“If she really loved you, she would have never left.”
Krishna notices something cracked and liquid in his father’s voice tonight. As the footfalls start to fade, a wave of premonition and regret washes over him. When he turns around, his father is gone and all that remains is the impenetrable darkness.
Twenty years from now Krishna’s wife, while picking the ripe pomegranates, will suddenly drop to the ground and never wake, leaving behind a three-year-old son. Then he will see his second wife, after having her own son and daughter, treat his eldest like an outcast, and will realize that his father didn’t remarry not because he didn’t find women nor because he caressed the false hope of his mother’s return, but because he knew too much about stepmothers. Only then will he understand the sacrifice his father made for him and realize how he had mistaken his father’s inability to express his feelings for his stoicism, and this moment will come to haunt him again and again as his son grows more gaunt and alienated with every passing day. This moment steeped in rain and darkness when his father gradually walks away from him toward the cornfield, fully knowing a man will be no match for a tiger, gun or no gun, when he could have run after him and said, “Papa, please. You are all I have now.” For the rest of his life on rainy nights, he’ll wake in the dark hours beside his mouth-breathing wife, Bhishma’s whimpers and his father’s “Huche! Huche!” ringing in his ears, and then unable to go back to sleep, he’ll go upstairs and place his ear on his son’s bedroom door hoping to catch the cadence of a stunted heart – but what he’ll hear is something unintelligible like his father’s hoarse coughs, the feelings all knotted and garbled at the throat, snarled clouds beyond the saving of even the rain.
PEP TALK
Muna Gurung
Muna Gurung splits her time between Kathmandu and New York City. Her fiction, non-fiction and translated works have appeared in Words Without Borders, The Margins, No Tokens, Himal Southasian, VelaMag and La.Lit. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow. Muna currently directs a high school writing center in New York, where her students help her discover America through activities such as eating an entire packet of Sour Patch Kids while writing about the flavour blue. Muna also founded KathaSatha, an organisation that fosters a public writing and storytelling culture in Nepal.
Make some coffee, Arunn. Although, what you really want is a cup of milk tea, with cardamom, with cloves. Grind the organic coffee beans she bought in Nuwakot. Let the black liquid drip through the cloth of the clay cone into the cup. This is the only way to drink coffee, really, she used to say between cupfuls. Dump the second cup of coffee. Resist the urge to make things for two now. She never liked hers black anyway. You don’t have sugar, you don’t have milk, you’re not a morning person. The cordless phone is low on battery. She doesn’t live here anymore.
Forget the smell of her shampoo. The chemical sugar scent that lingered on her pillow, like the streaks of wet hair that arranged themselves on the bathroom tiles post shower when she forgot to pick them up. Forget how sometimes, when the faucets were dry, you two carried buckets of water into the bathroom. The first time you showered together, you thought it was an accident. She stepped out of her clothes to sit down on the low wooden stool. She loosened her hair and untangled her legs. You let out a soft eh as though you remembered something you’d long forgot, and gathered your towel and slippers to leave. But she scooped a cupful of water and held it out to you. We’re made of the same things, she said, you should see the American women in the American locker rooms. You hung your towel up on the door, took the cup from her hands, and poured the water over her head. You lathered places she couldn’t reach as she listed secret sights from within an American locker room: a constellation of freckles threading the arms, shoulders and face, a passing brown lower back accented by an umlaut of dimples, faded pink nipples that look pasted or painted on, erratic black hair peeking from underarms, a warm bulge of belly shaded by a thin line of travelling hair, wrinkled thighs and necks creating folded patterns, an orange head of hair paired with orange wisps over delicate parts, and stubby dotted legs that slid on wet floors.
Remember the night she undressed you? Korean donors in suits had visited your work place, studied the profiles of students, pledged more money, and celebrated over chicken lollipops and large bowls of fruit punch. The insidious kick of the alcohol sent you stumbling home. She found you fiddling with the padlock on the chain gate. When she asked you if you were okay, you threw up. She dragged you up one flight of stairs, and leaned you against the doorframe of the bathroom as she took your clothes off. In that drunken blur, you remember thinking how you had never been naked in front of another woman. When you changed your clothes around others, you did what every girl in your hometown was taught to do: turn around, put your hands in your blouse, sling a new shirt over your head, slip your hands through the sleeves, and peel the first shirt off your back. But for the first time with sore clarity, you knew what you wanted. You wanted her to look at your body. The way you looked at hers. How her thighs held up by silver stretch-marks, widened and joined her hips, which rose and then dipped into her waist that circled up to touch her breasts as they fell away softly pulling down her birth-marked shoulders. But instead, she was fidgeting with the tap and calling you names: Donkey brains! Donkey brains! She drained out what felt like the largest cupful of brown water and rinsed you methodically. You were dried, tucked inside a thin dhaka shawl and left in front of the living room fan.
Don’t think about that morning after, when you walked into her bedroom to apologise for your drunkenness. She stirred and turned around to face you. As she lifted her blanket to let you into her bed, your I’m sorry dropped gently on her pillow somewhere. Half asleep, she shook her head, draped an arm around your neck pulling you into a hug, as you felt her nipples soften against yours. Shhh, let me sleep, she said with breath like the insides of an old, worn plastic bottle. Winter had taught the two of you to huddle for warmth in the mornings but you had carried this ritual into the summer, and past the rains. Sometimes you slipped into her bed. Sometimes she floated into your room with her sun-dyed hair in a mess about her neck, her eyes barely open. You two laid in bed longer, especially on weekends when you felt no guilt about the day passing outside the window – her cousin in the office downstairs screaming on the phone Forget Me Not Travels, Namaste, the children playing marbles and fighting over discarded cycle tyres, the neighbour’s chickens clacking and dodging city wheels, the pressure cookers whistling an indication of mid-day meals. Then, you two went to Rupa didi’s store to buy a packet of milk, bread and vegetables for a late afternoon meal. She chopped and you cooked while tuning into English songs on the weekend FM stations.
Stop asking yourself how you got here. What if she hadn’t seen you, a sixteen-year-old then, standing in school uniform waiting for glasses of sweet yogurt with raisins and pistachio at the lassi place in Assan? What if she hadn’t been the only one to ask you how you liked the new school, the other students, and Kathmandu, as though she read your homesickness in the sweaty lines of your palms? What if she hadn’t told you about the time she travelled with her father to your town? If she hadn’t asked after your Kalpana didi who sold the best churpis that hung hardened on thick strings, yet melted milky in the mouth? What if, after that lassi day, you two hadn’t spent the rest of high school sitting in the back rows of classes, giggling and tipping your chairs on two legs, your arms pushed against the walls, and your fingers locked? What if Sundays weren’t days when she invited you over to her house, and you two walked up to the rooftop with bags of oranges, laid on your bellies, and did your homework until your elbows turned ashy and worn from resting on concrete? What if you hadn’t spent all your pocket money calling her every evening from the phone at the knick-knack pasal outside the hostel? Pressing your lips so close to the receiver, as though you weren’t going to see her jump right off that school bus at 7:15 the next morning. What if she hadn’t left for
America? What if you hadn’t stayed in the city? What if you’d kept in touch? What if you hadn’t seen her five years after high school – Americanised with her short hair and loose clothing – at a fundraiser party in Thamel, where you asked linen-clad tourists to sponsor an education? What if she hadn’t recognised you? Hadn’t asked you where you were living or told you about her father’s death, or about taking over Forget Me Not, or about the empty family-owned apartment above the office in Lazimpat? What if, when you agreed to move in with her, she hadn’t kissed your cheeks and nose and eyes so blindly and hugged you so tight you swore a part of her entered you? You felt like she never left in the first place.
Forget about the night you discovered that feeling lodged in your chest, in your breasts, that suddenly spread deep into your armpits. You felt its sharp yet vacuous presence grow as she told you about an American hiker, a man who had walked into Forget Me Not looking for an adventure. You initially dismissed it as nothing: another white man who wanted to learn Nepali for a minute, who had finally found his place in the world, and was now ready to open himself to a Nepali girl. But she wasn’t any Nepali girl. In just the year you had lived with her, you watched her revolutionise her father’s old travel agency by hiring only women staff and guides, and providing cheap eco-friendly trips. She had even appeared on the local women’s magazine cover, as one of Nepal’s “youngest social entrepreneurs”; her interview was so full of English words, you had a hard time sounding them out in Nepali letters. The feeling in your chest and breasts and armpits returned when you found out that her American hiker had done more than just inquire about a tour package. He had affected her in a strange way. One day, you found her stuffing her face with daal bhat and talking about foreign penises. Did you know that a non-Nepali penis doesn’t carry with it an extra cloak? The tip sticks out like a head. It wears a little cap. Like, like a mushroom. Her commute home from her office below was now filled with laughter, as she spoke into the mobile phone in her renewed American accent. You had never imagined she would find a home in a random stranger. A home built on just one tiny hair of a fact that they had both read an obscure book written by yet another foreigner, a book about solitude of one hundred years.
Erase the memory of how the American, slowly and quickly became a part of the clanking of kitchen utensils. His cologne mixed with the smell of your chickpea potato curry, a dish she loved because she claimed only Arunn could get the chickpeas to the right softness. She used to be your garlic chopper, your dish-wiper, your green bean snapper, your can opener. But in what seemed like seconds, yet weeks and months, he had taken over parts of your role. He insisted on doing the dishes as she wiped and he said cans didn’t need openers; they needed a real man’s muscles. She laughed at his cocky jokes, as you stirred the chickpea curry to puree.
Clean up. Do things. Stuff the clothes she left behind in plastic bags, suck them skinny, and give them away. The other things that remind you of her, such as her toothless comb, her yellow plastic gun earrings, the hardened lentil gravy stain on the stove, three precious baby photos, her bathroom slippers, her pink nail clipper, the wooden stool, the smell of coffee in the apartment; pack the packables, eat the eatables, throw the throwables, give the giveables, keep the unkeepables. Like that memory of lining up for a warm samosa and milk tea in December, keep that.
Don’t check the phone. She will call once she is completely settled in her new place. Somehow without anyone else’s permission, you had imagined a home for the two of you. You had imagined yourself as an old lady on Saturday afternoons, squatting and scrubbing her back in the sun, counting her raisin-like moles. You had imagined carrying hot water bags into bed to soothe your aching backs. You had imagined learning how to knit socks for her so that she wouldn’t slip around the house. But the American had other plans for her. You remember the moment she told you, teary eyed, about how exciting the journey had been. How ready she was to take the American seriously, their lives seriously. You remember asking her should I leave too? In that you meant, didn’t it make plain simple sense that you would go wherever she went, that remember, you two were stitched that way? But she heard something else. She told you to feel free to stay here, that the place was empty anyway. But you know there is no space in this apartment for loss.
Forgive her for her language, her gestures, her love. Don’t think back to her moving away party when she introduced you to the American’s friends as her girlfriend, in English, and it validated your feelings for once. She spoke with you and around you as she recounted stories of how we loved to sleep late into the day over weekends, and how we lived right next to the best samosa joint in town and how Arunn is the best masseuse and how her chicken curry, boneless, is simply to die for. You noticed the way she jumped back and forth from present to past tense. But remind yourself to forget how she let your palm linger on the small of her back, and how when everyone had enough to drink, she pulled you to the sticky dance floor and swayed side to side guiding your arms to wrap around her waist, her right knee between your legs, her head on your chest, we better find each other again, she said.
Answer her call. She means it when she says she misses you. It was not her fault that she didn’t feel the pain in your chest, your breasts, your armpits. The pain you never revealed to her. When you visit her some day, you will see that she has set her new living room in the same way she set yours. Extra cushions on the ground next to the sofa, the tables tall enough to slip legs under, the wind chimes made out of bangles singing near the windows, the baby aloe vera plant above the TV. You will find that she has lined the kitchen cabinets with newspapers, folded to fit perfectly. She will make tea with not enough milk and too much sugar. But you will drink it and tell her about how one of the students from your village is thinking of taking up taekwondo so that he can impress the girl he sees every morning at his bus stop. She will tell you how she misses Rupa didi’s store. Then, concerned, she’ll ask you if you’ve found a new roommate. You’ll pretend to make a joke about how no one can ever replace her. She’ll laugh and slap your knee.
Sleep, Arunn. Because ever since she left, you’ve spent your nights looking for her. You remember waking up to find yourself in the living room, standing in front of an empty sofa, because somehow your muscles didn’t forget. They got used to you turning the TV off, nudging her awake, pulling her up by her arms onto her feet, walking her to bed as she muttered, you’re the best, Arunn, then tucking her in, closing her door shut and walking away. Into your own room.
FLAMES AND FABLES
Prabhat Gautam
Prabhat Gautam was born and raised in Kathmandu and lives in the United States. He started writing fiction as an undergraduate student at Kenyon College, Ohio. When the earthquakes of 2015 happened in central Nepal, he was away from Kathmandu and his parents. The opportunity to include Flames and Fables in the anthology has been a chance to pay homage to the city of Kathmandu, its present and past spaces, as well as hope for a future that is better built, more prepared and integral to Kathmandu’s identity as a city of cities.
It was as if someone had fired a gun in the house, and all windows had been thrown open to get the smell of gun powder out of the corners, Rabin thought as he opened his eyes and looked around the room washed with the sunlight streaming in through the east and south windows. He hadn’t heard gunshots in a while with the city returning to its usual routine after the recent wave of curfews and demonstrations.
He sat up on an upholstered bed, covered by a sheet with elaborate dragon prints, monsters swirling and slithering on the cheap Chinese fabric, swallowing their own feathery tails. Sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet firmly planted on the grey carpeted floor, he looked down at the sheet. It was blue, twisted and knotted because of his nightmares, still damp with the perspiration that made his nightshirt stick. Blue Mimosa was lying face down on the floor, a pagoda of read and unread thoughts.
“Rabin, Rabindra,” called a voice from outside the door. “Are you awake yet?”
He didn’t answer. He disliked being interrupted in these morning lulls. His coherence was a sluggish trail, while his reality remained hanging on a nail in some forgotten and empty room of his dreams, beyond his reach.
“Do you want dudhilo tea or lemony? Rabin, answer me!” the voice demanded.
“Ama, I am awake. I am awake,” he replied while staring at his ragged flat nails. He couldn’t stop chewing them. The protective cuticles were peeled back to show the glistening pink of his flesh.
“I can come and cut the lemon, just put some water on the stove,” he added, looking in the direction of the door. He thought of the tangy juices from the yellow fruit seeping into his cuticles, sending shocks of jittery pain up his spine. He stood up, his right hand trailed down and tugged at the elastic band of his briefs. He swung his upper body to the left and his head to the side, with crackles and pops.
“Your editor called about half an hour ago. He wants you to call him back on his mobile before you reach the office,” Ama continued.
“What did he want this early in the day? Constant nagging and nothing else from this dead end job,” exclaimed Rabin aloud, more to himself than his mother. The outburst weighed down with agitation and muffled by the door that separated mother from son, still pierced through. It travelled with a velocity straight to a specific place in the mother’s heart, and set off dominos of her thoughts tumbling.
“How am I supposed to know that? Did I want you to be a patrākar?” Ama erupted. “There were so many opportunities that you squandered. We provided you with everything that you had asked for and yet, you dropped out of the engineering school. We had so many dreams for you, Rabin!” She slapped the door with her open palm. It made a loud and dull thud, the sound reverberating through the house.
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