Mugshot

So, Ajit asked for a mugshot to be included with my "debut" piece in Nepali, in a new Nepali daily, Nagarik. Amazingly, I didn't have a head-shot of myself anywhere in my computer or on the web. Not one. So I had to take one...

I look weird in this picture, although I am sure that is exactly what I look like. I look old and grumpy, and the slicked-back hair isn't going to fool anyone, is it?

Just as I finished typing the last sentence, power came back. Which means I have to start writing. Sad.

Hanshu wearing a sari

Hanshu wearing a sari

Moonrise and Eunuch Song

Moonrise and Eunuch Song


The comedy of embarrassments begins early in the evening when a barefooted man, his sacred thread hooked around an ear and a hand pressing at the crotch of his lungi, wheedles a boy into lending his slippers for a minute: the floor of the lavatory is flooded and layered in yellow slick. The boy grins with bright white teeth set in
thick yellow plaque and looks away embarrassed. He turns to his companions, boys of his age who are wearing shoes although their teeth and clothes suggest a similar life, and looks at his toes as he laughs nervously. The barefooted man's whine is impossible to suffer anymore, so a chorus of disinterested yet exhortatory calls descends upon the boy: "lend the man your chappal, it is only for a minute, when traveling together we trouble each other, it is only the decent thing to do."

There isn't even standing space in the general compartment of Mithila Express coming to Raxaul: it is ordinarily a very crowded train, especially in the general no-reservations compartment. Crowded not only with bodies, but their riotous assault on the senses: their smells of armpits, feet, hair oil, food, luggage, tobacco-steeped phlegm, alcohol, flowers in the eunuch's hair; their colors of teeth, knees in threadbare pants, skins, wife's sari bundling clothes, neck-grime and toe-muck, green cloth parrots with black beaks, turmeric and paan stains, white crescent of lime under khaini-pressing thumbnail; their comedy of girths, where a man folds neatly above the space covered by his shoes while another man pushes four neighbors out of their orbits around him when he turns to spit into the corner under the sink. This compact of peas and limes in a box reshuffles along half-inch voids between bodies when an eunuch sings her way through, pinching buttocks and caressing loins, or when a barefooted man must ewwwwvisit the lavatory.

"Badebhai," pleads the man to the boy young enough to be his son. The boy evacuates away from his slippers, explaining in a tribal language what must have been a list of his inadequacies, instinctively probing the voids around his body to bend and slip into them. The barefooted man looks down at the slippers and looks up, looks around, looks exasperated: there are large holes where his toes will sink into the
worn slippers. Everybody laughs at the high-caste, janai-strung man's predicament. At least his janai is hooked over his ear. The boy retreats into a shell of soft abuses from his friends and dismissive curses from lighter-skinned, better dressed men. Quiet returns to the space between the lavatories where some twenty travelers sit compacted, fermenting in the stew of incidental companionship.

"Kasto lagyo ta hamro India?" It's alright. Different, that's for sure. It is hard to decide if I am included in the "hamro," or if the word is there to mark me as an outsider. He is the darkest man in the compartment, with the widest nose and thickest lips, hair fused into a thick mat. He speaks Nepali, Bengali, Oriya and Hindi. Even he confesses that he speaks Nepali better than any other language now:
thirty-four years of living in Kathmandu, he says. But he treats me like a guest, telling me to sit when a space opens up against the wall, offering me food, asking in rustic Nepali if "garo ta bhakhaina?". At least in this space between the doors and the lavatories, hamro India is alternately heart-rending and heart-warming. It is cold when we silently watch a railway-policeman rob two young men of their last rupee coin for stashing a cardboard box of sohnpapadi in the passenger class. It is unusually warm when the eunuchs approach, signaling their approach with sharp, inimitable claps and a sultry song.

"In aankhon ki masti ke…" sings the siren, her brows twitching like rueful serpents separated mid-congress, the pout of her mouth pointing and drawing, pushing and pulling, her hands slapping together to ward off evil or searching the pockets of mustached men suddenly giggling like little girls. Another eunuch, not quite as sold to their professional femininity, follows her in a green shirt, sleeves rolled
to reveal the biceps, a pair of lumpy, uneven bumps over the chest suggesting stuffed bra. A scowl of displeasure is fixed on her face. She grabs a man by his collars and shakes him, screaming into his face to pay up. Her companion, the siren, moves on unfazed and winking, asking her dewarji for ten. The angry eunuch sits on her haunches and sobs. "What are you looking at?" she lunges at a young man who is
terrified just by the presence of the eunuchs. The siren glances over from the other end of hamro space, grinds her buttocks gratuitously against a Jharkhand gardener's attentive crotch and makes her way back to her sobbing companion.

The moon rises over the southern horizon. It has to set before the sun will rise. Hundreds of kilometers must pass before Raxaul. The siren sits, her knees touching her companion's knees, and raises the angry eunuch's chin to look past the passengers, through the door, at the moon hovering over mosques and mounds of wheat chaffs and piles of cow-dung dried into logs. Once more she sings the same song, her mouth and brows and tip of nose and tilt of head shadowing Rekha. She sings
beautifully, the voice full of flaws, insignificant and significant, singing to an angry eunuch in a crowd of tired men, singing past the rush of tepid air to the cool face of a low-slung moon. The angry eunuch's shoulders relax. She wipes her eyes without once taking them off of the siren's face. A man sighs here and another man sighs there, knowing that nothing but the eunuch's song exists with honesty, with
force. The moon inches up. Each man hangs his head to listen to the song, so haunting and delicate, the dull edge of manly hoarse sugared with an affected high-pitch, its lulling balm reaching everybody.

The man who borrowed slippers to go into the lavatory emerges, breaking the spell momentarily. He looks at his benefactor the tribal boy, who is nestled between the bodies of his friends: rapt, spent. The man surveys the edge of his elbows for a point on the walls on which to lean, to listen, to wait until the bodies stir back into life. He seems content to be forgotten, for the moment, by the crowd,
by the boy, by the line of men who will have to create new voids for his limbs to probe as they negotiate a way forward in this small world, this hamro India. He stands there relieved, janai still hooked over his ear, two thick, dirty, dry toes strenuously curled up and away from the floor.

Back!

Back in Kathmandu, back online! Fucking NTC and its fucked-up ADSL scheme.

The trip back was even more eventful than the trip to Kolkata, especially because my myopia and some foolish choices along the way. Once more, there was the tenderness of contact among strangers, and the relentless assault on one's sense of injustice that is the proud flavor of Bihar. I mean, that place is fucked up.

I think I will write about the return trip for next Sunday, make the misery pay, so to speak. I will put it online in the next few days.

In other news: IPL is in full swing. I think I have also worked myself into a hole regarding work, and might not be able to dig or scramble my way out. But, I have determined that the way to go forward is with a big, fake grin of confidence pasted on the face, giving it nearly all [never entirely all... man must also play], and, essentially, not taking myself too seriously, although I must, and I will, take the tasks at hand seriously. But, I am not willing to lose my sleep or appetite or even an hour of comfortable posture over it. There.

Seriously, I think might need some help by the end of it all... within the end of next month, for sure.

This for Macwan, and others who know Savanna: I did meet Savanna, although Eli couldn't make it to the dinner. Kasnatscheewa, Savanna and I went to Sholo Aana, Behngali restaurant, and ate plenty of rice and a bunch of different curries, including jack-fruit and banana leaves and snake-gourd. The food was finger-lickin' good. Then we went to a mall nearby, where the ladies got a gift bag with a single bottle of shampoo each, I think for the entirely forgivable crime of looking fabulously pretty and foreign in an Indian shopping mall.

I got zilch, if I don't condescend to count the jealous and askance looks of many a Bengali man. I mean, at the end, I didn't get the bottle of shampoo, and I'd have really appreciated a gesture of that sort, you know, stroking my ego as I absentmindedly stroked my hair. I am trying to grow my hair long, which was at its ringed, although pathetically-thin but-gloriously-long best in 2004, which Rachel Ferguson cut short before she headed off to a semester of sleeping in tents. I want that same head of hair back, and perhaps parlay it into a role in a Nepali movie, perhaps as a moobed, mustached, paunchy bad guy who is clearly too vain to cut his sparse-over-the-crown hair. I think I would look pretty. Hella! Just like you, Macwan, except, prettier.

Bihari Nightmare

Although the boy speaks in Hindi, his kid sister answers mostly in Nepali, at times annoyed that she can’t find the right words in Hindi to explain herself better, smacking her lips and slapping her head to better express her impatience. They play tag in the train compartment, jumping from one bunk to another, even begging their many uncles to hoist them from one side of the compartment to the other. If the midday heat gets to them, they wilt like long-stemmed tulips and sweat face-down into the plastic covers of the seats. The train gets hotter when it stops in the middle of expansive, ripe wheat fields in rural Bihar. This wakes up the children, suddenly aware of the absence of sweat-chilling wind rushing in through the windows. They search for the Coke-bottle of water now misplaced during their more energetic moments, pass it back and forth, letting the water run down their chins, neck.

Although against advised regulations, I prefer to urinate when the train is stationary, without having to aim with care during so basically animal a performance. There is a heady aroma inside the lavatory, very unusual for Indian Railways, especially while the train is in Bihar, whose olfactory signature is surely the sun-cooked fullness of bad feces and thickly expulsed urine. The smell inside this lavatory is of marijuana. There is a bundle, a small sack locked in many layers of plastic, with a keffiyeh scarf thrown over it, placed inconveniently in the sink. I can’t help but prod the package, a wide grin on my face at coming so close to a Bihari example of the illicit. It is elections season. There are scores of Bihari farmers and traders on the train who openly bribe the railway police to leave large jute bags between the compartments and the lavatories. Who knows what is in these sacks?

My head is filled with wild speculations: who could have left the bag in the lavatory? I drift in and out of sleep, dehydrated, neck cramped from using the bag as a pillow: my simple insurance against theft. At sundown, the uncles and bearded Maulana Saheb father of the kids silently recite their evening namaz before breaking into spirited conversation about how long train-station food takes to go through the digestive track: it is longer than the usual, stay-at-home twenty-four hours, a man declares, because train journeys and Bihar tend to be collectively dehydrating. That is terrible talk for my stomach to hear: it has been more than thirty hours and four meals since I left home. Without deep, undisguised sleep, it is hard to let go of a sense of propriety, even in the middle of Bihar. Sleep and consciousness weave together like serpents in a mating dance: face-offs leading to sudden lunges in the other’s direction, twined into a confused ball.

At midnight, the compartment is filled with the Maulana's screams, the Nepali Maulana Saheb as his companions call him. He holds the little girl against his chest, daring the railway police and a Bihari man to touch the little girl. The screaming contest lasts a good fifteen minutes. The Bihari man is asking the Maulana to produce government issued identification cards for the two children. The Maulana repeats his challenge to touch him or his daughter. It seems the parcel has been discovered by the railway police, as if it hadn’t been deposited in the sink without their consent to begin with. The kaffiyeh suggests the most obvious culprits: Muslim men who have crossed over the border from Nepal. The Maulana will have none of it: they are being framed and targeted because of their religion, he declares. He challenges the Bihari man to produce any sign of authority to question him or his children. It turns out that the Bihari man is a self-styled vigilante, trying to stop unpleasant incidents on the train.

“It is elections season,” he says, as if that explains everything. He leaves the unspeakable unsaid, but the Maulana jumps at his accusations. “Are you calling me a terrorist?” he asks.

“If you have nothing to hide,” the Bihari man shouts. The Maulana’s voice is increasingly filled with rage. There is no question of taking this injustice, he says. He tells the railway police to inspect any or all luggage he and his band of travelers have brought aboard the train. The railway police are deferential towards the Bihari man, but everybody else in the compartment rises to defend the Maulana. The Bihari turns to us, rest of the passengers, and appeals to us to force the Maulana to let the kids be body-searched. “Touch my children,” the formerly mild Maulana screams, “and see if I don’t cut your hands off. Go ahead. You think we will let you walk all over us just because we are Muslim?”

The Bihari talks to our muted lot, now inciting us to listen to the Maulana: he mentioned the unspeakable word, he is being uncooperative, he is suspect, the Bihari says. “Who the hell are you to ask for identification?” the Maulana asks. One of the Maulana’s friends tells the Bihari to leave the compartment before they pick him up and throw him off the train. This is ugly. The Bihari man turns towards the policemen with their khaki uniform and bamboo canes, but they are increasingly weary of him.

“This man is harassing us because he wants to collect money from us,” the Maulana says. “If he can do this to me, he will do it to you next, and you, and you.” There is nothing more the Bihari man can add. He slinks away after accusing the Maulana of not being patriotic, not being Indian enough in spirit, not showing the integrity each Indian is supposedly infused with. “You still dare talk, you criminal?” is the answer he gets from the Maulana, who is literally foaming at the corners of his mouth. Everyone comes to a single conclusion: the Bihari man wanted to extort money from Muslims, threatening them with vigilante violence if they don’t comply.

I slip into an uncomfortable sleep as the compartment becomes quiet again. My dreams are of the strange, hinged nightmare variety: I wake up only to realize I am still sleeping, to wake up only to realize I am still sleeping again. There is another commotion in the compartment and I stumble towards the Maulana’s seat. He is bathed in the fluorescence of the compartment’s lights, his hands tied together, rocking silently in anger. I don’t understand why. I step forward, whisper into the ears of one of his companions to tell me everything, so that I can write about it.

They are traveling to their home some three hours outside of Kolkata. They work in Kathmandu: the Maulana tailors women’s garments in Bagbazar. I feel compelled to know the truth, so that I can write their story, of this unjust accusation and persecution in Bihar, the putrid anus of civilization. The Maulana’s friend looks me in the eyes and lets out a sigh. I wake up, see that the Maulana is peacefully asleep, his arm protectively draped over his little girl’s body. I feel relieved, and return to another bout of nightmares hinged to the physical space, dreaming about myself dreaming endlessly about myself, breaking open one wall of the labyrinthine prison of the dreaming mind to run into another, endlessly, until deep, forgiving sleep shuts out all punishing illumination.

On A Wire

On a wire

Rain surprises Basantapur's milling masses and sends them under ancient eaves, to wait out the thick ropes of water spouting down, it seems for a moment of magic, from heaven itself. Somewhere else in the city, the chariot of Machhindranath is being pulled through ankle-deep slush. The smell of Kathmandu rises, lumbering with its note of shit and dazed by layers of smoke, but it is nonetheless a sigh of satiation, a season signalling its new posture.

By the time the sun breaks through to shine a spotlight upon branches of small waxy leaves, what looks like camphor peeking over a palace roof, the dabali has renewed itself: those that hurried now find an excuse to watch the last, fat drops sliding off the tiled roofs. Those that cowered from the rain sniff the air to gauge how thick or wet it might have become. And, under the wide, interested eyes of Gauri and Shankar, a dug-duggi starts its chest-thumping once more, dragging with its beats the beam of sunlight away from camphor, towards the chant of a child showing off his brother and their heritage of chatak.

For the next fifteen minutes, the children, who can't possibly be more than ten years old, beat their drums without enthusiasm and call out in a series of wails and spitted chants so polished through practice that the sounds seem coated with experience more than imbued with a meaning. Experience of the kind that disallows innocence, that burdens childhood, that world-wearies and deprives of a treasurable idyll which would, in the darker pockets of their adulthood that surely wait, allow them to keep faith in life's genuine worth. A search for their—perhaps assumed—childlike innocence ends with their sluggish throw of limbs as they fake energy and enthusiasm, or the thick glaze over their eyeballs that seem to have been emptied of their natural humor.

It is perversely magnetic, the wringing of small, naked bodies to pass through six-inch hoops, or, for legs to scratch the ears of a boy balanced on the palms of another boy. It should be revolting, this public spectacle, this unchallenged shame of a whole people. But it is magnetic. It stills the eyes—will the boy choke on a snare of his own arms? Will he fall from the wire? Watch his face and its quivering skin: there is no flourish or bravado of a circus performer there.

The cobblestones of the chowk are still dark and wet, still imprinted with the memory of the many floods of animal blood they have seen. It is an easy fall. His brother is bored, thrusts his pelvis forward a few times and chants something in a high pitch which his unbroken voice and the thick coat of function renders alien, and finally makes eye-contact with the throng ringed around their small chatak, spreading the ends of the rag on his head, beckoning with chin-dips and slanted nods. There is a boy up in the air, on a wire, with one exploratory toe offered to the void, the other gripping the wire with condensed terror.

A crowd has gathered, frayed at its edge as some stop and some leave. Even the sight of these bony children performing impossible bodily contortions becomes familiar too quickly, and the eye searches for something else, something more perverse and terrifying, more lustily satisfying. Here is a cultural moment being manufactured for the natives and the strangers in the crowd, stitched into the tatters over the brown backs of the children, riding the carousel of their voices. Wow! Look at that! Look, son—that boy must be your age. You can write a letter to your pen pal for next week's English class about this. Write—public spectacle is a part of Kathmandu's heritage. Do you know what is called a spectacle?

How can a parent bring a child to watch this? It is easier to understand the woman squatting in a corner with the end of her dhoti between her teeth—she is the mother of the juvenile acrobats, she watches without moving an inch, her eyes not registering any fear, her face not betraying any greed. But parents who bring their children to the chatak? Are they schooling their progeny on an art that will blossom into active antipathy towards those dissimilarly stationed in life? Are they showing how from one person's terrible toil can come for another person the nourishing tonic of recreation? Is this an instructive outing on the darkly comedic benefits of inequality? Really, how can a parent not turn away hurt and angry to see a child no different than that which clutches their hand bite into an iron ring from which to swing a smaller child in frenzied spins over hard gray stones? What if the jaws tire? How much strength can that back or those hands have? What if the boy goes hurtling off, like a lump of weak earth, to shatter and spill across the chowk? Isn't the threat there transparent, that to expose a child to the servitude of another is to corrupt the simple notion on which all of modern morality is predicated: that all are born equal?

This is no country for equality, of any sort, between people. There is a tall man in the crowd who wriggles forward to position his camera under the high-flying boy and makes his shins quiver harder as the rope naturally squirms under his insubstantial weight. Another man hoists a boy—better dressed, giggling—onto his shoulders for him to better see the other boy walking the wire. Where there should be a heartfelt objection to the situation there is misplaced awe, a rapid patter of tiny palms clapping. The boy on the wire looks at the other boy, raised to the same level above the crowd, above the chowk. Then he nods to his mother squatting in the corner and gives a little yelp to find courage as he leaps off the wire, rushing to meet the wet gray stones that must be rushing skyward to meet him. Behind him, the wire quivers with its own small yell.

Red Bull! Red Bull!

Update:
Took me three hours to get to the half-way mark with the project. And only one can of Red Bull [Thai version] which contains the following chemicals:

Taurine, aka Bulljuice;
Choline
Nicotinamide
Dexpanthenol
Inositol
Lysine
Vitamine B6
Cyanocobalamine
trimethylxanthine


Nicotinamide, it seems, is not exactly what it sounds like. I won't wake up a monster tomorrow--or so I hope. Choline is supposed to protect the liver from certain kind of damage, and I can only hope that these are the kinds of damages that chemical with names like trimethylxantine cause to the liver...

----
Crunch time, people! If I can finish a few projects tonight, I can go to India tomorrow night. If I can't finish these projects, I can't go to India. Savanna Ferguson and Eli are going to be in Kolkata [information strictly for y'all who know Ms Ferguson], and I also want to witness the elections frenzy, especially in Bihar. With some luck, I will pass through cities where Ravi Kissan and Manoj Tiwari, superstars of the Bhojpuri film industry, are contesting. I think Ravi Kissan for the Congress [I] and Tiwari for the Samajwadi Party, with Sanjay Dutt likely to campaign for him. I might have got the names mixed up.

So, to help me through the night, I peed into an open drain, then bought two cans of Thai Red Bull. I don't know! The ingredients list is in Thai, so that's helpful. Naaaaat! But it has that Red Bull logo of bulls locking horns, although I am not sure if that image is trademarked in Thailand or not. Which is to say--I am totally clueless about what I am about to ingest.

I am hoping it will have sufficient amount of caffeine to make my heart flutter and my hands shake. I hope it will have enough sugar to last me two hours. I hope I can stay awake.

In other news: I broke a hinge off my laptop. I realize how totally Neanderthal that sounds: but it didn't happen because I was using brute force. I don't think I could have broken an aluminum pin that thick. Luckily, on this old-ass Dell, one hinge carries all data, and the other is simply a hinge. I think my laptop is now solidly desk-bound, because I see no point in fixing it now.

So--I am looking for ways of making quick money, if any of you out there know how a guy like me can help himself.

A good read

You know what is a good read?

The script of Wall-E, Pixar's animated film.

And I Blew It!

Bob Dylan sang: "Yippee! I'm a poet! I know it! Hope I don't blow it!" I can't say the same: I used to write poems once, made the mistake of sitting in a workshop with two good poets and bunch of pretenders, and realized I was one of the pretenders. Stopped writing poems right there.

But, years later, brooding in Mountain View, I wrote a couple of poems, disciplined, dry. Here's one:

---
Nightmare

We know how sleep lets any odd thing visit.
On days when it refuses to come, must
be there are new monsters barking at the
gates. Laying awake and counting aches in
each joint, trying to count sheep and the shards
of sharp wakefulness, simply breathing
and waiting for the lull and sweet of night--
those unseen forms still pry into our heads.
And jolted waking only reminds of
what's just been lost--there had been sleep and dream,
though tepid and horror-brushed. Toss again
and return to hell, where mirrors abound--
for, surely, man's torment is more of him
reflected in his mind's sanctuary.

---

I also found a story I had given up on. It was written at Whitman as a part of the Adam Dublin Grant. I have lost the other two completed ones, and the one half-worked story. Perhaps in another post I will include excerpts. It looks bad now, but back then people liked it, especially when I read it as a part of a presentation.

June came and settled ...

I have been going through some of my old fiction. Below are three sentences from "Fortune," which I wrote for Scott Eliott's class at Whitman: at 25 pages, it was too long for an undergraduate workshop, tried to do too much, but didn't give enough time or effort to it. The piece can use a lot of editing, and I think I will do just that--write more into it if that seems necessary, but definitely excise a bunch of stuff out of it

The rains are coming. More precisely, April and May are parching the soil to prepare it for June, so I thought these sentences would be timely.

"May scorched the ground and raised it in billows behind large trucks plowing through the village. June came and settled monsoon clouds over the mountains’ brows. The first threats of rain electrified the afternoons and stifled the earth and sweated the plants; periodically a storm whipped up the hills to bury the sky..."

---

more from same:

"Lok Nath had the house to himself, and he still had the cactus hedges where sparrows nested, the jackfruit trees with their dusk choruses of birds, a cold spring tucked away in the mountains where Navaraj kept fish, and a house plastered with past, the smell of which was the ghostly cold covering memories of the dead; the soft slough of morning draped around the roof was his call to awake each morning away from dreams, and above all, the rasping coughing drooling heaving chest was only recollection of his love for Saypatri and Sudha; his arms were the memory of playing with youthful friends and having in the sunny afternoon of youth a sense of invincibility and incorruptible righteousness; in his mornings under the sooty ceiling was a remembered something and a remembered someplace where all beloveds are eternally preserved."

---

Sorry, Reader; Thank you, Ashma; Here's a bonus piece:

PROMISES MADE UNDER INFLUENCES

My Love, I have finished thinking up the story our daughter will hear. She will ask me where the came from. I will tell her she is an eyelash of a cloud that blinked too hard. You fell with the rain. Your mother (that's you) was in my arms; we were in a coarse red desert to sleep in the first rain of the year and search for flowers that bloom for three days before disappearing into the dust again to sleep until the next rain. I saw you fall from the sky and I whispered into your mother's ears (those are your ears) how beautiful our daughter would be, and I told you mother that our child would be the eyelash of a cloud that blinks hard and she laughed with her face on mine. You were drawn by your mother's laugh (that's your laugh) and fell on her tongue and your mother swallowed you. The harder she laughed the lower you reached in her belly, until you could go no further; and you tickled your mother from inside and made her laugh even harder. And one day, as I chased your mother in the desert of red dust, you wanted to join us in play. From the thickest, darkest tumbling ripple of your mother's hair, behind which hide secrets known only to me, out you tumbled, bathed in water and light; and you climbed to your mother's eyes (those are your eyes), and kissed them and filled them with love, and you climbed down to your mother's throat and filled it with the songs she sings to you and all the stories about mountains and coyotes and finches and cottonwood and birch and pine; and you climbed down to your mother's breasts and kissed them and filled them with milk. My child, that is how you came to us (that is you and I), from a blinking cloud over a red desert. We couldn't go wrong, you know we couldn't go wrong -- she would have your eyes hair nose shoulders fingers ears toes, and she would have my mouth. She would be prettier than dandelions in a summer afternoon; she would be dearer than the heart of a dark stone shade in our desert of red dust.

Thank you, Ashma, for emailing this to me.

Doesn't feel like it...

I really hope I am done with this script, so that I can start writing the screenplay for a second story. But, somehow, it doesn't feel like I am done quite yet. I have trouble sticking to the details hashed out with the director or the producer--it is a pain to have to rewrite forty pages because the "tone is not what I was expecting."

I really miss writing fiction. I am hoping I will have a desk-bound situation soon, so that I can write between errands.

I feel bad that I am not updating more regularly, but I feel like I have been falling into a deep well of oblivion. With enough reflection--and a good measure of pretension, for sure--I could perhaps write on that, too. People have been known to do just that.

Updates?

Ruth Fowler is no longer updating her blog, , and that is a sad thing. If you read her older posts, from long ago, you see her wit and the wash of melancholy that is unique to her.

Hey there, Courtney Cross!

I am on a mission over the next two days. But I am also feeling very lazy.

India didn't lose the 2nd test against NZ. Tendulkar was godlike yesterday, although I didn't get to see his game last night.

Boring Uncle

Here's the piece that wrote after taking Abhi to Bhrikuti Mandap. It is a bit hurried, and doesn't give itself enough space to talk about the really important stuff: how an uncle is usually also the first corrupter, spoiling a boy with gifts and amusements of the sorts too-fussy parents would never allow. I wanted to focus on Stefan also, because I saw in them a kindred naivety at times, a bond of wonderment and yelping joy. Not to suggest Stefan is a kid: quite the opposite.

I have sent the accompanying photo to TKP to go with the article; it is likely the picture will also be on the paper.



----------

Boring Uncle

Nothing more loved than the daze of early mornings—the lulled hour before awaking; loved cocoon of one's own warmth and smell of night dripping away to the pillow and billowing outward from armpit or dear crotch; the toes keeping squiggly rhythm with sunny thoughts; the gentle intrusion of an unvaried rhythm of a neighborhood discovering itself at the gates of the most ordinary of wonders: a new day. And, nothing more cruel than to have that bit of luxury and languor snatched away by a shrill, flapping, pecking annoyance: the seven-year old nephew!

Nothing worse, then, to be awoken to a new accusation: “Boring uncle!” Come here, kid, look into my eyes, look past them with that apricot-sized brain, and try to find the edges of my mind. See if you can call me boring then. How rude is this new chant? Swami Ramdev's erratic left eyelid comes to my mind, and the reason why it should tug at my attention just then appears absurd until I realize it is to remind me that I am angry at the situation, and a tick of the face of a clownish voice would perhaps help dissipate the unfocussed, undirected anger. A few songs, a complete news broadcast, a stretch of the limbs and a regressive curl into the blanket still fail to chase away the rancor that has filmed my tongue and befouled the mood. Boring uncle, the twerp has the nerve! I shall have my revenge!

I ask Stefan, Zen monk and friend visiting Kathmandu, new subject in nephew's land of childlike abuse, if it would be interesting to take Abhi, aforementioned nephew, menace superior, agent of destruction of stuff and sleep alike, to a day out in our very public, very own amusement park in Bhrikuti Mandap. “Um,” he replies, “I am easygoing, so I am okay with whatever you decide.” I wonder if there is a special percept he must abide by that forbids him to be decisive and direct. “I don't want to go to the part,” Abhi says, folding his hands across his chest, thrusting his tongue through a gap in his teeth.

“Park, with a kay, not part,” Stefan enunciates to Abhi. “Would you like to come with us to the park? Would that be something you would like to be doing?” Although his speech is peppered with California fillers, like, umm and like and you-know, Stefan speaks almost like an Indian bureaucrat, as he is usually preferring the present continuous over other tenses. I laugh out aloud at the idea of an American monk in orange robes and a seven year old running through the paltry fares of the amusement park.

“No,” he says. “I rode the duck in the zoo.” He looks at me. “It was boring.” Meaningful pause—a threat, actually, that something more ominous or hurtful is about to follow. “You are boring. You always sit on your chair and take the remote. And you don't shave.”

Who wasn't seven years old once if he is no longer that age? It isn't his bratty and dismissive haughtiness or even the sort of unspoiled innocence that allows him to imagine the world as completely fenced by his experiences that abrades my patience: it is the fact that he makes me appear positively ancient, my own childhood fossilized into an exhibit of boring, my adventures through the fields and forests around the village when I was seven a feeble shadow compared against his great and Quixotic errands of the mind as he sits fixed and rapt before a television screen.

He has never climbed a tree, if he doesn't count the time I showed him how to climb a five-foot stump in Ranibari. Has he found eggs in high nests? Stolen fruits? Dressed himself with bows and arrows and grouped with rivals to play out the greatest war ever fought? Has he been so hypnotized by pine needles that he climbed up a slippery hill, covered in nettle and thorns, to bring back a brush with which to gently touch the skin of his friends? Do those years, where experience was fenced by the innocence created by the condition around, where stealing with friends was a major thrill, where at any slight provocation each child picked a stone to defend his stand, amount to nothing now? Must I compete with Powerpuff Girls and Ninja Hatori to impress a boy and prove I was once almost as interesting and smart as he is?

I am not a kind man, and this pill of hurt flowers in my heart a cunning conceit bordering on evil: I'll show this kid a thing or two, make him squeal like a little girl. Stefan watches as I fatten him on sugar first, to give him the hyperactive frenzy that prepares him for any kind of daredevil. At the very last row of the ride they call Columbus, essentially a boat-swing so massive that it can be sent swinging to give the rider a near one-eighty displacement, I put my arm around Abhi and teach him the essentials: grab the handlebar with both hands. Close your eyes. Scream, like a little girl, if you get scared.

Stefan is also diligently following the instructions. Soon the sky rushes to meet the face, or the ground tips to bare the patch of works underneath the ride. Everybody is screaming—some in delight, most in unadulterated fright. Abhi's arms go tense, small knuckles white with the sort of strength that a child shouldn't possess. I imagine the sensations in his stomach as he gets pushed against the seat and raised in a high arc, or when he experiences the beguiling queasiness of a split-second free-fall, a sensation for which the human brain is not originally equipped. I feel the satisfaction an uncle should feel in helping with the slow erosion of the original innocence, putting a new shine of experience atop his notion of the world, tearing a breach into the continuous fence around his imagined world to pour in a threat that will perhaps make him equally as boring as myself someday, with not much but a colorful mind to show for the damage. Stefan looks at me, and perhaps sees the wide, satisfied grin, and looks at Abhi instead: they are kindred for those three minutes, equally scared, equally hoarse with their screams that sound increasingly like that of a five year old girl. There, nephew. There.

Manufacturing Experience

I worry as every Wednesday rolls around that I lack the necessary, new set of experiences for a fresh article.

Abhi, my nephew, has been saying that he wants to take Uncle Stefan for a day out and about in the city. He has given Stefan a choice between going to the zoo and going to Bhrikuti Mandap, with its rides. Of course, Stefan can choose any place he wants, but it has to be between these two places, such are his conditions.

I am pretty sure I will write about them for next Sunday: an American Zen monk and a seven year old Nepali boy riding a ferris-wheel or sharing a stick of kulfi. Stefan constantly having to respond to the curious gaze of Kathmanduites and Abhi running all over the place, being his hyperactive, charming but a pain-in-the-ass presence.

How do I feel about inventing a set of experiences just so that I can meet a deadline? I feel it very smart of me, thank you.

Weak Finish

Like always. So much enthusiasm, so much effort, but a weak finish: true for most things I do, as some know too well.

I know there are fewer than five readers in Kathmandu who get to this site, so I am going to continue putting my essays here when I finish them, instead of waiting for Sunday. Think of this as an editorial privilege.

I am really interested in what you think of this piece. Please feel free to send me an email, or leave a comment. I know there is only a handful of you out there, but if you have the time, do send me feedback on this one.

Here's next Sunday's:





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What do trees mean?

Dusk falls like dust settles; jaws chew the astringent bark of a tough, thin guava twig. The sweat of small palms shine a handlebar fork three meters above ground, closer to the clouds than to the dung and dirt of a cornfield. Naked toes pinch knobs on the sleek trunk and dial into the secret thoughts of the Guava Giant. A child's fancy uproots the tree and and transforms it into a shambling, leafy apparatus piloted by a nimble machinist crouching in its sieved heart. Home falls away, skies are torn to reveal new lights, and with the night a new, happy blindness comes to the tree and its child, now the twin scourge of land inhabited by mean dwarves and hunched witches and dogs that bark and drool and dart with bared fangs...

This is how I remember a child I knew a long time ago, safely tucked away in his private roost in a guava tree on the edge of his kitchen garden, heeding no calls, waiting for nobody, perfect in his escape. Whenever I try to recall the times when he seemed happiest, there is a tree nearby—the same dwarf guava; another guava tree near his grandparents' home, bearing red guavas and rising above the plastic sheen of banana leaves in a moist grove; a capricious kapra tree over a grunting pigsty; mango trees that tangled their crowns and exchanged kisses of white flowers; eucalyptus with their camphor trunks carpet of pink and scarlet lancets; a tall resinous pine that teetered over a creek; a condemned poplar with homes for owls, moles, squirrels, a lovesick boy. I can't remember him too far away from a particular tree, befriended for such times in a boy's life as need a sturdy, silent, resilient friend.

But, I hadn't been thinking of trees when Rabi Thapa, reading Trees of Dreams, his essay on the arboreal foundations of our existence,asked a simple question: Do trees color your memories, and thereby form something of what you are?A selfish listener, I was impatient for something directed at me by writers who seemed to only address themselves, and this question came like a punch, throwing me down a funnel of memory that picked on specific moments, of painlessly bleeding from cuts from razors hidden in pant pockets as I scrambled after the biggest guava, or of shutting my eyes and fumbling for toeholds to climb down a crumbling trunk after reaching ecstatic heights with a bunch of debaucher friends, peeking into a bird's nest, worrying about leaving behind the smell of sweaty limbs, passing a bottle over slender, crowning branches as the sun glowed copper and gave a final flare before dipping altogether.

What shape within me is the work of trees? Fear and escape: the stuff of fantasies and nightmares; the universe separated from our waking, walking hours, the map of a lost kingdom. The fields and roads of Khaireni were spotted with trees, each standing long enough to acquire its footnote of patriarchal history, a chorus of ghosts of abused wives of accident-prone sons, bits of red threads or ribbons, a long echo of generational conflicts. Their roots rode out of the ground gnarled and knotted to expose tired thoughts, shaking wizened beards that hid life and its myriad ends. Each tree had a family's name, its honor, attached to it: the wedded trees of a chautara transforming into the only living relatives from a hundred years ago, still to be treated as a daughter, and a son-in-law still addressed with the honorific. An especially old mango tree would bend with its lode of gold-ripe fruits and entice young men up its difficult trunk, regularly to bash one on its roots and add a new name to an already long oral history. With these mechanisms of familiarity and foreignness, of fear and longing, a villager mapped the land around him into corners that helped him escape to a different psychic landscape, or trapped him in a snare of terror or witches, ghosts, enemies, unspeakable curses.

And, trees were also the escape hatch to a separate existence, where the thrill of certitude—that this is the chosen branch that shall not give, and that is the chosen trunk that shall transport to farther worlds seen from a height—was more precious than the percussive peril of a limb's crackle and snap, or its threat to crumble and let loose its population of ants and termites. When a head finally reached above the canopy, counting spores and seeds and bird shit splattered on new leaves, the world appeared as it is meant to be seen: from a shaky vantage, temporary in its flourish but massive, solidly unchangeable. This is hard to picture in a city, a chimera of lights and fixtures, mutating into endlessly new combinations, screaming from signposts and hoardings. But, in a village where the mountains and streams never move, where the hedges around fields survive longer than most people, it is the fixed threes that change, sometimes daily, their shape, the shade they throw down as their milk of generosity, the silhouette as guests and ghouls they cut against the evening sky. In these changes is recorded the village's day: who worked where, how long it took to cut down the housewife who hanged herself, for how long the lovers hid between the giant roots of a peepul tree. Trees are the most dynamic beings in a village, capable of cyclical renewal that leaves any wretch envious, able to fool with the breath and shine with which nature teases it, echoing the sounds of living animals and absorbing the dead. No wonder it opens for a village boy the door to his other existence, where the rules are constantly renewed, where love lasts an eternal moment, and the hounds of horror tear off larger chunks of meat.

I don't think trees need humans to rescue them, to save them. Humanity could be wiped off the face of this planet, and trees would still be swinging, whistling with the wind, scattering their thorny seeds or erotic scent, covering their small wounds with thick sap. I don't think trees can mean anything to our collective, except perhaps as resource, as wealth. But, to the individual, they are the first abacus on which the memory of a space is strung and shuttled to map a journey undertaken or projected through a lifetime. They are, at least for me, the most reliable, cunning, punitive, forgiving friend with arms to cradle and leaves to shade the wearied tramp.

Trees: Artifacts of Nature is showing at Gallery 32 @ Dent Inn, Heritage Plaza until March 30. A booklet available at the gallery has essays about trees, written by A. Angelo D'Silva, Sushma Joshi, Pranab Man Singh and Rabi Thapa.

Waltzing with Bashir

Saw the movie.

Some artists exist simply to validate the world which we--the human animals--shape around us; some with such force and clarity that they make you jealous of the lives they have sketched.

Not that I would want to be thrown into a war as a teenager to suffer its consequences for the rest of my life, but you get what I mean.

A young man whom everybody thought of as a genius who'd end up a nuclear physicist ends up selling falafel in Holland, and has a good laugh about it.

It is a beautiful experience, this movie, and every adult person who cares occasionally to be jolted into thinking should watch it.

In other news: it is close to 1 AM; I am listening to old Hindi songs as I try to type up the stuff I have written during the day, and I am very, very sleepy. Without caffeine--or any other stimulant, really--I find it hard to stay up so late.

I wish I weren't like the proverbial bhusyaha kukkur, the stray mutt who has no employment, and who is also without any leisure.

Look at the blogroll: I have included Nepalikukur, Rabi Thapa's blog, there.

Tom-Yum-Goong

I wish I knew what the title of the movie Tom-Yum-Goong was meant as; I get the culinary allusion, but no more.

I wasn't prepared for the all-around awesomeness of the movie, although I have seen Ong Bak. I could imagine Tony Jaa pulling off incredible feats of the body and imagination, but TYG surpassed all expectations I had. I was touched by the lyrical rage of Tony Jaa searching for his elephants. I was amazed by the very subtly executed four-story in four-minutes sequence, or the elephant-grapple sequence towards the end where folly is the hero: orchestra composed entirely in the sound of broken bones, and unless they used green screen for that sequence, the sheer number of moves executed by Tony Jaa is sequence--upwards of twenty men grappled with and incapacitated in one long shot...

But, more so than that, the most touching aspect of the movie is the embodiment of rage. I wouldn't have thought Tony Jaa could also act, with his body and his face, the rawness of his rage: too overcome by grief at seeing the skeleton of his old elephant, he lets his foes kick him back and forth, until he gets stabbed, at which point he comes to his senses and proceeds to kill or bone-break. Niice.

Stefan Comes to Kathmandu

This note is addressed mostly to y'all from Wally-town: Stefan is coming to Kathmandu. Yagya has offered to host him, and it is possible I will hang out with him some, but not quite as much, because I am still re-writing a script, some forty-percent of it after a meeting yesterday. Yagya also has to work, so I don't know how we will arrange for Stefan to be shown the city. Perhaps carting him off to Dhulikhel is an option. He is here for too brief a period, has to have his Indian visa renewed, and can't travel much within Nepal because of the various bandhs and "agitations" going on in the country.

On that note, my high-minded opinion:
--I think one look at the democratic exercise in India is enough to indicate what amount of trouble is portended by a document--the nation's constitution--that relies too heavily upon concrete definitions, too-precise demarcations around ethnic groups or language preferences or regional autonomy. It should be especially weary of becoming a document in the service of defined groups, at the expense of serving the abstract ideals of an individual citizen of the nation.

Instead of protecting the rights of the indigenous people of a region, it should universally protect the right of the individual. It should discriminate against non-citizens by discriminating against them as individuals whose certain inalienable rights have been suspended within its borders: for instance, a foreigner may not just as easily own property, or enter matrimony without meeting an extra set of legal requirements. A foreigner may not petition for his right to congregate in protest against the nation, and so on.

It is dangerous to write groups into a constitutional document, even if they be women or homosexuals or dalits: rights should be protected for each individual within the nation: those who hold a citizenship certificate, and those who meet legal parameters for a future acquisition of the certificate. Nothing more.

Then there should be special laws protecting the rights of the inarticulate minorities, of which I can think of the children first and then some of the disabled population, but nobody else. For everyone else,
there should be an equal import of the exact same letters of the law.

Democracy is not based on real ideals: Facism is based on real ideals. People *are* in fact created unequal: in girth, length, force of limbs, in wit. Not each individual is equally adept, or inadequate, at each effort. If the natural course of things is allowed to reign, we get a feudal system, where obvious superiority of strength and wit, capriciousness and guile and greed, translate to a better access to material resources, and thereafter, human resources. Obvious wealth translates to obvious access to more opportunities to prosper.

On the other hand, Democracy that is defined as abstract ideals lends itself to a debate that removes the monetary or physical might of the citizen, while appealing to ideals that have currency across cultures and time: integrity, equality, morality, nobility, fidelity.

Thus, escaping the confines of the individual's definition, Democracy can remain a constant, while continuously re-inventing itself in conversation with the spirit of the age.

Writers of a document like the constitution of a nation should not presume to know the minds of the future generations, especially through their hubris of representation. A constitution is always written for a distant, brighter, better future, not to solve the petty power-struggles of the day.

After saying all of this, I do, however, acknowledge that the body of history is mostly composed in scores of injustice. Groups that have been materially disadvantaged in the past will always coagulate in an effort to effect a short-cut to a dominant position. Nepal is especially unfortunate in two regards: its fractured ethnic and regional make-up; and, in the fact that rebellion was most successfully initiated by a group that can't operate on the fuel of fragmentation. Although the Maoists might have courted dissatisfied ethnic and regional groups to form a coalition in order to challenge the status-quo, they can not begin defining themselves as a group tolerant of multiple political actors. They are a totalitarian group waiting for a more opportune political climate.

I think Nepal is going to the shits. I think the insistence upon muddling the preamble of the constitution is a reason Nepal *will* go to the shits. I think it is a bad idea to define people separately in a document designed to guarantee equality for all, because I think the only reason to bargain for the inclusion, or exclusion, of a group as a special identity is to beget undue advantages for one group, while putting another at disadvantage.

What good governance should solve through education, employment and free expression, these idiots are trying to guarantee in the constitution.

That shit don't fly.