BUDDHA’S ORPHANS
Samrat Upadhyay
Samrat Upadhyay is a Nepali author of fiction. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of Graduate Studies at Indiana University. Samrat was the first Nepali-born fiction author writing in English to be published in the West. His first book Arresting God in Kathmandu, a collection of short stories, won a Whiting Award for fiction in 2001. His first novel, The Guru of Love was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003. His other published works include The Royal Ghosts and The City Son. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
ELOPING
In Hetuda, Mohini waited by the window in a corner of the rest house, watching the traffic and the crowd in the street below, inhaling the smoke spewed by the buses that plied this dusty town on the way to the border city of Birgunj or back to Kathmandu.They’d arrived here at three o’clock in the afternoon on the day of her wedding. Every time Mohini thought about home, fear crawled up her skin. She saw Father’s face, angry and bewildered, and mentally she offered him a fervent, tormented apology: Father, I didn’t mean to. I had no choice.
She didn’t want to dwell on what was happening at home, but hard as she tried, she couldn’t help but picture Mother waking up in the morning and discovering Mohini’s absence. Mother would think that Mohini had gone down to the courtyard for a bath or to the toilet. Humming, Mother would mentally check all the things she, along with a horde of women who’d soon show up, had to do this morning before the groom’s party, escorted by a loud band, arrived around nine o’clock. Even when Mohini didn’t come up after half an hour, Mother didn’t make much of it. She’d meant to observe the courtyard from the balcony, but each time a hundred things – flowers for the ceremony, colored cloths the priest had demanded, sweets such as laddoos and pedas – had occupied her mind.
There had been some disagreement between the two families about the most propitious time for the wedding entourage to arrive at the bride’s bouse. The bride’s priest, after consulting several religious calendars and patros, came up with eleven o’clock. Bur the groom’s priest had configured a time of nine a.m. as the most auspicious moment as dictated by the stars and the planets. “Amateur.” he’d declared the bride’s priest to be, and the bride’s priest, the most humble of the two, had consulted his calendars and books again and scratched his head: the nine o’clock time his colleague had deduced showed the dark shadows of Mars in ascension, and everyone knew that Mars wreaked havoc on marriages, unless its corresponding position in the birth charts of both the bride and the groom neutralized its ill effects. The bride’s priest consulted the groom’s chart again. Mangal was safely ensconced in the fourth house, whereas in the bride’s it sat in the fifth. “Impossible,” the priest muttered to himself. But he was a young priest who had been forced to take over the family’s occupation because his father had died abruptly, and he couldn’t imagine going up against the elderly priest from the groom’s side, someone who had known his father. Still, he meekly suggested to the bride’s mother that perhaps the more venerable priest had miscalculated the influence of the planets. Mother rebuked him, saying that his dead father would probably have concurred with the groom’s priest. “But, but, look here,” the young priest stuttered, waving the patro at Mother.
She simply shoved him aside and said, “What difference does a couple of hours make? Devote your time to more important matters than quibbling over an hour here or there.” It makes all the difference, the priest thought, but he didn’t say more. Still, he had managed to plant a seed of doubt in Mother’s mind. Her son had shacked up with the oil man’s daughter without the benefit of astrological consultation, and she was sure that the stars, had their alignment been considered, would have directed her son to a different, less scandalous life. So Mother did pass on the priest’s misgivings to the middlewoman who’d initially talked to Father about the alliance. The middlewoman scolded her, said the groom’s priest was sought after by royalty and aristocrats, and how dare the young priest question his judgment! The matter was settled.
In her mind, Mohini saw the women from the surrounding houses barge into the living room, asking where the bride was so they could begin to style her hair and make her pretty. Father would already be down in the courtyard with the priest, making preparations for the big event, which, Mother would realize in a panic, was only a couple of hours away. “Can you shout at Mohini to finish up quickly and come up?” she yelled at her husband below. “She needs to start getting ready.”
Father nodded. He was busy instructing some neighborhood boys who were setting up chairs for the guests. He shouted in the direction of the outhouse, urging his daughter to be done immediately. Then Father turned to help a boy string some colored papers across the length of the courtyard, and upstairs Mother rummaged for some gold and silver coins she’d need later.
“Has Mohini eloped? Where is she?” one of the women said, joking, and the rest guffawed; at the sound of their clamorous voices, Mother dropped a gold coin, which rolled across the floor, then slid under the large cupboard by the door. That’s when Mother knew that something was amiss: she hadn’t seen or heard Mohini all morning long. Asking the women to retrieve her coin Mother rushed down to the courtyard, perspiring. Without speaking to her husband, she made her way to the outhouse and softly called Mohini’s name so as not to attract attention. When there was no answer she reached out and pulled the door, which swung open. The outhouse was empty.
She turned and ran back upstairs, ignoring Father, who called to her, asking why she was in such a hurry. There, one of the women was lying on the floor, her cheek flat against it, her thin arms groping for the coin under the cupboard. Mother reached Mohini’s room, and out of desperation, she looked under the bed, wondering if the girl was hiding there because of wedding night jitters. She ran down again to the street, hoping that her daughter, on a whim, had sauntered to the corner shop to buy some spicy titaura. Mother looked left and right. By this time, her thumping up and down the stairs had aroused the suspicion of the women, who came to the window and asked her what the matter was. The more astute knew instantly the reason for Mother’s desperate look and cried out, “She ran away, didn’t she?”
A pedestrian who had stopped, attracted by the bright red cloth sign that announced AUSPICIOUS WEDDING, looked up at the women and shouted, “Who? The bride? She ran away?”
Everything exploded then. Father, who had been showing a boy how to tie the bamboo poles together for the wedding pyre, bellowed, “Who ran away?” He knew the answer before he’d completed his question. Letting go of the bamboo pole, he hurried upstairs and checked and rechecked every room, warning the women “Don’t make a fuss. Mohini has probably just stepped out. Maybe she’s hiding somewhere as a practical joke.”
Less than an hour remained before the groom’s arrival. Mother’s small yellow suitcase with a broken hinge was missing, and its contents were found dumped in a corner of her bedroom. Father opened his safe and discovered that four hundred rupees had evaporated. “Your son probably has a hand in this,” he said to Mother. “Send someone to that bastard’s house immediately.”
He glanced at the clock: half an hour left. Still enough time to salvage this, he thought, although his mind was getting slower by the minute. If Mohini had indeed sought shelter at her brother’s house, he had enough time to drag her home. I’ll tie her with ropes to the wedding pyre if I have to, he promised himself; I’ll gag her with a piece of the priestly cloth. “Wait, I’ll go myself.” He warned the women in the room, “Not a peep to anyone. She’s your daughter too, not only mine. If the groom’s party arrives here before I do, distract them, act normal. If my nose is cut today, yours will be too.” Not all the women were persuaded by this my-family-is-your family appeal. Some would be gleeful to witness the shaming of this family one more time, and now they pleasurably considered the likelihood that another scandal was about to strike the old man. But they did not show these feelings; their faces looked grave.
&n
bsp; A small crowd, murmuring and gesticulating, had already collected below the AUSPICIOUS WEDDING sign. They fell silent as Father, dressed in his starchy wedding kurta suruwal, hurried in the direction of his son’s house, scanning the street for the taxis that sometimes appeared on this side street. He couldn’t find one, but that didn’t stop him; he began jogging toward his destination. He prayed that no one from the groom’s family would spot him in this state, his face flushed and frightened. Why had both his children chosen to bring such enormous pain to the family? He glanced up at the sky as if beseeching the gods, but saw only stealthy black clouds gathering. People said that a rainy-day wedding foretold great happiness for the couple; perhaps the swirling clouds did mean that his daughter was at her brother’s house, simply afraid. In that case all he needed to do was coax and cajole her, use a sweet voice he vaguely remembered using when she was a child and climbed onto his lap, demanding stories.
Mohini loved – he remembered now – hearing him talk about the Giant Earthquake of 1934, which leveled the city and left thousands dead.
“Where were you, Father,” Mohini asked, “when the earthquake struck?”
“I was in this room, right here,” Father said. “It was a little bit past two in the afternoon. I was lying on the floor, dozing, when I heard a rumble, like something was boiling under the ground. I thought I was dreaming. But my whole body was shaking, so I sat up. You know that pomelo tree outside?”
Mohini nodded.
“It was slapping the side of the house – the whole tree swaying like a leaf. I stood, but the floor moved so much that I had to crouch. I cried for your mother, then remembered that she had gone to her parents’ house.” His wife had taken some leftover ghiu and chaku from the previous day’s Maghe Sankrati festival to her aging parents.
“Father, were you worried about Mother?”
He had been more than worried. His in-laws’ house was nearly a century old, with a roof that had already begun to crumble, and he couldn’t see how it could survive any earthquake, let alone a monster this big. He could hear thunderous crashes as houses in the neighborhood collapsed. In his mind flashed a picture of his wife, buried under the rubble of his father-in-law’s house. “A little,” he told Mohini. “I didn’t have time to think.”
Even as his house rocked, he managed to stumble down the stairs, then was jettisoned into the street, where the ground moved back and forth like a sieve. All around him houses were collapsing, emitting booming sounds like cannon shots. Dust swirled, sideways and upward. Wails and cries penetrated the air. A young man crawled down the street on all fours.
Then the earth became still.
“And Mother was all right?” Mohini asked. “She didn’t die?
“Of course not, silly,” he said, pinching her nose. “If she’d died, how would she be alive today to be your mother? Your mother, fortunately, had gone to the local dhara to fetch some water, so she was spared. But both her parents perished under the weight of the roof.”
“Do people who die in earthquakes go to heaven?”
“Why wouldn’t they? Of course they do. Besides, your grandparents were very religious people, so I’m sure they’re sitting on God’s lap at this very moment, just like you’re sitting on mine.”
“But people who kill themselves don’t go to heaven.”
“Where did you learn that?”
“Pradip Dai told me.”
‘And how does he know this? He’s barely a few years older than you.”
“He said people who kill themselves return to earth as ghosts and scare other people. He says that there’s a ghost who lives under our stairs, a khyak, with no Flesh on his body, only bones.”
Father laughed. “Your Pradip Dai is nothing but trouble.”
“Pradip Dai says that at night, on the Rani Pokhari pond there are women kichkanni ghosts who float on water. He says their feet are strange, with their toes facing backward, their heels in the front. They prey on single men and suck their blood. Is that true, Father?”
“Nonsense,” he said.
After a few moments, Mohini asked, “Father, do you love Mother?”
Her question had embarrassed him, for men didn’t confess such love unless it was in the dark, at night in bed. He certainly hadn’t felt the need to proclaim his love for Mohini’s mother. They were husband and wife – didn’t that say it all? But that afternoon of the earthquake, after the city stopped rocking and heaving, his heart had collapsed as he’d pictured his wife’s body mangled under the weight of her parents’ roof.
Driven by anxiety, he’d made his way across the city to her. Many houses had simply crumpled to the ground. Survivors walked around, injured, tottering, crying out for their loved ones. He could see, from across Rani Pokhari, that the beautiful Ghantaghar clock tower no longer rose to the sky. In the distance to the south, Dharahara’s piercing top was absent; the monument had broken in half. As he moved into Asan and Indrachowk, he had to skirt or climb over mounds of rubble; he occasionally glimpsed a severed arm or a head among the debris. Once he spotted a face between the bricks, eyes staring, the mouth moving as though attempting to converse.
“The Tundikhel parade ground has ruptured,” he heard someone say. In the Basantapur Durbar Square, the tops of several temples had been shaved off. The Kal Bhairav statue, with his glaring dark face, had remained more or less intact, and Father prayed in front of the fierce god, briefly, before heading on to Jaisideval, where he found his wife wailing, her childhood home in ruins, the pitcher full of water she’d fetched next to her on the ground. He’d put his arm around her, the first time in public, and asked her what was wrong. She’d buried her face in his chest, cried a bit, and said that she thought both her parents were dead.
Unable to answer his daughter’s question directly; he’d ended up saying, “I love everyone in this family.” He’d stroked Mohini’s hair and whispered, “And I’ll tell you a secret. I love you the most.”
He tried to recall that voice as he pushed through the vegetable-buying crowd in Asan, but he couldn’t. All he could hear was a preachy, judgmental voice that now began to castigate him, telling him how pathetic he looked running around, trying to find his daughter on the day of her wedding, with the groom’s party, in full regalia, probably already en route to his house. Father felt like giving up; he wanted to crawl into a corner of the marketplace and weep. But he pressed on, pushed through the multitude until he reached his son’s house, the very son he had expressly forbidden to attend Mohini’s wedding.
“It’ll create a bad impression,” he’d said with pursed lips to Pradip when his son came over with his wife a few days earlier, on their first visit to the house since they got married. “You’ll have to wait until the wedding is over. Then you can visit Mohini, but only after she returns here for a few days, not at her new home.”
Pradip had glanced at Chanda, disappointed. “But she’s my sister. Why can’t I attend her wedding?”
“I can’t stop you, but as a big brother, do you want anything to go wrong during Mohini’s wedding? Do you realize how hard we’ve worked to secure this family, this groom, especially after the two of you” – he gave a small nod toward his son’s wife, her presence, her validity as a new member of his family – “after you two... well. I’ll leave that decision up to you.”
Pradip looked pained, caught in a quandary. He turned to his wife, but she had her head down, too cowed by her father-in-law to say anything. Finally Pradip said, “Well, I so badly want to attend, but not at the risk of ruining things for my sister. I will visit her in her new home, though, in a few days, and you can’t stop me.” He addressed Mohini, who, throughout this exchange, had been quietly leaning against the wall. “Right bahini?”
As he neared Pradip’s house, Father realized that he ought to have sensed something was wrong right then, for Mohini’s face had paled when her brother mentioned visiting her at her new home. As he stood in front of his son’s house, Father hesitated. Had Mohini done
this out of spite? Had he been such a bad father? Had he been too strict? After all, it was not one child of his but both who had expressly defied his wishes and damaged the family name for generations to come. They had been good kids when they were young, and as a father he’d provided them with all they needed. So what went wrong?
Standing in the street, facing his son’s second-floor window, Father was about to call Pradip when he became certain that Mohini wasn’t inside. Fleetingly, he saw Pradip through the window, then his daughter-in-law, who, he had to admit, looked like a good, well-brought-up girl when he saw her a week ago. His son and his daughter-in-law appeared to be jostling in their room, laughing, mildly punching each other. Then Pradip turned his head and saw Father on the street, leaning against his cane, his face pale and stricken.
*
At first Pradip felt embarrassed at having Father witness the amorous scuffle between him and his wife; then it dawned on him that now was the time of his sister’s wedding. He knew something was terribly, terribly wrong. Yudhir came to his mind, suddenly, for his friend had, Pradip thought, been acting quite strange lately, casually plying him with questions about how he would feel if someone eloped with his sister, just as he’d eloped with Chanda.
“Why? Are you planning to elope with her, muji?” Pradip had said. “If you look at my sister with a crooked eye, I’ll gouge it out, break your arms, and throw you into the Bagmati River.”
Yudhir had failed to catch the joke and had become defensive. “What are you saying, yaar? Your sister is like my sister, isn’t she? My question was more philosophical than anything.” Pradip had thought that perhaps Yudhir had developed a small crush on Mohini; no surprise there, as she was beautiful, and no harm in a minor infatuation. But now, with Father outside his window, looking as if he was going to disintegrate like a poorly constructed doll, Pradip knew, instinctively, that his sister had vanished and that Yudhir was involved.
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