Monsoon pours and floods, colors the streets pale with diluted dogshit and rusty with plain shit burned by the sun. When sewers that have crusted over in July's infernal heat take too long to soften their black sludge with monsoon's first wetness, they float upwards, their muck sucked up to mingle with the rainwater. Skies change colors from one gray to another gray and rain hits green leaves of thirsty maize and make nights bearable. So the monsoon comes, but the whistle of the garbage collector doesn't come anymore. The world smells not of new rain but old rot, but there is rain, it washes and cools, so all is alright.
Rain drowns the haze in the valley's bowl and clears the sight to distant mountains. The new green is oppressively verdant, too well blended into different shades of green, standing each weed tall and dark, shaking each leaf supple and clean. It does bring a smile to my face. I walk towards the bus-stop, not minding the puddle, the endless sludge shoveled into the street from the sewers my men whose heads are barely visible, and stop dead near a pile of garbage. I stand there and smile and startle passersby, who give me frowned, quizzical look before walking on, shaking their heads. The foreman chatting with men in the sewer–who, in their turn, can only talk in grunts best timed with the throw of the shovel–stops mid-sentence, sagely draws on a cigarette, exhales his thoughts in my direction. Habitually incapable of not remaining reflexive in moments like this, when even the stance belies the buoyant enlightenment frothing within, I stare for a minute more at the small instance of unexpected beauty that has captured me:
There, in a pile of unclaimed garbage, is an event made possible by a long-standing political stale-mate and the tardiness of nature. Because no body has collected the bags of mango pits, and because it has rained and shined just enough, there are mangoes sprouting all over the heap of rubbish. Not green yet, not taken roots yet, these plants are a dark brown, like blood concentrated into a paste and smeared for dramatic effect. Three large brown leaves are collecting the sunlight needed to push forth three more leaves, at the moment the tiniest spikes at the apex of the shoots. It is a forest of mangoes on a rubbish heap. Tomorrow, politicians will agree temporarily to allow the roads of Kathmandu to be cleared, but today there is a new grove of mangoes on each turn of the road, each collection of our detritus. I remember again Calvino's essay about garbage disposal in Paris and wonder if he had ever imagined a scenario like this: could that fabulist imagine a temporary forest, a black forest of infants that searched with a single, naked root a route to permanence and fixture?
I pick one up, and another: they have a thick carpet of newspaper hiding the pits.
The shoots have probed their way out of a bed of wet pulp, unleashing the calories stored in their hearts, then unfurled the broad leaves to receive the nurture that rains down from the skies. I admire the penile probe and vulnerability of a root that has nothing but a discarded plastic bottle-top to grip. The plants are extremely fragile, more so for their defiance of traps set by Kathmandu politics and urban planning. When I walk with two saplings picked from garbage heaps, still training their tails of shiny plastic foil and wet newspaper, people stop their conversations.
I am still carrying the plants while waiting for the bus at Dhumbarahi. The trouble with surprising oneself with a gesture like that after a half-hour or so, it begs conclusion, resolution, pay-off. What comes from the garbage heap, I suppose, ought to go back to another garbage heap, but these are living things, and it is unkind to just toss them into the trash. I carefully put them down by the swamp lining Chakrapath when I realize there is just one face that smiles at me in the crowd waiting for bus.
I am trying these days to grow a beard, to tend to it, carefully count and save the few gray and pale hairs in the lot, upturn the tip of moustache and appoint the chin-hair to a fine position between clownish and dignified. The man who smiles at me has a beard I will have to wait another six months for: it is scraggly just the right way, hanging lush from the chin, wisped under cheekbones, neatly separated over the upper lip and correctly pointed. He must live there, because he wears no shoes, ties his shirt crudely on his chest, has fingernails thicker than I have toenails, and smiles at everything about which others try hard to look disinterested. It is difficult to tell if he is happy, because he shows no other expression on his face except a series of smiles. He nods at the mango saplings and grins again. He must approve of the gesture.
People rush about him to get into the bus. He shifts just a little in the wet sand and continues looking at everything that passes him by. A mother starts fighting with a khalasi for asking her to show her son's identity card even though he is in uniform and no more than eleven years of age. "What do you think a child this age does if not go to school?" she asks. "Some children don't go to school," coolly says the not-much-older khalasi and that reduces her to angry under-breath mutterings. She searches for faces that have witnessed the exchange and perhaps sympathize with her. She looks at me, I look at the bearded man. She looks at the bearded man, who smiles at her, nods, yes, yes. He looks at me and nods, yes, yes. He looks at the khalasi and nods, yes, yes. His thick, yellow, gleaming nails daintily scratch under his chin, along the nose. He doesn't stop smiling, buries his head between the knees briefly to smile at his toes and looks up again, smiles at everyone and everything that watches him.
The mother looks at me. She is defeated: she paid twenty rupees instead of fifteen because the khalasi came back with a stringing repartee. She paid an unfair price because I didn't shake my head in disapproval of what the khalasi had done. Instead, I deferred judgment to the bearded man, who showed a gracious equanimity and pointed so something bigger than the five-rupee differential. Now he points to the two mango saplings by the ditch and points to me and smiles. I can't help but grin. Yes, I nod, yes, yes. The mother can't bear anymore of this. "Strange," she shakes her head. "Strange," and walks away.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
What did I find today?
I was walking towards Samakhusi Chowk when something in a pile of garbage caught my eye: a young sapling of mango. Three dark leaves on a stalk, three more in their tiniest, greenest potency.
If the strike by the Maoists were not ongoing, if garbage were being collected daily, and if it hadn't been raining, the garbage heaps wouldn't be so dotted with new mango plants.
Next time you walk past a pile of garbage, try to find these plants. It is more than likely you'll find some.
If the strike by the Maoists were not ongoing, if garbage were being collected daily, and if it hadn't been raining, the garbage heaps wouldn't be so dotted with new mango plants.
Next time you walk past a pile of garbage, try to find these plants. It is more than likely you'll find some.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Rain!
Finally, it is raining. Although we missed out on the furious, thunderous, murderous rains of June and July, I think August is going to bring the kind of steady drizzle that sustains life in this part of the world.
It started raining around 2 AM last night, and it is still raining now, eight hours later. I hope more rain comes, lasts for five-six days. There are more and more stories about how farmers have been forced to pump ground-water to irrigate their paddies. This means the poor farmer who has to rely entirely upon rain [sky-water, as they call it in Nepali] for his subsistence-crop will suffer disproportionately: there is no ground water under his dry, rocky fields; he has no money for additional infrastructure, .
It started raining around 2 AM last night, and it is still raining now, eight hours later. I hope more rain comes, lasts for five-six days. There are more and more stories about how farmers have been forced to pump ground-water to irrigate their paddies. This means the poor farmer who has to rely entirely upon rain [sky-water, as they call it in Nepali] for his subsistence-crop will suffer disproportionately: there is no ground water under his dry, rocky fields; he has no money for additional infrastructure, .
Friday, July 24, 2009
Wonderment
This is a dry monsoon. Menopausal women can't walk too far before they consider returning homeward, but abandon that thought too, as their grandchildren race ahead to meet their friends. It is a small patch of grass where someone should have built a house long ago: the plot is divided, marked, mapped into rooms and passages. But this is a big city, and no doubt the wheel of fortune became for some an oil-press and chewed them up. Their detritus is perhaps this square of open space in our concrete jungle. I am dragging a pair of chappals around its perimeter. Grandmothers wiggle their fingers out from damp fists of toddlers and kids and sigh.
On the eastern front sit a row of young men, reeking perpetually of marijuana, staring at the children and women with thick red veins in their eyes, talking too loudly, shouting obscenities at each other. Nobody knows these men by their names here. Soon, one of these days, neighbors will descend upon them with rods and bricks and chase them away, but in a week or two, another crop of young men will take over the patch of green. They trickle away after dark, ambush people near Ranibari for mobile phones and cash, sometimes climb over the walls to steal a water pump or bathroom fixtures and door handles. But, for now, they josh, they kick each other around in the dirt, smoke.
Further ahead along the perimeter, young mothers walk with infants and toddlers. One pregnant woman walks with her friend who smokes a cigarette. The friend drags along a three year old who wants a lollipop in another kid's hand. The kid's mother pulls, rudely lifts the kid by one arm and swings him three paces forward, sets him down on his knees. “Walk,” she says, “Walk of I'll drown you in the paddy field.” The pregnant woman pauses to look at the said paddy, just off the edge of the neighborhood. Fruits hang from lime and persimmon and grapefruit trees, and another tree that is more laden than others, so full are its fruits along the length of its slender branches that it recalls all seasons past and future: the riotous sight it must be while in full bloom, and the satiation it must bring with its ripe colors and smell, sweet taste.
“Do you know what fruit these are?” An old man asks me because, of all the people passing him, I look him in the eyes and smile. I am seeing blossom and fruit on the wonderment on his face. “This is not persimmon, not pear, nor peach or plum,” he says. “Do you think this is apple?” he asks. “No, I don't think so.” I remember green apple growing wild around a small town in Washington, so many different varieties planted just for a few weeks of blossoms every year. “Not apple, I don't think.”
“So you don't know?” he asks, although he doesn't seem very disappointed by my ignorance. No, I don't know. “It is not apple?” he asks himself. “But look how rich it is, how much of it! How green and healthy it looks!” A young girl comes out of a lavatory hidden by the fruit tree. When I turn back from the edge of another grid of roads ready to be boxed in by houses, the old man is still looking at the tree full of fruits. It seems strange to me that he and I are the only two people seemingly touched by the fruits and their potency as promises.
A boy runs into me, slamming his face into my sternum: he has eyes only for his purple kite. I grab and lift him off the ground, make sure he isn't in pain. He is embarrassed: he must be ten years old, just of age that he feels indestructible, capable of flight of every sort. “This kite never flies where I want it to,” he says. “What bullshit you talk, boy,” I say, “Why don't you just admit you don't know how to fly kites?” He grins. Behind him, sitting outside the gate of their single-storey house, a lady who looks like his grandmother bounces a toddler on her knees. The toddler has a lollypop, which it sucks, spits on, holds out to the kite-running brother. The kite-runner leaps and leans forward, offering a tongue on which the toddler swipes the lollypop. Although the kite-runner returns to his kite, he races back to the lollypop and offers his tongue again, and when the toddler swipes the lollypop on it, cunningly bites down on the stem, snatches the lollypop away.
For a second or two, the toddler giggles and claps at the brother's cleverness, but the ruse becomes transparent to the infant mind and the waterworks and wails start in full force. “Bring it back,” says Grandmother, “Give it back!” The kite runner returns to the crying toddler, but instead of handing back the lollypop, starts wailing at the baby, feigning great pain, crying right back, confusing all greed right out of the toddler. It is a trick I have never witnessed before. It is almost political in its genius, praiseworthy. The toddler stops crying, starts slapping the brother's face with small hands, almost in affection. The brother has changed into the court jester, and he can no longer be blamed. The jester leaps in the air, lollypop still in mouth, and tries to flick the purple kite back into the tepid sky.
Back at the perimeter of the patch of green, a boy dribbles a football behind his elder sister. He talks in hushed tones. “Those boys are the Taichin gang,” he says. “They have killed seven people. I heard. They are drug-addicts, tyabeys.” I am tempted to ask the boy if he isn't confusing something he watched on the television with the reality of street gangs around him. Seven murders by a gang of boys slapping on marijuana buds in the evening to get a cheap high? But I don't know enough about street gangs around my neighborhood, with their cryptic, slyly obscene graffiti like “The beauty of Originality is in the O” sprayed on walls. The boy keeps turning towards a the gate of a house we have just passed, so I turn to look.
Landlord watches intently as Painter works on the wrought iron design on the gate painted black: he is applying gold to the relief. Not gold paint, but gold leaf. Real gold, actual gold, the kind for which mines and dug and wars are fought, on the gates of an ugly house. I sit down by the street, not because it is something I routinely do, but because it is something I don't routinely see: gold leaf being applied to the gates of a house in Gongabu. I want this gate to be tagged next, I think, preferably with an obscenity easily translated into Nepali. This gold is astonishing to me, after seeing in the mind of an aged man the promised gold of a tree bowing with an unknown fruit, after witnessing the gold of the political skill of a boy with a purple kite. Landlord watches me suspiciously, but he has to pay attention to the leaf of gold in Painter's hand, lest he sneak the evening's raksi's worth under the nails on his toiling hands. Gold, actual gold, on the outer gates of an ugly building in Gongabu! The wonders we get to witness daily!
On the eastern front sit a row of young men, reeking perpetually of marijuana, staring at the children and women with thick red veins in their eyes, talking too loudly, shouting obscenities at each other. Nobody knows these men by their names here. Soon, one of these days, neighbors will descend upon them with rods and bricks and chase them away, but in a week or two, another crop of young men will take over the patch of green. They trickle away after dark, ambush people near Ranibari for mobile phones and cash, sometimes climb over the walls to steal a water pump or bathroom fixtures and door handles. But, for now, they josh, they kick each other around in the dirt, smoke.
Further ahead along the perimeter, young mothers walk with infants and toddlers. One pregnant woman walks with her friend who smokes a cigarette. The friend drags along a three year old who wants a lollipop in another kid's hand. The kid's mother pulls, rudely lifts the kid by one arm and swings him three paces forward, sets him down on his knees. “Walk,” she says, “Walk of I'll drown you in the paddy field.” The pregnant woman pauses to look at the said paddy, just off the edge of the neighborhood. Fruits hang from lime and persimmon and grapefruit trees, and another tree that is more laden than others, so full are its fruits along the length of its slender branches that it recalls all seasons past and future: the riotous sight it must be while in full bloom, and the satiation it must bring with its ripe colors and smell, sweet taste.
“Do you know what fruit these are?” An old man asks me because, of all the people passing him, I look him in the eyes and smile. I am seeing blossom and fruit on the wonderment on his face. “This is not persimmon, not pear, nor peach or plum,” he says. “Do you think this is apple?” he asks. “No, I don't think so.” I remember green apple growing wild around a small town in Washington, so many different varieties planted just for a few weeks of blossoms every year. “Not apple, I don't think.”
“So you don't know?” he asks, although he doesn't seem very disappointed by my ignorance. No, I don't know. “It is not apple?” he asks himself. “But look how rich it is, how much of it! How green and healthy it looks!” A young girl comes out of a lavatory hidden by the fruit tree. When I turn back from the edge of another grid of roads ready to be boxed in by houses, the old man is still looking at the tree full of fruits. It seems strange to me that he and I are the only two people seemingly touched by the fruits and their potency as promises.
A boy runs into me, slamming his face into my sternum: he has eyes only for his purple kite. I grab and lift him off the ground, make sure he isn't in pain. He is embarrassed: he must be ten years old, just of age that he feels indestructible, capable of flight of every sort. “This kite never flies where I want it to,” he says. “What bullshit you talk, boy,” I say, “Why don't you just admit you don't know how to fly kites?” He grins. Behind him, sitting outside the gate of their single-storey house, a lady who looks like his grandmother bounces a toddler on her knees. The toddler has a lollypop, which it sucks, spits on, holds out to the kite-running brother. The kite-runner leaps and leans forward, offering a tongue on which the toddler swipes the lollypop. Although the kite-runner returns to his kite, he races back to the lollypop and offers his tongue again, and when the toddler swipes the lollypop on it, cunningly bites down on the stem, snatches the lollypop away.
For a second or two, the toddler giggles and claps at the brother's cleverness, but the ruse becomes transparent to the infant mind and the waterworks and wails start in full force. “Bring it back,” says Grandmother, “Give it back!” The kite runner returns to the crying toddler, but instead of handing back the lollypop, starts wailing at the baby, feigning great pain, crying right back, confusing all greed right out of the toddler. It is a trick I have never witnessed before. It is almost political in its genius, praiseworthy. The toddler stops crying, starts slapping the brother's face with small hands, almost in affection. The brother has changed into the court jester, and he can no longer be blamed. The jester leaps in the air, lollypop still in mouth, and tries to flick the purple kite back into the tepid sky.
Back at the perimeter of the patch of green, a boy dribbles a football behind his elder sister. He talks in hushed tones. “Those boys are the Taichin gang,” he says. “They have killed seven people. I heard. They are drug-addicts, tyabeys.” I am tempted to ask the boy if he isn't confusing something he watched on the television with the reality of street gangs around him. Seven murders by a gang of boys slapping on marijuana buds in the evening to get a cheap high? But I don't know enough about street gangs around my neighborhood, with their cryptic, slyly obscene graffiti like “The beauty of Originality is in the O” sprayed on walls. The boy keeps turning towards a the gate of a house we have just passed, so I turn to look.
Landlord watches intently as Painter works on the wrought iron design on the gate painted black: he is applying gold to the relief. Not gold paint, but gold leaf. Real gold, actual gold, the kind for which mines and dug and wars are fought, on the gates of an ugly house. I sit down by the street, not because it is something I routinely do, but because it is something I don't routinely see: gold leaf being applied to the gates of a house in Gongabu. I want this gate to be tagged next, I think, preferably with an obscenity easily translated into Nepali. This gold is astonishing to me, after seeing in the mind of an aged man the promised gold of a tree bowing with an unknown fruit, after witnessing the gold of the political skill of a boy with a purple kite. Landlord watches me suspiciously, but he has to pay attention to the leaf of gold in Painter's hand, lest he sneak the evening's raksi's worth under the nails on his toiling hands. Gold, actual gold, on the outer gates of an ugly building in Gongabu! The wonders we get to witness daily!
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Gurkha Riot Police in Singapore
The "Singapore Lahure" isn't your typical Lahure: if in the Queen's employ, he isn't a Singapore Lahure at all, and if in the employ of the Government of Singapore, he is in the police, not in the army.
How much does the impressions of one person affect the fate of thousands? A lot, needless to say. But, rarely do we get to point to specific moments in history when an incident indelibly impressed a person, who went on to institute something that created a new identity for a whole group of people. Case in point: the Singapore Lahure.
My nephew, in his quotidian quest for scrap paper, managed to dig out a copy of TIME magazine, [September 21, 1998], titled "Starr Report," all about Clinton's sexcapade.
In it is an excerpt from "The Singapore Story," memoir by Lee Kuan Yew, in which a young Lee, watching defeated Allied soldiers being marched back into Singapore by their Japanese victors, writes:
"While this platoon was camping in [our] house, British, Indian and Australian forces were marched to captivity... Many looked dejected and despondent, perplexed that they had been beaten so decisively and so easily. The surrendered army was a mournful sight.
"There were some who won my respect and admiration. Among them were the Highlanders whom I recognized by their Scottish caps. Even in defeat they held themselves erect and marched in time--"Left Right, Left Right, Left, Left!" shouted the sergeant major. And the Gurkhas were like the Highlanders. They too marched erect, unbroken and doughty in defeat. I secretly cheered them on. They left a life-long impression on me. As a result, the Singapore government has employed a Gurkha company for its anti-riot police squad from the 1960s to this day."
How much does the impressions of one person affect the fate of thousands? A lot, needless to say. But, rarely do we get to point to specific moments in history when an incident indelibly impressed a person, who went on to institute something that created a new identity for a whole group of people. Case in point: the Singapore Lahure.
My nephew, in his quotidian quest for scrap paper, managed to dig out a copy of TIME magazine, [September 21, 1998], titled "Starr Report," all about Clinton's sexcapade.
In it is an excerpt from "The Singapore Story," memoir by Lee Kuan Yew, in which a young Lee, watching defeated Allied soldiers being marched back into Singapore by their Japanese victors, writes:
"While this platoon was camping in [our] house, British, Indian and Australian forces were marched to captivity... Many looked dejected and despondent, perplexed that they had been beaten so decisively and so easily. The surrendered army was a mournful sight.
"There were some who won my respect and admiration. Among them were the Highlanders whom I recognized by their Scottish caps. Even in defeat they held themselves erect and marched in time--"Left Right, Left Right, Left, Left!" shouted the sergeant major. And the Gurkhas were like the Highlanders. They too marched erect, unbroken and doughty in defeat. I secretly cheered them on. They left a life-long impression on me. As a result, the Singapore government has employed a Gurkha company for its anti-riot police squad from the 1960s to this day."
Friday, July 17, 2009
Chepangni
so, here's the weekly essay.
i am getting tardy as a writer. i have assignments, i have deadlines, i am pretty much empty inside. it feels like i have lost sight of why i should write, even to earn that small wage.
in any case, here's another terribly written piece:
-----
Chepangni
“Does she look like a Chepangni? Does she?” Her husband asks. Chepangni leans against the still damp mud plaster, bright from the morning's wash of red clay. No, she doesn't look like a Chepangni. “She doesn't look like a Chepangni. What does she look like?”
Theuwataar is at the other side of a trail-bridge across the Trishuli river. At the very mouth of the bridge is a small tea and raksi shop with a bench on the Trishuli side. But, because I threw my chappals against the wall and sat, everybody is sitting on the floor: Chepangni, her husband the Chepang, Grandma, Lahure. Timo hovers around the edges, teasing a child, making her repeat her name. The two girls are in kindergarten and know how to say 'Morning!
“She doesn't look like a Chepangni,” I say, and mumble to my drink, “You are right. She doesn't look like a Chepangni.” Lahure begins to laugh, an interminable series of hiccups paced to allow a sip here, a smoke there. Chepang picks up a slimy, tart piece of gava and drops it into his mouth. Chepangni takes a cigarette and asks her husband for a light. Lahure is amused by the mild embarrassment that is spreading over my face. “She looks like a Bahuni, doesn't she?” Chepang slaps his thigh, shuffles on the balls of his feet to add emphasis. “Sir is probably thinking how did this ugly Chepang get such a pretty Bahuni wife,” he looks at his wife, who giggles back, haloes him with her flavored breath, mingling this and the other. Lahure continues his choked giggle.
“Does she look like a woman who has given birth to twelve children?” Chepang is very proud of his wife. His smile widens to reveal two more upper-molars. He swings his head back and finishes the raksi in his glass and instinctively reaches for the bottle that is empty by now, the second hour of our conversation. Chepangni smiles at her husband again, reaching her glass to the bottle in his hand. They discover together the small disappointment of a bottle without its gift of mild, sweet millet raksi. Lahure hands Chepangni the two bottles already empty. There is another round of disappointed laughter. Lahrue asks his daughter-in-law for another bottle.
“Twelve children?” It is hard to believe. There are a few lines around her eyes, but she couldn't be more than forty-five years old. “Four sons and four daughters,” Chepangni says. “Four died.” So easily said. Four died. Boys? Girls? No matter. Four. Dead. Eight survive; three work across the bridge, bring home eleven thousand rupees every month.
“So you are a Bahuni?” I ask Chepangni. “No,” she says, “What Chepangni, what Bahuni.”
“Ask her to speak the Chepang tongue,” Lahure says. “Such a pretty Bahuni she was when she was younger, but she knew only Chepang.”
“My father is a Bhatta Chhettri from Baglung. My mother was a Chepangni. He took her home. But these were the old days, you know how it was between castes. Somebody told my mother that Bahun-Chhetri let their Magar-Chepang wives sleep in the granary. But when they get sick or too old to work, they are put out in the jungle, in a cave hours away, to die on their own. She didn't believe that, of course, because her husband loved her. But when I was born, she waited for her mother-in-law to name me on the eleventh day. Nothing. Twelfth day, nothing, thirteenth day, nothing.
“There was another Chepang in that village. My mother and he were the only two Chepangs in the village of Bahun-Chhetri folks, and they were both orphans. So she went to him on the fourteenth day and said—Why aren't they naming my daughter? That's when the other Chepang asked her if she would leave the village and elope to a place where Chepangs lived. Can you imagine? From Baglung, they came here. My Chepang father died just a month ago.
“I hear my father has four sons, and is a rich man now. I heard he has a gairikhet that takes sixteen pairs of oxen. It may be that I have never seen his face, but he is still my father, and he is still alive. I want to go back and tell him I am his daughter. I don't believe he doesn't know I am here. Don't you think? These days even the law says I am entitled to his property.”
“You shouldn't be greedy,” Lahure says. Chepang adds without looking at his wife, “It is no good to live in hope. Expectations are no good, they only create trouble.”
“I didn't know that story!” Lahure exclaims suddenly agitated. “Nobody ever told me that story! I always wondered—the father is Chepang, the mother is Chepang. How did this bhauju have a Bahuni daughter? But I was always too polite to ask.” He starts laughing again. “But, now it doesn't seem at all strange. My father and mother were both Darai, but this Bhauju's mother was Chepang. Doesn't she look all Magar and none Chepang?” Grandma, our picture of silence, smiles just a little, looks at the finger of raksi remaining in her glass. She too was orphaned very young, without any memory of her father or mother.
“I was surprised,” I say. “I knew we were coming to a Chepang village. Had no idea there are Darais living here.” There were Bahuns, Chhetris, Gurungs, a Sarki family. Just no Rais and no Damais, they kept telling me. Over an afternoon of stories about migration and famine, fighting the Pakistanis and not getting to fight the Chinese, the most consistent color was that of mingling, mixing of bloods, each person sharply confused about their lineage, but muddled and assured about who they were. Chepangni, a Chhetri's daughter from a Chepang woman, had been called a Bahuni all her life in the Darai Magar-Chepang village. Now she smiled, accentuating her Bahuni features, smiling down her sharp nose and large eyes. Later in the day, some friends showed a photograph of an old Kandel Chhetri man, proudly flashing his strings of rudrakshya and tulsi rosaries and a vertical smear of sandalwood paste, who looked very much Chepang around the eyes and nose and the too, too bare strands of hair clinging to a round chin. I realized how vacuous and redundant my trained “sensitivity” became at the face of such a dynamic confusion of identities. These families had existed in harmony, nourishing and exploiting each other, looting and feeding each other, for centuries. Now we ask the Chepangni why she looks so much like a Bahuni, and that is alright.
“But, I am his daughter,” Chepangni is still speaking, her eyes searching the brown torrents of an over-brimming Trishuli. “He loved my mother. I was fourteen days old when my mother left the village. I don't believe he will be unhappy to see me. I am his firstborn. I must look like him, because I look nothing like my mother. I want to see his face once before he dies. He is my father, after all.”
i am getting tardy as a writer. i have assignments, i have deadlines, i am pretty much empty inside. it feels like i have lost sight of why i should write, even to earn that small wage.
in any case, here's another terribly written piece:
-----
Chepangni
“Does she look like a Chepangni? Does she?” Her husband asks. Chepangni leans against the still damp mud plaster, bright from the morning's wash of red clay. No, she doesn't look like a Chepangni. “She doesn't look like a Chepangni. What does she look like?”
Theuwataar is at the other side of a trail-bridge across the Trishuli river. At the very mouth of the bridge is a small tea and raksi shop with a bench on the Trishuli side. But, because I threw my chappals against the wall and sat, everybody is sitting on the floor: Chepangni, her husband the Chepang, Grandma, Lahure. Timo hovers around the edges, teasing a child, making her repeat her name. The two girls are in kindergarten and know how to say 'Morning!
“She doesn't look like a Chepangni,” I say, and mumble to my drink, “You are right. She doesn't look like a Chepangni.” Lahure begins to laugh, an interminable series of hiccups paced to allow a sip here, a smoke there. Chepang picks up a slimy, tart piece of gava and drops it into his mouth. Chepangni takes a cigarette and asks her husband for a light. Lahure is amused by the mild embarrassment that is spreading over my face. “She looks like a Bahuni, doesn't she?” Chepang slaps his thigh, shuffles on the balls of his feet to add emphasis. “Sir is probably thinking how did this ugly Chepang get such a pretty Bahuni wife,” he looks at his wife, who giggles back, haloes him with her flavored breath, mingling this and the other. Lahure continues his choked giggle.
“Does she look like a woman who has given birth to twelve children?” Chepang is very proud of his wife. His smile widens to reveal two more upper-molars. He swings his head back and finishes the raksi in his glass and instinctively reaches for the bottle that is empty by now, the second hour of our conversation. Chepangni smiles at her husband again, reaching her glass to the bottle in his hand. They discover together the small disappointment of a bottle without its gift of mild, sweet millet raksi. Lahure hands Chepangni the two bottles already empty. There is another round of disappointed laughter. Lahrue asks his daughter-in-law for another bottle.
“Twelve children?” It is hard to believe. There are a few lines around her eyes, but she couldn't be more than forty-five years old. “Four sons and four daughters,” Chepangni says. “Four died.” So easily said. Four died. Boys? Girls? No matter. Four. Dead. Eight survive; three work across the bridge, bring home eleven thousand rupees every month.
“So you are a Bahuni?” I ask Chepangni. “No,” she says, “What Chepangni, what Bahuni.”
“Ask her to speak the Chepang tongue,” Lahure says. “Such a pretty Bahuni she was when she was younger, but she knew only Chepang.”
“My father is a Bhatta Chhettri from Baglung. My mother was a Chepangni. He took her home. But these were the old days, you know how it was between castes. Somebody told my mother that Bahun-Chhetri let their Magar-Chepang wives sleep in the granary. But when they get sick or too old to work, they are put out in the jungle, in a cave hours away, to die on their own. She didn't believe that, of course, because her husband loved her. But when I was born, she waited for her mother-in-law to name me on the eleventh day. Nothing. Twelfth day, nothing, thirteenth day, nothing.
“There was another Chepang in that village. My mother and he were the only two Chepangs in the village of Bahun-Chhetri folks, and they were both orphans. So she went to him on the fourteenth day and said—Why aren't they naming my daughter? That's when the other Chepang asked her if she would leave the village and elope to a place where Chepangs lived. Can you imagine? From Baglung, they came here. My Chepang father died just a month ago.
“I hear my father has four sons, and is a rich man now. I heard he has a gairikhet that takes sixteen pairs of oxen. It may be that I have never seen his face, but he is still my father, and he is still alive. I want to go back and tell him I am his daughter. I don't believe he doesn't know I am here. Don't you think? These days even the law says I am entitled to his property.”
“You shouldn't be greedy,” Lahure says. Chepang adds without looking at his wife, “It is no good to live in hope. Expectations are no good, they only create trouble.”
“I didn't know that story!” Lahure exclaims suddenly agitated. “Nobody ever told me that story! I always wondered—the father is Chepang, the mother is Chepang. How did this bhauju have a Bahuni daughter? But I was always too polite to ask.” He starts laughing again. “But, now it doesn't seem at all strange. My father and mother were both Darai, but this Bhauju's mother was Chepang. Doesn't she look all Magar and none Chepang?” Grandma, our picture of silence, smiles just a little, looks at the finger of raksi remaining in her glass. She too was orphaned very young, without any memory of her father or mother.
“I was surprised,” I say. “I knew we were coming to a Chepang village. Had no idea there are Darais living here.” There were Bahuns, Chhetris, Gurungs, a Sarki family. Just no Rais and no Damais, they kept telling me. Over an afternoon of stories about migration and famine, fighting the Pakistanis and not getting to fight the Chinese, the most consistent color was that of mingling, mixing of bloods, each person sharply confused about their lineage, but muddled and assured about who they were. Chepangni, a Chhetri's daughter from a Chepang woman, had been called a Bahuni all her life in the Darai Magar-Chepang village. Now she smiled, accentuating her Bahuni features, smiling down her sharp nose and large eyes. Later in the day, some friends showed a photograph of an old Kandel Chhetri man, proudly flashing his strings of rudrakshya and tulsi rosaries and a vertical smear of sandalwood paste, who looked very much Chepang around the eyes and nose and the too, too bare strands of hair clinging to a round chin. I realized how vacuous and redundant my trained “sensitivity” became at the face of such a dynamic confusion of identities. These families had existed in harmony, nourishing and exploiting each other, looting and feeding each other, for centuries. Now we ask the Chepangni why she looks so much like a Bahuni, and that is alright.
“But, I am his daughter,” Chepangni is still speaking, her eyes searching the brown torrents of an over-brimming Trishuli. “He loved my mother. I was fourteen days old when my mother left the village. I don't believe he will be unhappy to see me. I am his firstborn. I must look like him, because I look nothing like my mother. I want to see his face once before he dies. He is my father, after all.”
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Surviving
Tomorrow, I head to Kurintar as a part of a group of writers and photographers collaborating on a wonderful little project. It should be exciting, going into the villages to talk to old women and recording their life experiences, internalizing what we hear, and writing in different forms to capture the essence of the grannies.
Here's for next Sunday: the title is ominous. I have strong opinions on the recent spate of violent mob activity around the country, especially the leit-motif: manipulation by a few people to get the mob to execute/persecute others on their behalf. But, for now, just this watered down essay:
-----
Surviving
Even at eight in the morning, we are weary enough to laugh about the possibility of being beaten up by villagers. An unlikely bunch of trekkers we make: three men, slight of beards, sharp of features and easy of gaits, walking in the incessant drizzle that is Shivapuri's rain. We are walking from Tokha to Muhanpokhari, from where Yagya and Dhiraj will continue to Sundarijal. We pose before the statue of Chandeshwori, murderous, divine, too-many limbed. I wonder aloud if it is not the creation of a grammatical error rather than a scriptural-sculptural mandate. “Dus haat-khutta bhayeki,” might have, instead of becoming the graceful ten-armed, two-legged goddess, end up a form of terror: ferociously waving ten different weapons, thundering down a celestial battleground on all of her ten feet powered by glistening, taut, muscular thighs, aiming for the neck to behead and drink the bright sap.
Yagya confers with two teenagers washing their hair under Chandeshwori's feet, their own well-shod feet splayed and managed as far away as possible from the grime running down their necks. It is possible to take the road that curves out of sight—but that is an inferior choice, because it is a road crudely drawn on the crumbling sand-face of Shivapuri. A child can piss on the road and cut a channel through it, and Monsoon is freshly upon us, eager to puddle and run. It will be unpleasant walking. Dhiraj thinks it more prudent to ask somebody that is not a teenager.
It's alright. We climb until we meet a trail, likely used by army personnel during their patrols. It can't be a trail used by villagers to collect firewood or fodder. Under a canopy of pine, there is no firewood or fodder. Our calculations about where we ought to be by what time races far ahead of us. As we argue about where we will cross Bishnumati and if it will be possible to do so on the mountain, without climbing down to the bridge by the ISKCON temple, we realize there is no more of the trail that is supposed to reach the road. We are in somebody's field of lima beans.
I am scared. Used to be that the thing I feared most at times like this was the farmer's dog, or the dog that survived on the farmer's scrapes. After that, it was the fear of accidentally happening upon a farmer's cucumber vines. But, standing at the rain-picked edge of a patch of lima bean plants, I worry that the three of us will be taken for something actually menacing enough to elicit mob-action: Kidnappers! What if there are children in those houses? I have always made faces at kids, even in a crowded street, to get them to smile, laugh, slyly hide their faces to start a game. There were some Indian tourists who tried that universal communion with children a few kilometers from where I was born, and they were soundly beaten by the villagers. Why should I expect a different fate?
Nothing happens. Nobody shouts at us, even for spoiling the edges of their carefully cut terraces, or for the genial crime of annoying the peace of a Saturday morning. We jump down a terrace and reach the road. A pile of uttis leaves is decomposing, liberating the smell of our shared life in the boarding school where that was the smell of the rainy months. We pause to discuss what houses and colonies existed ten years ago and what didn't. Some things look exactly as they were. But there is a jumble of the newly-minted. House, neighborhoods, shapes in the mountains. Some places and people have survived—the old couple on the hill, RK with his momo shop, the holes on the campus walls from where escape was made. The catalogue of what is new is immense. Most of it is in the form of new houses built into the mountainside, with ridiculous roofs and sentry-posts above the gates which, to me, seem sufficient for a writing life. At least the guards have a view, flower-vines outside their windows, terraces of rice fooling them each morning into believing in a verdant, stable, sun-kissed world.
I am tired; my body acts much older than its age. The microbus driver starts talking at Muhan Pokhari and doesn't stop until Bansbari. His khalasi is just as lively. They phrase everything to get me to agree with them: the other drivers are drunk and mad, the way they drive. The locals are drunk and mad, the way they descend upon anyone at the slightest chance. The police are sober and keen, the way they squeeze money out of you. Politicians are the only ones sleeping well: their bonuses are fattest, their work hours most leisurely, their job least punishing. Students are mad, it is hard to tell why: why do they so easily take a naked sword into their classrooms if promised meat and raksi in the evening? Who has brains? The man who sends money through the post office to his parents in the village, that's who. Because then everybody in the village knows that their son is in the city, earns money, sends it to the post office. Because then they can always borrow for salt-oil-soap.
Well, that's good. Makes old parents proud and rich. What else is good about surviving these days? Khalasi and driver shake their heads. “Kathmandu is a big city,” the driver says, “but the biggest crime these days is the crime of being a stranger. Being unfamiliar.” There is no guarantee when the students will turn on you, with their bricks and their iron rods. There is no guarantee when the people of a neighborhood will turn on you, take you out of your microbus, beat you to a pulp. There used to be a knowledge of security. It was alright to be a stranger arrived at a new village or neighborhood. It was possible to be a guest, to show up and ask for a drink of water. Today, that knowledge is gone. In its place is another knowledge: there is no guarantee of any kind. Being unfamiliar is enough reason to be violently forced out of a peaceful routine, to be beaten to an inch near death. We are at Bansbari. The khalasi starts collecting fares. The driver drives, still shaking his head periodically, perhaps disagreeing with violent new surprises flaring in his mind.
Here's for next Sunday: the title is ominous. I have strong opinions on the recent spate of violent mob activity around the country, especially the leit-motif: manipulation by a few people to get the mob to execute/persecute others on their behalf. But, for now, just this watered down essay:
-----
Surviving
Even at eight in the morning, we are weary enough to laugh about the possibility of being beaten up by villagers. An unlikely bunch of trekkers we make: three men, slight of beards, sharp of features and easy of gaits, walking in the incessant drizzle that is Shivapuri's rain. We are walking from Tokha to Muhanpokhari, from where Yagya and Dhiraj will continue to Sundarijal. We pose before the statue of Chandeshwori, murderous, divine, too-many limbed. I wonder aloud if it is not the creation of a grammatical error rather than a scriptural-sculptural mandate. “Dus haat-khutta bhayeki,” might have, instead of becoming the graceful ten-armed, two-legged goddess, end up a form of terror: ferociously waving ten different weapons, thundering down a celestial battleground on all of her ten feet powered by glistening, taut, muscular thighs, aiming for the neck to behead and drink the bright sap.
Yagya confers with two teenagers washing their hair under Chandeshwori's feet, their own well-shod feet splayed and managed as far away as possible from the grime running down their necks. It is possible to take the road that curves out of sight—but that is an inferior choice, because it is a road crudely drawn on the crumbling sand-face of Shivapuri. A child can piss on the road and cut a channel through it, and Monsoon is freshly upon us, eager to puddle and run. It will be unpleasant walking. Dhiraj thinks it more prudent to ask somebody that is not a teenager.
It's alright. We climb until we meet a trail, likely used by army personnel during their patrols. It can't be a trail used by villagers to collect firewood or fodder. Under a canopy of pine, there is no firewood or fodder. Our calculations about where we ought to be by what time races far ahead of us. As we argue about where we will cross Bishnumati and if it will be possible to do so on the mountain, without climbing down to the bridge by the ISKCON temple, we realize there is no more of the trail that is supposed to reach the road. We are in somebody's field of lima beans.
I am scared. Used to be that the thing I feared most at times like this was the farmer's dog, or the dog that survived on the farmer's scrapes. After that, it was the fear of accidentally happening upon a farmer's cucumber vines. But, standing at the rain-picked edge of a patch of lima bean plants, I worry that the three of us will be taken for something actually menacing enough to elicit mob-action: Kidnappers! What if there are children in those houses? I have always made faces at kids, even in a crowded street, to get them to smile, laugh, slyly hide their faces to start a game. There were some Indian tourists who tried that universal communion with children a few kilometers from where I was born, and they were soundly beaten by the villagers. Why should I expect a different fate?
Nothing happens. Nobody shouts at us, even for spoiling the edges of their carefully cut terraces, or for the genial crime of annoying the peace of a Saturday morning. We jump down a terrace and reach the road. A pile of uttis leaves is decomposing, liberating the smell of our shared life in the boarding school where that was the smell of the rainy months. We pause to discuss what houses and colonies existed ten years ago and what didn't. Some things look exactly as they were. But there is a jumble of the newly-minted. House, neighborhoods, shapes in the mountains. Some places and people have survived—the old couple on the hill, RK with his momo shop, the holes on the campus walls from where escape was made. The catalogue of what is new is immense. Most of it is in the form of new houses built into the mountainside, with ridiculous roofs and sentry-posts above the gates which, to me, seem sufficient for a writing life. At least the guards have a view, flower-vines outside their windows, terraces of rice fooling them each morning into believing in a verdant, stable, sun-kissed world.
I am tired; my body acts much older than its age. The microbus driver starts talking at Muhan Pokhari and doesn't stop until Bansbari. His khalasi is just as lively. They phrase everything to get me to agree with them: the other drivers are drunk and mad, the way they drive. The locals are drunk and mad, the way they descend upon anyone at the slightest chance. The police are sober and keen, the way they squeeze money out of you. Politicians are the only ones sleeping well: their bonuses are fattest, their work hours most leisurely, their job least punishing. Students are mad, it is hard to tell why: why do they so easily take a naked sword into their classrooms if promised meat and raksi in the evening? Who has brains? The man who sends money through the post office to his parents in the village, that's who. Because then everybody in the village knows that their son is in the city, earns money, sends it to the post office. Because then they can always borrow for salt-oil-soap.
Well, that's good. Makes old parents proud and rich. What else is good about surviving these days? Khalasi and driver shake their heads. “Kathmandu is a big city,” the driver says, “but the biggest crime these days is the crime of being a stranger. Being unfamiliar.” There is no guarantee when the students will turn on you, with their bricks and their iron rods. There is no guarantee when the people of a neighborhood will turn on you, take you out of your microbus, beat you to a pulp. There used to be a knowledge of security. It was alright to be a stranger arrived at a new village or neighborhood. It was possible to be a guest, to show up and ask for a drink of water. Today, that knowledge is gone. In its place is another knowledge: there is no guarantee of any kind. Being unfamiliar is enough reason to be violently forced out of a peaceful routine, to be beaten to an inch near death. We are at Bansbari. The khalasi starts collecting fares. The driver drives, still shaking his head periodically, perhaps disagreeing with violent new surprises flaring in his mind.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Accounts
--Prawin Adhikari
Elder and Younger are sisters, Gurungs from somewhere in the west. Elder has to sit down because of hot flashes. She pulls her lungi mid-shins, presses the soles of her feet against the already hot cement floor. Elder fans herself with a steel plate covering a bowl of potato and chickpeas curry on the show-case-counter. Younger still hasn't returned from her errand of buying a spoonful each of freshly ground cumin and coriander from the masala mill around the corner.
Samdhini is walking with a young girl. She pauses to smile at Elder. “Come, drink a cup of tea, Samdhini-O!” Elder says. “Just had tea two hours ago,” Samdhini says. But the day is cooling off just a little, and this window of restfulness needs friends. Samdhini sends the young girl ahead, tells her to be careful. “You look like you've been buried under embers,” she says to Elder. “Tell me about it!”
“Where is my other samdhini?” Samdhini asks. “Don't know where she crawled to die, that woman,” Elder loses her temper. “The tarkari is overcooked already. This bhai, bichara, he ate bhatmas without lime. And that woman is still talking to the shopkeeper.” Samdhini starts to laugh. “Where were you headed?” Elder asks.
“That way. Couldn't even give a little bit of dahi-chiura to the kids for fifteenth Ashar. She will bring some chicken. Cheaper by twenty rupees over there. This lahurey neighborhood has become too expensive.”
“They are lahureys, they can pay,” says Elder. “Look at that house! Isn't that like a mansion? He didn't waste money sticking stone to the outside walls. I have been inside. All the money is inside.” Both women fan themselves with whatever they find—a steel plate, the ends of a grimy curtain. Younger comes laughing, says her namaste to Samdhini.
“What are you grinning about?” Elder shouts. “Why did you have to rub your snout with the shopkeeper's?” Samdhini starts off on a long-winded tale about Younger's legendary tardiness. Once, Younger was washing clothes in a bucket outside the house. A visitor—the kind that you take indoors—distracted her. The clothes lay in the bucket for another three days. Samdhini reminded Younger about the wet clothes, wallowing in water gone green with algae. Younger put the clothes to dry, but forgot them for a week on the clothesline. “They were like leaves in autumn. Her boy had to go around wearing shirts that fell apart if you pulled on them.”
Two bahun men sit down. One is Loud, the other Deferential. Loud asks Elder if there is something to drink. “Of course, there is something to drink. Why wouldn't there be something to drink?” Loud wants jaand, not beer. He is too poor today to drink beer. “Then drink raksi,” Younger suggests.
“Oh, ho!” Loud grins. “I haven't eaten anything since eight in the morning. If I drink raksi now, won't I fall off the chair?” Elder points at Deferential. “Who is this?” “From my village,” is the answer.
“You don't want me to draw up your accounts, do you? ” Elder says. Loud's face distorts. “You hag!” he says, only half in good-nature. “Why did you have to go telling everybody I had wasted twelve hundred rupees in one evening? Do you know what my thekedar did to me when he heard?”
“What was I to do? I had to close all accounts. I needed the money. And you did, didn't you? You drank away twelve hundred rupees that night.” Deferential looks at Loud's face.
“Say what you want. You lied! You said you were selling the shop. You insulted me before my friends just to get your money. Where did you think I was running away to?”
“I did sell the shop, to this one here,” Elder points to Younger. “I am helping her run it now, show her how to run the shop, make some money. You accuse me of lying? I swear by the gods, I have never lied to a bahun-chhetri.”
What does it mean to a menopausal Gurung woman trying to find her way around a small tea-shop business in Kathmandu to never lie to a Bahun or a Chhetri? Loud smacks his lips together after taking a big swig of the jaand Younger has just put before him. Deferential is going queasy, looking alternately at the buffalo meat on his chiura, and the milky cup of jaand. He is a Bahun freshly transplanted to the city.
“You were afraid I would run away without paying your money,” Loud says. “But I am a thekedar now.” Loud is incapable of stopping his face from distorting into a mask of haughtiness. Deferential worships him from across the small table.
“You are a thekedar?” Elder can't quite believe, but she smells blood. Younger perks up—this must be a special point of instruction in her ongoing education about the successful management of a four-top tea-shop. Loud taps the table with his empty cup. “Lalitpur side. Not a big house, but I am a thekedar now. Started on Saturday.”
“Saturday was a good saait,” Younger stands with a ladle dripping by her side, watching Loud eat his chiura and buff-curry. “Give him some gravy,” Elder says. “No, no,” Loud replies, “give me more.” He taps the table with his enamel cup.
Two Bhojpuri-speaking boys ask for “the usual.” Younger pours them two glasses of raksi. The boys pick out two doughnuts from the counter. They knock back the raksi, ask for water to chew the doughnuts with. “Put it in our account, okay?”
“How much was that? That was twenty five rupees,” Elder says, fumbles through a well-worn notebook. “Why do you pretend, Aama?” asks the doughnut-raksi boy. “Here, give me the book, I'll write it in.” Elder hands him the book. “See, here, twenty-five,” the boy writes into the notebook, shows it to me, to Loud. “You are not that old, Aama,” he says to Elder. “At least learn to write numbers.”
“Ah, you loud-mouth madhise! Go away now!” Elder shoos the boys away, not without affection. “Don't return the doughnuts tomorrow,” the boy says. Stale confectionery is half-price.
“So you don't even know how to write?” Loud Bahun asks Elder. Younger turns the pages on the notebook, standing by the door. “I know how to read and write,” Elder says. I pick through the bhatmas on my plate. “No, no. I don't. I don't know how to write or read,” Elder says. Loud instinctively puffs up a little, taps the table with his empty cup.
--Prawin Adhikari
Elder and Younger are sisters, Gurungs from somewhere in the west. Elder has to sit down because of hot flashes. She pulls her lungi mid-shins, presses the soles of her feet against the already hot cement floor. Elder fans herself with a steel plate covering a bowl of potato and chickpeas curry on the show-case-counter. Younger still hasn't returned from her errand of buying a spoonful each of freshly ground cumin and coriander from the masala mill around the corner.
Samdhini is walking with a young girl. She pauses to smile at Elder. “Come, drink a cup of tea, Samdhini-O!” Elder says. “Just had tea two hours ago,” Samdhini says. But the day is cooling off just a little, and this window of restfulness needs friends. Samdhini sends the young girl ahead, tells her to be careful. “You look like you've been buried under embers,” she says to Elder. “Tell me about it!”
“Where is my other samdhini?” Samdhini asks. “Don't know where she crawled to die, that woman,” Elder loses her temper. “The tarkari is overcooked already. This bhai, bichara, he ate bhatmas without lime. And that woman is still talking to the shopkeeper.” Samdhini starts to laugh. “Where were you headed?” Elder asks.
“That way. Couldn't even give a little bit of dahi-chiura to the kids for fifteenth Ashar. She will bring some chicken. Cheaper by twenty rupees over there. This lahurey neighborhood has become too expensive.”
“They are lahureys, they can pay,” says Elder. “Look at that house! Isn't that like a mansion? He didn't waste money sticking stone to the outside walls. I have been inside. All the money is inside.” Both women fan themselves with whatever they find—a steel plate, the ends of a grimy curtain. Younger comes laughing, says her namaste to Samdhini.
“What are you grinning about?” Elder shouts. “Why did you have to rub your snout with the shopkeeper's?” Samdhini starts off on a long-winded tale about Younger's legendary tardiness. Once, Younger was washing clothes in a bucket outside the house. A visitor—the kind that you take indoors—distracted her. The clothes lay in the bucket for another three days. Samdhini reminded Younger about the wet clothes, wallowing in water gone green with algae. Younger put the clothes to dry, but forgot them for a week on the clothesline. “They were like leaves in autumn. Her boy had to go around wearing shirts that fell apart if you pulled on them.”
Two bahun men sit down. One is Loud, the other Deferential. Loud asks Elder if there is something to drink. “Of course, there is something to drink. Why wouldn't there be something to drink?” Loud wants jaand, not beer. He is too poor today to drink beer. “Then drink raksi,” Younger suggests.
“Oh, ho!” Loud grins. “I haven't eaten anything since eight in the morning. If I drink raksi now, won't I fall off the chair?” Elder points at Deferential. “Who is this?” “From my village,” is the answer.
“You don't want me to draw up your accounts, do you? ” Elder says. Loud's face distorts. “You hag!” he says, only half in good-nature. “Why did you have to go telling everybody I had wasted twelve hundred rupees in one evening? Do you know what my thekedar did to me when he heard?”
“What was I to do? I had to close all accounts. I needed the money. And you did, didn't you? You drank away twelve hundred rupees that night.” Deferential looks at Loud's face.
“Say what you want. You lied! You said you were selling the shop. You insulted me before my friends just to get your money. Where did you think I was running away to?”
“I did sell the shop, to this one here,” Elder points to Younger. “I am helping her run it now, show her how to run the shop, make some money. You accuse me of lying? I swear by the gods, I have never lied to a bahun-chhetri.”
What does it mean to a menopausal Gurung woman trying to find her way around a small tea-shop business in Kathmandu to never lie to a Bahun or a Chhetri? Loud smacks his lips together after taking a big swig of the jaand Younger has just put before him. Deferential is going queasy, looking alternately at the buffalo meat on his chiura, and the milky cup of jaand. He is a Bahun freshly transplanted to the city.
“You were afraid I would run away without paying your money,” Loud says. “But I am a thekedar now.” Loud is incapable of stopping his face from distorting into a mask of haughtiness. Deferential worships him from across the small table.
“You are a thekedar?” Elder can't quite believe, but she smells blood. Younger perks up—this must be a special point of instruction in her ongoing education about the successful management of a four-top tea-shop. Loud taps the table with his empty cup. “Lalitpur side. Not a big house, but I am a thekedar now. Started on Saturday.”
“Saturday was a good saait,” Younger stands with a ladle dripping by her side, watching Loud eat his chiura and buff-curry. “Give him some gravy,” Elder says. “No, no,” Loud replies, “give me more.” He taps the table with his enamel cup.
Two Bhojpuri-speaking boys ask for “the usual.” Younger pours them two glasses of raksi. The boys pick out two doughnuts from the counter. They knock back the raksi, ask for water to chew the doughnuts with. “Put it in our account, okay?”
“How much was that? That was twenty five rupees,” Elder says, fumbles through a well-worn notebook. “Why do you pretend, Aama?” asks the doughnut-raksi boy. “Here, give me the book, I'll write it in.” Elder hands him the book. “See, here, twenty-five,” the boy writes into the notebook, shows it to me, to Loud. “You are not that old, Aama,” he says to Elder. “At least learn to write numbers.”
“Ah, you loud-mouth madhise! Go away now!” Elder shoos the boys away, not without affection. “Don't return the doughnuts tomorrow,” the boy says. Stale confectionery is half-price.
“So you don't even know how to write?” Loud Bahun asks Elder. Younger turns the pages on the notebook, standing by the door. “I know how to read and write,” Elder says. I pick through the bhatmas on my plate. “No, no. I don't. I don't know how to write or read,” Elder says. Loud instinctively puffs up a little, taps the table with his empty cup.
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