Khadga’s son won’t be back until next week and I do not know if I will last that long. I feel like Bhimsen Thapa must have felt in his cell, his throat slit open, sputtering blood for nine days. I heard his anguish ring out in the hallway when they told him that his wife was to be paraded naked through the city’s streets. There were factions of the guards who thought he deserved it for forcing Rani Rajeshwari and the kings’ women into sati. But his wife, you asked, did she? Wasn’t she a pawn for her husband’s mistakes? Youth, my son, has all the right answers. Nobody deserves such cruelty. With age, our vision gets blurry and the answers become unclear.[break]
Khadga sent a letter saying you asked him questions and he had had to tell you some things. I bear no ill will toward him and you must not either. He has been like a brother to me, a better person than I could ever be. I was not surprised to find your letter in the bag of jadibuti. In fact, I am relieved that you are asking these questions of me.
The waters of the Bishnumati are seeping in from under my door and if the river doesn’t take me first, it will be the cough. I was a warrior once and I know when I am fighting a losing battle. The cough has become bigger than me, has sapped all my strength and made blood patterns on my mud walls that read like a message from the gods. The cough rattles my brain and before I can reach for the stained shirt, it spurts blood on the page (forgive the smudges, I have tried my best to wipe them away) and in the water that is rising below my cot. The spurt spirals and diffuses into strands, a lovely swirl, that reminds me of your mother’s hair, how it curled, the end of her plait rising even after she had tied it with string. Every time I left for battle, she cried, believing that I would not return, and I almost did not the last time. I thought I would die in Tansen and I would have if it had not been for Khadga. Sometimes, I wish he had abandoned me, and my life would have seen fewer sins had I died then.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
The water is rising, rising, and I know that you, my son, hate me. You asked me if this age was evil, or was it I? I do not have an answer, except that there is evil. There is also good. I did not want to bring you up with illusions and told you that we are born without choices. If I could answer that question again, I would say there are times we have choices. But these choices are still illusionary and lead to the same end. I could jump into the river, letting the water course into my body to drown out these coughs, or let the coughing take over the beating of my heart. They are all means to the same end.
The list of my sins is a long one, and I myself would find it difficult to reconcile with a father like me. But you must understand that I did not have a choice. If it had been only my life, I would perhaps have believed in choices. But to have you or your mother suffer because of my inability to perform my duties was no choice to me. It was the truth of my existence. I have no answers for my conscience except that there was nothing I could do. The Gods know that I am not guilty, that I did not want to be a part of the things I was ordered to be a part of. I will not deny that I did what I did but had I had any choice in those matters, the the Gods know that I would not have done them.
Why then did I? How could I do them? The mind is a complicated thing and sometimes to go on living is to rationalize one’s existence, to seek that little crack through which to seep out from the living for a little while. The reasons we come up with may not sound reasonable at other times. And you, my son, like me, live in a time that another cannot understand.
Would I have done those things had I had a choice? I believe not. I would not have lit the fire that singed the hair of the Brahmin physician, ate away the skin of his face until his brain and his jaws were exposed. I would not have, and when I did, I said a prayer for him, for his soul, for my soul, for the souls of all those watching, and for you, your sons and the souls of the sons of your sons. The physician was a Brahmin and was not to be harmed, but we burnt his face and watched him die.
The Gods have sent the rain and the waters to take me away.
I would not have slit the body of the Newar under-physician and held his beating heart in my hand before the king if I had had a choice. But even as I stood stilled by the weakening beat as the screams of the Newar skittered and faded into corridors, I felt the royal horror and knew the king had no choice, either. He was a slave, too, to his circumstances, like me.
Fear is also a curious thing. Fear of death. Fear of drowning. Fear of the ends of all things. It makes mutes of us all. We were told to dismember Bhimsen Thapa’s body and throw the pieces to the vultures by the banks of the Bishnumati, and now Bishnumati is flooding into my room, layering itself like skin around my ankles.
The water is rising, rising, and I don’t have the answers to your many questions. The foxes howl louder across the Bishnumati and I know they are calling for me. The water is coming for me. The cough is winding into the pockets of my body, leaking through my pores, emptying out my bones and making spaces.
And something stays me on my cot, does not allow me to cleanse myself in the holy waters (forgive the smudges, I tried to wipe them away but my hands shiver so from the cold). I am afraid that you will not be able to read this and I cannot write for too long. That you may not even get this one. This must be kept from those who may get you and I want you to get this. But the water will get me first, drown out my voice, wipe away my words and soften the paper till it shreds itself into submission. I must put this in the fishnet and if the river doesn’t take away the hut, Khadga will give this to you. The water is almost to my waist. Even the flies around the rotting bananas have taken leave.
The writer has recently graduated from University of Massachusetts-Amherst and lives in France.
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