Sarita was up at the crack of dawn to practice her walk in the new high heels. She just hadn’t been able to garner the grace that those Hindi film heroines were famous for; she admired the ease with which they moved their feet in rain-soaked dances, perfectly balanced in their high heels. But when she tried, Sarita struggled to stand straight, and her feet burned from the lack of padding in these shoes that she had bought at Kathmandu Wholesale.
She knew Binod would notice her high heels because he liked to compliment her when no one was looking. The other day, he said the mole above her lip looked like a tiny juicy grape. The same mole her mother said looked like a tumor. That was Sarita’s mother being kind. Well, how low had Sarita fallen, or how fitting, that she now thought a tiny juicy grape was a compliment, especially from a bully like Binod.
He showed up in her dream one night, kissing her, moving his hips up and down between her legs. She was jolted awake into a cold and lonely night, so wet that she was scared it would come running down any minute. Sarita prayed for forgiveness, and many nights after that, she was scared of falling into the darkness of sleep, which didn’t stop her from thinking about Binod often during the day, the subtle ways in which he showered attention on her, like those extra minutes after work when he hung around to ask if she needed a ride home, building up her hope until one of his cronies would start whistling, and that’s what Sarita couldn’t quite figure out—if Binod was sly or utterly false.
When the wall clock embossed with a picture of Jesus Christ struck eight and announced, ‘Glory be to God,’ Sarita hurried into the kitchen. She loved kneading dough for roti and slapping it on to a hot tawa where it puffed up and took on a life of its own. She had stopped caring about the fact that no one at work, not even Binod, asked her to join them for lunch.
‘Glory Be to God,’ Sarita said as she stood before the mirror, knotting the drawstring of her suruwal. A touch of red lipstick and a squirt of Lakme Elegant perfume later, Sarita slipped into her red high heels. She checked her profile. She had seen her manager attract a natural awe as if a person’s shoes defined her status. As long as her suruwal covered her legs, Sarita passed the modesty test. Priest Matthew always stressed on modesty. He had made an example out of Sarita when her lipstick fell from her purse one day. Priest Matthew picked up the lipstick and took a whiff of it in front of the congregation and said it reeked of sin, before slipping the lipstick into his pocket. Later, Sarita looked for it in every trash can, and when she couldn’t find it, she mustered the courage to ask him. ‘You’re bold,’ he said and gave it back with a smile.
Presently, with her lips red and her shoes shiny, Sarita sat on the edge of a seat in the tempoo where sweaty bodies chafed against each other. During this long and crowded ride to work, she played her favorite verse in her mind: Mark 11:25 ‘When you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.’ As soon as she reached her desk at Nepal National Bank, the taunts started.
‘Here is Miss Mary,’ Binod said.
‘Mary, when will you marry?’ someone chimed in.
Sarita’s eyes locked with Binod’s. It was as if his gaze were a thing, like a ball he volleyed up to her, daring her to pick it up and throw it back. Then his look became tender like he was privately relaying a message that he had no guts to declare publicly.
Sarita took out the wooden cross from her purse and placed it on her desk. The bank was buzzing already, with customers lining up to collect their money. Sarita and the three men were confined to this crammed remittance room with an awkward table arrangement where her back was perpetually exposed to their crude eyes and remarks. So many times, Sarita complained to management, but they kept brushing it off as a temporary arrangement. Unlike the main section of the bank where a glass partition was fitted from one end to another, behind which clerks sat in their cubicles, the remittance room had no ventilation. It smelled of poor people’s sweat.
The rumor was that the manager did not like Sarita’s constant chatter about God this and Lord that, but she knew that the real reason she was stuck in remittance was the lack of a college degree. She felt a mixture of awe and pity for her manager, a woman with wealth, education, and a taste for pencil skirts—the steady clatter of her high heels on the concrete floor was enough to put everyone’s mind to work, but rumor also had it that the manager declined a promotion because she wouldn’t dare earn more than her husband unless she wanted to be a homewrecker. No matter how many fancy degrees they had, Hindu women preferred to toil under gender oppression. Sita, the self-sacrificing wife of Ram, was always a step behind him, but Adam and Eve were companions as God had intended, for they sinned and repented together. Even Priest Matthew who displayed an open hostility at the slightest hint of lipstick said gender equality was what set modern Christians apart from simple-minded Hindus, urging Sarita to bring new women—or men—to church, something Sarita hadn’t yet been able to do.
A long line of people gave her their secret codes, showed her their ID cards, and collected cash that their relatives, working as cheap laborers, had wired from Dubai. Sarita was kind toward elderly customers who didn’t have proper identification but brought crumpled letters from their sons as affidavits, and she created a separate line for disabled customers, a policy the bank hadn’t yet implemented. They looked at her cash counting machine in wonder for it could count hundreds of bills within seconds. Like the whirring machine, Sarita’s own mind was constantly ticking—a wavering, bumpy path, in need of smoothing asphalt which the church no doubt provided. She considered buying a kilo of rasbhari for the evening mass as a gesture of appreciation though it was not her turn to do so. Priest Matthew had introduced a new rule where every member of the congregation had to bring an offering as a gesture of appreciation once a month—a small something—that would be of value to the church.
It was Priest Matthew who’d baptized her with the name Mary, a week after he had discovered her and saved her from an eternally cursed life as a low-caste Hindu. The priest had shown up outside their mud-plastered house on the outskirts of Kathmandu, two blessed years before, wearing a sharp blue shirt, carrying a bible and some mangoes. He sat on a mound of hay by the cow shed and read several stories from the bible, including the one about how the Lord healed the blind and lepers with nothing but miracle and mud. While the rest of her family sat on their haunches sucking on the mangoes, Sarita had been mesmerized by the silver-haired priest, his lilting Darjeeling accent, and his smile, which still lingered in her senses. He had appeared out of the fog, carrying stories so bright they spread a light in her heart. Most of all, the stories spoke to Sarita of a world where she’d be taken in as an equal by the Lord, not dismissed as a Kami. And she could read the same bible that the priest read, in simple English, even though until now low-caste Hindus like her had been barred from reading scripture, an entitlement granted strictly to the Brahmins.
Sarita had always wanted to speak good English, to go to college, but her parents saw that as an ill-disguised attempt at snobbery. Getting through high school alone had been a hard-fought battle. Her mother would time those morning chores perfectly until Sarita refused to wash the pots and pans which caused her mother to rebuke her endlessly from their mud porch every morning while Sarita walked to school.
Priest Matthew hadn’t just read the bible, he had unfastened a bolt and opened a door Sarita didn’t know existed, so despite her parents’ fear of the foreign religion, despite the seduction of an endless life roaming and roving the hills and paddy fields she grew up around, despite the prospects of marriage and family, Sarita followed the light.
Her father was a blacksmith who made iron statues and sculptures for a contractor. His dream was to open his own shop one day, which Sarita could help look after. She would clean the shop every morning, arrange the sculptures, fend off stray dogs—all the ways in which she was expected to put her hands in the water cautiously, then her toes, before jumping into a life devoted to cleaning her husband’s house. But her father’s request for a business loan was turned down by every bank on grounds of insufficient documents, or insufficient caste—one could only guess. Sarita knew her father could never afford all the equipment to forge metal, could never uncover himself from his moroseness, so she told her father that she wanted to discover her own path. He called her arrogant and other names, but she left her home and rode a bus to Kathmandu and found a single-room near St. Mary’s Church to live in. She volunteered at the church and landed a decent paying bank job, thanks to that high school certificate she fought so hard to earn.
‘How about some coffee and cake, Mary? It’s a beautiful day,’ Binod said. Sarita almost jumped, startled, because she still wasn’t used to being called Mary outside her church. It was a name meant to be used by people who treated her as their own. Binod had waited for his lackeys to leave for lunch before approaching Sarita with this proposal, which surprised her because it was a step-up. He leaned so close that a whiff of his aftershave assaulted her nostrils.
‘I’m busy,’ she said.
‘Actually, I have a genuine question. I’d love to hear about the bible from you.’
Binod was handsome, no doubt, with a clean stubble and easy smile. ‘We’ve been working together for almost a year, but I hardly know you,’ he said.
Sarita shuffled papers on her table. The scripture commends the person who obeys God’s laws and helps others obey them at every opportunity. Priest Matthew always stressed this point, and though other sisters and brothers brought new members to the church, Sarita, despite her inner voice setting her on a straight path, had never been granted the opportunity. She wondered if this was a test.
‘Sarita?’ Binod said, interrupting her thoughts.
‘I need to use the bathroom,’ she said, feeling a flush of excitement at the prospect of going out with Binod.
She avoided the remittance bathroom where grime had caught on to the edges of the mirror. Careful to be out of the manager’s sight, Sarita slipped into the bathroom in the main section of the bank. She looked in the mirror, wishing for the umpteenth time that she had a lighter skin tone. It was one reason she carried a tube of Fair and Lovely in her purse all the time. She now rubbed it generously and urgently on her face. She hoped he would ignore the mole, sticking out like a nipple, and focus on her pretty smile and the black hair that fell straight and proud below her shoulders.
‘Well?’ He was waiting.
As they walked the long aisle of the bank, heads turned. Sarita took small, measured steps, trying to strip away a vision from her mind of how jealous her female co-workers must be, in their two-inch heels and flats, too timid to wear high heels for fear of offending the manager, or their mothers-in-law. Sarita then felt guilty for harboring such petty feelings. But her mind was buzzing with so many thoughts, like a stirred-up bee’s nest, that she hadn’t even noticed that they had already reached the parking lot.
She had seen Binod’s swanky motorbike from afar. It was shiny and black with sharp edges all around and the passenger seat was elevated as if it was a mating call.
‘What do you think?’ Binod asked.
She was mesmerized by the various buttons.
‘As long as we get back on time,’ she said. ‘I hate to keep my customers waiting.’
Minutes later, they were out on Ringroad and Binod sped faster and faster, and Sarita’s heart beat like it was caught in a tornado. She screamed but she couldn’t hear her own voice, so she ended up laughing at her silliness. She clutched the metal bar behind the seat with both hands as he swerved in and out among trucks and cars and Sarita felt her heart swinging in her chest and a rush of blood explode in her veins. She screamed into the wind in delight and fear, but just as soon, she realized, it must be in a moment of weakness, her hands had left the bar and were tightly wrapped around Binod’s waist. She withdrew her hands, and not knowing what else to do with them, started punching his back, begging him to stop, stop, STOP!
Binod stopped outside a dusty restaurant on the highway. The place looked like a crumbling mansion where ghosts of old kings and queens might climb the creaky stairs at night. There was no one for miles except a lone waiter standing by a table with a fly buzzing around him.
Out in the back was a circular veranda overlooking the sprawling Kathmandu valley: old brick houses and ancient temples jostled against high rises of cement and steel, spread out beneath the blue hills. Sarita hadn’t realized they had ridden all the way up here. A quiet fear clutched at Sarita.
‘I come here alone when I need to get away,’ Binod said.
Their table was one of many lined along the arch of the veranda. A patch of bougainvillea harnessed on to the railing reminded her of dry corns that hung by the windows of her village house.
Binod ordered two coffees and fruitcakes. He took off his dark glasses. The other day, Sarita had made him the subject of confession at church. She had played this scenario endlessly in her mind—should she, should she not, and finally, without naming names, she asked Priest Matthew about desire. She stressed that she simply wanted to understand teachings on self-control. Priest Matthew said sexual union should be saved for marriage when the couple would enjoy mutual pleasure and be fruitful and multiply. When Jenny asked her who the guy was, it hurt Sarita to know Priest Matthew had shared her confession behind her back. Like that time when Sarita had brought a poster of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. Priest Matthew had praised Sarita’s astute judgment in selecting the finest poster and had even complimented her, in front of everyone, then later when she was alone, almost breathing into her ear. She had felt uncomfortable, but she couldn’t turn to anyone, least of all Jenny, whom Sarita found out much later, was Priest Matthew’s favorite. In a crowded room, his eyes always wandered toward Jenny, a pretty girl from a middle-class Christian family in Kathmandu. Apparently, her family had ‘connections’. He had struck Sarita off his list as soon as she landed in the city. When she searched for his eyes, Priest Matthew looked away. He only looked at her when she wasn’t paying attention. He kept his remarks short—’You look better with your hair loose.’ or, ‘don’t forget to clean the windows.’ The more glamorous work of maintaining the church website or ironing his choir robe went to Jenny. Sarita was now filled with pleasure and anguish at the prospect of Priest Matthew’s reaction to her high heels.
‘I joined a self-help group once,’ Binod said. ‘We met every Saturday to meditate and talk about self-improvement, but I quit because I didn’t have the patience or the humility.’
‘So?’
‘I have a lot of respect for you, for how far you’ve come in life.’
‘Everyone in my family thinks I’m an accident waiting to happen,’ she said.
‘You’re a risk taker.’
‘A proud girl in my village is like a snake that must be tamed before it harms others.’
‘Tell me about your family,’ he said as if he could sense that she wanted to open up.
‘Do you eat beef?’ ‘Have you had sex before marriage?’ That was her family. She had come to accept that her parents were unable to shake off their simple ways. Her parents were prisoners of fate and the caste system, as were her older brothers who defended her one day and called her arrogant the next. She could be a teacher at most, they said, probably because teachers were paid so little, they seemed melancholic and defeated. It was the bible that gave Sarita the confidence to leave behind a life mired in caste mentality. A life where a lower-caste woman couldn’t even step inside the kitchen of anyone above her station. Sarita followed the light to Mary Magdalene, the first to bear witness to the risen Christ. She was so proud that her chosen name was Mary.
‘Never mind,’ she finally said to Binod.
‘That answer was worth the wait.’ He smiled.
The waiter brought their order in an engraved, silver tray. His bow tie seemed odd in this deserted place.
Sarita sipped her coffee without looking at Binod but felt his gaze on her. Each time she laid eyes on him, he wasn’t looking at her, but out over the hills, lost in some thought. The top three buttons of his shirt were undone. She noticed a faint scar on his neck, like a birthmark, and she felt a tingle somewhere deep. She reached for the fruitcake and took a bite.
He moved his chair to face her. ‘We should do this more often,’ he said. ‘Look, I tease you because you’re so tense all the time.’
‘You know what takes guts, Binod? Showing this—your sensitive side around your lackeys.’
He ran his finger along the table, avoiding her eyes.
‘How come you don’t have a girlfriend? Waiting for your mom to find you a nice Hindu girl?’ she asked.
‘How come you don’t have a boyfriend? Aren’t Christian women supposed to be—’
‘Be what?’
He picked his words carefully. ‘Bold,’ he said, before adding, ‘and westernized.’
‘You can say it. Loose and easy. I know the rumors. Is that why you asked me out? Because I’m bold?’
‘You have a mind of your own. I find that attractive.’
He placed his hand on top of hers and circled her soft skin with the tip of his finger. Frightened and elated, she drew her hand back.
‘I won’t eat you,’ he said.
She felt a rush of blood in her cheeks.
‘Do you have siblings?’ she asked.
‘Only son. I’ve always had the pressure to be the son. The hope. You can’t know what that’s like.’
‘So, you’re part of the problem in our country. The sons and only sons.’ She took out her abridged Simple English Bible and turned to Revelation 3:20. ‘Read a passage. You won’t regret it,’ she said.
‘Seriously? You want to do this now? You know, you will probably have more friends if you make yourself a little less pushy,’ he grimaced.
‘Fine. Let’s just snap at each other.’
He took the book from her and let it rest in his palm for a moment as if he was weighing its worth. The golden inscription of The Bible shone on the cover. He ran his finger along the etched letters, then lightly scratched the soft-leather spine with his thumbnail. He turned the pages and scanned the words. He seemed to be reading more than a few lines.
‘What?’ she said.
‘I stand at the door, and knock; if a man hears my voice, and opens the door, I will eat with him, and he with me. Whoever brings back a sinner from his lost journey will save his soul from death… Am I a lost soul?’ he asked.
‘Isn’t everyone?’
He leaned closer. ‘How does a lost soul get salvation?’
‘Salvation comes to those who wait,’ she said, quickly regretting her response. She was impressed by his good English. ‘Why are you stuck in the remittance room, by the way? This is hardly ambitious for a man with a Master’s in history. Isn’t that what you told me?’
‘The manager says I’m all show no substance,’ he said.
‘I agree.’
They laughed together.
‘I wish I could afford college,’ she said before realizing how much time had passed. She checked her mobile. ‘I’ve never been late,’ she said.
‘We’re just getting started,’ he said.
She left her coffee half finished. He paid, and on the way out, he said, ‘There’s something different about you. New shoes?’
A flock of birds unfurled their wings into the beautiful sky.
It started to rain, the first of many monsoon rains. Sarita was drenched. They rode past adjoining brick houses whose ground floors were let out to cafes, bookshops, vegetable shops, bicycle repair shops, barbers and butchers. The shopkeepers squatted under tin awnings, smoking their cigarettes, staring at the rain and at passersby.
‘You’re okay?’ Binod asked.
The rain came down hard. Binod pulled over by a temple.
‘Let’s go in and wait this out,’ he said.
Sarita called the bank on her mobile, but the line was busy. Binod held her hand and led her into the narrow courtyard. They removed their shoes at the entrance. The temple looked as if it had been built in haste, to let stray dogs wander in for a brief shelter from the rain. Were it not for a row of diyas burning in front of Kali’s statue, it would have been impossible to navigate in the dark. The only other person in this cave-like room was a bearded beggar stooping for coins that devotees placed at the foot of the Goddess Kali. The room permeated with the smell of vermillion powder and the stench of uncollected garbage that wafted from the alley. The beggar grinned at them and walked away.
Binod offered her a clean handkerchief to wipe her face with, but Sarita had one in her own purse. She let her wet hair fall then combed her fingers through it and gently squeezed the end. Then she threw her hair back. He was looking at her. She felt a bit shy, but safe around him, which surprised her. In him there was a hidden capacity to care, she knew it. She wished she could take him to church. They would kneel and pray together. She was now beyond doubt that the church was the guiding force he needed to turn his life around. Everyone needed a sign, and this moment, right now, rain and thunder, was Binod’s to seize. Besides, Sarita was slightly disgusted at the state of this temple, like so many others in the city. How ancient it looked compared to her clean, brightly lit church built. Though it had only been two years since she had last been in a temple, it felt like her first time in a strange world. She wanted to escape this dismal place and run to her church and fall on her knees before the altar and surrender herself completely to the Lord. She closed her eyes and saw an image in which she swayed her arms in the air…
‘Sarita.’ Binod put his hands on her shoulders.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘No, you look beautiful,’ he said.
He looked at her cleavage, wet and slightly exposed. She covered it gently with her dupatta. She felt a rush. Their eyes locked. Her lips quivered. He touched her lips with his finger and began kissing them slowly. They kissed like they needed each other right there and then. Her knees felt weak, and she had no strength to resist. When she realized what she was doing she pulled herself back with a jolt.
He was breathing loudly. Then without warning, he slid his hand underneath her bra and squeezed her naked breast. ‘Don’t. I don’t like that,’ she said. He gripped her arm with one hand and forced the other hand into her bra again, clumsily trying to grope whatever he could clutch at. ‘I said, don’t,’ she said and managed to push him away. His eyes, fixed on hers, were trembling. She wasn’t sure if she should stay or run, but she stood. The air between them was now sour.
Binod hurried to his motorbike. She sat behind him again but did not wrap her arms around him. The rain had abated. Taxis, tempoos, motorbikes converged upon the street. Sarita felt trapped in a swarm of noise and smoke. She was angry and confused, unable to sort through her feelings. It didn’t help that she could smell the mixture of musky cologne and damp sweat emanating from Binod’s back. She knew Jesus would forgive her, though in her heart she felt she deserved to be punished so she wouldn’t be bold enough to be so reckless again. She tried to fight off the anger she felt at Jesus. He had so much capacity for love, yet he was capable of ruthless tests that Sarita now felt severely victimized by.
The least Binod could do was ask how she was, or something. A yearning to hear his voice grew in her.
‘Stop. I want to get off,’ she said.
He pulled over. And, without looking at her, he drove away. Sarita took a taxi to work, changed her mind midway and asked the driver to drop her off at the church.
A woman was sweeping the floor with a baby tied to her back. There was no one else. The marble altar was covered with white cloth on top of which red roses were arranged in several rows surrounded by brass candlesticks. A crucifix hung on a wall behind the altar, and on either side of the crucifix, marble columns struck a gracious pose. Stone-carved angels stood on their cornices looking up at a mural of the sun rising on Mount Everest.
Sarita knelt with her hands clasped.
‘Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in you,’ she said. This was not even the sort of thing she could take to confession. Priest Matthew might punish her with silence for months, and if word got out, she would lose every small gain she had worked hard toward. It didn’t help that she had enjoyed kissing him. Her pulse had stopped for a moment. Could she have stopped him from groping her? Had she overreacted? She now became resentful of everything—her fate, her life, and especially the sound of broom reeds scraping the floor. She wanted to quarrel with Jesus, but her body, from her head to her toe, filled with infinite sadness.
‘Special day?’ It was Priest Matthew in a cassock.
He glanced at her high heels. Sarita wasn’t going to cry in front of him.
‘See me in my office,’ he said.
She followed him into the room that smelled of stale ink. There was a desk with a computer next to a filing cabinet. A stack of newspapers lay gathering dust on top of the cabinet. He closed the door. Her heart beat faster. She had been in this room only once before, when she had made the confession about desire.
‘I need a fresh pair of eyes to tally our expenses,’ he said. ‘These are the bills from last three months. Open the spreadsheet and double check my numbers.’ He handed her a file.
He had never let her touch the computer before, and he didn’t trust people easily with bills. Sarita didn’t know how to use a spreadsheet.
‘Sit on my chair,’ he said. The leather chair had a towel draped over the headrest. Sarita sat on a plastic chair on the other side of the desk. He rearranged the files in the cabinet and talked about bookkeeping issues, lack of funds. The screensaver flashed Jesus offering the eucharist to a girl. Sarita struck a fly on the desk with a rolled newspaper. Priest Matthew looked at her, momentarily distracted by the stillness of death. He went back to his files, talking about the corruption of mankind, the violence inflicted on the poor. His words floated in the air like apparitions.
Parts of Sarita’s suruwal were still damp when she reached the bank. She had finally returned the receptionist’s call. She had never been late, had never missed a day of work. She apologized to waiting customers who quickly lined up in front of her desk. She wiped her face and hands with a fresh handkerchief and got down to work. Binod and his cronies started talking in whispers. He said something, prompting them to laugh and whistle.
‘One moment okay, dai?’ Sarita said to a customer. She reached in her purse and took out her cross. She placed it on her desk so that it stared directly back at him. Then she took off her shoes. All day the weight of her body had rested on her poor feet crunched in those high heels. It felt good to let the feet get some air. She even cracked a joint in her toe. She wanted to hurl a shoe at him, let the stiletto stab his face like a dagger, but she had to play smart. She dealt with all her customers, and an hour before closing, stepped into the manager’s office.
‘It’s either them or me,’ she said. The manager, apparently annoyed by her tardiness earlier, responded immediately, without even listening to what Sarita had to say.
‘Your fetish for the church and the bible should stop at the door, Sarita. Some people are fed up with your Lord this and Jesus that. Do you know that the only complaint we’ve received in the complaint box is about you and your bible?’
Hope swiftly transitioned into weariness in Sarita. She felt exhausted. She was almost about to leave when the manager said, ‘Sit down. Tell me what you came for. I just had to remind you about that before it escaped me.’
Sarita gathered her breath, her courage, and slowly she opened up. The manager listened intently as Sarita told her about the bullying, and in the spur of the moment, the temple incident was laid bare on the table.
To her surprise, the manager appeared sympathetic.
‘You are a hard-working employee. I value you,’ she said, putting her hand on Sarita’s. ‘But you must forget about that.’
Of course, Sarita thought.
Her mind wandered back to the month she had joined the bank. All the staff members had gathered in the conference room to watch a video about gender discrimination in the workplace. A woman appeared on the screen and talked monotonously for forty-five minutes about sections and codes in the constitution. Sarita had expected to be educated about different scenarios in which gender discrimination might occur, but the whole ordeal was so boring that most of the employees were chatting or looking at their phones during the screening. Later, a man who supposedly worked in HR but was really the accountant, said people with complaints should write their reports on a piece of paper and drop it in the complaint box placed next to the manager’s office, in full view of the main section of the bank. Those who dared to walk to the complaint box would no doubt risk being a subject of gossip.
‘There was no witness, and we can’t control what happens outside our premises,’ the manager said.
‘But there is still the issue of who Binod really is. How many times must I complain to be taken seriously?’
‘This is the first time I’m hearing about any kind of harassment. You’ve complained about the room. A very different matter. Why did you go out with him knowing the kind of person you claim he is?’
Sarita looked for the right words. ‘I thought he was sincere,’ she said.
‘Binod is a show-off and he’s lazy. I’ve given him an earful about his tardiness. Write a complaint and put it in the box. I’ll take it up with him and speak to HR if necessary.’
It sounded like a well-practiced performance. Sarita’s forehead creased. Anyone who came into this room was treated with an impressive display of framed certificates on the wall. There was also a photo of the goddess Lakshmi in her resplendent red sari, standing tall on a floating lotus with elephants on either side spraying water at her feet. The ironic symbolism of female power and prosperity wasn’t lost on Sarita, nor was the demonstration of piety given the castigation earlier. ‘With due respect, madam, your lectures to Binod haven’t really worked. This is about a woman’s safety,’ she said.
The manager raised her eyebrow, seemingly struck by Sarita’s boldness or by the truthfulness of those words. She then put her hand on her chin and sat like that for a while. She asked Sarita to go back to her desk and return in half an hour.
When Sarita opened the door, she found Binod near the water cooler outside the manager’s office. She looked him in the eye for a second and kept walking.
‘We need to talk,’ he said. She ignored him. He followed her into the remittance room and sat behind her even after everyone had left.
‘This is what I can do,’ the manager said when Sarita returned to her office. ‘I’ll remove them from that room.’
Sarita wasn’t sure she heard this correctly.
‘The Bhaktapur branch is looking for an administrative assistant. I can send Binod there. The other two I’ll figure something out.’
Sarita had been hopeful but unprepared for this turnaround.
‘Can I ask what made you change your mind?’ she said. She had no expectation that anything would actually get done.
‘There’s something about you, Sarita, that is utterly earnest. I don’t doubt that Binod mistreated you. For your own well-being, a formal investigation will drag unnecessarily into a long scandal, and I would not recommend it. You call it bullying, they will call it casual fun. We are not equipped to discern the difference, especially with no witnesses. A smarter way to deal with him would be to send him off. The Bhaktapur branch with its hour-long daily commute will be a good wake-up call for him. It’s a demotion. I’ve been fed up with his recklessness, anyway.’
We meet our destiny on the path we’re not supposed to take, Sarita had heard. Did she have to go through this trial for something to finally move in her favor? Before she left the office, the manager said thank you— ‘for bringing this to my attention.’
Sarita felt a lightness in her heart. She smiled.
In the parking lot, Binod was sitting on his bike, staring ahead. He revved up the engine when he saw her.
‘Hi, look I’m sorry. Can we talk?’ he said. But she kept walking, keeping her expression as grave as she could. He slowly circled the bike around her and exited the lot. Sarita didn’t want to read too much into that. With a touch of vindication and relief, she held the cross in her purse, and soon she was lost in the crowded street. A swelling knot of fear tickled through her bones. Would Binod lash out at her? She had heard enough about such violence and hate, but she couldn’t bear thinking about it.
‘The saddest part is that my betrayal didn’t come from an enemy, from Binod, or Priest Matthew. It came from you, my lord. But I know in every trial lies a blessing. You have shown me a blessing. Please help me find the strength,’ she said as her feet invariably moved in the direction of the church.
Ranjan Adiga is an Associate Professor at Westminster University in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he teaches fiction and creative nonfiction workshops as well as literature courses. He also teaches a summer writing workshop focused on immigrant children, and the power of storytelling that helps them articulate their shared experience.
