A decade old article

 https://lalitmag.com/my-dissent/

Ten years ago! 

Carrying Kathmandu

These past three days - ugh. 

Ms Upreti the neighbor and I took a short walk on Tuesday, before the arsons began. Until then, the fires had been small – mostly orange traffic cones piled up. I joked about how inexpensive the smoke plumes that day had been. So nice of Gen Z – even the fires are little. I told Ms Upreti about the day during the Hrithik Roshan Kanda when I and my friends followed a mob as it went around burning Madhesi-owner businesses, using the fire to light incense dedicated to Shiva Shambho. I was nearly giddy at the – how is an older man to put this – the near demureness of the protests. Yes, there were groups going around confronting the police, but a few tires here and there, some traffic cones, some barricades. 

The real burning began later, when – now it is a lot more clear – the Army made it possible. It may have been that they were trying to avoid further casualties, but the Army did allow the bloodletting to happen. 

The damages are estimated at around a billion USD. Every symbol of democracy was burned. Rashtra Bank was left intact. Now it is becoming more and more clear that the arsonists were far too well-informed and clear of intention than a typical mob. Almost as if someone has been studying Roman history recently and directing the mob.

I have as little faith in Gen Z as I did in Oli and Deuba's gang. They are a mix of inexperience and self-righteousness. This is to put it nicely. 

However, this is not why I have this post going. It is for the short story below, which I was reminded of as I took the walk with Ms Upreti the neighbor. It is about another time long ago, another time of terror.

--

Carrying Kathmandu

(Jan 3, 2013)

 

‘There is no turning back,’ Bidur looked Manav in the eyes.

Manav agreed – there was no turning back once they got on the road. It would take caution and cunning to walk the cargo from Anamnagar to Sanepa. There was a bridge to cross, the city was burning, the dogs were everywhere, sniffing for an opportunity to rush at the defenseless. They could wait for another day for the job, but they didn’t want to. Bidur didn’t want to wait, and Manav didn’t want to argue, for they had spent the Saturday past arguing about the interminable wait. The city had already been in turmoil for over a week.

Bidur ran back from the mouth of the alley. ‘Coast is clear,’ he said, sotto voce. ‘Roger, then,’ Manav said. They carefully picked the large, flat board wrapped in butcher paper and securely Scotch-taped, a board unwieldy enough for just one person to carry, but no easier for two to manage either.

Manav stopped at the pavement. No vehicle, no pedestrian, not even a dog marking its territory – the road was eerily empty. Not a sound, not a whisper, not a song but the buzz of his own heart irrationally scared of the emptiness of the road before him. Manav nodded at Bidur. They matched strides to march towards the Hanuman temple, where they would have to stop to take stock of their progress, chart their options.

To the west rose a plume of black smoke. From the hill to the east came the slow rumble of inevitability inching closer. ‘The river,’ Manav said. Bidur ran to check if the coast was clear, and roger, it was. Manav ran with the board over his head. He must have flapped like a flightless bird to anybody spying from the thousand shuttered windows around him.

‘Slow down! Slow down!’ Bidur said urgently. Manav could hear the wooden frame creak as he rushed the board, lopsided and flailing, to the shade under the house where Bidur waited. He knew the frame was of sapwood pine, light and weak, fragile.

‘Why are we being so afraid?’ Manav asked Bidur, who shrugged. The eastern rumble wasn’t getting any louder – that was both fortunate and unfortunate. If they’d wait there long enough, another plume of smoke was sure to rise from the east, where the slow rumbling serpent had just made its stop.

They walked along Dhobikhola. A dusty road littered with garbage, following the course of a river fed with sewers. A lone pig rooted in the filth outside an abattoir. Like fruits of a miracle, bright purple brinjals and spiky dhatura hung from plants dotting the dusty banks. A reservoir of plastic bottles pooled many an untold fathom deep. Snips and strips of cutoffs and refuse from a garment factory hid the shame of the river under motley.

‘We have to be afraid sometimes,’ Bidur said. They shuffled along silently over the dusty track. A dog ran out with its tail held high, whimpering, turning to bark at the furniture workshop yard from which it had been chased out. Half a brick bounced along the ground, narrowly missed the dog, went over the edge of the road, scared the pig enough that it galloped away, squealing as if it had been stuck.

‘Slowly, but, now!’ Manav said. Bidur turned around and lead the retreat. Behind them, the dog snarled at its enemies. ‘Don’t run,’ Manav said as he felt the tug on the board as Bidur quickened his pace. The dog gave a loud scream behind them as another missile found its mark. It hightailed past Manav and Bidur, disappeared under the bridge. It would be hell to hide there, amid excreta and shadows, but much safer than being in the open. If the slow-rumbling mob from the east descended the hill, it would perhaps pass right overhead, oblivious that Manav and Bidur guarded the cargo right under the bridge, under their very trampling feet.

Bidur tensed up when a man cackled behind them, his laugh a rasping trumpet of derision. Manav pushed the frame, prodding Bidur to keep walking forward. ‘Oi!’ the man called. Manav pushed the frame. Bidur hurried forward. ‘Oi! Stop!’ The hyena called from the gate of the furniture workshop.

Bidur shook his head at Manav – the board trembled as Manav tried to control his trembling hands. Manav clenched his jaws, breathed deep and turned around.

The man – the hyena who laughed and ordered them to stop – was wiry but short. He still grinned, a blackened row of teeth under spotted gums. If Manav put a hand on the man’s forehead and kept him at arm’s length, the man would flail as he tried to reach Manav. He also wore flip-flops which would make chasing difficult, unless the man took them off and wore them on his forepaws. He wore a filthy shirt with a pocket torn in a corner. Manav would never be intimidated by this villain. The hyena sauntered over to them, a fist-sized brick in his throwing hand. He jerked a thumb in the direction of his workshop. ‘I didn’t see you come from the other direction,’ he said. He picked a stick from the ground and slapped his naked shins.

‘I’m afraid of dogs,’ Bidur said. ‘You hit that dog and it came after us. I don’t like dogs.’  The man looked at Bidur and Manav, started in a wide circle around the board, dragging the stick in the dirt. Manav picked his side of the board and turned. The man put his hand on Manav’s shoulder.

‘Brother,’ he said, ‘Wait a minute, won’t you?’ Manav waited for Bidur to pick his side of the board, but Bidur was looking past Manav, past the skinny hyena.

‘What happened?’ A band of men with red and blue scarves wrapped around their heads emerged from the workshop gate. The leader carried two mobile phones and smoked a cigarette. His shirt was spotlessly clean, his jeans an expensive brand. He could be a bank executive or a web-designer with his own business. He could be a restaurateur in Thamel. The leader – Naikay, instigator – put his arm around his scabby guard-dog, the laughing hyena.

‘What do you have under there, brother?’ Naikay asked. Bidur didn’t respond. Manav took stock of the situation – the hyena, Naikay, four more young men, all Manav’s age. Each seemed reasonably amicable by his appearance, except for the hyena, but, each also wore a red and blue scarf around his head. Naikay’s phone rang, but he ignored it after checking who was calling. ‘Let’s take a look, brother, at what you have under the wrapping,’ Naikay said. But, he made little curlicues in the air, a gesture directed at his four companions to unwrap the butcher paper.

‘No!’ Manav barked. The lackey who had stepped forward to tear at the butcher paper froze, looked at Naikay for permission to initiate the search. ‘It took us a lot of careful work to wrap it. We don’t have any paper here. We can’t carry it unwrapped.’

‘Tell us then – what is under the paper?’ Naikay asked.

‘It is a canvas,’ Bidur said. ‘We have to take it to Sanepa.’

‘Why?’

‘Our job,’ Manav said. ‘That is what we do.’ He picked his end of the board, waited for Bidur to pick his end and walk.

‘Wait,’ the hyena said. ‘But, why did you run?’

‘Did they run?’ Naikey asked the hyena, who nodded, laughed. ‘Brother,’ Naikey said to Manav, ‘Please understand. We have to see what is under the paper. Please don’t force my hand. You know how it is. ‘

‘How is it?’ Manav bristled. Bidur nudged him gently with the frame, but Naikay was already squaring up to Manav. Bidur raised a hand in a placating gesture, but the man closest to him flinched as if Bidur had tried to touch his face. Or, hit him. The air crackled with intense energy.

‘They were sneaking that way, towards Babar Mahal. I came out and saw them. Then they tried to turn around and run,’ the hyena reported to nobody in particular. Naikay’s phone rang. He let it ring until the person at the other end hung up. Hyena stabbed at the butcher paper with the stick he had been dragging in the dirt.

‘Stop that!’ Manav hissed and snatched the stick from the hyena, broke it, threw it into the sluggish river. The hyena shrank behind Naikay. Bidur rolled his eyes, stepped between the men and the frame. Manav held the frame behind him, at an arm’s length. Bidur called the hyena to him, put a friendly hand on his shoulder.

‘This is a canvas. It means it is a painting. It took months to make, but it only takes one mistake to destroy it forever.’ The hyena vacantly looked at Bidur, unimpressed. ‘It is a work of art,’ Bidur said.

‘Let’s look at it, then,’ Naikay said. Bidur spread his arm, wordlessly pointing at the filth around, the pig that had trotted back to regard the posse with curiosity, the loose, light dirt underfoot. ‘Come on!’ Bidur looked Naikay in the eye. ‘This is no place for that!’

 

‘Is this good enough?’ Naikay asked. He and his posse had brought Manav and Bidur back to the road by the Hanuman temple, under the awning of a shop that was shut for the day. Nothing was open in the city – not even the windows that faced the streets. Without waiting for permission or protest, the hyena tore at the butcher paper. Manav let go of the frame with a huff and crossed his arms.

Naikay’s phone rang again. He didn’t answer it, but furiously punched a message. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and leaned against the shutters of the shop. ‘Huh,’ Naikay said. The hyena looked at Naikay, at the painting, at Manav. Bidur’s face had hardened into a mask of stone.

‘I’ve seen this before,’ one of the younger men spoke with his chin on his friend’s shoulder. His friend, who was fiddling with his phone, looked up, pushed his glasses up with his knuckles. 

‘This is a work of art?’ the hyena laughed. His laugh disappeared after he looked at Naikay, who shook his head slowly, grunting under his breath. Naikay looked at Manav and said, ‘Sorry, brother – but you know how it is. We had to ask you what was under the paper.’

‘Satisfied now?’ Manav said. ‘Now we have to take this all the way across town, in this sun and dust? You couldn’t have taken our word?’

‘There are people,’ the hyena said, ‘there are people who are carrying pictures we don’t agree with. These are unsafe times.’ Manav glared at him. But the hyena didn’t back down. Instead, he pinched a piece of butcher paper that still clung to the frame and ripped it, slowly, with exaggerate attention. A six years old boy hummed, imitating a motor-cycle, and slapped a bicycle tire with a cane. The hyena grinned at the boy. 

‘It is just a painting,’ Manav hissed through his teeth. The boy’s lone tire wobbled until it was righted with a well-timed slap of the cane.

‘Which is fine. This picture is fine. We have no problem with it. You can go now, brother,’ Naikay said.

‘Oi! Fuchey! Kid – today is a chakka-jam! No wheels on the road!’ The hyena laughed and chased after the boy.

‘Are you giving us permission to walk freely on the road?’ Manav squared up to Naikay.

‘This attitude won’t get you very far from here, brother,’ Naikay said.

‘Both of you!’ Bidur picked up his end of the frame and raised his voice a notch. Naikay swiveled towards Bidur, but Bidur had taken a step forward, crowding him against the shutter. The other men fanned behind Bidur. ‘You have forgotten my face, haven’t you?’ Bidur said to Naikay. A flicker of doubt sped across Naikay’s eyes. ‘I think you have forgotten my face. My name is Bidur. And you,’ he yelled at the hyena, ‘walk away from that boy.’

The hyena backed away, uneasy and deflated. The boy grabbed his bicycle tire and disappeared behind a house. The four men behind Bidur shifted their weights and searched the roads behind them. A crow circled above the Hanuman temple. The man fiddling with his phone took a video of the crow.

‘We have a long way to walk,’ Bidur said. The men cleared away.

‘Who is this guy?’ Manav asked as they picked up the painting.

‘Nobody,’ Bidur looked at Naikay. ‘Just a kid trying to please his father’s friends.’ The four men watched slack-jawed as Naikay’s face contorted in humiliation.

 

Manav walked in anger, outpacing Bidur so that the painting swiveled, came between them like a fence of crowded faces, a bouquet of blood-spatter or petals strewn over a hillside. Bidur tried to keep up.

‘You knew that motherfucker and you still let me go through that humiliation!’ Manav stopped in the middle of the road at Maitighar. Bidur listened attentively at the sound of a thousand feet dragging in their direction. ‘You knew him! He would have let us pass, wouldn’t have ripped the wrapping apart to let crows shit on the cargo!’

‘I wasn’t sure. I thought he was still abroad, working.’

‘You should have waited a little longer, until they tore up the canvas itself.’ 

‘Like I said – I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure why they let us go,’ Bidur said. Manav walked ahead. ‘You can carry the damn thing on your own.’

But Manav stopped after a few paces. Bidur caught up, the large painting flapping on its frail pine frame held aloft.  

In the silent tableau ahead of him, there rested a few three-wheelers, a car, a smoking bundle of clothes abandoned in the middle of the road. Riot-police in formation. A thousand men and women standing across the street with bricks in their hands. A police truck with gun barrels poking out of the nest above the driver’s cabin. The asphalt red with brick-dust, speckled with abandoned footwear, fuming with nearly-spent tear-gas shells. The whites of a thousand pairs of eyes. Raging veins on a thousand pairs of fists. 

A thousand heads wearing red and blue scarves.

‘Keep walking,’ Bidur said. Manav waited at the edge of the crowd. A policeman cradling a shotgun raised his hand to stop Bidur, but he held the painting before him, like a talisman, and walked into the fray.  

And, for the half-minute it took Bidur to walk past the mob with their flags and the police with their bamboo batons, to step gingerly over and around broken bottles, hot shells, bricks, sticks, pamphlets, puddles, bullhorns and slogans, everybody looked at the painting. The cargo that Manav and Bidur were charged with carrying across town, across the bridge and to a home, parted the thick violence in their path.  

Manav looked at the shotgun until the policeman pointed it to the ground. Manav stared at the bullhorn in the hands of a bearded guru until he pointed it to the ground. Thousands of pairs of eyes followed Bidur first – he obscured behind a broad, crowded, painted face – then swung around to quiz Manav. He looked at them broadly, with disdain, skimming over their passion-flushed faces. He peered around the painting until a fat man carrying an insignia painted on a flag stepped out of Bidur’s way. He measured his stride to remain behind Bidur, behind the talisman that transported them from that world to another until they walked past the upturned car burning at the mouth of the bridge, leaving behind the silenced crowd, the silenced shotgun and bullhorn.

 

Bidur was waiting on the other side of the river, at the mouth of the alley that went down to the Gurudwara. ‘Let me carry it,’ Manav asked when he caught up.

Manav looked at the city from the shadow under the painting which he balanced over his head, careful not to touch the canvas with his hair. He and Bidur had accepted the task of carrying it – this bauble – across town, through a riot. Bidur walked behind him, whistling now. The streets were still empty, but the city was stirring. The halal butcher behind the Gurudwara hadn’t opened his shop, but he was sharpening his curved knife on the whetstone outside his home. A goat strained against its tether, trying perhaps to put distance between its neck and the pervading smell of blood inside the shuttered meat-shop. A temple was wide open – it even had lit lamps and thick clumps of incense fragrant by the freshly washed idol. A woman walked with an open basket of marigolds. A plastic ball rolled from a doorway and bounced down the front steps, rattling to a rest by Manav’s feet. Bidur picked the ball, and as Manav walked ahead, Bidur threw the ball into the door from where it had spilled. Further down the street, three boys balanced atop a wall and watched Manav approach, until their friend hidden in the guava tree shook the branch on which he sat astride, raining ripe guavas all around. The paan shop wasn’t open, but the paanwallah leaned on his kiosk, lazily slapping at a handful of chewing tobacco. A girl, barely ten years old, carried a small yellow bucket of water, resting every ten steps. Somebody must have called her from somewhere, because she yelled back in a piercingly high voice, muttering, cursing innocently, spilling more water in her wake as she tried to hurry. The sound of a motorcycle racing away roared and echoed through the street. Manav and the four guava-thieves froze on their spots and listened. Nothing. The boys resumed their fight about who was to get which part of the spoils. Manav walked around the corner.

‘Wait,’ Bidur called. Manav turned. Bidur had spotted a large vat of water steaming over a large kerosene stove at the end of the alley. ‘Let’s wait it out, understand?’ Bidur said. ‘Let’s wait for sunset. They all go home after sunset, anyway, these punctual reactionaries.’   

‘The cargo,’ Manav said.

‘Bring it in,’ Bidur smiled.

 

Manav leaned the painting against the wall in the shop. A tall man with a long nose and a twinkle in the eyes smiled and pointed at the painting. ‘Brother – did you make that?’ he said. 

‘No, we didn’t,’ Manav smiled at the tall man and his friend.

‘Sister!’ The tall man stood and hollered. A middle-aged woman appeared from behind the florid curtain at the back of the room. ‘Sister – two warm glasses for our friends here,’ the tall man said before settling into his chair with a thud. ‘They have delivered high art to your humble abode, sister, and we must celebrate that.’

Manav and Bidur quickly drank the first glass of the weak millet brew and asked for refills. ‘I insist,’ the tall man said, ‘I insist upon paying for this round. For our artist friends.’ Manav and Bidur didn’t correct him. The tall man left his companion behind and hopped to Manav’s table. ‘Cheers, brothers!’ he said.

‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he said after finishing his drink and tapping the table to signal the shopkeeper for more. ‘I was in the Gulf for a long time. A long time. The air was like the breath of a child who is about to die of fever. All women covered themselves from head to toe. To see a Nepali sister on Fridays, coming out to eat momos with her friends, smiling to us and even asking how things were back home – that was like heaven. Women bring coolness to troubled heart, don’t they? You tell me, brothers – don’t they?

‘Now, it had been six years since I had left Nepal. I fell from a scaffolding, nearly four stories I fell, because I had been running a fever, but my supervisor – not a Pilipino, no, no, not a Bangladeshi, no, but a Nepali – my supervisor wouldn’t let me have the day off. So I lost my grip, and I fell. Didn’t even faint, just retched my guts out into the hot sand. Then I was given time to recuperate.

‘I’d be left alone all day long, tossing and turning with fever, cooking from inside out. I’d drink all the water in the bottle by noon. But I’d be too weak to walk to the tap, you see, too weak to refill the bottle. More than that, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to walk to the toilet if I had to go, you know, if I drank too much water, I worried I’d wet the bed, be humiliated before the others. I’d be parched, desperate. I’d lick my lips like this, for some salt to gather spit to wet my throat.

‘On the second day, I noticed the painting of a mountain that one of my roommates had put on the wall. Snow-flurries and cracked glaciers. Whenever I’d get very thirsty or hot, I’d concentrate on that painting. Then I’d fall asleep and dream of swimming in the stream in my village, or waiting in the thick shade of a tree on a mountain crest as the breeze dried the sweat on my back.

‘So, brothers, I looked at that painting for six days, while the fever ravished me, made mincemeat of my brain. The painting and I made friends, you see, became mits  – sometimes I’d wake shivering with cold. Cold. Brr! After six days and six nights, I woke up fresh, fresh as cow’s milk. Never got sick even once in the next four years in the Gulf. That is why I admire people like you, brothers, who bring coolness and relief into lives like mine.’

‘We didn’t make this painting,’ Bidur smiled at the tall man, who shook his head vigorously and wagged his finger. ‘No, no, no,’ he said, ‘please let me thank you nonetheless, for doing what you do, for bringing some relief into lives like mine.’

Manav and Bidur paid up and picked the painting. ‘Brothers,’ the tall man said, ‘please, will you let me say one last word to you?’

‘Yes?’ Manav said.

‘That painting of the mountain on my wall – the one I made my mit,’ the tall man waved his hand in the air, sighed. ‘It never existed. There never had been anything on the wall. My fever had made me see it. So, when I say that I want to thank people like you, my brothers, please believe that I mean it from the heart. I miss that friend of mine who saved my life so many years ago, you see? And I salute you. I salute you!’ The tall man staggered to his feet and saluted Manav and Bidur as they carried the painting out of the teashop.

After walking for a few minutes, Manav said, ‘Back there by the bridge – I thought they were going to burn the cargo.’

‘I thought they’d pepper it with buckshot,’ Bidur said. ‘I couldn’t decide who would pounce on the cargo first – the police or the mob.’

‘But, they saw the painting, didn’t they?’ Manav said, almost with a catch in his voice. They climbed up the stairs to Lain Singh Bangdel street in Sanepa Heights. The sun was setting over Thankot. ‘I want to look at it for the last time,’ Manav said.

 

Just as they arrived at Sanepa Chowk, the shops opened their metal shutters with boisterous, grating screeches. There was light. It spilled out from doors, from window displays of shampoo and electric cables and ladies’ hosiery. The barber trimmed his own beard; the fractal of his snipping scissors repeated in the mirrors on the three walls of his shop. The grocer winnowed a basket of tomatoes, letting the lackluster sink out of sight, calling the lustrous to the light. A toddler, shirt gathered around its waist, veered towards the road as it tried to waddle away from its mother, who snatched at it with alarm, but not without laughter, not without gratitude, a gesture made with one part terror and one part love. Two schoolgirls chewed sour, spicy candy and watched Manav and Bidur carry the cargo into a dusty lane to the east.

A dog followed Manav, sniffing at his feet, trotting ahead to read Bidur, trotting yet ahead to clear the road for them. It ran to gates and utility poles and marked their progress with personal notes to his comrades. Manav worried about not being able to clearly see the path beneath his feet. The large canvas wobbled and buckled whenever the two friends went out of tandem, but that quickly got them adjusting their paces until the painting glided smoothly over the dog-shit and puddles that peppered the road. The dog ran ahead and ran back, looked at Bidur with expectation, then disappeared. A little girl ran out to her balcony and screamed, ‘Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday!’ A chorus of children poured out onto her balcony and sang. A boy playing alone, knocking a football against a wall, also shouted to the balcony, ‘Happy Birthday!’

Manav knew they were almost at their destination. Bidur would call a number and somebody would come to a gate few houses down the road, take the cargo from them. Bidur would put his arm on Manav’s shoulder and ask – Are you tired? Manav would say – No.   

 

End.

 

 

 

Death! for ECS

 Sometime, a long time ago (a decade ago, not that long ago, but also a long time ago), I used to write page-fillers for ECS under pseudonyms. Today, while deleting old emails, I found this:

--

Death

The awareness of life is chased at its heels by the awareness that it, too, is finite. Innocence dies in the moment corruption is recognized, and death is the great corruptor of life. Laughter and love, the passion for an endeavor, unshackled imagination -- all of these qualities which are companions of innocence now become tainted with a grave and marked sorrow. Sunrises and sunsets no longer have their separate majesty and beauty, but are like their other companions: dawn and duck, mottled with the grey of sightlessness. From the mote the gaze shifts ever upwards, celestially, and finds indifference in the cold attitude of the universe and insignificance in the self's size and span, shape and breath. 

Mothers who gave us life will die, as will the babies cradled in our warm embrace. This hurts the most: that each death of a familiar person drags us closer to our own deaths. Yes, decay is constant, because the body begins its march towards decay in the moment of its conception. But death is precise, with no overdrawn tail, but with a brutal finality. And this seems unfair, this finality, this blow that stops everything else. 

We then clutch desperately for support and exit: let there be a heaven for me and a hell for others, so that I may enjoy, from my hallowed perch, the suffering of those who torment me now. Let me take my eyes and ears and lust and wrath to an afterlife, so that I may eat honey again and mount fragrant women and find my arms filled with strength and purpose. We seek afterlife, we seek heaven, we seek rebirth and immortality. We chase the elixir of life. Knowingly or unknowingly we expend absurd amounts of time and strength on fleeing from death. Our lust for life extends to encompass those whom we love -- for our love them is in fact our love for ourselves. This thing that awakens each morning in the home of our skull seeks to awaken again and again, without delay and surprise, and it hates decrease and loss. It wants increase, of love, camaraderie, the joys of the flesh. It hates decreases of the same things. 

And, death is the great reducer, the absolute eraser. 

***

  My first brushing with death was the result of an accident. I was the agent with the malignant hand, and the victim was a much younger being. I must have been three years old, in a sleepy little village by a dusty, meandering highway. Under the slate roofs of our house were the granaries where, quite regularly, cats came to birth kittens. Granaries attract mice, so it is only sensible that cats were allowed to give birth in the attic. I found that kittens that are only a week old make good play friends: they meow and scurry, purr and flip on their backs. My younger cousin also wanted his own kitten but I didn't want to share. I put a red string around my kitten's neck to claim it as mine, and after a long afternoon of playing with it I locked it inside a cupboard made of thick teak wood. 

My mother complained that there were more mice in the house, and that she could hardly sleep through the night because of a scratching noise that came from inside the walls. The next day, she plugged all holes on the mud walls with fresh cow dung and applied a mud plaster over the plugs, effectively hiding the holes. In a few days, the scratching stopped entirely -- the house had rid itself of its mice infestation. But a new, putrid smell filled the house instead. When my mother followed the smell to its source she found a shriveled, mummified kitten in the cupboard. 

It was my kitten, and I had starved it to death by forgetting it inside the cupboard. I still feel guilty -- and that is the primary emotion attached to death, still, after all these years. More than sorrow I experience guilt. 

***

The second death in my life also led to guilt. I am not suggesting that I hadn't by now learned that the quick and vital someday become dead: we were, after all, farmers in a village where ancestors were worshipped with blood sacrifices and boys carried catapults to get themselves a quick snack from tall trees: doves, sparrows, pigeons, parrots, pheasants. Which child hasn't been fascinated by the movement of ants, and perhaps driven by a primal instinct, tried to render them still, to push them into the dirt until their heads and thoraxes separate? But, there is another kind of death than the snubbing out of insect life: the kind of death that is felt personally, either as witness or perpetrator. 

I was playing hide and seek with a friend, a boy of my age. When it was my turn to seek and his to hide, I'd stick my head into a basket and count loudly. He did the same when it was his turn. I ran off to hide, but he never came to seek me out. Instead, it was my sister who came around, frantically searching, calling out my name. My friend had wandered off towards the road, still counting with the basket over his head, when a jeep ran him over. I was five years old, and he was my best friend. He was also the only son to his parents. Once more, I felt the pang of guilt, and for many, many years after that, I was afraid of walking past their home. My friend's mother would burst into tears, and I would be left awkward, unable to decide whether to say anything or sulk in silence. What would have his life looked like, if he had not died that day?

***

I saw a body bobbing in the river, bloated and dead. Men pulled it to the riverbank. Death brings stillness of the sort that takes away from a body its personhood and makes it into a thing, no more a being. The world tears apart and separates, leaves the living on one side and the dead on the other. The dead then belong to the solidity the material universe, whereas the living is still afloat, seeing light as color, experiencing vibrations as songs and expressions of love.

***

Mother killed a hen once, to feed guests from out of town. There were many eggs still intact in the hen, in various stages of development -- the material becoming the vital, a procession that begins with stuff and becomes a being. On one end is death, on the other end is life.

***

  And, that time came in life when people in the family died, one after another, some distant relatives, some friends. Family is also a lot of physical presence: the dead leave behind their rooms, their perch on the balcony, orange pips and the frail aluminum wrappers of the drugs they took to stave off the death that stole them away. Deaths early on in childhood felt like the gap left behind by a milk-tooth falling off: it was an absence, but time filled it again, so that laughter returned, small things became delightful once more.

But, with age, the absences became like hard pits carved into stone, capable of catching memories and regrets and nostalgia, but forever carved, never to heal again. The death of parents, the death of children -- how can they ever be healed? The hollow ever increases; the size and shape and span of the loss ever increases. Hurt grows and joy diminishes. There may be an immediate finality in seeing them burn or buried, but the emptiness doesn't mend. It stays, and grows, until the day comes when the edge between the abyss and the solidity of life blurs and we fall into the empty and void.

***

 An aunt gave birth to twins, and villagers immediately began to mourn for her: invariably, one of the twins would drink the share of his brother and thus send him towards an early death. When twins are not separated from each other, one of them dies: this was common knowledge. The aunt tried hard, going everyday to the shaman, measuring for how long she nursed each boy. Yet, one of them died. I wonder about the remorse she must still feel, and about the remorse the surviving cousin must feel even now. How does it feel, I wonder, to start life with the stamp of death so insistently marked on one's side? When my cousin walks, I wonder, does he feel the tug of the emptiness by his side, like a man feels vertigo when walking too close to the edge of the precipice? I wonder -- isn't that the feeling we all have from the very moment when we realize that death is everywhere and ever present? 

***

2015 was a year of deaths for Nepal. The earthquakes and the recent political agitations have brought many scenes devastation and death. And, as the calendar makes yet another turn, we yearn for change, for renewal. We wish for the specter of death to disappear, and we yearn for vitality and a new spring of warmth and growth. But, death is ever present -- just as the will to stare it down is ever present in us.

Yes, we mourn. But we also build. Yes, we feel the absence and emptiness. But, do we not also constantly create, constantly replenish? Pause and reflect and count the many instances of loss you have endured this year, and when you have a complete list of losses, turn your gaze towards the bright dazzle of everything new that has entered your life. For instance, I lost a great-aunt to the ripeness of age, but I have gained a niece who is only just beginning to sit up and giggle. If I don't celebrate the new and alive, my mourning for the old and dead is incomplete, devoid of dignity. 

So, let us contemplate our losses, and also count the gains. Let the grief we all feel be also a torrent that washes itself away, like a weight swinging at the ends of a chain, capable of hurtling out and away. And let it leave us with a jolt of lightness and release. Instead of death, let the emptiness swelling by our side be like that of a womb that is capable of calling into existence everything beautiful and worthwhile.

ए स्वर्गमा बस्ने हाम्रा बा ! तिम्रो नामको जय जय होस् !

The Lord's Prayer, from the Sermon on the Mound, in the Gospel According to Matthew, King James Bible: 

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

My translation:

ए स्वर्गमा बस्ने हाम्रा बा ! तिम्रो नामको जय जय होस् ! तिम्रै राज्य आओस्, स्वर्गमा भएसरि नै धरती पनि तिम्रै इच्छा अनुसार चलोस् ! आजको एक छाक आहारा पुर्‍याइदेउ । हामीले तिर्न पर्ने पैँचो मिनाहा गरिदेउ – हामीले पनि त अरूलाई पैँचो मिनाहा गरिदिएका छौँ । ए बा ! हामीलाई लोभलालचातिर नडोर्‍याउ बरु त्यता बोलाउने दुष्टहरूबाट टाढै राखिदेउ ! यो तिम्रै राज्य हो । यहाँ तिम्रै मात्र शक्ति छ, तिम्रै मात्रै भक्ति रहनेछ, सधैँ सधैँका लागि ! यही सत्य रहिरहोस् !

--

But why, Prawin? Why?

A young woman handed me a booklet with Everest and a Red Rose. I was hoping it was some racy little self-published romance. It turned out to be the Gospel According to John. Badly translated -- not inaccurate, just a tedious read, lacking all music. It disappointed. So I searched for the Lord's Prayer in Nepali. They all disappointed.

The Konkani translation of the Bible was such a big hit that it led to the Portuguese extracting enormous amount of wealth from the Malabar coast over nearly four centuries, mostly in the form of spices. The Bible has been in Nepali translation for at least 200 years now. But the language is still so stilted and awkward.

That is why I thought I'd try my hand at it.

Now the nerdy duo of Upadhyaya & Mainali can try their hands at it :)

Only the one photo...

of a chair, from another chair... lol!

 

Another excerpt that got excised from the book

This section:

Comedy and tragedy are thought of as opposite experiences. These are old words in the Greek language, from where they have entered so many languages of the world. Their second halves both refer to singing – the word ‘ode’ in English is of the same kind. But the first halves of these words are thought to come from two sources which are difficult to think of as simple opposites.

The first half of the word ‘comedy’ is believed either to mean having fun, or to mean the entire village. Thus, comedy together can mean raucous singing by everybody around. An entire village sings with joy. That sounds like much fun. But as for tragedy – the first part is believed to mean the bleating of a goat. Nobody knows why this is so – indeed, nobody fully knows if this is even true!

Long ago, I spoke directly to you and said that if we failed to understand the pain that Budhani carried from one life into the other, this would fail to become a story. When you began reading the story of the fierce little crow, you gave me your patience as keepsake. If you didn’t throw the book away in disappointment when Budhani’s heartbreak broke her so utterly that she became a diminished, woundable baby, you gave me your trust. If you are reading these words now, be assured that I have kept your patience and trust safe and close to my own heart. I have not mislaid them.

Budhani’s story, as it is told traditionally among the Tharus of a certain place, is a comedy – it is an ode, a song of strength, a celebration of their girl children and the women they grow up into. It is the story of a people who have lived in the bosom of the natural world, taking from it just enough to enrich their lives, and giving back with the gift of harmonious living. When a baby depends upon its mother for care and sustenance, it hurts her just enough to win over her attention and love. Have you seen a newborn calf insist at its mother’s teats?

The folktale celebrates Budhani’s cleverness. Through a series of riddles, she shows that her wit is sharper than that of the king against whom she is pitted. When asked for a rope made of ashes, she burns a rope and leaves the ashes undisturbed and asks the king to put it to use. When asked to satisfy the king’s craving for a curry of a gourd that has grown to fill up the inside of a pot, she grows a pumpkin and warns the king that he may not break the pot to get to the fruit. When asked to build a palace in the air, she tricks the king into listening to a flock of a particular kind of bird whose call, in the language Budhani and the king shared, sounds like a team of masons and carpenters urgently asking for bricks, mortar and wood to be sent up to the skies where the aerial palace would be built. Many animals, birds, insects who received help from Budhani come to her aid when she needs them the most. By untying the knots of these apparently impossible riddles, she forces the king to accept defeat.

And, sometimes, she murders the king by sealing him off in a tunnel. Then she becomes the wife of his son.

 But I – as your blameless refabulator – won’t trick you with so much dazzling wit and perfect plotting. I will not bore you with just the light and soaring laughter of a village rejoicing the triumph of a daughter who has become a queen, who has abandoned the hut for the palace, republic for fiefdom.

With your kind indulgence, I will also drag my goat along, bleating its protest at how life treats it. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, like a satisfying khaja.

What got left out :)

Since I know not too many people visit this site, I thought I'd use this as a place to begin thinking about the short essay I must write by the 21st, when Budhani is releasing in Kathmandu.

 I had been wondering about how much has changed since I began writing the story. The long section below, a little over 2000 words, was excised even before I began writing the second half of the story. I now realize that I began in Kathmandu, but really, the pace picked up in Agonda of Goa. I was working on a bunch of projects at that time -- Han Kang's The Vegetarian, Narayan Wagle's Koreana, and this, Budhani. I was also working on ICIMOD and Photo.Circle translations, I believe -- Agonda is only slightly cheaper to live in than Sanepa, after all. 

---

Three days had passed since Budhani had brought home calves born to King Adhipati’s cows, and now she waited in the cool shade of a bakaina tree profuse with white blossoms. She imagined the King’s soldiers galloping on their horses, coming to arrest her. Baba, her father, and Bhau, her mother, had scolded her at first for stealing the king’s cattle, then worried for her because they didn’t want soldiers to put Budhani in chains and drag her to the royal palace.

Budhani knew very well that she was inviting trouble. But she also looked forward to getting into a tussle with the most powerful man in the land – the great King Adhipati himself! Budhani didn’t mind a bloodied nose if it came from wrestling a bully into defeat.

An hour before the ripe berry of a red sun would set over the river Rapti, a billow of dust climbed skywards from behind the bamboo groves that lined the road to Budhani’s village. Budhani guessed from the size of the dust cloud and the clamor of birds scattering in fear that five soldiers rode their warhorses with utmost haste towards Baba’s house. The soldiers would have to ride past the bakaina tree, and they would surely see her. She had wanted the soldiers to arrest her there, under the bakaina tree, in the rain of their fine white petals. Budhani closed her eyes and waited.

And, in that moment of waiting, a slice of Budhani’s mind floated above her, like a feather lifted towards the skies by a warm breeze. It climbed up nearly to the crows in the sky and the cloud just above them and it looked down at Budhani under the Bakaina tree. It saw, from a height from where the edges of the world are as clear as ink-lines drawn on a bright sheet of paper, a line of flowers joining Budhani’s home to the King’s palace, diving into the underbrush and emerging like a clumsy scarlet stitch on a torn green shirt. The sight of the tiny red petals of the flowers made Budhani shiver with anger and sadness. The flowers led away from her past and returned to her future, both of which were full of terror for her.

A lone rider thundered ahead of the rest and nearly rode past Budhani, because her sun bronzed face and clothes the color of dry grass hid her so well in the shade of the tree. But the horse neighed as it was reined back in a sudden halt and an urgent voice whispered – ‘Budhani!’

‘Rajkumar! I have been waiting,’ Budhani smiled and opened her eyes. She came out from of the shadows. Rajkumar, firstborn son of King Adhipati, sat on his fine steed, but his face was full of fear and anguish.

‘Before the other soldiers arrive, Budhani, run away into the wheat fields and stay away for the night. I’ll drive my father’s cattle home. I’ll fall on my knees and beg him to forgive you. But, please, if you have ever counted me among your friends, run away! Hide! Go!’

Rajkumar’s horse whinnied and dug the turf with his hoof, just as impatient as his rider. A long chain of thick iron links jangled from the saddle. Budhani stroked the horse’s neck to calm him. ‘Take me to my home, Rajkumar. I’ll help you drive the cattle to your father’s palace.’

‘Will you not run away and hide, Budhani?’ Rajkumar asked. His head hanged in worry for his friend because his father had vowed to put Budhani in chains and starve her to death.

‘I will not run, Rajkumar, and I will not hide,’ Budhani said as the king’s solders arrived on their horses. They carried long, mean spears and naked, curved swords with gleaming blades and wore peacock feathers in their milk-white turbans. Each soldier was more fearsome than every other, even though each soldier had been brought into the King’s service because he had been judged the scariest man in the entire kingdom. The king had chosen them carefully to carry the terror of his authority into every corner of his dominion. A quiver of their moustache was enough to send the bravest man cowering into the reeds to hide from the glare of the longest day of summer until the gloom of the longest night of winter.

Rajkumar pulled Budhani onto his horse. As they rode through Budhani’s village toward her house, children ran out to greet them. ‘Budhani is riding the king’s horse,’ they shouted and tried to follow the loping horses. But when they saw the soldiers, and when the soldiers turned around in their saddles to bare their teeth through ropey moustaches, the children scattered like little chicks frightened by the shadow of a hawk sweeping down upon them.

Baba and Bhau were standing outside when Budhani and Rajkumar reached the house. Budhani jumped from the horse and ran to the cattle shed to free the calves that she had stolen from the king. Baba didn’t look at the soldiers, because he, too, was afraid of them. But Baba and Bhau had known Rajkumar ever since he was a happy child playing in the meadow beyond the edge of the village.

‘Rajkumar, my darling prince,’ Baba said with a little bow and fond smile. A soldier rattled the hilt of his curved sword. Baba bowed deeper and quivered. Rajkumar raised a hand to signal his soldiers to step out of the old man’s yard.

From the cattle shed where the young calves frolicked around her, Budhani eavesdropped with ears as sharp as those of a crow on the conversation between her father and her friend, the prince.

‘Rajkumar – Budhani is your friend. You have chased butterflies and herded sheep together. Why, she taught you to swim across the Rapti, where once you entangled yourself in my fishing net! Now your father is angry at her.’

‘Uncle, your daughter is just as headstrong as my father is unforgiving, and there lies the source of our troubles,’ the prince said mournfully. Budhani’s pig waddled to Rajkumar’s side and sniffed at his feet – even the pig knew and loved the mild-mannered prince.

‘We had wanted a son, but we got Budhani instead. If I had scolded her when she wrestled the boys into the canals, if I had whipped her legs with nettle when she climbed trees, if I had told her not to run when she should have walked or not to talk back when she should have silently endured…’ Now it was Bhau’s turn to show how much she regretted raising a daughter to be strong and outspoken.

‘No, auntie, don’t say that. Budhani wrestled the strongest boys only when they bullied the weak. She climbed trees and outraced the fleetest man only to show that she could. With a caw she can speak to crows, and with a roar she sends tigers scampering through the jungle.’

‘Yet your father calls for her neck!’ Bhau wiped her tears.

‘Keep faith yet – the way Budhani has been smiling smugly all this while, I suspect she has a trick or two hidden up her sleeve. The sun sets tonight, and we must march for my father’s palace. But I fear she’ll be home to pester you enough before the sun goes to its home in the west tomorrow.’

Budhani’s favorite bull Chand called after her as Budhani corralled the new calves toward Rajkumar’s soldiers. Each calf had Chand’s patch of white fur where their left horns would eventually grow. The calves looked like a jumble of the same face in different shapes and sizes. Budhani took a moment to caress Chand’s neck and whispered to the big bull. ‘I will be home before today’s parijat blossoms fall, Chand,’ she said.

‘Well, the King is waiting, isn’t he?’ Budhani asked cheerily, and although the four soldiers grinned and cheered, Budhani’s parents let out wails as sad as the lowing of a cow that has lost her calves to a deepening evening. Rajkumar turned his horse around to face the setting sun. He turned around one last time to look upon Bhau and Baba’s sad faces, then pulled Budhani up behind him.

Five horses thundered away from Budhani’s village, leaving a hundred worried hearts in their wake.

‘Rajkumar – spur on your horse, won’t you?’ Budhani asked. ‘We won’t reach your father’s palace by night if we keep up this pace. We must hurry.’

In response, the prince slowed his horse down to a trot. It was a while before the soldiers galloping ahead of them saw that their prince had fallen back and reined in their horses to a canter and then to a trot. By then, the prince’s horse was walking lazily.

‘We won’t reach the palace tonight, Budhani,’ the prince said. He pointed to the soldiers, ‘These are men I trust the most, but even them I do not trust fully. You insulted my father by stealing his calves – I worry that he may have ordered them to kill you before you see the moon that will surely rise tonight.’

Budhani looked up and saw the million and more stars twinkling in the moonless sky – some were bright, some were faint flickers, some were arranged in ornamented shapes, and some shone steady, colored in pale yellow or red. She knew many of the stars, for she had studied them through long, lean nights in this and another life. A flood of memories hurtled down from the starry sky and made her suddenly sob and grab hold of Rajkumar’s vest set with mirrors embroidered in red silk. After a moment Budhani realized that Rajkumar was holding his breath, perhaps troubled by how Budhani’s tears had soaked through his shirt.

‘Forgive me, my friend,’ Budhani whispered, ‘forgive me for this moment of weakness.’

‘It is not weakness to cry, Budhani,’ Rajkumar whispered back. ‘You will perhaps see me cry soon enough, before the sun sets tomorrow, or perhaps even before it rises in the morning, and I certainly won’t apologize for my tears.’ His voice choked already, so he cleared his throat as the soldiers walked back their horses to Rajkumar and Budhani. ‘Find suitable camp,’ the prince ordered his soldiers with added gruff in his voice. ‘We are too late to risk running into the father tiger of this forest.’

~~~

The soldiers chose a large sala tree in a clearing by a small pond to make their camp. One soldier climbed the tree to keep a watch, another posted himself closest to the pond where, throughout the night, many wild beasts big and small would come to drink water. Two soldiers leaned on the far side of the tree and immediately began to snore in challenge to the many crickets and cicadas of the forest. An owl hooted. Rajkumar laid down his saddle and riding blanket on the grass for Budhani to lean against.

‘I know this tree,’ Budhani said. She gave Rajkumar a spray of red flowers with tiny petals. Rajkumar looked around – he had not noticed the flower on the way to Budhani’s village, but the white flowers of the bakaina tree under which he had met Budhani had made him drink in the world in deeper draughts, so that he saw everything, everywhere. The red flowers were particularly prolific around this sal tree.

‘Why do you speak in such a strange voice, Budhani?’ Rajkumar tried to smell the flowers.

‘My voice mixes the sweet and the bitter, Rajkumar – no wonder it sounds strange to you. Have you never cried in happiness, prince? And, have you not had to laugh bitterly sometimes? I am under this tree once more, Rajkumar, and once more I am filled with the bitter and the sweet.’ Budhani spoke these words in an abrupt burst, then fell silent. She could feel the tenderness of Rajkumar’s gaze on her short and slightly upturned nose and on the fine black arch of her brows and the down that brushed her temples.

‘Oh, your life is in peril, and therefore everything is bitter, and I do understand that, Budhani – if I could beg my father to change his mind, I would, but he is a stubborn old man who has vowed to punish…’

‘Oh, shush, Prince! Sometimes you think everything revolves around you,’ Budhani scolded Rajkumar. The soldier who had fallen asleep on his watch in the sala tree startled awake and struck out with his spear at what he must have mistaken for a particularly large and untidy head of a robber in the night. A lone, blue feather floated down from the shaken nest to settle by Budhani’s head. A hot drop of tear slid down her face.

‘A lifetime ago – yes, it was exactly a lifetime ago – this tree was my home.’

‘I was young and beautiful and fiercely intelligent,’ Budhani turned towards Rajkumar as she began her story. ‘You may wonder how I remember so much from another life, when I wasn’t even a woman as I am now, but a young crow with the darkest down and a sharp beak. But grief sticks to you forever, even as joy evaporates, and it is grief that makes the heaviest burden we carry between lifetimes. By the evening, we begin to forget the happiness of our mornings, but the grief from another lifetime sticks to us. Close your eyes, Rajkumar, and try to remember, and your griefs will return to you.’

[PA: This bit is in the book, with the voice changed to third person, bits moved around.]

Rajkumar loved his friend Budhani deeply. So he obeyed and closed his eyes, tried to search for sorrows from past lives. His immediate sorrow over the possibility of losing Budhani first blinded him from seeing very far into the future or the past, but soon, in the eye of his heart, there stirred shapes and shadows, a vein of a heavy pain, a shouted accusation and an unspoken cry of despair. None of this was clear or distinct, but there was enough of a shape or suggestion that Rajkumar – like most of us learning something for the first time – understood that there was truth to what Budhani said.

Had Rajkumar failed to see the suggestion of truth in Budhani’s story, our story would also fail. We would also fail to see Budhani’s pain, and all of this prattling would amount to nothing. It wouldn’t be a story that reaches into the farthest corners of the universe and the warmest places of your mind and heart.

‘The nest from where this feather has fallen, Rajkumar, was once the home of a couple of crows,’ Budhani said.

Budhani hadn’t been born on the sala tree where she’d nested twenty years before the night on which she would tell Rajkumar her story, but that doesn’t matter here. (this bit is retained) She had been hatched a crow, brought up to be clever and resourceful, and had lived on her own ever since her mother had gently pushed her out of her birth-nest.

----

Everything hereafter, until Budhani's flight away from family, is in the book. Then this bit:

‘Love has consequences, Rajkumar,’ Budhani said. Rajkumar’s heart ached and his breath caught in his throat. He was the soldier-prince and Budhani his prisoner – he couldn’t show her the tears that stung his eyes. He turned away but found the abundant red flowers around them frightening. ‘Love has its cost,’ Budhani whispered, and Rajkumar knew it was he who was the prisoner, and Budhani his captor. And he knew too well the cost of love.

---

 ‘Somebody must have shown me to water and worm, led me to shelter away from rain and sun. But I saw and heard nothing, Rajkumar. Food tasted of nothing. No rest refreshed the limbs and no water quenched thirst. I survived, but it would have been a lie to suggest that I lived,’ Budhani said. Rajkumar didn’t speak, but his breathing was of a man awake and listening.

[This is how I wrote notes for future chapters]

RAJKUMAR WALKS AWAY TO REMEMBER THE TRIAL

BUDHANI AND RAJKUMAR REACH CAPITAL CITY – BUDHANI SEES KYETT

KING CALLS BUDHANI TO THE COURT

BUDHANI SAYS SHE IS INNOCENT, BECAUSE SHE ONLY TOOK THE CALVES SIRED BY CHAND

KING SAYS THAT IS ABSURD – THE HEIFERS WERE FROM HIS HERD, SO THE CALVES ARE HIS

BUDHANI CHALLENGES – ARE YOU WILLING TO GO AGAINST ROYAL DECREE?

BUDHANI, WITH KYETT AS WITNESS, TELLS THE STORY 

BUDHANI BEFORE THE KING

KORVIN REFUSES TO GIVE UP LIZZIE, WHO IS STILL TOO WEAK TO FLY AWAY AND MUST BE CARED FOR; KORVIN ACCUSES BUDHANI OF NOT CARING FOR LIZZIE

KING DEMANDS TRIAL OF STRENGTH – WHOEVER CAN TAKE LIZZIE, TAKE HER

BUDHANI LETS GO OF LIZZIE, WHOM KORVIN TAKES AWAY

BUDHANI CURSES THE KING, WHO, ENRAGED, TAKES AWAY HER TONGUE

BUDHANI FLIES AWAY, LOSES HER FEATHERS, ARRIVES AT HER PARENTS’ HOUSE LIKE A LITTLE CHILD

BUDHANI GROWS UP TO EXACT HER REVENGE FROM THE KING 

---

 Alison Schuettinger, who is an Assistant Professor at Parsons in NYC, and I began writing together during COVID. We'd meet online once a week, her morning and my evening, write for half an hour, and read the writing to each other over the next half-hour. If or when you read Budhani, you will see the transition between the two halves of the book. That section came out of one such writing session. It is my favorite bit of the book.

Another evening's writing became the opening chapter of Shelter in a Storm, the unpublished, unpublishable novel that I spent 2023 writing. The writing sessions with Ali ended when I moved to Pokhara for about 7 months -- mostly to finish the three projects I had been working on. (And I did finish them all.)

Vegetarian has been out since 2023. This is coming soon:

  

Miller's Song

 Sometimes we write things only we really like, stories which don't speak much to others. This is one such. It is in Shared Sacred Landscapes, available for download here: https://lib.icimod.org/records/67y76-5jc26 

ICIMOD has been restructuring its online library, so the download count seen here isn't accurate :)

--

We do not know how long ago the events described here occurred ― or where in the weft of events past or yet to come these people lived and died ― but, in the village of Yari, deep in the shadows of the Himalayas, in a valley of plenty and gurgling with the restive Karnali, lived a merchant with an insatiable desire. It wasn’t merely greed or ambition, for he was a learned man, a man of the world who believed in hard work and who had met and studied a thousand other men just like him. His desire was built on caution and thoughtfulness: as a child he had seen deprivation, and as a merchant he had profited from the hardships and the excesses of others. But, as much as he knew how to gain and gather wealth, the miracle through which it could be retained for all ages to come had eluded him.

Every morning, well before his sons or their wives awoke, the merchant chased away sleep and wiped clean his mind muddled with dreams. He cleaned the shrine for the ancestors kept in a corner of the wide, flat roof of his splendid house. He offered water and incense to the aged brass statue of the Buddha in the shrine, and remembered the gods of his home, of the village and the valley, and then remembered all the shrines, peaks and passes, rivers and lakes, meadows and forests where he had prayed for safe passage. In the few moments of rest before the day awoke like a beast in a hurry, he allowed the mind’s eye to wander, and allowed himself the proud but quiet joy of watching himself on his roof, in the home he had built to tower above all the houses in the village, a house that was slightly bigger than the village monastery. There were forty rooms under his roof, each built during the spring thaw of the forty years since he had started his life as a trader.

The merchant hadn’t started rich; he had grown up in a two-room hut, fatherless, in the bosom of a mother who shied from accepting charity and chose instead to labor for each rope of garment and each morsel of food. When his brother, older by two years and a lifetime of hardship already, had failed to return after a summer of herding cattle in the high pastures, he told his mother that he wanted to become a trader instead of working his kinsmen’s fields in exchange for just enough grains to see them through the long winter.

His mother had taken his face in her hands, gazed into his eyes, and quietly walked out of the house. She returned in the evening with a bundle of lamb’s wool. “Urgyen, you’ll repay them, each of them, before you gather your own wealth,” she said and recited to him a list of names and measures: women in the village who had put them in debt by sparing a handful of wool each. Even now, in his ripe old age, standing on the roof of the house where he had gathered more wealth than all the wealth of the richest men in every village within three days in every direction, he could recite the list of names, recall the face of every aunt or elder who had gently pushed him towards his fate.

Through that first winter, when the snow lay thick over the valley, the young merchant spun and wove and carded and felted the wool. His mother sat by the fire and prayed. When the thaw came and the first of the green shoots of wheat peeked out from the wet and dark soil, when traders who had wintered in the southern plains returned with bales of printed cloth and sacks of grain, pots of oil and boxes of ivory and coral, and news of beasts made of iron and smoke, the young merchant was ready with two blankets of coarse black wool to trade and a felted shawl under which to pass the nights.

His kinsmen who had crossed the high passes into the blue skies of Tibet and the frothy rivers to the dark jungles of India, who spoke sometimes among themselves in tongues he knew to be foreign smiled at him with compassion and took care never to speak to him harshly, even when they scolded or pelted their own sons with the dry droppings of goats and yaks for laughing too much or letting a goat wander off the trail. And the young trader repaid them with his only possessions: service, loyalty, obedience and deference. He took special care to know which cattle belonged to which merchant, and, without eavesdropping or being intrusive, he made it a point to remember the particulars of each kinsman’s transactions with traders along the long route over and around the mountains. He learned to look at the facts of trade like a handful of grains to be sifted, the chaff to be separated from what could become seeds to be sown in the coming year.

After the spring spent trading in the endless grasslands and salt-swamps of Tibet, the pair of blankets became twenty sacks of salt. He accompanied his kinsmen back to Yari for a spurt of hurried farm-work before continuing south, through the gorges cut by the Karnali and past villages of Khas people, who saw his age and assumed innocence and tried to seduce him into parting with his sacks of salt for cheap. But he persisted; he watched how friendships were made, how belligerently or politely bargains were struck, how quickly some kinsmen converted profit into goods or how they sewed coins into the linings of their coats. He didn’t sell his salt, but he readily opened a sack to hand out a large fistful to poor women with sons of his own age. He smiled politely and pretended not to understand the gestures made by Khas men with thick arms and soft bellies, but he spent the evenings sharing his tsampa with, and accepting salted gruel from, boys who wore hunger around their eyes and soil under their nails.

“Sell your salt,” kinsmen only a few years his elder would tell him. “Sell it, buy the grains you need and return to your mother. She must be worried sick.”

But he persisted, without seeming stubborn, without causing offence to those who were clearly more fortunate, and therefore may have taken offence at his ambition. He didn’t offer excuses, and he didn’t let it appear that he sought greater profit.

He had seen how a day’s walk northwards into the windswept plains of Tibet or southwards into the humid stench of the hot valleys of Salyan increased the value of his goods. In Yari, a measure of salt could be bartered for three measures of grain brought by Khas traders from Jumla. But a measure of grain would become three measures of salt when transported to the salt swamps of Tibet, where all day long the women and children carried buckets of brine to their raised terraces where the sun separated the salt from the water. The trader’s life was full of hardship between the two ends of such journeys, but the reward was of the ever-increasing sort. Even as a young boy, the merchant could count in his mind the vast possibilities of wealth that he could command. Accordingly, he acted with caution, holding back his merchandise until the very moment when the potential for gain was the greatest.

Gradually, his kinsmen retraced their steps homewards, loaded with dried apricots and obdurate highland wheat and mustard oil. But the merchant was determined to see the end of the road, to encounter the iron beasts that carried more goods in a day than all the yak caravans of the world combined, to befriend the dark men of the forested plains, for there the greed for gold and musk, the perfume of mountain hashish and sap of pine the was greatest: there lay the wealth he needed for his mother.

Coral, mirrors and glass beads, statues and amulets with the image of the Buddha ― if a trader went deep into the malarial south, these were the goods he brought home. But when the young merchant returned, just before harvest, he had acquired two new pack mules, and each was laden not with the trinkets or trifles expected of a novice, but only with grains. He showed his face to his mother. She touched foreheads with him, muttered a prayer of thanks and peered deeply at his face, then set about boiling water and preparing him a meager but warm meal. The young merchant immediately went around the village to the door of each woman who had given him a measure of wool.

“You are too generous, Urgyen,” each woman said when she saw the measure of grain set before her as repayment. He didn’t look up as he added more grain to the already generous portions, and, in response, the women climbed the ladders to their stores and each brought back an armful of fine wool. “Son,” each of the women said, “don’t embarrass us by repaying this gift. Your father was like a brother to me, and this I give because I have the right to love you like you are my own son.”

And that was a very long time ago ― forty-one winters had passed since. His mother had died, leaving him truly orphaned, but the merchant had built a wide world for himself. He had built his house one spacious room at a time, climbing up the terraced mountain. He had been still young and virile by the time he had gathered wealth enough to last his lifetime. Kinsmen who had once taught him to distinguish between coarse and fine merchandise brought to him their young sons to learn the trade. Richer men offered him their daughters in marriage, but he chose for his bride a poor orphan who knew little of luxury but enough of hardship and economy. Sons were born, and they, too, learned to trade, married pretty brides and filled the house with their laughter.

Now, when he took account of the wealth he had laid away ― the gold and silver, the musk and yak tails so sought after in the plains of India, the bales of fine silk in teakwood chests and heads of cattle strewn across seven meadows and a week’s walk, blocks of sandalwood and utensils of brass ― he accurately counted that his sons and their sons, and their sons and grandsons after them, could live for seven generations to come without ever having to card wool or carry salt, without ever having to leave the village of their birth. The merchant let out a sigh as he opened his eyes to face the gods on the altar of his house ― this wouldn’t suffice, this horde that would last a measly seven generations after his death. What of the sons and daughters to come after? He needed to work harder if he was to earn enough to last another seven generations beyond the seven he had secured against the tomblike cold of the winters and the sharp hunger that infected those months of inactivity.

But lately, as the end of his days approached, his mind had lost the surefootedness of his youthful years when every calculation fell snugly into place, like the hooves of the bellwether yak that plods through blinding blizzards on the high passes across the Himalayas. The beads on the abacus that in years past had flitted about like the shuttlecock on a loom now moved clumsily, as if tired after a life of counting and recounting, and the thread of his thoughts often frayed abruptly. It was in one such moment that he finally recognized the melody that he had often heard through his days filled with industry, when he heard for the first time the words in the songs that he had mistaken for a voice inside his own mind. The merchant was amazed that his daily routine had all along been accompanied by songs so full of reward; the calm and patience he had experienced for so many years was owed to the voice of another, to songs that echoed through the village and found him as he worked. When he understood this, he felt the shores of his patience and calm crumble away, for they had never been his possession, but simply gifts borrowed until this moment of rupture.

Didn’t the merchant once have a friend who died of malaria, nearly twenty years ago? Did the man not leave behind a child? No fate worse than to die shivering of sweat and fever in the winter, with the paths to shrines and sacred groves of ancestor gods buried under snow, weighed down by the helplessness of knowing that the disease had smuggled itself here from a faraway land, so that no local spirit or god could answer the appeals, for the gods, too, admitted to their inadequacy at such times, and the dhamis halfheartedly muttered their incantations, the smoke of the incense only stung the eyes and didn’t fill the flesh with the hope of healing. Malaria should kill men in the damp swamps of the Terai, not in the crisp air and crystal light of the mountains. And, so, after prolonged suffering, the man had died, leaving behind a seven-year-old girl, who, straightaway, knowing fully the hardship that awaited her, pursed her lips in quiet determination and set about being the orphan who doggedly pursues survival.

The merchant now remembered, not without revulsion, the cold and rational manner in which he had asked his eldest son to carry a sack of rice and a blanket to the orphan, and never since given any thought to his dead friend or his daughter. She was the singer: this he now learned. And he also learned that he no longer remembered her name.

 

The merchant came to the edge of his roof and watched the young woman ― what was her name? Sonam? Tseten? ― as she walked past his house. She glanced up and saw him. He froze in guilt; she smiled and scratched her head, walked around the corner of the house and began humming her tune again. The merchant walked to the room where he worked ― a brazier in a corner, a tiger-skin rug before a low table, an abacus, a bowl and a flask of water, ink, discreet heaps of scrolls. He scratched his head tilted to a side to follow the orphan miller’s song.

Every day, the orphan miller walked to the top of the village, to the mill on the stream that rushed through, and waited for villagers to bring her grains to be milled. Her share was a measure of the flour she delivered to their homes in the evening. Every year, each family also spared her their old clothes and blankets. There was no trade to be had through the winter when the stream froze over ― she had to set aside a portion of her wages each day, a fistful of the flour or tsampa, a store against the lean months. She lived downstream of the village, in a hut on the way out of the valley. The merchant rode his horse past the hut four times every year, and when he put his mind to work recollecting what he had heard and seen of the hut each time, he realized that he had seen nothing and heard nothing: through the always open door, past the threadbare blanket draped halfway across the threshold, he had seen nothing but the dim shape of a pellet on the damp floor and two pots stacked by a corner bearded in soot. He had heard nothing, but the miller’s song had always chased him to the gorge leading out of the valley, or welcomed him home after his lengthy travels.

 

Grief had left no score on the orphan: within weeks of her father’s death, Thendup, the old miller, had invited the geshe from the monastery and asked elders from each household to drink tea at his house. “I have milled your grains, brothers, but now I am tired. Geshe has given me mantras to chant, and a hut behind the monastery where I can rest my old bones, and I hope you will come when he calls you to bury my body. But, my brothers and nephews, know that you will not see me again in this village.”

The men had nodded their heads solemnly, scratching their bare heads, waiting for someone to ask the necessary question: “But, who will take your place, Thendup?”

Before anybody did ask the question, Thendup spoke in a soft voice, asking the men to lean in and listen. “I have learned something that none of you have – milling is not a job for someone without gratitude. Yes, the stream turns the water-wheel and the millstones grind the grains, but the miller makes the flour.” Everybody understood Thendup: without the care and compassion of the miller, each batch of flour wouldn’t match its purpose.

“We have among us an unfortunate child. Geshe knows better if she suffers now because of her father’s karma, or if this suffering is due to the karma of her own soul.” It was understood then that the child would become the village miller. For months to come, the women of the village would have to show the child how to mill the flour for noodles and how to grind roasted grains for tsampa, how to break grains for cattle-feed and how to store the chaff of wheat. But the orphan learned, and became the miller.

And, as her work became her life, when her daily routine required no effort, the orphan started singing. From dawn to dusk, with each breath, she sang – of gods and love, of faraway lands she had heard of only in songs, of the mother whose love she had never known, of the wind that brought snow and rain, and of the sun that brought the thaw. She remembered a song after hearing it once, and she could recite the songs of harvest and rain, songs of pilgrimages to Kailash in Ngari and to Swyambhu in Nepal. Her songs became the yarn that stitched together the village: they awoke to a song and were lulled to sleep by another; in the winter the songs touched the ache in the bones, sometimes taking away the pain, and sometimes sweetening it into a longing for the first runs of snowmelt in April. In the short spring the song was the smell of new grass and the flitting of butterflies among short-lived flowers. In abrupt moments when a man caught himself mid-thought, the miller’s songs were his thoughts, fading away in smoky curlicues. The wails of births and deaths in the village were twined with the miller’s songs.

 

The merchant spent the day poring over accounts, distracted, worrying the cubes of chhurpi mixed into the dry tsampa in a pocket of his chuba; he had always disdained the interruptions that came from his body: the need to feed, the need to chew his food, the cramps and aches in his limbs and joints, the need to empty his bowels even as he was in the middle of planning the next caravan to Purang in the north or Achham in the south. It felt profane, this insistent repatriation back to carnality. His daughters-in-law knew this, and all day long they quietly circled him, placing before him warm, salty tea or porridge flecked with dried yak meat, adding wood to the brazier or cracking open the window to let out the smoke. When his moon-faced second daughter-in-law climbed up the ladder with a bowl of rice and meat, he asked her to wait. He scratched under his hat, thinking, but she waited patiently.

“Dawa,” he said, “when did you go to the mill last?”

“I am going tomorrow, father,” she said.

“Go today,” the merchant said. “Go today.”

In the evening, the merchant heard the miller approach his door and call Dawa.

“I am coming,” Dawa said as she hurried down a ladder. The merchant called her in a louder-than-usual voice. “Dawa! Come up for a moment.”

Dawa stood on the ladder and peeked into the room, just her head and shoulders appearing through the passage on the floor.

“Give her more than her usual share, will you? Give her two times what you would give.”

Dawa nodded and smiled. As she climbed down, the merchant muttered, half a command to Dawa and half a reminder to himself, “We have enough to spare, don’t we?”

“Tseten,” he heard Dawa call. “You will need a bigger sack today!”

 

Over the next week, the merchant sent Dawa to the mill twice, and heard a lift in the miller’s songs. He instructed his daughters-in-law to bring to him their tattered old dresses, and although they protested that they didn’t have any tattered old dresses, that they had been well provided for, he nevertheless cut a comical figure, the patriarch rifling through the clothes of the women of the household and picking chuba robes and a thick outer bakkhus.

“Send these to the girl, Dawa,” he said.

When he noticed that the miller walked barefoot, the merchant sent her his dead wife’s shoes. And he wondered if he had done enough, if it was quite enough. Throughout the week he listened to the miller’s song, now with a certain amount of proprietorship. He even tried humming along to one of her songs, but was too embarrassed to listen to himself. However, with each day, through his mind's eye, he saw how little work he was getting done: he watched himself go about the day clumsily, mislaying scrolls, forgetting trading camps along a route, losing confidence that he had successfully imagined what people in a particular village would want beyond just the bare necessities of salt, grain and yarn. He had lived for so long now with the singular purpose of increasing wealth, without pause or rest. But he was restless now; he knew he was still poor, because the merchant inside him could feel the raw absence of what would bring fulfillment.

On a quiet evening, after watching from his roof as women gathered grains and greens drying in the sun, or gathered the children playing in the alleys, and as men ducked indoors to close the purse of the short autumn day, after listening to the miller walk past his house with her upbeat songs, the merchant put on a hat trimmed with fur and stepped out. “Urgyen la,” a cousin called from his house, “Where are you going?” But the merchant didn’t stop for longer than it took to wave at the cousin to signal that he was on urgent business. With each turn in the alleyways that took him farther from his house and closer to the mill he felt more like a thief. The cold lump of a silver ingot in his pocket felt heavy. He was grateful when the jumble of houses ended abruptly and the path to the mill opened up before him, hugging close to the clear, cold stream.

The millstone, resting still for the night, was as broad as the merchant was tall, and the mill was swept clean, with not a stray grain or sprinkle of flour anywhere. Water rushing under the mill chilled the air but the smell of crushed grain brought warmth to the merchant’s mind. Surely, nobody ever came here in the dark ― to the young and innocent the stream was the abode of a water-demon; and the mill was the domain of the miller, where only her labor was of a thing of value, for the rest were stone and wood and nothing more. The merchant took out the silver, embossed with an imperial seal ― shaped like the head of a horse, with eyes cut into deep grooves ― and carefully placed it by the millstone. Will she recognize it for what it is, he wondered. Only a man as widely traveled as he was, and only a man as wealthy, could tell the rare piece of silver from a misshapen lump of tin. It was the emperor’s own coin, worth a cartload of sandalwood, a hundred cartloads of salt. This was his gift for the poor miller: he wanted her to share in his wealth just as he had shared in her wealth of songs. A lifetime’s worth of wealth for a poor miller. But she will recognize it, the merchant told himself. When she arrives in the morning, even in the dim light of dawn, the silver will gleam and catch her eye, he thought.

 

Dawn broke the next day, as it did every day in the village of Yari, in the plentiful valley under the Himalayas. First stirred the fog from the river, rising to hide the stars already retreating from the morning’s brilliance, then stirred the birds in the pine and juniper, then came the calls of deer farther out in the forest and the lowing of cattle in their enclosures. A murmur filled the valley as men awoke to pray and women to prepare for the day. Incense rising from the sweet resin of juniper boughs chased after the thinning fog, meeting it midway between earth and sky, and dissolving before they could together smother out the sun. The miller’s song approached the merchant’s house and passed without hurry. The merchant smiled at the altar to his ancestors and touched the statue of the Buddha, calling forth a witness. He settled at his low table; the abacus and the scrolls rolled towards him. A shaft of sun illuminated the heavenward path for his prayers and offerings.

An abrupt silence snaked through the village and entered the merchant’s room: of course there were a thousand other noises that made up the voice of routines roped together like the crackle of fire and the gurgle of boiling gruel, but there was also the dread absence of a particular note: the miller’s song had gone quiet.

Drugged as they were by the omniscience of the miller’s songs, the villagers failed to hear the silence, but the merchant’s ears rang with the coarseness of an uninvited silence, and he saw the song withdraw and fade from the overlay of the village: now, the alleyways would seem dimmer, the cattle restless, the light in the ears of wheat dull. As the echoes of the miller’s songs faded away, the suffusion of warmth that had covered the village also ebbed and dissipated. The silence was a shadow, as if the gods had turned their backs upon the people of the valley.

Throughout the day, the merchant got up abruptly to stand at the edge of his roof, high above the rest of the village, to lean in the direction of the mill, as if through this supplication he could call forth the lost songs. He saw women carry sacks of grains to the mill, and, surely, he heard the millstones grind. But the miller didn’t sing. The merchant watched the miller hurry past his home in the evening, huddled under a bakhhu he had given her. In the morning, the merchant searched for the wisp of smoke that should have come from the miller’s hut, but saw nothing. When she hurried past his house, without looking up or making smalltalk with Dawa, it was already midmorning, and she had an unpleasant look pasted to her face, as if the villagers calling her to the mill had stolen the morning from her.

“Dawa!” the merchant called his daughter-in-law when he heard the millstones grind to a halt sometime in the mid-afternoon. “Go to the mill, Dawa. Take two baskets of wheat.”

“Father,” Dawa said. “We have more flour than we need for the entire winter.”

The extra flour, the clothes and blankets and shoes ― the merchant turned red with embarrassment. What explanation did he have to give? What must they think, his sons and daughters-in-law? But he didn’t have the patience to explain anything just then.

“Daughter, just go, will you? Half a basket of wheat, if you think we already have too much, but go.”

When Dawa returned, the merchant tried to think of a way in which he could ask her about the miller, if she seemed sour or if she had laughed freely, but without letting his impatience and dejection become apparent. Just then, he heard Dawa talk to her sister-in-law.

‘Something has taken over Tseten. She is pale, she is shivering, as if she hasn’t slept for a week. She didn’t even hear me call her name, and when she saw me, she jumped up, scared, and ran to a corner. She wouldn’t come to the door, she wouldn’t move her feet. She must have been hiding something. She stood like this, on her bakkhu, like she was killing a frog under her foot. She scared me.’

The merchant had to sit, because now he understood why the miller had stopped singing: the silver he had offered her had become her demonic master; greed had bred fear, and suspicion in her heart now poisoned every comfort. He looked at the wealth around him: the silk khata around the Buddha, which he knew was cut from the same cloth that a Lhasa merchant had offered to the Potala to be sewn into the robe that His Holiness the Dalai Lama wore for his ascension to the holy seat; the tiger pelt on which he sat daily; the ivory of his pen and the sandalwood of his table. The many rooms in his house where nobody slept or sat around a fire, but which were all full to the rafters. Debts outstanding that he hoped to collect from Limi, from Purang and Dunai, from Achham and Ladakh. The chest of turquoise that bore his seal and sat idle in a Muslim merchant’s home in Srinagar. Far to the east, in the valley of Nepal, in a Shakya artisan’s home in Patan, his name being carved into the base of a bejeweled statue of the Guru Rimpoche, with rubies and lapis lazuli on the sage’s crown. The silver was a paltry nothing compared to the wealth the merchant surrounded himself with every day, but it had been enough poison to seed suspicion and greed in the miller’s mind. Urgyen had taken away the song from her.

That night, after washing his bowl with hot water and drinking down the swill, the merchant asked his sons to sit with him. He passed around the scrolls and asked them to recite the contents to each other, then quizzed them hard. Dawa came into the room twice to replenish the oil in the lamps before the merchant was satisfied that his sons knew every detail he wanted them to remember.

“Go to your beds now,” he told his sons. “Remember ― this,” he swept an arm around, a finger pointing to the skies to encircleg everything he owned in the world. “All of this is yours, for you to keep and enjoy until the end of your days.” His sons looked at him with worry, but they were obedient, and so they went quietly to their wives. Perhaps he had given them too much to remember all at once.

 

The merchant didn’t bother with the gods on his roof when morning broke the next day. Before his daughters-in-law could rouse their tired husbands, the merchant had put on his fur hat and left the house. He was astonished to find the miller in the mill, sitting still in a corner as if somebody had forgotten her there a thousand years ago. When he stirred in the doorway, she looked up, recognized him, and scurried back with a tiny yelp of protest. Her knuckles went white from gripping the silver ingot in her hand. The merchant could make out the shape of the piece of silver under her bony palm. What names old Thendup would call me now if he could see what I have done! My sin is the greatest, he thought, for I have done worse than harbor greed: I have tainted an innocent mind with greed and avarice. 

The merchant kneeled by the door, keeping out of the morning light. “Why don’t you sing anymore, Tseten?” The merchant was embarrassed by how simple and plaintive he sounded. The miller didn’t answer. This woman ― this poor orphan, this daughter of a dead friend ― how pitiable and ugly she had become over just a few days!

“Tseten,” he tried to approach her, but she retreated into the dark. “I haven’t come to take back what I gave you. I have come to ask why you don’t sing anymore. Your song was the joy of our village. It was my joy, too. But you have taken it away from us.”

The miller watched the merchant as if it was he who had lost his mind. She tried to laugh, but only a repulsive twitch of the mouth filled her face. She buried the silver piece deeper into the flesh of her chest.

“It is only silver, Tseten! It isn’t the breath of life or the blessings of our ancestors. It can buy silk and wine, but it cannot buy a moment’s peace in the world.” Was the merchant telling this to the miller, was it Urgyen pleading to Tseten? Like scales falling away from a serpent, or like the colors of a sand mandala being swept away to reveal the plain ground underneath, desire fell away from the merchant, even as he realized that more and more desires were clinging to the miller every new moment.

After a long and quiet moment, the merchant kneeled before the miller and spread a scarf on the mill-floor. “Daughter,” he said, “Give me a fistful of flour.”

As he walked away, lightened of a burden, weighed down by another, he heard her call after him in a voice made ragged by a new fury ― “Doesn’t fill your belly, a song doesn’t. Doesn’t keep you warm, doesn’t fatten you, doesn’t make you the mistress of a big house like it makes your daughters-in-law, a song doesn’t. What do you know of want and poverty? When have you known the cold embrace of the floor and the shattering lightness of an empty belly?”

 

It didn’t take the merchant as long as he had feared it would take to walk far away enough that he wouldn’t see any of the mountains around his village: after all, the trading route hewed close to the serpentine rush of the Karnali. A sharp bend in the river, and everything else in Creation was hidden out of sight, save the blue-tinted light of the space and whatever life found a hold within. Knowing that he no longer saw his village or valley instantly put the miller’s song out of the merchant’s mind. In a fold in his coat he carried a small sack of tsampa, and in the lining were three gold coins. A party of Khas shepherds recognized him and flocked to him, bringing him firewood and water, showing him a flat recess in a fire-blackened cave where to sleep, never daring to question why he was so far from home and so obviously without kinsmen or merchandise, horse or mule. He tried to share his tsampa with them, but they laughed and brought him misshapen copper bowls of hot food instead.

The fire burned bright and hot for an hour, but soon no spark from the crackle climbed with the smoke, and the ash on embers turned as grey as the moonlight on it. When he saw that everybody around him was warm and asleep, the merchant spread his bakkhu by the fire, covered himself with an old and worn felt blanket, and waited for sleep to find him.