spent long afternoons in expensive hotel rooms in the city. He had money—his father owned land all over the country—so she didn’t worry about how often he opened his wallet.

In a hotel one drowsy afternoon, lying next to Jaya, Kanti played with a long gray strand of hair among the thicket on his chest. She twisted it, tugged at it, resisting the temptation to break it off. “Ouch!” he said, and it struck her that he didn’t say “Aiya,” as a Nepali would. “You want to bring me bad luck, Kanti?” he said, laughing. “Who knows what could happen in this godforsaken country.” He climbed on top of her and unabashedly told her about his fantasies: standing by the door, watching her make love to another man; coming home to find her seducing another woman. She did not find these fantasies particularly exciting, but she willingly responded when she felt him inside her.

Often, he fell asleep soon after they made love. She would stand by the window, figuring it must be cold outside, because the beggars were bundled up on the pavement. She could imagine the city of Kathmandu like New York, covered with snow, cars coming to a standstill, the Queen Pond frozen, the ice on top reflecting the light that burned at its periphery all night.

Her mother appeared perplexed. She’d heard rumors, Kanti was sure, that her daughter had had relationships with boys in America. But perhaps she didn’t think that she’d see someone so openly here. “What has happened to you?” she asked Kanti one afternoon, her eyes filled with resentment. “You were not like this before. Mrs. Sharma from the neighborhood was asking me if having a boyfriend was all you learned in America.”

“Jaya is different,” Kanti said.

“He is too much like those Americans.”

Kanti smiled. Mother’s knowledge of Americans was limited to the tourists she saw on the streets of the city.

The neighbors and relatives stared at Jaya when they saw him and Kanti together, as if he were indeed a kuirey, an American. Kanti assumed that was because he walked with a swagger, his chest challenging the world. And he went for days without shaving. Sometimes his jeans looked as if they had not been washed in weeks.

Jaya’s friends in the city were richer than Kanti’s friends. His cousins and best friends, Sunil and Vikas, copied Jaya’s nonchalance, his accent, and the dreamy way he talked about himself and America. Unlike his cousins, his other friends were not from the fallen Rana aristocracy. One was the son of the owner of a big hotel; another, the son of a man who owned major sugar factories and a Honda dealership. Often, when sitting in an expensive restaurant in the Soaltee Hotel or Yak & Yeti Hotel, or when watching Jaya and his friends play cricket in the enormous compound of Jaya’s house, Kanti could scarcely believe the world into which she’d stumbled—the world of upper-class Nepalis. She liked the ease with which they moved in their surroundings, with which they traveled back and forth between America and Nepal, between Europe and Nepal. At parties in Jaya’s house, she heard them talk about building new hotels in the city, about the new BMWs they’d bought, or how they’d just come back from a shopping spree in London.