“It doesn’t matter now,” he said, his hands shaking. “I won’t get angry. I won’t shout at you. I’ll let you do whatever you want. That way, I may get some peace.”
She uttered a sharp ‘Aiya” and put her index finger in her mouth. He went to her, pried out the finger, and inspected it. The cut was small, right above the second joint. He fetched the rubbing alcohol and patted her wound. She. didn’t look at his face but watched the cut with growing dismay.
“Here. I’ll slice the tomatoes,” he said.
“You are jealous, suspicious. You think I have a lover?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.” He waited for her to say something.
“Would you kill him if you thought he was my lover?”
“Who? The man downstairs?”
She seemed exasperated. “No, no,” she said. “My lover, any lover.” Something occurred to her. “Who was that man downstairs?”
He didn’t answer her and finished cutting the tomatoes.
Dust rose inside the bus, tiny particles glittering in the afternoon sun. The bus lurched toward its destination, the temple of the Goddess Durga on the outskirts of the city. His wife was asleep, her head resting against the window. In front of them sat a man with four hens, their feet tied together. With every jolt, the hens tried to rise in the air, cackling insanely, sending feathers floating up and down the length of the bus. The kohl on his wife’s eyelids trickled down her cheeks. Ganesh smiled and stretched his legs. He looked forward to the ceremony at the temple, where his relatives would ask him to kill goats because he was good at it. And Ganesh would hoist the khukri knife high in the air, its sharpened edge glinting in the dusk, amid the appreciative cries of the onlookers.
Another vision came to him. He was sitting in the middle of a field, his mother in her petticoat leaning over him, smiling and whispering. Blood was running down his nose, soaking the front of his shirt, trickling down his thighs and into the earth, where his friend was waiting with an open tongue. Then his wife leaped out of a photograph and shook her finger at him, and the dancing bald man had a face that looked much like his own. Everything grew silent, a bird cried – and he opened his eyes and looked around. The bus had stopped, caught in a traffic jam.
He was tired, as if he’d been walking for a long time. He woke up his wife.
“What?” she said, her eyes bleary, sweat like dew above her upper lip.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“About what?”
“Whether I can kill a goat today.”
She searched his face. “What’s the matter? You’ve never complained before.”
The hens once again rose in the air and sprayed them with feathers.
“Look,” he said. He lifted his hands. They were shaking.
She picked a feather from his head and ruffled his hair. Then she dabbed the sweat on his cheeks with the end of her sari. ‘You don’t have to kill a goat if you don’t want to.”
Her hand on his face felt good. “But what will everyone say? They will laugh at me.”
“Who cares?” she said. “What can it do to us?” His eyes closed; he felt her lips brush against his cheek. “My mama’s boy,” she whispered. “My sweet, sweet mama’s boy.” Now her lips were nibbling at his ear, and he opened his eyes. The man with the hens was staring at them, and he felt embarrassed, but he didn’t stop her; her words were soothing.
The bus came to a stop. They got out, clutching the bundles of rice and fruit they had brought to offer the gods. In front of them was a large field filled with cars and trucks, and, in the distance, the temple’s pagoda.
As they joined the crowd moving toward the temple, some of Ganesh’s fatigue vanished. He stopped to take off his shoes; the grass felt good beneath his feet. He shifted the bundle of rice he was carrying, and as they walked on, he touched his wife’s hand with his free hand. She looked at his face quizzically, then took his hand in hers. The sky was bright blue, and the sun shone on their faces. The temple bells sounded, a clear ding-dong that reverberated inside his body, then expanded into their surroundings.
As the crowd around them chanted songs praising the Mother Goddess, he briefly thought of his wife’s lover, but in this crowd, with its fervent devotion, the man had become inconsequential, faceless, dissolving into the crowd in which Ganesh was moving.
From “Arresting God in Kathmandu”, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
© Samrat Upadhyay, 2001