Arresting God in Kathmandu (7 page)

“Excuse me,” Deepak said. “May I talk to my wife alone?” He sounded belligerent, but he didn’t care.

“Wife?” Jill laughed.

“We’re not divorced yet,” Deepak said.

Birendra looked at him with a smirk. “Deepak-ji, you’re quite a man.”

Deepak took a sip and glowered at Birendra, trying to think of something cutting to say.

“My Deepak,” Jill said. “He’s so sensitive. He should have been the artist, not me.” Today she was wearing a Punjabi salwar-kameez, and her dirty-blond hair spilled down her back.

“I must talk to you,” he said.

“Okay.” She walked out on the balcony, and he followed. The city lights spread out before them.

“How long are you going to continue with him?” he asked.

“Why do you want to know, Deepak Misra-ji?”

“Can’t we—”

“It’s hopeless, Deepak. You’re insisting on something that’s not possible.”

“Why?” he said, his voice higher.

“There was a reason I left. We were both unhappy.”

“Then why are you here?”

“You don’t have a monopoly on this city,” she said, throwing back her hair.

He was ashamed. They stood in silence for a while. Then she put her hand on his arm and said gently, “Let’s go back inside.”

Deepak left the party a short while later and wandered through the streets. His throat was parched from the alcohol. Then he started walking toward Baghbazar. The address was somewhere in the back of his mind, and he found the house, located off the main street. He stood in front of the three-story building, wondering whether he should knock on the bottom door, when he looked up and saw Bandana-ji in the second-floor window. Only her head and shoulders were visible, but he could see that she was wearing the pink sari and blouse. She glanced down and spotted him. When their eyes met, she stood still. She smiled, and he hurried away, his heart throbbing.

The next day Deepak decided that he couldn’t go to the office. Over the phone he gave instructions to Bandana-ji, who didn’t mention having seen him standing outside her apartment. For four days he stayed in bed until late in the morning, then got up and listened to music. In the evening he drank whiskey and walked around the house, looking at photographs of himself and Jill or of Jill alone. On the fourth afternoon, while he was listening to ghazals by Jagjit and Chitra Singh, the famous husband-and-wife singers, the doorbell rang. There was Bandana-ji, clutching some files. “I need your signature,” she said.

As his sofa was piled up with his dirty clothes, something he kept telling himself to take care of, they sat on the living room carpet, where he signed the papers. It occurred to him he hadn’t heard Bandana-ji clear her throat since they’d started making love. As he sat there, his head bent over the papers, she started to quietly sing along with Jagjit and Chitra Singh. She had a beautiful voice, and he stopped writing and listened. She smiled as she sang:

If separated after meeting, we won’t sleep at night.

Thinking of each other, we’ll cry at night.

He turned the volume down so that he could hear her more clearly. The words penetrated his skin, and he closed his eyes. When her voice went higher, he felt a shaft of pleasure enter his ears and run down his body. With his eyes closed, Deepak imagined the voice belonging to a different body, someone with a long neck, large deerlike eyes, and an aquiline nose. Then he imagined it belonging to Jill, and he saw her pale face as her tongue played with the words. Her hand reached out and caressed his face, then started unbuttoning his shirt. He opened his eyes and let Bandana-ji undress him. He undressed her, his throat dry with anticipation. She kept singing even when he entered her.

Deepak stayed in bed for days, sometimes reading, sometimes staring at the ceiling, often drifting into sleep. In the evening he got up, put on ghazals, and slowly drank himself into oblivion.

Every few days Bandana-ji came with papers for him to sign. Eventually he stopped asking questions about the office; he just took out his pen and signed what she handed him. Then he waited for her to sing. When he heard her voice, his body moved as though under a tender massage. The warmth spread from the bottom of his spine to the top of his head, and he arched his neck to hold on to the sensation.

The phone rang constantly. People buzzed the doorbell and knocked loudly. Once he heard Jill calling, “Deepak, what’s the matter? Open up.” But he opened the door only for Bandana-ji, after peering through the curtains to make sure it was she. When she told him that some clients were irritated by his absence, he said, “Tell them I’ve gone to Singapore for a conference.” And when he finished his stock of whiskey, he drove to a nearby shop and bought two cases. Every hour without Bandana-ji was a long stretch of boredom, and he constantly thought of the pregnant woman on her face, the bones of her hips.

One afternoon, with Bandana-ji on top of him on the carpet, humming, Deepak saw someone move past the window curtains toward the back of the house. There was a creak, and he knew that someone had opened the back door, which he had forgotten to lock the night before. He recognized the footsteps as Jill’s. Then Deepak saw her legs at the entrance of the living room, and looked at Bandana-ji. Although her eyes were closed, Deepak knew that she was aware of Jill’s presence. What a sight, Deepak thought: the whole house smelling of alcohol, and he, on the carpet, straddled by Bandana-ji. Deepak moaned, and their movement became quicker until they climaxed. As Bandana-ji’s head came to rest on his chest, Deepak turned his head and saw the empty space where Jill had been a moment ago.

His pleasure was mixed with a strange satisfaction, as if he had won a battle he’d been fighting for days. But that didn’t last long. After Bandana-ji left, he became filled with self-loathing. He drank so much that he bumped into tables and lamps. In the living room he picked up a large photograph of Jill and, after glancing at it briefly, set it back, face down. He did the same with other pictures of her. He felt Jill was laughing at him.

Despite all the whiskey, Deepak couldn’t sleep. In the middle of the night he got up and took a cold shower, made himself a cup of tea, and sat in the living room, looking out the window into the darkness. He could hear the frogs outside, and their melodic croaking calmed his nerves. As the darkness gave way to a gray light, and the birds started chirping, his head cleared, and he reached a decision, a painful one.

The next day, his body tired but his mind fresh, Deepak asked Bandana-ji to submit her resignation. She didn’t protest. She went to her desk, entered something into the computer, and came back into his office. He had a stack of money in front of him, much more than what he owed her, but she carefully counted the money and took only what was due her. He wanted to say that he was sorry, but the only thing he could do was stare at the rest of the money on the desk.

It took him less than a week to hire another secretary, a short older woman with a loud voice. She wasn’t as efficient as Bandana-ji, but she caught on fast, and her phone manner was impeccable for someone with such a booming voice. For about a week, Deepak’s life acquired a semblance of normality again. The pleasure he had experienced with Bandana-ji now seemed unreal.

But this sense of control soon gave way to restlessness, a feeling of emptiness. He began to compare his current state to the rapture he had experienced when Bandana-ji sang to him. His everyday life was so lacking in color that he worried that something had happened to his brain. When he went to Jill’s apartment for another party, this time a celebration of a solo exhibition in the city, she was no longer attractive to him. He wondered why he had so desperately wanted her back in his life. It was evident that Jill and Birendra were lovers now, for they held hands throughout the party, their bodies close to each other.

One afternoon, a small boy delivered a package to Deepak at the office, and in it he discovered the pink sari. He picked it up and smelled it. It no longer bore her smell, that odor of cooking oil, so he assumed it had been cleaned. After work, he drove to Baghbazar and, with the package in his hand, knocked on the bottom door. An old lady told him that Bandana-ji had moved out, and that an Indian family now lived in her flat. No, she didn’t know where Bandana-ji had gone. The old lady shook her head, revealing toothless gums as she smiled. “She was a strange one,” she said. “She didn’t talk to anyone.” She paused, and a wistful look came over her face. “But she sang beautifully. It can only be God’s blessing.”

It was getting dark. Deepak decided to leave his car and walk around the block. There were many sari shops in the area, and he peered into each one as he walked past, the pink sari package in his hand, with the absurd hope that Bandana-ji might be buying another. The street was half-lit with shoplights, as there were no street lamps above. Whenever he saw a thin woman in a shop, he stopped to see whether it was Bandana-ji. At one point, he heard a woman clear her throat, and followed her for a short distance.

He walked the streets until he lost his bearings. His fingers were moist from clutching the package. By this time many shopkeepers had closed their doors and turned off the lights. After about an hour, he realized that he had walked all the way to Kupondole, past the Bagmati Bridge, which separated the cities of Kathmandu and Patan. He sat on the steps of a closed shop near a bus stop and listened to music coming from a stereo shop around the corner. Soon he recognized the voices of Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh, and he walked to the shop. A small man inside smiled at him. Deepak stood outside, listening.

This night I have to stay awake till dawn:

My fate is etched like this.

Sorrow has entered my heart.

Stars, why don’t you fall asleep?

He closed his eyes, and in a moment he realized the voice he was hearing was Bandana-ji’s, not those of the famous singers. And he saw her face, the pregnant woman on her cheek. Arching his neck, Deepak waited for the sensation of bliss to enter his body.

“G
ET HIM MARRIED
,” Rudra said. “Once he has a wife, he’ll come to his senses.”

“Who’d marry him?” Hiralal said. “The whole city knows he’s a drunkard.”

They were smoking, sitting in Rudra’s rice-and-beans shop in the neighborhood. Hiralal dragged on his Yak cigarette, and Rudra smoked from the chilim, making gurgling sounds as he sucked on the long thin pipe. Hiralal and Rudra had grown up in the same neighborhood, attended the same school a few blocks away, and had teased the same girls. Over the years, as his business prospered, Rudra had grown fat, and now he sat in his shop all day, groaning whenever he had to get up to scoop rice for a customer.

“We’ll find someone,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Hiralal replied. The sun was setting, and he could hear voices haggling at the nearby vegetable market. It was always in the evening that Hiralal most missed Rammaya. From his window he’d see her in the courtyard, combing her long black hair under the mild winter sun. She’d tilt her head as she combed the coconut-scented Dabur Anwla oil through her hair. Occasionally she’d look up at him, and he’d say something like, “Aren’t you going to come up?” She’d shake her head and go back to her combing. When she did finally come upstairs, he’d hover around her, just to smell her hair.

A woman came in to buy some mung beans, and after she left, Rudra said, “Why don’t I ask my wife to find someone? Anyone. I think the important thing is to get him married.”

Hiralal knew what Rudra meant by “anyone.” It meant they’d have to find a girl with a blemish on her face, one with pockmarks, a girl whose parents wouldn’t mind giving her away in haste—even to a drunkard. But Moti was getting out of control. Hiralal could imagine Moti lying on the street, face down, a patch of blood and vomit next to his head. He didn’t know where Moti found the money for his drinking; he probably relied on friends, sons of local merchants. Perhaps he even borrowed money from them. Moti had held a few jobs, mostly menial, but never for long; either his employers fired him or he simply stopped going to work. Now, at nineteen, he staggered through the streets, his eyes red and puffy, speaking to strangers in a slurred voice, stumbling into the alleys of Jaisideval whenever he came across his father.

Hiralal said okay to Rudra.

The drinking had begun when Moti was seventeen. He stayed out late and came home with alcohol on his breath. At first, Hiralal and Rammaya merely scolded him. But when he took up drinking in the afternoon, Hiralal had had enough. One evening when Moti arrived home swaying and staggering, Hiralal cut a branch from a tree in the garden and whacked his son’s legs. “You think you’re a big man.”

Rammaya, cooking in the kitchen, rushed down the stairs and stood in front of Moti, her arms outstretched. “Don’t you dare hit our son,” she told Hiralal. Their first child had died of pneumonia when she was six months old, which propelled Rammaya into a depression that lifted only when Moti was born. “You hit him again,” Rammaya had told Hiralal, “and I will leave you.”

For two days Moti stayed home, teetering around the house, a surly expression on his face whenever he ran into his father. Then, once he was steady on his feet, he returned to the neighborhood bhatti, a dark bar with tables and benches and a counter displaying fly-infested meat snacks. Hiralal and Rammaya tried talking to him calmly, and Moti listened, sometimes nodding, sometimes raising his eyes—large, like his mother’s—to look at his parents. “Do you promise not to drink?” Hiralal asked his son, and Moti said, “I promise.” Later that night, in bed, Rammaya said, “He won’t do it again. I know my son.” But the next day, after work, Hiralal peered into the bhatti, and there was Moti, his head against the wall, his eyes closed. As Hiralal stood in the doorway, the anger rising inside him, one of Moti’s friends nudged the boy. He opened his eyes, saw his father, and scrambled to get up, spilling the glass of raksi in front of him. Swaying as he stood, he said, “Ba?” as if he were asking Hiralal a question. Hiralal grabbed him by the right ear, and dragged him home, not saying a word, ignoring the looks of the pedestrians who stopped to see what was happening. At home, he took Moti to Rammaya in the kitchen, and said, “You said you knew your son.”