by Cary Groner
“Even if you’re aware of what’s driving you, it doesn’t necessarily make you able to resist it,” Peter said. “It’s all very emotional, and that’s the nature of the beast; we’re the saddest kind of slaves because we actually believe we’re free.”
As Devi translated, the lama said, “Ah,” and then sipped his tea, looking pensive. He spoke again.
“He agrees that we tend to be captives to our emotions,” Devi said. “But he wants to emphasize that compassion is the one emotion that has the potential to free us, because it isn’t based on a desire for our own happiness.”
“Free us from what, though?” Peter said. “From the kind of slavery I was talking about?”
“More than that,” Devi said. She listened to the lama for a few moments, then went on. “One of his Western students described the fall from grace in the Bible, and he says it’s like that, except that instead of a legendary event it’s a real one that happens in people all the time. What really chains us is ordinary mind, the inability to rest in pure awareness. That we’re always falling away from that, and that’s how we lose our true freedom.”
Peter rubbed his eyes. “It seems like you guys are way ahead of us,” he said. “I mean, this monastery is full of people who’ve taken vows that remove their DNA from the gene pool, who devote their lives to the welfare of others. That’s an extremely rebellious act against the forces of instinct.”
When Devi translated this, the lama’s eyes lit up and he laughed.
“Yes,” Devi went on. “He says every monastery is really a hotbed of subversives!”
Then the lama turned to Devi. They spoke together in Tibetan for a little while, and tears came to Devi’s eyes.
“What?” Peter asked, a little anxiously. He hoped this wasn’t about more karma purification.
She looked down and wiped her eyes. “He asked me if I was just sitting here translating, or if I was paying attention,” she said. “And then I realized this whole thing wasn’t just about having an intellectual discussion with you.”
Peter looked at Lama Padma, who was watching Devi with kind interest. “So I was the decoy?” Peter said.
Devi smiled. “Only partly,” she said. She glanced shyly at the lama. “He just thinks I have potential, and I might want to pay attention to that.”
SIXTEEN
In the morning, Devi appeared introspective, quietly holding herself apart from them as they loaded the jeep. When they were briefly alone, Peter asked her what was on her mind.
She stopped and looked at her feet shyly. “I think I might like to stay here for a few days,” she said. “Maybe spend some time with the anis.”
Alex walked up with her bag then, and overheard. “Devi,” she said. “Please tell me you’re not thinking about joining up.” She smiled, but her concern showed.
Devi shrugged. She was clearly wrestling with her feelings. “I’m just curious,” she said.
Peter watched her. “You should stay if you want,” he said. “We can pick you up next week.”
Alex looked at him, her eyebrows arched in surprise. But Devi’s face filled with color, and her eyes teared up. It was as if he’d casually offered her a diamond. “Would that really be okay?” she asked.
“Call me on your cell if you want us to come sooner.”
“Thanks,” she said, and put her arms around him.
| | |
On the road back, Alex was quiet for a long time, staring out the window. It began to rain.
“Let’s hear it,” Peter said, finally.
“How could you just let her leave like that?”
“She’s a grown-up,” he answered. “For that matter, so are you.”
She crossed her arms and stared straight ahead. “So I’m not allowed to be upset?”
“She’s got to figure out her own life. I thought you’d be sympathetic.”
“I’d be plenty sympathetic if it didn’t include her becoming a nun.”
“Give her time,” he said. “If you try to tie her up, she’ll fight you all the way.”
She made a dismissive puffing noise. “Since when are you the great oracle on successful relationships?”
He looked at her, genuinely stung by this. “I’m not,” he said. “But sometimes I know what not to do, and if there’s something really important to somebody you love, you don’t want to tell her she can’t.”
“Oh, like Mom and meth? Tolerance worked real well there, huh?”
He felt the hackles rise on his neck. “I put her into rehab three times, and three times she went back on that shit.”
“So then you do it a fourth, if you have to.”
“Another thing you learn along the way is when to quit.” His voice was hard. “If Devi wants to meditate, it might take her away from you, but it isn’t going to destroy her. Don’t pretend you don’t see the difference. You’re not that stupid.”
She fought back tears. “Maybe I should just walk back.”
“Good idea,” he said. “It’s only eight more miles, and it’s not raining that hard.”
“Goddamn it, Dad!”
“What do you want from me? I’m not her father.”
“You dragged me out to this godforsaken place, and the one consolation was that she’d be here! Now I don’t even have that!”
“You think I’m having a great time? Just weeks ago you wanted to stay. Don’t make it sound like this is all my damn fault.”
“It is your fault,” she said.
“It is not!”
“It is!”
“Enough!” he shouted, and she recoiled and sobbed harder. They were both too angry to say any more or even look at each other. Alex snuffled the rest of the way home, and when they got there, she got out of the jeep and went inside ahead of him, without glancing back. The silence continued through dinner. When Peter finally cooled down a little he wanted to say something consoling, but he didn’t trust his temper. Alex went to bed early but slept fitfully. Peter read until after midnight, then finally turned in, exhausted.
SEVENTEEN
The next day Bahadur appeared at the clinic with three girls.
“Doctor,” he said, with an unctuous smile. He seemed to enjoy viewing Peter’s reduced circumstances.
The girls crowded onto the exam table like birds on a wire, dangling their feet and surveying the room nervously. Two of them were beautiful, but the youngest was gangly and plain, and wore an old pair of plastic glasses held together at the bridge with masking tape.
Peter looked at them. “What are you doing here, Bahadur?”
Bahadur handed him a letter. It was from Franz, instructing Peter to cooperate with whatever Bahadur asked him to do. The survival of the clinic was apparently at stake.
“Now that I’m getting used to how things work around here, I trust there’s something in it for me?” Peter said.
“I suppose that depends on what you want, Doctor.”
“Tell me what you want, then we’ll negotiate from there.”
“Very well,” Bahadur said, smiling. “These three girls are to be sold as virgins. I will need a letter that they are intact and without disease.”
“You can’t seriously be asking me to do this.”
Bahadur tapped the letter in Peter’s hand and smiled. “Banhi tells me you’re quite impressed with the TB drugs and the quinolone antibiotics,” he said. “What a shame for your patients if they ran out.”
Peter stared at him, processing this. He’d just been talking to Lama Padma about bogus morality, but there was one form of morality he believed in, which was that you didn’t deliberately participate in things that harmed people. Now he was being asked to do just that, and if he refused, still others would be hurt because they wouldn’t get the drugs they needed. It wasn’t enough that he’d failed at everything else; now, if he wanted to keep practicing medicine, he even had to fail at the Hippocratic oath.
Alex loitered in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest, her expression of dista
ste suggesting that Bahadur might be the only person in the world more repugnant than her father.
“Escort Mr. Bahadur to the waiting room, if you would,” Peter said.
Her mouth fell open. “You can’t tell me you’re going along with this.”
“I don’t really have to tell you anything, do I?”
“This is disgusting, Dad. You’d lose your license for this at home.”
“Well, we’re not home, are we?”
“Pretty clearly not.”
“Then do as I ask, please,” he said.
Bahadur observed this exchange with interest, then sauntered out into the waiting room and plopped his ample buttocks down on one of the creaky chairs. Alex went behind the reception desk.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked, and Bahadur looked up in surprise.
“You’re certainly more polite than your father,” he said. “What do you have?”
She looked him straight in the eye and said, “Nothing.” Then she sat down, put her feet up on the desk, and opened a magazine. Bahadur hissed with exasperation.
Peter shut the door.
Banhi translated as he spoke to the girls. Two turned out to be seventeen; the plain girl with the glasses was fifteen but seemed brighter and more inquisitive than the others. Peter doubted she’d have an easy time dealing with clients, which meant her life as a prostitute was likely to be even rougher than usual.
“Ask how much their fathers sold them for.”
Banhi translated and reported the news impassively. “About twenty thousand rupees apiece.”
“Less than three hundred dollars.”
“A year’s income for a family,” Banhi said.
“Ask them if they know what they’ll be doing.”
Banhi shot him the sort of look you’d give an idiot. “Of course they know.”
“Ask them, please.”
She spoke to the girls. They replied shyly, their eyes downcast, playing with their fingers. “They say yes.”
“Ask them if this is something they’ve agreed to do. If they might rather return home, or go to school.”
“Doctor, this is all established,” said Banhi. “You are making Mr. Bahadur wait.”
“Bahadur wasn’t paying your salary last time I checked,” Peter said. Then he looked at her again. “Or is he?”
She reddened and her expression changed, which told Peter everything he needed to know. He was aware of what the clinic paid her, that it was barely enough to live on, and now he felt guilty for rubbing her nose in it. They were both collaborators at this point, anyway, so who was he to judge?
He lowered his head, showing a little deference. “Just ask them, will you?”
She spoke a little less sharply to the girls, who replied one at a time.
“The pretty ones say they cannot go home, that their fathers have refused to take them back,” she said. “They say they know of Bahadur’s other girls, that he has a good reputation in the towns they come from, and that they will be well paid.”
“Are they frightened?”
“They are a little afraid, but they have no education and don’t think they would like school very much.”
Peter looked at the girls. They were so shy they wouldn’t even make eye contact with him. They would have to grow up fast.
“Do they know about AIDS?”
“Whatever they know is almost certainly wrong.”
Peter nodded at the plain girl. “What about her?”
Banhi spoke to her. The girl answered quietly, her eyes downcast, and Banhi shrugged. “She will get used to it.”
“What did she say?”
“Her name is Usha. Her parents have three younger children, and there is not enough food. She likes to read.”
“She can read?”
“An answer much more complicated than I asked for,” Banhi said. “Shall I have them undress?”
“Not yet.”
Peter went out to get Bahadur, who stood at the window, watching the pale yellow smoke that belched from the rendering plant down the road. Peter smiled, shook his hand, and led him outside. Bahadur appeared suspicious of this gesture of truce. They strolled down the street, where the smell of rancid flesh soaked them like an invisible mist. A thrumming tornado of flies darkened the air over the plant.
“Your American teenagers are most disrespectful,” said Bahadur.
“It’s a big problem,” Peter said. “Whenever she’s discourteous to child slavers I ground her, but she just won’t mend her ways.”
Bahadur narrowed his eyes. “Did you want something from me, Doctor, or do you just prefer to deliver your insults in the open air?”
“The skinny one, Usha.”
“The spectacles are charming, are they not? A certain kind of man goes wild for such things.”
“You know she has no future as a whore,” Peter said. “Why did you even buy her?”
Bahadur sighed. “Everything is relationships,” he said. “She has two sisters who will be beautiful. I help her father by buying her, then in a couple of years I will make good money on them.”
“Who knows what will happen in two years?” Peter said. “I think you’ve made a bad investment.”
Bahadur eyed him skeptically. “Perhaps you would like to try her yourself. Is that it, Doctor?”
“I’ll give you six hundred dollars for her. You double your money.”
Bahadur was incredulous. “You want to buy her? For permanent?”
“Six hundred U.S., in cash.”
“Now I am more comfortable.”
“Why?”
“When you smiled at me before, I became worried. Here we say, ‘When the snake shows his teeth, it is best to step away.’ ”
“I understood that the first time I saw you smile, Bahadur.”
Bahadur shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, and they walked on past the plant. Squadrons of flies broke off from the huge vortex and attacked, swarming around their heads and biting viciously. Peter slapped at them, but Bahadur ignored the assault, letting them land on his face and head without flinching. Once or twice he casually waved them away. When they’d passed the plant, he sat on a low rock wall and pulled out a pack of bidis.
He slid open a matchbook and dug out a wooden match, then held it so the head pointed slightly back toward himself. He shoved it quickly down against the friction strip, extended his jaw as he lit the cigarette, then hollowed his cheeks as he sucked in the smoke. He growled a little. His jacket rustled as he shifted his weight. His dark, half-lidded eyes appeared disengaged.
“Do you know what would happen, Doctor, if the authorities learned that an American was attempting to engage in human trafficking?”
“Don’t threaten me,” Peter said. “You’ve been telling people I’m CIA. What if it were true?”
Bahadur flicked his ash. “Doctor, forgive me, but it is very obvious you are not CIA. The local station chief is a client of mine, as are two of his subordinates, and they all have the same look in their eyes. It is a look you do not share, I am happy to say.”
Peter ground the toe of his shoe into the dirty sidewalk. There was some kind of splattering of yellow grease or fat off to the side. “You’re going to make me beg, aren’t you?”
“If this is begging, you could use some pointers,” Bahadur said. “Perhaps you should pay attention to how the locals do it.”
Peter took a shallow breath and let it out. “I suppose it’s out of the question for you to just do the right thing?”
Bahadur guffawed. “This is Spike Lee movie?” he said. “The right thing is for you to pay me what she will earn over the next few years, which is perhaps twenty thousand dollars.”
“That’s crap, and you know it. She won’t earn a quarter of that, and you’ll have to feed and clothe her.”
Bahadur took a last drag on his cigarette, then threw away the butt. A street kid picked it up immediately and trotted off with it.
“Then perhaps seven th
ousand,” Bahadur said. “Special onetime discount.”
“Nine hundred.”
Bahadur raised his palms skyward, as if to catch rain. “You cannot take her to the United States,” he said, his voice a falsetto of bewilderment. “I am a judge of men, and I do not think you actually want sex with her. So what will you do?”
“I’m trying to figure that out.”
Bahadur put his hands back on the wall by his legs. “Let me explain how this will go, Doctor. You will pay me all this money, then you will come to the end of your stay here, and in three months the girl will be back with me, just like the last one. It is a waste of everyone’s time. So maybe for you I will say five thousand.”
Peter wanted a deeper breath, more air, but the smell was just too foul. “Fifteen hundred.”
Bahadur smiled. “I fear we are so far apart we will have to call in the UN soldiers with their pretty blue helmets to help us.”
“Two thousand.”
“Impossible, completely.” Bahadur shrugged. “Forty-five hundred is the best I can do.”
Peter stared at him. “Twenty-five.”
Bahadur waved his hand. “Three thousand, final,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”
“That’s ten times what you paid for her.”
“And a third what she’ll earn me.”
“A third what she’d earn you if she were pretty,” Peter said. “Twenty-six.”
Bahadur lowered his head and appeared to contemplate this. “I fear these flies will give me some horrible disease, and then I will have to come to you for help,” he said. “I cannot imagine anything worse.” He sighed. “Twenty-eight-fifty,” he said at last.
“Sold,” said Peter.
Bahadur smiled broadly, revealing jagged rows of crooked brown teeth intercut with gold. His tongue darted out between them, pink and wet. “You realize, of course,” he said, “that if you insist on creating additional demand in this way, I will be forced to increase supply. Even an American cardiologist cannot buy every girl in Nepal.”
“Congratulations,” said Peter. “You’ve proven there’s absolutely nothing good or beneficial I can accomplish.”