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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Fiction & Poetry |
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This month, we bring you acclaimed poet Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s fiction debut, a story set among the Tibetan diaspora in Nepal.
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ETTER WRITING WAS NO SIMPLE TASK. Take for instance Mr. Dorje who received money for his daughter’s education even after she’d stopped attending school. “She has no brains,” he explained to Karma. His daughter had twice failed the fourth grade. He suggested they avoid the school topic. “Just write about the weather and how China is destroying us,” he |
said. He was a widower and a cook in a monastery. He administered over gigantic aluminum pots of food with a ladle in one hand and a bottle of home brewed chang in the other.
Mr. Tendor had been a chieftain in Eastern Tibet. As evidence he wore his hat and his Tibetan dress even while lounging at home. He offered details of a country Karma would never see: lavish offerings to mountain deities on top of hills, week-long summer picnics where men shot at targets while standing on their horses, the electric air of stupefaction after a thief’s tongue was lopped off.
Mrs. Gombo owned a noodle restaurant and had more money than all six families living in an apartment building she owned, yet she still had use for $400 she received every year from a man in Florida. She had a Samsung television as tall as herself, a row of ceramic five foot-tall snow lions, and a leather sofa in her living room. She had resorted to dressing the sofa with a plastic cover because she did not trust her husband’s relatives - an older couple from Tibet living with them for a few months - not to ruin the leather. Pinching her bony arms together, she complained that she worked hard but never prospered. Karma, who was writing letters to keep her mother, Tsering, happy for nothing but good returns in future lives, nodded her head slowly.
Then there were the Trinleys: Mrs. Trinley’s face was thinner than the electric poles on the street. She had a mole on the ridge of her nose, and it was as though the mole, glossy and plump, sucked all the fat from her body. A hardworking woman who earned a few hundred rupees a day spinning wool for a carpet factory, Mrs. Trinley got to the point when writing to June, her daughter’s sponsor in Portland, Oregon. When exactly was the next cheque coming? Was it possible, for June, to send used clothes for her daughter as other sponsors did?
Her husband lectured on most topics in their letters, even on birds. “You are father and mother to my family,” he would instruct Karma. “Write that. The sun is peeping out from the clouds like a new bride,” he’d quote, with a grin. “Write that too.” In school, Karma had learned to stick to a format. Beginning. Middle. End. But if she protested, Mr. Trinley would remark that a good writer adapted to myriad styles.
Mrs. Trinley said Americans were kind people. Americans cancelled ice cream and movies in theatres in order to send little refugee girls to school. They were not crooks like the Chinese or the Tibetan and Nepali shopkeepers, who used unreliable weighing scales. She wanted to be reborn in America, even as a cat or a dog. Mr. Trinley said Americans had no shame; they had absolutely no control over their bodies. Americans farted as they strolled the streets of Kathmandu. “Just like that. In broad daylight and in public.”
“I bet,” he added, “their President lets out gas in front of his secretaries.”
Karma had recently graduated from high school and her mother had decided English would not work in her favor unless it was used to help the elders. Just earlier in the day Tsering had taken Karma to a neighbor’s house. She had pointed to the English letters on matchboxes, snuff bottles, sodden biscuit packets and to instructions on medication bottles ablated by fingers and time to a blur of lines. She had noted the expiration dates on vitamin jars; the elders saved everything even when they did not read, she had muttered. She had picked up two unopened letters. One letter implied the sponsor would visit in a year and that being propitious news, begat the next question; would Karma help translate when the sponsor came?
“Of course, she will. She has six months till she joins college,” Tsering had said.
Writing letters would improve her English and her karma. But Karma had wished she could have said, “Thank you very much. I can find other ways to improve my English.”
Now they were to compose a letter to a Mr. Gregory Hill.
“You must keep everything in perspective,” her mother said, leading Karma into Pema’s house. Karma understood this to mean she was not to get ideas about writing similar letters. Pema was not yet old but Tsering explained her situation was delicate, required swift action and that nobody else could be trusted with the task.
“This is a ‘special friend’ letter,” she said.
“Love letter from Pema to this American man?”
“Is that all you girls learn in school these days? Love letter she says, and not even eighteen years in age,” Tsering exclaimed.
“We must address Mr. Greg cordially, not too warmly,” she continued, after a minute.
Dear? My dear? Dearest? Karma wrote the three words down on a sheet of paper.
“Dearest is too much,” her mother said. “It will give him ideas.”
Pema ran a shop at an intersection where everyone coming or going in three different directions was vulnerable to her gaze. Older girls from Karma’s school said Pema was a 43-year-old widow with panties clogged with ideas.
“Strangers and government officials, even, are addressed as ‘Dear,’ Karma explained.
“All over the world?”
“Yes, all over the world.”
“O.K. ‘Dear Mr. Greg’ then,” Tsering said. “Mr. Gregory Hill. Like a movie star’s name,” she added softly.
Tsering had assumed the role of intermediary. She understood the story that was to take place and because she still had her husband, she was trusted to select the appropriate tone. She stated that the first letter would establish the direction of Pema and Mr. Greg’s future correspondence. None of it mattered to Karma so she wrote, “Dear Mr. Greg”.
“He lives in California,” Pema explained. “He’s tall and has feet the length of a Lhasa Apso. He is in tip-top shape and other than a filling in one molar, he’s disease free.” Pema’s eyes were on Tsering as she spoke. Karma had never known her mother to have female friends but for the duration of the evening Tsering and Pema appeared close.
Tsering had not seen Mr. Greg but having studied plenty of American tourists, she said she had no trouble conjuring an image of him. And, she added, he had never married.
Karma suggested mentioning the week-long festivities of the approaching Tibetan New Year. Tsering said it wouldn’t do to make Mr. Greg believe Pema was having too good a time. “A widow should not come across as a hedonist,” she said.
It would be best to portray Pema as a responsible, respectable woman, but one who was capable of jollity, according to Tsering. Letter writing was Karma’s craft but this was her mother’s project. Karma could not write a word without Tsering checking on the potency of each syllable.
“Every word is a weapon,” Tsering said, winking at Pema.
The first letter was cordial; there were questions about the size of the town Mr. Greg lived in (did any famous person live there?) and enquiries about the vegetables and fruits available in the market. What kind of deities did people worship in his town? Karma held her tongue to keep from answering the questions. To balance the ordinariness of the letter, she slipped in a sentence on the lingering reach of jasmine in the last hours of the day. Then, unable to help herself, she wrote about the dawn: how the opaque mist smeared itself so thickly it allowed people to believe it would burst like a balloon if poked with a finger.
She knew what her mother’s response would be if she read the unauthorized sentences, “Why would Pema stick her nose into jasmine plants when she knows men are pissing into them every day?”
The letter done, Karma thanked Pema for the tea and rushed towards the door. Mr. Greg would have to respond and they would take the next step. He would receive the letter in two weeks. If he wrote immediately, they could hope to see his letter in four weeks.
Karma was aiming to get home before 6 pm to catch a TV program on birds of the Himalayas. She had learned, a week ago, that the pigeons she found so dull and ungainly had originated in southern Asia several million years ago, even before humans had appeared. This fact, compounded with the idea that pigeons with white wings were not white but without color made her regard them with the same interest she kept for the tourists who came in shorts all year round. What did it mean that the white pigeon was not really white? It sounded like a conundrum the lamas would toss around in a conversation. The question, asked to nobody in particular, came into her mind several times a day when she encountered objects in white.
She waved to a friend as she walked by her store on her way to the stupa.
“Meet my cousin Rinchen. He’s here for the summer. He’s a final year college student. You can ask him about college and stuff,” her friend said.
“Hello Rinchen,” Karma said distractedly.
How many pigeons would it take to cover the stupa in pigeon droppings, she asked herself as she took a round of the stupa. A hundred or more beggars were scattered around the walking path of the stupa, their palms disciplined to receive. Tomorrow they would be elsewhere. Karma did not know how to speak of the destitute when she saw them in such large numbers; this was their country after all. Just the other day their milkman had said Tibetans were lucky bastards.
“If you were in your own country, you too would be selling your milk instead of drinking it,” he had said to Tsering. Tsering had responded that it was harder for a poor Tibetan to live in Nepal than it was for a poor Nepali to do so. “We walked across desert and formidable mountain passes to get to this country. We walked without a map and without a name to your city.” The milkman said he wished he were a refugee, perhaps then he would get a sponsor.
The milkman was knobby at the knees but nobody sent him money so he could stay home and play with a prayer wheel all day, he would tell them. He left his village at three in the morning and arrived at Karma’s house at six with the final two liters of milk and a thin coat of perspiration on his forehead. Even his cow, he said, felt the pressure of producing. Some of his customers had switched to pasteurized milk in plastic packages that were carried from the factory in a truck.
“How would you like to battle with a truck?” he asked Tsering. His cows aged each year. They were no match for Green Valley Dairy Ltd. whose milk was advertised to be, “as pure as the milk from the cows in your grandmother’s village.”
“Hello Rinchen,” Karma repeated to herself, in an effort to recall how she had sounded to him.
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VER DINNER TSERING EXPLAINED that Mr. Greg had a father, and a stepmother who was Chinese, not Chinese- Chinese but from Taiwan. A few months earlier while holidaying in Nepal, he had stopped at Pema’s shop to ask for directions to a monastery and Pema, lacking English words to explain the road’s circuitous path, had made a customer |
watch the shop while she walked him there. The next day Mr. Greg had returned with a bottle of Pond’s Shampoo.
“Head shampoo. Why would he give her head shampoo?” asked Tsering’s husband.
“A practical gift. First class choice,” Tsering explained to him.
Mr. Greg had then gone trekking in the mountains for three weeks and upon his return to Kathmandu he had brought Pema a bag of dried apricots.
“This proves he is a man with sense. Common sense is very important in a man,” Tsering said, directing her gaze at Karma.
Tsering had been fifteen when her marriage had been arranged in Tibet. She had seen her husband on the afternoon of her wedding day. Whatever she saw she had accepted, she had once said. Karma heard her parents address each other by their first names, not “Daddy” and “Mummy” like some couples.
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HREE AND A HALF WEEKS LATER Pema visited before the morning tea had boiled. She feigned nonchalance as her fingers fiddled with the envelope in her hand. Tsering said Pema must be embarrassed to be beholden for something she would have preferred to keep secret. But the letter had to be read. |
Pema said she’d just come from arguing with Mrs. Trinley. People in the area, and Mrs. Trinley included, dumped plastic bags full of refuse right across from Pema’s shop, which over time and under the blatant gaze of the sun, turned into putrefying sticky lumps of green and purple.
The stench made Pema nauseous all day. She had requested people to take their garbage out of view from her shop, to the big trash bins half a mile down the road, but nobody paid her any attention. She was now surprising people into shame; she had caught Mrs. Trinley just as she was about to let the plastic bags slip from her hands.
Might Karma or Tsering drop some hints about hygiene when they went to the Trinley’s next, she wondered? She held a photo out.
“Oh,” Tsering said looking at Mr. Greg, “Oh.”
He had begun his letter with “Pema” – no dear, not even hello; “Pema”. The word, all by itself, posited as a rebuke. It was a long way from the next line. In a Tibetan letter the salutation could take half the page, even to a stranger. Tsering said they had to continue to address him as “Dear Mr. Greg”.
“We can’t go backwards,” she explained.
Greg wrote that his father and stepmom lived an hour’s drive from him, and that he met them every alternate Sunday for dinner. He was a postman. He walked a lot. It was not the same as walking in the Himalayas but it was preferable to sitting in a stifling cubicle all day. He lived in an apartment complex, alone. The fog was thick where he was, he wrote. There were days when he imagined it was an alien swallowing his car as he pushed through.
Tsering said he was a sensitive man. Why else would he mention the fog? Her cheeks were red as though she’d been in the kitchen kneading flour.
They decided to respond to Mr. Greg’s letter the following morning. “Think about what you want to say,” Tsering called after Pema, who left to get her photo taken at a photo studio.
All morning Tsering fussed over the gray in her hair. Did she look older than Mrs. Chonzom who lived down the street? Mr. Tsering said she looked older than Mrs. Chonzom because she was older. Tsering said she had not asked him for his opinion.
| ECHOSTREAM |
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Karma never saw her parents lean or rest into each other when they sat side by side. She never saw any clues to intimacy but at night she often heard sounds escape their room: whispers, assenting laughs, conspiratorial pitches.
When Pema arrived the following morning, she laid a photograph on the table. Karma recognized the studio from the backdrop. Pema’s hands were folded in her lap; the camera had caught her just as she was rounding off her smile. Her face was shaped like an acorn. Her features were small and grouped closely together, her neck an unsteady branch. Only her hair, black and thick as a log, triumphed, down the center of her spine. It was the sturdiest column on her frame.
Tsering told Karma to ask Mr. Greg if there was anything he missed about Nepal.
“This will give him the chance to say he misses Pema,” she said, with a sparkle in her eyes.
“So this is how the game is played,” Karma thought to herself. She had brought her fountain pen. It had a nib that allowed delicate machinations to letters. She had been saving it for two years but recently had come to the realization that if she didn’t use it her mother would give it away. Everything she owned was prey to her mother’s generosity. I sit in my shop all day surrounded by perishable goods. All day I watch people and feel so much happens in their lives. Day after day, I sit in the one spot, watching them.
Tsering was pensive after Pema left the house. She asked Karma to buy a calendar, one with space for notes. Karma had heard her mother tell guests more than once that she had no need of a calendar. Everything was in her head, she would say. Karma selected a calendar with birds on every page. She took the longer route on her way home. She did not see the college boy in her friend’s shop. She could not recall his name. Her mother made a big red circle on the day they had mailed the first letter. She put a blue circle on the day Mr. Greg’s letter reached Pema and hung the calendar in the kitchen.
Over the next week Karma overheard her mother ask Pema on the phone if she had heard from “him.” During the days she called out to Karma with ideas for the next letter: the King was visiting the U.S; four of her favorite biscuits were manufactured by the same company in Nepal; nasturtiums were covering the walls; Pema was not willing to go to the internet shops and have Karma send emails because she didn’t trust the boys who ran those computers; green was her favorite color (green was Tsering’s favorite color.) Tsering said Pema had Mr. Greg’s photograph in a photo frame under her pillow. She said she could calculate quicker in her head than anybody on her street but this letter writing business stretched over many weeks was bewildering her because she couldn’t foresee or calculate the outcome.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Mo Lama
19 August 2010
05:01 PM
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Tsering, got this through Dickey. Enjoyed your colourful narrative. And the humour in it. Very you. Write more. You will do very well and we can have something good to read:-)
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Padma Govindaswamy
17 August 2010
09:52 AM
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Very poignant, A mother's thoughts to see her daughter reach the destination with a man
is the same throughout the world. Even if she is a refugee Tibetan.
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Ashish
12 August 2010
08:53 PM
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Lovely story. Gives me a new perspective on life....Please write more....
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Tinny
3 August 2010
10:26 PM
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Beautiful story. I could visualize your characters as I read them , thoroughly enjoyed it! you should write more!
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Marilyn Beech
29 July 2010
11:34 AM
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A delightful story, full of insights. I enjoyed it very much.
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