Where I Was When (Historical Fiction)

Where I Was When

“Karma! Arey Karma, are you listening?” Mataji came rushing around the corner, the front of her apron filled with small potatoes. “I’ll give you a good thrashing, you son of a donkey!” she yelled, spotting him in the field.

Karma kicked at the scratchy buckwheat stalks. When he had come to work at the camp—along with 34 other Tibetans—he had been an obedient boy of five. Three years later, he chafed at the work and Mataji’s beatings. A member of the local Gond tribe, she was dark as night and wore a massive gold stud in her left nostril. She never tired of telling Karma that she was descended from Durgawati, the warrior queen.

Mataji yelled again. “Go inside, Lata has some dipped rice for you.” That got his attention. He ran to Mataji’s hut, his worn sandals smacking the rust-red ground as he went.

Inside, Karma took the bowl and bent metal spoon from Lata and sank to the floor. He sat cross-legged in the corner, watching the hem of her sari sway this way and that as she made rotis. The food was good…yesterday’s rice, doused in buttermilk, with fiery mango pickle and raw onion on top.

Mataji soon joined him. “My mother wasn’t a donkey,” he said after a while. Mataji grunted, unconcernedly sucking on a piece of pickle.

“Lata, give him one of those rotis with some eggplant,” was all she said.

Karma’s mother had died a year ago, in childbirth. The scrawny babe—another boy—had died the next morning. “Your brother’s in heaven now,” Doctor Treadway had said. Then his face had turned red. Karma had wondered why. The American doctor was an enigma. But then, all adults were.

Mataji alternated between slapping Karma and force-feeding him. Karma thought she loved and hated him at the same time. “Does that make any sense?” he asked his mirror twin. But the apparition had no answers.

The doctor, on the other hand, was gentle and kind. He had come to the camps at Mainpat as a volunteer medic in May of 1963. It was supposed to be a weeklong trip, but a year later, the doctor was still there.

Tibetan refugees were still arriving by the hundreds, many after walking for two or three months. They were skeletal beings, their hands and feet wrapped in white bandages.

“It’s frostbite,” the doctor had explained to Karma. “Extreme cold has damaged their fingers and toes.”

The doctor tended to the refugees as best he could without modern equipment or even antibiotics. When he was off duty, he drank. He could down a bottle of whisky in a single evening. In the mornings, there was a sour stench about him. But Karma didn’t mind. When the doctor was drunk, he played guitar and sang songs in English.

***

It was nearly nightfall when Karma left Mataji’s hut for the community center. She had given him a rupee to buy a sack of rice from the vendors that had stalls outside. The road that wound up the hill used to overlook the steppes and deep green jungle growth. In the past two years, ugly concrete houses had been erected for the refugees and aid workers that came and went. Now there was always a faint smell of latrines mixed in with strong cooking spices like cumin, coriander, and mustard seeds.

As he neared the doctor’s house, Karma heard the familiar twang of the guitar. He neared and heard the doctor sing, “I fell into a burning ring of fire, I went down, down, down as the flames went...”

But Karma never got to hear where the flames went. The doctor spotted Karma and interrupted his singing to say: “Hey kid,” though he continued to strum the guitar.

“Namaste Doctor-sir,” said Karma. “Nice song. Very nice,” he added, rolling his head from side to side to show his pleasure.

“I can’t seem to remember the words all that well,” said the doctor. He set down the guitar, pulled out a ten rupee note, and waved it at Karma. “Hey, want to buy me some cigarettes?”

“One packet, Doctor-sir?” Karma asked, taking the bill.

“Yeah…and buy yourself a sweet paan.”

Karma ran off, yelling his thank-you-sirs as he went. He bought the rice and cigarettes first. Then he went to the paanwalla’s stall.

A couple of men stood chewing their paan and spitting reddish juice at the grimy community center wall. Behind the paanwalla, an oscillating fan stopped whirring. There was only electricity during the day. 

The paanwalla’s voice pierced the sudden silence. “They’re saying the pundit is dead.”

“Good!” spat a man in a dhoti. “About time.”

“You! You’re a horse’s ass!” the paanwalla shot back. “Nehru was the architect of modern India! Now who will take over?”

The dhoti-man pointed a finger at the paanwalla. “If he hadn’t bungled the Chinese invasion maybe we wouldn’t be overrun by these Tibetans, eh? They get all the best land, and for the rest of us…what?”

The paanwalla raised his voice. “Gondi idiot! What did we have before the refugees started arriving? Thanks to them the government is building a school and a monastery here.”

“Shouldn’t the government build those things for us Chhattisgarhis?”

***

Karma handed a pack of Wills Filter cigarettes to the doctor. “Doctor-sir, people are saying Chacha Nehru has died,” Karma said. “Did he went to heaven?”

Doctor Treadway took a breath and looked down. Finally he looked back up. “Did you know, Karma, that I’m half-Tibetan?”

Karma didn’t answer. Who ever heard of a half-Tibetan?

“Jawaharlal Nehru has done more for our people than perhaps any man on earth.” The doctor smiled. “I know you don’t get it…the loss of a great man is…” He sighed and shook his head. “You will get it, some day. You’ll remember, when you’re older, what you were doing the day they told you Nehru died.”

He picked up his guitar and sang:

“I'm out here a thousand miles from my home,
walkin' a road other men have gone down.
I'm seein' a world of people and things…
hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.”

Then he got up and went inside.

Karma walked back by the light of the moon, thinking that grown-ups were, indeed, very strange.