Arresting God in Kathmandu Read Free Page B

time. One night he even stayed in the housemaid’s room, and when he got home in the morning, Radhika was in tears. “Where were you?” She brought her nose close to his face to smell whether he’d been drinking. “What’s happened to you? Don’t you know that you are a father? A husband?” Now when he went to family gatherings, he wasn’t surprised that the relatives looked at him questioningly. The bold ones even mocked him. “Pramod-ji, a man should not give up so easily. Otherwise he is not a man.” Some sought to counsel him. “Radhika is worried about you. These things happen to everyone, but one shouldn’t let everything go just like that.” He didn’t feel he had to respond to them, so he sat in silence, nodding. His father-in-law stopped talking to him, and his mother-in-law’s face was strained whenever she had to speak to him.
    At a relative’s feast one bright afternoon, Pramod watched a game of flush. The men, sitting on the floor in a circle, threw money into the center, and the women hovered around. Shambhu-da was immaculately dressed in a safari suit, and his ruddy face glowed with pleasure as he took carefully folded rupee notes from his pockets. Radhika sat beside Shambhu-da, peering over his cards and making faces.
    “Pramod-ji, aren’t you going to play?” asked a relative.
    Pramod shook his head and smiled.
    “Why would Pramod-ji want to play?” said another relative, a bearded man who had been Pramod’s childhood friend. “He has better things to do in life.” This was followed by a loud guffaw from everyone. Radhika looked at Pramod.
    “After all, we’re the ones who are fools. Working at a job and then, poof, everything gone in an afternoon of flush.” The bearded relative, with a dramatic gesture, tossed some money into the jackpot.
    “No job, no worries. Every day is the same,” someone else said.
    Radhika got up and left the room. Pramod sat with his chin resting on his palms.
    Shambhu-da looked at the bearded relative with scorn and asked, “Who are you to talk, eh, Pitamber? A bull without horns can’t call himself sharp. What about you, then, who drives a car given to him by his in-laws, and walks around as if he’d earned it?”
    At this, some of the men nodded and remarked, “Well said” and “That’s the truth.” Pitamber smiled with embarrassment and said, “I was only joking, Shambhu-da. After all, this is a time of festivities.”
    “You don’t joke about such matters,” said Shambhu-da with unusual sharpness. “Why should you joke about this, anyway? What about the time you embezzled five lakh rupees from your office? Who rescued you then?”
    The room became quiet. Shambhu-da himself looked surprised that he’d mentioned that incident.
    Pitamber threw his cards on the floor and stood up. “What did I say, huh? What did I say? I didn’t say anything to you. Just because you’re older, does that mean you can say anything?” With his right hand, he gesticulated wildly; with his left, he rapidly stroked his beard. His voice grew louder. “What about you? Everyone knows you had that police inspector killed. We aren’t fools. How do you make all your money, donkey?”
    The use of the word
donkey
prompted the other men to stand and try to restrain Pitamber, who seemed ready to froth at the mouth. “Enough, enough!” cried one woman.
    Radhika came back. “What happened?”
    A shadow covered Shambhu-da’s face, and he too got up. “What do you think, huh? What do you think? Say that again, you motherfucker; just say that again. I can buy people like you with my left hand.”
    Radhika went over to Pramod and said, “See what you’ve started?”
    Bitterly, he said, “You are a fool,” and walked out of the room.
    He was engulfed by numbness; things disappeared in a haze. Words and phrases floated through his mind. He remembered stories of people jumping into the Ranipokhari Pond at the center of the city and being sucked under to their death.