Nima Read online

I LOOK UP, AND EVEN IN THE DARK, I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE EACH peak is.

  Ama Dablam, Khunde, Lhotse, Taboche, the realm of Khumbi Yulha and Jomolangma, the holy mother rising above them all, her sides salt-gray, a white cap for a crown. The home of the supreme goddess Jomo Miyo Lang Sangma. The roof of all the world. Mountains that birthed the world and all of its people. Mountains that protect us, mountains that isolate us, mountains we worship.

  The sun inches above those crests, transforming the valley, showering bits of light onto the six of us. But the sun can take away what it gives. When its rays thaw the ice, avalanches come. We’re still picking dung as the sun climbs. And my sisters are all still talking about the wedding.

  Second hums a tune, holding one hand over her face in a sort of tantric dance, alternating hands alluringly, one hand freckled, the other without a single mark. A beautiful mixture.

  “Are you going to dance for Norbu on your wedding night?” Third chuckles as she picks dung from the grass. Second dances as she scoops cakes and tosses them in the basket. “Where did you learn that?”

  “Don’t you remember? We saw it in that Bollywood film, in the cyber cafe!”

  “Shh, Mother will hear. You know what she thinks of that place.”

  “Tanu Weds Manu,” Second confirms the name of the film. “It’s the last one we saw.”

  “Shh!”

  “I don’t care,” Second says, still dancing. “In two days I’ll be married. And then—my husband will be the one to tell me what I can and cannot do.”

  Norbu and I and Second, all together in one home, in one bed. Wed.

  “Are all your baskets full?” Mother calls, breaking the spell.

  She’ll need every piece we picked up, and she doesn’t stop reminding us. The next few days will be crowded with relatives, friends, neighbors, strangers even, all eager to wish us good fortune and to congratulate my parents. And the ones with unmarried sons will be looking over the remaining sisters for a possible future coupling. It’s what always happens.

  All of my sisters are blessed with long, slender necks, firm legs, womanly curves. Each one believing they’re ready to be a wife. Beauty is a curse in a place where you cannot choose your own fate. Maybe it’s better to be born ugly. My sister Fifth will surely have the toughest time. She wears the mark of a tooth on her left cheek. It’s not from a lepcha that slipped into our home at night, eager to snack on a young girl’s flesh. Only fools say that, and they do. It’s from a village yard dog she was trying to pet. I saw it happen. I beat the dog with a closed fist until he let go of my sister. Tears ran down her face, mixing with the blood from her cheek, her whole body shuddering as she screamed, and that finally sent the mongrel scurrying. That shriek was the last sound Fifth ever made.

  She hasn’t spoken since. She grunts, nods, but nothing else. She rarely laughs or cries but Mother and my sisters know exactly how she feels. Fifth has made up her own language. Aside from using her hands, she scrunches her nose a certain way when she’s happy and another when she’s upset. Sometimes I feel that she’s the most expressive of us all, displaying thoughts with all of her body. All I have to do is look at her eyes, and I know what she’s thinking.

  Fifth wriggles her nose now, as if confirming my thoughts. I feel a rushing surge of warmth. She’s my favorite, the sister I speak to without words. The others never stop gabbing. They’re gabbing now about our deal with Norbu’s family. It’s a generous deal for our side. For each bride, the other family pays in yaks. Two brides means twice as many yaks, and more yaks mean a longer life for my family even though they lose their two best workers.

  Second likes Norbu. She told me so. It’s obvious even without her saying it. He’s tall, his shoulders are as wide as a doorway, his gaze light and happy, his manner soft but strong. He’s a man who can provide for a family. And with her young body so ready to give him babies, I understand why Norbu would like Second. But he couldn’t like both of us equally. He has to have a favorite. The more I look at Second, the more I’m convinced that she’s the one. She would be my favorite, too. I can find all sorts of reasons to like Second better than me. Yes, Norbu took my hand once, but maybe he only did it because my father was barely clinging to life on Nurse Lanja’s cot. Besides, I was foolish to tell him about my dreams. Life in the valley, in Kathmandu, what man would want a girl who talks like that? He’s being kind to take me, too.

  The way he looked at me that night, it wasn’t with lust or affection. It was pity, I tell myself. And when Norbu approached my father, the old man saw his chance. Two brides, more yaks. Success.

  In the older times, before the mikarus reached Nepal, we were even more tied to the land and the yaks. We didn’t have to collect their dung back then, we could chop down timber to satisfy our fires. Before I was born, the government made my home—the whole Khumbu region—a national park. That meant we could no longer touch the forest. Army patrols were busy with the Maoists, but if they caught you poaching it could mean prison if you couldn’t afford a bribe. Few did. Change is slow here, and us Sherpas are a stubborn breed. Most of our lives stay the same as they always have.

  We still pick berries, herbs, roots, and yartsa gunbu—a caterpillar fungus prized for its effect on male potency and frustrated husbands’ moods—a gift that’s saved marriages, no doubt, but destroyed whole communities. Erosion, jealousy, greed. Many children are pulled out of school to comb the hills. There’s no law against taking this mushroom, but there is against other lucrative things. We can’t take the timber, nor any of the rare creatures that fetch money over the mountains. Villagers still believe that everything here is holy, ours to protect. At least most villagers. Some still hunt for red panda, wolf, snow leopard. The government says they’ll pay for reporting poachers but the government has no money. At least not for us. The bravest Sherpas aren’t the ones climbing the mountains with Westerners, the bravest of us are the ones climbing the mountains to enter China. The Chinese grind up any and every bone to put into their wine.

  Boar, tahr, fox, when the Chinese grind them, they’re all tiger. And when they get a real one, from far in the south in the rice fields of the terai—they charge twice as much. Sometimes I imagine being a man and hunting those creatures, making that journey, a trip filled with so much worry, but so much adventure. If my father was well and able, he would—I don’t know why I bother thinking about what Father would do when I know he can’t. Wishful thinking is just that, something for children.

  My father’s misfortune doomed our lives so completely, my parents saw their daughters as their last chance. The only thing they had in abundance were daughters. For months and months, my father’s and mother’s worries were carved in the wrinkles on their foreheads and in the circles around their eyes. Worried that Norbu’s family wouldn’t give them enough for one prize, me, they upped the offer, adding my sister. They’d been negotiating since I first bled. Right after Ang died. My parents wanted to sell us both or nothing at all. Leaning hard on that birch branch, Father kept hobbling back and forth to the Norgay home. When he was too exhausted, he rode on the back of a neighbor’s pony, Mother holding the reins, leading him along the trail.

  Plans were at last finalized—for both daughters.

  As far as my parents were concerned, getting rid of two mouths was a big step towards the survival of the rest of the family. The drought had stretched over a whole year, and people are harder to feed than pack animals. But with the two best workers soon gone, caring for the new yaks, working the fields, my sisters would have to grow up fast. They’d have no choice. If this were a Bollywood film, there would be some kind of miraculous answer, a charmed solution to make everything simpler. Nothing in real life is as simple.

  I knew my place. I was tradable goods for my family. Something to be used. No one ever asked what I wanted.

  My mother is talking to me now, but my ears are listening to the chirps of birds flying through the dawn. Doves paired with mates they choose and stay with for life. Mates they c
hoose. I want to be like them: light, flying away from the old nest, never to return.

  “Are you listening, Eldest?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Aren’t you happy about your marriage?” Third asks me.

  “Of course I am,” I chime back.

  All my sisters want a husband. All of them want their own families, their own lives. Desperate for a new yoke to replace the old one. I’m ready to marry with my sister, too, Fifth seems to say with the flash of her bright eyes. That could be the surest way to gain a husband. No man wants a mute for a wife. Or maybe they do. To a man, that would probably be the best gift, the ideal in fact, as long as she could cook, clean, and make babies, why bother with tiresome chit-chat?

  Fifth wiggles her nose, the tooth scar twitching on her cheek. If she’s worried about her future, she doesn’t show it. My heart aches for her, and loathing for myself, the selfish Eldest who cannot be happy or leave the past behind.

  “My future has so much hope now,” I mouth to my mother, knowing that’s what she wants to hear. No love marriage for us, not even an engagement stage. Some couples are engaged for years, even having children before the ceremony. Many couples now choose their own partners. Not us.

  “Your future,” Mother says firmly, “originates with your past.”

  I’ve heard this one before. My eyes shift sideways. They want me to replace Ang, as though I was the cause of the ru’ that took him. Or if I made a boy with Norbu, that would replace Ang. I cannot help a thin smile: what’s the point of bringing another life into this world when we have so little to give aside from life itself? So little to share aside from hardship? When my belly swells, so will my responsibilities. It feels like these parents of mine are truly mad, envisioning solutions nestled inside the problems themselves.

  “With you married, it’s going to be easier for your sisters. It will be a good sign, showing others that our family has value. This union is a good beginning, an auspicious beginning for all of us. If the gods are willing, the land and sky will come together and bring us rain.”

  “And the drought will end, Mother?” asks Fourth.

  Mother laughs like the gurgle of an unexpected spring, pushing through a clog. “There has been a curse on the earth. And it will take time. But it will change.”

  My sisters—the three whose futures are yet to be arranged—share glances, the mysteries of their fortunes playing in their mind’s eye. “How long must we wait?” asks Third, the next in line by birth.

  Mother laughs again, differently, like a splash among stones. “Not so long. And when we marry the last of you, your father and I will be ready for our sky funeral.”

  My mother, like all Sherpa women: die young, exhausted by work and childbearing.

  I shake my head, trying to drop the feeling like a dead leaf. When all their children are married, most Sherpa women are ready to lay down on the mountain and feed the vultures. Alms to the sky. I don’t want your sky funeral to be any time soon, Mother. But how could I not dream of escaping?

  The sun pokes beams of light through the clouds. The birds are louder now, their song of joy replaced by warning shrieks. A golden eagle swoops down, talons ripping at fragile feathers. The doves dodge and weave, never leaving each other. If they did, one—maybe both doves—would be saved. But neither abandons the other, and the eagle gets its chance.

  I hate this hunter, this bird whose beak will one day feed on my parents. When it’s my turn, as the Eldest, I won’t have the heart to raise my kikuri to my parents’ still warm bodies. Is this the key to freeing the soul to the heavens—the bodies of our dead chopped to pieces to make it easier for the birds to lift them beyond?

  Mother’s close-set brown eyes focus on me as if she’s reading my thoughts. Then, as if to sum up my existence, my place, my role to serve, “Come,” she commands, and I march forward next to her, my four sisters trailing behind me as the village comes into view with its hilly farms and rocky soil where even potatoes and root vegetables are hard to grow. The mud brick homes with thatched roofs made of bundled reeds and sticks, the pockets of air between the layers providing cheap insulation. Last night’s dew trickles down angled roofs, collecting into plastic bottles, set around each home in supplication to a stingy water god. Please bring rain.

  The ground is a mix of icy scree and yellowish grass, parched dry and frozen from the high altitude. A high altitude ice desert. An underfed river snakes through the village. Yaks graze in twos and threes on both sides, sucking up what’s left of the short grass, some further up the hills, on midriffs once pine-green. Smoke billows from stone hearths, a rooster crows, then clucks in fear as if chased by a hungry tomcat. The sounds of early morning.

  All around the towering mountains, with their thick snowy capes, keeping the outside out, and us in.

  All my life here.

  I look up suddenly into the purple-blue sunrise after a single high-pitched cry. A war cry. The eagle, its great wings flapping, whizzes directly overhead, its talons clutching both doves.

  My sisters have already hurried on towards the village. My mother turns and yells and I run to catch up.

  5

  BACK HOME, MY FATHER IS IN BED WITH A BOTTLE OF CHANG. THE drink of the yeti, he calls it.

  The drink yetis kill for.

  I believed that as a child. That there were real yetis, crazed by the effects of the chang. I know now that it’s just the home brew that keeps my father’s mind as cloudy as the drink itself. A mix of barley and water, you can’t even see through it when it’s in a glass. Strong stuff, strong enough to not freeze through winter. Strong enough to turn a grown man into a demon child.

  I know all too well what happens when the chang takes him. I know all about chang, I’ve made it for my father, on my hands and knees, mixing hot water into a cask of thick, fermented grain. I’ve made it too many times to count, barrels of it, one on every holiday for my father to make blessings with, to drink with the other villagers. Now I make one each month, a barrel he shares with no one else.

  I’ve tasted it, too. Just once. I coughed so hard I thought my insides would burst. My sisters laughed. Luckily, my father didn’t catch me sneaking the drink.

  If you drink chang, you’ll get a headache, so goes the song, if you don’t, you’ll get heartache. Men yell this as a toast when they celebrate and when they suffer.

  When my father’s eyes are low and his fists hot, he repeats that saying over and over, like a mantra for black deeds. Best not to be around at those times, but where can I escape to? Only one option. Along with my sister, of course. “Two down,” he says, in between gulps.

  My gaze moves from Father as he is today to the yellowed photo of the proud climbing Sherpa he was not long ago. Almost four years ago.

  I remember a mother yak we once had, back when we were in Khumjung and Father wasn’t a cripple. The cow had broken a leg a few days after giving birth. Usually calves are vulnerable after birth—from frost, from starvation, unable to wean, from predators attracted by the smell of afterbirth and blood—but this calf was healthy. It was the mother who suffered from poor health. Or poor luck. One morning I found her still on all fours, and at first, I had just thought her lazy. But when I saw her leg, I was instantly reminded of my father. My sisters and I applied a moist poultice of herbs, and I remember the cow moaning, that little calf not leaving her side.

  We tried to set the leg in a splint, but the cow went mad, kicking and bucking. And moaning. That sound, that wail. We had no choice. The other cows wouldn’t let the newborn suckle, they didn’t have enough milk to spare. Poor luck, the job fell to me as Father was gone on a trek.

  My hands shook, the frost still clinging to the grass, crunching under my feet, my steps uneasy. And I remember the look she gave me. She knew. Strange, how even animals know what’s coming to them. Her eyes were blood colored, like deep lava-filled lakes with a stone thrown in. All morning she was grunting and mooing, but she fell silent when I got close. Do it, her e
yes said. Caressing the soft tuft of her nape, my hands steadied. And she was calm. I remember how hot the blood felt when it spurted out. A puddle at my feet, growing and freezing in between flecks of hardened grass. Even beasts deserve sky funerals, and I made one right there, offering the cow and her calf to the world beyond after taking them from this one.

  My father’s fate is crueler. He dies a little more each day. His life is a morning to night cycle: he sits and drinks, drinks and sits. When he does move, his fury is unleashed by the drink. Unleashed on all of us. Once I’m married, my sisters will have my example to contend with. I, as part of the Norgay family, will be rich, with six dozen yaks, and most of them producing milk.

  Norbu is one of only three children, all boys, and the other two are already married, so my sisters will have to look elsewhere. Luck chooses harshly.

  The impermanence of life, Buddha says. Always look forward, always be filled with compassion. But my mind is filled with doubt. And fear. Black thoughts on black days, I push our goat out of the way, and she bleats in protest. I sit on my worn wooden bench, rocking back and forth.

  My fingers clutch the bench like it could come alive under me. I claw at its chipped blue paint, not feeling as it collects under my fingernails. Finally, I leave. When my mother goes to bed with my father just a few feet away and he begins—that leg hasn’t diminished his desire—I leave when our home’s four walls seem to cave in, when the stink from the open mouths of the animals is too much, when my sisters won’t stop arguing, I leave. And I go to where my feet can’t take me, down the mountain, to the valley below and Kathmandu. In a classroom with girls my own age. Ready to graduate from university in the capital—learning without having to do chores—one day, I’ll come back to show everyone, just like Nurse Lanja did. Or at a festival, dancing with a boy, his hands on my body—and I smile, feeling no shame for wanting that touch, for enjoying it. For that thought alone, my father would hit me with a closed fist, and once would not be enough.