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. 

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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.

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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.

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 ‘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 

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 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: