Preeti nodded. “That was mean of him.”
“Well, I did push him. He tried to kiss me so I pushed him and he fell and broke his arm. How stupid is that?”
“It’s yuck,” said Preeti.
They saw Edna’s mother again, now sitting with her husband on a wall and watching one of the new houses being constructed. It seemed to the girls that there was always at least one house under construction in Ganesh Basti.
When Edna’s mother saw the girls she called out to them. “Have you seen Edna?” she asked.
“No aunty,” the girls said in unison and walked on.
They passed Sachi’s Chinese-brick house with its green windows.
“He was there too, Udip, with the boys at the sewer,” said Sachi.
“How do you know it was Udip. Weren’t they very far away?”
“Oh,” said Sachi, “I would recognize Udip if he was sitting on the moon,” and she giggled.
“How can you see so much from your terrace? I can’t see all that from mine.”
“If you don’t believe me I don’t have to tell you,” said Sachi. “Besides, your house is not tall enough.”
They came to Edna’s house after that. It was three storeyed and had English columns running through its length. Then, two houses later, it was Preeti’s house and Preeti did not turn to look. She knew her house looked like a coop, like a poultry hole with its heavily grilled upper verandah and its rust-coloured parapet. She knew her house, one storeyed and fat-roofed, designed after the houses in the flatlands beyond the mountains, was old fashioned and shabby amongst the new, slant-roofed mansions being built in Ganesh Basti. Her house was like a gourd in a garden of roses, unattractive and plain. “Let them eat drugs by the sewer,” she said. “What is it to you?”
“They were a bunch of goofers, that is what. So, I am watching and thinking that they can’t see me. Then someone starts pointing at me and I think, oh, what does it matter? I must look so small from so far. So I keep spreading out the clothes. And you cannot even imagine what happened next. This one guy – his hair was all long and all, this guy, he pulls something out of his pocket and starts looking through it. I think it was a pair of binoculars.”
“Oh?”
“Yup! These guys must be watching women through windows, movie style.”
“Yuck!”
“I know,” Sachi giggled. “It’s totally eww, isn’t it? Then they passed the binoculars around and I was so embarrassed about being in shorts. Thank god my shirt was a loose one. Whoever heard of binoculars being so readily available?”
Preeti had never seen real binoculars in her life. “Next time don’t wear shorts then,” she said.
“You are an idiot,” Sachi said, still giggling. “They were so irritating I stuck my tongue out at them.”
“What?”
“Yes. Then I gave them the finger.” “What?”
“The middle finger, idiot. I gave them the middle finger, and they gave me theirs, and I gave both of mine back to them. Now,” Sachi went on, hardly able to speak. “Now, every morning they sit around Deep Dimples Video Store and when I pass by they stick their tongues out at me and call me their morning glory. I hate it that I was wearing shorts.”
Preeti stared at her friend and adjusted the weight of the satchel on her shoulders. “You are mad,” she said.
And they were at the Ringroad.
The lane had been all brown, all dust, snaking through the neighbourhood, but the Ringroad was tar, briefly curving around Ganesh Basti like a deep gray carpet, graceful and attractive, the asphalt twinkling. On one side, bordering the neighbourhood, was the Greenbelt with tall and light green trees and soft violet mimosas. Here and there, within the Greenbelt, were kidney-shaped ponds choking with thick purple lilies and fat leaves so dark they were almost as black as the waters underneath. The girls had never seen what lay in those waters. If they went complaining to their mothers about lost balls, their mothers told them to play with something else. “That water is surely poisonous,” they said.
The Ringroad was like a dream, quiet and without a single vehicle upon it. The air wrapped around the mimosas and came off fragrant. Policemen stood on both sides at regular intervals, lined upon the sandy sidewalks, some standing at ease and looking ahead, others working to direct traffic away from the street and into smaller, branching lanes.
Preeti wondered where the royal family was going to this morning. She had heard talks about India and about Pakistan, but she could not be sure. She was always a little afraid for the King when he travelled. It was a dangerous thing to be King. Being a King meant being blessed and being cursed, and she was afraid of the people, the gods, the animals, the temples, and everything else that seemed to rule a King, the way they did not rule her. She was not cursed. She could go where she pleased, when she pleased. But His Majesty and his family, they were cursed. They could not go into certain temples, could not anger certain gods, could not perform certain rites. If they ever went into the Budhanilkantha Temple, they would be bitten by the most poisonous snake in the world and would die before they could ask for water to soothe the fire in their throats. It terrified Preeti, this complete vulnerability in His Majesty.
“Let’s go,” said Sachi, and the girls started crossing the road.
A policeman blew his whistle at them. “Stay where you are,” he said. “It does not look any prettier from there.” He looked at Sachi and smiled.
Sachi rolled her eyes. “Men are just eww,” she whispered to Preeti.
There were people gathered all along the sidewalks, waiting for the procession, and their noisy chatter had the policemen frowning and blowing their whistles at everyone. There were two mounted policemen on very tall horses, one on each side of the road, and the horses trotted rhythmically in place.
Preeti thought of Nepal and His Majesty as she thought of trees and their fruits, of skies and their birds, mountains and their clouds. She thought of His Majesty as moulded into the land, as Nepal herself. She adored the pictures hung upon the walls of houses, offices and shops, amidst oleographs and calendars of gods and goddesses, behind diyo lamps and incense sticks, reverentially garlanded with strings of marigolds and amaranths. The royal portrait in her school was in a circular frame, His and Her Majesties seated in deep chairs, His Majesty wearing the traditional daura-suruwal while Her Majesty sat serene in green chiffon and gold. Princess Shruti, the Crown Prince Dipendra, and Prince Nirajan stood behind their parents, their hands folded before them like members of a choir. The royal portrait in the school canteen showed His Majesty in an army outfit, sash across his chest, multiple badges and stars upon his shoulders. Her Majesty wore a sash too, and the badges, but her smile was gentle and she looked shy, like a little girl.
Preeti’s favourite portrait was the one that came on TV before the pro-grammes began. His and Her Majesty were fully majestic on the screen – silver cape, silver crowns topped with plumes of the bird of paradise, emeralds fringing the foreheads, heads so high up it made her dizzy. This was the portrait Preeti had bought off the sidewalk from a woman who also sold candies and dried fruits. Under this picture of His and Her Majesty was a quote: “The universe is woven and interwoven in Vishnu. From him is the world, and the world is in him.”
It baffled Preeti that none of the walls in her own house had pictures of the royal family. She had asked her mother once and her mother had looked at her and said there was no reason to go banging nails upon the walls. “Look, nails everywhere. There is no need to crack the walls with more.”
“Can’t we Scotch-tape a picture to place?” she had asked.
“The glue will ruin the paint nice and proper, leave square marks upon it.”
Preeti looked around. The paint was already ruined with age.
“We have all the gods on our walls,” she pointed out, tilting her chin towards the many calendars hanging from nails.
“King Birendra is not god,” her mother answered.
“He is. He is L
ord Vishnu.”
“Lord Vishnu,” her mother said, emphasizing every word, “is a nuisance. He reclines and rests on his snake and the snake swims all day on the ocean and your Lord Vishnu gets properly blue with pneumonia and stiff with rheumatism. Poor Lakshmi has no other job than to massage his legs day in and day out. If he stopped sleeping on a snake and started doing something more useful, it would be much better, no? Chronic pneumonia and severe rheumatism, that is all it is.”
Preeti stared at her mother, her mouth open. There were two Lord Vishnu calendars in the prayer room and one in the bedroom where this conversation was taking place.
Preeti had gone from her mother to her father. “Papa, why don’t we hang His Majesty in our house?” she had asked.
“Because,” he had answered, “because we don’t hang politicians here, that is why.” And he had laughed.
But Preeti did not care about her parents now. She had never seen His and Her Majesty in person, and the possibility, however remote, that she might today, made her doubly anxious. She held Sachi’s hand and stared at the street, unaffected by the policemen treet-treeting their whistles and scolding.
“Aren’t they handsome?” Sachi said, nudging Preeti. Preeti turned to look.
The policemen were handsome in their glowing, creaseless, light-blue uniforms. Navy blue caps hid half their faces and only their lips and their chins showed. The sky shone on their boots and their guns.
The policeman who had blown his whistle at them saw Preeti looking and said, “Heavy bag you are carrying.”
“We have to have the books covered for class,” Preeti said.
“Why don’t you put it down? Nobody will steal it. There are policemen everywhere.”
Sachi smiled and put her bag down but Preeti hesitated. No matter which frock she wore, Preeti felt shabby before a policeman.
“Put it down,” the policeman coaxed and she removed the satchel from her back.
“When will it come, dāi?” Sachi asked.
“Any moment now, any moment. So keep it quiet and full of respect, won’t you?”
The girls nodded. Preeti felt her heart fluttering in her head. Any moment now.
The Royal Palace started at Durbar Marg, the King’s Way, and ended at Maharajgunj, the King’s City, which meant the Royal Palace was two-and-a-half kilometres long. Just the numbers mystified Preeti. How could any palace be so long, and how could a family of just five people live in all of it? “His Majesty will have to take a car simply to get to the dining room,” she said, talking aloud, and Sachi, who always understood everything right away, rolled her eyes. “Imagine him in his silk nightsuit, Sachi,” Preeti went on, “driving his Rolls-Royce to breakfast. Of course, His Majesty does not drive his car himself, and there are many, many, many people living in the palace. His Majesty’s breakfast is probably brought to him in his bedroom, probably in the Rolls-Royce too! But still, imagine, what must a King’s Rolls Royce look like?”
“You are the insanest person in the world,” Sachi said.
Preeti had read in one of the Casino Royale magazines at Sachi’s house that His Majesty was the only person in Nepal to own a Rolls-Royce. She had sat on Sachi’s bed and flipped the magazine from first page to the last, looking for an image of the car, but there had been none and Preeti had tried to imagine it all: the insides of the palace, the insides of His Majesty’s car, the lives of the many, many, many people within these insides. It was the difficulty of the imagining, of trying to count the “many”, that had confounded her – how many? A hundred? A thousand? She had imagined millions, but that would have meant the entire country!
“Do you think His Majesty will roll his window down and smile at us?” she asked Sachi now. “And maybe we will see Her Majesty too, no? It will be so sweet.”
“His Majesty,” said Sachi, “is probably in his palace right now, drinking whiskey. Daddy says His Majesty drinks whiskey without any soda.” Sachi’s father worked at the Casino Royale at the Yak & Yeti and had spoken with almost every member of the royal family.
“You are an ass,” said Preeti.
“And you are obviously the most exciting person ever born, I suppose?”
“I don’t want to stand with you,” Preeti said. “And I don’t want to be your friend. And I am only your friend out of pity. Edna thinks your legs are so long you look like a mosquito.”
And Preeti picked up her bag and moved away. She walked towards a small crowd and as she walked she heard the far-off rumble of motorcycles. She felt the tickle of their vibration in her soles and she started to run. She ran so she could stand near the mounted policeman and his horse. She had never stood near a mounted policeman before and she laughed a little as she ran, her anger towards Sachi vanishing as suddenly as it had come. Everyone else seemed to be laughing too. The motorcycles were at the turn for the Ringroad and their growls were still diffused but Preeti could hear them getting closer and when she turned around she saw them coming at the turn, two at a time, and she threw her hands up and jumped, unable to contain herself.
A man before her said, “Oho!” and clapped his hands. Other people clapped too. Some whistled. One cried, “Āyo, āyo!” Another slapped his thighs. “Right here!” he said.
The policemen stamped their feet and from the “at-ease” transformed to “attention”. They raised their hands in a smart salute and the sandy sidewalk clouded under their boots. Even the horses stood still. Preeti held her breath.
“He is a god,” whispered a woman and held her son’s hand. The son had long hair, almost touching his shoulders. He looked like someone who would take drugs by a sewer and Preeti felt her anger against Sachi return.
The motorcycles passed two by two before her and Preeti faced the road and shouted out the national anthem, gloriously crowning His Majesty, praying for more glory, more success, more land to befall him. She shouted out the tune, and all the while she kept an eye on the long-haired boy, all the while she dreamed of kicking him, of throwing him on the ground and breaking his arms the way Sachi had broken Udip’s.
The boy pulled away from his mother and ran off into the crowd.
“These motorcycles are like no other motorcycles in all of the world!” he said. He kicked one leg and shouted “bhata-ta-ta-ta-tata”, in imitation of the motorcycles. A few adults whacked him on his head for being a nuisance but he did not stop.
Preeti looked around for Sachi but she was nowhere.
The motorcycles really were like no other in the world. They were very big and very blue-black with red and blue lights blinking and dancing in circles on their heads. The riders, mysterious and unknowable under large, all enclosing helmets, had to bend low to hold the handlebars. Their hands were hidden in black leather gloves. They sat upon their vehicles like men from the future. They did not speed past and were surprisingly slow, as though they too were looking at the crowd as the crowd was looking at them, but they were not really looking either. The motorcycle men did not turn once towards the sidewalk. They never looked any way other than straight ahead. The engines roared like beasts upon the road.
Somebody caught Preeti’s hand and she jumped up in surprise. “Oy,” she cried when she saw it was Sachi.
“Hello,” said Sachi, smiling.
“Want to race the motorcycles?” she giggled.
“No,” said Preeti, and then, “I hate you.” When she turned back to the road she had missed the last of the motorcycles that went past. “You just come and disturb me,” she said.
Cars followed the motorcycles and Preeti shouted out. “The Rolls-Royce!” she cried. “There will be the Rolls-Royce.”
A policeman turned around and shushed her. “Don’t be so noisy,” he said.
The cars were black but they looked blue under the sky. They had thin, silver antennae upon their hoods and they lulled the street with their soundless speed. The motorcycles had been so flamboyant – lights and sound and dark blue men in snow-white helmets – that the cars in their polished blac
kness, in their monotone, were dangerous and somewhat terrifying. The steel antennae shivered in the air and flashed like swords.
“Are you mad? His Majesty does not sit in any of these cars,” Sachi said. “Men with long guns sit in these cars so if anyone tries to do fishy things they can shoot you right there. Dhickchiyaun!” she shot Preeti and Preeti glared in return.
“Why are you making gun sounds in the middle of a procession?” Preeti said.
The first four cars passed and more motorcycles came by. The pattern alternated. Motorcycles-cars-motorcycles-cars-motorcycles-cars-motorcycles.
“Nobody can know where His Majesty really is, stupid,” Sachi went on. “He could be anywhere. He could have been in the very first car, and he could be in the last.”
They talked softly, hardly above whispers, and Preeti felt the danger of speaking about royalty while standing so close to policemen.
The motorcycles varied and some were green and white, but the cars sliding by were identical, black with silver antennae.
“It is quite possible that His Majesty is not in any of these cars,” Sachi said, keeping her voice low. “Daddy says that it is possible that His Majesty is not in the country at all, that he has disguised himself as such and such and taken the local transport to the airport. Anything is possible, my little candy. It is possible that there really is no His Majesty and the pictures and the movies, the speeches on the radio, all of this was invented because we cannot invent anything else and because we like interesting topics of conversation. Anything is possible, flowerbud.”
“It is possible, dear cockroach, that you are mad and know nothing,” Preeti said.
Sachi snorted. “I know everything, dear housefly. My daddy works in the casino and plays cards with His Majesty. I know everything.”
“Well then, dear flea on a dog, if His Majesty plays in the casino with your daddy then he does exist.”
“That too is possible, dear earthworm,” Sachi said.
The long-haired boy came back to stand with his mother and Preeti glanced swiftly at Sachi. Sachi was looking at the road but Preeti felt the change in her friend. Sachi was different now. Her hair was longer, straighter. Her frock was shorter. Her skin was scented like wood.
House of Snow Page 47