She poured him a glass, and served the meal—rice, black dal, cauliflower and potatoes. Then she served herself, and for the first time since his return they ate together. They did not broach any big subjects—How long will you stay, Dai? What will you do now, Bahini?—but lingered, instead, on diversions. Leela asked Bishnu about the Oasis Hotel, the Five Spices Bistro, his life in the desert, and he was happy to tell her about it: ‘All the kitchen staff are Nepali, Bahini, every single one. We live in the same house, sharing rooms. We talk our own language, eat our own food. If it weren’t for the heat, some days it’s like we’re living in Kathmandu.’ ‘Is it really, really hot?’ ‘Unbearable in the daytime.’ A vision of Maleah came briefly, powerfully, to Bishnu: Maleah in the hallway, laughing, showing him the goosebumps raised on her arms by the hotel’s air conditioning. He saw the moles on her inner arm: two of them, side by side. He smelled the scent of her skin. He waited for the vision to pass. ‘What about you, Bahini?’ he said. ‘First you took care of Muwa, then you took care of Buwa. The past few years have been very hard for you.’ ‘It was hard after he was bedridden,’ she said, but she did not dwell on the subject. Instead, she told Bishnu about some kind of study tour she had been on. ‘They took us out east,’ she said, a smile brightening her face. ‘It’s not like here, Dai, it’s completely different there, they don’t farm just for food, the way we do. They plant fruit trees and cardamom and broom—and mulberry to feed silkworms. They think of the market. They focus on cash crops.’ She uttered the words market and cash crops in English, with special emphasis, Bishnu noticed. The tour had been organized by their Thulo-buwa, the
The Book of Aleph
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