Land Where I Flee

by Prajwal Parajuly

  “Good, you have a thousand, then. Okay, now, go.”

  “Such a rich woman’s granddaughter being so stingy,” the driver muttered under his breath. He closed the trunk with all his might, which made the tiny car shudder, then got into the cab and drove away.

  “Bring your luggage up to your old room,” Chitralekha said.

  “I don’t want to sleep there,” Manasa replied belligerently. “I am not carrying three suitcases up those stairs. I am sleeping in the guest room.”

  An argument was guaranteed when Manasa requested that Chitralekha come downstairs, and Manasa wasn’t in a mood to quarrel the moment she set foot in the house. She employed reason.

  “I am jet-lagged,” she said. “I want to lie down as we talk. There’s not enough sun to stay outside on the terrace. Come to the room.”

  “No, no, it’s warm here. Come up. I have some oranges.”

  “Can’t you bring the oranges down? And can’t you wait at least until November before eating them? Are they even sweet?”

  “The sun is good for my bones. Just come up.”

  “Your bones don’t need to be any better than they are at eight-three.” Manasa’s forehead pleated into a frown. “I want to lie down.”

  “I have a mattress up here,” Chitralekha said, and then improvised, “for you.”

  Manasa bore her grandmother’s lie with gritted teeth and said, before huffing in, “Not coming to the terrace. I have flown all the way from London, and we’ve begun fighting even before I am inside the house.”

  The house hadn’t changed much since she was there six months before. The four red sofas in the sitting room were thirty-five years old—about as old as Manasa. The carpets covering the sofas, a Himalayan decorative idiosyncrasy that Manasa never quite understood, were snow-lion-patterned and shapeless. A map of Sikkim before it became a part of India adorned one wall. A map of India before Sikkim became a part of it was on another.

  Manasa had asked her grandmother to wash the sheets in the guest room for her arrival, but, conscious of Chitralekha’s combined disregard for hygiene and for suggestions from others, Manasa was certain that the only difference between the current sheet and the one she had slept on during her last visit was an increase in the number of critters it accommodated.

  That was the problem with her grandmother—she had never been big on beauty and décor, which Manasa could forgive as long as hygiene, too, wasn’t somehow withdrawn from her list of priorities. The one building Aamaa lavished architects, designers, and redesigns on was not the house where she lived but the factory in Kalimpong where she claimed to have started her career as a businesswoman. Aamaa wasn’t going to do anything about her home. When Agastaya once teased his grandmother about being the least house-proud woman he knew, the old woman had casually remarked that she could have wasted her time beautifying the house while pushing the family to penury or invested her efforts making good money, the fruits of which her grandchildren enjoyed blowing on their exorbitant education. Agastaya had never questioned his grandmother’s lack of aesthetic expertise since then.

  Writhing at the animal patterns on the dusty brown sheet, Manasa took out her phone from her purse, hoping there would be no message from her husband. There wasn’t. She looked further.

  Yes, there, in a folder marked SAVED IMAGES on her phone, was a photo from April. In it, she smiled through her buckteeth, sitting on the same bed. The same sheet shrouded the bed. Were it some other house, Manasa would have understood that the sheet had been washed between then and now, but this was her grandmother’s home, where Aamaa lived with an indulged servant whose workload rivaled a queen’s. Manasa wasn’t going to sleep on the sheet. An arthropod, almost frozen with fear, dashed to safety when she dusted the bed.

  “Aamaa!” Manasa shouted, her voice loud enough to travel to the terrace. “Why is the sheet dirty?”

  Chitralekha didn’t answer.

  “Aamaa, I know you can hear me. Why is it dirty?”

  “It’s not dirty. Prasanti washed it last week.”

  “Sure, your pet has begun washing sheets, too?” Manasa stripped the bed. “I am glad she does more than paint her nails all day. This sheet is old and revolting.”

  “It isn’t old. We bought it three months ago for your arrival.”

  “How can you lie? I took a picture on the bed when I was here last. It’s on my phone. These stupid horse patterns on the sheet are the same.”

  “Stop playing tricks on me. Show me the picture.”

  Manasa stormed up the staircase, registering that the action as well as the stairs were a poor imitation of what she saw on Star Plus family soaps.

  “Here.” She shoved her BlackBerry in front of Aamaa’s face. “Look at it.”

  “Well, at least you’re upstairs.” Chitralekha smiled. “At least I didn’t have to force my dying feet down the stairs.”

  “So, you didn’t want to see the picture at all? It was just a ruse to get me up here?”

  “Come sit.” Chitralekha pointed to a stool. “Eat an orange.”

  “I don’t feel like eating. First get the room in order.”

  “Wait for Prasanti to come, and please treat her well. Where’s jwaai?”

  “He’s in Kathmandu with your other son-in-law—the one who’s a hundred and fifty years old. I told them not to come. Matter finished. No more questions.”

  Chitralekha meticulously removed the fiber from an orange slice and handed it to her granddaughter.

  “Here, eat this,” she said.

  “You’re so manipulative. I don’t want a disgusting October orange.”

  “I shouldn’t have been. I am sure we’d have come to enjoy these riches had I not been manipulative.”

  “What’s the point of all these riches when you make your grandchildren sleep on dirty sheets? Where’s Prasanti?”

  “On my head.” Chitralekha let out a cackle.

  “No, where is she? I’m serious. I’m going to make that one work today.”

  “She’s pregnant.” Chitralekha giggled hysterically.

  “Okay, where is she?”

  “She’s dead.” Chitralekha laughed so hard that she spat out her half-eaten slice of orange.

  “I’m happy you’re having so much fun. Come downstairs if you want to talk to me.”

  Manasa had to admit that the bond she shared with Chitralekha had evolved differently over the years from her grandmother’s relationship with the other siblings. After Bhagwati ran off with a Damaai, a Bhutanese refugee whose economic instability perfectly complemented his low caste, the pressure to have an arranged marriage with a Brahmin—an Upadhyay, a Category One Baahun, at that—fell on Manasa. When a wealthy Kathmandu family asked for her hand for their Cambridge-educated son in London, Manasa dutifully complied.

  She had saved her family, rescued it from the swamp that her sister’s elopement had dragged it into, and yet her grandmother had looked upon this martyrdom as if it was simply a responsibility Manasa was expected to fulfill. Far from giving credit, Chitralekha continued insinuating that Manasa could have dissuaded Bhagwati from running away after all.

  In no time, Manasa’s marital responsibilities had increased, and the realization hit her—as she wiped off for the fifth time in twenty minutes a stream of daal coming down Bua’s face—that she was nothing more than a glorified caretaker of her corroding father-in-law. Had Aamaa not taken it upon herself to search for her a suitable groom from a suitable caste, of a suitable class and belonging to a suitable region, Manasa’s life wouldn’t have come down to this. In between giving up her career and looking after her father-in-law, Manasa had decided that every wrinkle in her cheeks and every line on her forehead was a direct result of Aamaa. And, in words and actions, the granddaughter didn’t let go of a single opportunity to remind her grandmother of that.

  “I have gossip!” Aamaa shouted from behind her. “It will make you laugh harder than I did when I saw your silly face.”

  “Gossip wit
h Prasanti—your only grandchild,” Manasa answered, wishing, for the first time, that Himal were here; it would have been a lot easier to drum some sense into Aamaa’s head had he been around.

  “Yes, do what you did during that Dashain,” Chitralekha said in resignation. “Run away from everything. Sulk. Cry. Make my birthday a rotten affair.”

  Chitralekha had a point. Manasa had made a total nuisance of herself the first festival after her marriage. Her husband to this day brought up her inconsiderate behavior toward her grandmother when he needed ammunition in an argument that was hopelessly going her way. When Himal was in Gangtok, Chitralekha was forced to morph into a docile deer and become cordial, even agreeable. Twisted as this reverence for one’s son-in-law and grandson-in-law (it, of course, didn’t extend to the daughters-in-law) in their community was, it had worked in Manasa’s favor on her first visit home as a married woman.

  Part of Chitralekha’s metamorphosis could be attributed to her desperate desire to be seen as classy by someone from a clan as old as her son-in-law’s. Without Himal’s presence, it would be impossible to repeat what Manasa had done that Dashain. On the day of Tika—the holiest of holy days, which her grandmother had been eagerly looking forward to because it was the first Dashain during which she’d apply on her beloved grandson-in-law’s forehead grains of uncooked rice blended with a yogurt-based pink paste, blessing him and being blessed in return—Manasa proudly declared to Chitralekha that she was on her period.

  “So, you can’t participate in any of the functions,” Chitralekha had sadly said. “No tika for you, and it’s your first Dashain after marriage.”

  “No, you will put tika on me,” Manasa said. “I am married into a different family now. No longer a Neupaney.”

  “But the period—no, I can’t do that. You’re impure.”

  Her ancestors banished their suffering women to the cowsheds so they wouldn’t desecrate the house with their vile touch. A version—less draconian but seemingly more rigid, given the day and age—of this practice still existed in her grandmother’s house, with the “sick” woman keeping to circumscribed areas, which excluded the kitchen and the altar. Supporters of the quasi-quarantine claimed that abstaining from kitchen duties, from religious rites, and from life itself was practiced to allow the women to rest, to recuperate. As teenagers, Manasa and Bhagwati had whined about the rules they were forced to adhere to during their periods. Sitting separately from everyone at dinner was humiliating—as though the cramps were not painful enough.

  “In my new family, a woman having her menses is considered even purer than a woman who’s not,” Manasa lied. “How often have I told you that I am especially hygienic when I am down? My family thinks the same way.”

  In this lack of purity and absence of godliness lay the answer to inflicting torture on her grandmother.

  “No, that’s your family,” Aamaa said. “This is mine. I’ll only offer tika to jwaai.”

  This was the best part. Aamaa wouldn’t forgo an opportunity to apply tika on Himal.

  “Who says you’ll put tika on him?” Manasa asked. “Who says you get to do that? You either apply tika on both of us or on neither of us.”

  “I understand you live abroad, but not during Tika, please,” Chitralekha pleaded. “It’s my first time offering tika to a son-in-law. I may not even be alive next year.”

  “Not your son-in-law but your grandson-in-law.” Manasa felt doubly evil for pointing out the difference in relationship.

  “It’s the same—all of you are my children as well as grandchildren,” Chitralekha had feebly said.

  But Manasa was unrelenting. She threatened she would slap her husband for no reason in full view of everybody if Chitralekha didn’t concede. Her grandmother, horrified as she may have been about having her beliefs toyed with and her festival desanctified, was forced to give in. The day Manasa left, she disclosed to Chitralekha that she had lied to her about the period.

  “It was just to give you a heart attack, to cause you the pain that you caused us girls when we were growing up,” Manasa said. “Now you know how we felt.”

  Yes, she had gone far, and she felt guilty about having done what she did to a barely educated old woman, more so when she saw the repulsion on Himal’s face as she narrated her victorious story to him on their way home. She had forced her grandmother, so set in her ways, to do what she had always been opposed to. It was a great triumph—one that she hoped to repeat but couldn’t because of Himal’s absence. When she had no person from whom to mask her monstrosity, Aamaa was a tough opponent.

  “See? I walked downstairs,” Chitralekha said as she sat on the bed whose sheet had been the object of so much rancor. “My bones feel like they will melt.”

  “You’re so generous—you’re Mother Teresa,” Manasa said as she unpacked.

  “What did you get for me?”

  “New sheets,” said Manasa.

  “Like this one,” Chitralekha added, patting the sheet that now lay in a heap at the bottom of the bed. “This is new.”

  “And you’re a good human being.”

  “I am better than Mother Teresa. At least I don’t convert my charitable cases into my religion.”

  “Is the driver home?” Manasa asked, wiping away the dust that had accumulated in the rickety closet.

  “One of the factory staffers has given birth,” Chitralekha said. “I think I should send some sweets to her family.”

  “Good. What a nice way for you to make up for not having bought your grandchildren any when they were growing up.”

  “So, will jwaai not make it to my Chaurasi?” Chitralekha said.

  “You’d better treat Bhagwati well.” Manasa and her grandmother had both become experts at non sequiturs. “She’s coming after so long. Not a word about castes. Where are the clean sheets? Is there anything in the house that’s not this filthy?”

  “Use the ones you brought for me.” Chitralekha laughed. “I am not the only one who lies. No sheets for me? No gift for me? Okay. I hope you brought something for Prasanti.”

  “Yes, a slap. In fact, I’ll give it to her now rather than later for running away when she was supposed to be helping with the luggage. And now I have to clean the closet myself.”

  “Look at you. You gave no trouble—not even as a teenager,” Chitralekha said, somewhat wistfully. “And now you’ve become a rebel. Marriage has turned you into an adolescent.”

  •

  The original plan was for Agastaya to meet Bhagwati at the Chicago airport and for them to take a flight together to Delhi. This solved many problems. Chicago was almost equidistant from New York and Denver. The direct-flight tickets from there were surprisingly cheaper than those from New York; a $150 difference didn’t mean much to Agastaya, but he was positive that Bhagwati wasn’t comfortable spending the extra amount. In addition, the savings were sufficient to deflect Bhagwati’s trip to his city. Her coming to New York would mean that Agastaya would have to change his entire life. Asking Nicky to spend a few nights at a friend’s place would give rise to a Mount Everest-size problem.

  Before long, the reality of spending eighteen hours on flights to Delhi and then to Bagdogra with a person he hadn’t seen for nearly two decades sank in, and a day prior to their scheduled departure, Agastaya, using a barely believable excuse of a work-related detour to Paris, hastily chalked up for himself a new itinerary. This ensured that he’d reach Bagdogra just an hour after Bhagwati, upon which they’d take a taxi to Gangtok together.

  Agastaya had talked with Nicky about paying for Bhagwati’s ticket to India. Nicky, as clueless about the functioning of his boyfriend’s family as he was about all things pragmatic, opined that Bhagwati might find the offer insulting. After discussing with Manasa the logistics of payment, it was decided that Agastaya would buy Bhagwati’s ticket online and not make a mention of the money. A few days after the purchase, he received a check in the mail from Bhagwati for $870.36, the receipt of which he never acknowledged to h
is sister and which he didn’t cash. Manasa later disclosed that Bhagwati had forced her to divulge the amount Agastaya had spent on her ticket. Bhagwati hadn’t yet brought up the issue of the check that didn’t get cashed.

  Agastaya had last seen Bhagwati eighteen years back. He should have met up with her at least a few times since she and the other Bhutanese refugees had been relocated to America two years before, but life had always intervened. When life came with a package called Nicky, it complicated meetings and reunions. Bhagwati had eloped at nineteen, and a fifteen-year-old Agastaya—acrimonious about his adolescence becoming even more tangled, now that Aamaa had one fewer person on whom to lavish her idea of affection/authority—decided he would have nothing to do with his sister for the rest of his life. Aamaa’s infuriation at his sister’s running away manifested itself in strange ways: phone calls to the grandchildren from the opposite sex found themselves mysteriously interrupted with coughs on the extension, a permanent embargo was placed on Bollywood movies, and tirades against lower castes increased in frequency as well as vehemence. Agastaya’s teenage self understood his sister’s fleeing as a betrayal of the family, a deed that changed everything in his life. He promised he’d never forgive Bhagwati.

  How different a teenager’s understanding of issues is from an adult’s. How quick and callous he had been to judge his sister. How easy it was to forgive her in light of the relationship of which he was now a part. The idea that an entire family should be so united in the denouncement of Bhagwati’s action—a scandal over one of its members being married to an untouchable—made him wonder just how much less palatable the notion of the son of the family putting off marriage plans with his boyfriend would be.

  He had tried to make amends with his sister, but long-distance phone calls and MSN Messenger chats couldn’t fairly convey the sentiments behind these apologies. Call-waiting beeps and smiley faces trivialized his repeated expressions of contrition, so much so that he was afraid that Bhagwati had begun doubting the sincerity behind them. Perhaps she suspected that he, too, had indiscretions now. Or maybe she just didn’t care—this was Bhagwati, after all. Only a certain kind of person, unmoored by repercussion, would stand up to a grandmother, a family, and a community like theirs.