Chapter 30 "Light of the Earth" The sense of the unknown

a sense of the unknown (1) 8 With the child in her womb and a sense of the unknown, she followed Canaan to Nepal alone.The first time she set foot on that land, she was greeted only by the misty mist rising from the twilight of Kathmandu.The turbid river flows quietly through the city, and the old city of Kathmandu is crowded, noisy, poor, and messy... The narrow alleys interspersed in it are as narrow as needles, provoking the rag-like old city.The temples towering all over the city are the only taller buildings, and only the square in front of the temples and the palace can see a suddenly open space.The brown-black thick roof and wood-carved window rails are sleepy in the dusk and full of distant unreality.Shrines can be seen everywhere on the street.

She began to be in a completely strange world again.All I heard in my ears were unfamiliar languages, and my eyes witnessed the Nepalese people sitting on the ground beside the narrow streets, their eyes were dull and dull. She grabbed Canaan's hand for the first time, in a taxi.Looking timidly at the man beside him, there was excitement in his heart, but at the same time he was full of hesitation.Canaan turned around and looked at him quietly, with an indifferent smile on his face, the meaning of which was unclear.He said nothing. After getting out of the car, he helped her carry her luggage.After passing through an alley, we came to a narrow street and stopped in front of a stone door facing the street.The stone-carved gate is very old, exquisite and complicated.Canaan stepped into the door, turned around and saw Kassan still standing outside hesitantly.

He said, this is my home, you come in.Kassan. She followed Canaan through the door.A deep and ancient square house suddenly opened up in front of the eyes, surrounding the courtyard in the middle.There are pavilions of different levels all around, two floors on the west side, and three floors on the east side.Half wood and half red brick, moss licking the corners of the wall and spreading into a decadent shade.The rotten and blackened carved wooden windows on the upper floor are like pairs of black eyes. Canaan turned around and said, follow me upstairs and put the things down first. The narrow wooden stairs creaked when stepped on.Canaan's room is on the east side of the second floor, next to a hall room.The door of the large room was open, and an old woman sat inside, busy with something.The wrinkles on his face had turned brown, old and short.Like a wrinkled walnut.

Canaan opened the door and went in, Mother, he called her in Nepali.The old woman raised her eyelids wearily, and said something plainly. He turned around and led Kassan from behind, and said to her, this is my mother, come and say hello to her. Kassan put his hands together and bowed his head to say hello to her. The old woman didn't look at her directly, but said to Canaan, the woman you brought back again. Canaan didn't answer, turned and left.There is an expression of displeasure on the face. Kassan asked him, is this your biological mother? Canaan replied blankly, no, this is my father's other wife.

She was sitting in Canaan's room, looking around the deserted walls.The old wooden pavilion gave off a musty smell.She clearly heard the sound of someone walking at the door, and then saw a woman holding a basin, with her head bowed, passing by the door. I'm going to meet my father, Cassan.You just sit here.Don't go anywhere.He said. After Canaan left, she sat there stiffly waiting.The splendor of this courtyard gave her a sense of isolation that she had known before, the kind of strangeness that she was familiar with in her childhood. After a long time, she could clearly recall the dinner that day.Before eating, Canaan told you that you must sit on the corridor with the women at home and wait. You can come in after we finish eating.Remember, you have to sit at the back of them.

In this way she saw the women carrying the dishes into the dining room, setting the food, and then coming out, sitting on the benches on the corridor and waiting.After a while, the men in the family walked into the empty dining room on the second floor. She sat at the end of those women at a loss.No one spoke to her, no one even turned to look at her.Even if I saw it, I didn't pay attention to it at all.It was not until a long time later, when it was already dark, that the men finished their dinner and filed out. She followed the women into the dining room.After sitting down, I saw on the table a large plate of white rice, a pot of vegetable and mung bean soup, a plate of curry potatoes, several bowls of kimchi, and several glasses of water.The women kept silent, and directly grabbed pickles and potatoes and put them into rice bowls, poured a little clear soup, and then swallowed them with their hands.Long skirts hugged their plump bodies.There are old ones and there are young ones.His face was originally beautiful, but it was full of traces of being eroded by the heavy toil in a humble position.No one expressed curiosity about her, no one spoke to her.Of course, she didn't understand it at all.She just sat in the corner so awkwardly, remembering that she hadn't eaten pilaf for more than ten years.But facing the leftovers in front of him, he didn't even have any appetite.Although she is very hungry.

He didn't take her to see her parents, but just took her into the opposite room on the second floor, a small side room, and told her, according to the rules, I will have sex with my wife tonight.This is your room, you will live here from now on.The women's toilet is in the corner of the first floor to the west, but you'd better not take a shower today. Finally, he turned around and added that tomorrow he will attend the cremation of my second wife.She was ill for a long time, and I didn't have time to rush back.Just passed away a few days ago. Kassan stood there dumbfounded, watching him finish these words with a blank expression, then turned and left.

Canaan never told her that he came back this time because his wife had been seriously ill for a long time, and his mother urged him to come back to see her for the last time.The selfishness and ruthlessness that Nepalese men have formed in their special social background has become a traditional character, and she was able to understand it at this time. She took out the luggage and arranged them one by one, only to find that the room didn't even have a cabinet, except for a bed and a coffee table in the corner, which was empty.She had to fold the clothes and put them back in the box. Lie down, the strange smell on the bed is impressive.This kind of strong separation and loneliness shows that this is still impossible to be her home.The memory of home still stays in childhood.The slight fire of making tea in the black tent and the subtle sound of burning, accompanied by the whispers of the grandfather sitting on the mat, are my summary and imagination of all the warmth of the world in my childhood.A person's home can be dilapidated and poor, but it is absolutely worthless.She was standing at the door of the black tent, peeking at the whole world from the opened felt, not in a hurry to step in.Even in the face of her relatives leaving again and again, she can still hide in the fortress of her family quietly, as if they will come back.

After leaving that kind of home, I began to face ups and downs again and again.She was taken away and lived in the big tent of Rilang's house, Jian Sheng's and Xin He's house, and Ye Lan's house.school dormitory.Canaan's home in Beijing.home in Hong Kong.And here it is. These homes don't serve much purpose other than to stay and wait for the next departure. It is said that experience makes people strong and mature.However, in fact, people do not become strong and mature, but a kind of dullness and resignation.Behind this, people often become weaker and weaker.Deep down in my heart, I want more and more to have a place to stay and find a comfort.After all, since stepping into this grand world, everything has become a fact that cannot be changed.

There is no way back, so I have to choose to move forward. That night, she just felt tired.Without taking off his clothes, he fell asleep unconsciously while lying on the side of the bed.In the early morning, I was woken up by the cold, dragged out the quilt to cover my body, and continued to sleep. In the early morning of the next day, a woman who looked like an elder came to her room, knocked on the door, and said to her in Tibetan, girl, please get up. Kasang opened his eyes and saw a pure Tibetan face.The kind of purple that can only be left by the sunlight on the plateau will always be a mark of blood on the face.She guessed that this was Canaan's biological mother.

Feeling of the unknown (2) The woman looked at her with pity, said nothing, and walked in with a bowl of porridge, and put the bowl on the table in her room.Then she stood by the door and watched Kassan quietly get up from the bed and fold the quilt. Girl, Canaan's wife passed away, and the cremation is today.Please come along.Her calm tone seemed to be practiced by a relative who was about to go far away. In the early morning, the old city is shrouded in mist, and the country that has slept on the waist and shoulders of the Himalayas is gradually waking up.The shops on the street gradually opened their doors, and the shopkeepers slowly and leisurely cleaned the fronts repeatedly and sprinkled clean water on the ground.The former Brahmin monks in the temple opened the gate of the courtyard and held the lamp to light up the face of the god. The fog lifts.She was at the end of the crowd.The men carried stretchers, and the bodies on the stretchers, wrapped in yellow fabric, moved eerily along the Baghmadi River as if floating over the heads of the crowd.Kassan can’t remember how long you’ve been walking, there are already more and more people passing by on the street, motorcycles and tricycles slip past your legs without any risk.Some people seem to have just come to sleep on the street from their beds, lying on the stone steps like those stray dogs.There are men sitting in the shop chatting and drinking with nothing to do, and boys running in the alleys wearing fake Chinese-made sneakers, holding sandbags in their hands.The old woman sat cross-legged in front of the porch of her house, choosing vegetables, her posture as if she were chanting scriptures. People finally stopped in the open field in front of a temple.Kassan looked through the gap between the crowd and saw Canaan and the men in the family lower the stretcher and soak the corpse's feet in the river.Surrounded by crowds of people who don't care about the funeral, even relatives don't see anyone grieving.They just stood indifferently for a long time, and then they carried the body out and put it on a square stone platform piled with firewood by the river.Men in white clothes scoop water from the river to cleanse the face of the dead, and then place dry wood around. He lit the fire, and it burned fiercely.A puff of white smoke rose amidst the expressionless gazes of the crowd.The man in white held a long stick in his hand and kept poking it into the woodpile to stir it up. The flame wrapped the corpse and burned for a long time, as if simply boiling a pot of water. The funeral went on all morning.After the fire was extinguished, the pile of black charcoal was pushed away, only faint gray and white ashes scattered.The man in white put it in a container, wrapped it in a white cloth, and buried it in the river bed soil on the bank.Scoop up a ladle of water from the river and pour it on the stone platform, and the charcoal ash will be washed away quickly.Everything disappears. This is a traditional cremation in Nepal.Burn the bodies of the dead on the spot by the river in the downtown area. Except for the family, no one was watching.On the other side of the river, there are still some tourists stopping by, holding their cameras to take pictures and videos here.All of them are equipped with high-end and professional outdoor equipment, and with all kinds of faces and languages, one can tell at a glance that they are in a different world from the people here. They were brought here with backpacks and visas, and were brought here by a plane ticket. Because they had never tasted poverty and backwardness in their own shoes, they were envious and admirable for all the novelties here. People say that this is the pure land of Buddhism, the cornucopia of world heritage on the subcontinent, the holy land closest to heaven in the mortal world, a red lotus at the foot of the Himalayas, a swimming port that transcends the maze, it has a variety of styles, it returns to the original... …So many people came here from all over the world to worship and take pictures in the temple, salivate in front of the beautiful and hard-working Nepalese women, and watch the people solemnly use the polluted water in the holy river to purify the water from the shore. I eat Italian food in restaurants, buy souvenirs in shops, and take pictures at cremation ceremonies.After I went back, I posted on a travel forum that Kathmandu was crowded and dirty, please pay attention to hygiene when eating pilaf, they usually don’t give you change when you buy small things, and you have to bargain hard when buying souvenirs... Then I prepared another A visa and an air ticket to fly to another paradise on earth... This is the contempt of the rich over the poor.After getting tired of the sophistication of the city you live in, the poverty and misfortune of another world can become a landscape, but it is only used to adjust your mood and increase your experience.People think that the people in the Buddhist kingdom are all enlightened people of Zen. Most of them are in poverty and misfortune. The highest state - and indeed a supreme state.Because apart from accepting and waiting for the moment of life, they have no other mentality to match such a poor and helpless existence. Therefore, even in the face of death, they can only respond with extraordinary indifference and calmness.Just like the water of the holy river, wrapped in a pile of ashes, wrapped in waste water full of bacteria, wrapped in imaginary sacred cleanliness, flowing silently. The market behind him was still noisy and the sun was shining. This morning brought her infinitely closer to the hometown in her memory.The peaceful land is now on the other side of the mountain.She could even smell the mix of soil, cow dung, and weeds in the wilderness. What she couldn't believe was that the serious illness and death of this dead wife, whom she had never met, had no impact on Canaan's life outside and business.And this is not due to religious consciousness's great desire for life and death, but it is obviously a kind of disregard and disdain. After the funeral was over, she followed the scattered family members back to the house.Walked to her room alone, just sat down, Canaan walked in and said to her, pack your things, follow me, come here. Canaan led her to go against the crowd all the way, through several streets, passing by many temples and halls, and walked to another urban area of ​​Kathmandu.Concrete roads, old wooden houses and low concrete buildings along the street, numerous shops and small shops, with many products but repeated. He took her to a restaurant and said, this is a western restaurant run by my brother, and the hotel is upstairs.Don't live at home anymore, and help here in the future. what do you want me for Feeling of the unknown (3) My dead wife used to work here and you need to replace her. Canaan, I'm not here to work.I am pregnant with your child.I come to marry you. Kasan, you have to know that in Nepal, there has never been a woman who can eat without working. The woman in the red sari standing next to Canaan stepped forward, said a series of words to Kassan quickly, and then dragged her upstairs. She heard Canaan throw a sentence behind her, this is my brother's wife, you will listen to her from now on. In her impression, after this sentence, she has not heard Chinese for a long time.Because Canaan seemed to have evaporated after that, and did not appear for a long time.And she was left in this hotel, working at the lowest level.The child in her womb seemed to be a salary paid by Canaan, and she did not receive any remuneration. I lived in a small room at the upper corner of a small hotel, a room less than two meters square, with only a very narrow bed and a small table beside the bed.There are only four people running the entire western restaurant and hotel, including Kassan himself.Too busy to be tired.She manages the keys and does the housekeeping, washing the sheets and cleaning the room.And when it was time to eat, there were not enough helpers in the kitchen of the restaurant, so she would be called down to help. During that time, she only felt that she had worked a hundred times harder than living in Rilang's house when she was a child.Sometimes I just can't imagine why I became a free labor force of the Canaan family in such a bizarre way.When she was four months pregnant, she was still choosing vegetables, chopping onions, peeling potatoes, and making curry ingredients in the damp and messy kitchen. She was too busy to stop for a moment.There was no water in the kitchen, so I was ordered to fetch water from the river; when there were not enough dishes, I was ordered to wash the dishes.There are too few people here, and Nepalese men have the habit of procrastinating in doing things, so sometimes when encountering impatient customers, they will wait impatiently and go directly to the kitchen to ask questions. She has no source of income.The only thing left was the child support left to her by Jian Sheng and Xin He.Nature is reluctant to spend.After eating for a long time every day, there are fewer customers, so I can solve light meals in the kitchen by myself, but because of morning sickness and fatigue, I can hardly eat anything.I was nauseated and dizzy from hunger.In the middle of the night and early morning, she finally fell asleep, but the late guest forgot to take the key, knocked on her room and woke her up from the bed to open the door. She went to ask Canaan's brother where Canaan had gone, but he said he didn't know, because he didn't care about Canaan's business at all.She asked for wages, but Canaan's younger brother told her contradictoryly that this was a business run by his own family, and the reason why he didn't invite outsiders was because the insiders didn't need to pay for their help and could earn some money. When she asked again, the man impatiently pretended that he could no longer understand English. Kasang was helpless, so he walked back to Canaan's house, found his mother, and asked about Canaan's whereabouts.When the woman saw her, she felt pity, and told her that Canaan never returned home for more than a month.He goes to business and sometimes doesn't come back for years.Women who were not born in Nepal will feel that life is difficult and humble when they marry here, and they cannot adapt.But after a long time, you can bear it and get used to it.This is a longstanding tradition.You and I are the same. He hasn't married me yet.Kassan couldn't help sobbing. The mother said, you have to wait, girl.He will come back to marry you, maybe it's just a busy schedule that delays it.But you have to know, girl, even if a man marries you, your humble status and life theme will still not change...For hundreds of years, women have been doing housework, bearing children, farming and growing vegetables, and serving their husbands...Don't you Still don't understand, girl, the place you came to is Nepal.not elsewhere. Summer is approaching and the rainy season is here.The political situation began to be turbulent again, and more and more soldiers patrolled the streets with live ammunition.Dengue fever epidemic.waterlogging. Hot, humid air filled every void.During the day, I was so busy that I was sweating, and I was so tired that I just wanted to sleep well at night, but at night, because of the sweltering heat and irritability, I couldn't fall asleep for a long time, and my head was full of cold sweat. When I was tired but tossing and turning in bed, I only felt such pain, as if I had never experienced it before.She lost her parents in the past, and she was dependent on others, but she never felt that she was a poor child.Because that is just a kind of lonely and resolute doomed by life, so I can face it indifferently. But now this kind of toil that would crush her bones made her feel hopeless for the first time.She wondered if she wanted to be here, give birth to a child, and then work hard all her life, until she was burned to ashes and thrown into the river, and there was no sign of Canaan. It was when she was six months pregnant that Canaan came back suddenly.When he came to the hotel, he saw Kassan busy in the dark and hot kitchen.Stomach puffed out, the skin on his face was greasy and shiny due to dripping sweat, his hair was in a tangle of irritability, his clothes were soaked, his temples were stained with crumbs of vegetables, he was walking around the kitchen with dirty dishes, he was so tired that even his eyelids Too lazy to lift.She looks like a peasant woman who went to the city to make a living.This bloated body, as well as the slovenliness and exhaustion on her face left by months of hard work, are in cruel contrast with the beautiful girl who was studying in Beijing before. His own mind was not going well, and seeing Kassan become haggard this time, he didn't have the slightest pity in his heart, but he felt disgust.Standing on the side smoking, not speaking.Did not call her.Until Kassan inadvertently turned around and faced his figure. canaan.She whispered to him. However, the expression on the man's face was gloomy and irritable, as if frosted.She felt aggrieved, and also had an unspeakable obscure mood. She really didn't know that when he went to the Bank of Communications this trip, his fortune took a turn for the worse. The antiques smuggled by his partner were seized by the customs, he lost a lot of money, and was almost arrested.At the critical moment, a mistress in the past took the opportunity of helping him escape to blackmail him, making him even more angry.After this unsatisfactory incident, he returned home with a cold and irritable expression on his face.He had been drunk and messed around at home for a week before going to the hotel to meet Kassan. She said, why did it take you so long to come back... Canaan's face was gloomy and he didn't respond to her.Put your head down and smoke.After a while, he said, you make people gossip with your belly up like this.I will marry you in a few days.Don't you want to get married?