Land Where I Flee

by Prajwal Parajuly

  Manasa and Bhagwati laugh cursorily.

  “The house is the same, huh?” I look around. “The ceiling is still wavy and uneven. Even the dining table looks very much the same as it did when I left Gangtok.”

  “What did you expect?” Manasa replies. “Marbled stairway and beautiful granite countertops?”

  “Talking about beautiful granite countertops, I was at the factory recently. It looks even better than it did during our days.”

  “Wait—why would you go there?” Manasa asks. “What new troubles are you creating for the family?”

  “Yeah, what, exactly, were you doing in Kalimpong?” Agastaya pinches a strawberry out of the can and eats it with relish. “You couldn’t have gone there to see the factory.”

  Strawberries are beautiful. Yet, almost always, they taste disappointingly flat. I have concocted a warped analogy that compares them to extremely attractive women who are terrible in the sack.

  In Himalayan Sunset, I spent close to a page describing the analogy.

  “Nothing.” Would I find a copy of Himalayan Sunset in the house? “Just relaxing.”

  It is late. Everyone wants to seek asylum in sleep.

  Safe subjects are exhausting. Other topics are hazardous.

  A cantankerous Manasa, a catatonic Agastaya, and a conciliatory Bhagwati stare ahead of them.

  I feel outnumbered—the pressure to entertain rises as the number of words exchanged diminishes.

  “Do any of you want to update me on what has happened so far?” I ask.

  “I don’t.”

  “I don’t.”

  “No.”

  “Where’s the bookshelf?” I make for the sitting room. “Maybe I should look at the books.”

  “Where it was when you left Gangtok.” Manasa heads upstairs. “I am off to watch mindless TV.”

  In the relative privacy of the sitting room, I open the sliding door of the shelf to see if it houses my books.

  There it is: Himalayan Sunset. The yellow cover. The sun peeping from behind the mountains. The sun setting on the British Empire. How easy writing was then—how easily it came to me.

  Such a clever book, critics said. In reality, it was a story that thrived on stereotypes. The Brahmins in Himalayan Sunset were stingier and more conservative than those of my real life, the eunuchs more flamboyant, the Western gays more promiscuous, the Indian gays even more deeply closeted, the Americans far more ethnocentric than those I came across, and the refugees all worked as dishwashers. Cobwebs in India dangled more freely, mosquitoes here sucked blood more vehemently, and roaches multiplied more aggressively.

  Of course, you must stick to pigeonholes in your writing; otherwise, there’s all that talk about inauthenticity.

  The East seethed at the unflattering portrayals of various members of my community, called the book a betrayal, but once the Western stamp of approval—with a nudge and a wink from literary critics—was plastered all over the book, the East came around soon enough. For the West, India is cool, and Sikkim’s former Himalayan-kingdom-ness even cooler.

  I conduct an experiment of my youth by allowing the book to open up to the best-read page. At the TNA library, that’s how we found smut. At the Neupaney Oasis, too, Himalayan Sunset opens to a sex scene. It is the part about Aamaa’s rape.

  Who has been reading this well-thumbed book? Who is getting his or her jollies from my well-reviewed rape scene? Every one of the pages where the rape was alluded to is dog-eared.

  Aamaa can’t really read English. Could it be Prasanti? Prasanti barely recognizes the letters of the alphabet.

  Finding your book wherever it’s been set can be weird. Finding the pages of the rape scene of the owner of the house you are in can be downright unnerving.

  I place the book on the shelf, and then I push it back, farther and farther back until I hear it fall to the floor behind the shelf.

  I pray that is the only copy in the house. I also pray I don’t find the other book. If Himalayan Sunset made me famous, there was another that brought me notoriety of the worst kind.

  •

  Manasa sneaks up to me from behind and makes herself comfortable on the sofa.

  “Look at someone looking at books—like his two books haven’t polluted the world enough,” she quips.

  “I thought you wanted to watch your Star Plus shows. Is that what an MBA from the Said Business School gave you a taste for?”

  “I decided against it. Are you writing again?”

  The other two follow her, as though they can’t bear being alone with each other for a second. “Yes.”

  “Really?”—Bhagwati.

  “A novel?”—Agastaya.

  “Nah, nonfiction.”

  “How the mighty have fallen.”—Manasa.

  “What’s wrong with nonfiction?”

  “With you there’s so much nonfiction in fiction that one just can’t say.”—Manasa.

  “Thanks for the support.”

  “What’s the book about?”—Agastaya.

  “I am undecided.” It would be wise not to blabber about the topic being eunuchs. “At the moment, I am just trying to write. I’ve never had writer’s block this severe. I stare at the computer for hours and still come up with nothing. I’m doing everything the writing greats have suggested—making notes, trying to write every goddamn thing I can think of, writing a certain number of words a day, dabbling in poetry, screenplay, rewriting my old interviews. Nothing works.”

  “Sure.”—Manasa.

  “Have you tried changing routines?”—Agastaya. He would know because medicine and writing are so similar.

  “Want to hear something I wrote? It’s a short poem.”

  “Ha. Who was the writer who kept ranting about poetry being the most insincere form of literature?”—Manasa.

  “How fun, Manasa. You’re at your best today.”

  “Sure. Read it.”—Bhagwati.

  “No, why should we encourage him, when he will use his writing to get back at us?”—Manasa.

  In the book, I described Aamaa’s rape, not Manasa’s.

  It was Aamaa’s identity that was compromised, not Manasa’s.

  It was Aamaa’s hirsute vagina that the readers of Himalayan Sunset got a glimpse of, not Manasa’s.

  And it was a blight on Aamaa’s character when my unreliable narrator, so sensitive and respectful of women, declared that a middle-aged Aamaa “must have enjoyed it. All these years, there had been no sex. The breasts may have sagged, but the desire not so much.”

  But again, it’s Manasa I am talking about. She can be a horror, a bitch.

  “It wasn’t your rape I described,” I say, looking away from Manasa. “It was the old lady’s. What ails you?”

  “Everyone knew it was her. Everyone knew whose family it was.”

  “Didn’t you say in London that you now belong to a different family?”

  “Don’t play games. You know what I mean.”

  “I described the rape of a woman who bought her first factory with money she extracted using the most questionable means. She deserves to be in jail.” That bit is true. After my parents died when the jeep they were in collided with a bus, and their vehicle fell into the River Teesta, a bawling Aamaa went to the then-chief minister’s office and lied to him: her son and daughter-in-law, she sobbed, had been on this trip to Kalimpong to buy some property. The large sums of money they had with them had gone down along with the jeep and its passengers. The money the charitable chief minister offered the relatives of the deceased wasn’t compensation enough for Aamaa. She emerged from the meeting with enough money to eventually purchase the Kalimpong factory.

  “Even if she’s the biggest villain on earth, you have no fucking right to write about her rape, you conscienceless prick.”—Manasa.

  “Oh, like Aamaa has a conscience.”

  “You don’t get it. No fucking man in this country gets how serious rape is. I can’t reason with you.”

  “I am going upsta
irs,” I say.

  “Where?”—Bhagwati.

  “To hell.”

  “It could be worse than hell. She’s made trouble about everything since we arrived.”—Agastaya.

  “Like what? I thought I was the only one who rankled her.”

  “You’ve forgotten about a Damaai granddaughter.”—Bhagwati.

  “A bachelor grandson.”—Agastaya.

  “And me.”—Manasa.

  “What’s her problem with you?”

  “Everything. I didn’t bring my husband to her awful Chaurasi.”

  “Why not?”

  My ugly sister glares in silence.

  “All right, I’m going to bell the cat.” I am such a showman.

  “Not tonight. It’s too late. Wait until tomorrow.”—Bhagwati.

  “Where do I sleep?”

  “Probably the couch. VIP treatment for you.”—Manasa.

  •

  I wake up on the morning of Kukkur Puja to ululating street dogs.

  Gangtok has a canine abundance that people incorrectly think doesn’t quite hamper the place’s beauty. Dogs—mangy, drooling, flea-ridden—populate the entire damn town.

  During the day, the capital belongs to humans. At night, curs reign supreme.

  For most of the year, dogs are either neglected or ill-treated. On Kukkur Puja, devotees run after them, garland them, and ply them with feasts.

  Tomorrow the dogs can fornicate in peace, but today those orgasms will have to be delayed because some pious human needs to absolve his or her sins.

  It isn’t even light yet. No one is awake.

  I can’t sleep because the couch of my yesteryears isn’t cooperating. Wads of feather and sponge from the sofa cushions are strewn all over the floor in evidence.

  On the table is what looks like a place card with my name written on it in Manasa’s unmistakable curlicue. The inside of the card contains a message: Darling Ruthwa, now that you are writing again, I thought you might require a book for inspiration. Please find V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life, which you love so much, on the table. Of course, your love for it was well documented in In the Foothills of the Himalayas. Enjoy the journey, brother. Love, M.

  The nerve of the bitch . . . she needs to be throttled to death.

  •

  Bold. Deep. Sad. Beautiful. Pitch-perfect. Chilling. Perfectly done. Poignant. Real. Visceral.

  A right-wing London newspaper declared the depiction of Aamaa’s incident in Himalayan Sunset as “the most visceral description of rape written in the last fifty years.”

  I took that as a big compliment. I take it I wouldn’t have received it if I admitted to everybody that the account was repeated verbatim—the litany of ellipses connoting pauses of pain—from my grandmother’s narration.

  Besides, I was always doubtful—in fact, I still am—of the veracity of Aamaa’s rape story.

  She’s, therefore, the better storyteller than I.

  That was Himalayan Sunset. There was also another Himalayan-titled novel: In the Foothills of the Himalayas, where, let’s say, things . . . er . . . didn’t work out quite as well.

  •

  I walk into Manasa’s room upstairs so I can throw Half a Life on her hideous head but find Bhagwati sleeping there.

  “Where’s the bitch?” I demand.

  “Couldn’t you sleep, either?”

  “Nah. I just woke up. That’s one uncomfortable sofa.”

  “It’s still dark. What time is it? Are you looking for Prasanti?”

  “No, for Manasa. What a frustrated, fucked-up piece of shit she is.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Salt. Old wounds. Left a Naipaul book on my table.”

  “The one from which you plagiarized?”

  “Aaargh. Yes.”

  “That’s funny.” Bhagwati laughs. Even when she’s just awoken or had a sleepless night, she’s glowing.

  “She has no conscience.”

  “She thinks the same about you.”

  “Well, we are descendants of the great Chitralekha Neupaney. How would we have consciences?”

  “Why, exactly, are you here again?” Bhagwati rubs her eyes and yawns.

  “Only if you promise not to tell anyone.”

  “I do.”

  “An old friend at an Indian publishing house—I am not disclosing which one—has asked me to write a proposal for a nonfiction book.”

  “Even after the plagiarism scandal?”

  “Yeah, he’s from Darjeeling. A Nepali helping a Nepali out or something.”

  “What will you write on?”

  “The eunuchs of the hills.”

  Her sleepy eyes exude skepticism.

  “Think of it—there have been so many books on eunuchs living in the plains. None on the hill ones. No one even knows they exist.”

  “Will it have buyers?”

  “It should. I’m writing it. I don’t know.”

  “Why Kalimpong?”

  “Wanted to do some research there—start with Prasanti’s family.”

  “And what did you find?” Bhagwati sits up now.

  “Nothing really,” I lie, and then improvise. “Nothing of consequence really.”

  Prasanti’s mother was dead. Her father was dead. Her stepmother, of whose existence I was unaware, was dead. When I finally tracked down a miserable half sister, she refused to talk to me. Even my accented Nepali backfired. So, I offered her money. One hundred rupees. Four hundred rupees. One thousand rupees.

  “You’re stalling,” Bhagwati declares.

  “Well, I did find her sister. She gave me nothing.”

  The truth was different. The half sister did reveal that she remembered a few things about Prasanti’s childhood. Prasanti—well, Prasanti was Prasant, a boy, then—had received all the love and affection from the parents. The father had been a priest and the mother insane. That was Prasanti’s mother, not the half sister’s. Prasanti had apparently run away from home when she was eleven. A few neighbors had by then gathered around us and pronounced the story true. Yes, Prasanti was last seen at her uncle’s funeral in Melli.

  She wasn’t exactly voluble, this pricey sister, so I asked her if I could see the other sisters. All three of them had been married to men from Nepal. One of them had even run away with a Jaisi, a lower-category Brahmin, and was now cut off from the rest of the family. I should have continued flashing the sister a new 1,000-rupee bill while layer after layer of secrecy was peeled off until the body of Prasanti’s early life was mine to devour.

  “I could have pestered the neighbors to talk, friends and relatives to gossip, but I left,” I say.

  “Because you were bored?” Bhagwati asks.

  “One could say that.”

  I tell my sister about the strange tension rippling in Kalimpong. The townspeople looked upon the new vigor brought to the Gorkhaland movement as a positive turn of events, but the more educated among the group huddled together in concern. A “suggestion” was made by the Gorkha Jana-shakti Morcha, the political party that over-promises and under-delivers, that everyone should wear traditional clothes during Tihaar.

  In these parts, a suggestion is often a mandate, and enforcers of suggestions are often self-appointed. Add to these enforcers the moral police of the hills in the form of a bunch of party-appointed young men—nay, boys—and Kalimpong was becoming an unrecognizable place. Dictatorial.

  The guardians of our culture—these political hooligans—gave inciting speeches, and people cheered. Loudly. The guardians of our culture banned alcohol while people made bootleg purchases. Frequently. The guardians of our culture eschewed Nepali in favor of Gorkhali while people became hopeful. Sadly. The guardians of our culture made promises and swore Gorkhaland would happen while people chose to believe them. Again.

  My run-ins with the guardians of our culture because I wore shorts and T-shirts became more frequent. One particularly bad experience later, I packed my bags for Sikkim.

  “So, you’re back
to writing about one of us?” Bhagwati asks. “Can’t you find other topics—like this tension in Kalimpong, for instance?”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “Think of it—it is a relevant issue. And it’s better than writing about Prasanti.”

  “Do you care?”

  “To be honest, I don’t.”

  “Then why ask?”

  “It seems to bother the others. Aamaa’s rape . . .”

  “Which very well could have been a lie.”

  “Even then.”

  “So, how’s your marriage?”

  “I know what you’re trying to do, but I can’t undo it, Ruthwa. I can’t undo what I did. You can, and I don’t think writing yet another book about one of us is the way to go about it.”

  “I am resurrecting my career, Bhagwati. It was horrible to be hailed as the next big thing in South Asian fiction when the first book came out and declared finished with the second one. This nonfiction book will help.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Lift those lines from Naipaul’s book?”

  “I didn’t do it intentionally. Who plagiarizes intentionally, especially from an author who’s read everywhere? It happened. I read and reread that cranky old man’s book to see where the magic lay. The words seeped in, registered—his words became my words. It was a big, fucking mistake, yes, but it wasn’t my mistake alone. The editor missed it. The copy editor missed it. The proofreader missed it. But I alone had to take the hit.”

  “So, another book, huh?”

  “A friend did me a favor, Bhagwati. I can’t go around demanding new topics. I am thirty-one. I can’t live the rest of my life clouded by that one mistake. I haven’t worked this hard before. I am trying everything. I am writing poetry, or trying to, at least. It’s awful. I am making mundane lists of my memories. I’ve never tried this hard to get back to writing. I can’t screw this opportunity up.”

  “You could do other things.”

  “And wonder for the rest of my life what would have happened if I hadn’t quit writing altogether?”

  “Do you think the plagiarism scandal was God’s way of teaching you a lesson for including the rape in the book?”

  “I didn’t think the rape story was true—that’s why I included it in the book. I still think it’s a lie.”