Land Where I Flee

by Prajwal Parajuly

  The traffic showed no signs of clearing up, and I knew that my new friend would not let go of me until I gave her money.

  Being the smart-ass that I am, I handed her a hundred-rupee bill with sweaty, excessive trepidation, the kind she probably sees only on her luckiest days.

  Little was I to know that this was one expensive eunuch: one hundred rupees wouldn’t do.

  I’d have to pay her a grand, which she’d split with her girlfriend, who had mysteriously appeared from nowhere and proudly unbuttoned her kurta, a loose Indian shirt, revealing what looked like semi-formed breasts with plenty of hair, or something close, if I was seeing correctly.

  Finally, as the traffic showed signs of movement, and they had successfully swindled me of Rs. 300, the eunuchs went on their way, blessing me and probably discussing what an easy day it was.

  Yeah, that’s the closest I’ve come to tits—well, kind of—since my arrival in India.

  Groups of eunuchs are found more commonly in the plains than the hills. Because most hill cultures do not favor their presence at weddings and celebrations—I can’t think of a single Nepali wedding at which eunuchs danced—hijras’ moneymaking rackets are worse suited to Gangtok than, say, Siliguri, which they migrate to in large numbers.

  In the hills of Gangtok or Kalimpong, you may find one or two eunuchs, ridiculed more than elsewhere because they don’t have to their benefit a power in numbers.

  Prasanti was one such eunuch.

  The tale she narrates about how she came to work at our place is different from everyone else’s story.

  Aamaa says she found her on a train and took pity on her. Prasanti says she was dancing at a wedding and Aamaa liked the way she livened the atmosphere so much that she brought her home.

  The eunuch’s story is highly unlikely because, first, she is a pathological liar; second, it’s something Aamaa, or anyone else for that matter, doesn’t substantiate; and, third, few people in Gangtok have much use for hijras at weddings.

  Whatever the truth, Prasanti had become family in a way the other servants, such as Didi, the old woman before her, never had.

  Aamaa built a small house for Didi once her son was trained and trusted enough to take care of our factory in Kalimpong. My cunning grandmother often points this out as an example of her altruism, but truly she got rid of the old servant because the rheumy woman’s usefulness had expired. Keeping her around was a liability.

  Prasanti, it was evident, wouldn’t go away even if her entire body was paralyzed.

  She had become too much a part of Aamaa’s life for her to be ejected to Kalimpong once her functionality declined. This gave the eunuch many advantages.

  Before Prasanti’s arrival, no servant, driver, or gardener who worked for us could sit on our furniture. When watching TV, they brought their own wicker stools, on which they sat out of everyone’s way, like figurines adorning the corners. Prasanti broke the rule within three weeks of her arrival—she said hijras couldn’t sit on the hard stools because of their sensitive behinds. She took to sitting in a chair that she didn’t share with anybody.

  It soon became Prasanti’s chair.

  Prasanti got away with a lot. Her mouth, for example, could put a Khalpara pimp to shame.

  The Nepali word for butt—condo—is often a bad word, straddling between grudging acceptance in some households and downright intolerance in others.

  In the hierarchy of filthy words, it doesn’t rank as high as the Nepali terms for vagina, whore, and penis, but it’s still a word the Neupaneys wouldn’t use at home.

  It’s also a word that, like fart, provokes endless laughter.

  Prasanti had no qualms about liberally sprinkling the word as noun—both common and proper—and adjective in her speech.

  In the beginning, Aamaa scolded her, gave her dangerous looks, and even boxed her ear, but when nothing could diminish Prasanti’s zeal for the word, my grandmother gave up.

  Condo became acceptable vocabulary at home, which certainly appalled the relatives.

  “Why do you keep shouting my name, oie condo?” she’d scream when we called out to her. “Do you need me to come scratch your condo, you condo-like people?”

  If Prasanti was in an especially bad mood, she’d bestow a form of condo on the neighbors, too.

  Physically, when she had no makeup on, Prasanti looked like your everyday male or perhaps a transvestite.

  Her rapidly thinning hair she anxiously tried growing long. She may have had breasts, too, but we couldn’t be sure.

  Often, we accused her of being nothing more than a very feminine male, a myth she threatened to debunk by exposing her nether regions to us. She never followed through with her warning, but we were all curious.

  We sometimes struggled to gauge if those bumps on her chest were breasts or simply fat.

  Because her choice of outfit was a lumpy kurta-pajama, it was easy for me to assume the garments housed breasts. Agastaya declared that they didn’t, but it was just like my older brother to claim that anything sexual didn’t exist.

  I once rummaged through Prasanti’s tin box, which was placed on another tin box in her room, to see what I’d find there and was struck by the number of lacy bras in it.

  When I told the others about my discovery, they wouldn’t believe me.

  When I was about ten, a child who knew more about sex than his older brother, I saw Prasanti’s bra strap peep from under her kurta. I directed Agastaya and Bhagwati’s attention to it. Agastaya, in keeping with his personality, looked away. Bhagwati, on the other hand, stared, transfixed.

  “What are you looking at?” Prasanti asked, annoyed. “Or is your condo itching?”

  “Nothing,” Bhagwati remarked, still a little shocked at the sight.

  “Oh, this?” Prasanti snapped the strap. “Well, we women have goods to take care of, don’t we?” She giggled.

  “What goods?” I asked good-humoredly.

  “Oh, you men are such bokas,” she said. “Such bokas and dogs.” She was blushing. Agastaya vacated the room. “Another dog has left.”

  “I am a dog,” I said.

  “Do you want to see my God-given gifts?” Prasanti asked Bhagwati, chattering nervously. “I can only show them to women. You don’t want to get the men too excited.”

  “No, not even if someone threatens to kill me,” Bhagwati said, covering her face. In English, she added: “This woman is insane.”

  This always infuriated Prasanti. She hated being left out, and people perpetually used English to abandon her. “What’s the phusuk-phusuk in English?” she demanded. “Are you talking about me?”

  Of course we were talking about her. We had never, up to that point in our lives, encountered this blatant a conversation about one’s sex organs, however nebulous. That it came from a servant—so what if she had taken it upon herself to hoist her status to something much higher?—was even more bizarre.

  Bhagwati continued in English: “Imagine if we were like her. Whom would we fall in love with? A man, a woman, or a yak?”

  “Yes, yes, make fun of me,” Prasanti grumbled. “I treat you like my own brothers and sisters, and you think I am a hijra and nothing else.”

  “Prasanti, just because I declined your offer to have a look at your breasts doesn’t mean you should cry and moan,” Bhagwati said. “Just do your work.”

  This reminder that she was a servant enraged Prasanti more than anything else. Off she went marching to Aamaa, with us in tow. We were curious what the eunuch would say and nervous about Aamaa’s reaction.

  Aamaa was in her office, barely visible behind a mountain of paperwork and a fog of beedi smoke.

  “These people are teasing me,” Prasanti whined. “They are calling me names. Their shit is stuck in their condo if they don’t make fun of me at least once a day.”

  “Stop listening to them,” Aamaa said distractedly. “Just do your work.”

  “Today, they threw sanitary napkins at me and asked me if I had any use for
them,” the eunuch lied. “No one asked me that question even when I danced at weddings. I treat them like my brother and sister.”

  Aamaa saw an easy solution to the problem.

  Tihaar, the Hindu festival of lights, was only a month and a half away.

  The Nepali Hindus celebrate its last day as a dedication to their brothers. Whereas many non-Nepali-speaking Hindus have their Raksha Bandhan to commemorate the sacred relationship between brothers and sisters, we observe our Bhai Tika. Manasa thinks there’s sexism at play—she often babbles something about the entire concept of sisters worshipping brothers so the brothers can protect them being an insult to her gender, but no one cares about Manasa’s feminist rants.

  Long story short, on the day of Bhai Tika, everybody with a sibling of the opposite sex gets blessed. When an opposite-sex sibling is lacking, cousins are involved.

  “They are your brothers and sisters,” Aamaa said to Prasanti. “You will celebrate Bhai Tika with them.”

  Bhagwati and I exchanged disbelieving looks. “You mean applying tika on us?” I asked.

  This couldn’t be true.

  The glittery tika that my sisters applied on my forehead and I on theirs was a fun affair. We managed to take the tedium out of a religious ritual and made it colorful and happy and even hilarious.

  With seven colors at our disposal and the forehead as our canvas, we had a riot. The base of the tika, made up of rice paste, didn’t make me itch like the red tika concocted with grains of uncooked rice and yogurt that Aamaa spread on our foreheads during Dashain.

  The year before, I daubed the image of a dog on Bhagwati’s forehead, when a simple circle with its surface speckled with colors would have sufficed. Manasa painted on my forehead a bird, or something like it, when a vertical base made up of the rice paste to be filled with colors was all that was required.

  “Yes, putting tika on you all,” Aamaa said before leaving for the factory in Kalimpong.

  Our favorite custom would now include Prasanti. She was an interloper.

  But there was an issue: would the eunuch offer tika to Bhagwati and Manasa, as Agastaya and I did, or would Agastaya and I put tika on her, as we did on our sisters?

  Aamaa didn’t seem too concerned.

  We didn’t confront Prasanti about the sanitary-napkin lie. We thought it was unimportant then because we had to share the news of the Bhai Tika development with Agastaya and Manasa.

  Prasanti, on her part, victoriously swayed back to the kitchen.

  She could have snapped her bra strap, but I might have been imagining things.

  When Bhai Tika arrived, after we lit crackers on a dog’s tail and made fun of Deusi participants, who sang carols and were keeping alive a custom that we as public-school students couldn’t ever aspire to, we sat down for our tika.

  We were still curious about whether Prasanti would fulfill a male role or a female one.

  Decked in her yellow wedding finery—the sari and blouse she wore in her previous life when she danced at weddings with her brethren—Prasanti, our sister, took her sisterly role seriously. By the time she was done, Agastaya and I had vegetable oil—we had never until then involved oil in our ritual, but Prasanti said that she knew better because she was a priest’s daughter—dripping from our heads and ears. Each of our foreheads also showed off a perfect vertical line, so meticulously filled with colors that not a dot strayed beyond the base, convincing Manasa and Bhagwati that destroying the eunuch’s artistry to make space for a silly dog would be sacrilege. There were no animals on my forehead that year, no colors childishly smeared.

  Agastaya and I reciprocated by applying tika on Prasanti and the sisters.

  Prasanti accepted our monetary offering of fifty rupees and exclaimed that she hoped what was in her envelope was equal to the amount in my sisters’.

  We thought that was where her role ended, but Prasanti insisted we weren’t done. She now applied tika on my sisters the way Agastaya and I did. In a weird, distorted logic that made no sense—because brothers make monetary offerings to their sisters—Prasanti, our brother, demanded money from Bhagwati and Manasa.

  “That’s one advantage of being a hijra, an in-between,” she said with a giggle and ensconced her four envelopes in between her bra strap and shoulder with a loud snap.

  To see this hijra—who’d add some much-needed detail to my third book, my first nonfiction book, my first book since the downfall—on my return home is to be taken back in time. Somehow, it seems as though everything will be all right.

  •

  She stares at me as though I am an apparition.

  Then she touches me, first with her index finger and finally with her entire hand.

  This description may read poignant, similar to a reunion between star-crossed lovers.

  It isn’t.

  In fact, Prasanti almost pushes me.

  “Aye, it’s . . . you,” she says, momentarily flummoxed about maintaining pronoun propriety, the variation of the Nepali you to employ.

  I am too old for her to use tan, reserved for intimates, lowlifes, and those younger than you, and which she, when dealing with an adolescent me, with alarming regularity substituted with timi, the great equalizer between tan and tapaai, the latter being the you that accords respect.

  And to her I am still somehow too familiar, still the cheeky brat who demanded that she show me her chest and rifled through her underwear drawer, for her to yet elevate me to a deferential tapaai despite how grown-up I must have seemed.

  She finally settles for a neutral timi before running away to inform Aamaa about this unexpected arrival.

  I wait for the world to fall apart and for the dogs to be set on me.

  Nothing happens.

  First, I see Agastaya, whom I had last seen in New York a year ago.

  Fat, ugly. Bald, bespectacled. Hands shaky, making me wonder if he had any right to conduct surgery.

  Words exchanged: “Hey,” “hey.” Eye language: Is that really you? Not a word about my going into the house. I remain at the threshold.

  Manasa and Bhagwati close behind. Bhagwati pretty in a slutty way. Think an angel dressed up as a whore for Halloween. A splotch of sweat under her arm when she nervously scratches her head. Manasa her lady-in-waiting. Nah, grandma-in-waiting. Wrinkly. Dark. Miserable.

  I had seen Bhagwati but not her husband on the same trip during which I met up with Agastaya, when I flew from New York to Denver.

  It had been two years since my last rendezvous with Manasa, and two years had added ten to her face. The husband must be getting tail somewhere else because he sure as hell couldn’t be tapping someone this hideous.

  Words exchanged: “Hey,” “hey,” “hey,” “hey.” Eye language: Are you kidding me?

  “Is no one going to invite me in?” My gaze moves from one sibling to another.

  “It’s not our house to invite you, Ruthwa.” This is Manasa, just like her namesake, the damn snake goddess, full of venom.

  “How Western,” I point out.

  “Talk values—it’s you talking values.” Manasa again.

  “Father-in-law still giving you problems, Manasa? What’s it now? Giving his peenie a little shake before bed?”

  “Cunt, you’re an absolute cunt.” To Bhagwati and Agastaya she says, “Oh, don’t look so shocked, you two. How American of you to take offense at the word. Nothing describes him better.”

  “Stop fighting. Come in, Ruthwa. But be prepared for Aamaa.” Bhagwati the peacemaker. Bhagwati the goddess. The bhaagney-keti, the girl who ran away. The reject playing mediator.

  I walk into the house where my first novel was set.

  “Didn’t know you were coming.” Ah, Agastaya. Sexless. Friendless. Lifeless. Role model whose academic standards I was expected to live up to and whose accomplishments it was hoped I’d replicate. An internationally acclaimed book didn’t do it. Everything would pale in comparison to the oncologist’s achievements.

  “I wouldn’t miss it fo
r the world.” I laugh. Nervous laughter from the others follows. “Aamaa’s eighty-fourth birthday—c’mon, I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “You do know there will be a lot of drama,” Bhagwati, who should know a thing or two about drama, warns. PhD, Engineering Drama should be the letters trailing her name, her low-caste name.

  “He’s here for that,” Manasa conjectures, and with a repetition of the sentence she declares it, guarantees it. “He’ll write about it. Bastard.”

  “Name a publishing house that will touch me.”

  “Some reality-TV production that branches into publishing—who knows?” says Manasa—acerbic, full of vitriol, her father-in-law’s crutch, her father-in-law’s darling. “It will be right up your alley.”

  “Nah, I want to write a book about putting an Oxford degree to good use, like a sister of mine is doing. Where’s the devil?”

  “She doesn’t want to see the devil.” Agastaya laughs at his own wit.

  America has bestowed upon him a wiggly paunch and a proclivity for platitudes.

  The hijra darts down the stairs, clearly excited about informing the others of my presence. Once she sees us in the same room, she stops short, disappointed.

  “Aamaa doesn’t want to see you,” she says.

  “Wouldn’t I know?” I smile at everyone.

  It doesn’t matter who wants to see me and who does not.

  I am here.

  I am with family.

  •

  Prasanti waltzes into the dining room with a can of strawberries, most definitely brought by one of my siblings from abroad, and places it on the table.

  “Here,” she says. “We have all finished dinner. Because your grandmother doesn’t want to see your face, you should celebrate with something sweet.”

  Before Manasa can chastise her and ask her for spoons with which to fish the berries out of the syrup and for bowls out of which to eat them, Prasanti disappears.

  “The way she does everything,” Manasa says. “Half-baked.”

  “Makes sense,” I offer. “Half is who she is.”