self off a ledge into the pyre. Just as the women used to do when their husbands died, before the British made them cool it. It’s becoming popular again. Strange. A 16-year-old widow just committed sati in India. She dressed in ceremonial robes, covered herself in ashes, walked through the streets chanting and ritualistically gave herself to the fire’s consummation. Did I mention the lama who let his rabid dog go karmically on its frothing way to bite seven children? Magic land, scary land, ShangriLa, bacteria. Goiters and albinos, that’s what their weak genes produce frequently. There is a folk tale about a woman who came to the capital and was very poor. She slept the night in a temple and put her only crust of bread under her head. A demon came and admired her goiters. He took them from her neck and placed them on his own. He left gold in place of the crust of bread. In the morning she was joyful to find herself free of the ugly goiters and rich as well. She went home to her village and told her story. Another woman with three goiters went to the same temple in hopes this would happen to her. Instead, the demon had become enraged with them. So he gave this woman two more, and took her crust of bread. She awoke to have the burden of five goiters and no food! It’s the lack of iodine here, no shellfish, no iodized salt. I am so pleased the folks around these parts didn’t take to the Christian missionaries. It’s more my style. Even in the darkest regions of my imagination, I am not a Christian, for I have been put to the test. What with death fresh in my life, no, it truly does not exist in me. I would prostrate myself to the rising sun at any time without shame. But being a little shy, I proportion my signal to my surroundings. My Son’s Death In July of 1980, my little son died, and the day before he looked just like a shriveled old man. I guess that’s what they call “the death mask,” all darkened around the eyes, hairless, toothless, temples sunken in, almost peaceful. Totally relaxed, he was a beauty. His balls almost as big as his little thighs. Before the birth, I wandered between filthy doctors’ offices more confused each time, with cross opinions. Some said it ws too small, some said big, all were rough, even wicked. Finally it was settled for me when I began to bleed, and we went off to the hospital which smelled like a toilet. Nurses in dirty white saris, dirty Kotexes in the squatter cans, they informed me they would remove him by Caesarean style. I helplessly was carried in a plastic sling from one building to another, the hot monsoon sun staring at me, and all the faces, where they curled me up in the fetal position and shot me up. I had to be awake because I wasn’t breathing easily. Even before I had told Tommy I was pregnant, I was terrified of surgery here. Still I’ve got to hand it to the female doctor whose knife I went under, a young Nepali. I could see, talk, move, all while my body was opened up. Only a little curtain separated my belly from my sight. I watched her work over me, and she, looking over her aqua mask, Oriental eyes penetrating mine, said, “Do not expect your baby to be alive... ” You can guess at the joy shared by all in attendance, at the sound of his feeble cry! I didn’t know how close to dying I was myself at the time. I felt calm, kept a civil tongue, talked, watched the We climbed steep paths in the hills, where Tommy began to dig his grave with an umbrella. It broke and he tossed it away and used his hands, weeping. We laid the little carcass in the hole and said our farewells. clock. To my left a masked female held my hand and sent charges of kindness through her touch. Love kindles life. I felt loved in that operating theater.... The mosquitoes attacked me afterward. Tommy had to fan me continually. When I was in delirium, I pulled the transfusion of blood from the bottle. Tommy nipped the tube before air could enter. The room was hot and stuffy, holes in the screen stuffed with dirty cotton. They never cleaned the blood up for over twelve hours. It fed the insects. Tommy searched the hospital for a mosquito net. I woke up in it and thought I had surely died. He literally saved my life over and over. I was left unattended, as is the custom here. Relatives watch the sick person. They didn’t let me hold my baby for four days. I think he was starving. When I got him on the fourth day, I ran away with him. They handed him to me in a lavendar, piss-damp quilt. An oversized stained shirt hung off his teency body. A flea was on it. No diaper, cord tied with a shoe string. Looked just like his father. Now I realize I was crazy then; a mother cannot be parted that long from her newborn. I hobbled to a taxi with Tommy and the baby. We saw the baby begin to fade the late afternoon of his sixth day. The rains began and I saw a rainbow, but it held little hope. Tommy ran for a doctor and a taxi. We slipped away in the taxi wildly driving and honking to the hospital. They behaved caustically with no equipment, bumping into each other. They couldn’t find a small enough needle or oxygen mask to fit his little face. He was purple. I was bleeding down my legs and my nose ran. I administered mouth-to-mouth until they threw my shawl over his face. We then got another taxi. I carried him as if he were alive to my breast and told the driver to take us to Pashupati, the oldest Shiva temple in the world. It was raining too hard to burn his body. We climbed steep paths in the hills, where Tommy began to dig his grave with an umbrella. It broke and he tossed it away and used his hands, weeping. We laid the little carcass in the hole and said our farewells. There was mica in the sandy soil and we shone from it. I had it in my teeth for hours. We walked back across the holy Bagmati River, stopped for hot sweetened buffalo milk, and went home empty. Street Theater The farmer next door is throwing a temper tantrum. He is screaming in a dramatic crying sound they make. It’s always a treat for me to watch. They really get into a passion, like we have not often witnessed in our own culture. Definitely the very best theater I have ever seen has been out of doors here in Pashupati. I saw a sadhu, calling Rama under the sun in the back- drop of a pipal tree, the sacred tree that Buddha became enlightened under. He ranted and raved and whipped his strips of colored cloth around like a butterfly. He beat his breast and wept. He showed the bottom of his foot to a leper. The leper was young — an intelligent English- speaking wanderer, a holy man, too — but the leper had taken the chillum pipe without changing the cloth called a sofie. That is the law of lepers. They must use their separate utensils for anything to do with contact, or hygiene. He was guilty, and the elder sadhu, the healthy one, threatened the leper with the wrath of Rama. The leper sang his way back into the heart of the sadhu. It was somewhat like an opera. We sat stunned, and took it all in. Magic land with traffic jams, the clash of the old world and the new, is Oriental in pitch, off-key to a Western ear. The Vanishing World Did I tell you about the billy goat that hangs around the downtown bus stop? His face is blackened; he’s an exhaust junkie! He waits around for a nice black exhaust pipe to stick his Drawing by Henk Pander Clinton St. Quarterly 45
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