But the king himself should have been beyond the reach of such goings-on. According to what Yagyaman had told me, the king was inviolable as long as he had the blessing of the Kumari. The power of shakti surged within him. No amount of pujas, counter-magic or worship to other deities, tantric or otherwise, could penetrate the protective forces the Living Goddess generated around the king.
But the Kumari’s powers are considered to be effective only as long as she remains pure and receives proper worship. The blotches that had appeared on the Living Goddess’s face twenty-four days before the massacre indicated not only that something was rotten in the state of Nepal but that the Kumari herself had somehow lost her purity. She was no longer acting as an effective conduit between Taleju and the king.
I asked Mr Joshi why they hadn’t changed Kumaris when this had happened, replacing the affected incumbent with a new one. Certainly, he said, the priests always have a Kumari in reserve – a Kumari-in-waiting – in anticipation of just such a misfortune. A little Shakya girl, with the right physical criteria and whose horoscope has already been checked against the king’s, shadows the real one. Living at home with her family, this little girl, providing she remains healthy and pure, refrains from eating certain polluting foods and incurs no cuts or bruises or other blemishes, can be called upon to become Kumari in the event of a calamity befalling the incumbent. When she goes to school at the age of four or five, the priests identify another candidate. Hers is not an official position, Mr Joshi said; she is merely a standby in case of emergency.
At first, when ominous signs began to appear on the Kumari’s body, spreading to her face, the priests did all they could to appease the Goddess and cure the Kumari of the complaint. They appealed to the palace for the king to send special offerings but none came. The monarch, they were told, was busy. Then, about twelve days later, Mr Joshi said, the unthinkable happened. The Kumari began to bleed. Her first menstruation had arrived without warning.
“Usually the Kumari is changed well in advance of her first menses, so there is never a gap between Kumaris,” explained the astrologer. “But in this case it took everyone by surprise.”
She has to be removed immediately, according to Newar custom, to a darkened room where she remains for twelve days while she undergoes the important Newar puberty rite of bara tayegu. Like ihi, bara tayegu is a rite of female empowerment involving the mock marriage of a Newar girl to a god – in this case the sun god, Surya. Its specific purpose is to eradicate the pollution traditionally associated with vaginal blood. As a result the dangers that orthodox Hindus attached to defloration, menstruation and childbirth are diffused and a Newar woman can go about her normal life much as usual during her menstrual period, cooking and eating with the rest of the family, and sleeping with her husband. The rite is especially important in the case of a Kumari, whose menstrual blood could otherwise be considered particularly dangerous.
Enthroning a substitute in a Kumari’s place at short notice, however, is not a straightforward matter. It takes at least a fortnight to prepare a candidate Kumari for the powerful installation ritual. And this ritual – normally conducted on the eighth night of Dasain – has to be performed on another highly auspicious day.
The astrologer wobbled his head. “This is a black year, as I told you; there were very few auspicious days. We were waiting for the right time to change Kumaris.”
“So, effectively,” I said slowly, as the realization dawned, “there was no Living Goddess at the time of the massacre?”
“That is why these things came to pass,” the astrologer confirmed. “Without the power of the Kumari, the king and all his dependants are exposed. They cannot be saved from the bad influences of the planets and the bad intentions of those who want to destroy them.”
After the massacre the priests came to Mr Joshi to check that the horoscope of the reserve Kumari, which had originally been aligned with the birth-chart of Birendra, also agreed with that of the new king, Gyanendra. Fortunately, it did. On the next auspicious day, on 10 July 2001, forty days after the massacre, a new Kumari filled the vacant throne. The ship of state had been clawed back off the rocks and set afloat again. But whether it could survive the tempestuous seas that lay ahead would remain to be seen.
“A dark period on the Earth has passed,” concluded Mr Joshi, restively adjusting his floor cushion. “Nepal must now find peace. But the signs are still not good. There are troubles to come.”
I left the astrologer in a state of agitation, shuffling papers around his desk as though some vital document continued to elude him. A few persistent clients remained outside his door. The rest had given up and dispersed, disappearing into the night of inconstant stars.
THE VANISHING ACT
Prawin Adhikari
Prawin Adhikari lives in Kathmandu where he teaches and writes fiction and screenplays. He has translated A Land of Our Own by Suvash Darnal, and Chapters, a collection of short stories by Amod Bhattarai. He is an assistant editor at La.Lit.
THE BOY FROM BANAUTI
Grandfather would read one book here and another scroll there through the year, but only in November – after consulting his astrological chart – would he spread the contents of his father’s old almirah in the palliative sun to drive the moisture and must out and to renew the mild poison in the hemlock that yellowed the pages. It was also the day of the year when we, the children of the extended family, were reminded of how much there is to learn, how much there is to inherit by way of words. Great-grandfather had collected or written with his own hand all of these obscure or pedestrian Sanskrit texts, boiling black angeri berries for the ink, sharpening nibs from bamboo and reed (because a quill, which originates in flesh, would have been profane), splitting bamboo to collect the thin film within to layer into paper. I hated the sight. It was a taunt, I knew it even then; I knew it was meant to burden the youngest boys in the family with guilt for not following the family trade, for packing their bags and going to an English-medium school instead of learning Sanskrit.
I hated that I was expected to learn, to memorize, to know. To remember details, causes and consequences, descriptions and explanations, names, genealogies, salutations and shortcuts to salvation. Examine the back of my head and you’ll see scars from falling from heights, or objects falling on my head from heights: roofs, branches, low bluffs along a stream, low walls, high walls. It is a miracle that I can remember anything at all. Yet, on such days in November, I was expected to kneel by Grandfather’s side and examine the past that my generation was meant to inherit: prayers, puran, commentaries and poetry. On such days, my schoolbag seemed extra heavy, doubly annoying.
*
“Come here,” Grandfather called me on that particular day and made me take off my shoes before I could kneel on the straw mat and yak-hair blanket on which he sat. “Read this English,” he said.
It was dated March, 1915. A dedication to Great-grandfather, in a neat hand, written by the Chief Engineer, Allahabad Bridge, Allahabad, on the title page of a handsomely produced copy of the Amarkosh, a thesaurus of Sanskrit. Grandfather smiled. I couldn’t tell what he seemed more satisfied by: his father’s adventures or his grandson’s ability to read letters with a third-grade education. I hastily slipped on my shoes, picked up my bag and walked away.
School was a mile away in the bazaar. A handful of us walked from our neighbourhood in Panchayat Bhavan to the bazaar every day. It was easier to walk along the highway, but Mother considered it too dangerous: each year, dozens died in motor accidents on the dirt shoulders of the highway. She thought everything was designed to kill her youngest child: trees, ponds, rivers, lorries and buses, wasps and hornets, berries, foreigners. So we walked through paddies laid bare after the harvest, dotted with stubble, dew-mulched and yielding underfoot. We jumped nimbly over muddy irrigation ditches and raced between fodder trees or houses along the way. Malla’s steam-engine rice mill announced nine o’clock with puffs of black smoke and a toot-toot-toot. That was our
signal to run to school, racing to be the first to cross the mill-yard, to be the first to cross the highway to Gorkha, be the first to jump through the gates at Sun Shine English Medium.
But on that day, I didn’t want to run; I didn’t want to reach the school where each day I was punished during the morning assemblies in the yard – for forgetting the national anthem when it was my turn to lead the school, for nails hastily chewed down just before inspection, for reading Surendra Mohan Pathak thrillers in Hindi or smuggling in Nagraj comics for the boys who lived in the hostel. I didn’t want to face Mr Hansen from Goa, who taught social sciences and loved to pick on Rajendra, Bir Bahadur and me for not doing our homework. I ran ahead, slipped behind a hedge near my cousin Ishwor’s house, and crouched to urinate as my friends walked past. They must have thought I had raced on, trying to breach the school gates before the nine-fifteen bell rang, before the principal’s brother Amshu fetched his cane to whip the latecomers.
After rolling my socks into tidy balls to stuff into the shoes, stuffing the shoes into the school bag and burying the bag under banana-leaf mulch by the guava tree behind Ishwor’s home, I sniffed the air and smiled to the sun. What a day! A clear sky, the sun mild on the skin, shades cold as they ought to be in November, and six whole hours languidly spread before me.
I wandered aimlessly, ducking to hide from elders who might know me or my parents or my teachers, stealing through kitchen gardens, crouching to watch buffalos tethered to stakes to soak in the sun, letting cactus thorns scratch the shin that itched, picking, sniffing at, and then flinging away, a dead bluebird. I wandered to escape rote and recital, to inspect closely how spit forces touch-me-nots to fold and to hide from the foliage long enough to fool it into unfolding, run a finger along the saw-edge of waxy pineapple leaves, pick beetles from cow-patties, squeeze between bamboos to squat on new shoots, eat wild kauso seeds and dig for fern roots, listen to the hoots of owls that perch on jackfruit trees and don’t sleep, chase the howls of sly jackals that haunt the edge of the forest, forget lessons in arithmetic of yesterday, the past week, the entire year.
Ram Shah Madhyamik was quiet for the time of the morning. I marched right through the school grounds, in through the west gate, out through the east. None of the teachers who came to their doors tried to stop me. This wasn’t my school, these weren’t my tyrants. Here and now, I could walk unmolested by authority. What a world!
Then it was past the jalebi shop with the soot-faced boy, past Arjun’s mother’s hut, down the crumbling chalk-hill behind Koirala’s Veterinary and Agriculture Shop that always smelled of poison, but on its board showed seeds and an egg and a hen and a cow all of the same size, life growing outwards, out to the downhill road to Gorkha, all the way to where the bridge across Marshyangdi stretched a full hundred metres, a crawl along the rails, spitting over the side, measuring the arc the wind made with the glob of spit before it became one with the river’s foam, letting the river reel in my head, stepping back just in time to say, “Wah! Marshyangdi almost sucked me down!”
Daraundi met Marshyangdi by a corner stained with charcoal-strewn pits. Even during the day, even from afar, the corner had a strong, tidal pull, like being sucked into a separate world. The crippled babaji in the Shiva temple was awake, unusually early for him: it was common knowledge he dived to the depths of the rivers during the night to collect human bones, breaking the churned surface of the waters with his withered, shrivelled arm. He sat combing his long hair with his one good hand, fanning its oily grey length over one knee, out over the stone threshold of the small, squat temple. Like always, he called me with the shrivelled arm he normally kept in its wooden box, pointing up to the Sun God to whom he had offered the limb many years ago.
I ran down the chalky path to the river that curved along the base of the bluff with the Shiva temple. Daraundi carved pockets of still water or shallow pools where long beards of algae and clear pebbly floors alternated. If the sun lasted an entire day the shallow pools would become warmer than the snow-fed currents of the river. By my favourite wading spot was Pushpa, an equal delinquent, sitting on the reddest, smoothest rock. He wasn’t wearing his uniform. When he saw me, he came bounding over rocks, leaping over the kids in the wading pool. We shook hands like men: Pushpa stark naked, me in my Friday uniform. He led me back to the rock where he was cooking his crayfish caught in the paddies by the river. Pushpa’s catch was impressive: thirteen, plump, sun-roasted to a pink hue, soon curling to sniff their tails like dogs, soon crunchy and sweet. Pushpa leaped from rock to rock to the bush where his clothes sat under a stone, and I surveyed the world.
It was the usual crowd of truants. Shankar, Binod, Sujan, Kishor, Kumar, Omkaji, Amrit, Rupesh and Sudip Malla were diving and swimming. Sujan was only a year older than me, but he could swim clear across Marshyangdi during the floods, without getting a hair on his head wet, never once cutting his arms out of the river, jumping near Dadim Dhik near Ram Shah Madhyamik, floating all the way across as easily as if he were strolling through a wide meadow. I couldn’t swim, and most of the boys were my uncles from my mother’s side, an entire village of cousins and second cousins, who would gladly beat me up any excuse they found. Mother would take their side, too – she’d interrogate me on why I was wherever I happened to be apprehended by one of those thugs. So I sat on Pushpa’s red rock until he called me to Hari-Hara.
Hari-Hara were two rocks, each the size of Bagaley Ba’s smaller teashop near Narayan Malla’s rice mill. Where they leaned into each other they made a short tunnel with a cold heart. Pushpa lit the cigarette he had brought for me. He pulled at it, puffed his cheeks out, and exhaled with a convulsive gathering of the chest and stomach. I took the cigarette. I didn’t smoke it right away. I scratched the tip of my nose with my thumb, but didn’t put the cigarette in my mouth. I spat through the gap in my teeth and rubbed the spit into the sand with the big toe. I whistled a little. I pulled at the cigarette and held my breath.
It felt like I had gathered all the dry leaves around the bamboo grove in Kunduley, all the brambles between Narighat and Khanikhola, all of last year’s mustard stalks after harvest and lit a fire somewhere under my throat, above my stomach. My chest heaved; pellets of air hit my ears from the inside. Something like a snort or a giggle or a belch or a sneeze or a cry escaped from a corner of my mouth. I exhaled. The smoke had gone thin and black.
“Good!” I said as Pushpa puffed up his cheeks to keep the smoke captive. He opened his mouth, letting curlicues of smoke rise on their own. Pushpa pinched the cigarette, wrapped it in a syaula leaf and put it away. He made a whooping yell and jumped into the wading pool. Syankanchha and Rakesh and Keshav and Marichey and Gajaley’s son waited for Pushpa to finish splashing around before dipping themselves up to the chin and thrashing with their legs.
I was still seeing tiny sparks of light – stars – just around my eyes, the part of life that is usually grey and invisible. Pushpa’s stone felt too hot. I slid down the length of its smooth face, still wearing my uniform, and splashed into the pool. I slept in the water, looking up at the boys who came close to yell and laugh until another distraction took them away. I really could hold my breath: nothing seemed distinct, not even my hands, and any pebble held before my eyes seemed round and shiny and money-like. Riches. When I sat up, sputtering the little water that had gone in through the nose, gasping for air, I saw the boy from Banauti pointing, laughing at me.
Although he pointed at me, nobody else was looking. He laughed soundlessly, without a pip or a squeak. His head was shorn, perhaps because of the sores and scabs that mottled his scalp. He was related to me, if you drew a line that wormed six generations back and wormed forward again until it tied me to him. Properly, the boy from Banauti was an uncle from my father’s side. His blind father sat outside their house to sell yogurt and walking sticks to people from Kathmandu trying to climb to Manakamana. His sister had thrown herself from the suspension bridge over Marshyangdi the day her friends told her that she had fai
led her SLC exams. Her friends had been joking, trying to scare her. She never got to know. The boy from Banauti now lived with Keshav’s family, away from his blind father who still milked the buffaloes and polished walking sticks in his spare time, but also cried and cursed in angry fits, swinging his sickle and stick at anything that moved, until the foaming spit dried to salt and tore open the skin of his mouth.
“Why are you laughing?” I said. I knew why he laughed.
He thought I had done something funny.
“You’re wet! Everything is wet!” he said.
“You’re in the water. You’re wet, too,” I said.
“That is your school uniform,” he said. “Your mother will be angry.”
“And you don’t even have a mother,” I said. I plugged both ears with my fingers and plunged my head underwater. Small, slow bubbles through the nose. Continuous. Hold your breath until you are sitting upright. Wipe your face with your palms before exhaling. The boy from Banauti raised his head to look at me before concentrating on his hands. His lips and brows twitched.
“And your father is blind,” I said. He didn’t look up. I knew I would next tell him that his sister threw herself from the bridge. There was nothing else left to throw at him. Sujan was jumping on Kishor’s shoulders, trying to keep him in the water, while Shankar was pulling Sujan’s leg. The wading pool was still because everyone had chosen a rock each and was warming their ears to bring the water out. It is easy. Find a large, sun-cooked rock. Embrace it, facedown, with your ear glued to it. Close your eyes, and drift into warm, sticky dreams.
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