Mad Country by Samrat Upadhyay

Author:Samrat Upadhyay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2017-02-03T01:51:58+00:00

An Affair Before

the Earthquake

The earthquake was yet to come.

She promised him before she left for America that she would return in two years, and they’d be together.

“Will we marry?” he’d asked.

“That I don’t know,” she’d said. “What good would that do?”

What good would marriage do! Well, marriage would keep us together, he’d thought. It’d tie us in an official bond, and never would we be apart! Or something like that. But he would have felt foolish uttering these words, so he hadn’t.

When she first told him that she was going away, he’d known it was coming. They’d been walking in the city center, holding hands, moving from Thamel through Asan, then Indrachowk toward Kathmandu Durbar Square. Soon they’d pass the giant drums to the right, statue of Hanuman the Monkey God to the left, then, to the right, figures of Shiva-Parvati leaning out of a temple window. On to the square and the nine-stage platform that led to the base of the Maju Deval temple, which was more than three hundred years old, where tourists and locals (now increasingly young lovers) hung out and watched the scenery. In front of the temple she’d say, “Shall we?” and they’d climb the steps, linger for some time as they watched the people below, and then they’d come back down. The next stop was the Kasthamandap temple, where they’d observe the Gorakhnath statue (both of them were not particularly religious), and she’d say, “This temple was made out of a single tree.” He was aware of the legend, of course, and he recalled that this structure was nine hundred years old, serving as a resting pavilion, a sanctuary, for merchants who traveled the ancient trade routes. “Our city gets its name from this temple,” she said, every time, as though he was unaware of it. And he’d take note of “our city” because that meant that she considered the city to be theirs, theirs together.

Our hearth, he thought. They’d circle the small shrine of Ganesh, still holding hands, and he’d feel that they were consecrating their togetherness.

But she was a free spirit. He knew that. If he’d chosen to ignore it, how was she to blame? Before they became lovers, he’d watched her from afar, and he’d admired her and thought, Now there’s a free spirit, and I’m not. It was strange, identifying oneself as an unfree spirit. But he’d felt a constriction inside himself ever since he could remember, since childhood. Shy, they used to call him, but he’d always known that it was more than shyness. He was trapped by his own thoughts, which, it became obvious to him by his teen years, went around in circles, or repeated the same patterns—which meant that his life followed the same patterns, over and over. He was free to go wherever he chose, and he traveled quite a bit in the early years of his profession—China, Germany, Australia—yet he was moving within this circle of entrapment.

But she was not restricted to her body or her mind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.