Land Where I Flee

by Prajwal Parajuly

  The manager treated her well, but his consideration toward her was always obscured by the others’ hostility. Perhaps he had called her in to apologize for Brian’s behavior. Maybe he’d even get rid of the devil.

  “There’s been a problem,” the manager began, maintaining negligible eye contact.

  She said nothing.

  “There were reports that you were violent with him, B. We’ve a zero tolerance policy toward violence. Here’s a message for you: do not come back. You can return your uniform shirt when you pick up your last paycheck.”

  If she were to look at the positive side of things, at least she didn’t have to disclose her profession to everyone she would meet at her grandmother’s Chaurasi. She wouldn’t be lying when she declared to relatives that she didn’t work.

  The apartment complex where Bhagwati, Ram, and their sons lived at Thunderbird Circle housed enough Nepali-speaking people to shatter the myth about Boulder’s monochromatic personality. The other Nepalis resented people like Ram and her: the Bhutanese refugees who had decided to uproot themselves from Denver, where they were originally settled by America, to Boulder for better opportunities. Hated almost as much as the refugees were the Diversity Lottery winners from Nepal. Then came the professionals—diligent graduates of American universities, working harder still to climb the immigrant ladder one visa status at a time—who maintained a safe distance from the first two categories, guided in no small part by a mixture of scorn and envy. A handful of South Asian students with the resources to afford the state university’s private-school-like fees or the brains to lend themselves to the school’s teaching-assistant workforce comprised the remaining residents. Rumor had it that the two couples sharing the one-bedroom in 208 were illegal.

  Bhagwati waved at the allegedly illegal wives sunning themselves in the courtyard and bolted for the mailbox before they could approach her with a question about her sons’ braces, which were paid for by some NGO. Today was the last day she needed to be reminded how lucky her family was for having so many things done for them by America. In the last few weeks, the tone of the letters from Chase and Citi had grown especially aggressive, so Bhagwati decided against opening her mail.

  In 213, sprawled on the flowery bed sheet that covered the carpet was a headphone-bedecked Ram repeating, “Thank you for calling Doe-mino’s. How may I help you?” over and over again. When he noticed her, he removed his headphones and smiled.

  “Got the Doe-mino’s job,” he said in halting English, and then, moving to the comfort of Nepali, he added, “I am practicing how to answer the phone.”

  “That’s nice.” Bhagwati faked enthusiasm. “At least one of us will be working.”

  “You’re back early,” Ram said. “Did you take a half day?”

  “No, I quit,” Bhagwati lied.

  Ram was quiet.

  “It was getting too much. The man had begun touching me.”

  “What will you do when you get back from India?”

  “Look for a new job—something that requires more qualification than the kind of jobs illegals do.”

  “A hotel?” Ram asked. “Front desk?”

  “Reservations, perhaps. No standing up required. When do you start?”

  “This afternoon. ‘Thank you for calling Doe-mino’s. How may I help you?’”

  “That’s fine. Now change the ‘doe’ to ‘da.’ It’s not Doe-mino’s but Da-minos.”

  “Da-da-da,” Ram repeated. “I’ll have to end practice soon. Aatish will make fun of me if he hears.”

  “You should tell Aatish you’re doing it all for him and Virochan. You didn’t have the good fortune to go to school in America the way they do.”

  “I’ll stop now. Will you join me to pray before I head to Doe-mino’s?”

  How ironic it was that her husband, an untouchable, the lowest of the low castes, an upsetting by-product of the heinous system that her ancestors had helped create and propagate, should be so full of piety. He knew the shlokas, memorized elliptical Sanskrit mantras, read the Gita, and understood what festival was celebrated for what reason. He was combative when she, a Brahmin, dismissed Hinduism’s many superstitions, made her analyze and reanalyze these beliefs, and furnished her with the scientific reasoning behind them, which she grudgingly acknowledged. And yet, he could never become a priest. He’d never be allowed near the altar of most Hindus. He was a casualty of Hinduism who had chosen not to be a victim. An untouchable who had no shame about his low caste as much as he did of robbing his Baahun wife of hers on account of her marriage to him. A bigger Hindu, a better Hindu, than she or anyone she knew. Ram Bahadur Damaai—whose kind the Christian missionaries had been targeting for centuries and whose family had stood firm in their devotion to Hinduism, naming their child after a Hindu god; Ram Bahadur Damaai—of the tailor caste, the father of her half-caste children who would, thankfully, not be taunted in this country for carrying in their bloodline accusations of incest and consanguinity; Ram Bahadur Damaai—responsible for the biggest blemish anyone had brought on her family, for belonging to a family of tailors, of alterers and cutters, for altering family dynamics in a way that could never be unaltered, for ripping grandmother from granddaughter in a way that could never be re-hemmed; Ram Bahadur Damaai—who gave her two sons in whose DNA were Damaai blood and Brahmin blood, one infiltrating another, poisoning another, the two sons her grandmother would never touch, whose presence would desecrate her ancestral house; Ram Bahadur Damaai—the untouchable kicked out of Bhutan along with Brahmins, Chettris, and Newaars, the man for whom she had given it all up and never regretted it—was a better human being than any of her family members would ever be.

  And as her husband stood in front of the makeshift altar—a shelf in their closet on whose surface sat a motley arrangement of colorful gods and goddesses—sonorously reciting the Gayatri Mantra, the Hanuman Chalisa, and the Ganesha Mantra, chants coined by the very Brahmins who had determined his legacy and the identity of his sons and grandsons—Bhagwati Neupaney Damaai, with a bell oscillating in frenzy in one hand, prayed the hardest she had in her thirty-seven years. For a long period she had put off thinking about the enormity of the impending reunion, but it was here now. She’d be seeing her grandmother after eighteen years—for the first time since the elopement—and she needed to fortify herself with all the prayers of all the religions in the world.

  •

  The love of Agastaya’s life hardly fulfilled the requirements that an ideal match was expected to satisfy. First, the person he desired to spend the rest of his life with wasn’t a Brahmin—not the upper-echelon Upadhyay Baahun, nor belonging to the lower orders. Second, as the first son and grandson of the Neupaney family, Agastaya, it was understood, would marry a Nepali, no matter from which side of the border. Nicky, even after all these years together, was still prone to Nepal-Naples/Nepali-Napolean malapropisms and was easily the most American American Agastaya had come across. And third, it was important that whomever Agastaya intended to bring into his clan be from a prestigious, well-known family. Nicky belonged to a broken one from rural Ohio, a descendant of a line of rednecks who could barely trace their ancestry beyond two generations and among whom the divorce rate hovered precariously close to one hundred percent. A less important requisite that the freckled, pale, and skinny Nicky fulfilled overwhelmingly was the fairness criterion.

  Despite being from his family and being witness to what his sister’s inter-caste marriage had done to it, Agastaya was sure that most of the issues that disqualified Nicky from being the perfect life-mate could be worked around. In the face of the big problem, this insurmountable problem, the mother of all problems, Nicky’s race, nationality, and questionable family background were hardly worth losing sleep over. No one in the family knew about Nicky. No one among the Neupaneys knew that Agastaya was in a relationship. Registered Nurse Nicholas Zachary Wells, you see, was a man, and the man had just threatened his boyfriend with the effective termination of their relationship if
they didn’t somehow adopt a baby soon and if his own concealment from Agastaya’s world continued. That Nicky should choose to drop the dual ultimatum five minutes before Agastaya was to leave for the airport was a quintessential Nicky trait. In the three years that they had been together, Agastaya had noticed with growing awe his lover’s scheming skills evolve and expand. The silent treatment hadn’t yet begun. It would once they neared the airport.

  “I’ve never been in a relationship where I was hidden for so long,” Nicky said, getting into the waiting cab. “I feel like the other man. Even Mormon Rob’s crazy family knew I existed.”

  “It’s just my grandmother’s birthday, Nicky. Even if you were to go to the party, it’d be boring.”

  “We can’t even fly together.”

  “We will fly together when we return. And before that, we shall see the Taj Mahal. Doesn’t that get you excited?”

  “I’m not sure the stupid king who built the Taj Mahal would have built it had he had to keep his wife hidden from everyone.”

  The Indian cabbie, while making a turn, stole a furtive glance at them in the rearview mirror. “Indian?” he asked.

  “Napolean-Indian,” Nicky answered for Agastaya and bitterly laughed.

  The driver nodded, as though he comprehended the frustration behind the hyphen. The spirited shaking of his head could have convinced anyone that the driver had long been a willing audience to Agastaya’s many rants on the unfairness of having to stress his nationality every time he mentioned his ethnicity.

  To leave New York was to leave an identity behind. And Agastaya had many identities. In Gangtok, he was the pressured orphan grandson of a woman who considered her other grandson long dead. In Pondicherry, he was the medical student proving that his belonging to Sikkim—a state still favored by the education god, for she endowed on its residents one precious medical-school seat after another—wasn’t the only reason he had found his way into the prestigious Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research. In New York, he was the high-flying oncologist in a clandestine three-year relationship with a nurse who he sometimes suspected had gossiped about their affair with other nurses. Shedding one cloak and donning another as he traveled from place to place was second nature to Agastaya. He was now mentally preparing himself to give up his New York self for several days—at least until Nicky joined him in Delhi after his grandmother’s Chaurasi. He hated the compulsion to be that supple.

  “What are you mostly looking forward to?” Nicky asked, his mood lightened by the taxi driver’s deep understanding of Agastaya’s Napolean-Indian existence.

  “Eating barely edible oranges on the terrace.”

  “And I thought you’d say you’d enjoy spending time with the family.”

  “It’s family. You can’t do with them, and you can’t do without them.”

  “What about the nephews?”

  “You know I love kids as much as I love snakes. Bhagwati isn’t bringing her sons.”

  “You also hated animals, but once we got Cauffield, you liked him. I now think he likes you better than he likes me.”

  Agastaya was nervous about where this conversation was meandering. He’d have to nip the topic before tempers flared, although he was thankful that his boyfriend had decided to temporarily drop his favorite issue of being nonexistent to Agastaya’s family.

  “What will you do while I am gone?”

  “Oh, you know, cheat on you, foolito,” Nicky said. “Go to Splash, pick up a hot Brazilian who possibly wants children.”

  “We’ve talked about that.”

  “Your stupid grandmother doesn’t know about me. Okay. I can’t attend her stupid eighty-fourth birthday—I can accept that. Even your stupid siblings don’t know about me—I can live with that. I can’t upload a harmless picture of us on Facebook—I haven’t complained about it. I’ve one desire, one burning desire, and I can’t even have that?”

  “I’ve told you time and again that we aren’t adopting kids not because I don’t want anybody to know about us but because I can’t stand them.”

  “You couldn’t stand dogs, either.”

  “Yes, had I not liked Cauffield, we had the option to return him. We can’t do that with a child.”

  “Think about it. Spend time with your hundred different cousins and their children. You’ll have a different opinion.”

  “I don’t want a different opinion. The kid will grow up with no mother. I grew up without one. I hated it. It was embarrassing.”

  “You also grew up without a father.”

  “Yes, it sucked, and you know it.”

  “You grew up in a different culture than our child will. Sikkim and New York are different places.”

  “Yes, let’s call attention to the cultural differences between us, as if your friends don’t do that enough.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Of course, you didn’t.”

  This should have been a ride full of chitchat, of bittersweet good-byes, of plans for Agastaya’s thirty-fourth birthday in the palaces of Udaipur, of excited last-minute changes to the itinerary they had meticulously planned for after Nicky joined Agastaya in Delhi in a week. It’d be Nicky’s first visit to India. Agastaya hoped that his boyfriend would gain a deeper sense of where he came from out of this tour. Maybe Nicky wouldn’t be so upset anymore when Agastaya reprimanded him for never finishing anything on his plate. Nicky would perhaps be more understanding of why Agastaya was just not comfortable holding hands in public. All these, however, were trivial issues. If Nicky didn’t bounce back and forth between the very private nature of their relationship and the desire to start a family, Agastaya would gladly settle for a lifetime of his lover’s letting half his $33 carbonara go to waste. He’d even be swayed to give Nicky a peck in a semi-deserted alley.

  Nicky’s paternal instinct, latent all the while Agastaya and he had been together, had suddenly surfaced since one of his many old lovers adopted a Belarusian boy. A few months before, when Nicky volunteered to babysit the child, Agastaya had been forced to spend a Saturday night in the toddler’s sniveling company, and he’d found in the baby’s abundant demands, cries, and screams a reiteration of everything he disliked in children. With children in the picture, your life was no longer your own.

  “You could babysit Anthony’s child all you want with me gone,” Agastaya said in a spirit of generosity, although he’d have preferred for Nicky to stay far, far away from father and son.

  “I’ll see him and Anthony Junior the day after,” Nicky said. “It’s Tony’s twenty-ninth birthday and Tony-the-Second’s third. How cute is it that they have the same birthday?”

  “You didn’t tell me anything about that.”

  “I would if the talk about the child’s cuteness didn’t make your eyes go glazy.”

  After all the words Agastaya had minced, the concerns he didn’t voice, and his effort at civility, he and Nicky were back to where they’d started.

  “How about we talk about the child once we get back?” Agastaya asked, compensating for the insincerity of his intentions with a softening of the voice that he found pathetic.

  “That’s fine, but promise me you’ll be less cynical of kids.”

  “I’ll try, but wouldn’t I be lying to you if I said I’d do that? You know I’m incapable of feeling that way.”

  Once their car reached the Triborough Bridge and they found the Manhattan skyline loom imposingly beside them, they both fell quiet. During their initial dates, they had often walked the Brooklyn Bridge and stood in silence, hand in hand, staring in wonder at the majesty of the city they called home. They hadn’t needed words, which could only diminish those moments. New York had the capability to render them both mute, as it did right now in its sun-setting glory, and sights such as this one made Agastaya feel that his problems were insignificant, that even if the car crashed and he died, the city would go on, the world would go on, life would go on. It was so easy to embrace the notion that
difficult times would pass, just as everything did, when you were overcome by such emotion. Impermanence was a beautiful thing.

  “I’ll miss you,” Nicky said, hugging him, when the buildings became dots behind them. “I’ll miss your stinky socks and the disgusting hair on your back.”

  “I’ll miss you, too,” Agastaya replied, genuinely moved. “I’ll miss your abs and the awesome hair on your head.”

  “I’m thinking of cutting it.”

  “Don’t. For me.”

  “I’ve already done so many things for you. I think it’s time my needs took priority.”

  “You’re right—you should do what you want,” Agastaya said with a sigh, trying to distract his irritation by looking at the puffy cheeks in the pictures of Hanuman, the monkey god, that adorned the car’s dashboard.

  “I also don’t have to take orders from you.”

  “You don’t, and I don’t expect you to.” Noting that his tone, too, had mimicked Nicky’s, Agastaya added, “You’d look good no matter how you wear your hair. You’d look good bald.”

  “That’s what Anthony used to say.”

  Feeling his temper escalate, Agastaya pointed at the dashboard and asked Nicky, “Are my cheeks bigger than Hanuman’s?”

  “They probably will be in India. All that greasy food—ew. Who is this fellow, anyway?”

  “Our monkey god.”

  “With a face like that, I hope to God he found his goddess.”

  “He didn’t. He was a Brahmacharya.” Agastaya stopped himself before the grind of explanation pushed him into dangerous territory—quagmires that he had until now managed to pull himself out of with minuscule success.

  “Oh, now I am supposed to understand what that means?”

  “He was a bachelor.” It was just Agastaya’s luck that his attempt at humor should somehow come down to nuptials and commitment.

  “Like we will be, thanks to your principle that I should be hidden under your bed forever,” Nicky said.

  In response, Agastaya verified that his passport was in the laptop case. A mixture of guilt and relief enveloped him as they pulled up outside Terminal 1 at JFK. Nicky had been insufferable the last few hours, and the idea of a week with his grandmother and siblings didn’t seem as unpleasant as it had yesterday. Agastaya would shrug off taunts about being past his prime, brave judgment on his singlehood, and fake curiosity in matches that would never come to fruition. After the few hours of hell he had been through with Nicky, he’d breeze through them all.