Exiles

by Cary Groner

  “He knows my name? What does he want?”

  “He won’t say. He goes by Raju.”

  Peter remembered then: the boy with the stick who’d fended off the dogs. “When was he here last?”

  “A few days ago. I told him you’d be back today.”

  When Peter asked Mina about Usha, she arched an eyebrow skeptically. “You bought her?”

  “As an alternative to where she was headed.”

  Mina startled him by laughing. “It’s fine with me,” she said. “Bring her in tomorrow.”

  | | |

  That afternoon Raju appeared. Peter shook his hand and explained to Mina what had happened.

  “What’s going on?” Peter asked. “Are you sick?”

  “No, sir. My father is ill these two months and now will not get up.”

  “Why did you wait so long?”

  “I came to find you, but this other man, he said you were not here. It was not possible for me to walk to Jorpati so I have returned just now.”

  Peter and Mina exchanged a look. “You didn’t need to see me personally,” Peter said. “Franz or Mina could have helped.”

  “I understand this,” Raju said. “However, when my father heard you are being American, he declaimed he will see no one but you.”

  Peter expected Mina to say something cutting about how this illustrated the deleterious effect of foreign doctors, but she didn’t. She just said they’d be done soon and asked Raju to show them the way.

  “You want to come?” Peter asked.

  “If he’s the oldest son, he may be the only one in the family who speaks English.”

  In the car, he watched her out of the corner of his eyes. She chatted with Raju, who seemed to take an immediate liking to her. She seemed transformed—looser and more open. Peter had thought of her during his exile, when he was plumbing the depths of patience and sanity, and had realized that much of her prickly aversion to him was probably justified. Nepal had exposed him for a fraud, and he too was calmer now, partly because his pride had been so thoroughly crushed under the wheels of experience that he no longer had much left to defend.

  As if she could read his thoughts, she asked, “How goes the karma purification?”

  He looked at Raju, who was staring rapt out the window, and it occurred to Peter that the boy might never have ridden in a car before.

  “I feel like a mashed bug, but I’m still crawling,” Peter said. “How goes it with you?”

  “Still crawling along,” she replied. Their eyes met briefly, and they smiled. Peter felt as if the roof had suddenly been torn from the car and there was nothing over their heads but wind and sky. He took a deep breath of sweet air.

  Raju lived in a small, third-floor walk-up in a concrete building over a shop. They followed the narrow stairway up to a flat roof, where an old woman was washing clothes in a red plastic tub and hanging them on a line. A small shed constructed of discarded lumber, cardboard, and tin hunkered to one side, slightly askew and fragile-looking. A thin young girl sat there, feeding stale bread and scraps to a handful of pigeons.

  “That is my sister,” Raju said. “She is very smart with birds, and twice a month we are allowed to eat one.”

  The girl squinted at Peter with a mixture of fear and curiosity, as if she’d never seen such an exotic creature on her roof or anywhere else. The apartment was next to the pigeon coop, and Raju lived there with two other sisters, who were sitting in the corner, playing a game, and a younger brother about two years old who shrieked with delight when he saw the strangers. The woman doing laundry was the grandmother; Raju said his mother had died the previous year. Peter thought back to the patch on the boy’s pants and the misbuttoned shirt. Now he understood.

  Raju introduced them to his father, who was sprawled on a thin straw mattress and propped up against the wall on a couple of pillows made of rags stuffed into old rice bags. Raju spoke to him animatedly in Nepali, apparently indicating that Peter was the long-awaited American doctor. The man smiled faintly, and the grandmother appeared in the doorway.

  “Mr. Shrestha,” Peter said, and shook his hand. Everyone in the family had rich, brown, lustrous skin except him; he was a pale, deathly gray. His abdomen was grossly distended, his limbs and neck like withered sticks. Peter asked him about his symptoms as Mina translated. It became clear fairly quickly that he had cancer, probably colon cancer that had metastasized; he hadn’t been able to shit for nearly two weeks, and he’d stopped eating. He was obviously in a lot of pain and would most likely be dead in days. Mina and Peter looked at the grandmother, at the children, and then at each other.

  “American doctors can heal anything, yes?” said Raju. “This is why we wait.”

  “Stay here with your father, will you?” Peter said.

  They took the grandmother outside onto the roof. She wiped the tears from her eyes as Mina explained the situation. She agreed to learn how to give her son injections for his pain, but there were no other relatives she knew of, and she didn’t think she could care for the children much longer.

  “Where are they going to go?” Peter asked Mina.

  “The Teku orphanage, probably,” Mina said. “This kind of thing happens all the time. At least it’s fairly new; it isn’t out of Dickens or anything.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What are you going to do, Peter? You’ve already got Devi and Usha on your hands.”

  He wanted to herd everyone out of the city and burn it down, so they could build something decent and start over. “It’s just that I’ve been thinking a lot about futility lately.”

  “I don’t want this to sound harsh, but you shouldn’t even do that much to take care of them while you’re here.”

  “What are you talking about? Why not?”

  “Because you’ll have to turn them over to the orphanage when you leave, and it will be even worse for them if you get involved with their lives and then dump them like a litter of stray cats.”

  He didn’t want to hear this; it was just another affirmation of Bahadur’s Law. Even so, he knew she was probably right.

  Raju took the news about his father badly. “I had always thought if I found you again …” he said. He cried and held his head.

  “I’m sorry,” said Peter.

  “There are no machines or special medicines, nothing that can be managed?”

  “It’s too late.”

  Raju sat against the wall and sobbed a sort of kittenish mewing, as if it were his intention to make as little motion or noise as possible. Peter put a hand on his shoulder. After a few minutes, the boy wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands, looked at each of them in turn, then stood. “My sister needs help with the pigeons,” he said, and started over to the coop.

  “Raju—” Peter said, but Raju just waved his hand behind him, a wave that was at once a goodbye and a dismissal, as if Peter and Mina were unworthy of a look back.

  They taught the grandmother how to administer the morphine and left her a supply, then packed up to leave. But as they were going, Raju came back and caught them at the top of the stairs. He sounded resentful, as if he regretted having to ask anything further but saw no alternative.

  “My father said that when it was time, he wanted a proper cremation at Pashupatinath,” he said. “Could you help arrange this? There is no money and I don’t know what to do.”

  “Of course,” said Mina.

  Peter wrote his address on a piece of paper. “Come find me there if I’m not at the clinic.”

  Raju folded the paper, put it in his pocket, and went back inside without looking at them again. Peter and Mina headed downstairs. Each time Peter’s rubber sole hit the concrete steps, the dry squeaking noise sounded to him like a small whispering voice. He looked out from the side of the stairwell; the sky was a clear blue, with a few bright clouds, and washing hung from lines on rooftops and balconies, shifting listlessly in the humid breeze. Peter tried to focus on these scraps of beauty, but as he continued downward his f
eet repeated the word over and over: despair, despair, despair.

  | | |

  A week later Raju was waiting by Peter’s front gate when he got home from work. Peter called Mina, who came over and picked them up.

  On the ride to Raju’s, it hit him how weary he was. Funerals had always served to remind him of his failures—and, for that matter, the failures of the universe to provide people with the longevity they could conceive of and therefore naturally wanted for themselves. When the families of his patients asked him to attend, he usually found an excuse to stay away. It felt cowardly, but in this he allowed himself cowardice.

  Of course then there was Raju, who had put himself in harm’s way to save them and asked little in return. When Peter arrived, Raju was trying to be stoic, but he was obviously distraught. Peter imagined what it must be like to be orphaned so young, with sisters to care for. He put an arm around Raju’s shoulders, and the boy leaned into him.

  “I’ll talk to the people at the orphanage,” Peter said. “I’ll give them money and make sure they look after you. When you’re older I’ll send you money too.”

  But Raju looked skeptical and didn’t reply, and Peter realized that once again he’d become the stereotypical American, trying to fix a bad situation with cash when something better was called for. But he couldn’t be a father to the boy; all he had to offer was a little temporary consolation. He felt that his debt to Raju was beyond mere gratitude for saving them from the dog pack, because Raju had offered his protection selflessly, with no thought of personal safety or recompense. He had seen their trouble and reacted with natural generosity and courage—it was more the how than the what that mattered. How could such a debt be repaid?

  It was after sundown, and a few friends of Raju’s father had collected. The men wrapped the body and put it on a rough litter made of bamboo and rope. One produced a straight razor and a bar of soap, then all the men took turns shaving each other’s heads, dipping the razor into a bucket. When they’d finished, one of them shaved Raju’s head; his locks fell to the surface of the roof and were carried away by the breeze.

  Then, chanting prayers, the men hoisted the litter onto their shoulders and started down the narrow stairs, followed by Peter, Mina, Raju, and the oldest daughter—the pigeon girl—whose name was Arati. The grandmother would stay home with the younger children, who were huddled together in a heap, weeping, their eyes big with fear. As the men negotiated the litter around a tight corner they almost tipped the body off, but one man caught it in time, and the others chuckled quietly at the mishap. Raju stared ahead, his expression inscrutable.

  After they’d gone a couple of blocks, Peter realized they were planning to walk all the way. A couple of the family’s friends, one playing a small hand drum and the other a bamboo flute, led the little procession through the darkened streets. Raju and Arati walked in front, just behind the body, holding sticks of incense, and Mina and Peter brought up the rear. The pace was slow down into Naxal, and they often had to maneuver around tempos, trucks, and cattle. But an hour later, as they headed east into Gyaneshwar and crossed the bridge over the Dhobi Khola, traffic began to thin out.

  The stars were shining, and the evening grew cool as they went on, the men seemingly tireless under their load. They made their way by streetlight, or by the illumination from an occasional passing motorbike, but there were dark stretches where they proceeded primarily by the glow from the rising moon. People walking the other way stepped aside and bowed their heads briefly as they passed. The drum and flute rang out into the night, their music plaintively marking the progress of the journey. Once, from a side street, a black dog appeared and began to howl.

  They passed Ring Road and, after another hour or so, entered the long approach to the Pashupatinath Temple. When they reached the bridge into the main grounds, the men stopped. The leader, the one playing the drum, came back and spoke to Mina. He was a tall, emaciated fellow in ragged clothes. His freshly shaved head gleamed in the dim light.

  “You aren’t allowed into the temple grounds because you’re not Hindu,” Mina explained to Peter. “But if you want to donate something for wood and flowers for the cremation, you can.”

  “How much?”

  “Give them four or five thousand rupees. It will be important to Raju that it’s done right.”

  Peter handed the money to the man, who nodded and spoke to Raju. Raju took the man’s hand, and they crossed the bridge. Mina showed Peter to a nearby bench, where they sat and waited.

  “How are you holding up?” she asked.

  “I probably should have eaten.”

  She pulled a small bag of cashews out of her purse, opened it, and shook some into his upturned palm. “It’s going to be a long night, I’m afraid.”

  The men carried Shrestha’s body into a nearby building to prepare it. Mina told Peter about the temple, which had been established in the fifth century, comprised several buildings over more than an acre, and was dedicated to Shiva. The Bagmati River, which flowed beneath the bridge, was sacred, though Peter could see by the light from the temple lamps that the banks were littered with old papers, cardboard, and other trash. Monkeys screeched in the trees overhead.

  On the other side of the river, a stone terrace abutted the base of the building into which they had taken the body, and stone steps led down to the water’s edge. This was the ghat where the body would be burned.

  They sat quietly for a while, then Peter turned to Mina. “Would you want to be cremated here?” he asked.

  Mina sounded bemused. “What kind of a question is that?”

  “I just wondered.”

  She hesitated. There was a commotion in the trees as the monkeys squabbled over something. “To tell the truth, I’ve always had the feeling I will die far from here,” she said. “I don’t know why. I can’t think about it without getting morose, so mostly I try not to.”

  This surprising sign of vulnerability moved him. They were in moonlight. The torches on the temple grounds flicked orange light onto their faces. Mina looked tired, her head inclined, her eyes downcast. She leaned forward and took some of her weight with her arms. Peter could smell her perspiration, her fatigue, and a certain distinct scent that was just Mina, animal and familiar and even a little sweet.

  It was time to say something; he felt it as surely as he’d ever felt anything. He didn’t really know what to say, but he couldn’t let things go on like this. His heart pounded.

  “If you should die far from here, but not far from me, what would you like me to do?” he asked.

  She looked at him, shifted her weight, uncrossed her legs. “Please tell me this isn’t some kind of joke.”

  “Of course it isn’t.”

  She half smiled, a smile that was part skepticism and part indulgence. “I thought you hated me.”

  “I thought so too, for a while. In fact, I was pretty sure the feeling was mutual.”

  She was pensive for a few moments. “I did hate you, I think.”

  He thought he understood her reasons now, but he wanted to hear it from her. “Why?”

  She exhaled between pursed lips, a fffff sound. “It’s embarrassing,” she said. “But almost every doc who’s come through the clinic has tried to get me to … you know.”

  “Are we talking about romance?”

  She waved her hand. “Oh, no, they didn’t want love; they didn’t even particularly seem to want friendship.”

  “Just bed the beautiful native girl so you can tell your buddies back home?”

  “Something like that,” she said. “The Belgian wasn’t a very good clinician, but the real reason we got rid of him was that he was such an incorrigible lech. I just figured you were the same.”

  He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “I wasn’t looking for sex, but you were right about one thing: I thought I knew more than I did,” he said. “I didn’t know anything. I would have torn out half that girl’s septum on the first day if you hadn’t walked in.”
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  “That’s also true,” she said, smiling. “You were a sorry case.”

  “So what changed, what happened?”

  She sighed. “You happened, I guess. You started listening to me. You bought a girl to keep her out of slavery. You’re paying for the funeral of a man you don’t even know.”

  “I didn’t do any of that to impress you.”

  “I get that,” she said. “But why? Nobody’s that saintly.”

  He thought about it. “Alex had a rough time growing up,” he said. “She has a lot of natural compassion, but she had to put so much energy into defending herself, early on, that it just got trampled. I guess I wanted her to see that it’s possible to live another way, that you don’t have to harden your heart to survive.”

  “I get the feeling you weren’t just targeting her for that lesson.”

  He shook his head. “I knew it had happened to me too. Just with the everyday grind of living, I’d developed this carapace. Nothing surprised me, nothing delighted me anymore.”

  “There must have been easier places, though.”

  He smiled, thinking of the map and the dart. “We picked Nepal because she has terrible aim,” he said, then explained.

  “So this wasn’t your first choice.”

  “Personally, I was rooting for Tuscany. Of course, Tuscany wouldn’t have had you in it.”

  There was a great hooting of birds, back and forth, among the trees. Mina shivered a little.

  “I missed you while you were in Jorpati,” she confessed. “I was kind of horrified when I realized it.”

  “It was mutual,” he said. “The missing, I mean, not the horror. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d really missed someone.”

  She turned to him, her eyes large. She rested her hand on his, lightly. “You still want an answer to your question?”

  “Sure.”

  She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Cremate me then, I suppose, wherever we are,” she said. “Keep some of my ashes with you, while you’re alive, and scatter the rest.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “And if you’re first?”