Sleeping Tigers

by Robinson, Holly

  Tomorrow, then, I would stake out the American Express office all day. I checked the hours posted on the door, thanked the women, and stepped outside. The rain had stopped and the clouds were clearing like curtains parting on a stage.

  I found a quiet corner in an alley and phoned my mother. Her voice was surprisingly clear on the line. “Are you all right? I’ve been frantic!”

  “I’m fine, Mom. And I think I can track Cam down tomorrow. Jon’s supposed to pick up his mail at American Express.”

  “American Express!” my mother said happily. She was relieved, I supposed, to think that I would be waiting someplace so clean, so efficient, so official. So American.

  “How’s Paris?”

  “She took her first steps alone!” Mom exclaimed. “Made it from the kitchen counter to your bed, the little monkey.”

  I bit my lip, overcome with an indiscernible emotion. Then it came to me: envy. I wanted to be the one to see Paris take her first solo steps! I felt cheated.

  Well, I’d see her walk when I got home, wouldn’t I? And by then this entire mess would be settled. I told my mother where I was staying before trudging back to Earth House.

  After her shower, Leslie’s hair floated about her shoulders like a yellow scarf. She had changed her clothes, too: She wore a short blue batik skirt with a pink tank top. As a final touch she’d tied a rainbow canvas belt around her tiny waist. I couldn’t decide whether she looked more like a harem girl or an orphan boy.

  “Time to tear up the town!” Leslie said, punctuating this announcement with her trademark hacking cough. She doubled over. “Bloody hell!”

  “You’d better stay in bed,” I said, leading her by the arm to her bed and propping her against the pillows like an oversized doll. “Come on, you don’t seriously think you should go out, do you?” Even as I said it, I realized that I was mothering her again.

  “Well, I’ve got to eat,” Leslie wheezed when she was able to speak again. “Besides, if we go to Durbar Square, we’re a lot more likely to run into your people than we are in this sty.”

  “I’m planning to catch up with Jon at the American Express Office tomorrow.”

  “What if he doesn’t show?” Leslie asked. “Anyway, aren’t you at all hungry? Come on! I promise to be a good girl and shovel down heaps and heaps of rice and tea.”

  I was famished, truthfully. “All right. Let’s go.”

  She stopped me with an upraised hand. “Wait! You’re not going like that, are you? You look like a bank teller!”

  “Or a teacher?” I said. At least I hadn’t worn a hair band.

  Leslie cocked her head at me. “Do us a favor and change your top, anyway.”

  “Doesn’t seem worth the bother, does it? Then I just have more clothes to wash.”

  Leslie ignored this and fumbled around in her own backpack. I accepted the pale blue sweater and strappy sandals she handed me. I had left Massachusetts for San Francisco because I wanted to change my life; I just hadn’t anticipated that updating my wardrobe would be part of that transformation.

  It was true, though, that dressing differently made me feel different. Even my posture and stride were altered, I noticed, as we meandered through the gathering darkness to Durbar Square. Because of the sandals and soft sweater, my back was arched and I held my head higher.

  The evening light was lavender, which made the red buildings look bruised and tired. At Durbar Square, Leslie asked if I’d heard of Kumari, the Living Goddess. I hadn’t.

  She led me in the direction of an ornate temple. “She’s a Hindu goddess, but always selected from Buddhist families of the highest caste,” Leslie explained. “Kumari is really Tuleju, the protective spirit of the Kathmandu Valley, who got really ticked off when the King made an improper advance. She threatened to leave Kathmandu forever, but the King begged her to stay. She agreed, but only if she could come back as a prepubescent girl, so that the King would never be tempted to touch her again. The girl who’s chosen as Kumari has to go through a sort of Miss Spirit World pageant to earn the title.”

  I stared at the enormous temple. When I examined the wood more closely, I could see that the carvings were of deer, fish, peacocks, snakes, men, and women. The people and creatures were all twined about one another in sexual positions, some loving, others so lewd and painful looking that I had to avert my eyes.

  I nearly had to hold my nose, too; the courtyard stank of rotting food and fish, sewage and damp wood. Even goddesses tossed their garbage out the windows in Kathmandu, apparently.

  Leslie was explaining that each girl chosen to fulfill the role of Kumari had to pass multiple tests of perfection to earn the title of “Living Goddess.” The final test consisted of walking through the inner courtyard of the temple past the heads of 108 slain buffalo, candles flickering between their horns.

  “Kumari can’t show any fear during the tests,” Leslie finished in a whisper, “and her reward for passing them is to live in this ghastly place, bestowing blessings on everyone, even the King of Nepal.”

  “Does she stay here until she dies?”

  “No,” Leslie said, explaining that, after puberty, the girl went back to her village, but as a former Kumari, didn’t usually marry despite a generous government dowry. “Rumor has it that any man who marries a Kumari is bound for early death.” She laughed. “Of course, staying single’s not necessarily a bad thing, is it? Nothing’s scarier than the thought of ending up married to the wrong bloke. Think of me and my spiritual husband.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I’m beginning to think it’s not marriage that’s so scary. It’s love. Just plain, ordinary love.”

  For dinner, Leslie took me to a place called Marco Polo. We checked several more lodges on the way with no luck, then ducked into a low rounded doorway.

  “Here we are,” she said, gesturing at the red-checked tablecloths and flickering candles as if she owned the place. “If your brother and his mates are anywhere within fifty miles of Kathmandu, they’re bound to turn up here eventually. It’s the only place in town that serves decent pizza.”

  Marco Polo was small, dim, and low-ceilinged. A few disgruntled plants huddled along the windowsills. Outside, cows cruised by with puzzled faces. Despite its humble appearance, the restaurant was crammed with travelers swapping tales: lost passports, missed trains, worst bus rides, where to go next.

  I drank a glass of passable red wine and listened as Leslie chimed in: Turkey, Spain, India, Bali, Thailand, Fiji. This woman collected travels the way other women our age collected shoes. Like most of these people, she had been traveling not for just a few weeks, or even for months, but for years.

  The man seated next to us introduced himself as Charlie. He was an Australian who had been living on his sailboat in Sydney for four years before coming to Kathmandu for “a mountain brew stop.” He was broad-shouldered; his skin was leathery; and he wore his dark hair hanging halfway down his back in a braid as tight as a curtain cord.

  Charlie had been traveling the islands between Borneo and Timor to trade wristwatches and sneakers for native crafts. He sold these goods to museums and collectors, he explained, and made what he called “One tidy living.”

  “What do you do at sea to keep from getting bored?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Stare at the water, mostly. What I really need is a woman to keep me company, warm up me bed at night.” He waggled his thick eyebrows at us until Leslie and I both laughed.

  Leslie had drunk three glasses of wine in quick succession, and now Charlie was waving a fistful of cash at the waiter. “Let me buy you another jarful of the grape,” he said, as a pair of small, black, shiny rocks clattered onto the table with the bills.

  “What are those?” Leslie touched one of the rocks with her finger and hiccuped loudly. She was drunk, I realized, and she’d succeeded in ignoring the pizza completely.

  “Eat up,” I commanded, sliding two slices onto her plate. “You promised.”


  Leslie waved her bangles at me. “Shush, Mum.” She was watching Charlie.

  He was drunk, too. Or maybe just nuts. He’d collected the rocks while climbing Mt. Merapi, a live volcano on Java. The rocks were magnets, he said, adding, “I use these stones for clearing me brain.” He placed one rock on either side of his head, just above his ears. “This way, the forces act to repel each another, and all of my thoughts go flying out my ears while the stones bust apart.”

  I laughed. Leslie gestured for Charlie to put the rocks on either side of her head, too. He obliged, gazing happily down her shirt as Leslie leaned towards him. Suddenly Leslie went pale and shot to her feet.

  “I’m going to be sick,” she announced and bolted from the table.

  “Now that’s a filly who pushes the envelope,” Charlie marveled, gathering his rocks back into his pockets.

  I followed Leslie into the bathroom. She was bent over the toilet, nearly headfirst in the open stinking hole. “You okay?”

  “Shit!” she said. “Oh, bloody shit!”

  At first, I thought she must be describing the toilet’s contents. But then Leslie hung her head deeper inside. “What’s the matter?” I asked in alarm. “What are you doing?”

  “I lost my ring.” Leslie stood up and leaned against the wall beside me. We stood there with our heads pressed against the cold tile.

  I couldn’t tell if she was going to laugh or cry. “How did you do that?”

  “Well, I leaned over the toilet to be sick,” she said stiffly, “and the ring just fell in.”

  Suddenly, we were both giggling. “I was only wearing the ring to see if it would tarnish,” Leslie managed to squeeze out between chortles. “It was a gift for my sister,” she added, and the balmy logic of this caused us both to double over, howling so that the sound echoed in the tiled chamber.

  By the time we returned to our table, Charlie was gone. Leslie sat down and began eating her pizza. She’d taken no more than three bites, though, before clutching at her stomach in real pain.

  I jumped up, felt her forehead. No fever. “Are you all right? Here, let’s get you some tea or something. Something to get you hydrated.”

  “Stop being my bloody mother,” Leslie moaned.

  “Sorry.”

  To my amazement, a minute later she sat up again as if nothing had happened and sucked down the rest of the wine in her glass as noisily as a horse at a trough. “Nectar of the Gods,” she said loudly. “Cures what ails you. Hey. Where did that nice man go with his rocks? He had such nice rocks!”

  A few diners had stopped talking to watch Leslie. The three Nepalese waiters had lined up against the wall; they stared openly as Leslie belched, sat up, and fanned herself with the hem of her t-shirt, exposing the swell of her breasts. She propped one bare foot on the table’s edge. Where were her shoes? Never mind that. Where was her underwear?

  I motioned for Leslie to put her leg down, but not in time. The poor bus boy was passing our table to gather dirty dishes from Charlie’s table. He stopped and stared up Leslie’s skirt, hovering in front of her like a moth trapped against a light.

  Leslie dropped her foot to the floor with a thud. “What I hate about Asia,” she said with a regal toss of her head, “is the way every guy stares at you. Fucking animals, men!”

  As if on cue, Jon came through the restaurant door and let it slam behind him. He took in the scene at once–Leslie in her skimpy clothes, glaring at the Nepalese waiters–and grinned. “Too right!” he cheered. “Fucking animals, men!”

  Only then did he notice me sitting next to Leslie. Jon tipped his straw hat at me and said, “Guess it’s true what people say.”

  “What do people say?” I asked.

  “You just never know what you’ll find on the streets of Kathmandu,” he said.

  Chapter thirteen

  Jon glided between the other tables with an actor’s cocksure grace, stunning Leslie into silence. Even I had to admit that Jon knew how to make an entrance. He had a buzz cut and tendons stood out along his neck and skull. He was so tan that the white scar along his cheek stood out like a bit of kite string, and he wore a heavy turquoise necklace. In less than two weeks, Jon had transformed himself from shabby Berkeley botanist to world traveler.

  “Where’s Cam?” I demanded when he reached the table.

  Jon seated himself across from Leslie. “Nice to see you, too, Jordan,” he said mildly. “It’s been a while.”

  “By your design,” I reminded him. “I had to fly halfway around the world to find you.”

  He shrugged. “Take it any way you wish.” He stopped my next question with one upraised hand while he spoke in fluent Nepali to the waiter.

  “That’s so beautiful that you speak Nepali,” Leslie breathed. “How many languages do you know?”

  Jon bowed his head in feigned modesty. “Eight. Well, nine, I suppose, if you count my rudimentary Mandarin.”

  Rudimentary Mandarin? Please. But Leslie rested her narrow chin on one hand and flipped her blond hair over her shoulder.

  Jon granted us each a beatific smile, laugh lines crinkling about his eyes. He ignored me, goading Leslie into exchanging the usual traveler’s tales. Jon rattled off the names of countries he’d conquered with the ease of someone reciting a grocery list. Leslie wore a rapt expression. I wanted to bite his smug chin.

  “Where is he?” I interrupted. “I need to see Cam.”

  Jon gave me the tolerant look of a parent putting up with a whiny child at the dinner table and made a big show of consulting his watch. “Probably in bed by now. Poor Cam’s stomach hasn’t adapted too well to Nepal.”

  “Take me to him.” I tried to make my voice stern, irreproachable, but instead the phrase “take me to your leader” flashed through my brain in neon green letters.

  I nearly started laughing at my own ridiculous posturing. I was suddenly outside my body, beyond the confines of my own life, maybe even twirling around on the fan’s creaking blades above the table.

  I could see myself from this distance as my poor body desperately tried to grapple with the situation. I was a teacher in an unfashionably long black skirt, and my untamed hair sprang like a bush around my sunburned face. I was a bore and a worrier, a drudge in Massachusetts, in San Francisco, and now in Nepal, too. I was already, perhaps, a mother. What was I doing here?

  Leslie and Jon were deep in conversation as I returned to my body with a thud. How long had my body been sitting here without me in it? Long enough for Jon to eat several slices of pizza and order a second bottle of beer.

  Time was only a human-manufactured, false construct. Once you let go of thinking about life in hours, you stopped measuring where you were or who you were. You were simply here, being. “Now” was what time it was.

  Was this what Cam had been searching for? This awareness of being so alive in the moment?

  Leslie nudged me sharply in the ribs. “You’ve got something to tell Cam, don’t you? Isn’t that why you need to see him right away?”

  Jon raised a pale eyebrow. From my newly acquired, more objective perspective, I could view him more clearly. Jon’s serenity was a sham. Beneath the table, he jiggled one foot, nearly upsetting his beer. He wasn’t any less a worrier than I was.

  “Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait until our boy Cam’s awake,” he warned, then stood up and tossed his napkin onto the table. “Or you can just tell me, and I’ll get a message to Cam. But wait! Don’t break my suspense just yet. Excuse me a moment.” He left the table, headed for the restroom.

  “I see why you wanted to find Jon,” Leslie breathed. “He’s really something.”

  “He’s something, all right,” I muttered.

  I steeled myself for Jon’s return. But, as the minutes ticked by, my perspective continued to shift. When Jon walked back across the dining room, he looked suddenly older and more vulnerable. He had lost weight and his shaved head gave away his true identity: he was an unhappy man poised on the thin lip of middle age. Jon was
just another seeker like the rest of us.

  After he was seated again, I said, “I brought some paternity and custody papers with me for Cam to look over. I want to talk to him about adopting his daughter if he has no interest in her.”

  Jon shook his head. “You’ve got noble intentions, Jordan, but scary Karma. This is the wrong time for Cam to be dealing with this. He needs to feel good about himself, about his contributions to the world, before taking on family responsibilities. He’s here to volunteer on a conservation project with me, through RCDP Nepal.”

  I threw my fork onto the table. The tines hit one of the plates with a ringing sound, making Jon jump. Good. “I don’t give a hoot about Cam’s self esteem! He has a child to think about now! And what about that sixteen year-old girl he left holding the bag?”

  Jon raised his eyebrows. “Sixteen, huh?” He sighed. “Well, if she’s smart, that girl will drop her baggage off with a decent adoption attorney and get herself some cash. And what about you? Why would you choose to be saddled with a child, when you obviously are struggling yourself?”

  “I didn’t choose,” I said, stung. “Nadine left the baby with me.”

  “Yeah!” Leslie seemed to wake up suddenly; she tossed her arm around my shoulders in an unexpected show of support. “That girl knew Jordan would make a kind, loving auntie.”

  The smug look had vanished from Jon’s face, replaced by alarm. “What are you talking about? How would Nadine even know you exist, unless you stuck your nose where it didn’t belong and tracked her down?”

  “That baby is my niece,” I said. “She’s at my apartment now. I have no idea where Nadine is, but she left me the baby and a note, saying that she wants me to adopt her. You’re right, I am struggling. But I am not going to let this baby down. That’s why I need to talk to Cam.”