Need to Talk

"Of course, everything is expensive now. But that is because I am poor. Much poorer than I used to be." He lies. He accents his lie with a crisp hundred rupees note folded like a tent. Under it is a still-smoldering stub of Shikhar. Whenever he has to project disinterested authority he bunches his moustache up to the nostrils, perhaps to smell in it the smoke and spice of an afternoon break from slapping dry cement to sewer-joints of damp bricks. A gold ring looks back at him, a blind Cyclops, its heart of stone lost long ago, the stem bent out of shape to cling to a finger thickened with labor. He sips his raksi through the mustache, wipes the dampness to the tips of his mustache, smacks his mouth and pushes the lips in a porcine pucker to smell the mustache. He must sense that my attention is wavering, because he starts again.

"The flood of 2050 ruined me. I was a good shopkeeper. Good merchant. Sahus in Bhairahawa gave me three lakhs, four lakhs in credit. But the flood came, and that was the end of my prosperity. Lakshmi swam away in that flood–that is what I tell people. The flood got everybody, but the poor remained poor, the farmers lost one crop. I had three truck loads of merchandise in a go-down. Water reached the light bulbs, that is how high it came. Three days earlier I had received a shipment of sugar. Sugar! In a flood! Like that!" A clap of hands: palms sliding over each other. Gone!

"I used to do one lakh thirty thousand rupees is sales daily. Can you imagine that much money? I guess you could. Now everybody has one lakh rupees. Even this shop cost one lakh rupees, Rabi says. Didn't you say, Rabi? Fridge, gas, liquor, table, chairs, everything. But the flood took everything from me, everything. I became one like a mad man, left home, left my family. I haven't been back ever since. Even now, sahus from Narayanghat, Birgunj, they say–if you settle down, if you do your work, we'll give two lakh, three lakh in credit. They still come to my family because I still owe money. Thirteen bigha land, a go-down full of soap, rice, dal, sugar: flood took everything."

He sees nobody is listening anymore. In the reprieve he grants, a Sherpa woman starts talking in her sing-song, impenetrable accent. "Sherpa people can't make food taste very good, but they are very clean, very clean," she says. The shop used to belong to her sister in law, who got her papers to go to "Fuddans," so Rabi, a Rai, owns it now. The Sherpa woman doesn't seem to approve. "It tastes alright, tastes of kodo, so it is alright. But what kind of a Sherpa restaurant doesn't have tongba?"

"You knew the people who owned this restaurant?" Niru Pokharel, whose cousin has an examination in a few days and who is quite lost in the big city where she has been for just a week now, smiles at the Sherpa woman, who gives Niru a brief history of the establishment: her sister in law bought it from another Sherpa family from Solu, their neighbor, and before that it was owned by the Gurung family that lives above the shop. There is never enough water here, and it is too far from Samakhusi Chowk for it to be profitable. It should have been closer to the chowk."

"With this style, style of management, this standard and service, it should have been outside the hospital, and then," says the businessman from his corner, finishing his sentence with a quick jerk of his neck to draw an exclamation with his chin. "It is alright," says Niru, who grew up with Rabi in Morang, "Babu is a hard working boy. He will make the place work." Rabi is indeed personable, recognizes faces, has a very polite, very friendly approach. When he learns that the one-armed man is also a Rai from around his area, he doesn't hesitate to call the customer into the kitchen, pull up a stool for the man, and start chatting about the Eastern Hills. The one-armed man pulls his sleeve over the missing appendage and shoves the sleeve under his backpack. They talk, calling each other Sainla dai, their Nepali a mellifluous contrast to the rough, confrontational cadence of Nepali spoken around Tanhun.

"So you are really a writer?" Niru sits at the table, not bothering to clear the next table where a teenager girl is whispering into the ears of a seven year old boy, both of them talking rapidly in English, conspiring about their next culinary folly: sukuti? Sekuwa? Buff Chowmin? The dark corners of the cheap bhatti around the corner seem to these children an escape rarely permitted by the family: the half-plate of momo shared between aunt and nephew a tastier treat than the canned/foiled sweetmeats their relatives in America can send. "So you are really a writer?" Niru asks. Nobody believes me when I say I am a writer. So I don't tell her I am also writing movies, because she wouldn't believe that.

"Not that I know much, but you know how it is, I have tried, not stories, I don't think I could do stories, but poems. No, not poems, exactly, because I think it is hard to write poems, but ghazals, yes, ghazals. I dabble in ghazals." She beams. Waits for me to say something, but I nod instead. What does one say to a nineteen year old woman who dabbles in ghazals? "So, you are still a student?" I ask.

"Of life," she beams again. This is precious. She is a student of life. I feel she is accusing me of hypocrisy, of fronting. I am a student of life. How tedious that is as an idea. "Back home, in Morang, there is an FM station where I have two hours every week and people tell me I have a very good voice. So I thought I would try here, in Kathmandu, but without contacts and relatives, it is impossible," she says. "It is just, just too big, too many people, too big a city." She is not exasperated. "But, I like reading more than I like reading, even though I do dabble in ghazals."

"You will return, won't you?" she stands by the door, holding her phone. I nod. "Maybe I will read your name in the papers some day," she says. I shrug. "It made me happy to talk to an actual writer," she says, but I don't wait to indulge such bullshit. It is cold outside, the rain having poured furiously first, and then steadily chilled the air with a persistent, pleasant drizzle. Now the air is damp, but not particularly wet. Businessman is furiously sucking on another Shikhar, hunched up by the newly laid sewer walls, slapping cement dust onto the wet walls to seal it. He looks up at me, but I don't think he recognizes me anymore. He sniffs at his mustache once more.