A RELATIONSHIP

 Time itself becomes lost in the mists: that’s what winter is like. Gyancha looks from tired eyes-it’s that woman again. Everyone calls her ‘crazy kanchhi,’ but he knows her as Ganga, and he recognizes her from the glass dot on her forehead and her dirty, tangled hair.

 Once one morning he had caught hold of her by her hair and said, ‘Ganga, Ganga, the sun is on the temple roofs, and you’re not up yet!’ Ganga had slept on, as cold as a stone. Gyancha had tried to rouse her by pulling her ear and pinching her cheek, but still she’d lain there, and so he’d been angry. ‘Hey Kanchhi, you crazy mule, get up! Your husband’s here!’

‘You’re mad, Gyancha,’ Ganga had told him. ‘Leave me alone. I haven’t slept all night, and now you come bothering me so early in the morning, you bastard!’

 Bastard? Gyancha’s heart hardened. The sun had been shining, and trust had bloomed between them. Gyancha touched its flower and vowed, ‘Truly I love you, you crazy woman. Why do you always elude me? Idiot! Am I some kind of monster?’

Ganga was still as cold as the dawn; like the rest of the town, she slept on. He was on his way out to wake up the city, to sweep its streets and alleyways clean. But his Ganga hadn’t got up, so he just gave up trying. “If you don’t get up, I’ll never come back, understand? I’ll never come back, not even if you die.’

 Then she smiled rather cruelly-‘Gyancha, why are you angry?’ she seemed to say. Her face was gray, her eyes were sunken, and he felt worry for her. ‘Didn’t you eat yesterday?’ he asked but was puzzled by her silence. ‘Not even a cup of tea?’ Ganga shook her head. ‘Why, oh why didn’t you come to me?’ He felt like spitting in her face, like grabbing her by her matted hair and throwing her to the ground. But Gyancha symbolized weakness; he was hopelessness embodied. His weakness had driven him down to Asan: in front of Kal Bhairav he had clasped his hands.¹

 At Ratna Park once, they sat in a corner. He had whispered, ‘Ganga, come and live with me.’

‘In your house, you bastard?’

‘Yes, of course, where else?’

‘Could you look after a woman?’ she had said, challenging his manhood.

 Gyancha had thought of the smelly rooms of his house and recalled the silence and the loneliness there on that frightful evening when he first stood alone: all alone in the great wide world. He had held out his arms and begged then for a mother’s embrace, a father’s affection. But all he had been given was a sweeping brush, and now after all these long years he still went on accepting it. In summer and winter he wandered aimlessly through the great city…

 Then the atmosphere changed; time moved on, and the sun crossed over the mountains. I shall marry you, Ganga, he’d thought. And with a big celebration at Bhadrakali, too!²

 The same porters’ platform, the same woman, Ganga, the same kind of pitiless morning. For two or three years she’d disappeared. But now here she is, lying prone on the platform. Gyancha sees that her teeth are revolting and her hair is tousled. She sleeps curled up like a dog. He feels like saying, ‘You crazy woman! I told you to get up at once!  The sun is high in the sky!’ He will shake her awake, he thinks, then embrace her and say, ‘I shan’t go out sweeping today. Let the inspector do his worst! Now that I’ve met you again in the cold…’

 Now the sun is shining down on the platform. A small crowd has gathered, and its mood is changing. Gyancha is rooted to the spot; there are many more streets for him to sweep, but he is unable to leave. A voice comes out of the crowd, ‘She has no relations, inform the city council.’ Slowly, Gyancha accepts the fact that Ganga is dead. She is just a corpse without heirs. A great palace of dreams collapses. ‘Ganga cannot die,’ he shouts silently. ‘She can go mad, for sure, but that’s all…’

‘The police must be told’-another voice from the crowd. Gyancha opens his eyes, alarmed. He feels as if he is far away. He is at Pashupati temple, perhaps, or by the Buddha of Swayambhu or the waters of the Bagmati. Once, Ganga washed her feet there. ‘Hey Gyancha,’ she had cried. ‘If I died, would you light my pyre for me? I need a man to do that, not a husband who causes me sorrow. Not a husband, who drinks all night, then beats me black and blue.’ She smiled then, as if she were ashamed. Another evening, she was weeping: ‘My husband died, I became a widow. My son died, now I’m all alone. The house, the land- it all went to the moneylenders.’

 How could her body be taken to the Bagmati? The Bishnumati was far enough³. And what about her funeral rites? Gyancha felt desperate: he couldn’t perform these duties. He couldn’t grant her only wish. There was nothing he could do for her, nothing at all….

 ‘Will anyone take responsibility for this body?’ asks a policeman. A hush falls on the crowd, the silence of death. Then it turns into whispers.

‘It must be removed from here. There’s nobody here to take it, is there?’

Gyancha imagines climbing a mountain, clutching at trees for support. He sees the clouds and the wide blue sky. The sun appears and he goes on; his arms and legs are not tired at all. He arrives at the top, beneath a vast lovely sky-Ganga is there before him. When she sees him, she covers her mouth and smiles. Gyancha reaches out to her; he gathers her up in his arms, caresses and kisses her: Ganga, Ganga…but she runs away. He hears her voice in the distance: ‘You may not touch me, not even when I am dead.’

 He feels anxious; he would like to say to the policeman, ‘Please go. I beg you. I will send her soul on its way.’ There are a couple of bank notes in his belt; perhaps he could afford the rites…

 But then the policeman roars at him, ‘Hey, were you something to her? You over there, the one sitting quiet! Why don’t you say something?’

Gyancha didn’t know what to say. What was Ganga to him? Could he say that she was his wife? No, they had never married. His lover? No, they had never loved. What, then? There was really no relationship between himself and Ganga. She meant nothing at all to him.

‘Is she your wife?’ Another question—Gyancha looks up. Everyone’s eyes are on him, filled with curiosity. He breaks into a sweat, and it is as if he has suddenly lost his voice. As he stares, bearers pick the body up. ‘Ram naam satya ho⁴,’ they chant, as they carry it away to the river⁵. The crowds do not disperse, and Gyancha lingers there for a while, wondering what it really was that linked him with Ganga, with crazy Kanchhi. How was he involved in her death? Because he could not join the bearers, what did he have in common with the people left behind?

 He had nothing to do with them really, he thought. Ganga’s was just one more anonymous death at the platform. He, Gyancha, lived amid such deaths. He would be a death one day, too. Other than this, he was nothing.

 He walks away and notices that sunshine is filling the street. ‘The inspector will give me the sack today,’ he thinks, and hurries off down the alley.

 Translated by Michael James Hutt

 1. Asan - Asan is the old market quarter of Kathmandu. Kal Bhairav is a famous statue of a ferocious deity in the city’s main square.
2. Bhadrakali - Bhadrakali is the name of  a temple to a fearsome aspect of the goddess Durga.
3.  Bishnumati Rivre - The Bishnumati river runs through the western sector of Kathmandu; the holier Bagmati is somewhat farther away.
4. Raam naam satya ho - May the name of Ram be truth
5.This the traditional chant of corpse bearers all over Hindu South Asia.