~Manjushree Thapa~
Manjushree Thapa
Rohit’s eyes were open but he wasn’t seeing much: a haze of trees, a block of buildings blurred in the yellow-blue hues of dawn: Kathmandu.
He was sick of the way the bus rattled his bones and tired of the women behind, who had chattered incessantly for the whole of the journey. “Strange,” the younger one remarked, as they passed a vast, tarred lot filled with colourful cars, “Like a garden made of metal.”
“Look at all those lights on the road,” the other woman said. Her voice was loud and nasal. “And they won’t give our village even one bulb! And look at those houses, they’re all offices.” “So many offices…. what do people do in them?” “They sit at tables and develop the country. See how wide the road is.” “And so many motor-cars. Where do they go at night, all these motor-cars?” “To the stalls of their owners.”
The bus swerved sharply and juddered to a halt. Rohit stood up, anxious to leave its chilly confines. Had they reached the bus park? Beyond the windows he saw the gleam of buses: yes. Looping his black-and-white book bag across his shoulders he jostled through passengers even as they were standing up. A woman clucked “Tch” as he brushed against her. “What’s the big rush?” someone griped. He paid them no mind and squeezed past to the conductor, a boy with a grin far too sly for his twelve years.
“Open the door,” he urged the boy. “Why don’t you open the door?”
The conductor kicked the door open and Rohit stepped out, dressed in a wrinkled gray tunic with traditional close-fitting trousers, a flower-patterned cap and Chinese cloth shoes that sold for fifty-five rupees in his village. To stave off Kathmandu’s corrosive fog he had added a black waistcoat and a scratchy gray muffler. His face was dark and wrinkled, his hands rough from farm work and his breath, a white evaporating cloud. Everything around here in the nation’s capital, smelled of grease and machinery. Lithely he walked up to the front of a large building with square glass windows, to where a row of buses were parked. Some of them were local, he knew, and others went all over the country. A sense of the vastness of the world washed over him. There were so many places he hadn’t been to: the horizonful of farmlands to the south, the manicured tea estates in the east. And beyond, India. Everyone went to India these days to work as doormen .
He approached a young man standing beside an emerald-green bus.
“I need to get to a place called Chettrapati,” Rohit said to him and the young man, who was wearing very fine modern jean-pants, pointed with his chin across the road. “We’re going to Patan, Chettrapati’s over there.”
Rohit withdrew, slightly embarrassed, and looked across the road. There were no buses there, just a row of three-wheeler auto-rickshaws. Still, the man had spoken with authority, and so Rohit made his way over to the auto-rickshaws, stopped at the first one, and asked the driver, “I need to get to a place called Chettrapati.”
The driver was wearing shiny black glasses. He mumbled something that Rohit didn’t understand, then leaned back and opened the canvas door. Rohit climbed in head, arms and legs first.
“Close the door,” the driver commanded and Rohit obeyed. The inside of the rickshaw was lively, with red-and-yellow linoleum mats. The walls were plastered with pictures of, yes, naked women. Rohit turned away, mortified. How shameful! What would have happened if he’d boarded the auto rickshaw with his wife? How humiliating that would have been! Shyly, he turned back to the pictures to examine just how salacious they were. A naked woman smiled back at him, a giant cigarette between her legs.
The rickshaw blurted out a roar and lurched erratically onto the road. It steered itself out of the bus park and batted a way towards the city hidden behind a veil of fog. Rohit vaguely remembered this stretch from his first trip into Kathmandu last year with his brother. It was like this then, too: trucks and buses showed up suddenly and roared
off into the fog.
“Come for a visit?” the driver shouted above the racket. Rohit hmm’ed, reluctant to talk to a man who kept pictures of naked women in his rickshaw. But he was of a gregarious disposition, so couldn’t help responding after a while, “I’ve got relatives here.”
“Your son?” The driver leaned out to spit, and Rohit saw the saliva streak past him. He leaned out and spat too, marvelling at the way the wind whipped at his face. But it was too cold, and he drew back.
“My brother. He moved here a year ago.”
“I’ve got a son,” the driver said. “Studying at the campus. Day after day I drive past his dormitory, but I don’t stop to see him. Know why?” He turned back briefly, offering a profile of his dark glasses. “His friends would laugh because I’m a driver. Imagine that! Can you just imagine that?” Rohit clucked sympathetically.
“Unthinkable,” he agreed. “Is that how a son should think?”
The driver swerved towards a narrow alley. “Is that how your own son should think?”
Rohit thought of his infant son in the village, all laughter, gurgles, shit and piss. He agreed, “That’s not how a son should think.”
“How many sons do you have?” the driver asked.
“One,” Rohit said. “And four girls.”
“Where?”
“Just outside Dhorphirdi.” The driver shrugged. Rohit couldn’t believe he didn’t know of it.
“Tanahun District,” he said. “An hour off the road. Dryest patch of land you ever saw—can’t farm a crop! The bus stops right at the bridge to Dhorphirdi.” The rickshaw sputtered to a sudden halt and the driver said, “This is it, Chettrapati.”
Peering out of the window, Rohit saw that they were hemmed in on all sides by narrow cement buildings. “Oho,” he exclaimed, “Look at all these houses. How dusty they look. How will I ever find my brother? Who are all these people? Do they live in these houses? Look at that girl with white hair! What happened to her?”
“She’s a foreigner. Forty-two rupees.”
“Forty-two!”
“What I said when you got in.”
“One rupee fifty,” Rohit cried indignantly. “That’s how much it should be. I came here last year and took a similar bus, don’t think I don’t know anything….”
“This is a private rickshaw,” the driver snarled back, turning to glare at Rohit through his dark glasses like an ominous insect. He pointed at the headboard. “Look at the meter: it says forty-two rupees.”
“Enough to feed a whole family!”
“Forty, then. But nothing less.”
“Taking advantage of innocent villagers,” Rohit cried, but he realised there was nothing to do but pay.
He took a long time fishing for a fifty-rupee bill and waited morosely as the driver counted out the change. A thief of a place, this city. And so noisy, so full of people whose heads bobbed up and down, up and down the streets. He saw the white-haired woman again and wondered why there was a ring in her nose if she was a foreigner. The driver nudged him out of his trance, handed back a bill, and leant back to open the door for him.
“Go on,” he said brusquely.
Rohit hadn’t fully stepped out when the rickshaw revved up again and chased off after a car. He took a firm hold of his black-and-white book bag. He must find a chautara with a green tin awning. Green tin awning, he’d been told. Young men, old men, women of all castes passed before him in a swirl of colors. Look, Rohit said to himself: girls wearing pants. Then he saw it, across the road, a high, covered platform at the centre of the stream of traffic, and it had a green tin awning. Chettrapati. He headed towards it and felt the impact of a warm, soft body and then the sudden metal edges of a bicycle.
“Don’t you have eyes!” someone yelled. A horn honked. A few cars swept by. A large man shoved him off the sidewalk. Rohit waited until the road was finally clear, and scurried to the platform. A few men were lying down on its bare cement floor. Tch: how cold they must be. By their high cheekbones he thought they might be Tamangs. Porters: they were all carrying braided hemp ropes with which to ply their trade.
Rohit squatted down beside them, imagining the life of a city porter, carrying chairs, desks, cupboards from truck to shop, shop to truck, from one merchant to another. What would make a man live such a life? A flood maybe, or a landslide that carried away his house and fields. Some of Rohit’s fields had been destroyed in the last monsoon. If they’d all been washed away, he’d have had to find another patch of land to settle, or seek a job in the city. But the gods had blessed Rohit and his brother with not a few kattha of farmlands, part of which he had just sold at his brother’s insistence. The fog seemed to thicken, and a silver mist rolled through the street, swirling over the commotion of the street. The cold of the platform stiffened Rohit’s bones, and he drew his grey muffler over his nose savouring the damp warmth of his own breath.
A long time, maybe an hour, passed as he distracted himself with the sounds and sights that ebbed and flowed before him. What was the reason, he wondered, that motorcycles made such a racket, but cars just glided by so silently? How much would all the signboards on this street cost? If everyone came to the city and stopped farming, what would people eat?
“Uncle,” he heard a voice eventually, and turned to see a thin boy dressed in a blue school uniform, standing a little way off. It was his nephew, Keshab. “Nephew,” he said warmly, standing up. “Come and pay your respects to your old uncle. How tall you’ve grown, how like a city boy.” He held out his hand in blessing, but noticed a certain stiffness about the boy as he bowed.
“Where’s your father?” Rohit asked warmly, trying to win the lad over. “How far to his shop?” The boy pointed vaguely towards one of the intersections and began to
trot towards it.
“What do you have in that nice school bag?” Rohit asked in an indulgent tone, following behind. “Books that teach you English?” But Keshab said nothing, and slipped so fast through the crowd that Rohit found himself scurrying behind. “You must be the tallest boy in your class,” Rohit called out after his nephew, as Keshab ducked into a dark unpaved alley. They followed the alley to a temple where the road opened on to a larger, pitched road, dense with traffic. An ambulance raced by, wailing like a widow. Rohit stuck close to his nephew as they darted through the cars across the road. On the far side was a large pavement full of street vendors selling shirts, caps, peanuts, vegetables and fruit. Keshab stopped and pointed further up along the sidewalk. “There’s Baba, over there.”
And there he was, Rohit’s younger brother, Narayan, sitting on the pavement at the epicentre of a concentric array of bananas. Rohit noticed that Narayan didn’t rise in greeting, let alone bow, as he walked up to him. He tried not to mind this slight; his brother had lost the patchy tanned complexion of a villager and his face was as pale as wheat. His hair was combed back and oiled, and he wore a sweater and impressively clean trousers of terry-cotton. The transformations people go through in a year! If it wasn’t for the dent in both their noses, Rohit thought, no one could tell that they were the same father’s sons. His nephew Keshab had disappeared, and for a while, Rohit just stood on the pavement, towering over his brother’s concentric display of bananas.
“Sit,” Narayan finally suggested, and Rohit squatted beside the bananas, holding onto his book bag.
“Sit more comfortably,” Narayan insisted, a hint of annoyance in his voice. Rohit settled down into the gritty pavement. His brother, he noted, was sitting on a straw mat. The protocol was all wrong. Pretending not to notice this affront, Rohit turned a keen, interested eye at his surroundings. A dim sun was finally glowing through the fog, putting a glint in the glass, steel and mica facets of the city. The building across the street had windows like dark gray mirrors. On the road so many cars were packed together, inching along like a giant metal snake. “Where does that go?” Rohit asked, pointing at a manhole cover, then answered his own question, “To the sewers, of course.”
Fashionable ladies walked by, their shoes clacking against the pavement.
“How much do your bananas sell for?” he finally turned to his brother.
“I take what I can get.” Narayan’s tone was flat and bored. “Do you want some? Hungry?”
“So early in the morning?” Rohit demurred, too proud to admit to hunger in the face of such a lack of ceremony. He essayed a smile. “Nobody eats at such an early hour.”
“And did you bring the money?” This was why Rohit had never taken to Narayan: the boy didn’t have the least courtesy, showed no considerateness for anyone but himself. He had been crass, grabbing and greedy all his life. Rohit reached into his black-and-white book bag and took out a roll of bank notes. “Fifteen thousand,” he said gruffly.
“Your share.”
There seemed to be a sly innuendo in his brother’s response: “I heard land was fetching twice as much at Dhor.”
Are we Dhor?” Rohit snapped back. “Is the government digging a road all the way to our door? Are they bringing us electricity?” He didn’t like Narayan’s direct, fixed stare. “Anyway, our fields are mostly sand. And with the landslides last monsoon….”
Narayan sank back on his straw mat, his wheat colored face spoiling. “Everyone thinks,” he spat out bitterly “I have it really good in the city, that I’m earning, my wife’s earning, my son’s in school, that I don’t have troubles of my own.” Gesturing contemptuously at his bananas he seemed to want to say something more but didn’t.
Rohit could hardly believe what he was hearing. “Are you suggesting I’m a thief?” He reached into his black-and-white book bag and pulled out the deed of sale. “Signed by the chairman of the Village Development Committee!” He waved the papers in front of his brother. “Look for yourself and see the thousands and thousands of rupees I’ve robbed you of !”
Instead of bowing in shame, Narayan grabbed the documents and began to look through them. The gall of the boy! Had he forgotten the times Rohit had washed him, fed him, clothed him, mended his pants, defended him from bigger boys, sheltered him from their step-mother’s wrath? All the times he’d taken the cows to graze so that his brother could attend school? Rohit wanted to remind his brother of the sacrifices he’d made, but now a woman in a sari had come up to the display of bananas, all fluttering nylon and flowers. Narayan put aside the deed and sold her a dozen bananas; both brothers watched her as she minced away in dainty high-heeled shoes. The flowers in her hair, Rohit noted, were plastic.
Narayan handed the paper back to Rohit. For a while, both the brothers sat in a huff, their expressions identical and hard. Rohit started shivering from the cold of Kathmandu’s meagre sun. His stomach began to growl, and he shifted and coughed to cover the sound. After what seemed like ages, Narayan mumbled something about tea and headed for a tea stall nearby . Watching his brother buying tea, he was suddenly filled with remorse. Where was his sister-in-law? Where had his nephew disappeared? Why did they not invite him to their dwelling to serve a proper meal there? Rohit was curious to see their lodgings; built of cement, it would surely be better than the old clay hut back home. Narayan came back with two glasses of black tea. They both sipped in silence. The hot drink soothed away the cold and eased his hunger.
So he asked, “And Keshab’s mother, where is she?”
“She works at a factory.” Narayan’s tone was conciliatory. “Otherwise she’d make a meal for you in our rented room.”
“Rented room?”
“We pay a thousand a month.”
A thousand a month! Rohit felt a pang of guilt about the eight thousand rupees he’d skimmed from his brother’s share by tampering with the land deed. Eight months of rent in this relentless city. Suddenly he wanted to get out of Kathmandu and back to his own Dhorphirdi. He gulped down the last of his tea.
“I should get back to the bus park.” His bony knees cracked as he stood. “There’s a meeting tonight—about the breached irrigaton canal…I mustn’t be late”
Of course, Narayan didn’t insist he stay. Instead he looked relieved. “I’ll show you to the bus, older brother.” Taking Rohit by the arm he led him further up the street to a four-way intersection. There, he pointed at a battered blue mini-bus. “Sit next to the window so you can see where you are. Get off at the bus park and ask at the ticket counter for the Pokhara bus.”
Rohit hoisted himself aboard. The aisle was crowded with girls in starched college uniforms. It seemed awkward and rude to push through these girls who were so pretty, so prim. So he remained by the door, clutching a bar.
“Older brother,” Narayan said awkwardly, reaching up to slip some soft notes into Rohit’s hand. “You must be…I couldn’t even feed you. And the bus fare…such a long trip.” His expression became doleful as he mumbled, “There are restaurants by the bus park…”
Embarrassed, Rohit shoved the money into his book bag. Then a man clambered into the bus, knocking against Rohit’s knee.
“Room, I need some room,” he said. “Can you move a little?” From the running board, he reached down and hauled up two bleating goats. Rohit pressed against the side of the bus to make room, then followed the man with the goats past the neat college girls. At the front of the bus, he managed a window-side seat and turned to wave at Narayan, but it seemed his brother had already left. The man with the goats sat across the aisle.
“Such goats,” Rohit commented appreciatively as the animals bleated in alarm. “Are you selling them in the bazaar?”
“If I get my price,” the man responded thoughtfully. “Only if I get my price.” “And how much will this big one fetch?” The man took out a cigarette from his coat pocket.
“I’ll take what I get,” he said, striking a match. “Eight-nine hundred, a thousand, twelve hundred, depending.”
“Twelve hundred!” Rohit leaned forward and plucked a hair from the goat’s rump and inspected the root . “There isn’t that much fat on it.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” the man repeated. The smell of his cigarette made Rohit realise how hungry he was. The man’s muffler was the same scratchy grey as his own, but cleaner. The man’s pants were of thick black wool. He was wearing shoes, but no socks. No, it now seemed that he was wearing socks, the colour of skin. The bus started up with a rumble. Rohit sat back in his seat fascinated by the sight of the skin-coloured socks: if a man didn’t look closely he’d hardly see the fine ribs and seams. As the bus lurched forward, Rohit was suffused with a sense of the infinite illusions of the city, of the layers and layers of things that presented one face now and the next moment showed another. Look at Narayan: the boy was so rude, so coarse, but knew in his heart that he owed Rohit his life. He didn’t show it, but he knew. How could he not? Rohit checked his book bag to see how much money his brother had given him. He counted again. One, two, three hundred. Was it too much or too little? The bus ground on.
He turned to the owner of the goats across the aisle. “How many meals can you buy in this city for three hundred rupees?”
