The City Son (2 page)

D
IDI IS HOLDING
a cup of tea. She hands it to the woman.

“Shall we sit down for a while?” the woman says, moved by this unexpected gesture of kindness. “My legs are giving out on me.”

Didi leads her to the porch, where there’s a mat. Darkness is beginning to fall around them. The boys will soon return home from their play. Didi will have to cook rice. There are some leftover vegetables from this morning. There’s some milk—she keeps two cows in the shed in the back—and a neighbor has brought over some goat hooves, which she will boil to make broth for the boys.

“What are you going to do?” the woman asks.

“I’m going tomorrow.”

“What about the boys?”

“They’re going with me.”

“Will you tell them?”

“They’ll find out soon enough.”

Didi is looking into the dark, perhaps to listen to her sons’ voices. Someone walks by on the path with a torch and calls out her name. “Everything is well,
bhauju
?” It’s a man’s voice.

“Everything is well.”

“What is the Masterji’s news in the city?”

“Everything is well.”

The man bids her goodbye and moves on.

“I saw them with my own two eyes,” the woman says.

“Did you see him there, my husband, in that marketplace?”

“No, but I did some investigating. I went to Bangemudha, knocked on the door, pretended that I was a student seeking help. Me, a grown woman! But I said I was what they now call an adult learner, returning to education after a long time.”

“What does the new flat look like?”

“It’s right next to the street, just a stone’s throw away from where he used to live, where she came to him for tutoring, where the beautiful boy, Tarun, was born.”

“I want to see this boy,” Didi says.

“This flat is the whole house, one story. The owner is a local merchant.”

“Tell me about Asan, since this is the place where you saw the boy and his mother.”

“It’s the old part of the city, you know, so it has that charm of the olden, golden days.”

“I know nothing of the city. I’m just a village numskull. So please tell me everything.”

“There is a vegetable market which is rancorous and alive all day. Spice shops make you sneeze as you pass by. Oil men sit in their cubbies dripping in oil, and they have these long, thin ladles they use to scoop the oil and pour it into their customers’ containers. There’s the famous temple of Annapurna. You might want to pay her your respects before you go to your husband’s home. There’s also a spot in Asan where a fish fell from the sky a long time ago. You can still see its imprints, but that’s a long story.”

Just then the boys come home, fighting. The older, louder one is berating the younger one, who is whining. They stop when they see the silhouette of the woman.

“I should get moving,” the woman says.

“How will you make your way at night? You can leave early in the morning.”

The woman sleeps next to Didi. The boys, snoring loudly, sleep in the corner. Because it’s a new place, the woman keeps waking up every hour or so, and every time she senses that Didi hasn’t slept. Toward early morning, she asks Didi, “What are you thinking about?”

“I can’t stop thinking about that beautiful boy.”

CHAPTER THREE

“R
AMRI CHHAINA,”
a villager had warned the Masterji when his father finalized his marriage to Didi. “She has a regrettable face,” the Masterji overheard someone say. Yet every time the Masterji thought of approaching his father about what he’d heard, he lost his nerve. His father had suffered hardships so the Masterji could go to the city for his studies. His father had eaten only one meal a day; he had taken out loans.

Masterji’s father would have been happy to have him stay in the village, but his teachers had been encouraging him to opt for further studies in the city. “Don’t waste that fine brain of yours,” they said. Right after his School Leaving Certificate exams, in which he performed brilliantly, he had
begun to teach at the school where he had studied. Although he enjoyed stimulating those young minds, he was slowly becoming restless. In the midst of imparting the day’s lesson he’d look out of the window and see his time passing by without any direction. The streams and paddy fields and woods where he had played now began to appear like a giant trap, the hills like a tomb closing in on him. Finally he went to his father, who said, “Of course, I support your decision and will make the necessary arrangements.”

“The city will be expensive.”

“That’s not your concern. You go there and study and become a big man and make us all proud. Just one thing, though.”

“Yes, Father?”

“Don’t forget your village. This is the place that gave you birth. You should never forget where you were born, the people around you when you were growing up.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Don’t get lost in the way of the city, Son.”

After four years of studying for his BA in Kathmandu, the Masterji came out at the top of his class. When his father called him home to get married, he returned, and now he was despondent at the news of his bride’s ugliness.

One morning the Masterji embarked upon a two-hour walk to his future bride’s village. He had her name and the name of her father, and after some inquiries he located her house. Given the two-story structure and an outer façade of nice-looking bricks, he knew that this was a family of
decent wealth, something his father had already hinted at. The Masterji sat in a tea shop across from the house and watched it. For nearly an hour he watched, drawing questionable glances from the
sahuni
. Then his bride emerged with an empty
gagri
on her waist. She was going to fetch water. She was round, her face like a soccer ball. His heart dropped in disappointment. When she came closer, he saw her face. It was
bhadda
, flat and dark and uninteresting. Her cheeks were puffed up as though cotton had been stuffed inside. She had dark spots on her face. A neighbor of hers passed by, and his bride began talking with her.

The Masterji asked the
sahuni
, “Is that the girl of the house? Sulochana?”

“Yes, that’s her. Do you know her?”

“I’ve heard of her, that’s all.”

“If you like her,” the
sahuni
said, “it’s too late. She’s about to get married.”

“I see.”

“Are you surprised? Given how ugly and round she is?”

“I’m just here drinking tea.”

“They’ve been wanting to get her married for a while, but all the boys have balked. But now they’ve found some poor sod. A bright fellow in the city, I hear.” The
sahuni
laughed. “He has no idea what he’s getting into. I hear the boy’s father has taken some big loan from this girl’s family, and the marriage is an exchange.”

The Masterji sipped his tea.

“Would you want to spend day and night with that face?”

“She must have some virtues.”

“She’s a good girl, works hard, a good cook. A model wife. But that face! What does it remind you of?”

The Masterji shrugged.

“No, no, tell me. Does it remind you of something?”

The Masterji said nothing.

“A battered
bhakundo
, like the football our local boys kick and kick so hard on the field that it’s all blackened and bruised.”

The Masterji paid the
sahuni
and said, “You’re no beauty either,” as he left. As he walked past his bride, the Masterji noted that her lower right arm, not covered by her dhoti, resembled an elephant’s trunk.

The Masterji trudged back home on the narrow paths of the hills. There were several moments during that journey when he could have swerved onto a different route, descended to a different village, then perhaps a few more villages until he reached a place from where a bus could carry him into the plains, where he could have disappeared. But he went home and helped his father prepare for the wedding.

Once they got married, the Masterji gradually came to appreciate his wife, even though he spent most of the year in the city. Despite all the cruel comments that had been flung her way throughout her life, she was even tempered and hardworking. She took care of the Masterji’s father as he became increasingly feeble and sickly. She spoon-fed him and bathed him with a towel. She was ferocious in
bed, during those times when the Masterji visited. She was like a tigress who took immediate control. She clawed and scratched and was inexhaustible. When the Masterji got tired, she rode him, with abandon, uncaring of the noise—the rocking, the crunching, the moans, and the whimpers. She made him cry, gasp, and, occasionally, shout—so loud and rollicking was their lovemaking. She was bigger than he, and he had always been thin and academic looking, so when she climbed on top he became a little afraid. During those perspiring nights, she didn’t tolerate any excuse or demurring from him. Her physical prowess was so strong that had he made a false move she’d have surely struck him. The pleasures he experienced those nights—her ample thighs and arms enveloping him, smothering him—were so severe that in the morning, once she became quiet and respectful like a traditional housewife, he wondered if he had dreamed them.

“This type of daughter-in-law only the most supremely blessed people will get in their homes,” the Masterji’s father said in his croaky, throaty voice. To his father, his daughter-in-law was an embodiment of Goddess Durga herself, strong yet sweet, firm yet nurturing. His father thought the bedroom noises were good signs. He saw the depleted yet satisfied face of the Masterji in the morning and thought her lack of beauty was no longer an issue.

But while the Masterji returned to the city happy and contented, mixed in with this satisfaction was a small degree of anxiety about who she was. If I displease her—this
thought came to him swiftly, like a small, fast sparrow—she will crush me. In the city the anxiety stayed with him, and it gradually diminished because their distance was so great. But over the years, each time he boarded the bus for the village, he experienced an excited type of dread. He didn’t look forward to seeing her face, but his mind went into a frenzy thinking what she’d do to him at night. Even when he returned for the last rites for his father, she didn’t leave him alone at night. It was not the proper thing to do—the grieving period was supposed to be pure and uncontaminated—and he felt guilty when he returned to the city.

After the birth of their first son, Amit, her body became heavier, and rounder, and she ate twice the amount she had before. He hated the way she ate, opening her mouth wide like a hippopotamus and shoveling her food in with her hand. Her jaws made loud chomping sounds when she ate, but he was afraid to say anything. He wondered if he had been spoiled by the city, as his father had warned, but he could no longer stand the noises she made, for example, when she gargled in the morning—the
aakh
and the
thhoo
that went on for eternity. They began to appear uncouth to him, crass and hillbilly.

CHAPTER FOUR

A
FEW DAYS
later Didi appears with Amit and Sumit in tow in Bangemudha at the Masterji’s new flat. The boys run to their father, who tousles their hair and comments on how they’ve grown since he last saw them.

“You should have informed me,” he tells them after they enter the house with their trunks and their bundles. The beautiful boy and his mother, the Masterji’s city wife, have gone to her mother’s, and he’s expecting them to arrive any minute now. Perhaps he can take Didi and his two sons to another location, offer an excuse about why they can’t stay here. “My students will be arriving here shortly,” he complains.

“We came a long way on the bus,” Didi says. The boys
are looking out of the window at the neighbor’s house, where some children are flying a kite on the roof. The Masterji thinks of lines from a famous poet that speak of the neighborhood in chaos after a child falls out of a window.

“There’s not even food in the house to eat,” the Masterji says. “Perhaps for tonight you and the boys—”