Exiles (20 page)

A mud that was not just about fertility, as Peter had told Lama Padma, but also about mortality. He wondered where he and Alex would be when their time came to die. This would have seemed morbid in the United States, but it was natural and practical to think about here, where death was a constant in every household. People’s parents died, their husbands and wives died, their brothers and sisters and children died. Peter remembered seeing Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy in college. The characters were dropping like flies, but Ray wasn’t painting a particularly dark picture; he was just showing Bengal as it was. Western democracies had had a tech bubble, but they were also having a health bubble. Bengal and
Nepal were how the whole planet had been a hundred years earlier. Half the epidemiologists Peter knew were on Xanax, because they understood that if enough strains of staph or strep or TB developed multidrug resistance, or if avian flu jumped species, the world would be just like the plague years again, with bodies stacked, rotting in the streets, the cities emptied.

Alex would be eighteen in April, just a couple of months away. She had started her slow walk away from him, and even in her presence he missed her. What he faced now was not her physical mortality but the first of the small, unavoidable deaths that lay before it. His daughter, a woman in love, opening the door that led from his house.

He recalled a Leonard Cohen song that had come out a few years earlier. There was a refrain:
“Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving, then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.”
He’d loved that song, the complexity and melancholy of it, even though he was never completely sure what it meant. He’d waited years for it to acquire resonance in the context of his own life, but now he was beginning to get it.

They came back down and circled the stupa twice more, Devi leading them, Usha by her side, Alex and Peter walking behind with their arms around each other, flowing with the crowd. They’d given away all their money. They had nothing to do but this. When they had finished and started for the street, Devi turned back toward them, her face illuminated by the butter lamps, her eyes dark oceans. She stopped and took them in her arms.

“I have another volunteer for you,” Peter said.

Franz wandered among his potted plants with a green plastic watering can, giving them each a little shower and inspecting the undersides of their leaves. During Peter’s absence the office had begun to resemble an abandoned temple, its musty bookshelves overrun with tendrils. On the shelf under the south window, Wittgenstein lay in the sun, watching with large green eyes and twitching his tail.

“Who?”

Peter explained about Usha. “She’s smart,” he said. “She wants to be a doctor.”

Franz shrugged. “If you can sell it to Mina it’s fine by me. But speaking of stray children, a boy’s been by, asking for you.”

“He knows my name? What does he want?”

“He won’t say. He goes by Raju.”

Peter remembered then: the boy with the stick who’d fended off the dogs. “When was he here last?”

“A few days ago. I told him you’d be back today.”

When Peter asked Mina about Usha, she arched an eyebrow skeptically. “You
bought
her?”

“As an alternative to where she was headed.”

Mina startled him by laughing. “It’s fine with me,” she said. “Bring her in tomorrow.”

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That afternoon Raju appeared. Peter shook his hand and explained to Mina what had happened.

“What’s going on?” Peter asked. “Are you sick?”

“No, sir. My father is ill these two months and now will not get up.”

“Why did you wait so long?”

“I came to find you, but this other man, he said you were not here. It was not possible for me to walk to Jorpati so I have returned just now.”

Peter and Mina exchanged a look. “You didn’t need to see me personally,” Peter said. “Franz or Mina could have helped.”

“I understand this,” Raju said. “However, when my father heard you are being American, he declaimed he will see no one but you.”

Peter expected Mina to say something cutting about how this illustrated the deleterious effect of foreign doctors, but she didn’t. She just said they’d be done soon and asked Raju to show them the way.

“You want to come?” Peter asked.

“If he’s the oldest son, he may be the only one in the family who speaks English.”

In the car, he watched her out of the corner of his eyes. She chatted with Raju, who seemed to take an immediate liking to her. She seemed transformed—looser and more open. Peter had thought of her during his exile, when he was plumbing the depths of patience and sanity, and had realized that much of her prickly aversion to him was probably justified. Nepal had exposed him for a fraud, and he too was calmer now, partly because his pride had
been so thoroughly crushed under the wheels of experience that he no longer had much left to defend.

As if she could read his thoughts, she asked, “How goes the karma purification?”

He looked at Raju, who was staring rapt out the window, and it occurred to Peter that the boy might never have ridden in a car before.

“I feel like a mashed bug, but I’m still crawling,” Peter said. “How goes it with you?”

“Still crawling along,” she replied. Their eyes met briefly, and they smiled. Peter felt as if the roof had suddenly been torn from the car and there was nothing over their heads but wind and sky. He took a deep breath of sweet air.

Raju lived in a small, third-floor walk-up in a concrete building over a shop. They followed the narrow stairway up to a flat roof, where an old woman was washing clothes in a red plastic tub and hanging them on a line. A small shed constructed of discarded lumber, cardboard, and tin hunkered to one side, slightly askew and fragile-looking. A thin young girl sat there, feeding stale bread and scraps to a handful of pigeons.

“That is my sister,” Raju said. “She is very smart with birds, and twice a month we are allowed to eat one.”

The girl squinted at Peter with a mixture of fear and curiosity, as if she’d never seen such an exotic creature on her roof or anywhere else. The apartment was next to the pigeon coop, and Raju lived there with two other sisters, who were sitting in the corner, playing a game, and a younger brother about two years old who shrieked with delight when he saw the strangers. The woman doing laundry was the grandmother; Raju said his mother had died the previous year. Peter thought back to the patch on the boy’s pants and the misbuttoned shirt. Now he understood.

Raju introduced them to his father, who was sprawled on a thin straw mattress and propped up against the wall on a couple of pillows made of rags stuffed into old rice bags. Raju spoke to him animatedly in Nepali, apparently indicating that Peter was the
long-awaited American doctor. The man smiled faintly, and the grandmother appeared in the doorway.

“Mr. Shrestha,” Peter said, and shook his hand. Everyone in the family had rich, brown, lustrous skin except him; he was a pale, deathly gray. His abdomen was grossly distended, his limbs and neck like withered sticks. Peter asked him about his symptoms as Mina translated. It became clear fairly quickly that he had cancer, probably colon cancer that had metastasized; he hadn’t been able to shit for nearly two weeks, and he’d stopped eating. He was obviously in a lot of pain and would most likely be dead in days. Mina and Peter looked at the grandmother, at the children, and then at each other.

“American doctors can heal anything, yes?” said Raju. “This is why we wait.”

“Stay here with your father, will you?” Peter said.

They took the grandmother outside onto the roof. She wiped the tears from her eyes as Mina explained the situation. She agreed to learn how to give her son injections for his pain, but there were no other relatives she knew of, and she didn’t think she could care for the children much longer.

“Where are they going to go?” Peter asked Mina.

“The Teku orphanage, probably,” Mina said. “This kind of thing happens all the time. At least it’s fairly new; it isn’t out of Dickens or anything.”

“Jesus.”

“What are you going to do, Peter? You’ve already got Devi and Usha on your hands.”

He wanted to herd everyone out of the city and burn it down, so they could build something decent and start over. “It’s just that I’ve been thinking a lot about futility lately.”

“I don’t want this to sound harsh, but you shouldn’t even do that much to take care of them while you’re here.”

“What are you talking about? Why not?”

“Because you’ll have to turn them over to the orphanage when
you leave, and it will be even worse for them if you get involved with their lives and then dump them like a litter of stray cats.”

He didn’t want to hear this; it was just another affirmation of Bahadur’s Law. Even so, he knew she was probably right.

Raju took the news about his father badly. “I had always thought if I found you again …” he said. He cried and held his head.

“I’m sorry,” said Peter.

“There are no machines or special medicines, nothing that can be managed?”

“It’s too late.”

Raju sat against the wall and sobbed a sort of kittenish mewing, as if it were his intention to make as little motion or noise as possible. Peter put a hand on his shoulder. After a few minutes, the boy wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands, looked at each of them in turn, then stood. “My sister needs help with the pigeons,” he said, and started over to the coop.

“Raju—” Peter said, but Raju just waved his hand behind him, a wave that was at once a goodbye and a dismissal, as if Peter and Mina were unworthy of a look back.

They taught the grandmother how to administer the morphine and left her a supply, then packed up to leave. But as they were going, Raju came back and caught them at the top of the stairs. He sounded resentful, as if he regretted having to ask anything further but saw no alternative.

“My father said that when it was time, he wanted a proper cremation at Pashupatinath,” he said. “Could you help arrange this? There is no money and I don’t know what to do.”

“Of course,” said Mina.

Peter wrote his address on a piece of paper. “Come find me there if I’m not at the clinic.”

Raju folded the paper, put it in his pocket, and went back inside without looking at them again. Peter and Mina headed downstairs. Each time Peter’s rubber sole hit the concrete steps, the dry
squeaking noise sounded to him like a small whispering voice. He looked out from the side of the stairwell; the sky was a clear blue, with a few bright clouds, and washing hung from lines on rooftops and balconies, shifting listlessly in the humid breeze. Peter tried to focus on these scraps of beauty, but as he continued downward his feet repeated the word over and over:
despair, despair, despair
.

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A week later Raju was waiting by Peter’s front gate when he got home from work. Peter called Mina, who came over and picked them up.

On the ride to Raju’s, it hit him how weary he was. Funerals had always served to remind him of his failures—and, for that matter, the failures of the universe to provide people with the longevity they could conceive of and therefore naturally wanted for themselves. When the families of his patients asked him to attend, he usually found an excuse to stay away. It felt cowardly, but in this he allowed himself cowardice.

Of course then there was Raju, who had put himself in harm’s way to save them and asked little in return. When Peter arrived, Raju was trying to be stoic, but he was obviously distraught. Peter imagined what it must be like to be orphaned so young, with sisters to care for. He put an arm around Raju’s shoulders, and the boy leaned into him.

“I’ll talk to the people at the orphanage,” Peter said. “I’ll give them money and make sure they look after you. When you’re older I’ll send you money too.”

But Raju looked skeptical and didn’t reply, and Peter realized that once again he’d become the stereotypical American, trying to fix a bad situation with cash when something better was called for. But he couldn’t be a father to the boy; all he had to offer was a little temporary consolation. He felt that his debt to Raju was beyond mere gratitude for saving them from the dog pack, because Raju had offered his protection selflessly, with no thought of personal safety or recompense. He had seen their trouble and reacted
with natural generosity and courage—it was more the
how
than the
what
that mattered. How could such a debt be repaid?