Act III, Sundhara

I will be outside Kathmandu, on the road, for a few days. I haven't checked Sunday Post, but it is possible that my article hasn't been published, on account of its crappiness. It does have one phrase which I wish to have published, shown to the world: "the prolonged freshness of feces in the winter." Here, the issue is one of the olfactory and visual persistence or the freshness of feces in public spaces in Kathmandu. Normally--or, in warmer weather--feces that appear overnight tend to dry, brown and contract over the day, and in a few days, become one with the city's overcoat of filth. Not so in winter. Now, dryness comes in patches, and the surface becomes mottled rather than uniformly browned, and its wetness is also preserved: it turns a shiny orange before it turns brown, as if the hemoglobin refuses to oxidise into rust.

Keen observation makes for good writing, I am told, but all I see around me is shit.

---
Act III, Sundhara

A busy afternoon around Sundhara looks an infernal mess. The halt-and-sprint frenzy of vehicles coming through Sahid Gate, the wide-eyed scurrying of pedestrians crossing where they shouldn't, the prolonged freshness of feces in the winter, the olive-garbed stampede of baton-wielding municipality police, the joust of peddlers and hawkers, the teary, insistent and sometimes absent eyes of limbless children laid along the post-office walls, all add to the fermented sensory mayhem of the space.

Sometimes during the day, late, perhaps, or just before everything else of interest is about to start—worries, meetings with friends or family, a demonstration outside Tri-Chandra to halt all traffic coming around Tundikhel—it is possible to hear warcries answered by ululations and lamenting, thick footfalls running after the fast patter of rubber chappals. Soon municipality police comes hurrying through, searching for seeming phantoms that melt into the crowd, shaking the moment with their threats, while signalling ululations are relayed to every corner in the neighborhood. Anybody witnessing this frequent and comedic show of municipal efficiency is habitually forced to giggle and gloat in empathy with those that have evaded the reach of city-issued bamboo canes. It is possible to be enthralled to see this dance of the city.

But, sometimes, these tableaux disintegrate into chaos. An end of a fariya comes undone and trips its owner, or a cane finds its mark on a fleeing child's back. A nanglo of oranges must be hard to juggle as a horde of pot-bellied, potty-mouthed men come pouncing, attacking their way through the crowd, putting a yard between themselves and each mall-shopping respectable citizen while, like fabled champions, finding with their canes the scum of the city: the tax-evading, slum-living, sidewalk-hogging, defecating, fast-hawking, rag-picking outsiders. Pressed to a side, fixed into observing, from one vantage their relationship—the gulf between the hunter and the chased, and the sinew that binds them together—becomes illuminated and detailed.

The chase is a farce that mirrors all that is primal and base in our relations: strength towering over weakness, the wretched fleeing for its life while a blood-thirsty horde goes giggling after it. It is an old struggle renewed each day by both parties. The weak says—I will connive to steal from your purse for no other reason than the fact that your draw my mouth shut and give me nothing to eat, will hear nothing I say, and you leave me with nothing to claim. The strong says—I remain strong because I steal your grub and your grit; because I rub out your voice, I can bellow. So the weak moves stealthily in the shadows to spread its wares of piled lime, piled strawberries, piled amala, freshly milled dal around a grindstone, sheaves of pirated DVDs, watches in submerged in water, rechargeable batteries, Cello pens on the sidewalks. It knows from old muscle memory that everything must be arranges in neat, pyramidal piles if upward mobility is to be effected: such shapes alone lift the weak away from the shackling memory of the wallowing pit where they had hitherto perished. It remembers from revolutions and temples. But, the strong knows where gold grows: it grows in the distance between the work done by a weakling and the feed it gets in return for that effort. Therefore the strong guards that distance angrily, as if it is the seedbed for its progeny.

A nanglo of oranges must be hard to juggle while running up a flight of steps, or while begging an alley to swallow you. Sometimes the oranges, so neatly piled, yet excused from rules of ambition, crudely tumble out of formation, fall down steps, fall into not-yet-caked feces, leave a bright, guilty trail behind for the municipal police to follow. This usually brings a short jolt to Sundhara, throwing in its path a hiccupping interruption, occasion for pedestrians to grin at the comedy of oranges falling like marbles down a flight of stairs, and mall-shopping respectable citizens banging into each other's important heads as they try to steal just one orange, or no more than how many both hands will hold, with one more in the bag, (why not?).

Right then, the unshapely, dim-robed metropolitan policemen bang their canes hard on the floor and glare at the citizens picking from the earth the fruits of another person's labor. The ruddy ardor of chase falls away from their faces and they clutch their sides in pain. They are deeply disgusted by the gestures of the people for whose comfort they chase away old women with baskets of peanuts and bags of strawberries. They lack the authority to chase after these thieves, so they watch in horror, looking askance into the alleys where the owner of the snatched oranges has disappeared. Suddenly, they are the fathers and brothers of the same women who set shop on the pavements.

Then the ridiculousness of the chase becomes apparent. Their sides hurt and they want a cigarette to catch their breath. Theirs is a job for jesters, pawns, jokers. They serve the aesthetics of another sort of people, which involves raining lashes at widows from outlying villages. From one vantage, the hunters look bewildered, confused by the cheap greed of pedestrians bending to snatch oranges from the ground and the wail and curses of a looted vendor echoing from an alley. That cry of desperation bonds with the bewilderment, the sense of betrayal on the face of metro-police. Come night, both police and vendor will share same room, same meal. Come tomorrow, they must wear their costumes and head to Sundhara to play out the farce. Thus, everyday Sundhara elevates from being just a mess and in its terrifying essence remains simply infernal.

This Ridiculous World

http://thisridiculousworld.blogspot.com/

This blog is maintained by the Weeds. Lily was a film student at Whitman. She is one funny girl. As in humorous, not ridiculous. The world, on the other hand, is ridiculous.

If you want a knowing chuckle every now and then, visit the link above.

No Updates

for a few days to come. No updates.

The 500 Blows

What is below is tonight's exercise. Let's see if I can start and abandon a story everyday after 500 words. I have started doing push-ups, 10 at a time. 500 words a day seems alright, especially if they don't have to go anywhere.

--
Policeman


Khatri's boys were doing the decent thing by helping out with the neighborhood watch group. Earlier, there had been talks about requiring volunteers from each house. “Drivel,” Tham Bahadur had said. Members of the Committee had been stunned. If Tham Bahadur objected to it, what need was there for anybody else to agree to the idea? It was November already, and the nights were getting colder.

It had been agreed that Khatri's boys could become full time watchmen for the neighborhood. They had been good. The older boy had beaten a junkie to a pulp after being stabbed in the shoulder when a handful of junkies were caught trying to pry loose Bhimsen's water-pump. Even the younger boy was brave enough. Kasaju's daughter in law had stormed into the lane wailing one night not too long ago, when three motorcycles had followed her from her office, trying to kick her green scooter off the road, whooping and yelling obscenities at her.

The younger boy had pushed his bamboo baton into the spokes of a motorcycle's front wheels. There had been witnesses, by now standing at their windows, who saw the bike skid along the road, sending off bright sparks. When neighbors came to defend Kasaju's daughter in law, carrying their canes spiked with nails and naked khukuris, two motorcycles fled, leaving behind two badly bruised men. Their motorcycle was promptly put on fire, and men beat the outsiders senseless before shaving their heads and rubbing the carbon from old batteries on their faces.

Tham Bahadur hadn't gone out into the street that night. He had made no effort to stop the mob either. It had been a difficult few days for him at the office afterwards because one of the outsiders turned out to be the nephew of a policeman from another district. “Where were you when this was happening right outside your window?” the policeman had asked, pushing his face closer to Tham Bahadur.

Because he had to stand in attention while addressing a senior policeman, Tham Bahadur had clenched his jaws and stared at a point in the ceiling just above the flag as he answered. “This wasn't happening right outside my window, sir,” he had said evenly. “More like three houses away. And I was sound asleep.”

“Don't mock me, Tham Bahadur,” the policeman had said, spitting anger with every word. That was a while ago. Karki's boys had continued to patrol the neighborhood. Tham Bahadur found the sound of their bamboo canes tapping on the pavement very comforting. If they were out doing their job, he could sleep in peace. Occasionally, the older boy would blow on his whistle or make a whooping sound, like the sounds Tham Bahadur had made in the jungles in Nayadada as a boy. Sometimes, his aching back would wake him in the early morning hours, and he would wait for the whooping and tapping to approach from the Ganesh temple end of the lane. His warm bed made it easier to imagine the company of many absent loves, and knowing that Khatri's boys were within earshot made him feel less lonely until sleep returned.

Lives of Jawang

I had wanted to write something brilliant with this post, but, as always, when the intention to brilliance is there, I fail. I am like the caveman who knows how to make sparks by hitting two stones together, but can never make a fire. Never a fire. In any case, here is the essay I submitted to The Kathmandu Post. I don't know if it has been published--I have to go out and buy a paper to verify.

---


Lives of Jawang is being shown at KIMFF, Rastriya Sabha Griha, at 3:15 pm, Monday, December 15. It is a work that reaches into mysterious distances to dig for kernels of truth. It is beguilingly a simple fare, but it is folded within itself. This thirty five minute long documentary by Ramesh Khadka builds itself up slowly, eschewing any grandstanding, to let rhymes within the narrative to work on the viewer.

Lives of Jawang is a good work of documentation, and of art. It would be wrong to claim it attains the impossible capacity for pure objectivity: there are lapses, the croak of a voice being piped through a wall, that jolt the viewer back into the seat, away from documented reality. But, that doesn't detract from the viewing experience as much. There is a fog that prevails over the village and its life which softens such intrusions and keeps the focus on motifs that linger in the background, waiting their turn to step into the limelight before quietly retreating into the shadows again.

By the time the contractor at a quarry says of his ilk that, “Chepang ko buddhi nai chhaina: khanne, ukkaune, jhikne, khaidine," the viewer knows just enough about digging and destroying in search of a harsh livelihood that she gasps with the overpowering punch of comprehension. By then, the viewer has seen just enough of the commentator, a Chepang from Jawang, that she can identify within the commentator's voice many shades of abuse and complaints and strains of old fashioned fatalism.
Between the opening scenes which come off as play-acted for the camera, where women ask each other what there is for food, and the closing scenes where the cast of characters has come into its own, we see the villagers forage for food in the jungle, in their aboriginal ways, tracing vines of tubers and yams to eke out a living, and close the narrative arc with men digging boulders out of the same slopes, slowly destroying for a paltry wage the very land that makes it possible for them to live like their ancestors.

Is it justified to ask an aboriginal people to continue their way of life? There is bound to be divisions amongst a people that finds its capacity for tradition tied to its chances of survival as a distinct people. Similarly, there will be those who champion a path away from tradition, towards what counts as normalcy, towards homogenization, which is a necessary step in a multifarious society aiming for the liberty of the atomized individual, where a life unshackled from inheritance is finally possible.

There is a passage in Lives of Jawang where an elderly woman wishes she could ear rice for every meal. She is the native who yearns for the foreign, because there is nothing attractive about the indigenous life to those who have to actually live it, those born into it and without a parachute of escape into another world. The very reason this documentary exists—as a documentation of a disappearing people that are slowly being pushed off the rocky slopes into the tumult of Trishuli—becomes a farce before this realization: this lady doesn't need her story to be told to people sitting in Rastriya Sabha Griha. She needs rice and dal and warm clothes to wear that come from China.

Some of the people speaking to the person behind the camera understand the gaze that is being turned on them, and don't mind a bit of posturing. The unpacking of authentic life for faraway voyeurs is exactly as old as ethnography in film. Villagers in Jhawang also relish the opportunity to address us from the other side of the funnel, understanding that they are personas on screen, unshackled from being persons that must face consequences of their stories and slurs.

Racism is rampant in Jawang, in the way aeons of victimization works its way into the myths and lores of a people. Of course, the traditional robber of the hills, the cunning Bahun, is told of by a village elder. But there is a seething hate present under the surface towards the Marwari owner of a stone quarry that employs young Chepang men. Not only is the quarry physically removing the landscape with which the lives of the Chepang village is tied, presumably to built malls and houses for Kathmandu elite, but the wages for a day's labor of “khanne, ukkaune” are very bad, and there is no regard for the safety of the workers. It isn't uncommon for a worker, who has also sneaked in a bowl of jaand during the afternoon break, to get squashed by a boulder tumbling down the sides.

Lives of Jawang works without much flair or fanfare, but it certainly works, juxtaposing very specific commentaries about life in Jawang. Two modern “evils” rear their heads in serpentine fashion: money and alcohol, but it isn't hard to see that these evils allow Chepangs to break away from the patterns of the aboriginal, for good or for bad. Alcohol requires cash, which requires working for the Marwari they despise, but it brings them out of the slopes and into our world, where it is possible for well-fed, warm and occasionally sober people to sit in a darkened theater and enjoy the pity that wells up when a child hungrily watches a grandmother digging food out of ashes.

Load Shedding

Life is tied to the load shedding schedule these days. I had plans to go to KIMFF the past two days--especially since Diwas got me a press pass--but there was electricity at home all day the past two days, and I spent most of it trying to be productive, or pretending something suchlike and failing. 

I don't get out of bed in the mornings unless there is power, which means I sleep until 9 most mornings, and most nights, I stay up as late as my body permits. Not that I seem to be getting much done, but it seems to make a slavish sense to tie the body to an arbitrary schedule. There is logic to it some where, in some shape I can't discern yet. 

And that's another--I have been feeling increasingly more dumb, uneducated, incapable of new ideas. It might be just that I am less and less impressed with myself, not yet facing up to the fact that I have already begotten a crust of mediocrity around me. 

But, [and this is what I was working up to], it feels a bit different now. I am inching closer to an idea of something that I want to put on paper/screen, working assiduously away from anything else I have done before, although I recognize the impossibility of it. Instead of writing a story, I am going to write a non-story. Instead of plots, there'll be elipses. Instead of characters there will be their absense in a world perfected and populated by them.  Three strands, violence of a different kind with each. A short, short. Minimal dialogues. A menagerie in jars. Flutes. River. Alcohol. Stone and sand and shadows, and ennui settling on pretty eyes. It will be bad, but much before that, it will be badass. Hella! 

Huri, if you're reading this, in a fw days time little will I send you, and you can send me a little.  

Failure to Launch

I need to be doing some serious writing work, which hasn't yet started to bleed freely... Since 9 this morning, I have been sitting at my desk, and this aborted crap is all I have to show for it:

--

Cymbals

I told him to smother the fire with wet burlap to hide the smell. He looked up when I stopped at the door. “You will take care of this?” I said. I had meant it as a question. He took it as an order. It was hard to trust him, but there were things to do, people to take care of.

Outside, everything was normal. Nobody had seen smoke or other signs of a fire. People laughed or argued, depending upon where they stood in the crowded market. The midday sun hid each face in a shroud of deep shadows. If people knew about the fire, they didn't show panic. The flute-seller was picking his teeth near the Annapurna temple. He was leaning against his bamboo pole crowned with three hundred flutes. If it weren't for the crowd of hawkers and their colorful wares, saris and brass lamps, the hands of a thousand gods, he would have stood out as a magician or a trickster. When he bared his teeth to sweep up the muck of his mouth with a pink tongue, I thought he grinned at me.

Because I thought he grinned at me, I walked up to him with a smile. He let a trickle of spit fall on my shoes before looking at my face. “Didn't realize it was you,” he said with the same grin. A punch of foul breath pushed back my head. “You saved the flowers?” the flute-seller said. I took it to be a question. He might have said it as a statement of facts. He tugged at his collar to get comfortable inside his yellow shirt.

The flowers became even more beautiful in the sunlight. The mauve and the pink, the stray buds of white, muted verdure of dry herbs and around their edges a dusting of fine red earth: colors leaped from my hands into the air, as if sprung from a cold lair. The flute-seller wasn't impressed. He crinkled his nose and looked away, at nothing in particular, but at a pocket of disapproval.

“Did you bring the sacks?” he asked.

“I told you I wouldn't,” I said. By then, he had huffed off, bobbing the crown of flutes some height above us. Air passed in or out of the flutes with every stride . Although they couldn't sing, they sighed or whistled staccato notes. “I would never bring the sacks,” I said. He turned around sharply with flared nostrils and a line of sweat seeping across the shut mouth. Pigeons resting on the roofs of shops along the street leaped from their perch and flapped lazily before resettling to peck and mount and nuzzle. I paused to stare a hole into his back, my head bobbing in anger and a gilded, venomous curiosity studying his gait to find a chink in the armor.

“I can smell it on you,” he growled over his shoulder. “You burned my sacks. I can smell it in your breath.”

“It was an accident,” I was becoming defensive. The strap on my sandal broke again. I stood on one foot to push the safety-pin through the strap and the mangled edge of the sandal. He waited to let me catch up, but he didn't turn around. He grabbed a thin, shrill flute into which he breathed in anger, pursing his mouth into an ugly pout, no doubt. Immediately as my sandal slapped the ground, he set a martial pace with the flute for me to follow.

---

I have no idea where this was headed. Now I sit down for another session of fruitless meditation.

Hiatus

I feel it coming, like a dull blade reaching to the bones, slow and painful. I will probably start seeking out certain books by certain men and read certain passages in them before finding a corner in which to mope about it all. Certain books by certain men never fail to touch the right spots in the mind. The heart, after all, is just a bleeding organ, and shouldn't be encouraged too much to go its own way. 

I am behind on my deadline for coming Sunday's article, which I intend to write on Jawang ka Jindagiharu, the documentary about which I said in an earlier port that it is worthy of an entire essay of its own. I sat down to write it, but found it more fun to chat with Diwas and Tuan instead. I am feeling very sapped of any creativity at all, which seems like a corny thing to say, except it isn't. It is like a person, who finds he can't write at all anymore, trying to explain to another person what a block is. Such explanations always come off as excuses, lame attempts at hiding the real defects in ability and character. 

When you aren't feeling creative, you are feeling the burden of the mediocre. If you have seen good work done by others and want to do even better, but in your plate or your page you see sub-standard fare, you know the oppressive mass of mediocrity. It isn't borne of jealousy--it is an acuity of knowledge of what exists as the capacity and creations of your peers, and what exists as limits to your own abilities. 

And I have been feeling mediocre, a feeling that is made worse by the incapacity to imagine the alternative. As a writer, I should be able to imagine a better sentence or turn of phrase, at the most basic level, like choosing a brick that'll fit better into the masonry. I haven't been able to see anything. It could just be December, that damned beast, ramming its way into cranial folds and making me blue. Or, it is possible, I am just plain dumb in the choices I make. 

 

Bikku Kumar Shah

La. Here's a picture for you to download and put on Facebook. Alikati crop gar, ani photoshop ma brightness/contrast/color levels haru adjust gar. Sethji bhayera facebook ma picture narakhnu ta thik haina. Ma sanga Tyke ko pani picture chha, yehin katai, older posta ma.

Blame Nobody

The flowers are here because they are pretty.

I can't find a link to today's article on kantipuronline.com Here is today's article as I submitted it:

Blame Nobody

Frames of War by Prem BK and Kesang Tseten will be shown in the human-rights section of the 6^th Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival, being held between 11 and 15 December, 2008. It is part a bouquet of vignettes and part promotional material for the book A People War. It suffers whenever it stops documenting the recollections and reactions of photographers responsible for the images, and the public who saw the traveling show of the book, and focus on Kunda Dixit instead, and thus sullies the solemnity of witnessing what actually matters.

There are many precious moments in the film: the gravely comedic exchange between a mother and father who correct each other about the date when their Maoist son disappeared, or the brave sermon by the daughter of a disappeared policeman about how the dwellers of huts are as happy as palace-dwellers, and therefore nobody should have her happiness taken away. The true picture of the conflict emerges in exhibition venues and in the vignettes collected in the homes of the bereaved as their rigid cocoon of discomfort is broken by seeing something so familiar as tragedy reflected in the eyes of total strangers.

Never mind Dixit's hammering of the cliché about pictures speaking a thousand words—it is when words come and halt in memory of the burn and terror and deaths and bereavement that filled the rural lives of the protagonists of the war's story that the photographs gain meaning. They come detached from the efforts of those who collected and edited them into a book that is also a travelling show, and become what they were originally meant to be: conduits of empathy, mirrors of the common, careful score of our quotidian fare of injustice and mindless violence.

That violence and injustice are daily staples seems to be a theme shared by Suma Josson's documentary I Want My Father Back. Whenever the narrator isn't saying sentences that make you want to head-butt a wall out of frustration, what we see is a broken string of vignettes about the cotton farmers of Bidharbha, in Maharashtra, for a while now driven to suicide, and evil multi-national companies based in the USA who should be held accountable for their deaths.

There are three vignettes in the film that summarize its intention. A grandmothers sits by her orphaned grandson, who sings a children's rhyme on a charpoy. Looking past the camera, the boy grins happily. This gets his grandmother crying. The boy turns to look at her, and as if punishing himself for the brief lapse away from her grief, his face quivers in empathy. His father killed himself after loans accumulated beyond his capacity to repay.

Illuminated by a naked bulb, two young men talk of the choices before them: suicide or banditry and insurgency. They choose banditry. In another vignette, a father unpacks a suitcase of clothes as the narrator reads a note left behind by the man's daughter, who killed herself in order to lessen the burden of loans on her father to make way for her sisters' wedding. In her note, she asks to “blame nobody” for her death.

Vandana Shiva tries hard to persuade that all evil comes from outside the farmers' idyll—politicians, businessmen, globalization, liberalization, genetic engineering, corporate greed. But this hides a fact: these men and women were not murdered, but driven to suicide. Not just by debt and preying greed of faraway men, but by their neighbors and brothers, by centuries old codification of honor and shame. They chose not to be thieves, and found suicide easier. It is the community that is really evil in this picture.

Both Frames of War and I Want My Father Back seem inauthentic because they purport to be documentaries while being merely non-fiction. Both have dictatorial voices telling the viewer what her opinion should be after watching the documentary. These are inadequate narrators who spend more than necessary portion of the film to establish themselves, and miss the speeches and actions of their subjects. They don't dwell on what is truly profound in the behavior of their subjects because they are too eager to return to themselves.

Jawangka Jindagiharu, by Ramesh Khadka, is far superior to the two documentaries mentioned above, as simple documentation of a people's lives. It isn't merely non-fiction. Yet, it is filled with characters—an entire village of Chepangs living in Dhading—and it reaches into mysterious distances to dig for verity. It isn't a clunky string of vignettes, but a delicate narrative with internal rhymes and echoes, of nature and change, man and his recalcitrant desires, of the cyclicity of ordinariness. It is a film that deserves praise while it is being shown. It deserves an entire essay dedicated to it.

Saturday come

A few days ago, Kathmandu was shut down for three separate reasons: students protesting the fact that bus fares hadn't been reduced although fuel prices had gone down; locals and students from Kalanki/Kalimati protesting the murder by YCL of two young men from their area; and residents of Chabahil/Boudha area protesting against the murder of two teenagers from their area, by parties as of then unknown.

It turns out that the teenagers were killed by their acquaintances over six thousand rupees in cell-phone related debt. I see three problems that compounded to create that incident:

--A teenager not only had a cellphone, but also sold it to his teenage friend for the sum of six thousand rupees. It is unclear if either of them earned any money. Why would a teenager sell his cellphone? How would another unemployed teenager be expected to pay for it? If his parents could afford a phone for him, he wouldn't be buying from his friend.

--What sort of desperation or alienation from the norm and the average sort of reality does a person have to be experiencing to be persuaded to plot to kill a friend for a sum of six thousand rupees? People won't admit to it, but this has racial undertones to it. Which brings me to my third point:

--The intended murder weapon was a home-made revolver bought for three thousand rupees, the price of death of each of the two slain boys. It had been bought in the Terai, where, as does water down a face of stone, weapons from the conflict have trickled down to nest with different groups. Such a weapon was smuggled to Kathmandu, no doubt to be put to use at some point.

It is a tragedy, more so because the kid who didn't want to pay back the debt had the counsel of two older men who incited him to murder. The second kid was an accidental witness who tagged along with his friend to gather the money, perhaps excited about the revelry that would follow. He had to be killed, as such are the needs of banal evil.  

---

Milan, who edited Sano Sansar, has been steadily adding slightest touches of editorial magic to the short film. Most of editing is routine, bound by the set script and severely restricted by the mistakes of other people. Yet, there is always an opportunity, or more, for the deft editor to transform a moment from a dull mistake to an occasion for wonder or chuckle, as the case may be.

I was especially touched when he took a free-standing clip of Sushma giggling, a short cough of a giggle that lasted two heaves of the shoulders, and pasted it over an exchange between two characters egging each other. He timed it perfectly at the first attempt, so that she appeared to be giggling at a joke being told off-screen. The moment had nothing to do with Sushma's acting abilities, because she hadn't acted when she giggled like that--it was a candid moment, where she probably thought we'd use the part where she was doing montage actions of picking and throwing cards, taking a sip of her wine, but she giggled in between moments, and Milan made perfect use of that. 

  

December 6th

Happy Birthday! Best wishes of the day.

I got to watch 3 documentaries ahead of the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival. One of them is good, but too traditional for Kathmandu: the audience here loves gimmick, doesn't have the acuity of intellect to separate content from vehicle, and will probably like I Want My Father Back, which, in my opinion, is a crap-chute of a documentary, with the chute part attached at your throat, so that crap can be shoveled in. Problem is: it is like a fleshy snake stuck on an elegant spine. The flesh is the corpulence of a hate-mongering Vandana Shiva--for that is what she comes off as, albeit she hate mongers against a form of hate--and a self-besotted filmmaker, who thinks that showing a younger, different woman, Priyanka!, is enough to go to absurd, fabulous lengths to disguise her propaganda as an act of documentation.

Similar is the self-importance of Kunda Dixit in The Frames of War. It is a project about a project that cannibalized the work of many photographers who worked during the war. Again, the real people inching towards the camera to tell their stories, the old frail under the burden of grief they can't shed, and the young as if bursting at the seams with incontrollable rage and need for revenge, are the real documentary, not Kunda Dixit in his office, very thoughtfully transferring data from one computer to next, showing how he had missed the arch of a woman's eyebrow in his first viewing. The movie would improve tremendously if they removed him and added back whatever footage of actual people pouring out their actual grief.

There was another documentary about Chepangs, called Jawangka Jindagiharu, which restored my faith in documentaries. I have always been deeply skeptical of people's ability to tell stories without making them into propaganda pieces. This documentary does that the least of the lot.

It is hard not to sympathize with disenfranchised farmers. It is hard not to rage against greedy corporations, but it is harder for me to listen to a bunch of narrators who patronize the audience and spew whatever crap they want.

I am tired now.

Malami article: my original

I have decided to post my article in today's TKP in the form in which I submitted it, and also post a link to the article as it appeared. Here's the link:

http://www.kantipuronline.com/kolnews.php?&nid=168472

Aditya did tell me that the article would be edited for style and content, to make it more suitable for the newspaper format. It loses me to gain brevity, going down from 859 to 523 words, but a newspaper article is supposed to hide the writer, not bring him to the fore. 

And, here's the article as I submitted it, all 859 words of it: 

--

Funerailles

     –Prawin Adhikari

     It is possible to find pirated discs of Nepali movies in New York, the city of cinema’s adolescence, even though some will say cinema was birthed by the Lumiere brothers in France, who did not conceive it. A bastard born to such a murky pedigree, cinema is nonetheless loved universally. That shadows flickering on a wall can be the carriage for narratives is not a strange concept to a species that searches for stories everywhere. This must be why cinema has a universal grammar and appeal. More often than written words or cultural rituals, music and cinema transcend differences.

     Pirated discs of Nepali movies compete among a cosmopolitan chorus of cinema, to act as a familiar for homesick Nepalis before which pretenses of otherness can disappear. It is perhaps in counterpoint, that we find a film like Malami, [Funerailles in French] Subarna Thapa's gorgeous black and white twenty-minutes short, shown on November 21 at Allaince Francaise, Kathmandu: because we seek a unique Nepali voice in cinema to waft over the local cacophony. 

      Nepali audiences are only just waking up to short fiction in cinema, with a smattering of festivals around the country to showcase the efforts of independent and necessarily small productions. Malami has the ingredients necessary to gently introduce a new audience to short fiction: it starts with an end and ends with a beginning; the middle is stacked with social and cultural problems that require specific solutions, whether within the boundary of the movie, or in debates afterwards; and it is just strange enough to awake wonderment and the desire to knock on the door and peep through the keyhole, if not open it to see the cinematic world as it really is.

     The movie sets out to alter long calcified perceptions of villagers from a dying hamlet. It is bracketed by images of the down of reeds and cotton tugged loose by a breeze, carrying between colour and its absence an arc of radical transformation of the subjects inhabiting the narrative. Malamicould be an outsider's manifesto about Nepali village life in frays, the way it pries into every hurt of every man, woman and child. Anup Baral's character talks to us as a specter floating between worlds, appearing to those who are about to die, or to a child who has acquired a mortal knowledge of the worlds. By the time the black and white pictures bleed into colours carried by light-filled forest and laughing children, the audience has seen transformative incidents, akin to watching the dead gain a will of their own.

     The living, on the other hand, appear to have lost ownership of their lives. Their distress is to be measured in the absence of fathers, husbands and sons, and to be scaled through defiance of aeons old traditions. They borrow safety for unborn life by servicing the dead. In the entire village, one man alone dares speak freely without being whittled down to unimportance, and he gets away only because he speaks to an otherworldly messenger. Everybody else is tied inextricably to the community and its rules.

      The community in Malami is a heavy shackle, reaching into the grave of the past and the womb of the future, skewering each individual with the burden of every other person. The men leave, as a wife points out, not only to put food in the bellies of those forgotten behind, but also to find leisure away from the village drudgery. It is a liberation that exacts its pound of flesh here, in the village, and there, in Dubai, Malaysia, Afghanistan.

      As a Nepali short, Malami is atypical in its French budget, its very experienced French cinematographer, its French production team, its French screenplay co-writer and a certain French gaze that it brings to rural Nepal, a nostalgia for a lost garden. But the dialogues are very sharp, especially when an old man silently shows his eye to a burly Gurung in exasperation. Translations of cultural gestures perhaps appeal directly the spectator that is lodged deep within the mind, right next to the narrator. Without the bridge of language to cross, pictures speak volubly, excitedly, to French and Nepali audiences alike. In this regard, Malami is an unparalleled success in the very short history of short movies about Nepal.

     Malami is equally instructive to the novice audience and to novice Nepali filmmakers. Its innovations in narrative technique aren't entirely avant-garde, but to a new audience, mere proximity with such ideas as the piercing of the skin between worlds, the metaphor as a solution to social crises, the ever-renewed chewing of life and death for thought-fodder is a fresh departure from the normal fare. Movies like Malami shouldn’t have to wait too long and work too hard to reach a wider audience. Kathmandu audiences enjoying and applauding it is a septic adulation. It is in how the flicker on the screen peels back layers on rural faces to show them a new heart of their life that Malami would succeed. This would be the perfect counterpoint to searching for pirated discs of Nepali movies in New York City. 

Pokhara

The petal is a peculiar shape, just escaping primitiveness, but close enough to nature that it arouses.

Grieving for Mumbai

Why this madness? Hindu terror, Maharastra terror, now Muslim terror... 

My "Patrakar" bag

I like the cane & jute bag that I sling around town with a pen and a pad of writing paper in it, looking all writer-ly, or so I think. It is falling apart around the sides, but I think it will last a long time to come, either with a cloth side [I am thinking a dark dhaka print], or with a strip of leather, although I don't know yet where I can source the leather. I might even put some food-coloring or tie-dying ink on the cane and color it a different color than the beige it is now. Any suggestions?

Clean this up?

Ashtami, today..

This year, as ever, millions of animals are being slaughtered for dashain. Nothing unusual about that. I am not a weak-bellied vegetarian, or I would be arguing that the Shakta Hindu tradition of animal sacrifices is some form of evil: it is the exact opposite; it is a form of appeasing the Good in the universe. What now feels like a farce--getting the goat to "agree" by wetting it behind the ears--is, in mythical methods, a neurological triumph. It is the moment when we, its human sacrificers, agree with the goat that it is dying in our stead, as our proxy. Animal sacrifices, properly understood, become acts of mystical empathy. It is our blood that flows from the goat once it has "agreed" to become the sacrifice to the goddess.  Therefore, it is only correct to mark our foreheads with rice laced with the sacrificial blood. (Although, this practice is much less common now, it does occasionally surface during certain ceremonies, like the kuldeuta's puja.)  It is important that once we make the sacrifice, we eat every edible bit of the animal.

However, it is still possible to wonder if this show of bloodlust is necessary anymore. The same scriptures that call for animal sacrifices also allow the same king of substitution with certain vegetables and fruits. Coconut works because it spills, as would blood; gourds work because they can be "beheaded" in a single stroke. Meat is, although expensive, plentiful enough that we consume it throughout the year. And a week of eating fatty, over-spiced meat can't possibly be good for the human body. We make unwitting sacrifice of our own flesh when we refuse to deflect in the slightest, away from a toxic tradition. 

A Bit of Myself

Alright: here's a bit of myself.

And here was the face, very briefly, for someone who wanted to see what I look like.

I don't think this makes any adsense

See--I am clearly angling for adsense money here...but I don't know how to make things livelier. I think putting up a pretty picture or two will help. I think, in order to lure people back to by blog, I will have to put up some pretty pictures. I might get so callous as to start posting pictures of babies;, or of the surprisingly cute white owl that sits on the frame of my room's open window and waits for sewer rats, pivots its head as if in question when it realizes I've been gazing at it with wonderment, and perhaps, though just a little, affection.

But, I also know the universe it a touchy bitch when it comes to the question of balance. Therefore, before any picture of acceptable cuteness, here' s a self-portrait. Note that I called the previous post "Pictures," and posted just the one: this one is in apology for that infraction.



Note how the subject appears to be staring at something or someone in middle distance. His face is a mask of brooding. There is more than a hint of weariness, and the air around his head appears thinner from lack of fortified thoughts. This is clearly a specimen of the lesser species of writers.

Pictures

This is me, clearly enjoying whatever bullshit I was ladling to innocent bystanders. It is hard to tell from this picture, but the foliage behind me is from a papaya tree. Harder to tell is the fact that gorgeousness makes its full couch a hundred yards from the balcony where I was propping my feet up on a bench: Begnas stretches for over a kilometer to the west. This is the lake where I was surprised to learn that it is possible to walk way faster than you can row a boat. Such realizations have special meaning especially if it is in the pitch darkness of a moonless night that a drunk fisherman rows you across Rupa after 8 pm, guiding the boat by distant lights, and taking you way, way off-course. Not that you can tell from this picture.

Clearly, I didn't take this picture. A tall Dutch girl named Vivian did. So, there's the photo credit. Satisfied?

Commuting to a Job

Here's a poem written at work in Palo Alto, after a lady killed herself
 on the morning of 13th February, 2007. It is possible to tell that I was
about to quit my job. I did, exactly 10 days after, because the interview
on the 16th went very well, and I got cocky.

It took me two months to find another job. Writing fake blog entries.
Which I did, by the hundreds...about burgers and sports watch, about
 video-chat software and a new animated series. The damned animated series
 went on to make a shit-load of money. I hain't seen not a dime of it.



Commuting

On Sunday, we gathered with ground meat and the
heat of chilies and garlic and masala, laughing at
misshapen dollops of meat in dough. On Monday, I
went to work still smelling of cooking with friends.

I was patient at work, although I wondered how
many days before I had money for lunch, how
long before I could see the dentist, and constanly
I wondered if I wouldn't be unhappier the next day.

On Tuesday, I ran to the station. The southbound train had
stopped two hundred yards to the east, and consequently,
the northbound was delayed. Cop-cars blinked on the tracks.
Everybody watched them. Some became so bored

They first toed the yellow line, then jumped down,
balancing on the tracks, arms flapping like birds
on a pylon, shading their eyes to look eastward, casually
climbing back to the platform as if they hadn't trespassed.

Full thirty seven minutes past the schedule, the hurried row
of amber displays announced a train four minutes away, on
its way. The cop-cars had vanished.- Although the southbound
stayed, rails hummed as a train tried to keep the air solid.

A warm and rustic voice said over the PA: "We apologize for
the delay. A fatality has occurred this morning outside
Mountain View station. We'll promptly be on our way."
The living must have felt relief. Wednesday was a fine day.

Reincarnation

I was trying to finish this story before 1st August, 2008, so that I could enter a short-story competition in Portland, OR., for a festival called Wordstock, with the organization-ing of which a friend from Whitman is involved. I had to travel as I was in the process of writing it. But, I think the real reason the story didn't reach an end was that I lacked clarity about the story: I knew what I wanted to write, but I had scant idea what the story was about. Shit don't work that way in writing. Thoughts don't make ideas. Nice is never enough to be good.

This is *NOT* history. It is inaccurate on many levels. If you can't spot where, well...

I have highlighted the sentence I like best: it is campy, purple, but also almost completes the whole story on its own.

--

It had rained hard all morning, but the sun was mild and pleasant for a July afternoon. I was throwing peanuts at monkeys in Pashupatinath when a man introduced himself as Lakkhan, reincarnated as Lukky Das Kayastha. He seemed to find me familiar, the way he brushed with his palms a rain-pitted stone to sit beside me.

“Been a long time,” he said to me. “Been waiting, a long time.” He spitted towards the river. There were a hundred steps of smooth-faced stone between him and the river: spit trickled over the stubble on his chin, both hands went up to wipe away the wetness. One swipe from the left, another from the right, coarse palms over the chin like sandpaper on splintered wood.

He smacked his hands together to let off a poisonous puff of snuff that tickled my nose and made him sneeze, once, twice, three times. He took the yellow towel wrapped around his head and opened it. Incense, sweat, charcoal and smoked-meat scents from the pyres across Bagmati lifted like individual flakes of ash released from a downy hold. Although it wasn't very hot at all, my spine had over it a sheen of moisture: I felt flaps of air ripple outward from Lakkhan as he snapped the towel, once, twice, before folding it into a triangle to put over his head, corners reaching past his folded knees to scabby ankles. Under the towel, he was all bony bumps parcelled in translucent brown skin, aglow from within, as if a wire-ribbed lantern of butcher-paper carefully abandoned by the wayside after a mist-filled morning's tryst.

I did look twice to make sure he didn't float an inch or half above the stone steps. He had gathered a mouthful of tobacco spit to nobly swirl in his mouth, capsuling it in neat bulges under one cheek or another, until the slender girl who gave us a wan smile moved on to sights better suited to long-lensed Japanese tourists like her. Then he spitted towards the houses on Chabahil hill. Like a pigeon spying out of the corner of its dumb, round, alert eyes, he bobbed and shifted from one foot to another, moving at least three quarters of an inch closer in my direction. He and raised his chin and brows at me. I shook my head, said “Nothing,” without really saying it.

“Such a long time you took coming,” he said in a heavily accented Nepali. “Been waiting a long time.” Was that a tourist-appeasing trick of his ilk, the one-legged, two-tongued ashen brood inhabiting the numerous small shrines across the Ram temple? “Don't recognize?” he asked again. I smiled, discomfited, embarrassed by the knowledge that I did know this man once, when I was much younger and needed his blessings and marijuana to get high in the evenings. “Babaji?” I hazarded.

“Ho, ho!” Lakkhan laughed. “What Babaji? I'm no Babaji!” He pivoted on one toe and one heel to face me, clutching with force the crotch of his inadequate dhoti, banging his knees together for emphasis. “First time only we are meeting. Still don't recognize?” His face leaned closer in with eyes wide.

“There we met,” he pointed across the river to the Panchadewal temples. “There, there, there, there,” he pointed to the temple of Birupakshya, the smaller bridge over Bagmati, the temple of Ram, a tin door under a stone upstream on Bagmati, from where a leg and a wisp of waist-long beard tentacled in search of some sunlight. I wanted to ask him when. “Long time ago,” Lakkhan said. “Not yesterday, not three month ago—in another life. Long time ago.”

“Another life?” Lakkhan nodded. He no longer looked in my direction, as if he had held his end of a bargain by telling me when we had met before. His chin jaunted up again, pointed all over the place as he hugged his knees and knocked them together as if they were the teeth of his other body, let loose to chatter.

“No problem if you don't recognize,” Lakkhan said. “First time I saw myself, I didn't recognize either. Like thief slinking in night through a sugarcane field, this dark face, ribs showing here and here. How would I recognize? Now you say this is not the face of a friend,” he cut a circle around his face with a finger.

“I am sorry,” I said. “You know, I have a shoddy memory. It is okay if you remember me from somewhere.”

“I remember you from here,” he put a finger on the stone under us. “Okay if you don't. That was two hundred years ago. You were in the service of the mad king, and I was his animal.”

As I listened to Lakkhan, sights and sounds around me changed. The pretty Japanese girl was sixty yards to our right, but I could hear the silk between her thighs rub on itself as she shifted tentatively towards the edge of the high embankment over the river. If Lakkhan hadn't raised his arm to point across the river to the temple of Birupakshya, I think I would have succeeded in hearing the fare quoted to her by the taxi-driver who drove her there, from the spill of his voice still echoing in the folded spirals of her ears.

I did remembered. In a different month, with a different sun hesitantly blanketed over a fog-breathed river, I saw Lakkhan squatting outside the temple of Birupakshya, his hands joined in prayer, not to the statue within, but to a bare-bottomed king.

“No, lord of lords, father and mother and owner, protector of cows and brahmins, no, exalted being, supreme radiance, no, don't!” Lakkhan rubbed his nose on the threshold of the temple. Inside, King Rana Bahadur Shah, grandson of the great Gorkha emperor Prithvi Narayan Shah, lord over all lands between the impenetrable jungles of Bihar and the northern deserts, between Tista and Sutlej rivers of the Gangetic plains, stood with his pyjamas around his ankle, eyeing the stone face of Birupakshya-buried-to-the-waist.

“Lakkhan,” he called out, “tell me again, slave, why I can't?”

I remembered also the afternoon that had brought these men together. I was holding a parasol of thin gold ribs under peacock eyes over the king's head as he sat by the temple of Ram, smoking hashish from an ivory and jade chillum, half-attentive to the ramblings of a toothless fool that had recently emerged from a cave under Kanchenjungha after six years in the darkness, feeding on heads of bats and drinking the drool of snails while he waited for enlightenment. Across the river, a girl of thirteen descended from the temple of Pashupatinath, an end of her widow's white dhoti draped over a shorn head, an ugly companion holding her elbow. She walked into the water and kneeled, as if to disappear in the cold, clear water, until a bunch of hibiscus floating downstream came to rest against her submerged head. The thin cotton dhoti soaked through with the color of her skin when she stood: the glaring eyes of her small breasts searched for us. A ridiculous bunch of hibiscus crowned her head. Water trickled down her sides and created, from air and dhoti pinched between the knees, a body of light, a crotch of mysteries, two buttery thighs and the graceful descent of limbs in aqueous dissolve.

In a flash, the king had thrown the chillum and was running down to the river. I ran after him, catching air with the parasol, letting a hundred peacock eyes flutter first on their gold hinges, then flake and trail up the stone steps. The king bounded down stone steps and leapt clean over small shrines, sometimes stepping off the smooth heads of the sixty-four shivalingams filing down to the river. The girl looked up. Her ugly companion, perhaps a few years older, but darker and with teeth thrown askew from being born into a slave ancestry, stepped forward in her own horror at the approach of the bounding beast. The ugly girl confronted the king, hit him squarely across the face, curled her fingers around the handlebar of his royal mustache, uprooted it. I had to spear her through with the tip of my parasol to separate her from the king when she tried to force him underwater, clinging to him like ivy around oak, grinding his waist between her legs, clamping herself over his bewildered face. The king stood, rubbed his shoulder where the parasol had grazed him, climbed out and sat inside the temple of Birupakshya the-wide-eyed, their madness contained for the moment.

The toothless fool, perched above everybody else, cackled and tittered, yanked at his loincloth to tie it around his head, pointed at the king and jumped. The king stood and faced the fool and everything else in the distance between them. He twitched the royal face where pink flesh declared the absence of the royal mustache, and walked away.

Experience counts for a lot when it comes to needling a parasol through a slave girl, and at that point in my career in His Majesty's service, I still struggled with the technique. The king walked on, leaving me, his servant and shadow, forty paces behind. From the western gate of Pashupati, where the golden bull keeps guard, the widow girl rushed out with three large men behind her. They were wrestlers from her village, loyal to her father, it seemed, and duty bound as brothers to avenge the death of her slave girl. The king's regal indifference notwithstanding, one of the wrestlers swung down his bamboo stick upon the king. Of course, I rushed forward with a khukuri and separated the man with one upward stroke.

What followed is well documented in the accounts of Baburam Acharya, Pandit Dhanajaya Shashtri, Buddhiratna Bajracharya, William Kirkpatrick, Sylvain Levi, Mahendra Johnathan Pradhan, Kaushalya Devi and Hiroshi Takeda. I won't say I remember events as they unfolded that day, because I have also read about that day in the histories written by Acharya, Pradhan and Takeda. I wouldn't bet one way or other if I were to be quizzed on exactly how much I remember and how much must be the impression of what I have read. My knowledge of those years must be a compact of experience and information; I might have seen the evening, but the sunset, surely, was dreamed up.

In any case, all major sources agree that the king returned three hours later, with a mask of sandalwood paste on his face, wearing a scarlet robe of silk that trailed on either side of Makardhwoj, the second strongest elephant in his stable. The young widow's retinue, eighteen villagers in all, were weighted down with chains and placed between Gaushala and Aryaghat, eighty-two paces for man and thirteen strides for the elephant between two bodies, with the young widow seated on a freshly prepared pyre at the end of the line, just outside the temple of Birupakshya. A runner brought the king's message from Gaushala-- “Would you do His Majesty the honor of becoming his third queen?”

Kantivati, Kantamati, Kantawati, widowed daughter of a Mishra brahmin, mortified at the prospect of remarrying with no hair on her head, wearing red again, letting that demon with handlebars over his mouth touch her with his eyes, turned her head to the north and said no. Another runner came after a few minutes. “Sri Sri Sri Sri Sri Maharaj Rana Bahadur Shah Bahadur Shamsher Jang Devanam Sada Samar Vijayinam, King of Nepal, asks you to reconsider,” he said, presenting to her a head scarf in which a pool of blood and hair had been carefully carried to her from the feet of Makardhwoj. “No,” said the girl, shivering in her thin dhoti, shrinking farther atop the pyre. After two more turbans came Lakkan Das, wrestler, scholar, jester and warrior, burdened with wisdom, on his knees to rub his nose in the ground beneath her feet. “Sister,” he said, “You are our mother and you are our daughter. There is a madman who comes for you. Elephants and turbans are sport to him. There is no sin where a king stands. Save us. Save your mother—she is but three boys away from the elephant. Save your brother—he is waiting for this runner to return, his head already under the elephant's foot.”

Kantawati married Rana Bahadur Shah, after making him kneel before her as Lakkhan kneeled before her. She had three conditions for the king—let my people go, make my firstborn son the heir to your throne, and marry my younger sister, so that she may take care of my child once I am gone. The king, his mask of sandalwood paste now dry, blood clotted over the corners of his mouth, solemnly called me to open a parasol of gold brocade in scarlet silk for his betrothed. Kantawati, my queen, alighted from the pyre, stepping firmly on the furrow Lakkhan had drawn with his supplicating nose.

In less than 10 months, Kantawati, all of fourteen years, gave birth to Girvanyuddha, a sickly boy with her large eyes. I spent many nights fanning Rana Bahadur Shah as he slept outside her door when he returned intoxicated from Pashupatinath, after an evening of opium and hashish, and couldn't get her to come to him. On other days, when, waking after the second hour of the morning, he went for a gallop and bath along Bagmati and returned with a fresh pot of yogurt from a farmer's wife, or mangoes from Bhimsen's garden in Thapathali, I pulled a fan of yak tails and peacock feathers, as the king, with his head on his wife's lap, read to her Maithili ballads written by his poet father, Pratap Singh Shah.

Incompletes

I am going to post my incomplete stories here, instead of keeping them in my computer. There is nothing worse than a story that goes nowhere. I know nobody ever reads this blog, but if anybody runs into these postings and can tell me where they've gone wrong, perhaps I'll give these incomplete stories another go.

Otherwise, screw them.

Also--I am translating poems right now, from Nepali into English. My favorite lines so far:

"A face I remember for its bright lit smile

has lost its light. Eyes are eclipsed: despair

claims the corners of her mouth and drips

like the acid darkness of a moonless night."

--Khin Maya Ale

Begnas, seen from the lake

More:

This is looking to the north--the forest that stretches to the right is Centurion Park: I don't know if that is the official name, but the manager at Begnas resort referred to it as CP. All the way to the top is Begnas Kot--it is accessible by a road on the other side of the hill, which makes it the highest point with a view of Begnas that has road-access.

Hill Top seen from the lake. The small houses make up Piple, a small village of fishermen. In the foreground are fish enclosures: when I saw that the water was far from HT, I thought perhaps we could construct a raft of sorts, for the water-sport we need in the story. But, I now know that the resort across the lake has a swimming pool, and a two-room suite right by the pool: the balconies of the individual rooms face the pool/lake/each-other, and the rooms are inter-connected. Now Mik has to become a fisherman or a bar-tender.

This is looking to the east once more: to the left is the CP, ro the right the bald-spot owned by Shangrila group, from where the view of Begnas has no rival; and the little smudge towards the center is the resort.

pictres from begnas

Here are some pictures. I am not sure if the upload has worked at all. I have groupled the pictures according to the locations from where they are takes, viz: Hill Top Hotel [HT]; the lake [BN]; The "Picnic Spot" [PS]; the Red House [RH]--although now I am not sure why I thought the house was a find; and Begnas Resort [BR]. Most pictures are of Centurion Park [CP], a jungle across the lake.

I will make future pictures larger--this was "medium" as blogger sees it. It is the same picture that I have email you. The bald spot can be seen from Hill Top, and is a candidate for a picnic spot, if the story remains on the HT side of the lake. Since the hotel is really, really small, and the view of the lake is complete, it would be easier to establish Mik as the innkeeper. On the other hand, if we choose to go with the resort, then we'll have to re-work Mik's place in the story.

This is the view looking to the east from HT: the small arrow shows the position of Begnas Resort [BR], rival of HT in our story. In either case, there are two jungles that are candidates for the picnic part: Centurion Park [CP] is seen to the left of the tree here. It is flatter than other jungles, and it is to the north of the lake, which is an added plus, as that is the side with the view.

This is what HT looks like: it is very, very small, doesn't have a proper bathroom, etc. Only 2 rooms. But, other than this, Begnas Resort is the only other place in operation around Begnas: there is nothign even as close when comes to Rupa. It is right at the edge of the jungle, but has nothing going on for itself other than the view, such as the one below, looking to the north. This is where the Annapurna range shows itself after late August.