Buddha's Orphans , livre ebook

Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Book One
Part I
Orphan
Off to Ganga Da’s
Kaki’s Jealousy
Nilu Nikunj
Part II
The Document
Jonathan Swift
Did You Know the King?
Sleeping Dogs Can Lie
Shortcut Bajé
Thamel Days
A Job for Raja
Muwa Visits Maitreya
Fever
Part III
A Woman Grieving
Lama-ji
A Visit to Muwa
Raja’s Flat
A Young Man in the City
Absurd
Book Two
Part I
A Daughter in America
The Singer and the Beauty
Missing
Eloping
Nilu’s Hunch
Part II
A Young Woman in a Black Overcoat
The Kick
The Return Home
A Birth
Part III
Kali
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright © 2010 by Samrat Upadhyay

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Upadhyay, Samrat. Buddha’s Orphans / Samrat Upadhyay. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-618-51750-3 1. Orphans—Fiction. 2. Nepal—Politics and government—Fiction. 3. Nepal—Fiction. I. Title. PR 9570. N 43 Q 84 2010 823'.92—dc22 2009014019
Quotations on page vii are translated by Jeffrey Hopkins, Geshe Michael Roach, and Bradford Hatcher, respectively.

Cover design by Brian Moore
Cover photograph © Bruno Morandi/Getty Images
Author photograph © Daniel Pickett Photography

e ISBN 978-0-547-48840-0 v2.0816
 
To the women in my family:
Ammi, Sangeeta, Babita,
and my “snow leopard” Shahzadi
While you see that those close to you are drowning in the ocean of cyclic existence,
And are as if fallen into a whirlwind of fire,
There is nothing more awful than to work for your own liberation,
Neglecting those whom you do not recognize due to the process of death and rebirth.
—Chandragomin, “Letter to a Student”


Learn to see that everything
Brought about by causes
Is like a star,
A problem in your eye,
A lamp, an illusion,
The dew, or a bubble;
A dream, or lightning,
Or else a cloud.
—from The Diamond Cutter Sutra


Even the shortest of moments might be at least six days wide.
—Gua 57, The Book of Changes
 

Book One
 
Part I
Orphan
R AJA’S MOTHER HAD abandoned him on the parade ground of Tundikhel on a misty morning before Kathmandu had awakened, then drowned herself in Rani Pokhari, half a kilometer north. No one connected the cries of the baby to the bloated body of the woman that would float to the surface of the pond later that week. The School Leaving Certificate exam results had just been published in Gorkhapatra, so everyone deduced that the woman, like a few others already that year, 1962, had killed herself over her poor performance.
That morning Kaki was at Rani Pokhari, getting ready to sell her corn on the sidewalk, when she saw Bokey Ba approach from the parade ground area, carrying something on his palms, as if balancing a tray.
“After ages, Bokey Ba is coming to visit me,” Kaki said to the woman who was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the shoe shop, where Kaki sold her corn. Bokey Ba, so called because of the goatlike beard hanging from his chin, was a derelict who’d made the parade ground his home for no one knew how long.
He knelt in front of Kaki. In his arms was a baby swaddled in a woman’s dirty shawl. Kaki let out a gasp. “Whose baby did you steal? Look, Vaishali, come here.”
Vaishali ambled over. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Let’s fetch the police,” she said to Kaki. “What did this nut case do?”
“Whose baby is this?” Kaki spoke loudly, even though Bokey Ba wasn’t hard of hearing. “Tell me, where did you get it?” She gingerly reached over and lifted the shawl. “It’s a boy,” she whispered. “And barely a few months old. Bokey Ba, what are you doing with this baby?”
Bokey Ba tried to form the words, but they didn’t come. It had literally been months since he’d talked to anyone. He pointed behind him, toward Tundikhel.
“Where’s the baby’s mother?”
Bokey Ba shrugged, cleared his throat, and managed to hoarsely say, “Don’t know.”
“So why bring him here?” Vaishali said. “Take him back. What can we do?”
“Wait,” Kaki told her. “Let me look.”
Bokey Ba handed her the baby, and thinking that his job was done, he stood and was about to leave when Kaki yelled at him, “Where are you going? Sit!”
Bokey Ba sat on his haunches. Kaki inspected the baby’s face, running her fingers over it. “He seems healthy enough.” The baby began to cry again, and she said, “Maybe he’s hungry.” Her maternal instinct made her want to open her blouse and let the baby feed on her breasts, but she realized how foolish that was: a dry woman past middle age in a crowded street, feeding a baby she didn’t know. So she requested that Vaishali mind her corn station as she and Bokey Ba looked for the baby’s mother.
For the rest of the morning, Kaki and Bokey Ba roamed the area in search of someone who’d claim the baby. Kaki walked in front, clutching the baby to her chest, already feeling protective. She puckered her lips in kisses at him whenever he cried. They circled Rani Pokhari, where the mother’s body now rested at the bottom of the pond. The pond was said to be haunted at night by ghosts of those who’d committed suicide in its waters and those who had been repeatedly dunked, as state punishment, until they could no longer breathe.
But for restless students at Tri-Chandra College, the sight of the pond had a calming effect as they skipped classes and spent hours on the roof, smoking, discussing politics. It had been more than two years since King M’s coup, and he showed no sign of returning power to the elected officials.
Bokey Ba and Kaki entered the grounds of Tri-Chandra College, both of them looking out of place among the college students loitering on the lawn and drinking tea; then the two continued on to the premises of the Ghantaghar clock tower and finally returned to the khari tree on the parade ground, where Bokey Ba slept at night. The baby hadn’t stopped crying all morning, so Kaki handed him to Bokey Ba and went to fetch some milk. Bokey Ba sat on the platform surrounding the tree, holding the infant, afraid to look at his face, and the baby’s cry rang out across the field, attracting the attention of some of the regulars. A small crowd formed around Bokey Ba, hazarding guesses as to what had transpired: the old man had stolen the baby from a rich merchant; the baby was Bokey Ba’s own child, born from the womb of an old prostitute. Stoically, Bokey Ba waited in silence for Kaki, who arrived after some delay. She’d had to appeal to a neighbor of hers to lend her a bottle and some warm milk.
Kaki shooed the crowd away. “Here, feed him,” she said, handing the bottle to the old man, who shook his head. “You found him,” she insisted. “You feed him.” He took the warm bottle from her and inserted the nipple into the baby’s mouth, and he sucked hungrily. His eyes explored Bokey Ba’s face as he drank. Soon the bottle was empty, and the baby began to bawl once more. When Bokey Ba looked helplessly at Kaki, she laughed. “Rock him, sing to him. He’s yours now.”
And before Bokey Ba could say anything, she traversed the field to her corn station, where Vaishali was battling the coal embers and complaining that the smoke was stinging her eyes. “This is not easy work,” she told Kaki, who took over.
Kaki grilled corncobs on the sidewalk and sold them at one suka apiece. Early in the morning she’d remove, one by one, the outer husks from corn she had purchased from a farmer. Around eight o’clock, once the area began to thicken with people, she’d light her earthenware stove, a makal, which was filled with pieces of coal. She’d first grill the corn over an open fire, then cook it further in coal embers, letting the heat perform its magic and using her fingers, which were callused and thick, to turn the cobs occasionally. This was a good spot to do business. The bus stop stood across the street, at the entrance to Tundikhel. The marketplace of Asan was only a furlong away, to the right, and the girls’ college, Padma Kanya, was up the street, to the east. The girls from Padma Kanya College especially loved Kaki’s corn, which she dabbed with a special paste of green chutney that teased, tickled, then shot flames in the mouth, making her customers go “Shooooo” and “Shaaaaaa.” The two other corn sellers in the area, one stationed at the mouth of Asan and the other close to the Muslim enclave near the Ghantaghar clock tower, didn’t command as large a clientele as Kaki did. Her advantage was that chutney, and though the two other corn sellers had tried to pry the recipe from her, Kaki kept it a secret and made her c