She needed to persuade the politician to scrap his plans of a seven-story construction and stick to just six floors. The scoundrel had told her that his building would be a hotel, which explained the rows of blue-tiled bathrooms that faced her garden. Already, the lower floors had begun putting up customers. On the terrace, the politician-cum-hotelier said with a flourish, patrons could enjoy a continental breakfast while watching the Kanchendzonga. Chitralekha had no objection to the hotel plan in theory. She may have had an issue with noisy Bengali tourists, but Prasanti and her foul mouth would take good care of them. What she needed was a rectification to the blueprint obstructing her view of the mountain—and that meant cutting the building plans to a smaller size.
Manasa had gone back to bed, mumbling in one sentence something about jet lag, an aching head, and dizziness. She had, true to her word, assigned to Prasanti a laundry list of chores to finish by the end of the day. As peacemaker, Chitralekha had let Manasa know that she’d keep Prasanti busy the entire evening, and it hadn’t been a lie. Employing her servant to stop the politician from going beyond six stories was the last resort. When she had complained to the chief minister about his sycophant subordinate’s insolence, Subba firmly told Chitralekha that it was too small a tiff for him to get involved in. She’d have to fight some of her own battles, he said.
Just a few days before, Agastaya had laughed at Chitralekha when she complained on the phone about the grotesque new construction. He said that she, who wasn’t big on beauty, wanted to create trouble because she had nothing better to do. Yes, she didn’t care for vases with flowers, Buddha paraphernalia on the walls, trophies in the living-room showcase, and paneling the walls with wood, but this mountain, the Kanchendzonga, was her god. It wasn’t something she had picked up from the Buddhists of Sikkim. She just felt more at peace with the mountain than she did at temples or pujas. She had spent so many mornings eating oranges on the terrace and puffing on her beedi, watching the mountain change hue, so many evenings watching the sun disappear behind it. To have a politician encroach on this sacrament just because he wanted a hotel to house the very tourists who wouldn’t let go of Gorkhaland, her natal home, and on account of whom her people in Kalimpong and Darjeeling were suffering, was preposterous. She had no intention of forgoing her morning ritual of praying to the mountain and replacing it with scenes of half-clothed Bengali tourists doing their ablutions.
“Go do your thing.” Chitralekha muttered encouragement to Prasanti. “Go show them what you do when you’re unhappy.”
People from the plains would know better than to invite the curse of a eunuch. Prasanti had already dressed up in a loud yellow sari, anointed herself with red lipstick, dabbed red makeup on her cheeks, and even acquired a red drum. She’d knock at every door in the hotel, sing, clap, dance, create a rumpus, undress herself if need be, try undressing those men who refused to oblige, but she wouldn’t come back until the patrons had parted with satisfactory amounts of cash.
Chitralekha wished she could witness the scene. She wished she could see the terror unleashed by her half-sex servant on the people whose money would finance the seventh floor of the hotel. How she wished she, too, could join Prasanti in the extortion. Prasanti wouldn’t disappoint. She was a great bully.
Chitralekha knew she had vanquished her opponent when her servant returned with Rs. 1,051. Soon the phone would ring, and the politician would offer a compromise: he’d give up the idea of the seventh floor if Prasanti stayed away from his hotel for life. Chitralekha would dither a little before finally agreeing.
Questions and Answers
Agastaya maintained that no time in Gangtok was quite as beautiful as October. The skies cleared, the rains retreated, and the clouds were too scant for the mountain range to disappear behind after a few hours of visibility. The sun shone with all its might, as if knowing that it would be frail and sickly once November set in. The temperature was just right—warm with a hint of chill in the evenings. October was festival time. When the Nepali and Gregorian calendars decided to cooperate, Dashain mostly took place in the month. Every so often, Dashain and Tihaar both occurred in October. This was one such year. Dashain had gone, but it was Day One of Tihaar, the Nepali Diwali, which shared some of its characteristics with the Indian festival of lights, while various features, such as the worship of crows and dogs, were unique to the Nepali-speaking Hindu world. Today was Kaag Puja, to celebrate which offerings were set aside in the sun for crows to feast on. Pigeons, pheasants, and sparrows, too, basked in reflected reverence and found easy morsels of food on building terraces. The Kaag Puja wasn’t as resplendent as the Kukkur Puja following it, during which such affection was showered on dogs. Even stray dogs, much maligned and an absolute menace to Gangtok, were garlanded and their foreheads smeared with tika.
When his cab approached the vicinity of Gangtok town, Agastaya didn’t spot any gargantuan display of festivity—no marigold-garlanded windows, no colorful lights, and no fireworks. He asked Bhagwati if she remembered past Tihaar celebrations being this muted. Bhagwati muttered that everything seemed subdued probably because it wasn’t dark yet. The driver, whose interjections every time he gathered what his English-speaking passengers were talking about Agastaya was now used to, explained that the more ostentatious celebrations would begin the next day.
For now, Gangtok was trapped at a crossroads—convalescing from Dashain and fastening its seatbelt for Tihaar.
Agastaya wondered aloud if the driver would help them with the luggage up the hundreds of stairs they’d have to tackle to reach the house. The driver responded by making a turn where the stairs used to be and slowly going uphill.
“Didn’t you know about this?” he asked, looking back at Agastaya, who was nervous about the vehicle skidding. Neither Bhagwati nor Agastaya had seen the new driveway leading to the house.
“Aamaa did tell me about it,” Agastaya said, bowled over by the narrow path and the genius with which his grandmother had engineered both the design and execution. “She mentioned it a million times, and yet I forgot.”
“It’s one of her big stories, isn’t it?” Bhagwati said. “It’s her favorite topic when we make awkward conversation on the phone.”
“How she managed to do it, I am still to understand. I am impressed. Do you remember those stairs?”
“Yes, I first talked to Ram on them. Eighteen years later, I am in a different Gangtok and belong to a house that has its own driveway.”
“The legality of which is questionable.”
“As with everything else on Aamaa’s list of accomplishments,” Bhagwati said, following Agastaya out of the car.
Prasanti was toweling her hair when they entered the house.
“Not a day older than when you left,” she said to Bhagwati. “A lot older than I remember you,” she said to Agastaya.
“I can’t believe I’m actually seeing you again,” Bhagwati said. “Are the others here?”
“Yes.” Prasanti giggled. “Yes and no.”
“What do you mean?” Agastaya towed the bags in.
“Only Manasa came.” Prasanti laughed. She didn’t help Agastaya with the luggage. “The oldest-looking of the bunch came without her husband. Come sit. Aamaa has gone for a meeting.”
“She can still work in her old age?” Agastaya said.
“The meeting is with a minister,” Prasanti proudly informed them.
“Have you put on weight, Prasanti?” Bhagwati asked.
“Yes, I look better,” Prasanti replied.
Manasa’s entrance lent wings to the servant’s feet, and she vanished into the kitchen.
“What was that?” Agastaya asked, amused.
“She’s been given a lot to do—only half of her chores are complete,” said Manasa. “Aamaa is out for a meeting.”
“I’d be lying if I said I expected her to stay home to welcome us,” Agastaya said. “We heard it was with a minister.”
“I don’t think so.” Manasa sat down on one o
f the sofas around the coffee table. “Whom did you hear it from?”
He pointed toward the kitchen and laughed.
“You should know better than to believe her. She’s become even more disrespectful and still does nothing around the house.”
“We could sense that,” Bhagwati said. “She didn’t help us with the luggage at all.”
“At least she was here when you arrived. She ran away when I came. Perhaps a good thing because I’d have lost my temper at her incompetence. How was your flight?”
“Average,” Agastaya said. “The way flights are.”
Comments on weight gained and receded hairlines should have been bandied around with gusto, but they weren’t. Agastaya wished someone would remark on his balding pate. That would clear the path to talking about Manasa’s appearance. The abundance of lines on her face was everything graceful aging was not.
Manasa punctured an uncomfortable silence with a call to Prasanti. “Prasanti, where’s the tea?”
“I have two hands, not seven, condo,” Prasanti replied. “And of the two, one is swollen because of all the work you made me do.”
Manasa and Bhagwati chuckled.
“See? I make you laugh even when I work!” Prasanti shouted.
“Don’t force me to throw some more clothes at you to wash,” Manasa said, and then she narrated the story of the bed sheet to her siblings. “Aamaa is like a stubborn child. I find it absurd that she treats the stupid factory in Kalimpong like it’s a palace when she doesn’t even live in it. This house is filthy.”
“It’s always her way of doing things—what’s new there?” Agastaya said. “If she didn’t like it, she’d let us all know.”
“You shouldn’t tolerate that,” Manasa said. “She needs to be put in her place.”
“Too much drama,” Bhagwati said.
Prasanti sashayed in, bearing three cups of tea.
“I don’t take any sugar,” Agastaya grunted.
“I can’t make another cup,” Prasanti replied, matching him in gruffness.
“Prasanti, go make another one,” Manasa said. “And learn some manners.”
“She’s become even more terrible,” Bhagwati observed.
“Somebody needs to beat her until she cries,” Manasa said. “Since when did you become so foreigner-like, Agastaya? No sugar in the tea, huh?”
“It’s been a number of years. No sugar for me.”
Yet another awkward silence was brewing. It was Agastaya’s turn to terminate it. “I am still jet-lagged, so I’ll sleep,” he said.
Agastaya had escaped to his old room from the first major meeting without having to skirt around any talk of marriage. Bhagwati had made an attempt in the car, but, to give her credit, she’d stopped immediately after he made it known that he wasn’t keen on discussing the topic. His sister had clearly come with a desire to make him bare his soul. She hadn’t succeeded, just as he had been a failure at getting her to talk. How complicated adulthood was. It had so many dangerous curves, so many restricted areas that, if trespassed, the adults could find themselves squashed in. Had they been children, they’d have probably called each other names, fought and made up a dozen times throughout their journey to Gangtok. As adults, they could barely muster enough courage to ask questions that mattered.
What would it be like to bring Nicky into the middle of all this? People, especially women, loved the man. Would he become as big a hit with his grandmother and sisters as he was with the ladies of New York? Were Nicky to be here, would people suspect something was going on between the two of them? Agastaya was erudite, intelligent-looking, humorless—a man who would look like a doctor even if he decided to wear a jumpsuit and carry a purse. The glasses, the hairline, the graying around the temples of the hair that still remained lent to his persona a kind of sexlessness—guardian-like, avuncular. It surprised strangers when Agastaya, just to see their reaction, declared that he liked men—not because he was the last thing a stereotypical homosexual looked and acted like, but because he was one of those people about whom no one thought sexually. Nicky often said that he felt as if he was dating an older brother. Chances were that if Nicky, who was good-looking in a rugged, manly way, did accompany Agastaya here, no one would guess they were lovers—they were just too odd a couple to arouse people’s suspicions.
How brave the eunuch servant was to live life on her terms. She was her sexuality, reveled in her in-betweenness, lusted openly, lived unapologetically. Gender, sex, sexuality—they meant nothing to her. How fortunate she was to be so transparently, so blatantly, unmistakably gay. Would he have had it easier were he more like her and less like himself? Would a lisp have helped? A prettier face? Fuller lips? Longer hair? Had he deliberately toned down any flamboyance? Was he ever loud? How many aspects of his personality were repressed? Did the repression double up now that he was home? Was Hanuman, the Brahmacharya god, like him a homosexual? Did the god, too, try his best to stir longings in himself for women? Was Dr. Agastaya Neupaney a hypocrite? Did his homosexuality have something to do with the unisexual nature of his name? If the fourth a in Agastaya—seldom gender neutral, almost always feminine—didn’t trail him, would he have become a different person?
He was a successful doctor who lectured at NYU while Prasanti was an uneducated servant with nothing to her name. He had traveled the world while Prasanti had never been on a plane. He was super-specialized while Prasanti could barely do the dishes right. He was annihilating tumors while Prasanti had no role to play outside her employer’s house. Yet Prasanti was a superior human being. She loved who she was, wouldn’t change how she had been made, didn’t care about how she was perceived. When he became like this eunuch servant—as sure of himself as she was of herself, as impenitent, as devoid of hangups—he’d consider himself a human her equal. Until then, he’d live the way he had always done—cautiously masked, afraid of being discovered, detached from reflections that would keep him up at nights. At least the jet lag quieted his thoughts and was quickly putting him to sleep. If only every night were as simple.
•
Bhagwati had a story to set straight. The claustrophobia that she had experienced in the house as a teenager now returned in waves. She felt suffocated the minute she stepped into the sitting room, bright and airy as it was. She guaranteed herself, as she tried swallowing the nausea building in her, that this feeling of incarceration would only increase once Aamaa came into the picture.
This room was where it had all started. Here was where, on a rainy May afternoon, after a hailstorm had cloaked Gangtok in white, Bhagwati first cast eyes on Ram Bahadur Damaai, the man who would later be her husband. He had come to talk to Aamaa on an assignment for some obscure Nepali newspaper in Bhutan. It had a devoted underground readership, he said to Chitralekha.
Ram asked Aamaa pointed questions about her wealth, of which Chitralekha was reticent to talk; about her social obligations, of which she coined apocryphal details; of her education, the lack of which she proudly proclaimed and the importance of which she dismissed; and about Nepalis in Bhutan, the indifference to whose plight she could barely mask. At that point, Bhagwati would have never guessed that she’d spend the rest of her life with this sanctimonious journalist.
Once the interview was over, and he had sufficiently impressed Aamaa for her to deign to ask his name, he replied, “Ram Bahadur.”
Bhagwati, who didn’t understand why she chose to linger, tried hard not to laugh at the antiquated name. It was a name that belonged to her parents’ days. Her generation was full of lesser-known variations of well-known gods—names like Bhagwati, Manasa, Agastaya, and Ruthwa. Ram, Lakshman, Sita, and Shiva were too ancient to belong in her age group.
“Ram Bahadur what?” Aamaa had asked.
“Ram Bahadur Damaai.” He was unflappable.
“Such a nice, long, pointed nose on such a fair face—you look as good as a Brahmin,” said Aamaa. It was a remark that only Aamaa could get away with. Aamaa also needed a lesson that
her idea of beauty—the long, pointed, aquiline nose and a forehead the size of Palzor Stadium that she spoke of so gushingly—had lost favor among Bhagwati’s generation. No one wanted a nose too prominent these days.
“What difference does it make?” Ram had defensively asked.
“None in this day and age,” Chitralekha said, but she rose without waiting for the tea that Prasanti had been asked to serve.
Ram showed himself out after informing Chitralekha that the piece on her would be out in the next issue and that he had various other important people to interview. He added with an acerbic smile that he was sorry he couldn’t stay for tea.
Once her grandmother withdrew to her office, Bhagwati ran out of the house, out the gate, and to the stairs that led to the main road. She slipped twice on the melting hailstones.
“Wait, wait!” she shouted.
Ram turned.
“I am sorry she behaved that way,” Bhagwati said, out of breath.
Ram looked taken aback. “Who?”
“My grandmother—what she said about you looking like my caste.”
“You don’t have any reason to be sorry for that,” Ram said. “A lot of people mistake me for a Brahmin.”
“It must make you angry. Brahmins are ugly.”
“You aren’t.” His candor surprised her less than hers did.
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