Nima

Nima's story Part 2

Part 2

Three years passed. The girl had completed her language studies at the minority institute in Chengdu and was sent to work in Lhasa. She was not adequately qualified for the job, but an acute shortage of translators had probably made the party scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Her job was relatively easy, primarily translations of slogans from Chinese to Tibetan, and occasionally translating news favourable to the Communists from English publications.

Although she was back in Lhasa, she made no conscious effort to find out about her old parent, and when they ran into each other some weeks later it was by coincidence. Once she had found her though the old woman, who now had a job at the cement plant outside town, would not let go. She insisted that the girl stay with her in her one room flat some distance out of town; even haranguing her daughters bosses in her party office to force her hand.

However, the girl was equally adamant. Finally a compromise was arrived at. The girl would visit her mother once a week on Sundays and stay through the Losar weekend. 

And come hail or hell-fire, the old woman was sure to be at her house that day. No matter that her factory was behind schedule and announced Sunday a working day, or her bosses threatened her with thought correction sessions, she would be home and waiting, even if the girl could stay but a few fleeting moments. It was as if her life hinged on these all too brief encounters.

All week the old woman would slave for that one day, prepare and count the moments to it. All too soon it would be past and another long week stretch ahead."

Nima sighed then continued with her narration. "She was making Ninety Yuan at her job at the cement plant. Most workers complain they cannot feed themselves on that amount. I don't know how she managed it, but whenever the girl came to visit her little room was scrubbed clean, there was rich food on the table and invariably the presents, too expensive for her to afford.

It made the girl feel ashamed. She made thrice as much money, wore better clothes, had more of everything, yet found it impossible to deny the ragged woman smiling anxiously beside her, her single Chuba in tatters; two pots, a small table, an old felt blanket, and a clean cotton cloth her sole possessions. Even the poor had more. Among them too she seemed the poorest. She had nothing, nothing." There was a lump in Nima's throat and her eyes were damp, but she continued gamely.

"The old woman was slowly losing the battle for life, but from somewhere she found the energy to go through the day. As she weakened her work points fell. So did her earnings, but not the presents. It was as if it were something beyond her control.

Then one day, over a year later, it all came out. The girl was being sent abroad with a delegation. There was a slim possibility that she might run into a relative abroad; perhaps even her exiled father. The old woman could not hold back on the truth any longer.

After those early years the woman had given up trying to tell her daughter of the past. The girl was headstrong, and too affected by communist party propaganda to listen. But what she had to say now could not wait. It was the final responsibility left to her, and she would not die with it unfulfilled.

So she told the girl. A truth so shocking that for a long time afterwards the girl would not believe her. The little child that the old woman had reared from birth, nursed at her breast, raised through the grim prison years was not her own, but that of her former masters, aristocrats from east Tibet.

Two decades earlier, serf and master had together fled the great socialist revolution that came to liberate them, towards Lhasa. Once in Lhasa though, where their former masters found it hard to maintain even themselves, the tenuous bond between slave and master snapped. The once rich lords became poor while their forgotten serfs drifted into the deepest depth of drudgery.

Not quite forgotten as it turned out. For one fiery night, a night of storms and violence, there was a knock on the woman's door. Her husband had by then left her to go into the mountains and she was alone. A girl came inside, a young girl with a baby at her breast.

The girl was the daughter of her former master. The family, she explained, was fleeing into the mountains. She was afraid for her little child, then only sixteen months old. Would the slave take care of her child. She would return for it when she was able.

The old woman was alone and poor, but she was no coward. She accepted the child. As it turned out the family was captured the following morning and the fleeing mother killed along with the rest of her household. The child remained with the woman.

But now, when the girl went abroad, she must seek out her long lost father, for it was said that he was alive and well in exile. She was to find him and thus relieve her dying foster-mother of the enormous responsibility that her former masters had entrusted her with. The father must now accept his child.

I don't suppose the girl would have taken the old woman's ranting seriously had she not herself gone through a trauma soon afterwards that set her thinking.

Then it all fell together. The woman's self-effacing behaviour before the child, the unusual honorific that she used to address her own daughter, her love that bordered on adulation, her standing in a torn chuba next to her little princess; suddenly it all made sense.

The great socialist revolution that freed the million proletariat of the motherland and set the heart of workers the world over aflutter had done nothing for Pema Choeden. If anything, between them her former masters, the Phunstok, and the Communist Party had dragged her into the deepest abyss of drudgery and humiliation so that her master's child might be brought up with some little semblance of her noble birth."

Seeing Greg's look of comprehension Nima said with feeling, "Yes, I am that child, and Pema Choeden, Nima's voice choked. 

Steadying herself she continued, "Pema slaved a lifetime, denied herself the smallest of necessities so that the child of the Phunstoks might be worthy of her great families; families that so selfishly abandoned slave and daughter without a passing thought as to how the wretched woman could possibly raise a child of their lineage. If I left her now the Communist party would kill her. It would be the ultimate ignominy of the Phunstoks on their former serf.

If you were in my place would you?"

"What?" said Greg, taken unawares by the question.

"Abandon her to the Communists?"

"No, I suppose not."

"There, you have your answer. I don't know how she managed it, but she came out here to Nyarong, a thousand limes from Lhasa just to be with me. I cannot desert her now. You say there are a few persons who direct our lives. I don't know who directs yours, but for the time she is alive mine revolves around Pema. You know now why I cannot go with you.

I think I really should be going now, and you should too."