House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

  By the time she finally got out of the taxi and sprinted into the hotel, Juhi was already in the café overlooking the pool, cigarette in hand. Of course. Like a chimney, Shagun thought, patting down her frizzy fly-away strays before she walked towards the table. She tried sitting down. Juhi stood up immediately, and scooped her into a very tight hug, against which Shagun’s neck craned uncomfortably. She breathed in heavy perfume. Floral notes. She remembered. Femme. Hugo Boss, it must be. She once had a penchant for perfumes.

  They sat down. Juhi lit another cigarette, and offered one to Shagun. She refused politely.

  “So,” Juhi said between drags, “How have you been?”

  “Good, busy,” Shagun looked at Juhi’s eyes, then at the table.

  “Don’t you have a daughter? How is your daughter?” A smile, red lips stretched over white teeth. How are they not stained by that much smoking?

  “Good. She’s seven years old. Aditi’s her name. Very bright. A lot of trouble,” Shagun spoke to the table top, reminding herself not to worry. Neel would pick their daughter up from her friend’s house.

  A lot of nodding, the smile still stretched taut. Juhi understood. “Ah. Children.” She had a boy. He lived in England, with his father.

  “His father is Eurasian,” Juhi explained, tasting the word. Eurasian. She outlined it with the blood-red lips – enunciating. The old South Asian training in enunciation seeped through her new American twang. Shagun had gone through the same rigorous training. Each mispronounced or garbled word was met with a slap on the thigh. The sound awoke those dormant memories of the old school. Assembly lines she straightened out. The hormones oozing out of their skin into zits, hair, breasts. Behind the dilapidated buildings, business idea meetings: plans, anticipations. There they had stretched and widened. So long ago. She wondered whether they should talk about it. Frolic in old memories.

  Instead, fillers –

  “I also have a son now. He’s just five months old.”

  “Really!” Reaches out for her hand, briefy touching it before retracting. “Good job.”

  “Yeah, thanks. It’s definitely not the easiest job.”

  Another smile, another drag. “You work somewhere?” Her eyes removed from the question, focused on some tomorrow.

  Shagun breezed through the answer. “No. I used to. I started at Nabil Bank. I mean, you know how I always wanted to start a business.” Juhi nodded. “But there wasn’t any money, and then, well Ma fell sick, and she wanted me to settle down. I got married, and you know having two kids – whoo! So hard to handle. Especially since Neel is never home. He can’t help with the kids.”

  “Why not?” The inquisitive eyebrow, furrowed.

  “Well, he works so hard, he has no time.”

  Lips pursed. “Really.”

  Like this, without the burning red lipstick, she suddenly looked like her old self. A hungry girl, she had been. Juhi had tried drugs and older men that she could attract. She had tried working hard at school. And yet satisfaction had always evaded her. Is she still hungry? She didn’t look it. Sometime since those years of despondent youth, she had tried success, and had succeeded in getting it. There could no longer be a hunger. Could there?

  “Are you hungry?” Shagun asked.

  “Oh, no. Not at all. I had a little slice of apple pie, and some chamomile tea. Would you like a cup? Chamomile is very good for you. It has anti-stress, anti-inflammatory and detoxifying properties. It has flavonoids, too, which reduces the risk of stroke, diabetes. It’s even supposed to –”

  “I can’t. Can’t drink chamomile. I’m nursing still. Chamomile is not good for nursing mothers. Just a Sprite, and fish and chips. It used to be good here, and I’m a little hungry.”

  “What hogwash! I drank chamomile while nursing. And you? Drinking Sprite?” At the same time, to an approaching waiter: “A Sprite, please, and an order of fish and chips.”

  “Yes, I drink Sprite. Why?” Shagun said.

  “You never used to! You hated carbonated drinks. Remember? All that sugar will give you diabetes!” Mocking her now.

  “Soda helped the heartburn when I was pregnant. I still get it sometimes. So I had to start drinking it.”

  “You were such a pet. They loved you, didn’t they, those teachers? Perfect grades, perfect manners. People pleaser.”

  “Hah!”

  “And since when did you stop blabbering? Remember you always won the debate medals? And Rakshya always came in second. She hated you! All that gold, for talking! And now, look. Trying to be what? A one-word wonder?”

  “Yeah, those medals,” Shagun let out a small laugh. “They’re gathering dust now. As for the talking, well, there is little talking to do, except opening my mouth to tell my daughter to stop whining!”

  “Hah! Things do change!” Another drag. The cigarette stub succumbs to the ashtray.

  “There was a time you wouldn’t stop talking and wouldn’t touch soda!”

  There was a time. Of course, there was one. Those were the years of maybes. The years scribbled on their skins by their parents, whose ink seeped under the dermis and was imbibed by their very cells: the ink that wrote her completely off her course. The years of “I will never”, scratched. “I will always”, scratched thrice, blotted out. Not anymore.

  No. Still.

  The petroleum lines, now hers. The electric bills, now hers. The child. The children, now. The cycle. And her ideas, her potential?

  She looked at Juhi, with her cool cigarettes, her sanitary removal from everything. The same Juhi, who once struggled with directionless, chaotic questions, now had all the answers. She had to have the answers, because she had written a great many articles about them! She was an authority on women in corporations and science and at the same time, an authority on women who fetched well water and darned shoes. She had a business that promoted handicrafts by women in rural Nepal: she exported them to the United States. An old business idea, whispered behind a dilapidated building in her voice, Shagun’s. She even remembered the day. One Tuesday lunch break, twelfth grade. On the same day she saw the bruise:

  “Juhi! You have to stop seeing him! Isn’t he thirty years old? Did he do this to you?” She poked at a sick, blue bruise on Juhi’s arm.

  “What do you care? He is the only one who wants me. What do you know about rejection? Tall and willowy. Aren’t you going to be a hot-shot lawyer or some tycoon? That’s what they say about you! You know what they say about me?”

  The food and drink arrived, and as the conversation drew on, each sentence drew her further away. It was the way Juhi talked – the words that she wove like beads on a necklace in a perfectly aesthetic sequence, a continuous progression of words. Words that could easily be drowned in the sound of a pressure cooker, and yet could pervade time. Her hands danced to these words, gesticulating about new ideas Shagun had never conceived; tracing the shapes of people and places that Shagun had never known. The life in her eyes: the spires of Viennese cathedrals, the sheer drop of the Grand Canyon. An entire life lived, over a cup of chamomile tea.

  When she was done, there was an ocean between them. Shagun said nothing. There was nothing. In the foreground of the cigarette smoke, her fifteen years flashed and burned silently. Years hastily lived through, condensed into days and nights of nothings. It was these nothings that filled the void between them, that expanded in the hot summer air.

  They both must have felt something die, for they shifted uneasily in their seats, not looking at each other. Juhi’s phone rang, and she picked it up in relief.

  “Yes, you can bring the car up. Bring the black sedan, it’s for business. I will be out soon,” she said, putting out her cigarette. She asked the waiter for the check. She turned to her now. A smile of imminent departure.

  “Can I have one?”

  Surprise. “A cigarette?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why of course!” Pushes the pack towards her, lighting it for her.

  “Remember the first time w
e tried smoking, outside Sahdev dāi’s small gate, after school? We didn’t even know how to light it! You coughed so hard!”

  “Yes.” A strained smile. Her eyes evasive, counting over the day’s remaining tasks. “Yes. Those days... Listen, hon. I really have to leave. It’s 3:30 and I have a meeting at 4:00 sharp, and the traffic is so bad here! How do you manage?”

  “I manage.”

  “Well, I must absolutely leave, babe.” She stood up and put down a five hundred-rupee note, batting down Shagun’s protests over the bill. “It was so good to see you after so long!” Hugs her. “Give your children all my love. Should I drop you off anywhere?”

  “Thank you, but I’ll be fine. Give my love to your son.”

  “When I see him next!” Walks away in long strides, laughing.

  Shagun gathered her things slowly, and walked outside. Juhi was gone. Hailing a taxi from the hotel would be expensive. A bus would take too long. She had to nurse the baby, he would be hungry. She decided to walk further down to hail a cab, but lost in thought, she kept on walking. Once at the Ganesh temple, her feet automatically led her through the habitual circumambulation; her mind was abuzz with the afternoon’s heat and conversation. She walked the entire way back.

  When she finally opened the gate to her house, she heard the noise of the TV. They are home. Her breasts, sore with hours of milk, leaked and throbbed painfully. She opened the main doors, and began to climb the stairs. She could hear the baby crying, calling for her. Robbing away, with his tiny hands and his warm wants, all her maybes. As this alien thought entered her she staggered under it, catching the stair-rails for support. Had she? She gasped for breath, and sat on the stone stairs for a while, clutching at her midriff, as though it would slip from her hands. She was having post-natal contractions. Cold pain pulsed through her. Why? She had not drunk the chamomile.

  She sat still for several long moments until the contractions died away. The white noise from the TV was drowned by the buzz in her brain. Through the door’s screen she watched the dying sun, not moving. Nothing moved except what moved inside her (something she did not fully understand): welling up from deep under, spilling out until her vision was blurred and her mind was confused by her body. It was an emptiness inside her, which hardened, knotted then broke, and it was everywhere. She cried for the warm bundle of flesh that could easily strip away everything with the curling and uncurling of a fist, and as she thought of this, her breasts leaked and the emptiness moved up against an old hunger. It tore her apart, and its blood tinged the sky red as dusk fell around her. Soon, they will call. She will have to go back in. When the mosquitoes descended, she finally got up. When she climbed the stairs, her hands and feet were stones. Alien were the sounds of the TV and the screams of the children, which magnified as she opened the door to their flat. The light in the hallway was off. She stepped in, her heart falling, and was swallowed by a new darkness.

  THE LETTER

  Rajani Thapa

  Rajani Thapa is a Nepali writer based in London. Her writing appeared in the first issue of La.Lit in January 2013, to which she is also a contributing editor.

  I’m writing another letter to V. Morning is breaking and I’m watching the square, gray-black intercom unit. When it’s quiet I think I can hear Maisie’s breathing. Nancy, the duty nurse, rolls her eyes. She listens when the monitor crackles and spews out Maisie’s voices and screams. Unlike me, Nancy knows what to ignore and when to rush upstairs.

  I’m a kind of saint to the residents of St. Michael’s. I linger in their doorways to listen to their ramblings. My tiny adjustments to their meals seem to make all the difference. I’m young and unimportant. The nurses are stern and rushed. They’re as set in their ways as the old people in their charge. I have to clean dentures, bedsores, and toilets, but this is almost the ideal job for me. When I do the night shift, I get about four hours of stare-at-the-wall time. There’s nothing better than being awake, doing nothing. I read a book sometimes but it’s hard to concentrate after everything you’ve been through during the night shift.

  V and I have been writing letters to each other since we were children. Ever since he came to live with his grandparents in my neighbourhood in Maharajgunj. His grandfather was a tall, straight, and jovial military man. His grandmother was only ever seen peering out of a window in their house. People said she was crazy. A former servant of the family once told a story about how the old woman smashed up every plate in the house in a fit of rage. V kicked a ball was light and graceful, like he could float away. One day, the Major came to see my father about something and V came along. As the adults talked, he passed me a piece of paper on which he’d practised his signature – long squiggles in Nepali and in English. On the blank side of the paper, I practised my new signature and passed it back to him a few days later. There was a lot to write about over the years.

  I can’t concentrate on the letter. It’s five o’clock; two hours until I have to start getting breakfast ready and three until the end of my shift. I set my pen down. The cat passes the doorway, long black tail flicking lazily. I involuntarily scratch my arm and feel a light tickle in my nose. The cat doesn’t belong to St. Michael’s but we have a few cans of food in the kitchen for it anyway.

  I notice that my cursive handwriting gets unruly at the bottom of the page as my hand runs out of space. V’s writing is rounded and precise. Unlike mine, it has hardly changed over the years save for a shift from blue to black ink. He started to make little cigarette burn designs on the paper when he took up smoking. The Major caught him once and put his own design on V’s cheek. So everyone can see, he was told.

  V and I became friends with Poonam when we were teenagers. She lived nearby and her parents were never home. We spent hours in her room smoking cigarettes and weed and drinking Khukuri Rum. But our real conversations were always by letter. Sometimes we even wrote them right in front of each other.

  You’re in front of me and your eyes are really red. I hope the Major doesn’t come looking for you.

  I get up to take a walk around before everyone wakes up. I take off my boots and walk down the corridor in my socks. The sun is coming through the skylights. Early mornings always make me think of Kathmandu. I wrote most of my letters then when I couldn’t sleep.

  I think of my mother’s voice on the phone two days ago. She phoned to tell us that one of our cousins had to be rushed to the hospital with chest pains. It was early morning and her voice came out trembling through the speaker as my brother walked around it, gathering mobile phone, keys, and folders. When she said she was glad we were together at least, he paused for a split second before continuing to adjust his tie.

  I think of the shadow of death creeping closer. First it was my grandfather’s death a year and half ago. It was followed by my father’s stroke and my aunt’s breast cancer, now in remission but not forgotten. Then my uncle swerved on his motorcycle to avoid a stray dog. He recovered from his head injury but everyone says he isn’t the same. I’ve begun to understand that every death builds and expands on all the other deaths before it.

  I get to the kitchen and reach for the cat food on the counter. Immediately I feel the cat’s arched body rubbing against my leg. I open the can and quickly dump the wet clumps into the bowl on the floor. I stifle a sneeze and walk into one of the rooms. I can hear loud breathing.

  I saw V coming home one night on the back of someone’s motorcycle. He stood outside the compound for a long time, his head leaning against the concrete pillar of the gate. When I went out to talk to him, he had a look on his face like he’d done the best bad thing in the world. He smelled faintly of vomit. His eyes were defiant. He told me he would write and walked inside.

  I’m sitting on Janet’s empty bed by the door. At seventy-two, she was the youngest here. Her bald head was always covered with a flowery scarf. After she died I asked Nancy who tied the scarf for Janet every morning. Nancy just rolled her eyes and asked me to pass her the triangular tablet counter for Irene�
��s medicine.

  I come to this room every couple of hours to help turn Irene and Maureen. I wonder what it’s like to spend your days in bed, being turned over by other people. When it’s with Nancy it’s very quick. She’s about a foot taller than me and grew up on a farm tossing bales of hay. We’re supposed to use a slide sheet to gently manoeuvre the patients onto their sides, but Nancy just lifts them up.

  I leave the room and walk back down the corridor and think I can hear the soft fall of rain. My anger at the London rain filled V with amusement. How can you be angry at the rain? In the still-dark living room, I can make out the house-shaped parakeet cages covered with towels. Jenny the 104-year-old, the oldest resident at St. Michael’s, likes to sit here all day in her wheelchair. One of the nurses once wondered out loud, why can’t we just cover them at night like the birds?

  V started hanging out with a new group of friends last summer, a few months before I left Kathmandu for London. I went away for a couple of months, to visit my grandparents in our village. When I came back he looked thin and ill. He had dark circles under his eyes. I mentioned it to Poonam who just gave me a funny look and changed the subject. I noticed she started to avoid us.

  I hear Bill muttering in his room as I walk back towards the staff room. “Just kill me,” he’d said the first time I changed his catheter bag.

  I glance at the staircase leading upstairs and wonder, for the millionth time, what happens if there is a fire in the night? With just me, a duty nurse, and all these people on the brink of death? Nancy says I have death on the brain. I worry too much for someone so young. But it’s only since I’ve started working here. I want to ask V if he’s started thinking like this too.

  I’m finally free to leave at 8 a.m. The nursing home is full of voices and activity now. Nancy’s already disappeared, probably gone off to her next job. I should go home to sleep but it has stopped raining for now and I decide to go see my friend in Whitechapel. Sometimes I still get mail there.