Exiles (18 page)

Alex loitered in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest, her expression of distaste suggesting that Bahadur might be the only person in the world more repugnant than her father.

“Escort Mr. Bahadur to the waiting room, if you would,” Peter said.

Her mouth fell open. “You can’t tell me you’re going along with this.”

“I don’t really have to tell you anything, do I?”

“This is disgusting, Dad. You’d lose your license for this at home.”

“Well, we’re
not
home, are we?”

“Pretty clearly not.”

“Then do as I ask, please,” he said.

Bahadur observed this exchange with interest, then sauntered out into the waiting room and plopped his ample buttocks down on one of the creaky chairs. Alex went behind the reception desk.

“Would you like something to drink?” she asked, and Bahadur looked up in surprise.

“You’re certainly more polite than your father,” he said. “What do you have?”

She looked him straight in the eye and said, “Nothing.” Then she sat down, put her feet up on the desk, and opened a magazine. Bahadur hissed with exasperation.

Peter shut the door.

Banhi translated as he spoke to the girls. Two turned out to be seventeen; the plain girl with the glasses was fifteen but seemed brighter and more inquisitive than the others. Peter doubted she’d have an easy time dealing with clients, which meant her life as a prostitute was likely to be even rougher than usual.

“Ask how much their fathers sold them for.”

Banhi translated and reported the news impassively. “About twenty thousand rupees apiece.”

“Less than three hundred dollars.”

“A year’s income for a family,” Banhi said.

“Ask them if they know what they’ll be doing.”

Banhi shot him the sort of look you’d give an idiot. “Of course they know.”

“Ask them, please.”

She spoke to the girls. They replied shyly, their eyes downcast, playing with their fingers. “They say yes.”

“Ask them if this is something they’ve agreed to do. If they might rather return home, or go to school.”

“Doctor, this is all established,” said Banhi. “You are making Mr. Bahadur wait.”

“Bahadur wasn’t paying your salary last time I checked,” Peter said. Then he looked at her again. “Or is he?”

She reddened and her expression changed, which told Peter everything he needed to know. He was aware of what the clinic paid her, that it was barely enough to live on, and now he felt guilty for rubbing her nose in it. They were both collaborators at this point, anyway, so who was he to judge?

He lowered his head, showing a little deference. “Just ask them, will you?”

She spoke a little less sharply to the girls, who replied one at a time.

“The pretty ones say they cannot go home, that their fathers have refused to take them back,” she said. “They say they know of
Bahadur’s other girls, that he has a good reputation in the towns they come from, and that they will be well paid.”

“Are they frightened?”

“They are a little afraid, but they have no education and don’t think they would like school very much.”

Peter looked at the girls. They were so shy they wouldn’t even make eye contact with him. They would have to grow up fast.

“Do they know about AIDS?”

“Whatever they know is almost certainly wrong.”

Peter nodded at the plain girl. “What about her?”

Banhi spoke to her. The girl answered quietly, her eyes downcast, and Banhi shrugged. “She will get used to it.”

“What did she
say
?”

“Her name is Usha. Her parents have three younger children, and there is not enough food. She likes to read.”

“She can
read
?”

“An answer much more complicated than I asked for,” Banhi said. “Shall I have them undress?”

“Not yet.”

Peter went out to get Bahadur, who stood at the window, watching the pale yellow smoke that belched from the rendering plant down the road. Peter smiled, shook his hand, and led him outside. Bahadur appeared suspicious of this gesture of truce. They strolled down the street, where the smell of rancid flesh soaked them like an invisible mist. A thrumming tornado of flies darkened the air over the plant.

“Your American teenagers are most disrespectful,” said Bahadur.

“It’s a big problem,” Peter said. “Whenever she’s discourteous to child slavers I ground her, but she just won’t mend her ways.”

Bahadur narrowed his eyes. “Did you want something from me, Doctor, or do you just prefer to deliver your insults in the open air?”

“The skinny one, Usha.”

“The spectacles are charming, are they not? A certain kind of man goes wild for such things.”

“You know she has no future as a whore,” Peter said. “Why did you even buy her?”

Bahadur sighed. “Everything is relationships,” he said. “She has two sisters who will be beautiful. I help her father by buying her, then in a couple of years I will make good money on them.”

“Who knows what will happen in two years?” Peter said. “I think you’ve made a bad investment.”

Bahadur eyed him skeptically. “Perhaps you would like to try her yourself. Is that it, Doctor?”

“I’ll give you six hundred dollars for her. You double your money.”

Bahadur was incredulous. “You want to
buy
her? For permanent?”

“Six hundred U.S., in cash.”

“Now I am more comfortable.”

“Why?”

“When you smiled at me before, I became worried. Here we say, ‘When the snake shows his teeth, it is best to step away.’ ”

“I understood that the first time I saw
you
smile, Bahadur.”

Bahadur shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, and they walked on past the plant. Squadrons of flies broke off from the huge vortex and attacked, swarming around their heads and biting viciously. Peter slapped at them, but Bahadur ignored the assault, letting them land on his face and head without flinching. Once or twice he casually waved them away. When they’d passed the plant, he sat on a low rock wall and pulled out a pack of
bidis
.

He slid open a matchbook and dug out a wooden match, then held it so the head pointed slightly back toward himself. He shoved it quickly down against the friction strip, extended his jaw as he lit the cigarette, then hollowed his cheeks as he sucked in the smoke. He growled a little. His jacket rustled as he shifted his weight. His dark, half-lidded eyes appeared disengaged.

“Do you know what would happen, Doctor, if the authorities learned that an American was attempting to engage in human trafficking?”

“Don’t threaten me,” Peter said. “You’ve been telling people I’m CIA. What if it were true?”

Bahadur flicked his ash. “Doctor, forgive me, but it is very obvious you are not CIA. The local station chief is a client of mine, as are two of his subordinates, and they all have the same look in their eyes. It is a look you do not share, I am happy to say.”

Peter ground the toe of his shoe into the dirty sidewalk. There was some kind of splattering of yellow grease or fat off to the side. “You’re going to make me beg, aren’t you?”

“If this is begging, you could use some pointers,” Bahadur said. “Perhaps you should pay attention to how the locals do it.”

Peter took a shallow breath and let it out. “I suppose it’s out of the question for you to just do the right thing?”

Bahadur guffawed. “This is Spike Lee movie?” he said. “The
right thing
is for you to pay me what she will earn over the next few years, which is perhaps twenty thousand dollars.”

“That’s crap, and you know it. She won’t earn a quarter of that, and you’ll have to feed and clothe her.”

Bahadur took a last drag on his cigarette, then threw away the butt. A street kid picked it up immediately and trotted off with it.

“Then perhaps seven thousand,” Bahadur said. “Special onetime discount.”

“Nine hundred.”

Bahadur raised his palms skyward, as if to catch rain. “You cannot take her to the United States,” he said, his voice a falsetto of bewilderment. “I am a judge of men, and I do not think you actually want sex with her. So what will you do?”

“I’m trying to figure that out.”

Bahadur put his hands back on the wall by his legs. “Let me explain how this will go, Doctor. You will pay me all this money, then you will come to the end of your stay here, and in three months the girl will be back with me, just like the last one. It is a
waste of everyone’s time. So maybe for you I will say five thousand.”

Peter wanted a deeper breath, more air, but the smell was just too foul. “Fifteen hundred.”

Bahadur smiled. “I fear we are so far apart we will have to call in the UN soldiers with their pretty blue helmets to help us.”

“Two thousand.”

“Impossible, completely.” Bahadur shrugged. “Forty-five hundred is the best I can do.”

Peter stared at him. “Twenty-five.”

Bahadur waved his hand. “Three thousand, final,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

“That’s ten times what you paid for her.”

“And a third what she’ll earn me.”

“A third what she’d earn you if she were
pretty
,” Peter said. “Twenty-six.”

Bahadur lowered his head and appeared to contemplate this. “I fear these flies will give me some horrible disease, and then I will have to come to you for help,” he said. “I cannot imagine anything worse.” He sighed. “Twenty-eight-fifty,” he said at last.

“Sold,” said Peter.

Bahadur smiled broadly, revealing jagged rows of crooked brown teeth intercut with gold. His tongue darted out between them, pink and wet. “You realize, of course,” he said, “that if you insist on creating additional demand in this way, I will be forced to increase supply. Even an American cardiologist cannot buy every girl in Nepal.”

“Congratulations,” said Peter. “You’ve proven there’s absolutely nothing good or beneficial I can accomplish.”

Bahadur shrugged. “Life offers so few opportunities to humiliate rich Americans,” he said. “One must seize the day.”

Back at the clinic, Peter examined the two girls Bahadur was keeping and gave them a clean bill. As Bahadur was about to leave, he took out a battered suitcase and emptied it onto the counter. It contained a two-month supply of all the TB drugs the clinic
needed, a variety of antibiotics, good French IV solutions, latex gloves, and sundry other supplies.

“Perhaps I have neglected to give you my card,” he said, handing one over. It read:

The problem with buying a human being, Peter realized, was that then you owned her, which turned out to be a little awkward. He called the NGO to which he’d taken the first girl, but they’d met their quota for the next two months and had no place for Usha.

There was nothing to do but take her home. Though Alex had mixed emotions about the whole thing—she was still aghast about the other girls, but Peter had apparently redeemed himself slightly with this gesture—she agreed to bunk with Usha until Devi came back. When they came into the house Usha stood still, looking confused and tense, then spoke to Alex in Nepali.

“She hopes you’re not planning on having sex with her tonight, because she has her period,” Alex said.

“Candid, isn’t she?”

“Evidently.”

“Explain the situation, will you?”

Alex spoke with Usha for a minute, then turned to Peter. “She thinks you’re nuts, but it’s fine with her.”

Peter started getting dinner together, but Usha—either worried by what she considered her own dereliction of duty or horrified
that this crazy foreigner would inadvertently poison them all—insisted on helping. Together they made a dinner of
dal-bhat
, and Usha ate like a girl possessed. She was a good four inches shorter than Alex. Her face was gaunt, her hair stringy, her overall demeanor that of a spavined dog, but she seemed reasonably good-natured, and she clearly appreciated the food. As they ate, Peter reflected that seven months previously, as he had moved about his comfortable Berkeley office seeing patients, he would have been surprised to hear that come February he’d find himself in a tiny concrete room in Jorpati, Nepal, having acquired, in approximate order, a divorce, a motor scooter covered with ox shit, a lesbian near-daughter-in-law, a small brown goat, dysentery, a housekeeper who doubled as an informant, a medical supplier who doubled as a pimp, and a sex slave with whom he had no intention of having sex. Oh, and yes, instruction from a Tibetan lama on the endless mutability of things.