Читать книгу The Ends of Kinship - Sienna R. Craig - Страница 12

Diki had carried the child for half a year before she acknowledged her pregnancy to anyone, including herself. Winter helped. People dressed in so many layers during the season that the contours of bodies—the slope of a hip, the plum fullness of breasts, the bulge of a belly—could be masked.

Snow drifted across the walled city, settling on parapets, dusting livestock, straining roof beams. Diki spent her days predictably: meting out straw and food scraps to the animals, weaving, cooking dried turnip stew, drinking tea with her neighbors, gathering dung before it hardened to ice, stoking the hearth, feeding the animals again, sleeping long nights under the watch of so many stars.

But even had it been summer, she would not have spoken about the nascence in her womb. To do so would have risked another death.

Diki’s losses lived within her like stones. Perfect round handfuls of hardened grief, ten of them. She would not allow herself to feel the weight of the eleventh. If this tiny tangle of blood and bone could survive the hardened landscape of her interior, so be it. Diki ate what there was to eat, always saving the fleshier bits of meat for Dhondrup, her husband. She did the work expected of her.

Dhondrup felt the quickening after Losar. He returned from a trip to the village of Kimaling, smelling of burnt juniper, horse sweat, and new barley beer, to find Diki asleep in their nest of sheepskins and rough wool. The only other person in their house was old uncle Wangdu, a monk who could sleep through anything. Dhondrup sidled in beside his wife, wrapped his rough fingers around her abdomen. She had fallen asleep fully dressed. He untied Diki’s chuba, loosened her petticoat. Diki stirred, but she did not fully wake. Dhondrup sighed. He had hoped for some sort of love—a physical release after the pent-up energies of ritual—but he let his exhausted wife sleep. Still, her body felt full and alive, unlike her skinny legs, her hardened expression. With his hands on her belly, Dhondrup felt the child inside flutter. Movements as delicate as moth wings. Dhondrup stiffened with surprise. He held his breath, now hoping his hands would not wake his wife.

Dhondrup’s training as a ngakpa and an amchi was limited. People did not refer to him as either a tantrist or a doctor. Yet he often assisted the men who appeased the spirits, who examined pulses and gave medicines. On the night in question, the ritual had been for an old nomad woman who was down from the high pastures to live with relatives for the winter. She was suffering from tsadrip, a shaking that sometimes led to frozen limbs or the inability to speak and that everyone knew was the consequence of spiritual pollution.

In the winter of 1961, it felt as if defilement was everywhere. People spoke of this time as a degenerate age, marked by war and new forms of greed. Chushi Gangdruk, the Tibetan resistance soldiers, had begun to arrive in Mustang. Loba understood these soldiers’ desires to challenge Chinese encroachment on Tibetan sovereignty. Still, it was difficult to quell these warriors’ hunger—for firewood, food, munitions, even women—or to predict what the government in Kathmandu would do in response to their presence. It was a tempestuous time.

Dhondrup withdrew his hands from his wife’s body. This did not seem like an auspicious moment for new life. Still, he prayed for the being in her belly. In the coming days, without letting Diki know, he performed rituals to remove obstacles. He requested a divination. The lama’s dice and rosary revealed reasons for hope.

By the time the snow began to melt, everyone could see that Diki was pregnant, but she refused to speak of her condition. As the days lengthened and her belly continued to round, other women whispered, “It looks as if she is carrying a son.” This was the tenth time she had conceived, but she had no living children.

Diki’s first pregnancy had come on the heels of her engagement to Dhondrup, which had been arranged by their parents. That one ended before the sickness wore off, her stomach still a plane of adolescent flatness. She was only eighteen. The second, third, and fourth pregnancies passed through her just as quickly, coming in with Losar and departing before the warm winds of spring. Some believed she worked too hard. Others gossiped that Dhondrup’s male substance, his khuwa, was weak. “It must not mix well with her blood,” they said. The fifth she counted twice, for they had been twins, delivered too early and without breath. Dhondrup was off trading. Had it not been for old ibi Kunsang and the medicine the amchi gave her, she would have bled to death.

Before the twins, she had simply carried sadness. After them, she gave in to anger. She could not bear to look at Dhondrup, let alone lie down with him. He left her alone for a year, finding comfort in drink. Some said that so much death must have its root in spiritual misdeeds, in this or previous lives.

The seventh and eighth pregnancies were conceived in drunkenness. She willed them to leave her body.

Then came the winter of pilgrimage. Dhondrup stopped drinking. Diki reclaimed an appetite. On the lama’s advice, they made the journey to Kathmandu, hoping to purify the negative karma that had gathered around them like storm clouds. She remembered their visit to the cave at Yangleshö, her prayers to Guru Rinpoche and Yeshi Tsogyal, this divine couple, so perfect in their union. She carried the ninth pregnancy to term, but their daughter lived for only a few days before fever took her. They buried her small body in the walls of the house, as was custom.

It is understandable, then, why Diki would not speak about the life inside her now. She was thirty, but she felt much older.

As spring ripened and the stars moved toward Saka Dawa, this most holy of lunar months, Diki could sense the basin of her pelvis, her groin, opening and closing, the ways that she and other villagers kneaded tsampa and tea into a hard ball of dough each morning for breakfast. At first, she thought these contractions were the onset of labor and, perhaps, the end of this life. But then they settled down into the vessel of her body.

The baby turned on the day that namdru, “sky boats,” flew over the northern horizon. It was late spring. Dhondrup and several other men were sitting on the roof of their home, repairing bridles, weaving rope. “They must be sending arms for the soldiers,” said one of the men. Diki cared little about these battles, but she did notice that the child’s haunches seemed to have slid down toward her womb door, his head prone, as if he too were watching the sky.

Her waters broke during Tenpa Chirim. This ritual cycle rallied the protective deities of this land to drive out negative forces that might interfere with good harvests. Rituals such as this provided a rare moment of entertainment, a release from the demands of subsistence. Diki and other village women squatted together against the rammed earth walls of the palace, watching and listening. A massive silk brocade thangka fluttered from the roof of one of the tallest homes in the village. The abbot and the king’s priests made offerings, recited texts, sounded trumpets, drums, cymbals. Monks transformed into wrathful dharma protectors, twirling across the open-air courtyard that became a ritual stage.

Diki was so absorbed in the spectacle of these dances that it took her a moment to realize that the dampness she felt between her legs was not spilled tea. It was the beginning of her labor. Fortunately, ibi Kunsang was not far away. This village widow was twice Diki’s age. They were not from the same social rank. Kunsang was a commoner, a phalba, whereas Diki was a hremo, a noblewoman. Still, Kunsang was the person most women called when labor started.

Diki rose and Kunsang followed. Other women’s crouching limbs expanded to fill the small space their bodies had occupied. Few took notice of the wetness at their feet.

“The pain has not started, but waters released,” said Diki. Kunsang nodded and took Diki by the elbow. They walked steadily toward Diki’s home.

Diki helped Kunsang boil water, warm oil, and prepare an area away from the hearth, with old blankets and rags. Contractions began in earnest. Diki groaned. Kunsang handled the laboring woman. “Sit. Rest your head here. Let me feel the child.” The old woman’s palms offered a practiced dexterity. In addition to all the other women she had attended during birth, she had been through this routine ten times herself. Although only half of those children had made it to adulthood, they had all survived their first years of life. In fact, she’d even given birth to one of her children completely on her own, in a rapeseed field at dusk.

Kunsang sculpted Diki’s inner form. She did not say anything when she realized that this child’s back end, rather than head, was near the pelvic floor. She had helped to turn several breech births and sensed that this child could still be moved. Kunsang began this delicate work, her hands riding the waves of each contraction.

“This feels different,” Diki managed between moans.

Kunsang had few words, but she repeated them as minutes turned to hours. “Don’t cry. Breathe. Child will come.” She was surprised, actually, that Diki’s body tempered itself. Kunsang’s wrinkled fingers had not been washed, but she coated them in oil and felt for the child, coaxing the womb door to widen. She could feel a feathery softness. Hair. The old woman let out a sigh. “Push. Push when the pains come.”

Diki’s son came into the world alive, yes, but with the cord wrapped around his neck. Kunsang worked it like knotted yarn, then blew her own breath into the mouth of this infant, sucking and spitting away what remained of the watery world he had left behind. He cried, loud and pure, and with that Diki burst open.

“Don’t cry. Hold him.” Kunsang placed the newborn on Diki’s chest. The placenta slipped out like a fish.