Bamboo

By Eliza Calvin

The bamboo smelled like smoke that night. It was the night the pig mother ate her litter. The piglets screamed like human babies, hoarse and shrill. The sow had not been underfed; perhaps she had just been bored.

Pragya had returned to the house gulping for air. Her mother and aunts were huddled around the dying flame of a candle, making momo for next day’s Ropain festival—a celebration of the planting season. The dumplings contained fleshy hunks of buffalo with minced cabbage or the creamy mash of potatoes. The women were whispering about the sow’s feast and how they would explain what had happened to the children the next day.

Her mother ran to the girl whose small hand was pressed against her chest, willing oxygen to fill the bubbles of her lungs.

“What did you see, Pragya?”her mother asked, the wrinkle between her eyebrows cavernous in its concern.

“Bhoot,”said her Pragya, between heaves, “ghost.”

 

Her mother was the only one who believed Pragya’s story. Her aunts and uncles and cousins and father, whom she called Buwa, laughed at her. She was twelve, after all, a silly child. She was not supposed to be out after dark, but her mother, whom she called Aama, talked her husband out of punishing the little girl.

“Whether or not you believe her, the girl suffered a fright. That’s punishment enough for going out in the dark,”said Aama.

 

The family grew rice on a paddy field about ten miles from Kathmandu. The paddy had been in the Parajuli family for five generations and provided a comfortable life. There was always more than enough food and even meat once a week. Sometimes they’d order bison from Kathmandu which would arrive early Friday mornings on the back of a dusty Jeep. Other times Buwa would call for a child—Pragya, or one of her cousins—to help him in the shed. The child would hold down the quivering, soft body of an unlucky chicken as Buwa sawed away at the neck. They’d grill the breasts and legs outside, sucking spongy marrow from the bones. The blood-spattered aprons of Buwa the butcher and his young assistant drying on the clothesline made for sinister picnics.

Pragya and her cousins attended the grammar school in the village and would be permitted to go to a prominent high school in Kathmandu, when the time came, if they could pass their exams. Not all of her friends were afforded such a privilege.

“Pragya is rich as a queen! And twice as mean!”her friends would mock.

Pragya had been the strong kind, the kind with a sense of humor, the kind to laugh and tease back. But she had become withdrawn and dull in the days and weeks following her encounter with the bhoot. She stopped raising her hand to offer an answer in maths, her best subject. She stopped playing covert games of tic-tac-toe with Sanjita and Alina when Mr. Kushal was writing on the chalkboard.

She stopped playing football with her schoolmates during lunch. She would sit in silence by the side of the pitch, in a patch of dry dirt, twirling bits of grass between her calloused fingers. If a stray ball landed nearby, she awarded it not even a glance. Her classmates prodded and yelled, “Pragya, kick it back!”

The children were not aware what had happened, just that there had been a sudden change in their friend. They would trade information about hushed grown-up conversations they’d overheard: the furtive glance of a mother searching for her child who unknown to her was spying…crouched behind an open window leading into the kitchen…his mother’s face lit only by candlelight as she says to her husband in a voice hushed and light, “Something has happened to the Parajuli girl…Pragya…Thank God for our normal boy.”

 

Pragya was to work the paddy field with her family when she was able. This had once been a great joy for Pragya. She would invent songs and poems to pass the time:

“Oh, bhat, oh, ropai! I can’t wait for dinner tonight!”

But Pragya’s encounter had occurred the night before Kharif began, the second planting season. Her family desperately needed the little girl’s help in sowing their great expanse of rice. But she would sit disinterested in the mud.

Pragya would dunk her head under the murky filth of the paddy for lengths as long as a minute. She loved the blanket of mud—dark, free, expecting nothing. An aunt or cousin would finally grab her by the collar or hair and pull her back to daylight. Pragya would lick the warm silt from her lips and gaze up at her rescuer who, with the exception of her Buwa, would be too concerned to scold.

If he caught her, Buwa would slap her, leaving the flush of a handprint in Pragya’s mask of mud.

She did not cry.

He would yell.

She would not whimper.

He would grab her arm—his lengthy, thin fingers fitting neatly around the small circumference of her bicep—and drag her back to the roadside where there was no shade to speak of. Pragya would either burn in the torrid sun or wrinkle like an ancient woman in the unremitting rains until the workday was over.

Aama would cry, “Hurting her like that won’t help her!”

“She’s a little liar and now she’s acting sanki—she’s lost her mind!”Buwa would reply.

 

The Kharif planting season meant the monsoons would roll in, their hulking hauls of gray water dousing the fields and surrounding mountains, drenching the parched paddies with the moisture they craved. Pragya remained useless. Her eyes possessed a new vacancy her Aama could only compare to the empty, fortified stalk of bamboo.

The bamboo frightened Pragya.

And it was everywhere.

Windy days troubled her. The gusts seemed to breathe and suck through the bamboo, spawning strange hisses and whistles that reminded the girl of her grandfather’s final exhale when he had died—the way his ossified chest seemed to collapse in on itself, never to inflate again, and creating a hollow, moaning noise that Pragya thought could not possibly be human.

 

The bamboo reminded Pragya of that night. No one had believed her story, except her Aama, and it made her feel alone. She worried that as time passed she’d stop believing herself too. So a few months after the incident, she wrote down her story on a piece of cardboard, wrapped it in the plastic sheathe from an old newspaper, and buried it by a tree in the yard when no one was around.

It read:

You snuck out for a walk at night like you did sometimes when you knew Buwa and your uncles were off getting drunk. You knew Aama and your aunts were talking in the kitchen. They assumed you were in bed and never checked. And the cousins with whom you shared a room never tattled. When you were a child, you liked these walks alone in the night. They were peaceful and helped clear your mind.

Usually you just walked down the hill in the backyard—the one that leads to a clearing and the shrine to Balarama and the bridge. This night, while you were standing on the bridge, you felt an urge to go into the bamboo forest. It was a very calm realization. It was like an even-tempered voice was telling you to go, that there was a reason, and it would be fine.

So you went, even though you were never supposed to do that, especially after dark. You knew in your head you’d be in trouble—big trouble—especially with Buwa, but your heart felt calm and it felt right to be walking in. You were not scared of getting lost or being attacked by wild animals or strange people.

You do not know for how long you walked—it could have been ten minutes or a hundred. Your eyes had adjusted to the dark, but suddenly it was completely black, like a bright light had been turned out. It startled you and you stopped walking. You could not see your hand stretched out in front of you. You could only make out the dim outlines of bamboo around you. A few seconds after the blackness, you heard a loud scream. It was not a person screaming, but you could not describe it. It was almost-human, almost-animal. Whatever it was, it sounded like it was in pain.

It grew louder and louder, coming closer and closer. You were frozen in place from the fear and would not know in which direction to run anyway.

Suddenly, you felt a hand. It grabbed your hand in its hand and started pulling. The hand seemed to be all bones and no flesh. It felt so cold that it hurt to touch. So cold it was burning.

The hand dragged you, quickly, so you were forced to run. You struggled to keep up with its pull. The scream followed you, closer and closer, and the thing pulled you, farther and farther.

Hours seemed to pass in that terrible darkness.

You finally reached the outskirts of the bamboo woods. The screaming ceased. The hand dropped yours and was gone.

The candle at the Balarama shrine had been unlit earlier. But when you returned, it had been lit again.

You knew it was a bhoot pulling you along. Or maybe a bhoot screaming. Or maybe they were spirits, like lakheys you read about in fairy tales.

Over time, you might not even believe your own experience. You may bury it so far away it seems like a dream…or like nothing at all.

But I promise you, it happened.

You might not have wanted it to happen, but it did.

 

Years passed. Pragya’s life seemed to occur to her as a series of photographs—she was always one step removed, floating above herself and looking down…

She was the little girl buried under the shallow, milky mud of the paddy: yelled at, scoffed at—or worse, pitied.

She was the lone figure trudging up the hill to school in the sandy morning light. She saw herself behind a gaggle of students—once her friends—her leather shoes creased where her toes bent from months of wear and hundreds of hilly climbs. The other children would run ahead, racing and singing. Pragya willed one weighty foot in front of the other.

She saw the little schoolhouse, New Rise Academy. Once: a sanctuary. Now: a wooden box perched on its bluff in such a precarious manner that Pragya imagined the softest touch could send it toppling, prompting an avalanche that would devastate the entire village.

Pragya saw herself leaning over her exams. Her mind was vacant as she grasped in desperation for the right English words.

C. Mira _________ the ___________ flowers on the way to her grandmother’s.

1. ate; dead
2. burned; eager
3. picked; beautiful

She saw her cheeks color as the exam went on. She didn’t know a single answer. Most of the test she left blank, unwilling to render a guess. She would not be able to go to high school in Kathmandu. She would not be able to go to high school at all.

Pragya saw herself in the paddy, her back becoming hunched during her formative years: bending, bending, bending. She saw her stooped body thinning the rice plants in an effort to prevent overcrowding—killing some baby sprouts to make room for the others to grow.

She saw the girls and boys from New Rise Academy, once her friends, trickle away from the village like the last drips of water from a spout.

She saw the disdain in her Buwa’s eyes, provoked by anything, but always directed at her. The nights he did not go drinking with his brothers, he would often spend fashioning switches from the husks of bamboo. He would whittle the tough, tan wood down to a desirable width and, after a couple of Gorkha beers, get to practicing his swing on a tree in the yard. Sometimes after Buwa had gone to bed, Pragya would go to the chuletro tree and drag a nubby fingernail down the perforated recesses of the scars left on the trunk.

She saw Buwa drop the switches in the family’s work basket, along with hoes, sickles, hats. The switch would not hesitate to leave its sting on her wrist or the back of her neck if Pragya paused for even a moment to catch her breath during the harvest. Buwa had become more of an overseer than a farmer.

Pragya had lost the desire to speak after her incident in the forest. No one seemed to trust her words anyway. She could not will back her conversation or good humor. She would laugh politely if someone told a joke, or find a small voice to breathe “thank you”or “no.”But a spirit inside her had died.

She would listen idly in the paddy fields to the chirpy noise of her Aama and aunts gossip. She concentrated on her work. Only Buwa seemed to mind.

“Bhoot got your tongue,”Buwa would say laughing. His bamboo switch would lay claim to her arms, back, chest, stomach, thighs. Each time she looked at her painful crimson welts, Pragya could hear the hissing swoosh of the switch as it made its mid-air journey. She could hear the crack of the instrument against her papery skin, like a foot on dead leaves.

 

One day the women were discussing an old friend of Pragya’s, Sanjita, who’d been accepted to a prestigious college in Delhi.

“She was always such a smart girl,”said an aunt.

“And so beautiful, so poised,”said another.

“Pragya, have you heard anything from her lately? You two were so close as children,”said Aama.

Pragya had not heard from Sanjita. The girl had left the village for high school without even a wave goodbye.

Pragya felt the sting from a deep-buried memory…Sanjita, her skin young and smooth, her boisterous curls tied up in two red ribbons…whispering, “When we’re old, we’ll go to high school together and get boyfriends. Then leave them when we go to college in India!”…the girls shrieking, their laughter like dice rattling inside a tin cup.

Pragya offered her mother a silent shrug.

Buwa had been dozing under the spare shade of a small tree, or so the women thought. But he’d seen the shrug. He came for Pragya, his lean limbs struggling with the weight of carrying the rest of him, evidence of too much whiskey the night before. He dragged his daughter to the roadside and yelled, “Lie down!”Aama followed behind the pair, a dull sickle still in hand. Her eyes were red but she said nothing.

“Lie down! Face down!”Buwa said. Pragya did. Buwa kicked her all along her small body until his feet were grisly, brown, and cracked, like the bison meat they had drying on their hot tin roof. Then he whipped with his bamboo switch her so severely she could not sit down for a week.

Later Aama dressed her daughter’s wounds by candlelight. She silently bound them in old cotton scraps. The women were never able to meet each other’s gaze.

 

Buwa seemed to be aging at a rapid pace. He was absent more and more from the paddy field, favoring his bed and some beer or whiskey over any sort of labor. This was fine news for Pragya during the day. But at dusk, when the work-day ended, Buwa expected his daughter to read to him. She was to invent specific voices for each character and use proper intonations fit to Buwa’s liking. She was lashed if she failed and the violence was more intense when Buwa was drunk.

The pair slowly made their way through the collective works of Charles Dickens. Pragya loved the books and would get lost in their worlds. She became Oliver in Oliver Twist and adopted a voice akin to her father’s, thinly veiled, for the role of evil Fagin.

She loved Dickens’dark sense of humor in A Tale of Two Cities. She glanced up at her Buwa’s face as she read, “The whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanizing and softening to behold in action.”But the irony seemed to float, like dust in the light, over her father’s head. He stared unblinking into the wall next to his bed.

Pragya’s favorite book was Great Expectations. Once she stumbled upon a particularly touching passage and could not help but shed a tear. She did not dare brush it away because then Buwa would notice and the punishment would surely be dire.

It read, “That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

 

Pragya was twenty when Aama told her that Buwa was dying.

“The doctor came,” the words breaching through Aama’s sobs, “and he says it is a matter of weeks. What will we do without your Buwa?”

Aama took Pragya in her arms for the first time in years. The bulging meat of her mother’s body pressed against her gaunt one repulsed Pragya. But she stroked her mother’s back until Aama’s tears had soaked through the shoulder of Pragya’s white shirt. The wet patch formed a translucent window through which a map of old scars was visible—the lines intersecting like roads.

“He loves you, Pragya,”said Aama. “Everything he did, he did out of love.”Aama dragged a finger across the bottom of her nose, collecting its stringy mucus. “He has loved these nights of reading. In fact, why don’t you stay here today, while we go to work, and read to him? He would love that.”She offered her daughter a weak smile, patted her cheek, and bustled out into the misty Nepalese rain.

 

Buwa was sleeping in his bed, but his eyes flapped open the instant Pragya rapped on his open door.

“Would you like me to read to you?”she said and he nodded once. His skin was jaundiced and smooth as a child’s. Even his eyes were a mucky yellow. The color reminded Pragya of dog urine.

She grabbed a book from his pile on the floor—Bleak House—and sat in her usual hard-backed chair, a few feet from her Buwa’s decaying body. She read, “It was one of those colorless days when everything looks heavy and harsh—”

“Pragya,”Buwa interrupted. He struggled to speak. “Water.”

His muscles had atrophied and he was unable to bring even a small cup to his lips. She poured some water into his mouth and returned to her chair. She did not pick up the book.

A storm had developed—the boom of its thunder the loudest noise Pragya had ever known.

A gust of wind came, suddenly, carrying with it a load of rain and forming a puddle on the floor beside the open window. Pragya went to the window, closed it, stooped with a blanket that she retrieved from under the bed so she could soak it up.

But she did not clean.

She had this eerie, familiar feeling. The feeling of hearing a childhood song after decades but remembering every word. The feeling of someone watching you from afar and without even looking, knowing they are. She felt the heft of the blanket in her hands. It was a scratchy, gray wool.

Her father lay next to her, looking straight ahead. He lacked the energy or muscle to even tilt his head slightly to the right.

Pragya felt an urge, then—a calm realization. The bulky blanket felt almost weightless, like another pair of hands was helping her to lift it. She felt a push against her back: two hands, more bone than flesh, and so cold they burned.

The blanket was over her Buwa’s face. He moaned, the small noise stifled by the heavy  knit.

Maybe hours passed with the blanket held tightly against her Buwa’s face. She watched the man’s chest fall and rise, fall and rise. It reminded her of a red balloon he’d brought her once from the city. The gift was a limp, rubber tube and smelled a bit like the inside of a book.

“Thank you,”she’d said, confused but eager to stow this curious city thing in the flower-print box where she kept her treasures—cracked buttons, pretty candy wrappers, Coca-Cola caps.

“No, Pragya. It’s a balloon. You blow it up. Look,”her father had said, laughing. He plucked it from her tiny hands and put his mouth to it. He breathed and it inflated. He breathed again and it grew a little more. It had seemed so miraculous, this little red balloon, starting out so small and her Buwa stretching it so effortlessly with swells of recycled air.

Now Buwa’s chest had stopped moving. He’d passed the threshold of death and she’d not even noticed, like the bud in the ground that is green one day and a flower the next. She felt regretful she’d missed the moment he’d left. She’d been lost in a day dream.

Pragya tucked the blanket back under the bed and returned to her chair. She licked a calloused finger and flipped to a page near the end of Bleak House. She read aloud— to the rain, to the wind, to the paddy field and the seedlings struggling to push through their dirt roof…

“I have never known the wind to be in the east for a single moment since the day when he took me to the porch to read the name. I remarked to him once that the wind seemed never in the east now, and he said, no, truly; it had finally departed from that quarter on that very day.”

 

Eliza Calvin recently graduated from University of Massachusetts Lowell with a degree in English. She currently resides in Lexington, Massachusetts.