by Cary Groner
Devi spoke to the lama, who replied softly. “Yes,” she said.
“Any swelling in his feet or ankles?”
“Sometimes.”
“How does he spend his days?”
When he heard the question, Lama Padma smiled.
“Sitting,” Devi said. “He says meditating is his job, that is why they pay him the big bucks.”
Mina laughed. Peter glanced at her; she too seemed more at ease. The stern glare had left her eyes, which looked softer and somehow larger.
“How many hours a day does he meditate?” Peter asked.
“He says eighteen or nineteen.”
Peter looked at Mina in disbelief. She just nodded.
“So if you add eating and sleeping and walking in the evening, he gets how much sleep a night?”
“About three hours,” Devi said. “Sometimes two.”
Peter tried to understand how this could be possible. The only patients he’d ever had who slept so little were clinically depressed, which was obviously not the case here.
He turned to Mina and spoke quietly. “Angina, don’t you think?” She nodded again. “Has Franz ever done any bloodwork?”
“Last year he took a sample, but the vacutainer broke on the way down the mountain and we were in a hailstorm, so we had to let it go.”
“Is it all right if I examine him?” Peter asked.
Devi asked and the lama nodded, his eyes bright. Peter put on his stethoscope and checked Lama Padma’s carotid arteries, then listened to his heart and lungs. He thought he heard a murmur, maybe a little click or mitral valve noise. Usually this was nothing; sometimes it was worth paying attention to.
“Did he ever have rheumatic fever as a kid?”
Devi spoke to him. The lama replied, seeming somber now. “He says he doesn’t know,” Devi said. “When he was growing up, most children had fevers, and many died. He lost a brother and a sister to measles, but the other diseases were not called by any names that he remembers.”
Peter noticed that the lama’s nails and lips had a bluish tint. “What does he eat?” he asked.
“Mainly tsampa, roasted barley flour mixed with hot water and butter. Some tea. Rice, sometimes, also with butter. Lamb, when it’s available.”
“He likes butter, I take it.”
Devi didn’t bother to translate. “All Tibetans like butter,” she said.
“Is it all right if we do some tests?” Peter asked.
The lama nodded. Mina drew blood, and Peter hooked up the portable EKG they’d brought, which confirmed his impressions. He told the lama he probably had atherosclerosis and heart disease, and that he’d most likely had rheumatic fever as a child, which had damaged his mitral valve.
“If you come down to the valley we can arrange an echocardiogram,” Peter said. “We may want to put stents in your arteries and repair the valve. Is that something you’d consider?”
When the lama heard the translation of this, he smiled.
“He says he very much wants to help you do your best, that he can see this is important to you and he appreciates it,” Devi said. “But his commitment is to stay here and practice.”
Mina seemed unsurprised, but Peter felt frustrated. Why had he come all this way if no one was going to take his advice?
“Unless he’s willing to exercise more, he may progress to heart failure within a couple of years,” Peter said. “And he should probably cut down on the butter.”
Devi spoke with the lama, and he looked thoughtful for a few moments before replying.
“Lama Padma says please do not be upset,” Devi said. “He says he will try to walk more.”
Peter was used to patients disregarding his recommendations out of fear or carelessness, but this was new terrain. He didn’t completely understand, but he couldn’t deny the lama’s presence and evident kindness. He felt chagrined at his frustration.
“Tell him I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I just want to get him well.”
Devi spoke to the lama, and he answered. “He appreciates this,” she replied. “He says he will even try to cut back on his butter, but that the whole monastery will have to pray if he is going to accomplish such a great challenge.”
With that, Lama Padma and Lobsang began to laugh again. Peter looked at Mina; she shrugged, and her expression said, Ke garne?
Lama Padma spoke to Devi, then. She turned to Peter again. “He wonders if you know anything about Western science.”
He was surprised by the question. “Biology, mainly,” he said. “That was my undergrad degree, and I try to keep up. Why?”
“He’d like it if you would think about corresponding with him,” she said. “He enjoys what he’s learned of this, and he’d consider it a favor.”
“I’m really an amateur,” Peter said. “But sure, of course.”
Devi spoke to Lama Padma and smiled at his response. “He says he is an amateur at meditation too,” she said. “That’s why he has to practice so much.”
Lama Padma and Lobsang laughed again, and once more Peter felt the calm of the place settle into him. An uncanny radiance suffused the room, as if even the light held secrets. Peter’s eyes went to the window, to the sky outside, and in that moment he felt that he had been lifted right through the glass and into the open air. It was a dizzying and exhilarating sensation, as if the boundaries of his mind had expanded to encompass part of the sky. When he looked back at Lama Padma, the lama was watching him intently, a coy smile on his lips, his eyes dancing with delight.
Lama Padma spoke gently to Devi, who blanched a little and glanced at Alex.
“What is it?” Alex asked.
“He wants all of us to have his blessing before we leave,” Devi said. “He thinks that soon some karma purification is coming for everyone in the room.”
“Oh, no,” muttered Mina.
Peter looked at her. He had come back through the window, back into himself, but he still felt a little giddy, as if nothing could really be unpleasant. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Isn’t that a good thing?”
She looked at him, frank dread in her eyes. “Long-term, yes,” she said. “Short-term, get ready for things to hit the fan.”
TEN
Two days later Peter awakened at 2:00 A.M., curled into a fetal position with excruciating abdominal cramps. His gut made noises that sounded like a trapped badger going bonkers in a trash can—something he had actually heard once, as a kid at summer camp, and had forgotten about until now. He sprinted down the hall to the bathroom and burst in on Alex, who was crouched miserably on the toilet in her nightshirt. He backed out, and they spent the night taking turns.
They barely made it to the clinic the next morning, where Mina herded them into a room, looked them over, and said, “Tch.” Peter didn’t like putting himself at her mercy, but he didn’t know what else to do. Alex lay down on the exam table, and Peter slumped in the chair. “Any suggestions?” he asked weakly.
Mina smiled, just slightly. “You could take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to develop compassion for the plight of your patients,” she said.
Alex and Peter looked at each other and had a brief moment of telepathy, in which they both understood that they were too debilitated to kill her.
“Or we could go over to the hospital and leave samples for the lab,” he said.
“The treatment is going to be the same regardless of what you’ve got,” said Mina.
“Flagyl, I suppose.”
“What is it?” asked Alex.
“A miraculous medicine that will make you feel much better,” said Mina.
“By killing every living thing between your mouth and your butt, including a bunch of stuff that’s good for you,” Peter added. “You’ll feel like you have the worst flu in history, but you’ll feel better than you do right now.”
“We’ll get you some yogurt to take with it, and you’ll be fine,” Mina said. “Now, if you can get up, we have patients who are, believe it or not, sicker t
han you are.”
| | |
That evening Sangita and Devi came over to tend to them. Devi went upstairs to be with Alex while Peter sat up on the couch.
“All foreigners, this happen.” Sangita clucked sympathetically, handing him a cup of mint tea.
Peter sipped gratefully. He’d already had the first dose of Flagyl and was too nauseated to eat. Sangita sat in one of the chairs and blew on her own tea to cool it. She sipped it, set it aside, and took out her knitting. He’d never seen her knit before—possibly because she never sat still long enough.
He’d been wanting to ask about her son, but it always seemed too awkward. It bothered him that he was so little acquainted with the details of her life, partly because she knew much more about him and Alex, and the imbalance of this emphasized her status as a servant and irked him. He liked to believe that such things could be more or less egalitarian—you’re working for me today, maybe I’ll work for you tomorrow—but he knew this was a bullshit rationalization to assuage his conscience, because in fact he would never find himself working for her. All of which was, of course, further complicated by the relationship between their daughters.
What struck him, though, was that Sangita accepted the situation as she accepted everything, with a shrug and a “ke garne?” and a rueful laugh at the great jokes the universe played on people. For her part, Alex viewed Sangita as a motherly figure who happened to take a little money for her mothering, and who was in any case the mother of her lover. Devi was harder to read; Peter sensed fire in her, a temper and a keen sense of justice. As a result, he felt more comfortable with her, since they were basically two sides of the same coin. Sangita, Peter thought, would scoff at such high-minded concerns. They didn’t make her life any easier, and anything that failed in that regard was by her definition a waste of time. Peter thought he understood why they all functioned so well as a kind of wacked clan.
Not that this delivered him from the anxiety the master feels in the presence of the servant he senses is his superior. Knowledge, the great leveler, offered one way out of this angst.
“Franz told me you were Tibetan,” he said, looking for a casual way into the questions he wanted to ask. “How did you end up here?”
She waved her hand. “Story very boring.”
He doubted it. Her general amiability to the contrary, underneath she was one of the most private people he had ever met, and he briefly recalled Franz’s dismissal of his questions, saying that Sangita would tell him about herself if she chose. Peter didn’t want to press her, but her reticence just provoked his curiosity further.
“I’ve got nothing better to do,” he said. “I’m just sitting here, trying to get my gut working again.”
She leveled a keen, evaluative gaze at him, then glanced upstairs, as if to be careful she wasn’t overheard. “This many years ago, when Devi very young,” she said quietly.
“You came over the mountains?” Peter asked. She nodded but seemed hesitant to continue. “It was bad in Tibet, under the Chinese?”
She looked at him as if he’d just asked whether the sky was blue. “My parents, killed,” she said. “Older brother, a monk, they put in prison. My sister, they take her to police station and rape her, many times.”
“Jesus.” Suddenly Peter felt idiotic for opening this can of worms, but now it was open and there was no way to seal it up again. If he felt embarrassed or enraged or sickened, her frankness said, he’d asked for it.
“When my younger brother go for her, he get angry and shout at them. They take him behind that place and shoot him. The monasteries, they tear them all down, everything burn.” Her face was flushed. She set her knitting in her lap and picked up her teacup. It shook a little in her hand.
Peter felt ashamed at his own ignorance. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he said.
But the fuse was lit, and it looked as if it was going to burn right down to the charge. Sangita’s whole being had transformed from her usual placid politeness into seething indignation, and Peter knew he’d misjudged her. She was more like Devi than he’d realized. Her body tensed, and her voice took on an acerbic edge. “When we come to Nepal, Sonam and I working in tea shop in Tamang, to north,” she said. “We stay four years, then the owner, he sick becoming. He give shop to us, we rooms adding, put in kitchen, some trekkers then come. Everything pretty fair okay.”
“Good for you,” said Peter.
“Then one day these people come; I don’t know word in English.…” She gestured as though she were carrying a rifle.
“Guerrillas?”
“Yes,” she said. “Maoists. Time to time, they come to village and take money and food. Not ask, just take. Then one day my son taking too.”
“They conscripted your son?”
She nodded. She set down the teacup but didn’t pick up the knitting. She interlaced her fingers, then pulled them apart again and placed her hands, palms down, on her knees. “I go find leader and tell him give my son back. He laugh. He say he doing this for my benefit. I proletariat!”
“What did you do?”
Her right hand shot up and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I not very polite then. I say to this man—I charity needing not, just only my son. Then they come and take tea shop, throw us all out. We Kathmandu coming.”
“How long ago was this?” Peter asked.
“Six years. Devi still very angry, so I not much say.”
“I don’t understand why you pretend to be Nepali, though.”
Her hands still shook as she picked up her knitting again. “I Tibetan,” she said. “But here I speak Nepali, I know customs.” She pointed to the small red dot on her forehead. “I wear bindi. I took Nepali name and gave daughter one as well, though Sonam this much will not do.”
“But why?” Peter asked.
Tears brimmed in her eyes. “I afraid if Communists take over Nepal they will rape Devi like my sister, they will shoot us just like Chinese did.”
ELEVEN
A slender girl of about fifteen was sitting on the exam table when Peter walked in. Mina was engaged in a heated discussion in Nepali with a middle-aged man who appeared to be the girl’s father.
“What’s the problem?” Peter asked.
“He wants to stay while we examine her.”
“Why’s she here?”
“Female trouble of some kind.”
“Out he goes. Tell him.”
The man chimed in with a deep, resonant voice. “I speak some English, Doctor,” he said. “I will not leave her alone with a strange man; it is not proper in my culture. I realize you Americans may not understand, but—”
Peter interrupted him. “Mr.—”
“Bahadur.”
“Mr. Bahadur, Mina will be here during the exam.”
“Yes, yes, she told me this. I’m sorry, but still it is not acceptable.”
“You’ve brought in your other daughters over the years,” Mina said. “You never insisted on staying before.”
Bahadur was a large man with a thick black beard and a potbelly, and he wore a traditional Nepali tunic with a Western sport coat over it. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and seemed agile, as if well oiled. His big hands moved fluidly in front of him in motions that suggested bargaining, or perhaps the deflection of blows. He shrugged as his eyes shifted between Peter and Mina.
“Before, the girls were always examined by nurses,” he said. “It was not an issue.”
“It’s not an issue now,” said Mina.
“I believe it is,” replied Bahadur.
Peter and Mina exchanged a look of consternation. The girl sat on the exam table, watching with canny dark eyes, her hands beside her and her expression inscrutable. Her legs were crossed at the ankles; a little copper bracelet just above her left foot gleamed dully against her cinnamon skin. Her eyes moved from Peter to Mina to Bahadur like translucent black stones, wary and alert.
“I understand your concern,” Peter sa
id, even though he didn’t really understand it. “But I will not even ask this girl the color of her hair with you in the room.”
Bahadur smiled, just a bit sarcastically. “Surely, Doctor, you can see the color of her hair.”
Peter shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, poised. Bahadur took a small step back.
“One of two things is going to happen now,” Peter said. “You’ll leave so we can examine her, or you’ll take her to some other clinic.”
“Now look—” said Bahadur, but Mina cut him off.
“You will not take me seriously because I am a woman,” she said. She nodded toward Peter. “Maybe you will take him seriously, hm?”
Bahadur looked at the girl again, then shrugged in concession. “All right,” he said reluctantly. “I only meant to be of assistance. Please come get me if I can answer any questions.”
He strolled out of the room, head high with preposterous dignity. Peter left Mina with the girl and went to find Franz, who was in his office.
“Ah, Mr. Bahadur,” Franz said. “The man who shoots only X’s.”
“How many daughters does he have?”
“Let me pull the charts.” Franz went to the B cabinet and pushed away the thick tendrils of the plant that sat atop it, then rooted until he produced a stack of manila folders. He looked through them. “God, you do ask the right questions, don’t you?”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Eight counting the one you’ve got now,” said Franz. “I suppose it’s possible, if his wife is strong.”
Peter took the charts and looked through them. “Three or four of these birthdays are within six months of each other,” he pointed out.
Franz looked at the folders and grunted. “I doubt she’s that strong,” he said. He threw the charts on his desk. “Scheisse,” he said. “He’s a zuhälter.”
“A zoo what?”
“Procurer. Whoremonger.”
Peter leaned against the desk. “What do we do? What are the laws?”
“They are ambiguous, unfortunately,” Franz said. “I think it is technically all right for a woman to sell herself if she chooses, but no one else may take any of the money.”