Land Where I Flee Read online

  Sizing up the man before her, Chitralekha concluded that he wasn’t worth inviting to her Chaurasi—he wasn’t a long-term politician like Sikkim’s Subba was. He’d probably be blinded by power, do something stupid, and spend his life absconding or rotting in jail. But at almost eighty-four, she didn’t need to think long-term. She was already the oldest member of her extended family on all sides—her father’s, her mother’s and her husband’s—and she was conscious of her mortality. At the most, she had ten years to live. Currying favors with Moktan wouldn’t get her anywhere in the long run; from now on, she was all about immediate gratification.

  “What do I get out of it?” she asked.

  “What would you suggest? We keep hearing rumors that you’ll stop being directly involved in your business, that one of your grandchildren will take over, but aren’t they all abroad? I have a lot of respect for your decision not to step down even at this age. You are an inspiration to all of us, you see. But please do not ask us for money because we rely on the blessings of people like you to keep ourselves financially afloat.”

  “Just two months ago, I gave two lakhs to your organization. I am not donating any money unless I see a return on that.” She lit her beedi. It was a habit no amount of amassed wealth would help her get rid of. She also understood that it intimidated most men of power when she smoked in front of them. Her white sari, the loose end of which demurely covered her white hair, and smoking just did not go hand in hand.

  Kamal smacked his lips. “Do you have any suggestions on how we could help you?”

  “This Gorkhaland movement is going nowhere, Kamal-jeeu. We have waited long for something to happen. There’s too much vandalism, too much hooliganism. We need to inspire the people, inflame them. Ask any person from Kurseong or Kalimpong if they have faith in Gorkhaland, and they say no.”

  “Now, even if someone like you says that, we are doomed. We have been doing our best. Just last month a meeting with the West Bengal minister of—”

  She cut him short. “Meetings don’t achieve anything. Look at us right now. We have met for the past five minutes, but we haven’t talked about anything useful.”

  The politician’s forehead furrowed. “Do you have any suggestions, then?”

  “Yes, we need to instill a sense of oneness in our people. Why don’t you mandate that everyone should wear the Nepali costume—daura-suruwals and gunyu-cholos and topis—certain days of the week, especially during festivals and important national holidays? Look at you—you wear a Gurkha hat, but where’s your daura-suruwal? You, more than anyone else, need to set an example. Let’s declare one date—how about the first day be during Tihaar, say, sometime next week?—as the date for everyone to wear only Nepali clothes in solidarity.”

  “That’s a good idea. We would like to do that.”

  “Yes, another time for dressing up could be the day of the conference. And I’ll come to it, too.”

  “It’s a good plan—but perhaps next week is too early.”

  “It’s not. This movement requires urgency. It has to start now.”

  He looked at her as though surprised at the lack of caveat. “Is that it, then?”

  She glanced at the clock and then at her watch. “That’s it, but by now you know that my factory in Kalimpong will be the supplier of all the Nepali clothes to the stores. The clothes are ready. All you have to do is make your announcements. We even have custom-made daura-suruwal—no other factory has manufactured the outfit before. Your men will take care of all those stores that don’t buy their clothes in bulk from my factory, right?”

  Moktan’s eyes lit up—Chitralekha couldn’t make out if it was in indignation or admiration. She procured a package from under her desk and unwrapped it. In it lay a set of cream-colored daura-suruwal.

  “Yes, I can do that,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, wiggling the outfit out of its package. She untied all the four pairs of strings, even those on the inside, of the top. “And ten percent of our profits will be donated to your cause—whether your cause is killing people or getting them their state, I don’t know.” Next, she focused her attention on the pants.

  “It’s Gorkhaland,” Moktan said. “A few casualties occur along the way, which is unfortunate, but what revolution didn’t have people die for it? Those who die are either villains or martyrs.”

  “Yes, and you are the hero.” She chuckled while holding up the suruwal for her guest to inspect. “Your men down there make too much noise. The next time you come to visit me, can you come alone? Let’s plan a meeting three months from now. You could also pick up your donation then.”

  Moktan brought his hands together in supplication and perhaps as a precursor to a long-winded speech that Chitralekha would have to prohibit.

  “Look at these photos, Moktan-jeeu—what do you see?”

  The politician turned around. His eyes fixated on the picture of her with the ex-chief minister, but he was quiet.

  “That’s who I am, Moktan-jeeu,” Chitralekha said. “I am your friend for a lifetime if you’ve earned my trust. I don’t care if your party is not in power. I don’t care if you will never be reelected. I’ll forever be faithful to you.”

  Moktan listened in silence.

  “You’ll give yourself an opportunity to earn my trust, will you not?” Chitralekha looked him in the eye. And then she broke into a smile, one that birthed a multitude of lines on her face. “You will see to it that your picture will be standing there among these, won’t you?”

  Moktan nodded and told her he would have to rush to a meeting with I. K. Subba, the chief minister of Sikkim, who had publicly announced his support for the separatist movement. “We Gorkhaland people have so much to be thankful for in people like you and him, Aamaa,” he said. “For too long we’ve been under the oppression of the Bengalis. Gorkhaland as a state has to happen. We have to have a separate state just as you people in Sikkim do. Thank you so much for giving us hope.”

  Once Moktan left, Chitralekha summoned Prasanti to banish Basnett’s picture to the cupboard.

  “She now doesn’t want to see a mere picture after she saw such a macho man in person,” Prasanti teased, tying her shoulder-length hair, receding around the temples, in a chignon. “How old is he? Are you sure his caste is Moktan? He looks like a Newaar to me. His eyes aren’t small enough to be a Moktan’s eyes. By the way, the fatty priest is still around, retching poison into anything within reach.”

  Chitralekha smoked another beedi. The meeting was a success. She would turn eighty-four in a week. For most of her life, age had meant nothing. In fact, like most women of her generation, she did not even know when her actual birthday was. But this was different. It was a slap in the faces of those diseases that killed you before you reached your prime. Eighty-four was special, for she was now among the very few who had survived that far. To most people, like her pathetic husband, living to that age was an unattainable dream. It was time to go now—maybe stick around for a few years and then die peacefully. Her biggest fear was of outliving one of her grandchildren, and, going by the surgeries, aches, and pains they complained about, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if she lived to see at least one of their deaths. She didn’t want that. She had witnessed too many people dying—her husband, her son, her daughter-in-law. She wouldn’t be able to withstand another tragedy. She had bargained with God that at least this quarter of her life would be devoid of sadness. And she’d see to it that he kept his promise.

  •

  Bhagwati could have prevented the pot from toppling over, but her wandering thoughts had betrayed her.

  “Help!” she screamed. “The spaghetti water spilled on me.”

  She braced herself for the generous sprinkling of innuendos that would come her way in the distance that she had to limp between the dishwasher and the kitchen entrance. Brian, the busboy whose presence triggered in her the same reaction as did the peccadilloes of the ruffians outside the refugee camps, was nowhere to be seen, but Bh
agwati had become skilled at discovering creepy figures lurking inside walk-in freezers or behind bulky kitchen equipment, and even in her pain, she looked over her shoulder, lest someone jump at her. Two weeks before, when she allowed her thoughts to compare somewhat unfavorably the Dashain festivities in Bhutan to those in Gangtok, a mouth had come dangerously close to breathing hot, putrid air against her shoulders and neck. That’s what she got for daydreaming about Hindu festivals in Christian America. She had to constantly be on the watch, or she’d find her body parts and the busboy’s coming together in unwelcome interaction.

  The cook rushed to her as she fell to the floor. The pain was unbearable.

  “Good thing the water hadn’t come to a complete boil,” he said, grazing his hand over the burn. “Brian, could you get me a Band-Aid?”

  “It’s a burn.” Bhagwati winced. “I think I need a cream—something with aloe—more than I need a Band-Aid.”

  “I don’t know where the fucking first-aid kit is,” Brian said with a snicker, and he swaggered outside, only to emerge a few seconds later with a box. “I don’t know how to open this damn thing. She only works here like us, and now we’re all becoming her damn slaves.”

  By now, a substantial crowd of kitchen staff had gathered around the reclining Bhagwati and the gently comforting cook, and each offered his own diagnosis and prescription. Between a suggestion to rub toothpaste on the affected area and another to use a pack of ice arose an idea that a long, passionate kiss from the cook might help alleviate Bhagwati’s pain. Raucous applause signified approval from the bystanders.

  The cook handed her a tube from the box. Bhagwati concentrated on squeezing the cream out of the small tube and applied it to her ankle. The burn didn’t seem as severe as the pain was.

  “It’s just a first-degree burn,” someone said, before the manager commanded the crowd to disperse. “She’ll be fine.”

  “Damn, refugee,” the cook said to her softly, ignoring her grimace. “Damn, you can only be happy you weren’t hurt by a pot of fully boiled water.”

  “Thank you,” Bhagwati said. “Could you please ask Brian not to bother me today?”

  “Don’t worry about him. You be careful around boiling pots. Be thankful I was here. The last time someone from your world burned himself, he applied some butter. Crazy man.”

  Bhagwati still had a stack of dirty dishes to negotiate, but the story about this other person from her world intrigued her. She wanted to ask the cook, whom she was still hesitant to call by name because of its numerous silent letters, if that burned man had been treated as badly as she was. The manager—suited, limp-wristed, but otherwise a kind man—was already looking at her with impatience, so she dashed off to tackle the plates, which, in between the accident and its treatment, had trebled in number.

  Days like today took her on an endless question-and-answer session about whether life had actually changed for the better since she’d left the refugee camps of Nepal. When she and other Nepali-speaking Bhutanese were herded out of Bhutan because they weren’t Bhutanese enough to be Bhutanese, they wouldn’t let go of the hope that Nepal would take them in, but their ancestors had been gone from Nepal and been in Bhutan too long for them to be Nepalese.

  Life in the refugee camps of Nepal was supposed to be better than living in fear of persecution in Bhutan, but it wasn’t. Day in and day out, she and the other refugees struggled as noncontributing members of society, loathed by the Nepalese outside the camps—the Nepalese from Nepal; the real Nepalese—because the refugees’ desperation had attracted enough Western attention for countries such as America to come to their rescue. The campers had survived years clinging to a thin reed of hope that someday America, Australia—any country where life was better than in the camps—would whisk them away. When America finally did, life didn’t get any better.

  “All that beauty wasted on a Damaai,” her grandmother had said about her in more than one phone conversation, adding a colorful word or two to describe her husband’s low caste. But she was used to her grandmother’s barbs—they didn’t hurt her the way people’s behavior toward her at work did. In the kitchen of Tom’s Diner in Boulder, Colorado, she was often invisible, which was preferable to being the recipient of uninvited caresses. The first female dishwasher, the waiters and cooks had cheered the minute she walked in. All this she bore for the low-caste Damaai husband of hers—a nameless, identity-less, stateless Damaai.

  Refugees didn’t belong anywhere, but she especially belonged nowhere. Who was she? Born: a Nepali-speaking Indian with a dead father from Sikkim, a dead mother from Nepal, and a live grandmother from Kalimpong who was married into Sikkim. Post-marriage: a Nepali-speaking Bhutanese who had lawfully relinquished her Indian citizenship so she could belong. Post the ousting of 106,000 Nepali-speaking people from Bhutan: an inhabitant of a state of statelessness in the refugee camps of Nepal. Post America’s magnanimity: a refugee now in America with a shiny green card that would probably never land her a job commensurate with her expectations.

  She could have gone back to Sikkim and exploited her grandmother’s connections to reestablish her Indian identity, but her husband was too proud to give in. In the beginning, he, like thousands of others, had languished in disbelief that his country would actually turn him away, but Ram had done enough harm to the monarchy with his column in an underground Nepali newspaper. Incredulity gave way to expectation, which was gradually usurped by hopeless resignation. After living that way for a decade and a half, Bhagwati had stopped questioning the purpose of life.

  At least in Boulder she was making a wage and trying her best to become a functional part of society. Despite efforts ranging from picking up Dzongkha, that Bhutanese language so different from Nepali, to cultivating reverence for the king, Bhutan had never felt like home, and these days even Gangtok seemed alien, as though it had decided to grow up and old without her. The shiny new city with the pedestrianized square, like Pearl Street here, wasn’t what she’d left behind. Now, when she saw pictures of her hometown on Facebook, she felt no familiar stirrings. It was like staring at a photo of her long-dead parents.

  Brian placed a new stack of plates beside her. The dishes had been piling up, and she was woefully behind. She’d have no time to drink her coffee, and she willed the bitter pangs of remorse stemming from the looks the manager flung at her to go away. She wasn’t about to peg the accident to her negligence, to her drifting mind—not today, at least.

  “Hey, refugee, what’s going on?” the line cook yelled. “Why are the dishes so slow?”

  Bhagwati didn’t answer but hurried along to scour off a plate some breadcrumbs that an excess of maple syrup had rendered immobile. The old Christian busboy, who usually scraped the plates before he brought them to Bhagwati while extolling the virtues of Christ, manned the counter today. She’d have to deal with Brian’s handiwork, and that entailed getting rid of every uneaten morsel of food left on the dishes.

  “Plates not coming fast enough!” someone shouted. “No food if no plates. Where do we put what we fucking cook?”

  Bhagwati loaded some dishes into the washer, wishing someone would turn down the heat.

  “Damn, refugee, are we okay?” Brian said. “We are running outta plates.”

  She paid him no attention. Brian would probably do what he’d done three days before—tell the manager that she had been painting her nails. To corroborate his story he had obtained a bottle of nail polish that he claimed to have heroically confiscated from her.

  But he hadn’t.

  “Damn, at this rate, you’ll be fired,” he hooted.

  A grain of rice clung stubbornly to a plate. Had Brian been doing his work instead of breathing down her neck, her workload would have been reduced by half.

  “Damn, girl, the rice don’t want to leave you.”

  She stayed silent. And then, as he turned to leave, Brian’s hand touched her back, as if by accident. But Bhagwati knew better. She slapped him.

  “You!�
� she shrieked. “Stop touching me with your filthy hand!”

  Brian winced and yelped. A waiter, the line cook, and the Christian busboy came by to inspect the scene. Just the day before, Brian had gone past her, deliberately brushing his arm against her behind. She had said nothing then. Last week, it was something else. She looked around, hoping at least the Christian busboy would cheer her on, as he, too, had on numerous occasions complained about Brian’s disrespectful ways. But the old man’s face reflected disbelief, and his revulsion—like everyone else’s—was not directed at Brian.

  “Bitch.” Brian walked away. “What’s this country come to, taking in immigrants like you? You can’t take jokes, man. You don’t understand the language; you don’t do jokes.”

  The next batch of plates arrived surprisingly well-scraped, and complaints about the dishes not coming out soon enough abruptly stopped.

  If this was how things worked around here, maybe she should continue behaving the way she just had. She wondered about how difficult life was for a barely educated refugee in this country. She had, at least, received an excellent English-medium education in Gangtok. Her husband had gone to a government school in Bhutan and was nervous about his English, so she forgave him for not being able to hold down a job for more than a few days. Often, she, who was confident in her language abilities, didn’t understand the way Americans spoke—did they really have to twist and turn their tongues all the time? Hardly had she celebrated the victory of having understood something when off they’d go, curling their tongues, making incomprehensible whatever little she had gathered until then. Fifteen years at the camp had rusted her brain.

  “These seem to be the last plates of the day,” the cook said. “The boss wants to see you in his office after this.”

  She looked up in surprise at the calm tone and found the absence of any epithets strangely jarring. That’s what her life had become: she thought something was amiss when she wasn’t summoned as a refugee.