Free Arresting God in Kathmandu by Samrat Upadhyay

word, ignoring the looks of the pedestrians who stopped to see what was happening. At home, he took Moti to Rammaya in the kitchen, and said, “You said you knew your son.”
    When it became clear that Moti would not stop drinking, Rammaya again became depressed. Hiralal did not understand why Moti drank, and asked himself whether Moti felt something absent from his life. Both Hiralal and Rammaya had doted on their son. It occurred to Hiralal that perhaps that was the problem: perhaps they had pampered him. They were never able to say no to him, even when he demanded things they could barely afford: a large toy ship when he was seven, a brand-new Chinese bicycle when he was twelve, a trip to the Indian border to watch movies with his friends when he was fifteen. If Moti didn’t get what he wanted, he threw a fit, and Hiralal and Rammaya would succumb. Their giving in to their son’s every demand, Hiralal now thought, had turned Moti into a needy teenager, someone who felt insecure when faced with the rejections and disappointments of the larger world. Even as a teenager Moti had clung to Rammaya and sought her protection when he couldn’t deal with his father’s anger.
    “It’s not our fault,” Hiralal told Rammaya. “People do what’s etched on their foreheads at birth.” He enumerated for her the children from good families who’d gone astray: his cousin Bhola’s young daughter, who had eloped with a truck driver; their neighbor Horn’s son, who languished in jail for the murder of a police inspector; Rammaya’s own niece, who was rumored to be working as a prostitute in the city’s luxury hotels.
    But Rammaya could not be consoled. She moved around the house slowly and took longer to do her household duties. In bed, she hardly spoke to Hiralal, and sometimes when he woke in the middle of the night, he found her sitting, staring up at the ceiling.
    One morning she complained of a headache, and within a week she was gone. “Meningitis,” the doctors said. It was as if someone had sucked the breath right out of Hiralal’s body. And no tears came. He tried to cry, but his eyes only burned.
    After Rammaya’s ashes floated away on the Bagmati River, Moti’s drinking became worse. He went to the bhatti in the morning and stayed until it closed. Sometimes Hiralal heard him crying in his room. One morning Hiralal went to him and asked, “You miss your mother?”
    Moti looked at his father with cloudy eyes and said, “Ma comes to me in my dreams.”
    Hiralal smiled. “She never comes to me. She must love you more than she loves me.” All day long it bothered him that he hadn’t dreamed of Rammaya since she died.
     
    A week later, Rudra’s wife offered a proposal. A beautiful girl’s parents were looking for a groom for their daughter. Hiralal waited for the bad news. “She has a slight limp in her left leg,” Rudra’s wife said. Hiralal sighed. This was not what he had imagined for his son. “But she’s very beautiful,” Rudra’s wife added. “And a very good girl. She’ll take care of Moti. Bring him around.”
    Hiralal looked at the framed picture of Rammaya by his bedside. Would she have even considered this? “Moti has to agree,” he said to Rudra’s wife. “Do the girls’ parents—?”
    “They know,” she said. “But they’re anxious to find someone for their daughter.” Before leaving, she told Hiralal, “I’ll bring a photograph tomorrow. The parents were unwilling to give me a picture unless you were interested.”
    Hiralal was grateful to her for acting as a lami—the middle woman—for Moti, but he felt bad for the girl’s parents, having to settle for their daughter’s marrying a drunkard. But what else could they do? Let their daughter be mocked by neighbors and relatives all through her life? Hiralal knew how his society viewed such matters: better to have an alcoholic son-in-law than no son-in-law.
    The next morning, after getting dressed for work, Hiralal went to