“Where is Lactogen? Who’s going to buy it?”
“I bought some yesterday,” Malati said. “Sir, what brings you here?” Her breast was back inside her blouse, and she was rocking the baby in her lap.
Ramchandra looked at Malekha Didi, and Malati said to her, “Leave us to talk alone for a while.”
Malekha Didi left., but not before warning Malati that she was to cook the morning meal after feeding the baby.
Ramchandra wanted to sit down, but the only place to sit was the cold kitchen floor, so he remained where he was and said, “I just came to see, about yesterday—”
“I’ll have to make formula for the baby,” she said, and got up. “Why don’t we talk in the other room?”
“Is this your bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t bother about tea,” he said. “I came by to talk.”
“Let’s go to the other room.”
In the living room, he sat on the sofa, noticing that the carpet had large stains, and that some baby clothes were strewn about. A framed photo on a nearby table showed a younger Malati with a man about Ramchandra’s age. Another photo, this one on the wall, was of the same man with the albino woman. They were standing a little apart but with an air of intimacy, which made him think they were husband and wife. There was no heater in the room, and it was cold.
Malati went into the kitchen, and when she came back, the baby was not in her arms. She held two glasses of tea, which she set on the side table before sitting beside him. To warm his hands, Ramchandra cupped a glass of tea.
“How old is your girl?” he asked.
“Eight months.”
Her face, which so far he’d seen as that of a child, became transformed. He noticed lines of maturity, creases under her eyes. The room suddenly seemed different to Ramchandra, as if he wasn’t sitting there, as if he was on the ceiling, looking down at the Ramchandra below. Swallowing the saliva that had filled his mouth, he asked, “Is she your sister?”
Malati smiled. “No, that’s my stepmother.”
“But you call her didi?”
“Yes, that seems the most appropriate.”
“You’d mentioned your mother.”
“My mother vanished from my life a long time ago. Malekha Didi is my mother now.”
No good mother would call her daughter a slut, Ramchandra thought—that’s what stepmothers are for. Of course he knew that some stepmothers treated their stepchildren with affection, but a distant memory pressed on him. A restaurant near New Road where he used to go for tea and, when he had enough money, for samosas, after finishing college and before starting a teaching job. A small boy, in a frayed shirt and loose half-pants held up by a thin rope, was constantly scolded by the woman he worked for. She criticized him for being slow, for not boiling the tea properly, for leaving the glasses dirty. The boy looked to be barely twelve, but he had an old, sad face. One day, when the woman was about to lift her hand to slap the boy, Ramchandra confronted her. She looked at him in contempt and said, “If his mother had disciplined him, I wouldn’t have to do it.” Later, when the woman had gone into the back room, he asked the boy why he put up with her, and the boy said he couldn’t leave because this was his home; she was his stepmother.
“The tea will get cold,” Malati prodded him.
He took a sip. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“No, just the two of us. My father passed away a few years ago.”
“And the father of the child?”
“I’m not married. He doesn’t live here.”
Ramchandra was filled with a sweet sense of pleasure, something he’d not experienced since his late childhood. He watched this girl, her sensitive face, the sadness in her eyes, the faint lines of womanhood circling her mouth, and the voice that emerged from him came from a depth he didn’t know existed. “I am so sorry about yesterday.”
She must have heard the difference in his voice, for she looked at him sharply. The morning light filtered through the thin curtains, making beams of the dust in the room. Two pink clouds spread across her cheeks, perhaps signs of embarrassment at her own thoughts. She looked at him again and let a brief smile shine on her face. She prompted him toward the tea, and they both picked up their glasses.
“It was humiliating, sir,” she said in a quiet voice.
“I don’t know what to say. Even my wife was angry with me.
“Does your wife know you’re here?”
“Yes,” he lied.
“What did she say to you?”
“About my being so hard on you?”
“Yes.”
“She said you were young and sensitive, and I should’ve been kinder.”
Malati sipped her tea, pulled up her legs on the sofa, and rocked gently.
“Is your baby asleep now?”
“Yes, but I’ll have to feed her soon and then help Malekha Didi.”
“So you will come for your sessions again?”
She hesitated. “Do you think I’ll pass the exam?”
“Of course you will.”
“I feel so helpless.”
“I think the problem is Ashok,” he said.
“How is Ashok a problem?”
“You can’t concentrate with him in the room. I’ll start tutoring you alone.”
She observed him calmly, again with a soft smile, and he felt uncomfortable.
“I want you to pass,” he said, and before he could stop himself, he said, “And you’ll come every day, not just two times a week.”
“You know I don’t have the money.”
“I’m not asking for more money.” His rational thoughts quarreled in the back of his mind. “You need to pass. I’ll help you.”
“Why do you have to treat me in a special way, sir?”
Her closet had reminded Ramchandra of the myriad of tiny cramped rooms, sometimes no bigger than bathrooms, where he and his mother had lived, sometimes in a relative’s home, other times in a rented house in a neighborhood full of drunks and prostitutes and open drains smelling of urine and feces. In one room, the landlord had pressed himself upon his mother, and she had not screamed for the neighbors because she knew they’d think she’d invited it on herself. Ramchandra was twelve then; he’d climbed on the landlord’s back, pummeling him, as tears ran down his cheeks.
“I’m not giving you any special treatment,” he told Malati. “I want my students to pass. Once you become successful in a few years, you can pay me back.”
She looked at him mischievously. “Will you chase after me with the police if I don’t pay you back then?” She laughed at her own joke, and crinkles formed around her eyes.
Malekha Didi appeared. “Are you going to he-he-ha-ha all morning? Who’s going to cook lunch?”
“You’d better go now, sir,” Malati said.
He stood. “So, you’ll come tomorrow?”
She nodded.
As he walked out of the house, Malekha Didi chuckled.
It was already nine o’clock, and his first class started at nine-thirty, so he had no time to go home for his meal before heading to school. Ramchandra stepped into a general store near Malati’s house and called Goma on the phone at the counter. “Where did you go? I was getting anxious.”
“Have the children left for school?”
“Yes.”
Ramchandra always kissed the children on their cheeks before they left for school, and now he cursed himself for not having noted the time on the clock in Malati’s house. He told Goma he’d have to forgo lunch, that he was going straight to school. She said she’d bring his lunch to the school around eleven, when he had a break between classes. Despite his protests, she wouldn’t budge. As he was about to hang up, she said, “You went to see her, didn’t you? That girl?”
“Yes, I was not feeling good about the whole thing.”
“What did she say?”
“I apologized to her, and she says she’ll come.”
“You,” Goma said. “Wo
rrying about a student like that.”
He wanted to tell her that Malati had a baby, that she lived in a room that made their flat in Jaisideval seem palatial, that she had a stepmother who didn’t seem right in the head, but all he said was goodbye, and then hung up.
The only way he could get to the school on time was by taking another three-wheeler, and he was annoyed with himself for having spent so much money that morning. This driver didn’t have his meter on, which meant he was going to charge more than the usual fare for that distance. He almost shouted heated words of argument, but he made himself sit back and close his eyes. What can you expect these poor people to do? They have to eat, too, and gasoline prices kept going up. And, with Dashain around the corner, they had to worry about getting new clothes for their family and spending money on meat. In some ways, Ramchandra wished he were back in his youth with his mother, when, during Dashain, they’d go to the market and buy a kilo or two of goat meat to cook. They didn’t have to worry about getting new clothes, because they had no close relatives in the city, only a few distant cousins who shunned them during festivals anyway. Now, under the watchful gaze of his in-laws, Ramchandra was constantly aware of how little he spent on his family. Last year, Mrs. Pandey, after fingering Sanu’s new frock, said, “This cloth couldn’t have cost more than thirty rupees, eh, Goma?” Goma had lied, said it cost about a hundred, plus thirty rupees for the stitching, and Ramchandra had seethed with anger.
The three-wheeler dropped him outside Asan, and he walked to the marketplace. At the entrance of the marketplace, the owner of a bookshop, where Ramchandra sometimes browsed for textbooks, greeted him, and Ramchandra waved back. Then he stepped into the alley where the school was, and right there, in front of the school, in the middle of the alley, was a huge mound of garbage.
On the first day he’d come to this school, the same sight had greeted him. He’d had a call from the friend of one of his college classmates. Mr. Tiwari was looking for someone to take the place of the math teacher, who had died in a bicycle accident. Ramchandra’s elation at getting the phone call, which signaled that he might rise to a full-time position, was crushed when he went to the school the next day. In the narrow muddy alley where it stood, behind the Bir Hospital, piles of garbage had been dumped right in front of it. Two stray dogs, their skin covered with bruises and wounds, sniffed their way through the garbage and watched Ramchandra warily, as he stared at a faded sign on the building. It bore the school’s name, in both English and Nepali, painted on the background of a lotus. The building was old and the entrance so small that even Ramchandra, who was not a tall man, had to stoop slightly to get in. After a couple of steps, he found himself in darkness and had to fumble his way through to another door. It was then that he discovered that the school was actually built around a courtyard; he heard the cacophony of voices rising from the classrooms, as children chanted their daily lessons. A boy was drinking from a tap in the middle of the courtyard; Ramchandra asked him where the office was.
Mr. Tiwari, the principal, was a genial old man with tufts of white hair growing from his nose. He wore an old suit with a bright red tie. “What to do, Ramchandra-ji? He was a very popular teacher; the students liked him. With the S.L.C. exams so near, we badly need someone.”
The question on the tip of Ramchandra’s tongue was, of course, about the salary, but it would have been improper to talk about money so early, and Mr. Tiwari never brought it up. He did say, “Well, if you want to do some side business, you know, you can ask some of the students with better-off parents to come to your home for tutoring.” Mr. Tiwari punctuated the sentence with a wink. It was standard practice all over the country, but lately there’d been some concern, expressed in newspaper articles, that many teachers were deliberately not teaching the required material in the classroom and then telling students that if they wanted to pass the almighty S.L.C., they’d have to fork out extra cash for private tutorials. Several irate parents had even formed a group and petitioned the education minister, who had nodded in sympathy and made vague noises about “quality education for every child—in the classroom.”
“I understand,” Ramchandra said to Mr. Tiwari, and looked out at the courtyard, where the students had congregated after the ringing of the bell. This was not his idea of a school, one whose students wore dirty, crinkled uniforms, one that had no playground with green grass, no seesaws, no swings, no slides. Some of the younger students at the moment, in fact, were stepping into a large puddle that had formed in the center of the courtyard from last night’s rain.
Now a small pack of people entered the room, and Ramchandra realized that this very room, with one desk and a few chairs, served not only as the principal’s office but also as the staff room. Ramchandra craved tea. Goma always made perfect tea, with just the right amount of milk and sugar, boiled for a long time but not too long, and Ramchandra had gotten into the habit of drinking it every two hours. He’d had a cup before he left home, but now the dismal surroundings had increased his thirst.
Just then a small boy, wearing a uniform much too large for him, came in, wiping the sweat from his forehead, and asked Mr. Tiwari, “Shall I bring tea, sir?”
Mr. Tiwari looked at Ramchandra apologetically and said, “He’s a poor farmer’s son. Couldn’t pay the fees, so we made this arrangement.”
Ramchandra probably wouldn’t have felt critical if Mr. Tiwari hadn’t mentioned it, but now he thought, a student is the teacher’s servant? The boy was smiling at him. As if sensing Ramchandra’s disapproval, one of the teachers, a dark woman with a small face, said, “He’s a very smart boy. He came first in fifth grade last year,” and she patted the boy on the side of his head. The boy came to attention in front of Ramchandra and asked, in a well-rehearsed voice, “Shall I bring tea for our Aadarnia Sir?”
Aadarnia. Deserving Respect. Hiding his disgust, Ramchandra nodded, and the boy left, bounding out the door into the courtyard.
Mr. Tiwari introduced Ramchandra to the coterie of teachers who had crowded into the room. The small-faced woman with sharp, hawklike eyes was Bandana Miss; the tall, gangly man with the mustache was Gokul Sir; the surly man with a patch on his left eye was Khanal Sir; the man who didn’t smile was Manandhar Sir; and the nice-looking woman with the bouffant hair-do was Miss Lama, originally from Darjeeling.
The boy brought in the glasses of tea, and Ramchandra, after taking a few sips, felt better. Mr. Tiwari enumerated various plans for the school, including the building of a small canteen for the students and teachers. A rich businessman was soon to make a huge donation, he said with another wink. Judging from the indifferent expressions on the other teachers’ faces, Ramchandra surmised that talk of the big donation had been circulating for the past few years and would probably continue for the next few. He looked at the faces around him—the dark expressions, the taut lines, the constant shifting of eyes punctuated by vague staring into space. Yes, these people were not unlike him. They all had plans for themselves, for their small lives with their small children and their small rented flats in dark corners of the city. He felt sorry for himself, for them, for Mr. Tiwari, who was old and foolishly optimistic. And on that first day, this self-pity had, strangely, served as a salve for his disappointment at the condition of the school.
Ramchandra pinched his nose and stooped as he walked beneath the sign that read kantipur school in two languages. He went straight to the staff room to sign the attendance register, and there he found Bandana Miss, who had become the principal after Mr. Tiwari’s death last year. She was in a good mood, which was unusual. “Ramchandra Sir, come, come, let’s have a cup of tea,” she said. She signaled that he should sit down.
“I have only a few minutes before class.”
“One or two minutes late for your class. Do you think the students care?”
Bandana Miss was usually strict about her teachers’ punctuality, and Ramchandra wondered what was different today. She reached beneath her desk and brought out a box. “Sweet
s,” she said, passing the laddoos and barfis to him. “Here, take one.”
“And what’s the occasion?”
“My son is going to America.”
A boy brought in two glasses of tea. This boy was a poor villager from the hills, who had been hired by Bandana Miss last year after she managed to coax a local Newar businessman into donating some money to the school. Bandana Miss’s aggressive personality often bothered the teachers, but they had to admit that her boldness had benefited the school. Now a swing set stood in the yard, where a long queue of students formed during recess every day. Brand-new blackboards had been installed in the classrooms, and a man had been hired to fix the building’s broken walls and floors.
Ramchandra sipped his tea and wondered how Bandana Miss had managed to arrange a trip to America for her son, who, he had heard, was involved in drugs. As if answering an unasked question, Bandana Miss said, “I found an American family willing to sponsor him. He’s going to the district of”—she consulted a letter on her desk—“Nebraska. A very good university. One of the top schools in America.” She rattled off the name of the university, but Ramchandra had never heard of it. Then again, he knew the names of only some of the famous ones, such as Harvard and MIT. As Bandana Miss outlined her plans for her son, Ramchandra’s mind drifted to this morning. The dark closet with Malati and her baby, the albino stepmother. It all seemed unreal now, as he listened to Bandana Miss’s talk of America and what her boy could accomplish there. “The family is going to give him a car, and soon he’ll have a television set. America is a great country. Not like our Nepal. Here, you work and work, and still you have nothing to show for it. There, you work hard, and you make money, and people recognize you, and soon you become very prosperous.”
Ramchandra finished his tea, congratulated Bandana Miss, and went to his class. Still thinking of Malati, he couldn’t focus on his teaching. Not that his teaching needed much focus. The classes he taught were easy, and the same textbooks were used every year. In fact, the textbooks he was using had been prescribed years ago, at the time of the first education reform in the country, and they hadn’t changed since then. A couple of times, especially during his first year at Kantipur School, Ramchandra had appealed to the principal. He brought in copies of new textbooks from the Tribhuvan University library, books that had innovative styles of learning. But Mr. Tiwari had smiled his genial smile and said, “Why do you want to rock the boat, Ramchandra-ji? Isn’t everything working out okay? Aren’t the students learning what they need to pass the S.L.C.? Besides, this is the textbook prescribed by the government, and what if students begin to fail with your textbooks?” Ramchandra hadn’t argued with him, but he had talked to other teachers, and they’d also shown an apathy that, he soon discovered, seeped through the floors of the classrooms. So Ramchandra gave up trying to change the textbooks and, instead, focused on teaching his tutees well, so that his private students started to acquire high marks in the S.L.C., and his reputation as a good math tutor grew.
The Guru of Love Page 3