Decision to Leave

By Bhoomika Dongol

By the seventh time Ashima decided to leave her husband and go back to Nepal, it was already the middle of December and his birthday was just around the corner. Out in the mid-western prairies, nature had put on yet another spectacular boreal show with its shimmering blanket of snow. The geese had migrated down south and Ashima was confined in her apartment dodging the brunt of the season. Drawing circles with her index finger, she inspected the matchlessness of each snowflake on her window pane.

“Cheers to another glorious year of shoveling the snow,” Ashima said to herself, and turned up the volume of the eastern classical song she was listening to:

Been intoxicated all my life without a drink,
Will I ever forgive myself for being so naive?

One thousand and eighty-four, one thousand and eighty-five… Ashima counted the number of days she had been away from home. Fifteen more days before the new year, and it will be almost eleven hundred days away from her country of origin, give or take leap years.

Ashima was not as fair as her sisters. Her youngest brother was darker, too, but it didn’t matter in that part of the society because he was a boy. It is always easy to find a match for a boy, her parents would say. Ashima was the middle child, and never got the attention that the first child naturally gets or the pampered love that the youngest one gets. So she confided in books. She read fables and pretended to be a mythical being. She loved Tagore’s poetry and immersed herself in his wordsmithery. She felt she belonged there, in a surreal world of free verse and shapeshifting dragons.

But when Avi, a fair boy of the so-called upper caste, fell in love with her and they decided to elope, Ashima sensed that her destiny was about to change. Avi had turned 27 and got a scholarship to study engineering in Saskatoon.

Ashima had one more year to graduate. She was enrolled as a second-year student in one of the last remaining fine arts schools of Kathmandu. The building was an ancient relic. Outside the school, there was a coffee joint where Ashima and Avi would meet and plan their future together.

And that was how the master plan was plotted. Ashima would meet Avi outside the old courtyard next to her ghostly residence, and they would take the night’s flight to Turkey, and from Turkey to Saskatoon, it would be another eleven hours. If they stayed, they would never be able to marry each other, let alone prosper in their respective fields.

Right before the clock struck 11 pm, Avi signalled Ashima to get into the taxi. She checked her belongings, which were nothing more than a small backpack with few clothes and a handbag with a book of Parijat. Although she was warned not to look back, she did. The house she grew up in stared back at her starkly. There were no meaningful signs encrypted on its walls.

Ashima’s green scarf flitted in the cold November breeze, and its cashmere edges brushed against her cheeks. In the dark, it was hard to make out if she was really crying or if her round blue glasses were only damp with a partial mist. Avi and Ashima did not speak in the cab until they reached the airport.

“You’ve got to be strong, Ashima.” Avi said.

“I am strong,” she replied, “stronger than you think.”

If you look back, you will not be able to leave.
​
Avi had told her not to turn around, not to look back. The night was still candid and fresh somewhere deep in her hippocampus.

---

Turns out, there was a different caste system in North America. It was similar to what they had at home, but unspoken. Ashima knew more about this when she started working for a non-profit for Indigenous and black youth’s higher education. It felt like she spiraled into the web of what she was trying to evade.

Three years went by in a blink. To make some sense of the fleeting time, she wrote. She emptied her thoughts into her journal. Writing. This was her becoming.

While checking out some books at the local library one day, Ashima saw a flier that encouraged emerging writers to network through writing clubs. She registered for the event and soon found herself joining a club that met on Sundays. It was snowing beautifully that morning. Little fluffy flakes descending down the Saskatchewan river, like there existed no water but only thin icy fields of white.

Her hands were sticky because of the heat and the sweat inside her mittens. She couldn’t get outside the house without them. She thought of Avi, who was working on a major project with a client that week, so he had been more occupied at work than usual. They were battling their own loneliness. Sometimes even their tiny apartment was not puny enough to escape their ruins. They never confronted each other, though, over how they felt about their decision to leave.

There were some friends who kept them on their toes. Avi’s senior Nepali friends from the university who had seen so much snow that the frost felt like home to them. Avi and Ashima were still not warming up to their surroundings. But they kept it to themselves. 

That day, Ashima took the bus downtown and tried hard to maintain little penguin paces on snowy fields. The direction kept changing when she moved around her phone, and as geographically challenged as she was, she got lost a few too many times before discovering the right house where the writers’ group was convening. It was a townhouse a little off the main street, around a looped crescent where the suburban residency began. It was nothing like the house she grew up in. There were shiny red wreaths on each door.

Ashima rang the doorbell. Before any human greeted her, there was a cat who made its exit from the door and sneaked outside the front porch. “Tinkerbell.” A girl probably the same age as Ashima opened the door and greeted her, while also multitasking to persuade her house cat to stay indoors. “It’s cold outside,” the girl said. “Come on in.” Ashima wondered if it was meant for her or the cat.

“Hi, I am Megan. We are all here, waiting for you. You can leave your coat in the hallway. The other writers have gathered themselves in the kitchen.” The voice echoed in a large urban living room space scented with fresh lavender and tea tree oils.

As Megan introduced herself, so did Adriene, Lisa and Katie from the writers’ group.

“I am sorry I’m a little late. I got lost. My name is Ashima, it means borderless in Sanskrit...” Ashika fumbled for a non-metaphorical introduction but she failed, and one of the girls cut her short.

“No worries. We were just settling in, feel free to warm yourself up first.,” Katie said. A pair of red Christmas tree earrings dangled from her ears.

“What would you like to drink?” Megan asked.

Turns out, every attendee had brought a small snack item with them for the meeting. It did not occur to Ashima that she could have cooked something traditional, too, and she felt a little embarrassed to be so empty-handed.

“I’m good. A glass of water would be nice,” she said.

They sat around a sturdy oak table that had a tall cylindrical vase filled with daffodils in its center. “I love your house,” Lisa said.

“Yeah, it’s got so much warmth and beauty,” the others attested.

Megan was a published writer; she recently finished her MFA and her poetry collection was well-received in the local literary festival last year. Her book captured the essence of her hometown in the rural midwest.

Katie worked at a locally-owned bookshop and was writing a memoir. She was the oldest one in the group. Ashima could not distinguish if it was Adriene who said she had never been in a writers’ group or was it Lisa. Both had some of their writing published in a few lit mags and anthologies here and there. Lisa said she loved Margaret Atwood and wanted to write like her. Ashima had read Alias Grace but loved Atwood’s poetry more than her stories for some reason.

Megan led the meeting, and she assigned the first 30 minutes to write in silence, and later, everyone would share what they wrote. Adriene set the time on her phone, and Katie munched on some Cheetos. Ashima noticed how their white hands shone against the black ink on their artisan journals.

By the time the 30 minutes were over, Ashima was only able to conjure up a few stanzas about what it felt like becoming a stranger to oneself.

The others had filled at least two pages. Katie continued to weave abandoned threads from her own memoir. Megan read a poem about her prairie farm-life that Ashima had a hard time comprehending. Lisa finished her short story about feminine monsters and little-known Greek mythological figures.

While the others were very articulate about their comments and feedback to each other, Ashima felt like she was fumbling through her vocabulary to define how she felt about what was being read. Some felt gory, some felt highly visceral, while some were in a completely different genre than what Ashima usually read and wrote in. So she remained frugal with her comments.

Finally, when Ashima volunteered to read her piece in the end, the girls gave her that look—the look that meant she did not belong. Lisa was the first to comment. “To write real poetry, you have to unpack the layered meaning of sorrow and peel each layer, you know.” She added again, “You have to uncover the core while not losing the essence of the profound pain that a poet is alluding to…”

Megan added, “Ashima, in writing, you must always show, don’t tell. Like Lisa said, you have to learn to un-layer without obvious metaphoric tendencies...”

Ashima felt uncomfortable, she nodded her head in submission like she usually did at parties back home where the invincible fraternity of potbellied uncles would tell her what she should do with her life and what she shouldn’t.

She knew that she was not a trained writer, no MFAs to her credit. She journalled every day and read voraciously. But she had never had anything in print, just a few articles in her college magazines and a love letter to her credit. The love letter that melted the heart of her brother’s lover. A narrative about his unrequited love for the girl next door that revived the penmanship of Florentino Arriza from Love in the Time of Cholera. Ashima had written the letter with so much sincerity and longing that it worked as a Cupid and kindled an enduring romance. Two children and three honeymoons later, her brother still called her up from time to time asking Ashima to write a letter for his wife. He was always the one who believed that Ashima had a way with words.

But as she sat there in front of the beige oak table dodging the interrogating eyes of her critics from the writing group, Ashima swallowed her pride and cleared up her voice to say, “Thank you. I appreciate your comments.”

The group chatted about the free consultations happening with the writer in residence at the local library and some other stuff of varied importance that Ashima did not value. She was lost in her thoughts. She regretted that her thoughts came to her in her native language; she wished she thought in a different language.

At the end of the meeting, the writers decided to plan another session next month, fitting everyone’s schedules. Until then, they would keep exchanging emails to stay in touch. Ashima nodded and exhibited a faint smile in approval. She came from a culture in which gesticulations replaced language; she came from a family of oral historians whose stories had been lost in translation.

As she was tying up the laces of her worn-down winter boots, Adriene, the quiet one, came up to her and spoke gently. “Don’t feel bad about what they shared earlier. Art is a creative cathartic practice. Your poem’s grief resonated with me. It’s hard in the beginning, but trust me it gets better. It always does…”

Ashima could not register what Adriene meant by “getting better,” but she nodded in affirmation. She thanked everyone and left the house feeling a sense of emptiness she could not fathom. It felt like the death of something. Or someone. Maybe a version of herself she had not known?

She recalled the last time she felt this way. It was the day when the local cafe in her neighborhood back home had been shut down. The Maoist insurgency during the 1990s had dwindled small businesses in Kathmandu. It was called the people’s revolution. Put simply, it was a war. And like in any warfare, the working class, the proletarians were at stake; they were the pawns. The cafe could not sustain itself with cheap customers like Ashima slouching in a corner with a book. So what if it was a safe haven for other bookworms like her.

A month later, they closed the cafe, and Ashima stood outside the padlocked door one last time, staring at its blue windows. She returned every day to the abandoned spot and waited until the cobalt of the window sills slowly faded into an arctic blue, and she couldn’t bear it anymore. She couldn’t cry, but whatever saline trickled through her eyes felt ceremonial. It had nothing to do with her being a feeler. “Remember to live lightly,” she had promised herself. It was the end of an era, Ashima had thought.

On her way home from the exhausting writing session, in the passenger seat of an empty public bus, Ashima made up her mind to talk to Avi, to reconcile with their past, and to grieve for it together. Perhaps talking about loneliness will make them feel better.

She turned back to look at the wreath of flowers on Megan’s door, but noticed that they had all turned pale and auburn. She thought of the door of her house in Nepal. The wooden latticed windows and the creaking old doors. If doors are made of wood, perhaps they have memories?

Ashima’s moniker translated to the one without borders, which also meant she was infinite and free. She could not be confined into a four-dimensional box or a shaded territorial region. She is capable of transcending seamlessly beyond borders and horizons, beyond dimensions and consciousness.

How little we know about living, because we are always uncovering only the realms of consciousness, Ashima’s grandmother used to say. She had read somewhere that with our consciousness maimed, we live with a fragment of ourselves.

It is not possible to step into the same river twice. Tomorrow, I will feel different, she told herself. She took out the journal she had bought from the dollar store. She tore the page that had her poem. For one last time she read it softly:

a tiny filament of light in you has died
for a million other slivers to come alive
let your rivers swell, let your islands inundate
weep, wail, go running towards the mountains.
paint your wounds, tend to your own wreckage
muse at all that is broken and ruined
see how you melt away
without a vessel to contain your pain
what a strange grief it is,
to mourn for who you used to be...

She crumpled the piece of paper and decided to burn it upon reaching home. But at the same time, she thought it was too kitschy to do so. She laughed at the thought and averted her gaze to her bus window for distraction. The South Saskatchewan River flew across the Paris of the Prairies. She decided to take a walk through the river promenade instead of heading home. It was freezing cold, but why should it matter? In a weather like this, even a teardrop would freeze and become a beautiful snowflake.

On some summer days, when the river thawed, and Joni Mitchell’s songs on clouds and crocuses would play through her headphones, Ashima would find a stranger staring back at her from the water’s reflection. Ashima, the borderless one, would gingerly look at that face filled with chagrin. She would ask her river image, “What is it you are seeking? Intimacy, amity, perhaps forgiveness?”
​
“I can’t put my arms around you anymore. I can’t keep living in your memories. But know that it is alright to feel the way you do. It’s time to let me go,” the image would say.

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​Bhoomika Dongol, pronounced with a “Hh” sound in between the “Bb” and the “oo” phonics in her first name, gets mostly called “B-oo-mika” by native English speakers.  Some just call her B; she considers this condensed denominator of her moniker to still hold some pith, but not as deeply as the real meaning of her name, which is essence. Bhoomika is an anthophile and is eluded by the concept of home. She is grateful her writings have found a humble abode in CBC First Person, Spring Magazine, Opening Doors anthologies by the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, and Paragon Literary Magazine. By chronicling the oral stories told by her mother and grandmother, she keeps her Newari indigeneity alive.