Lucky Ticket by Joey Bui

Author:Joey Bui
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

After the exhibition was taken down, people asked me how it felt to be an artist. They always said the word in English. Buwa, my father, couldn’t say it without laughing. He had heard what I was saying to my friends at the university: It was a real honour to show people how the civil war hurt us Nepalese, it was an emotional experience, etc.

Buwa stared down over his white moustache and smacked me on the head. He had always done this, teasing for the most part.

‘Forget it, Buwa,’ I told him, and his laugh turned into a sneer.

The exhibition closed after three months because there was no custodian for the space. Not long afterwards, we received a magazine from Julie in America. Manna, our maid, brought it to me at breakfast. She had already torn open the plastic sleeve and riffled through the magazine.

‘You are famous, Mister Artist,’ said Manna. She opened the magazine to the page with my photo, the one I used for the exhibition, and pointed to my name in small print underneath: Ngodup Thapa.

Manna handed me the small yellow card that had come with the package and I moved over to the window to read it. Printed in serif font, the card read: Congratulations, it is important to show how the civil war hurt your people; it is a very emotional image. Julie’s signature was printed at the bottom. The card had curly lines, like English vines, embossed around the borders. I started to itch.

Julie first visited our house in Balkot earlier this year, one day in March, in the evening before the electricity went out. I could see her approaching our house with her driver. I changed my shirt before I went to open the door.

‘We have a guest,’ I called out to Buwa. ‘A white woman.’

He was in the study, measuring our chairs for new cushion covers.

‘What, at this time?’

Julie had come in a taxi organised by the university; her driver was a local Nepalese man. He came to the door with her and gushed about her art career in New York. I went to find Manna before she left for the day and asked her to make us some chai.

‘What, at this time?’ Manna said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We will be waiting in the living room.’

‘You think you can take an American lady to the living room in the state it’s in?’ She sent me to make the chai while she pulled the old cushions out of the cupboard.

Years ago, the living room was where Buwa talked to professors and activists about the state of affairs with the war. The furnishings had once included cabinets full of old books and keepsakes, and a red rug with a gold trim, which Aama, my mother, had ordered from India. Since her death seven years ago, Buwa had removed the decorations one by one. The professors and activists had stopped coming.

I heaped four spoonfuls of sugar into each cup and carried the tray up the steps into the living room.

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