Exiles

by Cary Groner

  The evening was cool. Windows turned orange in houses and apartments as lights came on inside. A big 747 drifted in over the valley, on final approach, its lights blinking red and white. The roar of its engines echoed back and forth between the hills, growing loud, then soft, then loud again, like ocean waves swirling and chuffing between cliffs.

  “That is the weirdest thing,” said Alex.

  “What?”

  “Two or three months ago I would have felt like the plane was normal and the goat was weird. Somewhere along the line I switched sides.”

  Peter knew what she meant. He was now able to spot other Americans a block away, and not by their clothes, because Canadians and Brits and Australians dressed pretty much the same way. (The Germans he could always tell because they had a peculiar habit of wearing shorts and sandals with dark socks, and sometimes even knee socks.) But a lot of the Americans looked kind of dead in the eyes. They would walk the streets purposefully, their wallets poised, buying brass trinkets and folk art and often seeming to genuinely experience nothing. It made Peter uncomfortable, because once he became aware of it, he realized other people probably saw it too.

  There were nice Americans of course, and some of them had done a lot of good. There was a couple from Oregon who’d spearheaded the conversion of the tempo fleet from diesel engines to electric motors, and earnest students of Buddhism, and a woman from Sausalito named Olga, who’d started a program that gave poor villagers alternatives to selling their daughters as domestic slaves. But the tourists were a distinct breed. Peter had lived his whole life in his home country and somehow never noticed that look until he saw it in contrast to people who were different.

  They passed the floodlit grounds of the Australian embassy, then took a couple of turns and found themselves on quiet, deserted streets without lights, unpaved and fronted by small shops and ramshackle houses. Wayne Lee came to full attention and picked up her pace.

  “I should have brought a flashlight,” Peter said. “I have no idea if it’s safe here.”

  Alex straightened her shoulders and looked around. “Let’s keep going.”

  He’d always liked her courage, but after a few minutes they heard scufflings and he began to have doubts. He thought he saw movement behind them, flowing dark shapes low to the ground. Wayne Lee broke into a trot, and he struggled to rein her in.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Alex.

  “I don’t know, but I’m not liking it and neither is the goat.”

  He felt a surge of adrenaline. They were moving quickly, but the living shadows moved with them. The street branched, and one fork led back to the main road, about a hundred yards away, where there was light.

  “Take a right,” Peter said, but the things followed.

  “Dogs,” said Alex. “It’s a dog pack.”

  “They want Wayne Lee.”

  They started running. The dogs closed the distance and were nearly on them when a figure suddenly darted out from the shadows. It was a boy, yelling in Nepali. They halted, and the dogs quickly surrounded them. The boy walked in a circle, keeping himself between them and the dogs, brandishing a long, heavy stick. The dogs snapped at it, but he was quick; he’d pull it away at the last second, then slap them on the nose with it.

  “You have a bit of trouble, I think, mister sir,” said the boy, his English heavily accented.

  Peter asked him what they should do, and he told them to bend down and pretend they were each picking up a rock. They did as he said, and the dogs immediately backed off a couple of feet.

  “Follow me, please,” he said. “Keep your arms up, like you are going to throw the rock. You, girl, in the rear, please to face behind you. Arm up.”

  Crablike, they shuffled their way down the narrow lane. Wayne Lee, bleating and shivering with fear, shat prodigiously. Alex—in addition to walking sideways, keeping her arm up, and watching the dogs—did her best to avoid the goat shit, often unsuccessfully.

  As they approached the lit street, though, one of the dogs lunged at the boy, briefly grabbing the stick in its jaws. The boy stepped back, which pulled the dog toward him, then shoved the stick down the dog’s throat. It gagged and opened its jaws for an instant, and in that moment the boy yanked the stick back out of its mouth and smacked it on the snout. The dog snarled and lunged again, and this time the boy clobbered it hard over the skull. It yelped and scuttled back to the pack.

  They kept moving, the dogs still with them, but the strategy was working; as they approached the light, their pursuers began hanging farther and farther back, and by the time they reached the paved road, the dogs had melted into the black gloom like djinns.

  The three of them stood under a flickering yellow streetlight, sweating in the cool air, as the panicked goat continued to bleat. The boy’s eyes gleamed in his dark face.

  “Who are you?” Peter asked, astonished at this intercession.

  “I am Raju,” the boy said. He stuck out his hand, and they shook.

  “Thank you, Raju. You saved our necks.”

  The boy was about twelve, barefoot, and he wore a loose Madras shirt that hung askew because he’d buttoned it wrong. His pants were held up with an old piece of nylon climbing rope and had a carefully stitched patch over one knee. How to account for this discrepancy? The tidy patch with its tight whipstitch, the shirt one button off. Peter wondered how long ago the patch had been applied, and what had happened to the woman who sewed it.

  He realized that even as he was sizing up Raju, the boy was doing the same to him.

  “It is not wise to walk here at night, certainly not with an animal,” he said, sounding cheerful for a kid who had just faced down a pack of feral dogs with an old stick. He whirled the stick around him nonchalantly, and Peter couldn’t help noticing how graceful and economical his movements were, as if he’d been training all his short life with some dog-stick master for just this moment. He saw Peter watching him and smiled.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Peter asked. His heart was finally slowing down.

  “You are American?”

  “Yes.”

  Raju swished the stick back and forth in front of him, thinking. “Why does an American have a goat, if I may demand of you?”

  Peter smiled at Raju’s formal, almost-correct schoolboy English. The boy’s parents must have struggled to get him some sort of education. “We live here now,” he answered.

  Raju shrugged his narrow shoulders in that unique Nepali way—resigned to fate, making the best of the situation, the physical expression of ke garne. “I suppose if you are American you may give me rupees as a token of your appreciation,” he said, sounding a little unconvinced, as if he’d only heard rumors of this odd custom.

  Peter handed over all his cash and then remembered with chagrin what he’d just been thinking about Americans and their wallets. Raju grew wide-eyed and looked around a little fearfully.

  “Sir, if a policeman should see this he will think I am a robber. This will buy my whole family food for a month.”

  “Good,” Peter said. He asked Raju if he knew where the Phwoof clinic was. Raju shook his head, so Peter described it to him. “If you ever need anything, Raju, if someone in your family is sick, come find me there.”

  | | |

  Ten days later Devi worked with Alex to translate the response from Lama Padma.

  Dear Peter,

  Please be assured that it is not my intention to convert you to anything. Buddhists do not posit a God in the sense of an all-powerful being who looks down on everything and causes benefit or harm. What you think of as your dark view of life on earth is not so unlike ours, in that we consider existence in the unenlightened state to be an endless cycle of suffering. It appears to me that the genetic mechanisms you describe are nothing more than the biological machinery of that cycle, which we call samsara. As such, I find them interesting but not surprising.

  Though we do not say there is a God in the narrowest sense, we do aim to experience w
hat we call Buddha nature. This is described as yeshe, the all-pervasive awareness that suffuses everything, and that is our own fundamental essence. The goal of meditation is to develop wisdom and compassion to the point that the mind rests in this state at all times, sleeping and waking, without distraction, even across the threshold of death. That, put very briefly, is what is meant by Enlightenment.

  I hope you do not feel too much despair at the state of things, but despair is an important first step. I could go on about this, but I think I will continue later. I have a couple of students from California now, and I have learned something about the Western attention span!

  Yours,

  —Lama Padma

  FOURTEEN

  “You recall our beloved Mr. Bahadur?” asked Franz.

  “How could I forget?”

  “He is quite exercised, and it turns out he is zuhälter of choice to a wide spectrum of government ministers and muck-a-mucks in the army.”

  Peter was astonished. “Are you telling me that a government with an armed insurrection on its hands is actually getting bent out of shape over the tribulations of an aggrieved pimp?”

  “The power of such men lies in their ability to inflict damage,” Franz said. “They can end marriages and careers with a word.”

  Franz had acquired a stray cat, which he’d named Wittgenstein in honor of the philosopher from his hometown. Wittgenstein jumped up onto the desk and started rubbing his face against Franz’s hand, bit him affectionately, then lay down under the lamp.

  “In any case, I’ve had to placate them,” Franz muttered, petting the cat and looking slightly guilty.

  “Which means what?”

  Franz cleared his throat. “We have a small satellite clinic out in Jorpati, near Boudhanath, that serves the monks and nuns in the monasteries there.”

  Peter considered this. “That’s a workable commute, right? What would it take, an hour?”

  “You’ll be on call when you aren’t in the clinic. It’s important that you live nearby.”

  Peter stared at him. “I’m being exiled?”

  “Just till things cool down.”

  “How about I quit and save you the trouble?”

  “Admit defeat?” Franz asked. “Take your ball and go home?”

  “My balls, more like it, instead of handing them to you.”

  Franz blinked enigmatically. “Of course, there’s the matter of your daughter. I understand she’s quite happy here now.”

  Peter couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Sangita,” he said. “You sent her as a spy?”

  “Not at all,” said Franz. “But she cooks for me too, and with a little effort one can draw her out.”

  Peter got up and went to the window. The invasion of privacy notwithstanding, he knew Franz was right; Alex was happier with Devi than he’d ever seen her. If they left the country now she’d be even more upset than when he brought her over. Then there was the matter of Bahadur; was Peter just going to roll over and go belly-up for some lard-ass hustler? The more he thought about it, the more he realized there was all kinds of unfinished business here, and home seemed less appealing than ever. He put his hands in his pockets and studied the floor.

  “You’re a fascist,” he mumbled. “A devious, manipulative Austrian brownshirt.”

  Franz wagged an admonishing finger at him as the cat jumped from the desk to the windowsill and slipped out.

  | | |

  “Mike’s Breakfast,” said Peter. “On me.”

  Alex looked at Devi uneasily. “This can’t be good,” she said. She got her coat, keeping a watchful eye on her father, and the three of them headed out.

  Mike’s had been started by a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1970s who’d liked the freewheeling hash-head haven that was Kathmandu in those days. His restaurant was still a gathering place for homesick, hungry Westerners who craved something besides rice and lentils for breakfast. Peter and the girls took a tempo across town and sat at a table in the garden. Devi had never been there.

  “Waffles with scrambled eggs and orange juice,” said Alex, when they’d been seated.

  “Pancakes,” said Devi. She looked at Alex, a little unsure of herself. “With butter and maple syrup and hash browns. Okay?”

  “The diabetes express,” said Alex. “Go for it.”

  “Coffee here,” Peter said. “And, mmm … everything everyone else is having.”

  When the waitress left, Alex turned anxiously to her father. “Let’s hear it.”

  Peter explained the situation, and soon she looked as if she were going to burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll have a jeep, so you can borrow it once in a while.”

  The girls looked at each other. Devi put her hands on the table. “I want to come too,” she said.

  It was the most openly assertive Peter had seen her. “Don’t your parents need you?”

  “I think they’re tired of having me around.”

  “She’s practically been living with us, anyway,” Alex said.

  “Still, you’d have to ask them,” he said.

  “I will, but they won’t mind.”

  Peter rested his chin in his hands. He should have anticipated this, and he hadn’t. “What about school?”

  “I can do homeschool, like Alex.”

  “Franz says it’s barely an apartment—really just a big room.”

  “We’ll pretend we’re in New York,” Alex said. Peter did his best to sound reasonable. “What I mean is, you won’t have any privacy.”

  Devi rolled her eyes. “I grew up in a family where having your own room means hanging a blanket,” she said. “I’m not used to privacy. Too much privacy is what makes Westerners sick in the head.”

  The conversation was a stark reminder that new alliances had complicated Peter’s authority. Of course, he could lay down the law like a bully and endure weeks of sulking while he and his daughter lived like caged rats in an ugly experiment, courtesy of a vengeful panderer. Beyond that, though, they’d be treating Tibetans without a Tibetan translator, which would only worsen the nightmare.

  It hadn’t occurred to him, but for that reason alone it would probably be better to have Devi there than not. Add in Alex’s happiness and the effect it would have on him, and matters quickly distilled themselves into clarity. Some defeats turned out not to be defeats at all.

  The girls picked at their food in silence, looking tense and unhappy.

  Peter did his best to suppress a canny grin. “You’ll both have to work in the clinic every day, then,” he said. “You’ll do your schoolwork in the evenings. Absolutely no malingering.”

  “Ha!” said Alex, grinning. She high-fived Devi. “Ha!”

  And Peter thought, “Ha” is right, kid.

  | | |

  Peter awakened on their first morning in the new place and lay there, disoriented, thinking he had to go feed Wayne Lee. But Devi’s parents had moved into the house to care for the goat while he and the girls were gone. It turned out that Sangita and Sonam had been living in a wall tent set up in the courtyard of an apartment building, which was why Devi never wanted to take Alex home with her. It was also why Sonam hadn’t been able to get over his respiratory problems.

  The Jorpati apartment adjoined the house of a Nepali Brahmin family; ten years previously it had been a cowshed. The family had hired workers to plaster the walls and pour a concrete floor over the dirt. They apparently hadn’t bothered with rebar, and the floor was full of cracks that still emitted a vague odor of manure. It was about fourteen by twenty, not a closet but close enough with three people crammed into it. Peter had a cot in the corner near the window; on the opposite side of the room, behind a curtain, Alex and Devi shared a small double mattress on a platform made of pallets.

  Devi was snoring softly, but Alex was in the first stages of her early-morning rustling. She’d be up soon. The walls were damp with all their breath. Suitcases, backpacks, the heater they’d brought, and various cardboard boxes containin
g food and household goods were spread out across the floor. To the left of the door was the kitchen, which consisted of a sink, a tiny fridge, a two-burner propane hot plate, three pans, and a teakettle. The bathroom was an outhouse in the owners’ backyard.

  Peter heard noises from outside, so he hauled himself up and pushed the curtain aside. There was a water tap just below the window, and a long line of women stood in the morning chill, waiting to fill plastic jugs from the trickle that flowed out of the spigot. Fortunately he and the girls had their own supply inside, and he’d bought a filter.

  He lay down again, his hands behind his head, which was propped up on a cheap, lumpy pillow. He stared at the ceiling, laced with a complex pattern of cracks like the scratched hide of an old water buffalo. The walls of the room had been painted, but the ceiling had been left the dull bone white of rough plaster.

  So much for canny victory. I am an utter failure, Peter thought. It wasn’t a particularly dramatic revelation, just a dry, unpleasant truth, like the bitter taste that lingers in the mouth the morning after too rowdy a night. He had failed at marriage, failed at fatherhood, failed even in his battle with Bahadur. He had been too trusting; he had underestimated multiple threats; he had failed to work hard enough. He was forty-four. His old classmates had successful practices and beautiful wives and brilliant children and elegant homes in lush suburbs, and he was lying on a hard mattress on the floor of an old cowshed while women in lungis drew dirty water from a rusty tap five feet from his head. He had chronic diarrhea; he was afraid of getting TB; he was afraid of Alex getting TB—in fact, increasingly he was just afraid in general.

  Alex mumbled in her half sleep, and outside one of the women suddenly laughed boisterously. Peter wondered at the happiness of the Nepalis, people who owned nothing but a few clothes, a cooking pot, a jug for the neighborhood water tap. They lived short, uncomfortable lives beset with pestilence, shared with parasites and mangy dogs, and still they laughed more than anyone laughed in Berkeley.

  As for him, he dreaded the new clinic, dreaded the day itself. He didn’t even want to leave his bed. He remembered, briefly, the radiance at Lama Padma’s, the singular light that seemed to hold secrets, and the feeling of being physically carried outside of the room and into the sky. What was that, anyway? Lama Padma had grinned at him as if he knew exactly what was going on. To Peter it was unlike anything he’d ever felt, and at the same time the experience seemed familiar, as close to real happiness and freedom as he could imagine. But as far as he knew he might never see Lama Padma again, and he had no idea how to regain that state himself. For that matter, this business of karma purification was even worse than Mina had predicted. It wasn’t just things hitting the fan; it was he himself hitting the fan and getting cut into thousands of pieces that blew outward to the winds.