Jessica Powers
The valley of Kathmandu was no stranger to Americans, and it was almost a relief to find myself unremarkable in such a foreign land. Every few weeks a horde of windowless buses would appear with fresh visitors wearing denim, and flower crowns, and a strange sort of Bowie-esque ferocity. Most seemed in no hurry, despite the many hillside temples, to leave the mystic charms and comforts of the city in search of enlightenment.
Sabir, my Newari host, affectionately called them pilgrims. Amidst their quests for self-actualization or draft evasion the pilgrims spent a lot of time congregating around market stalls and showing off their hallucinogen-induced smiles. Some did venture into the mountains in tribes and returned bathed in holy water and clarity and conviction. I hated those pilgrims. They knew what they had come to find.
As I was exempt from the draft, I had spent the past seven years living with my parents and working as a doctor for the municipal hospital. Joining the Red Cross was a decision that had been building for the last seven years and my parents were amused to discover I would be stationed in the “Mecca of hippiedom”. I think they thought it would help me focus on something other than Cassidy. Maybe they thought I’d take up Tibetan Buddhism like the rest of the pilgrims, start walking around barefoot, and shave my head. Kathmandu was just a word to me then, and all that mattered was that I wouldn’t be at home.
Sabir was a devout man who lived in a house with a four-foot doorway. A dyed purple cloth hung over it in lieu of an actual door. I asked him about this the day I arrived in Nepal.
“The low doorway keeps ghosts from coming in,” he told me in surprisingly good English. “Ghosts can’t lean forward to duck beneath it. They will hit their heads instead and decide to leave me alone.”
“What about short ghosts?” I asked him, chuckling. As a doctor and an atheist I took a great deal of pride in my skepticism.
“If a ghost that short gets in I will fight it,” said Sabir, rising to his impressive stature of perhaps four and half feet.
“As much as I’d like to see you fight a ghost, there aren’t too many people under four feet tall,” I said, setting down my knapsack and supply bag.
“Ah, my friend,” he said gently, “but you are forgetting the children.”
Coming to Nepal had done what I suppose I’d intended: it had made me forget, just for a moment. A surge of guilt overwhelmed me and I sunk into the woven cot where I would sleep.
“Oh.” I buried my face in my hands.
Sabir seemed very concerned by this. He kept offering me tea and saying, “I have not meant to offend you.” I took the tea because it was hot, and reassured him he’d done nothing wrong.
“How tall did you say the door was?” I managed to ask.
“One and a quarter meters.”
I did the math in my head and nodded gravely. And, even though I had laughed at the superstition only moments before, I found myself turning to Sabir, a stranger, with desperation. “One and a quarter meters. That’s four feet.” The tea cup rattled in my hand. “My daughter, Cassidy, was four feet and two inches.”
We both glanced to the purple hanging on the door.
“Could we . . . ?”
“Certainly, my friend.”
“Not that I . . . you know.”
“Of course not.”
“Just in case.”
“I understand.”
That night, we borrowed a saw from Sabir’s neighbors and cut three inches out of the doorway.
Sabir pretended not to see me swiping at my eyes. I kept glancing to the doorway, trying to convince myself I was still a man of science and medicine and facts.
“If Buddhists believe in reincarnation,” I said later, “How can you be afraid of ghosts?”
Sabir looked at me as if I were a child demanding why the sky is blue.
“Why not both?”
The next morning a loud banging resounded from our neighbor’s house. It was the same neighbor from whom Sabir had borrowed the saw, and I watched him glance to it as he put away the dishes. Two boys were fighting on the porch and had knocked over the flimsy banister in their carelessness.
“Rabten and Michewa,” said Sabir, staring intently at the teacup in his hand. “Trouble makers, but they mean well.” A slender woman appeared to scold them. She was not classically beautiful, but there was something about the way Sabir looked at her that made our house seem stuffy and overly perfumed. For the first time since arriving I felt like an intruder.
“Their mother, Ditya.” Sabir told me. “Her name means answerer of prayers.” I glanced between Sabir and the woman on the porch. Her sons, perhaps aged ten and twelve, were walking together in the street, presumably to school.
“I can finish the dishes if you’d like to return her saw,” I said carefully. “I’m sure she could use it now.”
“Yes, yes,” said Sabir. He set down the teacup with a sharp clank.
“She could probably use some help fixing the bannister, too.” I stood and plucked the dish towel from his hands.
“Of course,” Sabir said, like I’d told him a great secret. We traded places at the sink.
Pulling on his shoes, Sabir collected the borrowed saw and straightened. He paused. Facing the doorway and not me he said, “It was an arranged marriage. Ditya and her husband.”
I plunged my hands back into the basin.
Sabir said, “Her husband is from the South. He speaks a different dialect than us. They have to talk in English to each other, but Ditya’s isn’t very good.”
I told him, “I’m sure she’d appreciate your help.”
Sabir hefted the saw once more and strode away. I heard him call to Ditya in Newari. She came back outside and down the steps to greet him.
I held the teacup Sabir had been washing up to the light. There were spiderwebs in the ceramic. Cracks so small I could barely see them. Absolutely miniscule.
Because of the influx of American tourists, Sabir had quit his old job selling hats and now led tours into the mountains. On weekdays he went to the Bishnu shrine of Budhanilkantha. He left every weekend on an overnight trip to the shrine of Namobuddha. The site was holy because it was the place where a prince once came across a starving lioness and her cubs, and cut off a piece of his own flesh so they might eat it and live. The prince became a Buddha for this act of generosity.
When Sabir invited me to go with him to the shrines I always declined. Despite the three inches of missing wood in his doorway, I remained firm in my position: I had not come here for anything other than a job. I did not believe in ghosts or gods or pilgrimages. The thought of those holy places filled me with terror. Pilgrims returned from those shrines claiming to have felt the presence of Vishnu, to have seen the future, and to know beyond death. I had long since decided not to ask these questions; the answers would never be enough.
There were vagrant children bathing in one of the dirty city canals and I kept my eyes down as I walked past. The city stank of black pepper and standing water and marijuana. I stepped into the phone booth. The dial turned and clicked.
“Hello, Martha Hughes speaking,” said the red telephone.
“Hey mom, it’s me,” I said into the receiver. I told her about my work, and about Sabir, aware that a few of the vagrant children had taken notice of me and were eyeing the phone booth with interest.
“We went through some of her things before we left for the summer cabin,” mom said. “I hope you don’t mind. Your dad and I felt it was time.”
“Right,” I swallowed roughly, “Yeah, that’s okay.”
“We kept everything important,” mom said consolingly. I hated this feeling. All of my parents’ pity had gone to Cassidy when she was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis, and with her gone it seemed to have transferred back onto me.
“The finger paintings?” I asked.
“All here.” A pause. “But we couldn’t find her stuffed horse anywhere.”
“It’s with her,” I swallowed thickly.
“Right, how silly of me to forget.”
“You’ve had other things on your mind.”
My mom had raised Cassidy as much as I had. When I was at the hospital working my parents were at the hospital with her. Cassidy liked my own mom best, and I was too grateful for jealousy. But now, in the aftermath, a sparking guilt seemed to sit with me like a firecracker that hadn’t gone off.
When my daughter was born I’d thought: here it is. Here is my chance to find the inexplicable spectacle of life I had only read of, and did not deem real. To feel love beyond description, or sorrow beyond compare. What I got was the wet rasp of a child’s lungs and her feeble hands shaking in my own. What I got was everything, and then everything was gone. And I was left, my same old skeptic self, aged and longing for the ember of belief she had given me to come back.
“I haven’t thrown anything away yet,” said my mom, “Just sorted it into piles. It’s all waiting back at the house until Fall. You can go through them when you visit for Thanksgiving.”
“Okay.”
“I only bring it up because, well, your father and I figured you might want to ask Mary if she wants anything.”
Mary did not want anything. Mary had not wanted Cassidy at all. I’ll carry the baby to term, but not after, she’d told me. I can live with the shame, but I can’t live with the child. It can be put up for adoption.
And I’d said, I’ll take her.
“You know I haven’t seen Mary in seven years,” I told my mom. A lie. I’d spotted her in the back of the funeral wearing a red scarf and a wedding ring. She looked considerably older, and she was alone. She had not joined the line to add dirt to Cassidy’s grave, but stood fixed and somber, like those statues of the Virgin in Catholic churches. She left without speaking to me, and I pretended not to have seen.
“I just think it might be helpful to . . . reconnect with some friends from your past,” said my mom. “Please, Lewis.”
“Yeah okay,” I said, “I’ll give Mary a call.”
My mom sighed in relief. “Thank you.” She quickly imparted her love on me and ended the call. Steeling myself, I picked up the phone again and dialed “O” for operator. Why should it matter to me if Mary did, in fact, want a keepsake of Cassidy’s? But, just as a voice coughed on the other end, a ball smacked the outside of the phone booth with a mighty clang. The ball lay unclaimed outside the phone booth. The vagrant children were all staring. They wanted me to play with them.
“Operator present,” said the red telephone. “Where can I connect you to?”
Under the weight of the children’s stares my body seemed to crumble within itself, as if I were made of sand. This wasn’t a sign. It wasn’t. But I hung up the phone. Walked past the vagrant children with downcast eyes and a hunched posture. Left the ball in the dirt.
Once home, I shoved my way under the four-foot-three doorway, pacing with pent up energy. A noise sounded at the door, and for a second I thought Sabir had returned from Namobuddha a day early. But it was only the purple cloth over the door, rustling, like a young spirit was passing through.
The practical thing was to call Mary in the morning and get rid of the toys. Forget this nonsense and go home to Vermont. But my eyes were drawn to the purple cloth, which seemed to whisper: What if?
Ditya had decided to paint the new banister yellow.
Sabir said, “She loves that color,” and I knew exactly what he meant. We had taken to sitting in the kitchen after dinner with the windows flung open. Me, watching the doorway. Him, watching her.
Then I said, “Perhaps I could meet her.”
Sabir tore his eyes from the window to look at me. “Her English is really quite poor.”
“Then you can translate for me.”
The walk to Ditya’s seemed to take a lifetime. I felt every crunch of sand beneath my shoes, the heat pressing down on me like ocean waves.
“Hello,” I said to Ditya, who had noticed us and paused her painting. “My name is Lewis, I’m staying with Sabir.” Sabir translated while I roughly explained my job with the Red Cross.
“Wonderful, wonderful,” she said. She kept glancing behind, and eventually beckoned us to follow her.
“She says her husband is out back tending the cattle,” Sabir translated. “She’s invited us in for tea.” Inside, there was only one large room, with a few tapestries hung to separate the woven beds. We took our seats around a low dining table. Through the window I could see the gray cattle grazing, their horns forming a curved U.
We spoke for a short while. Ditya kept going in and out to bring us tea, or show me one of her ceramic paintings. Sabir had to translate almost everything she said.
When Ditya asked us to stay for dinner Sabir blurted, “Where are Rabten and Michewa?”
“My boys have dinner with Batsa,” she said in English, gesturing to the house across the street.
“Will they be coming home soon?”
“No,” Ditya said. There was a finality to it that I didn’t understand. Sabir deflated in his seat and did not mention her sons’ names again.
After that they spoke in Newari. I sipped my tea and let the language wash over me. The longer Sabir looked at Ditya the more beautiful she became to me, until I was forced to look away.
Some time passed before Ditya made a sharp noise and rose abruptly to clear the plates. She and Sabir spoke more quickly after that, and the language became percussive, like the Madal drums I heard in the marketplace.
“Kr̥payā,” said Sabir.
Ditya’s eyes were shiny and drawn in by tight creases. She still looked beautiful, but it was the sort of beauty meant for thunderstorms and wrathful goddesses. I remembered what her name meant: answerer of prayers.
“Kr̥payā,” Sabir said again. Please.
“I too tired for talking,” said Ditya, clearly trying to bring me back into the conversation. “No time left.” She’d raised her voice and a moment later her husband came in from outside. We left soon after.
When we returned to Sabir’s home, ducking beneath the four-foot-three doorway, his mouth was set in a grim line. “Lewis,” he said into the darkness of the room.
We’d left only a single lamp on and everything glowed pale red.
“I’m listening.”
“I waited too long,” said Sabir. “The prophets are liars. It really can be too late.”
The next time Sabir mentioned Namobuddha, I told him I was ready to see it.
Upon our arrival, bodies pressed against me and the smell of cannabis clung to my coat. The mountain winds were unforgiving, even in summer. The shrine of Namobuddha sat on the cusp of one mountain, but framed by the face of another.
The tour group dispersed to explore and, as I looked at the colorful flags hung in celebration, and the masses of pilgrims kneeling to praise him, I found myself hating the Buddha whose altar of sacrifice we had come to.
“You look angry,” said Sabir.
“I think I am angry,” I admitted. It felt dirty to lie to him. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
Sabir crossed his arms and fixed his attention on me. His forehead furrowed with irritation. “Why not go home then? Why drag this out if you don’t want to believe?” As if it were that simple to let go.
“This isn’t something I can just choose to walk away from,” I said. When I took Cassidy in I had imagined myself as the Buddha in the legend: some benevolent saint, some hero. Instead I found myself like the lioness he had saved, helpless to protect my own cub as the sickness starved her tiny body.
Sabir gave a weary sigh. “Lewis,” he said, “I’ve seen how angry you are. I know. But blaming yourself or some Buddha won’t help.”
Something boiled over inside of me.
“Right, so I’ll just walk away. Pretend that it never happened. Move on like I’m some teenager going through a break-up. It’s easy for you to say. You never had any children to lose!”
Spittle flew from my mouth and landed on Sabir’s forehead. He wiped it off without breaking eye contact. A few of the pilgrims were staring at us.
Very quietly, Sabir spoke. “I never had children to lose?” He gave a hollow laugh. “I would have thought you’d guessed by now that that isn’t true.” Sabir turned to look at the shrine, a deep shame in the crease of his mouth.
“Oh,” I said eloquently.
He continued looking at the Buddha.
“Which one?” I asked.
“Rabten.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“But maybe?”
“Maybe.”
I shuffled my feet.
“There’s something tangible,” I said, “About blaming myself. About being angry. Something to hold onto.”
“It was only once,” he said. “Ditya and me. He could be mine. It doesn’t matter now.”
We stared at the shrine for a long moment.
“Faith is . . . not easy,” he said eventually. “But I still believe it’s worthwhile.”
“I guess I thought I would feel something different,” I told him, “Something more. But I haven’t.”
As a doctor, I had believed that medicine would not fail my Cassidy, and taken the apparent lack of godly intervention as a sign that none existed. But I had never thought to ask.
A gust of wind howled over the spine of the mountain and I tried to feel whatever Sabir did, but all I felt was cold.
“I think you and your anger have reached an impasse, Lewis, that you are stuck. In Buddhism we believe in reincarnation,” he said. “Your spirit leaves one life and enters another. But there is a place in between, a gap, called the Bardo. I think you are in the Bardo now, trapped between one life and the next.”
“How do I get out of the Bardo?” I asked him, trying to hide my sniffling.
Sabir’s hand clasped the crook of my neck and shoulder like a gauntlet.
“I wish I knew.”
That night, I snuck away from Sabir and our campsite. I don’t know what I expected. The idea of the Bardo, and that I was stuck with no way out, had tossed around my head all evening. Maybe I just needed a walk to clear my thoughts. Yes, that was all. I tilted my chin and felt the wind kiss my throat.
Just then, a pitfall in the grass sent a shock through my body and yanked me to the ground. Achingly, I pulled myself to my knees and realized I had tumbled into a sort of cove. A small pool of velvet black water lay before me. Flecks of silver danced across it from the stars. If there was ever a place I could call holy, this would be it.
The air was weighty here, like a presence or a held breath. Like something was waiting. Everything was still. I remained on my knees.
My ears strained for a sound. Anything at all. I jostled at the slightest whisper of wind, jumped at a cricket’s chirp. It had to be here. This had to be what all those pilgrims had found. Because of course I wanted it, too. It was ridiculous that I had pretended to give up on anything outside of sharp reality. Of course I still expected the same thing we all expect: a reason, a sign, a voice of reassurance. Some proof that this is not all there is to have.
So I knelt by the water’s edge as the stars flickered in the black depths of the pool. I knelt and listened to the pant of my own breath, the rapid beating of my own heart. And when the sun rose over my holy shrine, I dropped my head to my knees and held it between my hands.
“Have you been out here all night, Lewis?” A tender hand found the crease of my neck and coaxed me out — Sabir. Without my consent, my body began to convulse and I let out a series of guttural sobs. I shoved Sabir away and stood, suddenly furious.
“I did everything right,” I shouted, “I played the game, I tried it — I believed!” I ripped up a patch of grass and threw it into the black pool, desecrating it. “I waited all night for your precious Buddha or enlightenment or whatever, and nothing! No sign, no voice from the heavens, no answer, no proof!” I yanked up another fistful of grass.
Sabir regarded me warily. “So you’re telling me that you came all the way to Nepal, and to Namobuddha for no reason? That you sat here all night on a whim? That you heard nothing?” He approached me with a tender sadness. “You want to know that there is something more out there, beyond the Bardo. Isn’t the fact that you are even sitting here proof enough? Why would you have come here if you didn’t already believe?”
I released the fistful of grass and it scattered in the wind. “I don’t know,” I said. My body tingled with cold. Maybe I did believe. Maybe wanting would be enough.
“There is no shame in faith, Lewis. Would you rather believe in nothing?”
Seven years ago I had loved the idea of believing in nothing. I had strutted around like an exoskeleton, weightless of things like anger or love or grief. I was too clever for faith, too liberal for religion, too brilliant for rules. The nothingness seeped into my steps and into my fingers. It spewed from my mouth like bile. There was nothingness in the mechanical way I wrote in lab booklets, in the tasteless meals I ate alone in my dorm, in the passionless slap of skin between Mary and I, as if we were making the love of two unnamed strangers. When people looked into my eyes they saw a gaping black wound for a pupil and false blue irises like technicolor cartoons. I had deluded myself into thinking that my hollow life was filled by absence, until seven years ago — when I finally had something to lose.
Now, in the wake of my loss, I was clinging to the fragments of absence, an utter fool for wanting to go back.
“It was empty,” I said, “to believe in nothing.”
Sabir nodded. “Then there is your answer.”
We stood several feet apart and, though I wanted to embrace him, I held myself back. It seemed important to let him be alone in that moment — two solitary figures, two fathers, and the great expanse of the mountainside. Then the clouds shifted and a dawning light poured down from above.
The shadows Sabir and I cast were short and distorted, as though we were being trailed by the silhouettes of two children. A gust of wind crested over us. Maybe it really was just wind. Maybe it was the spirit of my daughter, or the voice of some Buddha. I gave a wet laugh.
Why not both?
JESSICA POWERS is a student at Tulane University, where she studies English, French, and Anthropology. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. More of her work can be found at jessicapowerswrites.com.