The Royal Ghosts

Samrat Upadhyay

Description

“Startlingly good” stories of Nepali society set against the backdrop of violent Maoist insurgencies (San Francisco Chronicle).
 
From an author like “a Buddhist Chekhov,” The Royal Ghosts features characters trying to reconcile their true desires with the forces at work in Nepali society (San Francisco Chronicle). As political violence rages, these people struggle with their duties to their aging parents, an oppressive caste system, and the complexities of arranged marriage, striving to find peace and connection, and often discovering it in unexpected places.
 
These stories, from the Whiting Award–winning author of Arresting God in Kathmandu and The Guru of Love, brilliantly examine not only Kathmandu during a time of upheaval, crisis, and cultural transformation but also the effects of the city on the individual consciousness.
 
“Like William Trevor, Samrat Upadhyay compresses into a short story the breadth of vision and human consequence we expect from a novel, and he does so in a prose that seems as natural as breathing.” —Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe
 
“Takes us straight into the heart of the troubled and enchanting kingdom of Nepal.” —The Washington Post
 
“Upadhyay’s not-so-simple stories are lucid and often luminous.” —Publishers Weekly

Sujets

• Short story
• Maoism
• Insurgency
• Arranged marriage

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 09 février 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780547561486
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
A Refugee
The Wedding Hero
The Third Stage
Supreme Pronouncements
The Weight of a Gun
Chintamani’s Women
Father, Daughter
A Servant in the City
The Royal Ghosts
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright © 2006 by Samrat Upadhyay
All rights reserved
 
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
 
www.hmhco.com
 
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Upadhyay, Samrat, date. The royal ghosts : stories / Samrat Upadhyay. p. cm. “A Mariner original.” ISBN -13: 978-0-618-51749-7 ISBN -10: 0-618-51749-9 1. Nepal—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9570.N43R69 2006 823'.92 dc22 2005016737
 
e ISBN 978-0-547-56148-6 v2.0714
 
 
 
 
To my chhori Shahzadi
A Refugee
P ITAMBER CROSSED THE BRIDGE to Kupondole and found the gift shop where he’d been told Kabita worked. But the man behind the counter said she’d quit after just a few days. “She wasn’t right in the head, you know,” the man said, “after all that happened to her.”
“Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. I tried to convince her to stay on, but she just stopped coming.”
Pitamber left the shop and stood on the sidewalk, squinting at the sun and noting the intense heat, strange for autumn. This morning he’d woken restless, with a hollowness in his stomach, and thought about the letter he’d received a fortnight ago from his childhood friend Jaikanth. The feeling remained with him throughout the day as he searched for this woman named Kabita, whose story Jaikanth had described to him. “She’s in Kathmandu with her daughter, and I know what a kind man you are, Pitamber. Please do what you can to help her. She’s suffered immensely.”
Now Pitamber made his way to his flat in Dharahara, where his wife, Shailaja, was cooking French toast in the kitchen. She turned to smile at him as he came in. “Any luck?”
He said no and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Why hasn’t she contacted us? Jaikanth said he gave her our address. It’s been nearly two weeks.”
“Maybe other people are already helping her. Didn’t Jaikanth mention other people she knew here?”
He nodded, then told her what the man in the gift shop had said. “I hope she’s found another job,” he told Shailaja, then said that his stomach had been mildly upset all day.
“It must be hunger,” she said. “Why don’t you go wash your face and I’ll give you some French toast. Sumit should be home any minute now.”
He went to the bathroom, washed his face, took several deep breaths, then went to find Jaikanth’s letter. He read it again, and paused as he did: “They killed him in front of her, Pitamber. Can you imagine what that must have been like?” Jaikanth hadn’t explained the details of the killing, but over the past two weeks Pitamber had formed a picture in his mind: three Maobadi rebels, barely past their teens (they were always so young in the news), storming into her house, dragging her husband out to the yard, slitting his throat with a knife. The four-year-old daughter probably inside the house, perhaps sound asleep, perhaps with a nasty cold. And after the men leave, a woman standing there, her palm over her mouth.
The woman’s face was never clear, but Pitamber’s mind always flashed with these details: the sun’s rays glinting on washed pots drying on the porch, one rebel raising his finger to warn the neighbors peeking from the windows of their houses, the men’s footprints on the rice paddies through which they escape.
He massaged his temples. Surely she still needed help now. It was clear that Jaikanth was expecting him to house the woman and her daughter for a while, and Pitamber was willing to do this, even though his was only a three-room flat in a small house. He wanted to help her, mostly out of compassion, but partly out of obligation to an old friend of his family, a friend from the village where he grew up.
When Sumit, his twelve-year-old son, returned from school, they drank tea and ate French toast, then Pitamber and the boy settled down to play chess. Pitamber had bought the set two months ago, after the first set, a cheap one with plastic pieces, disappeared from their flat. Pitamber suspected that one of Sumit’s friends from the neighborhood, who had a reputation for lifting small objects from the surrounding houses, had swiped it, but he didn’t pursue the matter. Sumit had shown remarkable skill in the game, so this time Pitamber bought a marble set with finely carved pieces. It had cost him nine hundred rupees at a tourist shop in Basantapur. His stomach dropped when the shopkeeper first told him the price, but he’d rationalized the purchase, convincing himself that his son would become a master someday. “We should enroll him in the neighborhood chess club,” he’d said to Shailaja the other day. “He can play with older kids and learn more quickly.” But Shailaja was hesitant. “He might be intimidated. There’ll be kids his age better at the game, and you know how he is.” She had a point. Sumit was a sensitive kid; he berated himself whenever he lost to his father. Perhaps he should gain more confidence before joining any clubs.
The two played chess that evening for nearly an hour. Sumit made a couple of silly mistakes and slapped his forehead each time. Pitamber deliberately muddled his moves to compensate for Sumit’s errors, careful to pretend that the mistakes were genuine. Toward the end of the game, Sumit captured his remaining knight and paralyzed Pitamber’s king. “You’re getting much better,” Pitamber told his son, and suggested the three of them go for a walk.
The air had gotten considerably cooler and more pleasant, but Pitamber soon grew annoyed by the crowds on the pavement and the cars and trucks spewing fumes and blasting their horns beside them. The three walked toward the stadium, and Sumit spotted a large billboard advertising a Hindi action movie. “I want to see that,” he said, and he held out his arms as if he were carrying a machine gun. “ Bhut bhut bhut bhut. ” He mock-shot some pedestrians, and Pitamber scolded him. The boy had been watching too many of these movies on video. Shailaja was too lenient with him, and on weekends, when he and Pitamber were not playing chess, Sumit remained glued to the television despite Pitamber’s pleas for him to turn it off. He even recognized all the actors and actresses and knew their silly songs by heart.
Chess was better for him. It taught him to think, to strategize, to assess his own strengths and weaknesses. It was a good game for a future statesman or a philosopher. The idea of his son’s becoming someone important brought a smile to Pitamber’s face, and he ruffled the boy’s hair.
After dinner that evening, Pitamber went to his bedroom to read the day’s paper. In Rolpa, dozens of policemen had been shot by the Maobadis. In Baglung, two rebels had been beaten to death by villagers, who now feared reprisal. The cold, passive language of the news reports disgusted Pitamber, and he set down the paper. It was hard to believe that this country was becoming a place where people killed each other over differences in ideas about how to govern it. At his office the other day a colleague openly sympathized with the rebels and said that the Maobadis had no choice. “Think about it,” the man had said. “For years we suffered under the kings, then we got so-called democracy, but nothing got better. Most of our country lives in mind-boggling poverty. These Maobadis are only fighting for the poor. It’s a simple thing that they’re doing.”
“Simple?” Pitamber had said. “Your Maobadis are killing the very people they claim they’re fighting for—innocent villagers.”
“They’re casualties of the revolution,” the man said. “They are martyrs. But the revolution has to go on.”
Pitamber took a deep breath and said, “It’s easy for you to blather on about revolutions from your comfortable chair.”
The discussion ended with him walking away from his colleague. Later Pitamber barely acknowledged him when they passed in the hallway, even though he knew that what the man said was not entirely untrue: poor people in the country were fed up with how little their conditions had changed, democracy or no democracy.
Pitamber again went to find Jaikanth’s letter and reread it, this time stopping at the three names and addresses of the contacts Kabita already had in the city. Through one of these people, Pitamber had learned about the gift shop where she had worked. He had tried reaching another of the contacts but had been told the man was out of town. Pitamber reached for the phone and called the number again. The man answered this time, but said he didn’t know the whereabouts of Kabita. “She hasn’t been in touch, but I believe she has a distant relative who is a sadhu in the Pashupatinath temple. You might try him.”
 
Early the next morning, after