The Gurkha's Daughter (4 page)

“Aamaa thinks I have the ability to do a lot more in the world,” Sarita said.

“The world is your family, Sarita. What you do with them is how you use your potential.”

“I know you think Aamaa is useless, but she's the first person who has shown an appreciation for my opinions and talents. She has encouraged me to take up sewing again. I gathered the courage to go to college because of her. If she wants to help me realize my dreams, why should I stop her?”

You need to be someplace you will be appreciated, not shouted at all day long,
he had said.
I am not going to lie—the process of becoming a famous star will be difficult. You will have to forget a great deal of what you've been taught. The competition is tough, and my cousin will teach you about things you might have to do with rich, powerful men to gain favor from them. You've a bright future, Kaali, don't let your mistress tell you otherwise. You have to promise not to forget about us lesser people when you are rich. All right, promise me that, keti.

“And what about your husband and son, Sarita? They should be your dream. This college dream will end once you realize how difficult life is alone. I've done it, and it isn't nice. At least you have a husband who doesn't beat you up. You've been married fourteen years. Don't throw it all away on this wild notion of love. We are Nepalis. We are different from these people.”

“But I've been unhappy, Bhauju, really, really unhappy. I love my son and thought I'd suffer through this for him, but—”

“What sufferings are you talking about, Sarita? Suffering is your husband beating you up, coming home drunk, and throwing utensils at your head. Suffering is your husband cavorting with other women and having mistresses. Suffering is not having a husband at all. You have a husband, and he is a nice, reliable man. He takes care of your son and is a good father. He has even
allowed you to go to college although he clearly doesn't like it. Why throw it all away just because some white woman lectures you on love? She sees marriage through her Western eyeglasses. What you and
jwaai
have is special. Don't let anyone—least of all a sixty-year-old white woman who's spent her life alone and is now living in a foreign country with a foreign family—tell you otherwise. It's a great marriage. You just need to be on the outside to see how beautiful it is.”

“Aamaa says I could go to Australia.”

“You could also go to Australia with your husband and son. You could start a new life there with your husband and son. You could work, study, earn with your husband and son by your side. You don't need to sacrifice one to have the other. You'll have disagreements, arguments, and fights, but that's the beauty in it. If I could bring your brother back from the dead, even if I were told all we'd do once he came back is fight, I'd happily have him. Life is so much better when you have someone to share it with. You don't want to be alone, Sarita. Five years of loneliness has half killed me. I sometimes don't recognize who I am. I see fully the differences between the person I was before your brother passed away and the person I am now. Take my advice—talk it out with your husband. He might be willing to move to Australia. If it's a great opportunity, why not? Then talk to your Aamaa. Tell her you can't leave your husband because you don't want to. If she's the goddess you claim she is, I am sure she'll understand.”

The sun grew stronger as a new day stretched ahead and the van stuffier with the progression of the journey. Sunny awoke and right away opened his window, letting a breeze blow in. Erin asked for her Discman back, opened her window, and took pictures. The driver was mellow, his near-death experience several hours earlier discouraging him from overtaking larger vehicles.
When Kaali tried sitting up, the van abruptly made a turn, and she hit her head on the roof.

“That was just stupid Kaali,” Sarita said to her husband on the phone. “Can't even stand straight. All right, I have to go now. We are almost here. Can you hear the conches? Looks like they've already donated a cow—wait, it's a calf—to the priest. Bye. Be careful of what you eat in that strange land—don't they eat anything that has four legs?
Chyaaa
.”

“Kaali is such a bad name, Kaali,” Parvati said. “From now on, introduce yourself to everyone as Rekha.”

“Rekha is a good name.” Sarita giggled. “Rekha, like the actress.”

Kaali looked bewildered.

“And maybe, Sarita, while we are in Birtamod, after the thirteen-day ceremony is over, we could go to Siliguri.”

You will stay in Siliguri for a few days before going to Bombay,
he had said.
You have to do as my cousin says. He's a nice person but can lose his temper easily. Remember he has nothing to gain out of you—he's doing you a favor because I have convinced him of your potential. You have to understand that everything he makes you do, even if you've been taught that it is wrong, is a stepping-stone to your becoming a big star.

“I hear these cleft-lip surgeries are a lot cheaper in India than in Kathmandu,” Parvati said as she headed to the house, and added in a whisper, “I am too tired to make arrangements for a separate room for me to mourn in. I hope they've already taken care of that.”

“I'll help you, Bhauju,” Sarita offered.

“Kaali, Kaali,” Parvati shouted. “Yes, stare longingly at the road, like the overnight journey wasn't enough. Or do you want to go home to your poor family? You know that's the way to them.”

“Oh, so this is the way to India?” Kaali asked.

“Yes, fool, it is.”

Kaali was quiet for a while. “I have four hundred rupees I brought with me,” she said. “It might get lost in the
halla-gulla
here, so will you please keep it?”

“Where did you get the money from? Have you been stealing?”

“No, no, this is the money I earned from my singing during
Tihaar
.”

“Yes, must be. I keep forgetting you went singing with that terrible voice of yours from house to house. Maybe people didn't throw you out because they were feeling bighearted during the festival season. Shouldn't you have given it to me before we set off, Kaali? Give it to me, okay, but don't make a scene out of it. Time and place for everything, girl, time and place for everything.”

L
ET
S
LEEPING
D
OGS
L
IE

Munnu—no one knew if that was his real name—momentarily stopped ruminating about his troublesome wife to return the greeting of the gigantic girl in front of him and smiled. Yet the smile did not stretch to his eyes—the eyes looked shiftily at her, nervous and uncomfortable.

“Are you all right, Bahini?” Munnu asked, his lips still a smile, his stare faltering. “Have you eaten lunch yet?”

“No, Aamaa isn't home, and the servant is sick,” Shraddanjali replied. “I might need some noodles. I am hungrier than these coolies' kids.”

She was polite, exaggeratedly so. She made it a point to wish Namaste not just to her neighbors and friends' parents but also to the servants. The flustered servants, unused to this display of respect from the child of a rich man, grinned back and sometimes hurriedly broke into a Namaste before she did. This kind of niceness coming from the daughter of someone so important was embarrassing, and while some initially decided that she was mocking them—theirs is after all a class that everyone disrespects, even the drivers, and is accustomed to being ridiculed—they came around to accepting her frequent greetings with the obsequiousness ingrained in their psyche.

Munnu knew she would ask for noodles. Shraddanjali was also talking more than she should. She often did that, and he was aware of what it resulted in.

“Wai Wai or Maggi, Bahini?” he asked.

“Let me take one Wai Wai and one Maggi. Both vegetarian.”

Munnu Bhaiya turned to the section housing noodles and chips on shelves that reached all the way to the ceiling of his L-shaped store. For their everyday needs, the neighborhood people—and pedestrians who passed by the busy thoroughfare leading to the bus stand—depended on Munnu's convenience store for
paan
, chips, chocolate bars, toffees, condoms (safely concealed in a drawer, of course), soft drinks, pens, notebooks, and cigarettes.

His landlords, the famous doctor-architect couple of Kalimpong, had begrudgingly rented out a little space on the road-level floor to Munnu at minimal cost. The husband had grunted that a
paan
store would not play well with the aesthetics of their seven-story building—a beautiful construction painstakingly built with more money than they'd spent on any single thing besides their only daughter's unsuccessful leukemia treatment—but Munnu had been persistent. He promised to keep the store free of flies and offered to clean not just the storefront but also the stairs. The landlords liked Munnu. He was less businessman-like than his father—the scumbag who was rumored to soon be taking up residence in Mecca, of all places—and they patronized Munnu's store as much as they could.

With Munnu renting the space, a hundred-square-foot area lay empty. A travel agency, advertising trips to the few tourist spots in town with red, green, and yellow lettering stenciled on the door, was paying good money for the rest of the floor. Neither Munnu nor the travel agency owner wanted the spare room. The landlords had tried using it as a garage for their little Hyundai Santro, but the first night their chauffeur drove in,
the building vibrated with an intensity they hadn't felt since their dead daughter skipped over her new rope on the terrace. The garage stood empty for the better part of the year until another
Musalmaan
asked to rent it out. He would match what Munnu was paying. So it happened that two
paan
stores, side by side, one tinier than another but both very small, stood on the road level.

Initially, Munnu had been nervous about a competitor next door selling exactly the same goods his shop stocked, but he soon realized his fears were unfounded. All of this part of Relli Road, the neighborhood in the vicinity of Baidyanath, came to him as creatures of habit. Sure, to passersby, the two stores were the same, and Munnu found the foot traffic decrease slightly soon after, but that wasn't anything to be overly concerned about. Should the new shop eat into substantial profits, he'd simply talk to the landlords about renting the formerly vacant space. In fact, as a precautionary measure, he'd ask them to rent him the place before the other store's lease was up. What paltry business his store lost now was hardly cause for an anxiety attack. What was worth one throbbing headache was this animal in front of him.

At almost six feet tall, she was maybe the tallest girl in Kalimpong. Hers was one of those faces you couldn't do so much about, which Munnu thought was a pity, because each one of her features, isolated from the rest, was rather striking. The combination resulted in an unremarkable face—not downright ugly but slightly incongruous. Munnu, who prided himself in his ability to determine what was amiss in a woman's attractiveness, knew she'd have been far better looking if some part of her face were slightly ugly—maybe a bucktooth here or a bump on the nose there. It was evident she tried too hard. She was a high school girl, but she wore thick, luminous lip gloss that rivaled the shine of her artificially colored burgundy hair.

He had seen this girl grow. She frequently beat up neighborhood boys as a grisly overweight child, but she was now as thin
as a bamboo stick. On days she was sick and absented herself from school, she'd puff into his store, dressed in just a shawl and pajamas with pictures of red hearts on them, asking for a pack of Good Day or Bourbon biscuits. “The Well-Mannered Terror” his father and he had nicknamed her. Munnu was still a little afraid of her. She has a mole on her upper lip, he reasoned, which means she will always have a sharp tongue. Always a sharp tongue, he thought with a gentle shudder.

“I don't see your daughter anymore,” said Shraddanjali to his back as she opened the glass-topped rectangular box on the counter. In it were rows of chocolate bars—foreign imports along with Dairy Milk and Fruit & Nut—more expensive than the ones consigned to jars.

Munnu heard a thud and a clink behind him but didn't turn. He'd have to find a way to move the stack of noodles near his seat at the counter. He continued chewing the last remains of his
zardaa paan
, which he had recently developed a preference for over the more innocent
meetha
one, and wrapped the Wai Wai and Maggi with page three of a three-week-old newspaper. Having finished his job, he let his eyes wander to the green lipstick a Bollywood actress wore, coughed three times, and, still with his back to Shraddanjali, asked her if she wanted anything else.

“I hope you have a plastic bag today,” Shraddanjali said.

“No.” Munnu turned around. “Environment. Remember?”

“
Oooof
, your concern for the environment has inconvenienced us. At least you should supply us with paper bags before you do away with all plastic.”

“Right, Bahini, right, other customers, too, keep complaining. Leezum's mother has even threatened to go to the Munnu next door to do her shopping if I don't keep a hidden supply of plastic bags. But what can I do? I promised myself and those students from Dr. Graham's Homes.”

His reference to the other store owner as “Munnu” delighted Shraddanjali.

“You call him Munnu, too?” She laughed, gathering her package. “We call him Chunnu. What's his real name anyway?”

Munnu didn't know his neighbor's name either.

“Munnu Two,” he said.

They laughed the laugh of two people who had known each other a long time but were still uncomfortable with the vast gulf separating one's silver-spoon upbringing from another's fast-improving but modest existence.

“Okay, I need to go boil these now,” Shraddanjali said. “I hate it when I have to work.”

Munnu was certain that Shraddanjali would whine some more, as she always did when she took from the store more than what she paid for. But when Dr. Pradhan, the building's owner, appeared, Shraddanjali stopped talking.

“Shraddanjali, my
naani
, not so little anymore, huh?” Dr. Pradhan said as the teenager joined her hands in Namaste to her. “Ah, now you will stop growing, and now you can buy all these pretty clothes when you go to Delhi University. How excited you must be.”

“Yes, Auntie, very excited, but I still have my exams to study for before that,” Shraddanjali said. “And what if I don't get into Delhi University?”

“You will, don't worry,” Mrs. Pradhan said. “How's your mother doing?”

“She's fine, Auntie, very fine. But I have to leave now. The servant is out, and Aamaa isn't even home.”

Shraddanjali again joined her hands in Namaste. Not many young people did that when taking leave.

“How big she's grown, Munnu Bhaiya,” Dr. Pradhan said, and after confirming Shraddanjali was out of earshot, mumbled, “Very well-ironed skirt or belt. Or whatever.”

“She looks well mannered, but she isn't, Memsaab,” Munnu complained.

“Has she been doing it again?” Dr. Pradhan asked.

“Every day she comes here—sometimes one chocolate, sometimes two. Today it was two.”

“Soon you'll be operating at a loss, Munnu Bhaiya.”

“But what can I do, Memsaab? She's a big person's daughter. I can't accuse her of anything.”

“Hire a helper, Munnu.”

“I can't afford one, Memsaab,” Munnu said.

“Maybe you could just talk to the parents.”

“Yes, but she's eighteen. Talking to the parents about an eight-year-old's bad habits is reasonable, but this is a full-grown
haathi
we are talking about.”

“Don't speak about my friend's daughter that way, Munnu Bhaiya,” Mrs. Pradhan said.

“See, that's my point, Memsaab,” Munnu replied, unable to make out the seriousness of his landlady's admonishment. “If I tell someone else about it, who will believe me? I am a Bihari
Musalmaan
paanwalla
, and she's the daughter of the biggest lawyer in Kalimpong.”

“It's a disease—I forget what they call it in English,” said Dr. Pradhan. “How are your wife and daughter? I'll see them in a little while now.”

Munnu was born in Kalimpong. He was brought up—motherless—in Kalimpong. His father, successful to the extent that a
paan
-shop owner could be, dragged his toddler to the store under the excuse that Munnu would have had no one to look after him at home. Munnu had grown up in his father's store. Neighbors and customers often asked the senior
paanwalla
why he didn't provide his son a formal education, to which the gruff man replied that there was no better school than the
shop. And he might have been right. Munnu recognized his first letter at the store; he learned to add at the store. He also discovered how to make people like him (his father wasn't a popular man, and his ruthlessness as a part-time moneylender was well known) with his ready smile, inquiries into their lives, and a compassionate ear.

Munnu didn't let the truth of his family's being wealthier than most of his middle-class customers get to his head. Despite knowing no home other than Kalimpong, he knew he would never totally belong here, that he'd always be considered an outsider, and listening to his customers' problems without asserting his superiority would be the easiest way for him to be one of them—or come close to being one of them. He was so much of a Kalimpong man that he thought in Nepali and not in Bhojpuri or Urdu. Despite all that, assimilation had its limitations, and Munnu didn't mind that. He was, after all, living in a region that was vocal—and sometimes violent—in its demand for a separate state based on ethnic differences, so it was normal for ethnic affinities to compound.

Only two years ago, after helping Munnu set up shop and leasing his own store to another Muslim businessman, his father took up the task of finding a bride for his son. The old man's attempts at finding a decent girl in Kalimpong were futile. First, the number of Muslims in town was negligible. And second, the girls were either educated—an idea both Munnu and his father were wary of—or belonged to poor families, which meant a measly dowry.

Soon, father and son expanded their search to include Darjeeling, Siliguri, and Kurseong. Finding no one suitable even there, they stretched their territories farther and settled on a fifth cousin from Meerut, far away in Uttar Pradesh. Munnu would have preferred someone who spoke Nepali, but he had long ago reconciled himself to his narrow options. And Humera
was really fair—white like the best-quality flour he sold. A color TV and furnishings came in the dowry.

Humera stood out in Kalimpong for one big reason. The color of her skin played no role in her attracting the town's attention. In fact, her looks had nothing to do with it—it was what covered her fair face that piqued everyone's interest. She was the only woman in the entire town to don a burqa. In Kalimpong, a few Muslim women veiled their faces, as did some Marwari wives, but no one wore a burqa. No amount of coercing on Munnu's part persuaded his otherwise subservient wife to give up her favorite accessory. Munnu would have been happy if his wife had veiled herself, but a burqa—anachronistic and out of place—was taking it too far. He was afraid that everyone in town would assume that he made his wife wear it.