Arresting God in Kathmandu (22 page)

Not long after, Nani Memsaheb started questioning my master’s judgment about matters in the house and the hotel. We were in the kitchen, and they were discussing the poor performance of the hotel’s restaurant manager, a woman my master had hired a few years before. My master was saying that he wanted to transfer her to the laundry room, because she had developed a hostile attitude toward the restaurant staff, in particular the assistant manager, who was known for his hard work and efficiency.

“That’s ridiculous,” Nani Memsaheb said abruptly.

My master didn’t say anything for a while. With a vague smile on his face, he said softly, “Nani, the staff have been complaining to me for months now. Something must be done.”

“She’s fine the way she is,” she said. “Where she is.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because.” Nani Memsaheb sipped her tea and looked out the window. “You think I don’t know what goes on in there? They don’t like her because she’s a woman and she tells them what to do.”

“It’s not like that at all, Nani. She’s having a bad effect on their morale. She screams at them, insults them. The assistant manager told me that she even threw water on him the other day for some small mistake he had made.”

She replied, “She threw water on him because he laughed when she asked him to rearrange the south room tables.”

“Still,” my master said cautiously, as if something were stuck in his throat, “the chef told me that she dumped his perfectly fine chicken chili in the garbage.”

“She dumped it in the garbage because it tasted like garbage.” She pointed at me. “Even our Ramey here cooks better than that chef.”

I tried not to appear insulted.

My master looked at me, then down at his fingers.

That night I prayed to Lord Ganesh, whose small framed picture hangs on my wall, that he make everything better in the house, the way it was before. But even as I prayed, my eyes closed, my palms joined in supplication, I knew that would not happen. In fact, at that point I had a vision. With my eyes closed, I saw a young man with Nani Memsaheb, and she was laughing with him. At first the man was a stranger. Then slowly his face became mine—me, with a smooth, youthful face—and I quickly opened my eyes, my heart pounding, and stared at the picture of Lord Ganesh, with his long snout and his doelike eyes, which at that moment were mocking me.

One Saturday during the winter month of Meen Pachas, a time so cold that even the fish are said to be frozen, I was taking my early morning bath by the water pump in the garden. I find the cold water and the smell of the earth just as light breaks in the sky invigorating. Normally I have this time to myself, so I was surprised and slightly irritated at Nani Memsaheb’s appearance. She couldn’t see me, because the pump is hidden behind bushes. I quietly turned off the water. Through an opening, I saw that she was crying, her arms tightly hugging her chest. Occasionally she looked up at the sky, as if searching for an answer in the heavens. I kept watching her, mesmerized. She paced in the garden for a while, then wiped her face and went inside.

For a long time, I stood by the pump, shivering, but ignoring the cold, wearing only my dhoti, which clung to my skin.

Some of the older men stopped coming to the evening sessions. One said to me, at the end of his last session, “Ram Mohan, this house is not the same anymore.”

He had come to the kitchen to get a glass of water, although there was always a carafe full of water on the balcony. He took some pills from his pocket and swallowed them, leaned against the counter, and sighed. “Amazing what a woman can do.”

I didn’t voice my opinion.

“Well, this is it. I have decided.” And he walked down the stairs and out of the house.

One by one, the others stopped coming. Soon, there were only four who attended, then two.

One evening a big argument erupted between Nani Memsaheb and the high government official with the mustache. As usual, she had interrupted my master. “No, I don’t think you are anywhere dose to the truth. It’s very easy for you to sit up there on that cushion and preach on the illusions that our desires create. But the truth is this, that most ordinary people like me want to learn how to live and fulfill our desires, not treat them as if they were stepchildren. For us—”

“Quiet!” the mustached man shouted.

There was silence.

Nani Memsaheb looked at him contemptuously and said, “And why should I be quiet?”

His voice quivered. “Because you don’t know anything.”

“And you do?”

“Nani,” my master warned.

“I know a lot more than you do,” the man said.

“I have yet to see evidence of that.”

The other man, small, with a bulbous nose, said to Nani Memsahib, “What is this? Aren’t you ashamed to be doing this?”

“Leave it be,” my master said.

“She’s a woman,” the small man said, “and she doesn’t know her place.” To my master, he said, “Sorry, Kailash-ji, I didn’t want to say anything. But this has become unbearable.”

“Get out,” Nani Memsaheb said.

Both men watched her, and my master said, “Peace, everyone. It’s a small thing.”

“Get out of my house,” Nani Memsaheb told the two men. She stood. “Now. Quickly. You come to my house and you want to put me in my place. Go home, and do that to your mothers and wives.” Before anyone knew what she was doing, she picked up one of my slippers near the door and started to beat the two men.

“Nani!” my master shouted. It was the first time he had raised his voice in a long time.

But Nani Memsaheb kept hitting the two men with my slipper (my slipper!), and they hastily stood and put on their shoes. She backed away and watched them, a thick strand of hair falling down her forehead, her face flushed. My master moved toward the men and tried to pat their arms, but they brushed his hand away. “We didn’t come here to be insulted like this,” they said. “Kailash-ji, you’d better control your woman. Otherwise she will destroy you.”

They left, muttering, their faces red.

My master hit her. He slapped her so hard that she fell back a couple of steps.

She put her hand to her cheek and said, “All right.”

He immediately apologized, but Nani Memsaheb kept repeating, “All right,” and she went to their bedroom. We heard the door being locked.

My master sat down weakly. I poured him a glass of water, which he seemed to swallow in one gulp. He started to sob. I didn’t know what to do.

I went to the kitchen and finished the dishes. As I was about to go to my room, I heard murmurs coming from their room. I stood next to their door and, judging from the words “my old man” and “Nanu,” it was obvious that they had made up.

A few days later they had another argument, and my master had a heart attack. They were sitting at the dining room table, waiting for me to serve dinner. I don’t recall what Nani Memsaheb said, but my master responded, in a sharp, hurt tone, “Of course, my thoughts don’t matter, my feelings don’t matter.” His face flushed, then turned gray, and he started to rub his chest and groan. I was holding a bowl of chickpeas, so I could only watch as his chair tipped and he fell to the floor. Nani Memsaheb rushed to him, shouting his name.

“We must take him to the hospital,” I said, and ran to the neighbor’s house to look for Krishna, who could drive, because my master’s regular driver had already gone home.

In the car, Nani Memsaheb cradled my master’s head in her lap. His eyes were closed. “Don’t leave me,” she said, and repeated the words, rocking her head above his ashen face till we reached the hospital.

It turned out that my master had had a minor heart attack, and after he spent a couple of days in the hospital, the doctors let him leave, with detailed instructions to Nani Memsaheb about his care. For a few days, she didn’t leave his side.

“I’ll resume yoga again, soon,” he told her. “Not to worry.” He had lost a great deal of weight; his cheeks were caved in, and his eyes were dim and hesitant.

“No yoga until you get better.”

“But yoga helps—”

“No arguments,” she said. It was obvious from her appearance that she had done her share of crying in the past days.

He smiled feebly and repeated, “No arguments.”

Although they did not argue for a few weeks, my master’s body was going through an argument of its own. His fifty-second birthday was approaching, but he looked sixty, with new lines on his face and his breathing erratic and raspy. Twice he had to be taken to the hospital because he had difficulty breathing. Each time he came back, he looked worse.

“The doctor told me to keep him relaxed,” Nani Memsaheb said, and as she noticed that I was looking at her strangely, she added, her expression slightly guilty, “We’ll have to be careful not to upset him.” I have done nothing, I thought.

During those weeks, Nani Memsaheb stayed with him in their bedroom. He even had difficulty walking to the bathroom, but that didn’t stop him from worrying that the hotel would fall apart without their supervision.

“The hotel can go to hell,” Nani Memsaheb said. “Your health is more important.”

When some of my master’s friends came to see him, they didn’t speak to Nani Memsaheb. The mustached gentleman curtly nodded at her and smiled at my master. “Kailash-ji, we like to see you healthy and happy,” he said, and my master responded that he was healthy and happy, that this was just a cosmic test to challenge his resolve. They exchanged a few spiritual jokes about swamis.

The small man with the big nose came the next day and would not look at Nani Memsaheb as she ushered him to my master’s bedside. The man spoke at length about some Ayurvedic treatment for the heart, which had cured one of his friends.

But over time my master’s health did not improve, and Nani Memsaheb became absent-minded, often forgetting and losing things. Once she went to the market and came back empty-handed. “I forgot,” she said. “I tried, but I couldn’t remember what I went for.”

I gave her a glass of water.

“It was as if my thoughts had become breathless, Ramey, as if someone were choking them.” She was ready to cry, I could tell, but she left before she did so in my presence.

When she cooked for my master, which she now sometimes insisted on doing, she would forget to turn off the gas in the stove, and in about an hour, the entire house smelled of rotten eggs. In the afternoons she retreated to the living room, and when I took tea to her, I would find her on the sofa, holding her head as if someone had hit her. “Tea, Nani,” I said, and she would look up with dull, dry eyes.

Finally, Nani Memsaheb asked her mother to come live with us, an idea I didn’t like, because I partly blamed her mother for bringing Nani Memsaheb into this house. But it was clear that taking care of my master had exhausted Nani Memsaheb, so I reconciled myself to the idea of her mother’s moving in.

Nani Memsaheb’s mother turned out to be an excellent nurse to my master, who now was being taken to a doctor every week. She also proved to be an agreeable person, and I didn’t mind her help in the kitchen. After she came to live with us, Nani Memsaheb began to spend less time with my master. She’d stay at the hotel all day, sometimes until late at night. I couldn’t believe the hotel needed such constant supervision, but she finally gained back some of her color and started to smile more often. It was also clear that she looked forward to getting out of the house every morning.

What startled me was how my master had been transformed from a healthy, robust person to a coughing, wheezing, sputtering old man. All those years of yoga and meditation and all that high-minded talk. I conceded that maybe Nani Memsaheb was right. Maybe we shouldn’t worry about tethering the monkey to the leash; maybe we should forget about the monkey and, instead of constantly toying to achieve higher levels of existence, live our lives like ordinary human beings. But when I tried to imagine what the situation might have been had Nani Memsaheb not entered the picture, I could see my master still surrounded by his adoring relatives, conducting the spiritual sessions, and me massaging his feet each night. I felt nostalgic and couldn’t help being critical of Nani Memsaheb.

My master appeared relieved that it was his wife’s mother, and not his wife, who tended to his needs day and night. Only occasionally did he reveal any anguish. One night he simply refused to drink the soup Nani Memsaheb’s mother was trying to feed him with a spoon. “Come, Kailash-ji,” she coaxed. “It’ll help you sleep properly.”

But he crossed his arms and pressed his lips together like a child.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

I was standing in the doorway, watching with sadness.

My master looked at me and said, “Where is she?”

“She’s at the hotel, hajur.”

“This late?” He winced in pain, shook his head.

Nani Memsaheb’s mother held the spoon close to his mouth. “Eat,” she said.

“I want Nani to feed me,” he said.

“But she’s not here.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “I want her.”

We had to plead with him for nearly half an hour before he finally drank the soup.

Rumors started circulating that Nani Memsaheb was spending time with men in the hotel and around the city, mostly older, well-off men like my master. His cousin came to visit one day and whispered to me in the kitchen, “She’s behaving like a prostitute, Ram Mohan. He should never have married her.”

I put her ridiculous talk out of my mind until the evening Nani Memsaheb brought home a gray-haired man in a suit. I heard her tell her mother that he was a casino manager at the largest hotel in the city, and that he was offering advice on how to start a casino in my master’s hotel. Her mother was quiet throughout dinner as Nani Memsaheb and the man laughed with a disturbing familiarity. She didn’t even introduce him to my master, and after the man left, she and her mother argued behind closed doors in the living room. Their voices were loud, so I heard everything, and I shut the door to my master’s room. Her mother demanded to know about her relationship with that man, and Nani Memsaheb retorted that she didn’t need to answer to anyone in this world, and that if it wasn’t for her, her mother would be out in the streets, begging. I believed that my master, even though he was asleep in his room, had an idea of what was going on.