After 13 years

On Wednesday morning, when Kapanadidi arrived, she didn’t walk into the house calling out for my mother, which she does like a ritual every day. She just stood on the veranda, leaning against the window. I think I’ll probably never forget the way Kalpanadidi looked that morning. She wore an aquamarine woolen kurta, and an earth coloured shawl, her hair held in a pigtail and her cheeks blushing from the walk.

“I went to see my sister, yesterday.”

My mother and I had been admiring the flowers when she arrived. We stopped and looked at her when she made the announcement.

“Your sister?” my mother inquired.

“My step-sister. I found her in Panchkhal.”

“I think you’ve mentioned her before. But didn’t you say she was lost?” my mother asked.

“I found her. Someone from the village told me they seen her in Panchkhal, so I went looking for her yesterday,” she was still leaning against the window.

Thirteen years had passed, when Kalpanadidi decided to finally jump on the first bus to Panchkhal to find her missing step-sister. The bus journey didn’t take as long as did the search.

“It was hours before I found the right village,” said Kalpanadidi later, as she sat in the veranda with a bowl of potatoes and peeler in her hand. She finished one with full concentration before turning to another.

Some two hours were spent going from door-to-door, asking people if they knew where Saraswati lived. Some gave her sketchy directions. Some told her there were many Saraswatis in the village. An old man told her to sit down on the pirka for two minutes and talk to him and he would help her find Saraswati. But it was not the time to sit down. So, sketchy directions were issued once more.

“Then I met his seven year old boy, who said his mother was called Saraswati, which filled me with hope” now she was slicing cauliflowers, making them apper like white bonsai all piled up in the bowl. “The mother had gone into the forest to gather fodder.”

I had put down Memories of my Melancholic Whores now, shutting Delgadina out of my mind for Kalpanadidi’s story.

“I felt strange waiting for her to show up,” she continued. “I wondered if Saraswati would recognize me- thirteen years is a long time.”

Saraswati was thirteen when she disappeared. She had been living in her village in Dolakha, with her father and step-mother. Kalpanadidi had been married for a few years and had moved to Kathmandu. The family later discovered that Saraswati’s biological mother had arranged a wedding for her and had sent the uncle to get her out of Dolakha secretly. The family made no further efforts to find her when they found out a wedding had been planned. And Saraswati never came home again.

“When I was little, I used to carry her on my back,” Kalpanadidi said, as she mopped the floor, never looking up once at me, as I followed her everywhere in the house that day.

“Sometimes, I climbed trees with Saraswati on my back, while people shouted me,” she smiled.

“I would carry her to wherever my step-mother was working, so that bahini could be fed.” When the step-mother eloped, Kalpanadidi became Saraswati’s foster parent.

Kalpanadidi had moved to Kathmandu and just become a mother when she received the message from her village saying her kid sister had disappeared. But that day, in Panchkhal, sitting on the pavement of a mud-plastered brick house with a corrugated tin roof, Kalpanadidi wondered if the Saraswati she was waiting for would really be her sister.

After a good 30 minutes, which felt much longer, she saw Saraswati walk toward her.

“She came toward me with an unchanged pace, as though she had been expecting me,” Kalpanadidi was now doing the dishes. “The girl hasn’t changed much- only more fat everywhere now. And how much she resembles me!”

Her face turned toward the faucet, I could only hear her voice now.

“Her face was soaked in tears by the time she came close to me.”

Saraswati put her doko down and fell into Kalpana’s arms, summoning an audience from the neighbourhood. Her hands were coarse and her heels cracked with dark lines that promised a permanency. Her hair was still jet black and longer than it had ever been.

“The first thing I told her was that her uncle had died,” Kalpanadidi continued. “I told her he was crushed by a boulder during a mudslide. And she said he must have died of the sin of giving me away to an old man at 13.”

“Saraswati had asked aama why they were setting up the marriage without telling Father and all she was told was it was Aama’s duty as a mother and Saraswati’s destiny.”

The two sat in the sun, talking about everyone in the village. Saraswati flaunted her sister to her neighbours, “Mero didi, from Kathmandu!”

Saraswati fixed a lunch of boiled Wai Wai and a fried egg for her sister. But the sister had no appetite.

“Her eldest is seven, then a four year old boy and a two year old girl,” explained Kalpanadidi. “They only started at me the whole time and the eldest once asked Saraswati why she was crying.

When Kalpana got on the bus to Kathmandu her temples throbbed. Saraswati rang her five times while she was still on the bus.

 “Sapana jastai, like a dream,was what she kept repeating to me,” Kalpanadidi turned toward me and wiped her hands across the apron. “My sister wouldn’t stop crying for a single minute. I wonder where she found all those tears.”

Every chore she ran around the house that day became an interlude to the story I was sewing in my head like a patchwork quilt. I had met a different Kalpanadidi that day. As she stood leaning by the window in the verandah, in the soft December morning sun, her cheeks starting to blush with the heat, talking about her sister, it occurred to me that the unmistakable moisture in her eyes that morning-which lasted all day- made her so different from every other morning I’d seen her.