“I know. That’s because I don’t look like a Brahmin.”
“And what do you look like?”
“I don’t know—a Punjabi?”
“Punjabis are hairy.”
“And tall.”
“Are you?”
“What?” Bhagwati said. “Hairy or tall?”
“You’re just tall.”
By the time they parted ways, she had offered to take him to the monasteries around town. It had been over two months since she completed her Class 12 board exams, and she was at that beautiful juncture in life where lazy day after lazy day stretched out in front of her. A number of her friends were preparing for entrance tests to engineering and medical schools, but Bhagwati had faith that the Sikkim quota and her grandmother’s connections would get her a good seat in a reputed college. She had been waking up the last few mornings not knowing what would occupy her day. The least she could do for this stranger Aamaa had humiliated was show him her town.
Ram declared that the Rumtek monastery, the pride of her state, was unkempt. The Ranka Monastery was better, but he didn’t feel as spiritual there as he did at the Paro Taktsang in his own country, he confided. The Enchey monastery wasn’t anything too special. To Bhagwati, all this was new. She had played tour guide to her mother’s family from Kathmandu, her grandmother’s clients from Kolkata, and a missionary couple from Belgium, and no one had belittled Gangtok’s beauty the way Ram had.
“Gangtok is nice, but it’s too unplanned,” Ram said, once they were on MG Marg. “You should see Thimpu and Paro.”
“I don’t want to.” Bhagwati was combative. “There’s beauty in the chaos of Gangtok. From what I hear about your capital, every house looks the same. Every street is a clone of another.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“Yes, it is. I like that the building up there looks like a matchbox, that another looks like a biscuit house from a Blyton book.”
“Never heard of those books,” Ram said.
“That’s because we in Sikkim read, unlike people in Bhutan.” Ram probably hadn’t read Enid Blyton because he hadn’t gone to a posh school as she had.
“Sorry if I offended you,” Ram said. “It’s just that I don’t care about monasteries. Take me to a temple.”
“Why? So you can compare our temples to yours and find ours lacking?”
“No, because our temples aren’t anything like yours. Ours are a bit of a joke.”
“Really?”
“Yes, so many Hindus and no temple anywhere as well funded as the poorest Buddhist monasteries,” Ram said, before informing her of the plight of her fellow Nepali-speaking people in the neighboring country. Bhagwati had never felt more ignorant in her life; she had never been guiltier of her charmed, apolitical existence.
For the temple visit, she’d wear a yellow kurta—it behooved her to look traditional. She’d perhaps even cover her head with the red chunni when she did her obeisance. For a millisecond, the idea of a sari was appealing, but it would be difficult to deal with the stairs to the Thakurbari temple. Also, wearing a sari would attract too much attention, and she needed to be discreet. Her grandmother assumed she’d be at the Community Library all day.
“You look like an actress,” Ram said with a laugh. He had been waiting for her outside the gate to the temple. Bhagwati knew she looked great. The whistles of passersby—louder, more aggressive, and more frequent today than any other day—were testament enough. Some lottery seller serenaded her with a new Bollywood song doing its rounds with the censor board.
“And you’re wearing what you wore yesterday,” Bhagwati said.
“Should I’ve worn the daura-suruwal?”
“Why not? I wore a kurta.”
“It’s frowned upon in Bhutan—remember?”
“Is anything not frowned upon in your country?”
“Almost everything—for us Nepalis. To live in a house as big as you do would only be a dream for the Nepalis of Bhutan.”
“Our house is old and disgusting.” Bhagwati wished she could show off the factory in Kalimpong to Ram. If the house in Gangtok impressed the poor man, the Kalimpong factory would reduce him to speechlessness.
“No, it’s not. It’s big.”
“Aamaa doesn’t care too much about living in a beautiful home. She doesn’t like spending time or money on the house.”
“My house in my country may be even smaller than your sitting room.”
“Do you even think of it as your country?”
“Of course, it’s mine.”
“Stupid country. Stupid you.”
“And you? A heroine? Because everybody’s staring at you?”
They rang every temple bell they could find. Some clappers swayed too high for her to reach, so he lifted her to them. She’d hang on to the bell while trying to wriggle out of his arms. Both laughed.
“This one seems to have been made for giants,” Ram said, as he jumped to strike a bell’s clapper. It was too high even for him.
“Let me carry you,” Bhagwati said.
“Can you?”
She crouched and asked him to hop onto her back. Straining her shoulders, she lifted him to the bell, which he rang once, twice, three times.
“I rang all the bells—that’s a first,” Ram cried.
“Tomorrow we should go to a church.”
“I think some unhappy girl is walking toward you,” said Ram.
It was Manasa—frantic, panting, in her pajamas.
“Where were you?” Manasa asked. “I looked everywhere for you.”
“We had come to the temple.”
“Aamaa is searching for you.”
“This is Ram,” Bhagwati said. “Aamaa knows him.”
“Aamaa is furious.”
“She thinks I was at the library—why should she be furious?”
“Your results are out.”
Bhagwati hadn’t passed her boards. At Tashi Namgyal Academy, patronized by the elite of Gangtok and inarguably the most glamorous school in the state, failure in board exams wasn’t a regular phenomenon. Maybe one or two unsuccessful students blotched the school’s perfect records every few years, hurling themselves to infamy while the toppers graced front pages in the Sikkim Express. This obsession with examination grades, a very South Asian malaise that had now permeated Sikkim, lasted for weeks and months. The failure’s family would be pitied and the failure stared at. She wasn’t a great student but not failure material, friends and neighbors would titter about some unfortunate girl.
And that had been true for Bhagwati. She was no budding genius such as Manasa or Agastaya, but she wasn’t as academically disinclined as Ruthwa either. No one would think of her as the type who failed. In fact, she herself couldn’t believe it. The granddaughter of the great Chitralekha Neupaney had failed an examination.
“She’s going to kill me,” Bhagwati said. “A failure in her family—she’ll hate me for the rest of my life.”
“She will,” Manasa said. “Don’t go home now, please. Don’t.”
“What if there’s an error in the result?” Bhagwati asked.
“Yes, the principal called Aamaa to let her know that he has requested a reevaluation.”
“But that could take weeks,” Bhagwati argued.
That’s how Bhagwati ran away. It was going to be temporary—a quick disappearance until Aamaa’s wrath subsided. Ram became the person with whom she escaped because it was convenient.
She had no intention of eloping, of getting married. She just wanted to escape the humiliation of failing an examination.
She ran away because she knew not running away would destroy her. She was up against Gangtok’s gossip mill. Her getting inadequate grades in an exam would be entangled with tales of affairs, alcohol, drugs, pregnancy, and depression. She’d forever be the girl who failed.
Ram and she first went to the Green Hotel, where Ram was putting up, grabbed his bag, and reserved a taxi to Phuntsholing, in Bhutan. During the journey, Bhagwati freque
ntly looked back, sometimes in fear and sometimes in hope, to check if they were being followed.
Life, as she knew it, was over.
Once on the other side of the border, she called home, praying Manasa would pick up.
“Some people saw you with a man,” Manasa whispered. “They told Aamaa you eloped with him. Aamaa is convinced that you ran away with a Damaai.”
A month after the entire town of Gangtok pronounced her married, Bhagwati got wedded to Ram. She didn’t love him then. The love came much, much later. She got married because she couldn’t continue burdening Ram—his relatives were already asking questions.
Two days later, Manasa—the only person in the family with whom Bhagwati corresponded—called to let her know that Bhagwati’s reevaluation result was out. A 62 in math, by all means a respectable score, had earlier been mistyped as 26. The 36 in physics was still a 36, but that didn’t matter. She could fail one subject and yet pass the boards.
Bhagwati hadn’t been a failure, after all. She was married, but she had passed the examination that had pushed her to marriage.
Was her grandmother’s absence at home now a deliberate snub? She wouldn’t put it past Aamaa. The granddaughter would have to thaw the old woman. Perhaps Bhagwati’s attempts would translate better in person than they did on the phone. She wondered if she hankered so much for forgiveness because she knew it would never come. Even if it did, how would Aamaa dispense it? Would she declare her granddaughter exonerated? Would she shower on her an old person’s blessing that was so revered around here? All Bhagwati needed was for things to return to normal. What this normal was, Bhagwati couldn’t quite tell. Was it her relationship with Aamaa pre-elopement? Was it the bond her grandmother shared with Manasa?
Bhagwati missed Ruthwa. His irreverence would have come in handy here. The youngest of the siblings would make light of the whole situation, call attention to Manasa’s graceless aging, and draw comparisons of her face with Bhagwati’s. He’d probably ask Bhagwati if the secret of her beauty lay in a healthy sex life. He’d throw in a joke about sex with the untouchables being good for your skin. There’d be a play on the words touching and untouchable or an analogy only her banished brother could come up with. It would do everyone a lot of good for Ruthwa to be here. She wondered if he was still traveling between one ex-lover and another, perhaps still trying to write.
She found Prasanti flipping through the pages of a glossy magazine in the kitchen. The room looked smaller than when Bhagwati had left it. In fact, everything in India seemed minuscule. The telltale signs of her grandmother’s increasing opulence were visible in the sizes of the refrigerator and dishwasher, which sparked memories about the job from which she had just been let go. Even she, who lived in America, didn’t have a dishwasher at home.
“What function does it serve here?” she asked Prasanti, who stared at her scrutinizing the machine.
“It’s no use,” Prasanti answered. “The minute I switch it on, the power goes off. I have to do all the dishes by hand.”
“You mean, clean the dishes of two people?” Bhagwati asked. “You’re lucky.”
“Now, with the arrival of all you people, there’s even more work to do. Manasa thinks I am a servant.”
“You aren’t,” Bhagwati quickly added. “You’re part of the family.”
“Which family member would be so badly treated? You should have seen the number of dishes I washed this morning.”
“You did dishes for three people this morning, Prasanti.” Bhagwati laughed. “I clean the dishes of so many people.”
“How is four people many people? You people are just four. And I hear in America even the husbands help. Is that true?”
“Mine does.” Bhagwati wondered where the openness came from. She’d nearly made an admission to her servant that their professions were similar.
“You may think it’s easy to wash two people’s dishes, but you don’t know about your Aamaa’s eating habits. She’s a true Maharani—wants a different bowl for a different vegetable. Sometimes, seven, eight bowls surround her plate.”
“Dishwashers are overrated. The dishes don’t come out as clean as they do when you use your hands.”
“And then the hands look like this.” Prasanti demonstrated—each nail was painted a different color.
“Also, you don’t have to clean the house every day,” Bhagwati said.
“Sure, I don’t,” Prasanti replied.
“Do you?”
“Not every day but every other day.”
“Lying. Aamaa doesn’t care about cleanliness here.”
“You wouldn’t know.”
“How’s your life?” Bhagwati asked. “You look happy.”
“I am fine. Growing old. Looking better. Looking after your grandmother, whose grandchildren don’t care about her. She’s not the young woman you left when you ran away, you know.”
“I know,” Bhagwati said. “Does she take good care of you?”
“I am a servant. She treats me better than a servant. I’d say I am like a poor relative to her, which is better than being treated like a servant.”
“I am seeing her for the first time since my marriage.”
“Yes, I know,” Prasanti said. “Your marriage with the untouchable. How are your children? Are they more Brahmin or Damaai?”
“They’re humans,” Bhagwati said.
“Like I am, condo,” replied Prasanti. “Second-class humans.”
“Who says you’re a second-class human?”
“It’s in the way people treat us.”
“You have a job, a nice home, and a family,” Bhagwati said, feeling sincerely sorry for Prasanti, even though the servant’s categorizing her children in the same group as eunuchs unsettled her. “You have nothing to worry about.”
“Yes, I have some money and gold,” Prasanti said.
“That’s more than what I have,” Bhagwati confided.
“Won’t I need all that when Aamaa dies? She’s in her eighties and won’t live forever. I’ve got to think of the future for myself, too, don’t I?”
The absurdity of bartering stories with a servant didn’t escape Bhagwati. Their shared struggles in their similar professions must have engendered this new level of connection. At least the conversation with Prasanti was free flowing. The eunuch divulged information liberally and asked questions she needed answered. There was no palpable discomfort as was evident in her sister, no guardedness that characterized her brother’s conversations with her, and none of the resentful taunts that Bhagwati was sure would start once Aamaa was home.
•
Manasa had already exceeded her sleep quota for the day by the time Agastaya and Bhagwati arrived. Once her brother excused himself, the prospect of making small talk with Bhagwati all by herself was more than she could handle, so she, too, extricated herself from the sitting room. She was back at home, in a familiar setting, with people from her past whom she was reluctant to make a part of her present. Her siblings and she had become painfully proper with one another. She was more herself with her husband’s family than she was in her old one.
She had only five more days to go—five never-ending days. She’d then return to being nanny to her father-in-law. The thought of Himal’s inability in dealing with Bua’s handicap fueled her with momentary pleasure, but she quickly stopped herself from feeling too smug—her husband was in Kathmandu, and a retinue of female relatives would relieve him of his filial duties. Himal had a comfortable life.
It was easy to forget that she was here to celebrate her grandmother’s eighty-fourth birthday—to commemorate eighty-four years of Aamaa wreaking havoc on humanity. It didn’t feel festive at all. Bhagwati and Agastaya could hardly be trusted to liven up a drab affair. Manasa understood that Bhagwati’s life was too complex for her to celebrate a silly birthday with reckless abandon, but Agastaya should have been the most jovial of them all. He led such an unencumbered, uncomplicated life. He was free to do as he pleased, had no ch
ildren to look after, and no father-in-law’s pee dribble to wipe off the toilet seat.
When Manasa emerged from the guest room for dinner, Agastaya and Aamaa were seated at the dining table. She wasn’t going to be spared the brisance that would result from the reunion between her sister and warmongering grandmother, after all.
Manasa chose a seat next to her brother and helped herself to a ladle each of murai and aloo dum. Hardly had she mixed a spoonful of the puffed rice with the fenugreek-heavy potato curry when Chitralekha said, “And this one doesn’t eat at all.”
“I am not hungry,” Manasa retaliated. “And why, exactly, has your pet made such snacky food for dinner?”
Bhagwati quietly trudged in. “Oh, everyone is here,” she said to no one in particular as she took the chair farthest from her grandmother—the one at the opposite end of the table. Manasa felt sorry for Bhagwati. Her sister couldn’t muster the courage to greet her grandmother.
“This one will starve herself to death—and that one doesn’t want to get married!” Chitralekha shouted. “These are my grandchildren.”
“Is that what this is all about?” Manasa asked. “You have a problem with Agastaya, and you just drag me in?”
“He says he has no time for girls. He’ll be here a whole month.”
“No, I’ll be here only for a week,” Agastaya said. “I have to go to Delhi, Bombay, and other places after that.”
“Only for a week?” Aamaa wrinkled her nose. “What’s that? Why did you come at all, then? A week will vanish in no time.”
“I know. But it’s work.”
Aamaa looked at no one and moved her lips with her mouth still shut. “If you’re staying only for a week, then we’d better all go to sleep now. We don’t have too many hours to spare for our family members.”
“Why would we sleep this early?” Agastaya boldly volunteered. “Tonight is talk night.”
“I don’t know about that.” Aamaa got up. “I am going to sleep. I am old and frail.”
“Aamaa, nobody sleeps at seven,” Manasa said. It hadn’t taken Aamaa much time to start her shenanigans. Manasa had warned her grandmother to be nice, and Aamaa, the woman of her word that she was, had kept her end of the bargain by ignoring Bhagwati. How was Manasa to know that her grandmother had a bone to pick with Agastaya, too? Manasa was stupid for not considering that—her grandmother had scores to settle with everybody.
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