A birth in the family

A short story

Maya Keshari Tuladhar was born with mischievous eyes and a precocious smile. She emanated such airs that all her visiting relatives unwittingly placed that  little extra money on her forehead as they filed by the bed where her mother Tara Keshari collected each offering with a grateful nod and a shy, exhausted smile.

Keshar Ratna Tuladhar, Tara's beak-nosed father, stood by the bed and greeted every well wisher with a curt namastay and a nod. "Maiya will become Kathmandu's biggest scholar," he declaimed  to everyone's surprise, while his young son eyeing the  growing stack of rupees stammered  self-consciously, offering to pay for her schooling. The boy's wife peered from behind, spellbound by the child's wry pouts that—she felt—portended a troublemaker; but she bit her grin and resolved to help raise Maiya as her own. And throughout that evening, the visitors offered extravagant sums of money, transfixed by the child's smile and by her knowing, mischievous eyes. Only her grandmother Roop Sova frowned upon the ceremony. She still mourned her three teenaged daughters who had once shared the family's one-room shack in Chetrapati and who had succumbed to tuberculosis in the distant past. Those had been lean, debt-ridden years, willed through without any assistance from Keshar Ratna, yet Roop Sova still blamed herself for failing her babies. Yes, only Tara had survived, but look at how she had flouted all decorum and disgraced the memory of her sisters. "I can tell," she fumed, "the child will turn into a good-for-nothing. What else can one expect of mixed blood?" Just then, little Maiya shrieked so malevolently that Roop Sova forgot her own name for a week and had to rely on her daughter-in-law to assist her.