Читать книгу The Ends of Kinship - Sienna R. Craig - Страница 13

On the night Dolkar learned that her only daughter was pregnant, she had fallen asleep in front of the television. Routine brownouts, “load-shedding” in local parlance, meant that the Kathmandu electrical grid went dark, on schedule, across the city. The generator whirred to life, waking Dolkar. She wiped drool from her cheek and straightened the pillows at her back. Chinese actors playing Tibetan warriors and light-skinned Lhasa girls dressed as nomad princesses moved across the flatscreen. This Tibetan teledrama beamed into her Kathmandu living room from Lhasa, via satellite. Even half awake, Dolkar picked up the plotline. It reminded her of the Ramayana soap opera—a version of the Hindu epic that aired on Star TV last year—except for the language. She’d learned Hindi during winter trading trips to India, selling sweaters in roadside stalls back in the 1980s before she and her husband bought this plot of land and built a guest house. Now she practiced Hindi by watching Bollywood films. She could manage the Sinicized inflection of official Lhasa Tibetan, but she had no desire to learn Chinese.

The young girl who helped in the guest house kitchen had cleared the dinner dishes. Dolkar’s husband had retired to their third-floor bedroom, carrying his own mother on his back up the stairs. Such was the nighttime routine. Dolkar yawned, arched her back, reached for a thermos of hot water. She’d been on her feet since five in the morning, making apple pancakes and omelets, vegetable fried rice, endless pots of hot lemon-ginger-honey for tourists. This little hotel did not have attached bathrooms, but it offered the refuge of a peaceful garden and a clean kitchen. It was rarely full, but it had never been empty since the day Dolkar opened its doors thirteen years ago.

Thirteen years. In her half-sleep, Dolkar spun numbers in her head. She could write 2013 in standard English numerals at the top of the receipts that tourists requested, but Devanagari was the only script she navigated with some degree of confidence. Dolkar was nearly fifty. She’d had one year of government schooling, hardly enough for literacy, but had secretly studied her daughter’s Nepali primers during the girl’s early years at Little Angels School. Once her children were older, Dolkar took to sounding out Kantipur newspaper headlines after her husband had drunk his tea and set aside the morning paper.

Thirteen years. With half a century behind her, Dolkar was now thirteen years older than her mother, Diki, had been when she died, after giving birth to her younger brother, the third live birth gleaned from thirteen pregnancies. Unlike other women of Dolkar’s generation who had made lives for themselves in the city but still carried nostalgia for the village, Dolkar did not miss Mustang. Even all these years later, she felt that the land itself had taken her mother. A life hard as stone and soil, a place steeped in ritual but bereft of modern health care. It had swallowed her mother whole.

People said that Dolkar shared her mother’s face. She found the comparison difficult to reckon from the one photograph she had of the woman who birthed her. That, and shards of memory: hands, hair, voice. In the black-and-white portrait taken during her mother’s only trip to Kathmandu, the woman did not smile. She stood, formal and erect, beside her husband, against a painted backdrop of the Himalayan range. They both looked so young.

Dolkar had come into this world as a labruk, a back-to-back child, just a year after her elder brother’s birth in 1961. Both had good appetites and bright eyes. Everyone thought this family’s bad luck was behind them, but a clutch of barren years opened up after Dolkar and her older brother were born. Dolkar’s younger brother was about a month old when their mother died. Diki’s milk trickled, halted. Then chills and fever came in waves. Dolkar, who was eight years old and therefore mature enough to care for baby goats and baby humans, began taking the infant to a paternal aunt who nursed the child. They consulted the amchi, hoping the sickness would lift. At first, it was just that Diki’s postpartum stomach did not seem to deflate. Instead of breathing a sigh of relief after birth, it was as if her body was a sheepskin bellow filled with air. Pain distorted Diki’s face when Dolkar or her elder brother hugged her. Then the fever spiked, as did the smell of rot emanating from that most private place. Ibi Kunsang came with boiled herbs and poultices, but it was too late. Dolkar held her mother’s hand long after the feverish flush had drained away, replaced by an ashen stillness. Dolkar’s father, Dhondrup, sat beside the hearth, a widower reduced to tears and drink. He would remain this way for years.

Dolkar’s mobile buzzed. She reached into the pocket of her loose cotton pants and pulled out the smartphone that had been a gift from her son, Tsepten. That boy had a sense of drama and timing. He had been born on a bus. He should have been a ngakpa like his father. Instead, Tsepten managed a Nepali restaurant in Queens.

Dolkar still thought about the moment he came into the world. Very pregnant, she had been halfway through an overnight ride from Kathmandu to Benares, India, for winter trade. Her contractions started soon after they crossed the border. For the next few hours, Dolkar held on to the seat in front of her and eventually moved into the aisle. Despite her travel companions’ protestations, the driver refused to stop. The teenage ticket boy, strung out from sniffing glue, began to cry. Two chickens walked up and down the aisle, calmly pecking at spit, snot, and instant noodle crumbs. A woman from lowland Nepal, her muscled arms like mahogany, offered Dolkar sips of water and shouted, “Don’t worry! The baby will come soon!” A Brahmin astrologer stayed clear of the polluting mess of birth, but he began calculating the child’s chart.

The scene was so chaotic that Dolkar forgot her fear, forgot the memories of her mother’s face at death, visions that she had not divulged to anyone but that haunted her. This was her second pregnancy but her first true labor. After the miscarriage, she was terrified that whatever caused her mother’s misfortune had been passed on to her. But then came Tsepten. One of Dolkar’s cousins caught the child, whose strong cries pierced the morning air. Dawn came swiftly, flamingo pink clouds hovering above the Ganges. Dolkar became a mother. Once the newborn had been bathed and swaddled by an Indian nurse at a government hospital, the other Mustang women with whom Dolkar had been traveling joked that Tsepten must have liked the Bollywood songs blaring from the bus speakers. “He wanted to come out and sing,” they said. “He will bring joy.”

That was about three decades ago. Now, Dolkar thought, Tsepten spends good money for people to carve strange pictures in ink across his arms and back, he wastes time in some place where he pays to run around in circles and lift heavy things, and he refuses to get married. Tsepten had decamped to New York after earning his School Leaving Certificate (SLC). Dolkar no longer understood her son, but she had set aside anger. Tsepten inherited his father’s charisma and discipline, but his father couldn’t see it. They had not spoken to each other in more than a year.

Their daughter, Tsering, was tame by comparison. She’d done well in school and hoped that, after some years as a babysitter in New York, once her papers came through, she would enroll in nursing school. Dolkar’s phone vibrated again. Tsering Chori lit up the screen in crisp Helvetica.

“Ama, are you sleeping?”

“No, chori. Watching television.” Although Tsering could understand Logé, she and her mother had slipped into the habit long ago of speaking to each other in Nepali. They exchanged simple words, about weather in Kathmandu and weather in New York, about tourists in the guest house and the two young American children Tsering nannied for a living, Aiden and Lucy. A-den, Lu-chi, as Dolkar called them. Through her daughter, Dolkar had learned about strollers and sleep training, monkey bars and peanut allergies. Tsering seemed enamored by the lists of dos and don’ts her American boss posted on the refrigerator, the well-oiled management of it all. In hearing Tsering describe these children’s lives in America, Dolkar marveled at the amount of attention they received but wondered how they would learn to manage pain and disappointment when it came for them. She kept these thoughts to herself.

“Ama, there is something to tell you,” said Tsering. Dolkar’s stomach tightened. “Ama, my period stopped two months ago. The baby will come in summer.”

Dolkar breathed out. A baby. No illness or injury. No immigration officers knocking on the door. Across the world from her own baby, she smiled. This was good news.

“Are you eating well? Do you feel sick? What did the doctor say? Do you get to see a picture? Have you told Jamyang?” Dolkar was not usually effusive, but the questions tumbled out. Tsering, whose name meant “long life,” was twenty-six and engaged to her cross-cousin, Jamyang, a taxi driver who worked nights. The arrangement had been secured several years ago, but the couple had grown up together and had been friends before their families bound them to each other. Affection evolved. This child would cement their bond. As was becoming common these days in New York, Dolkar thought the couple might combine a formal marriage ceremony with the child’s first birthday. Dolkar could imagine the envelopes of cash and piles of kathag, the buffet line and pale orange walls inside that Punjabi banquet hall near Roosevelt Island. She had never been there, but she’d seen videos.

“I want to eat everything and then nothing at all, but the doctor says the baby is healthy. She’s nice. Born here in New Jersey, but her parents are from Himachal Pradesh,” answered Tsering. “We speak Hindi plus English together, mix and match. And, yes, Jamyang knows. He is so happy. We haven’t found out boy or girl, but it doesn’t matter. We only want good health.”

“Don’t tell many people,” Dolkar advised. She had not planned on saying this. “You don’t want gossip to cause harm.”

“Ama, you believe that?”

“Believe that gossip is powerful? Certainly!” Dolkar flushed. Her daughter sensed this passion through the phone.

“But how could just saying something cause problems? The doctor says it is important to take vitamins, eat well, not get too much tension.”

“Yes. That is important. And go to the doctor for checkup,” responded Dolkar. “But what people say matters. Just take care yourself.” Dolkar spoke little English but she used what she knew to reach her daughter. Just as the power of people’s talk was real, so was the need for checkup.

Tsering’s next question surprised her. “Ama, how was it, when I was born?” Dolkar did not answer right away. “I know the story of Tsepten,” Tsering continued. “Everyone knows that story! But what was it like with me?”

Dolkar took a deep breath. Tsepten’s birth, so dramatic, so public, had allowed Dolkar to set aside her fear. With Tsering it was different. She had been in Mustang, no longer in her natal village but in the unfamiliar hamlet of her husband’s family. She had been terrified.

“You were born at home, in the same house where your father was born,” answered Dolkar.

“I know that Ama, but what was it like? Did you go to the doctor when you were pregnant? Did you feel sick and then hungry? Did you have strange dreams? Who helped you?” Now it was Tsering’s turn for questions.

“No, no doctor. It was summer. Hot, out in the wheat field. They told me stay home, but I made snacks. Carried them to the workers. Then pains started. Aunt Karsang brought me back to the house. She took good care. Cousin Sonam too. Massaged my back. Gave dried fish from Mapham Yumtso. They say it helps to make the baby come quickly. You came quickly. You were good on the breast. Father cut your cord and put medicine butter on the roof of your mouth to make you cry well. Lama Tharchen made the kyekar,” Dolkar said, recalling the natal horoscope that augured long life, suggesting the name Tsering. “He made incense offerings too,” said Dolkar, “to purify.”

Dolkar remembered the smell of juniper, the sense of accomplished exhaustion at the sight of her daughter. She remembered the taste of bone broth and of falling in and out of sleep with her newborn. Dolkar was happy when the Nepali health workers arrived with vaccinations because many children had died of fever and pox in previous years. She shared some of these memories with her daughter.

But Dolkar did not tell Tsering about the miscarriage she had about a year before Tsepten’s birth. She did not tell her daughter about the blood on the walls of the district hospital where she’d gone that time, after she began to bleed, or about the cold metal cot, the clumsy doctor, the frigid speculum. She did not tell her daughter about the injections she began to receive once they moved to Kathmandu, to stop the possibility of another pregnancy. She did not tell her daughter about the arguments with Tsering’s father about this decision, how he called such medicine a sin. She did not tell her daughter that she longed to be present in America when her first grandchild came into this world. Part of Dolkar wanted to share all of this with Tsering, but she felt there was too much space between them.

“Don’t worry, chori,” said Dolkar. She wrapped her free hand around her abdomen, held her phone to her ear with the other. “Everything will be fine.”