The Ends of Kinship. Sienna R. Craig
the laboring woman. “Sit. Rest your head here. Let me feel the child.” The old woman’s palms offered a practiced dexterity. In addition to all the other women she had attended during birth, she had been through this routine ten times herself. Although only half of those children had made it to adulthood, they had all survived their first years of life. In fact, she’d even given birth to one of her children completely on her own, in a rapeseed field at dusk.
Kunsang sculpted Diki’s inner form. She did not say anything when she realized that this child’s back end, rather than head, was near the pelvic floor. She had helped to turn several breech births and sensed that this child could still be moved. Kunsang began this delicate work, her hands riding the waves of each contraction.
“This feels different,” Diki managed between moans.
Kunsang had few words, but she repeated them as minutes turned to hours. “Don’t cry. Breathe. Child will come.” She was surprised, actually, that Diki’s body tempered itself. Kunsang’s wrinkled fingers had not been washed, but she coated them in oil and felt for the child, coaxing the womb door to widen. She could feel a feathery softness. Hair. The old woman let out a sigh. “Push. Push when the pains come.”
Diki’s son came into the world alive, yes, but with the cord wrapped around his neck. Kunsang worked it like knotted yarn, then blew her own breath into the mouth of this infant, sucking and spitting away what remained of the watery world he had left behind. He cried, loud and pure, and with that Diki burst open.
“Don’t cry. Hold him.” Kunsang placed the newborn on Diki’s chest. The placenta slipped out like a fish.
MOTHER
On the night Dolkar learned that her only daughter was pregnant, she had fallen asleep in front of the television. Routine brownouts, “load-shedding” in local parlance, meant that the Kathmandu electrical grid went dark, on schedule, across the city. The generator whirred to life, waking Dolkar. She wiped drool from her cheek and straightened the pillows at her back. Chinese actors playing Tibetan warriors and light-skinned Lhasa girls dressed as nomad princesses moved across the flatscreen. This Tibetan teledrama beamed into her Kathmandu living room from Lhasa, via satellite. Even half awake, Dolkar picked up the plotline. It reminded her of the Ramayana soap opera—a version of the Hindu epic that aired on Star TV last year—except for the language. She’d learned Hindi during winter trading trips to India, selling sweaters in roadside stalls back in the 1980s before she and her husband bought this plot of land and built a guest house. Now she practiced Hindi by watching Bollywood films. She could manage the Sinicized inflection of official Lhasa Tibetan, but she had no desire to learn Chinese.
The young girl who helped in the guest house kitchen had cleared the dinner dishes. Dolkar’s husband had retired to their third-floor bedroom, carrying his own mother on his back up the stairs. Such was the nighttime routine. Dolkar yawned, arched her back, reached for a thermos of hot water. She’d been on her feet since five in the morning, making apple pancakes and omelets, vegetable fried rice, endless pots of hot lemon-ginger-honey for tourists. This little hotel did not have attached bathrooms, but it offered the refuge of a peaceful garden and a clean kitchen. It was rarely full, but it had never been empty since the day Dolkar opened its doors thirteen years ago.
Thirteen years. In her half-sleep, Dolkar spun numbers in her head. She could write 2013 in standard English numerals at the top of the receipts that tourists requested, but Devanagari was the only script she navigated with some degree of confidence. Dolkar was nearly fifty. She’d had one year of government schooling, hardly enough for literacy, but had secretly studied her daughter’s Nepali primers during the girl’s early years at Little Angels School. Once her children were older, Dolkar took to sounding out Kantipur newspaper headlines after her husband had drunk his tea and set aside the morning paper.
Thirteen years. With half a century behind her, Dolkar was now thirteen years older than her mother, Diki, had been when she died, after giving birth to her younger brother, the third live birth gleaned from thirteen pregnancies. Unlike other women of Dolkar’s generation who had made lives for themselves in the city but still carried nostalgia for the village, Dolkar did not miss Mustang. Even all these years later, she felt that the land itself had taken her mother. A life hard as stone and soil, a place steeped in ritual but bereft of modern health care. It had swallowed her mother whole.
People said that Dolkar shared her mother’s face. She found the comparison difficult to reckon from the one photograph she had of the woman who birthed her. That, and shards of memory: hands, hair, voice. In the black-and-white portrait taken during her mother’s only trip to Kathmandu, the woman did not smile. She stood, formal and erect, beside her husband, against a painted backdrop of the Himalayan range. They both looked so young.
Dolkar had come into this world as a labruk, a back-to-back child, just a year after her elder brother’s birth in 1961. Both had good appetites and bright eyes. Everyone thought this family’s bad luck was behind them, but a clutch of barren years opened up after Dolkar and her older brother were born. Dolkar’s younger brother was about a month old when their mother died. Diki’s milk trickled, halted. Then chills and fever came in waves. Dolkar, who was eight years old and therefore mature enough to care for baby goats and baby humans, began taking the infant to a paternal aunt who nursed the child. They consulted the amchi, hoping the sickness would lift. At first, it was just that Diki’s postpartum stomach did not seem to deflate. Instead of breathing a sigh of relief after birth, it was as if her body was a sheepskin bellow filled with air. Pain distorted Diki’s face when Dolkar or her elder brother hugged her. Then the fever spiked, as did the smell of rot emanating from that most private place. Ibi Kunsang came with boiled herbs and poultices, but it was too late. Dolkar held her mother’s hand long after the feverish flush had drained away, replaced by an ashen stillness. Dolkar’s father, Dhondrup, sat beside the hearth, a widower reduced to tears and drink. He would remain this way for years.
Dolkar’s mobile buzzed. She reached into the pocket of her loose cotton pants and pulled out the smartphone that had been a gift from her son, Tsepten. That boy had a sense of drama and timing. He had been born on a bus. He should have been a ngakpa like his father. Instead, Tsepten managed a Nepali restaurant in Queens.
Dolkar still thought about the moment he came into the world. Very pregnant, she had been halfway through an overnight ride from Kathmandu to Benares, India, for winter trade. Her contractions started soon after they crossed the border. For the next few hours, Dolkar held on to the seat in front of her and eventually moved into the aisle. Despite her travel companions’ protestations, the driver refused to stop. The teenage ticket boy, strung out from sniffing glue, began to cry. Two chickens walked up and down the aisle, calmly pecking at spit, snot, and instant noodle crumbs. A woman from lowland Nepal, her muscled arms like mahogany, offered Dolkar sips of water and shouted, “Don’t worry! The baby will come soon!” A Brahmin astrologer stayed clear of the polluting mess of birth, but he began calculating the child’s chart.
The scene was so chaotic that Dolkar forgot her fear, forgot the memories of her mother’s face at death, visions that she had not divulged to anyone but that haunted her. This was her second pregnancy but her first true labor. After the miscarriage, she was terrified that whatever caused her mother’s misfortune had been passed on to her. But then came Tsepten. One of Dolkar’s cousins caught the child, whose strong cries pierced the morning air. Dawn came swiftly, flamingo pink clouds hovering above the Ganges. Dolkar became a mother. Once the newborn had been bathed and swaddled by an Indian nurse at a government hospital, the other Mustang women with whom Dolkar had been traveling joked that Tsepten must have liked the Bollywood songs blaring from the bus speakers. “He wanted to come out and sing,” they said. “He will bring joy.”
That was about three decades ago. Now, Dolkar thought, Tsepten spends good money for people to carve strange pictures in ink across his arms and back, he wastes time in some place where he pays to run around in circles and lift heavy things, and he refuses to get married. Tsepten had decamped to New York after earning his School Leaving Certificate (SLC). Dolkar no longer understood her son, but she had set aside anger. Tsepten inherited his father’s