“But we can’t stay there for long, not with nine children,” Kamala’s mother reminded him. Her face was drawn with worry. Kamala, watching the fear in her mother’s face, felt her momentary glee disappear. She felt the adults’ worry press down on her.
“We can sell our gold,” Kamala’s aunt said in her soft, melodic voice. Her heavy gold bracelet clinked against the glass bangles as she raised her arm to show it. The only thing of value that they had been able to carry out of their homes was the heavy gold jewellery that lay on the body of the women – earrings, septum rings, nose-rings and bangles, attached to their bodies like permanent organs. “We don’t have a lot, but if you sell it well, it will bring money.”
“Perhaps we can buy a small plot of land with it,” Kamala’s eldest uncle said. “And we still have the pastureland.” There was silence. Nobody said that the pastureland would hardly feed them like their farmland had done.
“All the cattle are gone,” Kamala’s mother, who did not shy away from unpleasant topics, reminded. The old people’s mournful voices went on and on, talking all morning. This was not the funny conversations they had around the fire in their home – the cold, the rain, and the exhaustion had all taken a toll. Everybody sat there, huddled, with black circles around their eyes.
As they talked, her mother motioned to Kamala to come nearer. When Kamala sat down on her lap, her mother crushed some leaves in her hands and dribbled the herbs over the places where she had been stung by nettles. The dark red welts turned black, mixed with the green sap. Kamala felt her skin burn. She bit her lips to stop from crying out aloud. “You won’t have a mark in two days,” her mother assured her.
As Kamala sat on her lap, her mother unscrewed the earrings that her grandmother had given her from her ears. Kamala felt her ears lighten as the earrings were lifted. She felt naked, as if she were sitting in front of her family with no clothes on. Her lips trembled, and she felt the tears rolling down her cheeks. “Why are you crying? You’re a big girl now,” her mother scolded. Kamala, looked at her mother’s face through a blur of tears, and saw that her mother was also crying.
Jethi, whose earrings had also been removed, wiped Kamala’s face with her rough palm. “Come with me. I am going to show you something,” Jethi whispered. Behind the pine forest was a huge meadow full of alpine flowers. As they ran across the grass, the sudden vastness of the space exhilarated Kamala, after the claustrophobic darkness that had surrounded the adults only a moment ago. When they came across a clump of small ferns, Jethi stopped.
“This is called a rani sinka,” Jethi said, picking a lime green frond.
“Why?” said Kamala, sniffing, her breath still broken in uneven sobs.
“Because it is fit for a queen, that’s why.”
The fern had a shiny black stem, thin as a polished needle. “Will it hurt?”
“No. Give me the back of your hand.”
As Kamala put out her hand, palm facing down, Jethi put the fern on it, and slapped hard. “Aiya!” said Kamala. Jethi removed the leaf to reveal the delicate design of the fern traced on the back of her hand in white powder. As Kamala looked at the design – exquisitely wrought in her hand down to the most minute detail – with awe, Jethi broke off a small section of the black stem, and inserted it through the hole in her earlobe. “This will keep your piercing open until we find you new earrings,” Jethi said. Kamala put her hands up, felt the tiny twig where her earring used to be, and ripped it out of the lobe. “What are you doing!” Jethi said, vexed. Kamala slapped Jethi’s hand away and stamped on the rani sinka, saying: “You wear those stupid sinka earrings! I want real ones!”
Kamala ran down the meadow and started to pick mushrooms. Jethi yelled: “You leave your earlobes empty, and your piercing will close up! Your ears will become stubby and ugly!”
Kamala ignored her and bent to pick up a large brown mushrooms. The floor was studded with all kinds, grey ones with long stems, white circles resting on stubby stems, bright red ones. Kamala had to learn fast which mushrooms were edible, which ones poisonous. “And don’t you collect anything that will kill the entire family,” Jethi shouted, as she saw her younger sister grabbing the mushrooms from the field. “I know better than you which ones to eat. I used to go and collect mushrooms with Mama,” Kamala said haughtily. They picked in silence for a while, Kamala working one end of the field, and Jethi supervising her sister’s work from a discreet distance. Soon, they had enough for the whole family.
Then, feeling like she had worked enough, Kamala dropped her pouch of mushrooms, and gave a hiccuping scream and ran up the hill. She had spied a goat grazing on the rocks. Kamala tried to grab the goat’s tail. The goat, startled, sprang up the hillside and disappeared.
“Kamali!” Jethi said. “We could have eaten that animal, and now its gone!”
“Who was going to catch it? You?” mocked Kamala.
“You just come down from those rocks, and I am going to beat you for your insolence,” Jethi threatened, waving a spindly stick. Jethi could scramble up the rocks as fast as her little sister. But on the night of the flood, she had caught a big splinter on her big toe in the rush to reach the hilltop, and she walked around with careful, measured steps since. Not heeding her sister’s reprimand, Kamala turned her attention to dragonflies. It wasn’t dragonfly season yet, but once in a while a bright blue one flew by.
“Don’t scream and scare them, Kamali,” said Jethi. “Here, stand still.”
Kamala, mollifed, came closer. The dragonfly, a brilliant blue one, opened and closed its gauzy wings like a fan over a pink cluster of flowers. Then it settled on a big green leaf, sunning itself in a motionless daze, unaware of the two girls looking at it. Jethi’s hand sneaked up to it. She clamped two tips of her fingers right over the top, swiftly, until the dragonfly was caught. It fluttered in her hands, rustling like paper. She brought it closer to Kamala so that she could take a look and see the two globular eyes. “See,” said Jethi. “You have to sneak up on it and catch it when it is not looking.” Like death, thought Kamala, as she felt her own fingers pressing down on the gauzy wings and felt the panicky flutter inside her palms.
“Gimme, gimme!” The twins, carrying switches of yellow alpine flowers, pounced on the two girls from their hiding place behind a rock. The twins had returned to their usual level of destructiveness after a few days of despondency. “I want it!” “No me!” In the scuffle the dragonfly lost a wing and fell down frantic and fluttering on the ground. “See what you have done, you fools!” said Jethi. “The dragonfly is going to die now, because it won’t be able to fly.” Both the twins got a punch over their heads from their elder sister, and were dragged down the hillside howling in protest. Kamala bent down and picked up the alpine flowers they had abandoned, then sat down on a flat rock, and looked at the fluttering dragonfly. A trickle of tears crept from underneath her eyelids, and she brushed it away. But the tears continued to come, and she cried briefly – for the dying dragonfly, for her lost earrings, and because the sores on her legs were starting to hurt her again.
A day later, Kamala’s father, along with his brothers walked down the hill to the bazaar. The bazaar was full of people whose home had been swept away. People in muddy clothes clutched their few possessions: a cooking pot, a household deity, a red plastic box containing sindoor.
The shops, held together by branches and plastic tarpaulin, overflowed with sacks of rice in quantities never seen before. Sacks and sacks and sacks piled up towards the sky. Small brown, jute bags plump and splitting with rice. They walked around the bazaar, dazed by what they saw.
A small man with a fresh, bloody gash down his face, pointed to the white grains scattered on the ground. “What good fortune for these shopkeepers, huh, Dai. They got all this rice at dirt cheap rates from Kathmandu. It’s sent by the government for the people affected by the flood.”
They returned three days later, carrying sacks of rice on their backs. They were weary from walking. Her father ha
d bought it on credit from the shopkeeper with whom he had a long-standing relationship, with the promise to pay it back within a year. He had put half of what remained of his land, the farmland he had on higher ground, as collateral.
Kamala’s uncles, who had friends at the Bazaar, heard how the rice was sold by the relief workers, and how people in the district headquarters were stocking up, enough to last them for a year. This was the most rain to have fallen in the Mahabharat mountains in seventy years. A thousand, three hundred and thirty-six people have died, the government announced. Five lakh people were affected. This was the biggest flood, and for relief workers, the most lucrative.
“Wasn’t that rice supposed to be distributed free to families affected by the flood?” the brothers asked, but the shopkeepers shook their heads and said: “Were they supposed to? We bought it with our own money.” And all the bureaucrats and officials shook their heads in bafflement, pointing from the local politicians to the Home Ministry, from the Central District Officer to the Police, until at last there were so many people who were supposed to be responsible it became impossible to blame anybody. And nobody, of course, knew who was to blame.
*
Nine years later, Kamala continued to remember the flood each time the monsoon arrived. It was during the nights when the rain poured down, bringing no coolness to the heat, that Kamala found it hardest to fall asleep. Two weeks before the old man arrived at her door, a thunderstorm had taken place. Lightning, a flash of bright white electricity in the wet sky, had illuminated her room for a brief instant. Her body tensed in anticipation. The thunder, when it came, sounded like wooden houses collapsing in the rain.
She lay awake, sweat beading her upper lip, listening to the rain slam on the tin roof. She hated being under a tin roof. Then she remembered that the sounds, even under concrete roofs, had not gone away – the cyclical predictability of rain, cloud, water, and time culminating in an awesome moment that reminded her of the inevitability of death.
She closed her eyes, hoping that would drive away the sounds. Bright green spots slowly grew larger and larger, blossoming like shoots right inside the lids of her closed eyes. Her husband, Mani, was on her left. They had met and fallen in love two years ago. She was working as the baby-sitter for a wealthy business family. He was their security guard.
Mani had saved enough to put in an application for a visa to go to Korea. He had been accepted, and spent a year working in a packaging plant in Seoul. After his return, he carried a cellphone. He went to the STD-ISD booth every evening and made long-distance calls to his employers, with whom he spoke in Korean. He had worked in their factory, and they had liked him so much they had asked him to manage their Korean food restaurant, which they had started in Kathmandu. He had agreed, but with reluctance. Seoul was where his heart was. Sitting in the dusty restaurant in Thamel, he dreamt up elaborate entrepreneurial ventures for his future – an export-import business, a factory that would manufacture plastic, a packaging plant. He talked about how Kamala would accompany him to Korea once the baby could be put in a boarding school. Her son, now one and a half, had recently started to walk.
Kamala didn’t want her husband to know how much the rain haunted her. She knew she was in Kathmandu, in the middle of a valley, and that there was no possibility of a flood. Her children would never wake up in the middle of the night, hear the roar of nature that has swelled to breaking point and then have to run up the hillside, leaving all possessions, all clothes, all firewood, all gods behind. They would never die, as Kamala almost did, trapped in a wooden house that collapsed under the weight of mud and debris brought along by a hillside denuded of trees, the soil as loose as if there was a giant anthill below.
The thunderstorm continued throughout the night. Kamala woke up in the middle of the night, and felt an excruciating pain in her head, as if she had been grinding her teeth so hard, and so long, the jaws had started to grind into the soft part of her brain. A piercing, needle-like pain throbbed near her ear. Blue dragonflies swarmed by her half-awakened consciousness, pushing her awake. She had dreamt that Jethi and her entire family were swept down the hillside in a deafening chaos of mud and timber. That’s when she knew with certainty that Jethi was about to die.
It was impossible for Kamala to go back to the sleep. Midnight. Later. Even later. Time slipped by while Kamala lay there, pretending to sleep, hoping that her pretence would lull her to unconsciousness. She lay there, enmeshed in a bright haze of half dreams when she heard a mosquito whine, persistently, right next to her ear. She got out of bed and skirted the sleeping bodies, quietly switched on the light, inspected the round red mosquito bites, and then walked around the silent room.
Everywhere she went there was the presence of death, the smell of warm air and strange shapes of light showing the dusty crevices of night in a way that she had never seen before. Frightened of her own mortality, Kamala stood there, feeling the presence of Jethi who was sleeping in the village as if she was in front of her. Kamala had known then that her sister was dying. Those about to die have the power to touch people thousands of miles away in a way that is impossible for the living. Kamala understood this as if somebody had come and told her.
Kamala opened the front door and felt a blast of rain enter the room. The trees bent in the wind. She sat down by the doorway and felt the spray from the tin roof reaching her in a fine mist. The wind was gusting hard. A branch broke off and landed inches off her feet. The hair on her body stood on end from the cold wind.
Across the mossy courtyard, past the triangular brick borders, on the old brick wall, leaned a guava tree. As Kamala watched the rain beat on the leaves and slid off the wet trunk, she saw a single fruit fall. She walked out and towards the tree, her feet squelching on cold mud. The rain pelted on her with the solidity of hail. Rain slashing down her neck, she stooped and picked up the fruit. It felt like a talisman inside her closed fist.
Kamala limped back to the house. She was soaked, so she did not bother to run. She sat on the steps, her thin cotton blouse and sari clinging to her skin, and raised the guava to her mouth. Her teeth sunk into the hard green rind, through the astringent green rind to the white flesh, from the soft whiteness to the ochre crunchy seeds. She sat there, eating the fruit, breathing in the astringent smell, saying, under her breath, over and over again: Hurry, hurry. Climb the guava tree. Why had the universe spared her, but was now taking her sister?
She knew, even as she played this nine-year-old ritual in her mind, that she was fooling herself. This time, the tree was not going to offer its salvation.
Kamala returned to bed and lay down. She was shivering, but she did not change her clothes. She listened as the rain came splashing down, in miniature rivulets and streams, in tiny floods on the garden path. The cock from Sukumel Bajai’s house crowed around four a.m. The earth exhaled the smell of wet earth. The smell of crushed leaf and bark floated into her room. By the time the sky lightened with the pale blue ink of dawn and the silence was broken by sparrows and temple-bells, she knew her ritual had failed. This time, the tree was not going to offer its salvation.
The Old Man laid down his empty tea glass with a sigh. He lit another beedi, and it glowed inside the tunnel he made with his fingers.
Jethi, he said, was a beautiful woman, too young to die. But die she did, on one of those monsoon nights when the rains come with such force ordinary people give up any hope for salvation and wait for the end to come. Sometimes the rains just raise the heat and sting of mosquitoes and bright green shoots of rice. At other times, they raise the wrath of rivers that lie like somnolent snakes over winter, and then are woken by the monsoon to wash away entire hillsides in a heavenly tantrum of destruction.
For Jethi, the monsoon brought clouds with black and silver undersides, the tears of the ocean borne on an unstoppable current from other continents, other places, foreshadowing death. Then it erupted into a storm that went on for three days, dumping silt and gravel of a disintegrating hillside into
Sungdel village. The entire hillside slid down, a treacherous sludge of mud and debris, and swallowed her house, the firewood in her rafters, her children and with it, also herself.
The Old Man told her thirty-five houses, including a health-post, were swept away by the landslides. More than ninety houses were damaged. Forty-three people were dead, a hundred and fifty missing. But even in apocalyptic destruction, there are stories of miracles. The telecom tower in Udaypur had been destroyed by Maoists, and nobody knew about the flood until days later. When rescue workers arrived on the scene a week later, they found a miracle – two men alive in the debris. Everybody else in their village had been buried by the hill that slid down three hundred meters into the valley. Guided out by a capricious fate, those two had been left to live.
Jethi was not one of the lucky ones. She, with her youngest child tied to her back, had tried to hold on to the beam of the kitchen when she heard the water coming. They found her, three days later. The log, along with other detritus, had floated down and landed on the banks of a river further downstream. Jethi’s hands were locked around the beam, as if she were holding on, even in death, to the spiritual centre of her dismembered home. The body was battered beyond recognition.
Then an ear-stud had caught one of the twins’ eyes. The two boys, now sixteen, had been working in Diktel. They returned to the village when they heard about the flood. They couldn’t find the area where their house had been. The entire village was covered over with a mountain of silt. They had dug through the area but didn’t find any bodies. Then bodies had been recovered downstream, and they had gone down to see. They did not recognize their sister, but one of them saw the small ornament embedded in a corpse’s ear. The tiny golden studs had been sent as a gift by Kamala for her sister’s wedding a year ago. Brought over by her husband Mani from Korea, the studs were golden, with outstretched wings and bulbous eyes – two exquisite, machine crafted dragonflies.
House of Snow Page 39