The City Son

by Samrat Upadhyay

  “Ah, Rukma,” Sahara says, her palm flat against the table. “I don’t know what to tell you.” A pause. “I’m not married, and I don’t intend to marry, so I can’t offer you guidance. Have you spoken to your Newar lover since you separated?”

  Rukma indicates no.

  “I’m wondering,” she says, “if there’s also some helplessness in his situation, a majboori that forced him to marry someone of his own caste.”

  The idea intrigues Rukma, even though she’s sure it’s not true. But truth, with its allegiance to what’s real and solid, is on the whole unappealing and dissatisfying. So it doesn’t surprise her when what she says is this: “Do you suppose he’s also thinking about me? Right now?”

  Sahara’s eyes become alert, and she quickly takes a measure of their surroundings, as though some NGO types might be listening in. “Hmmm,” she says. “Let me consider this.” But it’s clear that she can barely contain herself over this idea of the Newar lover pining for Rukma. Her fingers are shaking above the table; there’s something more happening here for her. “Hmm,” she says. “It’s possible, it’s possible that he’s also thinking about you.” On the table a spoon glistens with a thin coat of grease. She picks it up and plays with it heedlessly. “How will you find out, though?”

  “Find out what?”

  “Whether he’s thinking about you.”

  “How?”

  “Well. I don’t know.”

  “I can’t possibly contact him.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I can’t possibly go to his house.”

  Sahara stops fiddling with the spoon, which is a good thing because if she hadn’t Rukma would have clamped her hand on top of hers to stop the fidget. Their gazes lock. “Rukma?” she says.

  Rukma can feel it, a vigor that’s slowly starting to hum through her body. “Yes, Sahara?”

  With her eyes Sahara is following the trajectory of Rukma’s thoughts, and she clasps Rukma’s hands above the table and says, “Don’t do anything foolish.”

  “What type of foolishness?”

  “You know.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re not considering …?”

  “What am I considering? What?” Rukma stands. “I will do what I need to do.”

  Their tea is done, and as they exit the shop a cloud of flies follows them, buzzing around their faces as though arguing.

  “Aren’t you returning to Swarga?” Sahara asks.

  Rukma shakes her head and marches up the hill toward the main thoroughfare. Sahara keeps pace with her, alternately trying to dissuade Rukma from her mission and giggling over what she imagines Rukma is going to do. It’s clear to Rukma that Sahara hasn’t had this much entertainment in a long time, and she just isn’t willing to let go as Rukma moves toward the city’s center, where her destination lies. On the way she tries to shake Sahara off, suggesting that she better attend the meeting where her NGO colleagues are waiting for her slide shows and charts and graphs that pinpoint the cause and proclaim the cure. But Sahara is so enamored of Rukma’s little project now that reminders about her work obligations, duties to her country, are not registering. She’s fallen into a trance, this Sahara, and now she’s following closely at Rukma’s heels, chattering into her ears. She’s less like a modern, chic working woman and more like Sanmaya in Lazimpat, whose little world has its own customs and its own language. And as with Sanmaya, Rukma can’t even make out what Sahara is saying. She is speaking gibberish, a mishmash of NGO language and entreaties and accolades with frequent forays into her own past with a brother who … committed suicide? Rukma can’t be sure. As they enter the dense snarl of the inner city, Rukma stops paying attention to her, and she does indeed become like a servant, carrying on with her own low-key ramblings as she accompanies her mistress into the market.

  At the mouth of the inner market Rukma pauses. She needs to orient herself. It has been a while since she’s been to his neighborhood. He belongs to an old Newar family with a house built by a great-great-grandfather, a house that has been a mainstay of his family for generations. It’s not a grand house—it’s right on the street, with a crumbling façade, opposite an entrance to a Buddhist bahal that has been seized by pigeons who also fly to the roof of his house to poop. The house is at the edge of the street that then veers into the tourist district, and if you’re not careful you can suddenly find yourself among high-priced curio shops and white-faced, wild-haired, scraggly foreigners with their impossible tongues. “It’s this way,” Rukma says, but she’s saying it more for herself, not for her companion, who she wishes would simply drop away so she could be alone. But Sahara is not easily dissuaded, and now Rukma likens her, in her mind, to a beggar hounding her for baksheesh. Perhaps if Rukma gives her a coin she’ll scoot away?

  The swarm around them is like a mob. There are many angry people in the city. Rukma hadn’t noticed the amount of rage that circulates here. People shove others out of the way as they stride toward their destinations. One man is holding a bunch of red radishes in his hand and shaking it at the vending jyapu, who is so enraged that he’s not even looking at the face of his prospective customer. There’s a fat man with his hands in the pockets of his trousers glaring at the passersby, looking for an excuse to pounce on somebody, anybody, and Rukma dares not meet his eyes. The housewife up in the window wearing a shawl is berating the young girl below. The young girl is justifying, rationalizing, pleading. Judging from the housewife’s index finger peeking out of the shawl and moving softly in the air, the punishment for the girl will be severe and crippling.

  This is the city Rukma lives in, and she becomes despondent just thinking of these people unwilling to relinquish their anger. But today she has a task to perform, and she can’t dwell on distractions. She has to focus. Her every thought has to be sharp, like the ray of sun harnessed through a magnifying glass to burn insects.

  Rukma spots the house and turns to Sahara. “You can’t go in with me,” Rukma says. Sahara pleads and begs, but Rukma is firm. “There’s a tea shop in that alley.” She points toward the bahal. “Go drink tea in there, watch the pigeons.” And she actually ends up giving her, from her purse, a few rupees for tea. She knows of the shop because she’d spent time there with her Newar lover.

  She waits until Sahara crosses the street, then pushes the door and enters. Inside, it is pitch dark. She’s never set foot in the house. He never brought her here. Why would he? His family wouldn’t have approved any more than hers. They knew he had a girl somewhere, but in their mind he was having a little bit of fun on the side with a doxy, and it’d all go away once they hooked him up with a nice girl from their own community. When Rukma had asked him once whether his parents would accept her, he’d said, “I’ll make them.” Their visits to the tea shop in the bahal lane across from his house were an adventure in a type of daring, or “getting you used to my neighborhood,” as he liked to say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “KOI HUNUHUNCHHA?” Rukma asks in the darkness.

  Someone responds from above, a woman, in Newari, and soon there’s a rumble of footsteps down the stairs, and a flashlight shines on Rukma’s face. She gives her Newar lover’s name. The voice that comes from behind the flashlight is that of a young boy’s, and gradually she can see the dim outline of his shape. He’s a plump boy. There’s a problem with the electric circuit down here, he says, that’s why the ceiling light is not working. He takes Rukma upstairs, the first set of stairs, then the second, and at once she’s in a large room. Her Newar lover is seated on the floor, his fingers about to lift food from a plate into his mouth. He’s as handsome as she remembers. His bride—Rukma recognizes her immediately from the market—is about to ladle vegetables onto his plate. She appears to be a sweet woman, in all likelihood a virgin until she married, cloistered and sequestered by her parents and trained well in the culinary arts. Out of the corner of her eyes, through the window, Rukma sees Sahara across the street on a be
nch outside the tea shop, eyes fixed on the house. The window is small, but Rukma is sure her companion can see enough to fill in the blanks. It’s like a small, personal theater for Sahara as she drinks her tea, watching Rukma rupture a domestic scene.

  Upon Rukma’s arrival, the Newar lover’s hand holding a torn-off piece of puri and tarkari is in midair, with the gravy dripping tap, tap, tap below on the plate. His mouth is open in shock. The little boy, Rukma’s usher, farts loudly, then disappears somewhere—the house is most likely cavernous and roomy inside even though it appears small and constricted from the outside. “It looks like I came at the right time,” Rukma says. “Time for the afternoon khaja.”

  “Timi?” her Newar lover asks.

  His bride asks him in Newari who Rukma is.

  “I was just passing through. Do you recall the tea shop where we used to hang out?” Rukma points her finger toward the window, and across the street Sahara bolts up and places her hand on her chest, as if asking, Me? Rukma ignores her and turns her attention to him. Slack jawed, he fixes his gaze on Rukma, but it’s less anger and discomfort than awe. He simply can’t believe that Rukma is here, near the very bed where he makes love to his wife.

  His wife’s eyes are taking in every tiny gesture, each modulation of the voice of her husband and this stranger. She has turned red, as if she were the one about to be discovered with a compromised past.

  “It surely is a surprise,” the Newar lover says. “I hadn’t expected that we two would meet in this manner.”

  “I saw the two of you in the market some time ago,” Rukma says, pointing to the wife. “I had been wondering about you since then.”

  “Please sit,” the wife says, unable to mask her displeasure but trying hard to be a good host. The wife indicates the cushion across from her husband, but Rukma says, “There’s a bit of room here, so let me sit here, okay?” and she plops down on the cushion next to him. His wife says something in Newari to him; he tells her in Nepali to bring Rukma some food from the kitchen upstairs. The wife leaves.

  “So?” Rukma says.

  “What are you doing?” he whispers.

  “What?” Rukma says. From her sitting position she can only see the telephone and the electric wires out of window. Sahara is down there by the tea shop, craning her neck, Rukma is sure, for a glimpse of something, anything.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he says.

  “What?” Her pretense at innocence pleases her. She wishes she had invited Sahara up and given her a camera so she could have snapped a picture of her during her who, me? act. Sahara could have also observed everything and reported each detail later. Yes, I’d say that the way you sat down next to him could only be described as plopping down—thyacchaa! And the wife’s eyes did indeed get bugged out. Here, I jotted down some notes: “Rukma’s eyes wide like an innocent damsel. Her Newar lover has a drop of gravy on his lovely mustache.”

  “Should I not have come?” Rukma asks him. “Are you angry with me? Should I go?”

  He’s still whispering, and frankly Rukma doesn’t understand the need for secrecy. There’s nothing hidden here. “Why couldn’t you have called me?” he whispers. “Don’t you see what a difficult …?” His irritated whispers become gentler. “Did you really want to see me?”

  She tilts her head and transforms her face into a full-throttled expression of endearment.

  “Did you miss me?” he asks her.

  He appears ready to kiss her, and it is in this pose—their heads a few inches apart, his lips glistening—that his wife finds them when she stands at the door with a plate of food for Rukma. The wife strides in and bangs the plate down in front of her. She says something to her husband in rapid-burst Newari. Rukma begins eating. The Newar lover is eating slowly with an amused expression, conveying to his wife that he is tolerating this charming but eccentric friend from the past. Rukma tells the wife what good friends she and the Newar lover were, then turns to him for confirmation, “Friends, no? We were very good friends, no?”

  “Yes, we were good friends,” the Newar lover mumbles into his food.

  “Your husband and I used to spend long hours together.”

  The wife has moved to the window, and, her face turned at an angle to them, she’s looking out. Sahara must be beside herself at this clear view of the wife, whom she should have deduced by now has already suffered the initial blows. An idea comes to Rukma, and she stands, the fingers of her right hand sticky from the food, and she joins the wife at the window. Across the street Sahara is standing like a statue, eyes fixed on them. Sahara can see the strained face of the wife, Rukma’s lips moving next to the wife’s ears, although Sahara can’t hear what Rukma is saying. Rukma is describing the hideaways in the city that her husband and Rukma used for their trysts: temples, parks, hillocks, paddies. She describes the brilliant flowers in the parks: lilies, daisies, roses, carnations, extra-large sunflowers. She details the motorcycle ride the Newar lover took her on, a circle around town, then to the ancient city where they hopped and skipped on the cobblestone pathways, and she slipped on the hay the farmers’ wives had laid out to dry. “I thought I had broken a bone,” Rukma tells the wife, “so your sweet husband picked me up and carried me back up to the central square with its soaring temple. People watched us and followed us because they didn’t know why this handsome man was carrying this woman who was grimacing in pain; they thought a film was being shot.” Rukma tells her about the time when the two of them had gone to the movies. In the dark theater a stranger sat next to Rukma, and as a melodramatic scene unfolded on the screen, the man sighed and put his arm on the back of Rukma’s seat; his fingers rubbed her shoulder. Before she could complain, the Newar lover also put his arm across the back of her seat, and his hand found this stranger’s hand. Then all hell broke loose.

  Rukma licks her fingers, says that although she’s enjoyed the company and the food, she’s overstayed her welcome. The wife doesn’t move from the window. She is already confusing loving moments she’s spent with her husband with pictures Rukma has implanted in her mind: the whipping of the wind on the back of the motorcycle, the feel of his strong hips against her hips when he carries her up the hill toward the ancient city’s square, the touch of his thigh against hers in seedy and secluded tea shops that dot the city. It’ll get to the point where she won’t be able to distinguish which experience is hers and which is Rukma’s because he also has taken his wife to the ancient city and for rides on his Kawasaki 250 cc.

  The Newar lover, still seated on the floor, looks defeated. He is realizing, perhaps, that he ought to have stopped Rukma. He’s examining his wife anxiously. He accompanies Rukma down the stairs, holding the flashlight. At the bottom, he scolds her for revealing their past to his wife, then he attempts to embrace her, asks her when he can see her again. She tells him to come to her house so she can introduce him to her husband.

  Rukma’s journey home is, inexplicably, filled with sadness. She keeps recalling the wife, her peace destroyed. Sahara wants to accompany her all the way home, but Rukma is tired of her questions—“Were you telling her about me?” “What did his face look like when he first saw you?”—so after providing Sahara with some details she tells Sahara to go away. Sahara gives her a wounded look and says that she hopes Rukma won’t forget to call her when she wants to do something like this again. Rukma knows Sahara won’t be able to sleep tonight. She has also been changed by this experience, and the microcosmic moments of what occurred inside the Newar lover’s house, the moment-by-moment unfolding—the flashlight suddenly shining on the ceiling to reveal spiderwebs; the rose-patterned sheet on the Newar lover’s bed; the chubby boy’s fart as he bounded away to play after showing Rukma in—all of these will seep into Sahara’s brain through repeated playing until they begin to color the experiences that belong to her, that arise out of her own senses. She’ll begin to think that she owns a rose-patterned bedsheet, or in the midst of an NGO meeting, the thought will appear that she has a chubby nephe
w to take to the doctor for his gastric problems.

  By the time Rukma reaches Lazimpat, she is so filled with sadness that she can barely move. The guard asks her if everything is all right. She says it is. Tarun is in the living room, but she barely glances at him as she goes up. From the kitchen Sanmaya asks whether she needs a snack before dinner, which she says will be ready in an hour. Rukma doesn’t have the energy to answer her. She goes to her room and lies down on the bed, but then she gets up and goes next door, to the room that her mother-in-law had occupied. Every few days Sanmaya dusts the room, so it’s habitable. She lies down on the bed—it is smaller than the bed she shares with Tarun, but it feels comfortable. The room is also smaller, perfect for one person. She closes her eyes and soon drifts into sleep. She wakes up, briefly and groggily, to hear voices. They are talking about her, wondering where she went. “I saw her come in,” Sanmaya says. “I peeked from the kitchen and saw her climb the stairs.” Tarun concurs, says he saw her, too. Mahesh Uncle says—must be to Tarun—“I thought there was some sound in your room.” It feels good to be talked about. She’s like a child who’s hiding in the perfect spot, smack in the middle of everything but concealed enough that no one can ever find her.

  They look for her in the Japanese garden, they ask the guard if he’s seen her leave the house, and finally with a worried air they eat dinner.

  Later that night, Sanmaya discovers her in her mother-in-law’s room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  IT BECOMES HER room. It’s a natural transition. She likes how its size seems to match the cramped feeling inside her. She has stopped going to Swarga. When she contemplates taking care of all those people, this thought descends upon her: Who is going to take care of me?