The Ends of Kinship. Sienna R. Craig
write in any language but especially in English. The neat line that ran atop Devanagari script seemed to keep the letters in check, tethered them to one another like a rope. They only had Tibetan class twice a week, and much of this time was spent reciting the alphabet, memorizing prayers, and singing songs. She could find reliable shapes in the graceful lines of this, her natal-yet-not-natal language, and could reproduce, fairly faithfully, these shapes when asked. But English was unhinged. Shapes turned backward and forward. She couldn’t wrangle the words.
As soon as the teacher turned his back to the chalkboard, Maya poked Wangmo in the ribs. They always sat side by side, sleeves of their crimson blazers brushing up against each other, ankles entwined in a clandestine hug. This intimate act was made possible only because the classroom was that crowded. The poke meant that Maya would help Wangmo with this impossible assignment.
Maya was Wangmo’s best friend. They were not from the same part of Mustang, but this didn’t matter. As children, the differences in their local dialects fused quickly into a vocabulary of sisterhood, wherein mother tongues mingled with the lilt of Nepali.
Maya was only a year older than Wangmo, but she seemed much more mature—maternal even. When Wangmo had been fairly new to Buddha Heart Boarding School herself, a six-year-old boy from Tangye was deposited at the school by an uncle and enrolled in kindergarten. With no empty cot in the dormitories, nine-year-old Maya volunteered to share her bunk with this terrified creature, his ankles pockmarked by bedbug bites, his cheeks mottled by wind and sun. The boy loved her, instantly. Even after a bunk became available, the boy resisted this move, wetting his bed each evening and being scolded each morning until the housemother returned him to Maya’s nocturnal care.
Maya came from an important family. Her father was a Tibetan doctor and a Buddhist priest, someone who commanded respect. Her mother was loud, big bosomed, hilarious. Both loved Maya and her siblings unconditionally and took more than the usual interest in their education. In other words, Maya had something to write about when it came to parents.
Perhaps it was because they spent so much energy in school on rote memorization, and maybe it was even a gift, but Wangmo’s memory rarely failed her. She could still recall with alarming accuracy the English essay she turned in all those years ago.
Parents is extremely essential for all human being. If they didn’t give birth to us, we can’t come into this life. They are like a God. Our parents give us whatever whenever we wanted. They solve our problems and help us to get success in our goal. They do hard work night and day. This is all for our future. In our life they are nearest and dearest friends. Our parents is really good and kindness for us. They always support us till our last breath. We all are so lucky we got such a parents like ours. So, we should respect and love our parents. At last, always love your parents because their face got wrinkle by giving time for us.
Wangmo really liked the line about wrinkles. She remembered gripping her pencil, following the motions of Maya’s hand, one beat behind her friend. Wangmo copied each of the letters, each of the words. These two girls deposited their completed essays on the teacher’s desk at the end of class, careful to let several other students turn in their assignments in between their identical compositions. When the teacher handed back the essays the following week, he said nothing of plagiarism. More concerned with form than content, he noted the improvements in Wangmo’s penmanship and corrected Maya’s grammatical scrambles of the verb “to be.” In his mind, these were students with very different prospects. They couldn’t have written the same essay.
Now that Wangmo has become a parent herself, such memories carry a different weight. From the relative comfort and security of a one-bedroom walk-up in Sunnyside, she takes a sip of sweet tea and closes her eyes.
She thinks of the tiny two-room dwelling that had been her childhood home. It was a crook in the elbow of Monthang, tucked into the neighborhood known as Potaling. It had a hearth, a place for sleeping, a nook for storing grain, one small window, and a wooden ledge that served as a shrine. The interior shone a lacquered black by candlelight, painted by years of dung smoke. A poplar trunk, into which had been carved footholds to form a ladder, led to a rammed earth roof that stitched this dwelling to her neighbors’ homes, a row of brambles partitioning the differences between them. In the summertime, Wangmo used to scamper across the stacked firewood divides between houses, stealing handfuls of cheese set out to dry on other people’s roofs. She recalled her mother’s heart-shaped face underneath a tight woolen cap, the dull black braid that hung down her back, the fraying edge of her woven apron.
Her mother said that their family had been poor, “from the beginning of the beginning.” Both of her grandparents had died when her own mother was hardly a teenager, her grandfather from drink and her grandmother from work and an illness of the heart. All these years later, Wangmo still wondered what this really meant. Her mother’s elder brother and only sibling had been killed in a road accident in Lucknow during a season of winter trade. This further propelled her mother into an orphaned indentured servitude. She worked for one of the noble families of Monthang, weeding fields, harvesting grain, collecting firewood and manure for fuel.
Wangmo vaguely understood that she was not allowed to know her father because he had power, because he did not claim his paternity. But she would never hear the story of her father from her mother. Instead, it took two decades and ten thousand miles before someone laid bare the circumstances of her birth.
It was at a Losar party, late in the evening, during her first year in New York. She’d been in the bathroom, smoothing her chuba in the mirror. An older woman emerged from one of the stalls. Instead of adjusting her own outfit, fixing her hair clip, or washing her hands, she just stared at Wangmo with a look that hooked incredulity to compassion.
“Whose daughter are you?” the woman asked. Her speech was slightly slurred, as if a shot of Johnnie Walker Black Label, meant for the men, had made it into her Coke. Perhaps it was the slow medicine of drink that made the woman pause, that made her notice Wangmo in the first place.
There was no escaping kinship here. Wangmo knew that the woman expected the name of her father, but she gave a different answer. “My mother is no longer. She was from Monthang.”
The woman fixed her gaze on Wangmo’s features. “She was poor, from that little corner house, right? I remember her, and the family she worked for. You must be that nobleman’s nyemo! Your eyes are just like his! How old are you? About twenty? I remember how hard she worked in their fields. Nyingjé, your mother died when you were young. I knew her brother—the one who was killed in India. But you found a good foreign sponsor for school in Kathmandu, right? At least you got an education.”
The woman gestured to her forehead. She did not have to say anything for Wangmo to know what she meant. Karma was written here, inscribed in invisible ink on the swath of skin above the eyes. “And now, here we all are, rich and poor, yoked to the promise of money in New York.”
In this place of public secrets, a woman she had never met—of whom she had no memory—had just succeeded in giving voice to so many things that Wangmo wanted not to hear, not to name, and yet ached to know. She had done so with a turn of phrase that dizzied Wangmo but that also made her strangely satisfied with the ways their language could harness truth.
Pleased with her discovery—this falling into place of another piece in the mosaic of kinship that stretched between Nepal and New York—the woman now seemed disinterested in Wangmo. She adjusted her apron and headed out the door.
Before that encounter, Wangmo had often wondered if the man this woman named was her father, but she had never received direct confirmation. The moment opened up so many emotions, from outrage to compassion. As she used to do with Maya when they had lain awake in their dormitory cots, she finds herself spinning stories about people she did not know, the people who were her parents.
Wangmo imagines her mother at the end of a long day of weeding, her father coming to inspect the work. Her mother’s back is soaked in sweat, her doko brimming with new fodder for his animals. He sees her, a young woman who works hard but is not yet weathered by sun and wind. He takes an interest. He comes to call on her in that crooked little house. Maybe there is sweet talk after he takes a swallow