Million Dollar Babu

I have been told that this a somewhat crappy essay, and I agree. I tried writing it after a sleepless night, and a storm in the head. I am beginning to feel guilty that I am not writing as well as I ought to be writing--or even as well as I am capable of writing.

In other news: Detective Jagat Kunwar is returning to Kathmandu. I look forward to seeing him.

----

Chakraborti? That is possible, it sounds just about right, a Babu with a service in the Railway, Chakraborty sounds right, but it could easily have been a Banerji or Chatterji. A solid Bengali name, not Muslim or Bihari. Nadim Bhai is not sure. But the story is hilarious, so he has to giggle, and that makes it harder for him to remember the name of the Million Dollar Babu. What is a story that doesn't name the emperor who parades naked through the markets of Barra Bazaar?

Chakraborti Babu arrives at Topsia in a car with tinted windows, sends the driver to look for Nadim. The world-weary driver adds another layer of security: instead of approaching Nadim, he catches Nadim's childhood friend, another man named Nadim By the time Nadim and Nadim are in the presence of Chakraborty Babu, it feels like a bad gangster movie. Chakraborty Babu is big in the spongy rosogulla way, not at all imposing, breathing a little hard, constantly wiping his forehead.

“You know foreigners, Nadim Bhai,” says Chakraborty in Bangla. “I have a job for you that nobody else can do. If you do it well, twenty percent is yours. Think, Nadim Bhai. You will make twp lakhs minimum. And if you do this job well, there'll be more.”

Nadim knows foreigners because he is associated with a small NGO that runs a clinic from a one-room Youth Club in his neighborhood. A teashop around the corner loans them tables, or loans their plastic chairs—in any case, every time the clinic opens, foreigners grin and nod at the teashop and point at the chairs and tables on which rickshaw pullers and other teashop-wallahs sit for chit-chat and gup-shup. These foreigners also go to Nadim's home, sit in his kitchen and talk to his mother, his sister. Elena used to spend every day with him, running after Zeenat Aman, taking Baby Amrin to the hospital for surgery. People of Topsia are used to seeing her step lightly through the laughter and mud and despair of their neighborhood, with Nadim following shortly behind, his short, limber gait full of understated swagger.

Nadim doesn't know what to make of the opportunity: a few hours' work and two lakhs on the table! He consults Elena. I can't keep myself out of it. “What do you think, Parawin Bhai?” asks Nadim. “Money is money,” I say. “But, what is the catch?”

“No catch,” Nadim says. “The Bengali Babu has wads of money, a lot of money in American dollars, and he wants me to get it converted through my foreigner friends.” What foreigner friends? Backpacker volunteers who want to spend two weeks washing wounds and irrigating ears of children from a Muslim slum in Kolkata? Why isn't the Bengali Babu going to a bank? “Arre, yaar! It must be haraam money! He is scared. Every time I meet him, he drives me out to Tangra and takes me to eat Chinese. What do you want to eat? This, this, that? Eat more! You want whiskey? I have to say—Ramjan is going on. I don't take during Ramjan. Yesterday, for me and Nadim, seven hundred rupees at the Chinese restaurant. But he doesn't eat anything. Not even a Sprite.”

Nadim arrives three days later with two sheets of photocopy: one is a certificate of “authenticity.” The fine print is garbled, but the word “authenticity” is legible. The other is a photocopy of a million dollar bill. “You should have seen him. He was so scared. Every time someone came into the restaurant, he would snatch this up and put his fist under the table. I said—show me the original. What if you don't have an original?”

A million dollar bill? In Kolkata, with a Babu in the Railways? I search for denominations of US currency in wikipedia: of course, the million dollar bill exists. Rarer are the ten-thousand dollar bills, commemorative, by now illegal tender. Almost as infrequent as the two-dollar bill, a genuine legal tender that is just so quirky. Hank Williams sang about it: “I got a hot-rod Ford han a two-dollar bill, I know a shpot right over der hill, der's soda pop han dancin's free...” I show Elena the wikipedia entry on the million dollar bill and she falls off the chair laughing and between breathless bouts of laughter explains everything to Nadim.

The next day I fry mushrooms with soaked rice, then throw in the daal from the previous night, which was too salty to eat. The rice soaks up the salt, now there is khichadi for dinner. “There!” I say to myself. But Elena doesn't come home on time. She can get easily distracted by new curtains, or even mops and scrubs, at this point in her life. I sit glumly and type, slowly seething in anger. When she comes, she has a helmet on her head, and Nadim right behind, jumping two, three steps at a time. They can't wait to start giggling.

“I wish you were there! We went to a six, seven story tall building, through these alleys... oh those alleys! You should have seen them!” Nadim takes over the narrative: “We had to pass through seven, eight doors. Big men just standing there, like guards. And hair everywhere!”

“Big piles of hair, all over the floor, all along the walls, right up to the ceiling. They deal in hair. It was weird. There wasn't any hair only in the stairwell, but there were men standing in the stairwell, all silently peeing on the wall.”

“We reached him. He sent everybody away and then took out this small plastic pouch from his vest. Inside, he had the million dollar bill.” Chakraborty Babu's body guards positioned themselves at the entrance, behind ceiling-high pile of human hair, where all barbers of Kolkata must send their cargo. Elena took the note and slowly read out the text printed where the legal tender is normally shown. “This bill has been printed to increase your FUN! To be used exclusively at fairs and parties!” And more such drivel, all disguised by genuine typography and serious artwork to make it look and feel real.

Chakraborty Babu doesn't quite understand at first, and Elena can't understand how, in Kolkata, a city where even the Muslim women from the slums sometimes get a Masters in Sociology before becoming a gate for reproduction, reduced to veil and vulva, a Babu who lords over all the hair of Kolkata and has a job in the Railways could be fooled by so many into thinking that he was a Million Dollar Babu.

“It is a fake, made for children,” she explains. For birthday parties and fairs. And now Nadim and Elena laugh, waiting for me to join in.

I don't think that is funny at all, I say. I think it is sad, incredibly sad. He thought it was real for so long, it must have become a part of his dreams. He must have dreamed of a lot of things that would come out of that tender and give him happiness. It must have become the font of his hopes for a future filled with happiness, and you, with one careless gesture, showed him the truth about him: he is but a fool, hoodwinked by god knows how many who played along in the charade. It is cruel to do that to a person, I say. But, all said and done, who wouldn't laugh at the Million Dollar Babu?

Last day in Kolkata

Nobody ever around to take my pictures. So I take my own.

rain

:-(

Turn, Return

I finished translating the book [Sambidhan ma Dalit] this afternoon. Need to proofread it, and won't have the time to copy edit it, although it could really, really use some good copy editing.

Hi Ken! Thanks for the tip regarding ears and filthy swimming pools. I don't think I will be entering a body of water anytime the rest of my life. If I ever go deep-sea diving, it will have to be in a vessel, and not like you at all.

I am taking the train back to Raxaul tomorrow. Two-tier AC, no less, courtesy Elena, for I am broke, broke, broke. And the old disease of ATMs tricking me over the weekends has caught up with me. In a puff of smoke, the money Yagya had put into my account disappeared through the sieve of international banking laws...

But, renewed. Energized. Want to make money now. Screw art. Screw writing for the sake of writing. I would cross the border with a brick of cocaine if I could find one, just to start making money.

I am going to start making TV ads for chewing tobacco. Or toilet plungers. Or nylon wigs for middle-aged bureaucrats. Or hashish chewing-gum for nuns in Darjeeling. Or grain alcohol for pregnant women. Anything that will make me money.

My ear is bleeding

Two weeks ago, it started discharging, following a swim at the Tollygunj Club, which, I must say, maintains a filthy pool of water.

It started drying up and was pretty much done by yesterday.

This morning, it discharged blood.

I have lost hearing. This was inevitable, but it was supposed to come some thirty years from now, not last night.

Flight of Crows

The Flight of Crows:

When Tuan painted crows, hundreds of them hopped along the ground until they disappeared as speckles of black ink in the distant background, or tore out of the paper with eyes peering down hardy beaks, head atilt to examine the painter or the onlooker, each crow differently captured in the acuity of its rodent wile. They always watched you attentively, Tuan's crows, some mid-peck at a dry worm, some treading on the tips of their toes, legs flexed for the upward thrust to safety, but always aware of your gaze. Sometimes he painted them alongside eggplants and gourds and drunk monks acting like fools: the crude twist of a misshapen gourd looked like the fierce knotting on the face of a monk whose loincloth has come undone in his drunkenness and now looks like the crow that understands fiercely the secrets of the world and therefore resents it for being so quick to snatch from it anything beautiful.

I have just finished walking around the four tallest buildings in Kolkata, forty, fifty stories high apartment buildings that are rumored to be slowly sinking back into the pokkur ponds from where they soared aloft. I have followed the flitting and caws of crows to a heap of rubbish, just finished guzzling from a can hidden in a plastic bag, and settled on a worn bench outside a barbershop that is mostly bamboo and tarpaulin. A bald man is getting a shave. Another man is running a hand over his freshly shaved head. The barber sizes me up, sees: balding, greasy, unkempt hair, stubbly chin. I turn away from him and face the crows instead.

Hundreds of crows are speckled over orange and green rags from the recent nationalist celebrations. Because it is drizzling lightly, some crows look up to receive the spray on their faces, but some lift soda-bottle caps and sip in leisure. They have no fear of my stoic presence on the bench: for them I might as well be the crumbling, half-painted, unbaked clay figure grinning in a corner, a god that wasn't lucky enough to be bought for a puja, and now brandishes a sword of foil over a restless, rancid kingdom. I crush the can after lapping up the last few drops of malty wetness around the rim and throw it in a low arc into the midst of the black crowd. Not all heads turn. Most trace the arc with a patient study. A few shuffle an inch or two outwards in a ripple, and a few outright dart from the spot where the can flops to a rest. A novice saunters up to the can, bobbing to his sides like a young man in a spiffy new jacket and affecting a jaunty gait. Novice pinches the can and tilts it, immediately drops it. Another crow comes in for a closer inspection of the can and needlessly pecks Novice. Novice caws once, doesn't sound much of a protest, and bobs away, his gait now carrying the sting of admonition. The pecker knocks the can around a bit, pulls at the plastic bag, lifts one foot as if to crush the can, perhaps changes its mind, because it rushes off towards Novice to land another needless peck on its head.

So the horde pecks and picks apart the detritus of four tall buildings. I have counted seven servants by now who bring garbage tied in a Spencer's bag from the biggest mall in Kolkata that sits adjacent to the tallest buildings in Kolkata. The mall is in its turn built over an evacuated pond, after forcing the closure of a factory that existed there, and after expelling the shantytown around the pond. One bag, thrown from the edge of the pile, spills a riotous palate of orange and curry yellow and shellfish and sequins from the backs of rohu fish from a dinner party. Many crows hop to pick prawn shells, but what is the nutrition in that? A scuffle breaks out over another plastic bag that has remained closed until a Hulk of a crow ambles into the riot, raises its hard black beak to the sky and lets out just half of a caw. Order returns briefly as bobbing heads watch Hulk and me, Hulk and barber, Hulk and three other bags that come as missiles shot from another world. Hulk pecks once, lets others pull apart the plastic bag, rummages, picks a shiny bit of a disposable plate and flies to the top of the barbershop.

Hulk caws loudly and flies off to the branches of a gnarled tree across the bay of trash. A man somewhere between forty and sixty staggers towards us. He steps directly into the garbage and, with a violent jerk of his head, throws off a woven plastic sack twice the size of his body. Another ripple of dark wings ensues, another clamor of caw-caws, and everybody settles down, including the man, who chooses the roots of the gnarled tree for support. Man unravels the gomchha rag tied around his head to support the load, and in the folds finds a chewed-up datiwan twig with which he cleans his teeth. He looks across his kingdom, knows I am out of place there, spits out of the corner of his mouth, looks away dismissively, dozes off, wakes to wipe the beads of moisture that have settled on his hair.

Man startles a crow eying his ankle and lobs a phlegm missile at another. His leathery hands grip the equally leathery trunk of the tree that gives him ribbed shade, and pushes himself up, propelling the body forward. He kicks plastics apart, stoops to pick up metal: a handful of paper-clips, greasy foil, a length of concertina razor wire, a set of TV antenna constructed with aluminum pipes, one whole copper kalash in a sack of empty bottles of foreign liquor. Man stuffs his already bulging sacks with the new finds. He pauses, suddenly aware of the crushed aluminum can under his foot. He picks it, smells it, shakes any remaining liquid out, looks at me as he drops the can to stamp on it with vigor. He presses the can into a small ball and stuffs it into the sack.

Man rolls the gomchha around his head, creating a hollow in the top to cushion the load. Then he pinches the sides of the sack: there is no hold because the plastic sack is bloated, so Man must pinch small folds with his fingertips. He presses upon the load with his head, pushing his buttocks into the sky, grunting. He squats, starts, falters, sighs, takes a pouch of khaini from a fold in his lungi and quickly gets patting and spitting and repeating the squat and start. Man succeeds in throwing the load into the air and receiving it on his head. He is Atlas and he is Shiva. Then Man splays his bony frame like Christ on the cross and staggers over the effulgence of rich homes, every separated muscle on his arms and shoulder registering the squelch and filth underfoot. Man wears his neighbors' sins like a crown on his head and leaves the crows behind after spitting in their direction a mouthful of dark, rejuvenating juice. He staggers, stands still, stretches his arms more to balance the burden, stumbles forward. Man repeats the struggle until he disappears from view.

Crows and a flower

More photos... I should be working. Instead, I am drinking jaljeera, eating two-week stale cucumber, and stalking crows.

more photos

I have prepared some photos today. Early in the morning, I spent some time on photoshop making posters of myself. Which I plan to put on a couple of t-shirts. Fuck Che. Wear Prawin. I'll put up the posters later.

Photos

Since my computer is broken, I have inherited Elena's computer for the meanwhile. I have been fooling around with Photoshop to distract myself and made a few posters, etc, mostly of Elena. But, here are a few photographs that haven't been manipulated with much, although they aren't exactly as in camera. Also, obviously, one is a posterized picture. I wish I had more graphic skills.

Tumi amako bhalobasho? Ekhono?”


“Lau, lau, lau!” He is a bit distracted, the script AD, but he tries his best. Although the lights have been set up for a while now, the artist for this scene can’t speak Bangla very well, and the AD’s job is to prep her within the hour. He did not write the dialogues. He will not call the shots. They have given him a somewhat impressive title: Monitor! The manager of Cocoon, an upscale boutique from where Aparna Sen will pick up an artifact sometime in the afternoon of the following day, a Wednesday, mistakes the novice artist for a well known face. She elbows Monitor for space across the table and volunteers to make the Bangla into Roman for the foreign artist, her eager face lapping up the shine of Elena’s radiant makeup that borders on the garish. Men in the unit surreptitiously leave their posts to check if the artist procured by the producer really stands up to the mark, the production value of the movie.

They seem to approve, because some of them suddenly grin like idiots, rapidly flick their tongues over dry lips and search the room for other pairs of eyes that might be labouring under the burden of similar thought. I am standing in a corner, waving my arms to check where I cast a shadow, checking if I can see the camera in any of the many mirrors artfully arranged around the boutique. It is an upscale sort of a place where cleverly disguised crap sells for artwork just inexpensive enough for those devoid of actual interest in art to hang and stuff and strew their living quarters with a semblance of culture. Driftwood dragged out of the sea is painted to look old, carved to look weathered; terracotta and gilt sculptures are pressed with grime and pasted into the crannies of the wood to make the whole structure organic. Lamps have been built into the sculptures, so that a seated Buddha smiles to one half of the room while casting his unkind gloom in another direction. Two men from the unit stoop to examine tin boxes for breath-mint, printed with pinup posters from the fifties in America and arranged over a faux-antique table. The manager raises an eyebrow. Her assistant, who has by now twice sprayed a jasmine scented room-freshener into my eye, transports his Babu potbelly to the table and unceremoniously removes the entire tray of glorious, nubile, buxom, sylphine ghosts from a distant land.

“Okay, okay,” says the artist, playing with her hair, eager to show how quickly she can learn the lines. “So, I say ‘love, love, love’ and run towards him?” She asks questions in Hindi and English, but the mustachioed AD answers only in Bangla. Cocoon’s manager bristles in her chair, eager to partake and please, but in her turn snubbed by those in the film fraternity. I can’t suppress a grin that flashes all too conspicuously across the room. Love, love, love! And hug the hero, a fat Bengali with too much cigarette in his breath, and be too eager to marry him. Of course, he is going to be distracted by the fleeting shape of his true love passing outside the shop window. One scene, with some six lines, to be shot from three different angles, and we are done in two hours. “You will manage,” says Devroop, first-time producer with a brown briefcase never an inch away from his body. “She will manage,” he comes over to mention to me. Perhaps he senses my skepticism. Love, love, love! Tumi amako bhalobasho? Ekhono? Do you love me, still?

The short reading progresses to a shorter rehearsal. The artist can’t remember all the nuanced consonants. The manager of the store tails her for a minute, reminding, mouthing, illustrating: “Like in rat!” Monitor stands behind the director, another potbellied man in plastic sandals, wearing the universal Kolkata scowl of someone with a digestive disorder, forever on guard against being found out at fraud as sincere artistic intellectual. Everything functions smoothly without his involvement, anyway. Two rehearsals reveal the need for prompts, cues, spoon-feeding by Monitor. The fans are shooed away from light sources and reflective surfaces, and other fans are switched off to create silence on the set. The manager quietly protests against switching off the air-conditioners, although the erratic hum of the machine is a cause for concern for the sound engineer. “Sound? Camera? ” “Rolling!”

Before the director says action, Elena runs on her toes towards Rahul, a swanlike imitation of what she must think of as cinematic elegance. She wants to be in a Bollywood movie eventually, one scene or two sufficing to round off her dream, perhaps a dance, but nothing item-like. Something with mehendi and flowers and running around trees, not a bit in a bar. “No, no,” says the director patiently before turning to the Monitor to ask what the artist’s name might be. “Action is meaning dialogue. Love, love love!” “Okay, okay, okay,” says Elena. After he nods at the cameraman, the sound-engineer, and the hero, the director barks: “Action!”

It is a Tuesday afternoon, and surely it is a Tuesday afternoon in Kathmandu, too, where, at one or two temples, Alok Nembang must have just finished bowing his head in a silent prayer. He is starting his second movie after Sano Sansar. Some people in the industry claim Sano Sansar did very well, and some people claim Sano Sansar didn’t do quite as well as it was expected to do. None of that matters now, I am sure, as Alok prepares to make similar adjustments in Kathmandu as I am watching in a boutique in Kolkata. Although, I doubt if any of his artists will have to be coached in the dialect being used, or reminded that “Action!” comes before action. I find myself wondering about where the pujas are being held for Alok’s movie. Perhaps one is at the temple of Karyabinayak, after which deity Alok has named his company. Perhaps another is a choice of the producers at Music Dot Com. I don’t know.

But the magic of cinema is the same here or there. A Bihari man wearing a bright blue shirt has found his way into the boutique. People in the unit mistake him for one of their own. He sidles over to my side. “That lady is the heroine of the film?” he asks. He drips with lust and leer. “No,” I tell him, “She is doing just one scene.” “She is not Indian,” he declares. “I don’t think so,” I say. “So she is not the heroine?” he asks. “I don’t think so.” But he clearly doesn’t believe me. He edges closer and closer towards Elena, until his toe softly knocks against a light-stand. He smiles at everyone who notices his intrusion and retreats to my side. “She will be a hit heroine,” he says. Elena looks at me across the room and smiles again. This makes the Bihari bristle. He shrinks. I smile at him. He doesn’t smile again. Monitor starts prompting Elena: “Love, love, love!”

Trouble in Kolkata!

I was trying to check out the subtitles in Sano Sansar [there are a few typos...] when my computer froze. I tried to re-start it, and it just died!

I hadn't backed up two days' worth of translations that I had completed. I am a day behind schedule now, and I an already on a very tight schedule. I am panicking now, because it seems like there is a hardware malfunction. Or a virus might have got to it, although that is very unlikely, since I haven't been online since leaving Kathmandu, and have shared a USB with another computer that has a pretty good Norton AVP.

I have already wasted a day, and I can't aford to waste another day, but the technician is not here yet. I don't know when he will get here. I don't even have a phone to coordinate with him. Kinda tragic it is.

On the other hand, Alok Nembang's movie starts shooting tomorrow.

Point, no point, and Kolkata

I was listening to my father talk to a group of journalists at a function organized by "Paila," an NGO interested in diverse activities, where he told the journalists that they ought to write clearly enough that the first sentence in their articles should contain their thesis or argument.

I disagree, but from a privileged position: I have a column where I specifically refrain from doing that. I attempt to write lyrically. There can't be a flow to the sentences unless the images in consecutive sentences are in harmony. If that harmony is sustained/ruptured through a design, the images form a specific argument of their own.

For this reason, I consider long descriptions as what one might call "thesis." The choices that go in constructing a description aren't without calculation, and therefore they present a specif stance on a problem: sociological, aesthetic, rhetorical. I don't want to put the thesis in the first sentence because I am not writing a college paper or a report for an NGO. I don't want to explain anything to the people in specific words, because guiding the thoughts of a reader is more satisfying.

On a separate note: As soon as I get done with my obligations for QC, I am going to leave for Kolkata. I will translate "Sanbidhan ma Dalit" by Subhash Darnal, try to write some movie scenes, and keep writing for the Kathmandu Post column.

Signatures

Here are a few signatures. Enjoy!

Jhalanath Khanal -- UML

Girija Prasad Koirala -- Nepali Congress

Prachanda -- NCP Maoist

The one word answer

As a response to a comment about "Need to Talk," I wrote: No. It meant: no, it isn't about the special need of Nepali people to talk a lot, and no, I don't believe all writing needs a thesis. If I were trying to prove a particular point, I would need a point. But I am not trying to prove a particular point. I am trying to write very generally about the things I see and experience. Sometimes I write about the thoughts that come into my head, unceremonious, uninvited.

Often, the posts I write for the paper are pointless, *and* badly written. Rarely, they are pointless and well written. A couple of them are perhaps well-written, and with an overarching point.

If I wanted to make a point, I would write reviews or commentary. My column in Kathmandu Post doesn't even have a name, because it would be dishonest to give it a semblance of organization. Yet, I talk about the commonplace, the ordinary. I must be doing something right, giving the commonplace and the ordinary a divergent persona, a separate voice, that people read it, and dare I say, enjoy it.

Here are few posts that have no point to them, but are not without meaning:

http://prawinreviews.blogspot.com/2009/04/moonrise-and-eunuch-song.html

http://prawinreviews.blogspot.com/2009/01/kolkata.html

http://prawinreviews.blogspot.com/2009/04/bihari-nightmare.html

And here are some that perhaps articulate the points they try to make:

http://prawinreviews.blogspot.com/2009/03/weak-finish.html

http://prawinreviews.blogspot.com/2009/05/waiting-for-tarkari.html


I take pleasure in sentences, phrases that are potent or lyrical or simply limp with pointless whimsy. I do sincerely believe that the essays I write have a meaning to them, if not a point or a thesis that can be stated in a few sentences or less. I like to think of my essays as a bouquet of impressions and expressions, part of which wilt and disappear, part of which will come back to the reader at a later time.

The mangoes growing in the rubbish heaps around Kathmandu--apparently it made a lot of people here happy to read about it. Somebody else said--write more about mad men nodding yes, yes, yes. What was the point to their fascination with that?

Need to Talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strange

Monsoon pours and floods, colors the streets pale with diluted dogshit and rusty with plain shit burned by the sun. When sewers that have crusted over in July's infernal heat take too long to soften their black sludge with monsoon's first wetness, they float upwards, their muck sucked up to mingle with the rainwater. Skies change colors from one gray to another gray and rain hits green leaves of thirsty maize and make nights bearable. So the monsoon comes, but the whistle of the garbage collector doesn't come anymore. The world smells not of new rain but old rot, but there is rain, it washes and cools, so all is alright.

Rain drowns the haze in the valley's bowl and clears the sight to distant mountains. The new green is oppressively verdant, too well blended into different shades of green, standing each weed tall and dark, shaking each leaf supple and clean. It does bring a smile to my face. I walk towards the bus-stop, not minding the puddle, the endless sludge shoveled into the street from the sewers my men whose heads are barely visible, and stop dead near a pile of garbage. I stand there and smile and startle passersby, who give me frowned, quizzical look before walking on, shaking their heads. The foreman chatting with men in the sewer–who, in their turn, can only talk in grunts best timed with the throw of the shovel–stops mid-sentence, sagely draws on a cigarette, exhales his thoughts in my direction. Habitually incapable of not remaining reflexive in moments like this, when even the stance belies the buoyant enlightenment frothing within, I stare for a minute more at the small instance of unexpected beauty that has captured me:

There, in a pile of unclaimed garbage, is an event made possible by a long-standing political stale-mate and the tardiness of nature. Because no body has collected the bags of mango pits, and because it has rained and shined just enough, there are mangoes sprouting all over the heap of rubbish. Not green yet, not taken roots yet, these plants are a dark brown, like blood concentrated into a paste and smeared for dramatic effect. Three large brown leaves are collecting the sunlight needed to push forth three more leaves, at the moment the tiniest spikes at the apex of the shoots. It is a forest of mangoes on a rubbish heap. Tomorrow, politicians will agree temporarily to allow the roads of Kathmandu to be cleared, but today there is a new grove of mangoes on each turn of the road, each collection of our detritus. I remember again Calvino's essay about garbage disposal in Paris and wonder if he had ever imagined a scenario like this: could that fabulist imagine a temporary forest, a black forest of infants that searched with a single, naked root a route to permanence and fixture?

I pick one up, and another: they have a thick carpet of newspaper hiding the pits.
The shoots have probed their way out of a bed of wet pulp, unleashing the calories stored in their hearts, then unfurled the broad leaves to receive the nurture that rains down from the skies. I admire the penile probe and vulnerability of a root that has nothing but a discarded plastic bottle-top to grip. The plants are extremely fragile, more so for their defiance of traps set by Kathmandu politics and urban planning. When I walk with two saplings picked from garbage heaps, still training their tails of shiny plastic foil and wet newspaper, people stop their conversations.

I am still carrying the plants while waiting for the bus at Dhumbarahi. The trouble with surprising oneself with a gesture like that after a half-hour or so, it begs conclusion, resolution, pay-off. What comes from the garbage heap, I suppose, ought to go back to another garbage heap, but these are living things, and it is unkind to just toss them into the trash. I carefully put them down by the swamp lining Chakrapath when I realize there is just one face that smiles at me in the crowd waiting for bus.

I am trying these days to grow a beard, to tend to it, carefully count and save the few gray and pale hairs in the lot, upturn the tip of moustache and appoint the chin-hair to a fine position between clownish and dignified. The man who smiles at me has a beard I will have to wait another six months for: it is scraggly just the right way, hanging lush from the chin, wisped under cheekbones, neatly separated over the upper lip and correctly pointed. He must live there, because he wears no shoes, ties his shirt crudely on his chest, has fingernails thicker than I have toenails, and smiles at everything about which others try hard to look disinterested. It is difficult to tell if he is happy, because he shows no other expression on his face except a series of smiles. He nods at the mango saplings and grins again. He must approve of the gesture.

People rush about him to get into the bus. He shifts just a little in the wet sand and continues looking at everything that passes him by. A mother starts fighting with a khalasi for asking her to show her son's identity card even though he is in uniform and no more than eleven years of age. "What do you think a child this age does if not go to school?" she asks. "Some children don't go to school," coolly says the not-much-older khalasi and that reduces her to angry under-breath mutterings. She searches for faces that have witnessed the exchange and perhaps sympathize with her. She looks at me, I look at the bearded man. She looks at the bearded man, who smiles at her, nods, yes, yes. He looks at me and nods, yes, yes. He looks at the khalasi and nods, yes, yes. His thick, yellow, gleaming nails daintily scratch under his chin, along the nose. He doesn't stop smiling, buries his head between the knees briefly to smile at his toes and looks up again, smiles at everyone and everything that watches him.

The mother looks at me. She is defeated: she paid twenty rupees instead of fifteen because the khalasi came back with a stringing repartee. She paid an unfair price because I didn't shake my head in disapproval of what the khalasi had done. Instead, I deferred judgment to the bearded man, who showed a gracious equanimity and pointed so something bigger than the five-rupee differential. Now he points to the two mango saplings by the ditch and points to me and smiles. I can't help but grin. Yes, I nod, yes, yes. The mother can't bear anymore of this. "Strange," she shakes her head. "Strange," and walks away.

What did I find today?

I was walking towards Samakhusi Chowk when something in a pile of garbage caught my eye: a young sapling of mango. Three dark leaves on a stalk, three more in their tiniest, greenest potency.

If the strike by the Maoists were not ongoing, if garbage were being collected daily, and if it hadn't been raining, the garbage heaps wouldn't be so dotted with new mango plants.

Next time you walk past a pile of garbage, try to find these plants. It is more than likely you'll find some.

Rain!

Finally, it is raining. Although we missed out on the furious, thunderous, murderous rains of June and July, I think August is going to bring the kind of steady drizzle that sustains life in this part of the world.

It started raining around 2 AM last night, and it is still raining now, eight hours later. I hope more rain comes, lasts for five-six days. There are more and more stories about how farmers have been forced to pump ground-water to irrigate their paddies. This means the poor farmer who has to rely entirely upon rain [sky-water, as they call it in Nepali] for his subsistence-crop will suffer disproportionately: there is no ground water under his dry, rocky fields; he has no money for additional infrastructure, .

Wonderment

This is a dry monsoon. Menopausal women can't walk too far before they consider returning homeward, but abandon that thought too, as their grandchildren race ahead to meet their friends. It is a small patch of grass where someone should have built a house long ago: the plot is divided, marked, mapped into rooms and passages. But this is a big city, and no doubt the wheel of fortune became for some an oil-press and chewed them up. Their detritus is perhaps this square of open space in our concrete jungle. I am dragging a pair of chappals around its perimeter. Grandmothers wiggle their fingers out from damp fists of toddlers and kids and sigh.

On the eastern front sit a row of young men, reeking perpetually of marijuana, staring at the children and women with thick red veins in their eyes, talking too loudly, shouting obscenities at each other. Nobody knows these men by their names here. Soon, one of these days, neighbors will descend upon them with rods and bricks and chase them away, but in a week or two, another crop of young men will take over the patch of green. They trickle away after dark, ambush people near Ranibari for mobile phones and cash, sometimes climb over the walls to steal a water pump or bathroom fixtures and door handles. But, for now, they josh, they kick each other around in the dirt, smoke.

Further ahead along the perimeter, young mothers walk with infants and toddlers. One pregnant woman walks with her friend who smokes a cigarette. The friend drags along a three year old who wants a lollipop in another kid's hand. The kid's mother pulls, rudely lifts the kid by one arm and swings him three paces forward, sets him down on his knees. “Walk,” she says, “Walk of I'll drown you in the paddy field.” The pregnant woman pauses to look at the said paddy, just off the edge of the neighborhood. Fruits hang from lime and persimmon and grapefruit trees, and another tree that is more laden than others, so full are its fruits along the length of its slender branches that it recalls all seasons past and future: the riotous sight it must be while in full bloom, and the satiation it must bring with its ripe colors and smell, sweet taste.

“Do you know what fruit these are?” An old man asks me because, of all the people passing him, I look him in the eyes and smile. I am seeing blossom and fruit on the wonderment on his face. “This is not persimmon, not pear, nor peach or plum,” he says. “Do you think this is apple?” he asks. “No, I don't think so.” I remember green apple growing wild around a small town in Washington, so many different varieties planted just for a few weeks of blossoms every year. “Not apple, I don't think.”

“So you don't know?” he asks, although he doesn't seem very disappointed by my ignorance. No, I don't know. “It is not apple?” he asks himself. “But look how rich it is, how much of it! How green and healthy it looks!” A young girl comes out of a lavatory hidden by the fruit tree. When I turn back from the edge of another grid of roads ready to be boxed in by houses, the old man is still looking at the tree full of fruits. It seems strange to me that he and I are the only two people seemingly touched by the fruits and their potency as promises.

A boy runs into me, slamming his face into my sternum: he has eyes only for his purple kite. I grab and lift him off the ground, make sure he isn't in pain. He is embarrassed: he must be ten years old, just of age that he feels indestructible, capable of flight of every sort. “This kite never flies where I want it to,” he says. “What bullshit you talk, boy,” I say, “Why don't you just admit you don't know how to fly kites?” He grins. Behind him, sitting outside the gate of their single-storey house, a lady who looks like his grandmother bounces a toddler on her knees. The toddler has a lollypop, which it sucks, spits on, holds out to the kite-running brother. The kite-runner leaps and leans forward, offering a tongue on which the toddler swipes the lollypop. Although the kite-runner returns to his kite, he races back to the lollypop and offers his tongue again, and when the toddler swipes the lollypop on it, cunningly bites down on the stem, snatches the lollypop away.

For a second or two, the toddler giggles and claps at the brother's cleverness, but the ruse becomes transparent to the infant mind and the waterworks and wails start in full force. “Bring it back,” says Grandmother, “Give it back!” The kite runner returns to the crying toddler, but instead of handing back the lollypop, starts wailing at the baby, feigning great pain, crying right back, confusing all greed right out of the toddler. It is a trick I have never witnessed before. It is almost political in its genius, praiseworthy. The toddler stops crying, starts slapping the brother's face with small hands, almost in affection. The brother has changed into the court jester, and he can no longer be blamed. The jester leaps in the air, lollypop still in mouth, and tries to flick the purple kite back into the tepid sky.

Back at the perimeter of the patch of green, a boy dribbles a football behind his elder sister. He talks in hushed tones. “Those boys are the Taichin gang,” he says. “They have killed seven people. I heard. They are drug-addicts, tyabeys.” I am tempted to ask the boy if he isn't confusing something he watched on the television with the reality of street gangs around him. Seven murders by a gang of boys slapping on marijuana buds in the evening to get a cheap high? But I don't know enough about street gangs around my neighborhood, with their cryptic, slyly obscene graffiti like “The beauty of Originality is in the O” sprayed on walls. The boy keeps turning towards a the gate of a house we have just passed, so I turn to look.

Landlord watches intently as Painter works on the wrought iron design on the gate painted black: he is applying gold to the relief. Not gold paint, but gold leaf. Real gold, actual gold, the kind for which mines and dug and wars are fought, on the gates of an ugly house. I sit down by the street, not because it is something I routinely do, but because it is something I don't routinely see: gold leaf being applied to the gates of a house in Gongabu. I want this gate to be tagged next, I think, preferably with an obscenity easily translated into Nepali. This gold is astonishing to me, after seeing in the mind of an aged man the promised gold of a tree bowing with an unknown fruit, after witnessing the gold of the political skill of a boy with a purple kite. Landlord watches me suspiciously, but he has to pay attention to the leaf of gold in Painter's hand, lest he sneak the evening's raksi's worth under the nails on his toiling hands. Gold, actual gold, on the outer gates of an ugly building in Gongabu! The wonders we get to witness daily!

Gurkha Riot Police in Singapore

The "Singapore Lahure" isn't your typical Lahure: if in the Queen's employ, he isn't a Singapore Lahure at all, and if in the employ of the Government of Singapore, he is in the police, not in the army.

How much does the impressions of one person affect the fate of thousands? A lot, needless to say. But, rarely do we get to point to specific moments in history when an incident indelibly impressed a person, who went on to institute something that created a new identity for a whole group of people. Case in point: the Singapore Lahure.

My nephew, in his quotidian quest for scrap paper, managed to dig out a copy of TIME magazine, [September 21, 1998], titled "Starr Report," all about Clinton's sexcapade.

In it is an excerpt from "The Singapore Story," memoir by Lee Kuan Yew, in which a young Lee, watching defeated Allied soldiers being marched back into Singapore by their Japanese victors, writes:

"While this platoon was camping in [our] house, British, Indian and Australian forces were marched to captivity... Many looked dejected and despondent, perplexed that they had been beaten so decisively and so easily. The surrendered army was a mournful sight.

"There were some who won my respect and admiration. Among them were the Highlanders whom I recognized by their Scottish caps. Even in defeat they held themselves erect and marched in time--"Left Right, Left Right, Left, Left!" shouted the sergeant major. And the Gurkhas were like the Highlanders. They too marched erect, unbroken and doughty in defeat. I secretly cheered them on. They left a life-long impression on me. As a result, the Singapore government has employed a Gurkha company for its anti-riot police squad from the 1960s to this day."

Chepangni

so, here's the weekly essay.

i am getting tardy as a writer. i have assignments, i have deadlines, i am pretty much empty inside. it feels like i have lost sight of why i should write, even to earn that small wage.

in any case, here's another terribly written piece:


-----

Chepangni

“Does she look like a Chepangni? Does she?” Her husband asks. Chepangni leans against the still damp mud plaster, bright from the morning's wash of red clay. No, she doesn't look like a Chepangni. “She doesn't look like a Chepangni. What does she look like?”

Theuwataar is at the other side of a trail-bridge across the Trishuli river. At the very mouth of the bridge is a small tea and raksi shop with a bench on the Trishuli side. But, because I threw my chappals against the wall and sat, everybody is sitting on the floor: Chepangni, her husband the Chepang, Grandma, Lahure. Timo hovers around the edges, teasing a child, making her repeat her name. The two girls are in kindergarten and know how to say 'Morning!

“She doesn't look like a Chepangni,” I say, and mumble to my drink, “You are right. She doesn't look like a Chepangni.” Lahure begins to laugh, an interminable series of hiccups paced to allow a sip here, a smoke there. Chepang picks up a slimy, tart piece of gava and drops it into his mouth. Chepangni takes a cigarette and asks her husband for a light. Lahure is amused by the mild embarrassment that is spreading over my face. “She looks like a Bahuni, doesn't she?” Chepang slaps his thigh, shuffles on the balls of his feet to add emphasis. “Sir is probably thinking how did this ugly Chepang get such a pretty Bahuni wife,” he looks at his wife, who giggles back, haloes him with her flavored breath, mingling this and the other. Lahure continues his choked giggle.

“Does she look like a woman who has given birth to twelve children?” Chepang is very proud of his wife. His smile widens to reveal two more upper-molars. He swings his head back and finishes the raksi in his glass and instinctively reaches for the bottle that is empty by now, the second hour of our conversation. Chepangni smiles at her husband again, reaching her glass to the bottle in his hand. They discover together the small disappointment of a bottle without its gift of mild, sweet millet raksi. Lahure hands Chepangni the two bottles already empty. There is another round of disappointed laughter. Lahrue asks his daughter-in-law for another bottle.

“Twelve children?” It is hard to believe. There are a few lines around her eyes, but she couldn't be more than forty-five years old. “Four sons and four daughters,” Chepangni says. “Four died.” So easily said. Four died. Boys? Girls? No matter. Four. Dead. Eight survive; three work across the bridge, bring home eleven thousand rupees every month.

“So you are a Bahuni?” I ask Chepangni. “No,” she says, “What Chepangni, what Bahuni.”

“Ask her to speak the Chepang tongue,” Lahure says. “Such a pretty Bahuni she was when she was younger, but she knew only Chepang.”

“My father is a Bhatta Chhettri from Baglung. My mother was a Chepangni. He took her home. But these were the old days, you know how it was between castes. Somebody told my mother that Bahun-Chhetri let their Magar-Chepang wives sleep in the granary. But when they get sick or too old to work, they are put out in the jungle, in a cave hours away, to die on their own. She didn't believe that, of course, because her husband loved her. But when I was born, she waited for her mother-in-law to name me on the eleventh day. Nothing. Twelfth day, nothing, thirteenth day, nothing.

“There was another Chepang in that village. My mother and he were the only two Chepangs in the village of Bahun-Chhetri folks, and they were both orphans. So she went to him on the fourteenth day and said—Why aren't they naming my daughter? That's when the other Chepang asked her if she would leave the village and elope to a place where Chepangs lived. Can you imagine? From Baglung, they came here. My Chepang father died just a month ago.

“I hear my father has four sons, and is a rich man now. I heard he has a gairikhet that takes sixteen pairs of oxen. It may be that I have never seen his face, but he is still my father, and he is still alive. I want to go back and tell him I am his daughter. I don't believe he doesn't know I am here. Don't you think? These days even the law says I am entitled to his property.”

“You shouldn't be greedy,” Lahure says. Chepang adds without looking at his wife, “It is no good to live in hope. Expectations are no good, they only create trouble.”

“I didn't know that story!” Lahure exclaims suddenly agitated. “Nobody ever told me that story! I always wondered—the father is Chepang, the mother is Chepang. How did this bhauju have a Bahuni daughter? But I was always too polite to ask.” He starts laughing again. “But, now it doesn't seem at all strange. My father and mother were both Darai, but this Bhauju's mother was Chepang. Doesn't she look all Magar and none Chepang?” Grandma, our picture of silence, smiles just a little, looks at the finger of raksi remaining in her glass. She too was orphaned very young, without any memory of her father or mother.

“I was surprised,” I say. “I knew we were coming to a Chepang village. Had no idea there are Darais living here.” There were Bahuns, Chhetris, Gurungs, a Sarki family. Just no Rais and no Damais, they kept telling me. Over an afternoon of stories about migration and famine, fighting the Pakistanis and not getting to fight the Chinese, the most consistent color was that of mingling, mixing of bloods, each person sharply confused about their lineage, but muddled and assured about who they were. Chepangni, a Chhetri's daughter from a Chepang woman, had been called a Bahuni all her life in the Darai Magar-Chepang village. Now she smiled, accentuating her Bahuni features, smiling down her sharp nose and large eyes. Later in the day, some friends showed a photograph of an old Kandel Chhetri man, proudly flashing his strings of rudrakshya and tulsi rosaries and a vertical smear of sandalwood paste, who looked very much Chepang around the eyes and nose and the too, too bare strands of hair clinging to a round chin. I realized how vacuous and redundant my trained “sensitivity” became at the face of such a dynamic confusion of identities. These families had existed in harmony, nourishing and exploiting each other, looting and feeding each other, for centuries. Now we ask the Chepangni why she looks so much like a Bahuni, and that is alright.

“But, I am his daughter,” Chepangni is still speaking, her eyes searching the brown torrents of an over-brimming Trishuli. “He loved my mother. I was fourteen days old when my mother left the village. I don't believe he will be unhappy to see me. I am his firstborn. I must look like him, because I look nothing like my mother. I want to see his face once before he dies. He is my father, after all.”

Surviving

Tomorrow, I head to Kurintar as a part of a group of writers and photographers collaborating on a wonderful little project. It should be exciting, going into the villages to talk to old women and recording their life experiences, internalizing what we hear, and writing in different forms to capture the essence of the grannies.

Here's for next Sunday: the title is ominous. I have strong opinions on the recent spate of violent mob activity around the country, especially the leit-motif: manipulation by a few people to get the mob to execute/persecute others on their behalf. But, for now, just this watered down essay:

-----
Surviving



Even at eight in the morning, we are weary enough to laugh about the possibility of being beaten up by villagers. An unlikely bunch of trekkers we make: three men, slight of beards, sharp of features and easy of gaits, walking in the incessant drizzle that is Shivapuri's rain. We are walking from Tokha to Muhanpokhari, from where Yagya and Dhiraj will continue to Sundarijal. We pose before the statue of Chandeshwori, murderous, divine, too-many limbed. I wonder aloud if it is not the creation of a grammatical error rather than a scriptural-sculptural mandate. “Dus haat-khutta bhayeki,” might have, instead of becoming the graceful ten-armed, two-legged goddess, end up a form of terror: ferociously waving ten different weapons, thundering down a celestial battleground on all of her ten feet powered by glistening, taut, muscular thighs, aiming for the neck to behead and drink the bright sap.

Yagya confers with two teenagers washing their hair under Chandeshwori's feet, their own well-shod feet splayed and managed as far away as possible from the grime running down their necks. It is possible to take the road that curves out of sight—but that is an inferior choice, because it is a road crudely drawn on the crumbling sand-face of Shivapuri. A child can piss on the road and cut a channel through it, and Monsoon is freshly upon us, eager to puddle and run. It will be unpleasant walking. Dhiraj thinks it more prudent to ask somebody that is not a teenager.

It's alright. We climb until we meet a trail, likely used by army personnel during their patrols. It can't be a trail used by villagers to collect firewood or fodder. Under a canopy of pine, there is no firewood or fodder. Our calculations about where we ought to be by what time races far ahead of us. As we argue about where we will cross Bishnumati and if it will be possible to do so on the mountain, without climbing down to the bridge by the ISKCON temple, we realize there is no more of the trail that is supposed to reach the road. We are in somebody's field of lima beans.

I am scared. Used to be that the thing I feared most at times like this was the farmer's dog, or the dog that survived on the farmer's scrapes. After that, it was the fear of accidentally happening upon a farmer's cucumber vines. But, standing at the rain-picked edge of a patch of lima bean plants, I worry that the three of us will be taken for something actually menacing enough to elicit mob-action: Kidnappers! What if there are children in those houses? I have always made faces at kids, even in a crowded street, to get them to smile, laugh, slyly hide their faces to start a game. There were some Indian tourists who tried that universal communion with children a few kilometers from where I was born, and they were soundly beaten by the villagers. Why should I expect a different fate?

Nothing happens. Nobody shouts at us, even for spoiling the edges of their carefully cut terraces, or for the genial crime of annoying the peace of a Saturday morning. We jump down a terrace and reach the road. A pile of uttis leaves is decomposing, liberating the smell of our shared life in the boarding school where that was the smell of the rainy months. We pause to discuss what houses and colonies existed ten years ago and what didn't. Some things look exactly as they were. But there is a jumble of the newly-minted. House, neighborhoods, shapes in the mountains. Some places and people have survived—the old couple on the hill, RK with his momo shop, the holes on the campus walls from where escape was made. The catalogue of what is new is immense. Most of it is in the form of new houses built into the mountainside, with ridiculous roofs and sentry-posts above the gates which, to me, seem sufficient for a writing life. At least the guards have a view, flower-vines outside their windows, terraces of rice fooling them each morning into believing in a verdant, stable, sun-kissed world.

I am tired; my body acts much older than its age. The microbus driver starts talking at Muhan Pokhari and doesn't stop until Bansbari. His khalasi is just as lively. They phrase everything to get me to agree with them: the other drivers are drunk and mad, the way they drive. The locals are drunk and mad, the way they descend upon anyone at the slightest chance. The police are sober and keen, the way they squeeze money out of you. Politicians are the only ones sleeping well: their bonuses are fattest, their work hours most leisurely, their job least punishing. Students are mad, it is hard to tell why: why do they so easily take a naked sword into their classrooms if promised meat and raksi in the evening? Who has brains? The man who sends money through the post office to his parents in the village, that's who. Because then everybody in the village knows that their son is in the city, earns money, sends it to the post office. Because then they can always borrow for salt-oil-soap.

Well, that's good. Makes old parents proud and rich. What else is good about surviving these days? Khalasi and driver shake their heads. “Kathmandu is a big city,” the driver says, “but the biggest crime these days is the crime of being a stranger. Being unfamiliar.” There is no guarantee when the students will turn on you, with their bricks and their iron rods. There is no guarantee when the people of a neighborhood will turn on you, take you out of your microbus, beat you to a pulp. There used to be a knowledge of security. It was alright to be a stranger arrived at a new village or neighborhood. It was possible to be a guest, to show up and ask for a drink of water. Today, that knowledge is gone. In its place is another knowledge: there is no guarantee of any kind. Being unfamiliar is enough reason to be violently forced out of a peaceful routine, to be beaten to an inch near death. We are at Bansbari. The khalasi starts collecting fares. The driver drives, still shaking his head periodically, perhaps disagreeing with violent new surprises flaring in his mind.

Accounts

--Prawin Adhikari

Elder and Younger are sisters, Gurungs from somewhere in the west. Elder has to sit down because of hot flashes. She pulls her lungi mid-shins, presses the soles of her feet against the already hot cement floor. Elder fans herself with a steel plate covering a bowl of potato and chickpeas curry on the show-case-counter. Younger still hasn't returned from her errand of buying a spoonful each of freshly ground cumin and coriander from the masala mill around the corner.
Samdhini is walking with a young girl. She pauses to smile at Elder. “Come, drink a cup of tea, Samdhini-O!” Elder says. “Just had tea two hours ago,” Samdhini says. But the day is cooling off just a little, and this window of restfulness needs friends. Samdhini sends the young girl ahead, tells her to be careful. “You look like you've been buried under embers,” she says to Elder. “Tell me about it!”

“Where is my other samdhini?” Samdhini asks. “Don't know where she crawled to die, that woman,” Elder loses her temper. “The tarkari is overcooked already. This bhai, bichara, he ate bhatmas without lime. And that woman is still talking to the shopkeeper.” Samdhini starts to laugh. “Where were you headed?” Elder asks.

“That way. Couldn't even give a little bit of dahi-chiura to the kids for fifteenth Ashar. She will bring some chicken. Cheaper by twenty rupees over there. This lahurey neighborhood has become too expensive.”

“They are lahureys, they can pay,” says Elder. “Look at that house! Isn't that like a mansion? He didn't waste money sticking stone to the outside walls. I have been inside. All the money is inside.” Both women fan themselves with whatever they find—a steel plate, the ends of a grimy curtain. Younger comes laughing, says her namaste to Samdhini.

“What are you grinning about?” Elder shouts. “Why did you have to rub your snout with the shopkeeper's?” Samdhini starts off on a long-winded tale about Younger's legendary tardiness. Once, Younger was washing clothes in a bucket outside the house. A visitor—the kind that you take indoors—distracted her. The clothes lay in the bucket for another three days. Samdhini reminded Younger about the wet clothes, wallowing in water gone green with algae. Younger put the clothes to dry, but forgot them for a week on the clothesline. “They were like leaves in autumn. Her boy had to go around wearing shirts that fell apart if you pulled on them.”

Two bahun men sit down. One is Loud, the other Deferential. Loud asks Elder if there is something to drink. “Of course, there is something to drink. Why wouldn't there be something to drink?” Loud wants jaand, not beer. He is too poor today to drink beer. “Then drink raksi,” Younger suggests.

“Oh, ho!” Loud grins. “I haven't eaten anything since eight in the morning. If I drink raksi now, won't I fall off the chair?” Elder points at Deferential. “Who is this?” “From my village,” is the answer.

“You don't want me to draw up your accounts, do you? ” Elder says. Loud's face distorts. “You hag!” he says, only half in good-nature. “Why did you have to go telling everybody I had wasted twelve hundred rupees in one evening? Do you know what my thekedar did to me when he heard?”

“What was I to do? I had to close all accounts. I needed the money. And you did, didn't you? You drank away twelve hundred rupees that night.” Deferential looks at Loud's face.

“Say what you want. You lied! You said you were selling the shop. You insulted me before my friends just to get your money. Where did you think I was running away to?”

“I did sell the shop, to this one here,” Elder points to Younger. “I am helping her run it now, show her how to run the shop, make some money. You accuse me of lying? I swear by the gods, I have never lied to a bahun-chhetri.”

What does it mean to a menopausal Gurung woman trying to find her way around a small tea-shop business in Kathmandu to never lie to a Bahun or a Chhetri? Loud smacks his lips together after taking a big swig of the jaand Younger has just put before him. Deferential is going queasy, looking alternately at the buffalo meat on his chiura, and the milky cup of jaand. He is a Bahun freshly transplanted to the city.

“You were afraid I would run away without paying your money,” Loud says. “But I am a thekedar now.” Loud is incapable of stopping his face from distorting into a mask of haughtiness. Deferential worships him from across the small table.

“You are a thekedar?” Elder can't quite believe, but she smells blood. Younger perks up—this must be a special point of instruction in her ongoing education about the successful management of a four-top tea-shop. Loud taps the table with his empty cup. “Lalitpur side. Not a big house, but I am a thekedar now. Started on Saturday.”

“Saturday was a good saait,” Younger stands with a ladle dripping by her side, watching Loud eat his chiura and buff-curry. “Give him some gravy,” Elder says. “No, no,” Loud replies, “give me more.” He taps the table with his enamel cup.
Two Bhojpuri-speaking boys ask for “the usual.” Younger pours them two glasses of raksi. The boys pick out two doughnuts from the counter. They knock back the raksi, ask for water to chew the doughnuts with. “Put it in our account, okay?”

“How much was that? That was twenty five rupees,” Elder says, fumbles through a well-worn notebook. “Why do you pretend, Aama?” asks the doughnut-raksi boy. “Here, give me the book, I'll write it in.” Elder hands him the book. “See, here, twenty-five,” the boy writes into the notebook, shows it to me, to Loud. “You are not that old, Aama,” he says to Elder. “At least learn to write numbers.”

“Ah, you loud-mouth madhise! Go away now!” Elder shoos the boys away, not without affection. “Don't return the doughnuts tomorrow,” the boy says. Stale confectionery is half-price.

“So you don't even know how to write?” Loud Bahun asks Elder. Younger turns the pages on the notebook, standing by the door. “I know how to read and write,” Elder says. I pick through the bhatmas on my plate. “No, no. I don't. I don't know how to write or read,” Elder says. Loud instinctively puffs up a little, taps the table with his empty cup.

MJ Dead

Michael Jackson died. Heart attack.

there was a revolution about to start in Iran, and the only good thing they had going for themselves was the attention of the international [western] media.

What happens? MJ dies. All eyes turn to him.

Good Fences

I am getting worse with every post/essay.

This is so lackluster. I need to recharge in a big way.

----


Good Fences

There is no struggle more lonely than the fight for respite, the battle against a myriad forces for the opium of sleep, for a descent into quiet so smooth that nothing is remarkable the next morning, and for an awaking so complete and abrupt that an entire night passes in the blink of an eye. That is luxury, that is heaven. The body feels it in the reserves of energy bulging in the limbs and an uncanny acuity of the mind. Daylight makes everything brighter and more saturated in its color than ever before. The air tastes better; the mouth rids itself of its dirty sock of rotten breath and bitter plaque. There is no kink in the neck, no arm twisted into pinpricks, no sheet dislodged and wrung around the body laboring through a long night. A man in this manner renewed instinctively practices empathy, the golden rule, social graces: he smiles, he picks children to make them laugh, he feels noble and acts on that feeling. He becomes a good neighbor.

Until reality knocks his teeth out, that is. Monsoon, so blithely disrespectful of women pulling ploughs and villagers marrying toads, skirts the rims of the valley on its way elsewhere, always vagrantly elsewhere. Concrete roofs heat up, wait silently for the thick of night to radiate. A friend needs attention thousands of kilometers away. The head rings from the frantic back-and-forth of emotions. Ugly mullet is already sticking to neck-sweat. The air is still, without any sign of mercy. A white owl flies to perch on the the window, shrieking, being answered from four houses down. From the sewers somewhere come the terrified squeals of a rat. Mosquitoes put up a concerted raid, swarming along the net, circling endlessly at an uncomfortable near-distance, like fate coiling in to claim the last russet glow of life.

Across the street, the neighbors are evicting their tenants, a bunch of boys who have everyday of the past six months grumbled about the lack of water. It is just past midnight, but they have managed to procure a small truck, which comes barrelling down the narrow street, loudly honking at the too-frequent intersections. An argument breaks out about what the last month's rent ought to amount to: the boys say they need a thousand for the truck, and therefore five is all they have. But the rent is six, and there is no way in hell they can just pick up their beds and toss them into a truck, the neighbor shouts. The boys try to hoist a second bed over the corrugated-iron gate, kicking the gate open, kicking it shut, banging into it, banging out of its prison. Long after the argument about money has been forgotten, one of the boys starts about the water, the lack of it, the expenses that caused, how the new house has water three hours everyday instead of never. The neighbor needs to answer, but she has nothing to
say, because this truth hurts her more than anything else the boys said all evening long, because there are three other families living in that house, surviving on no water whatsoever. She tries to say something, but something catches in her voice. She starts and stalls, caught in an odd recital where emotion rushes before reason, where reality oppresses with its full weight to clamp her voice to kill it before it can register a protest.

Barely a minute passes between the truck's disappearance and the arrival of a rival nuisance: idiots in the neighborhood have takes a motorbike and modified its muffler on the exhaust. It screeches into the neighborhood, comes to a halt, revs its engine. There has never been a louder noise in the neighborhood, not even during a wedding around the corner, from where a brass band played terrible rendition of tasteless Bollywood songs all night long. The blacktop in the neighborhood is unspoiled, without surprises, and for most part, straight. It is an exciting course with gentle curves, wide, stable surface, well lit enough that there is no danger of being surprised by a stray dog or a drunk on his way home on a motorbike. The idiots run their motorbike all night long, attracting unfortunate admirers, other young men, mindless idiots who are satisfied even just to twist the accelerator while the bike stands stationary.

It is impossible to sleep. Fantasies begin to rise: what if a bottle of flaming kerosene Molotoved their shining youth as they raced past the window? What about a line, tied to gates, blackened with grease, set at the level of their necks? Let them roar then, let then yell with excitement. What about a long pole that suddenly shoots from the dark to lance through the spokes of the motorbike and sends the delinquents in flight, brief, coarse, not quite murderous, so that the job can be finished with bricks, sacks of gravel? A noose that catches the one in the back, the one with the loud mouth, yanks him right out, and by the time his friend turns around, dangles him from a pole? A kitchen knife could then cut out the rider's liver, even as he tries to make more noise, rev the engine one last time in an act of punk, rebellion.

Sleep, with its dark trickle of villains, spills from hair-roots and the involuntary shuddering of the eyelids and sits on the chest. Knowing that this is sleeping and this isn't makes it harder still. There is light outside, the darkness becomes an unsightly gray before turning a luminous, crisp blue. But bad sleep sits on the chest, reaching into the brain, clawing through the mind for the small and beautiful moments of rest and illumination, and slobbers as it feasts, shifting on its heels occasionally to remind that this is no nightmare, neither a reverie, not a wisp, not abstract, not ether. This is real, this beast of discomfort, slowly eating all goodness away, pushing its own kernels of the abominable and vile into the roughed-up bed of the conscious.

Morning means more neighbors awoken to a new day with the imprints of thousands of old ones: the rattle of a bicycle returning from Ranibari with drinking water; middle-aged men grunting after the shuttle-cock at the community badminton net; Amala on her roof, complaining about water, a hand-pump getting scratchier and angrier as nothing comes, nothing but stale air poisoned with the stench of watery rust. Suddenly, the hated motorbike starts again. A boy with a broken arm is revving the engine while his friend holds the bike. I scream from the roof, but they don't hear me. Another neighbor marches down the street swinging a large iron rod. “All night long,” he says, and twenty heads come out of their windows: “all night long! Not a minute of sleep!” The boys who thought the loudness of their motorbike gave them immunity from community policing, seem taken aback. The big iron rod rests lightly atop the motorbike headlight as the boys are advised against repeating last night's racket.

Twenty windows close. So it is morning. So what? Must sleep. Now.

Then they woke me...

Load-shedding in the middle of the day, a tardy monsoon, and riots in the streets outside: perfect ingredients for a mid-day nap. And the heat and lethargy makes for the perfect day-time lucid dreaming.

I was having an excellent dream this afternoon. It was something I would call awesome-o or super-bueno. Because it lead up to a pay-off of the kind I prefer: I was going to write a story at the end of it, to be read before an audience. What's more, I was being paid to write the story!

It was a fantasy more than a dream, but it came with the sensory reinforcement of a dream, you know, where the colors are extra saturated, where immediacy feels more immediate, where the surprises are bigger and where the satisfaction of being creative within the boundaries of the dream-world is greater.

I was in a truck, somewhere in the US, with a bunch of people who brought out their crack pipes. I am not kidding. I resisted: I don't do crystal Meth, I said. Who was selling the drugs? Mithun. Kinda funny, but Mithun had the rocks in a small brown-paper bag, and was selling them for twenty dollars each. I realized I needed to get off the truck, so I faked injury, said my leg was hurting a lot.

The truck stopped where a crowd was waiting for me. They put me in a wheelchair. These were Nepali people in the US, and I had been invited to read at one of their celebrations. They were going to put me up for two days, in a room where I had a writing desk. This room faced north, had white walls, a small bed with soft, white sheets. A window that looked out on a flat roof with rails, and a gray, broad river flowing from east to west. I remember thinking: not bad, not a bad room to write in.

One of the organizers gave me a contract, written in blue ball-point pen in a uniform, precise, small Devnagari. The text in Nepali listed questions about myself, instructions on how I was to write the story, the details they [the community that had invited me] wanted to see. I had two days to write. I was being paid 250 bucks, which I thought wasn't very much at all.

Because I would need to write some 12 pages for it to be a decent length reading, and it would take me about three hours to write one decent page, to edit it, etc. But I was going to do it for the 250 they were offering, because, after all, I was a writer. No matter how much a writer says he is not being paid enough to write [editing is a different matter], it is always more than he ever thought he would get paid, to do the work he desperately wants to keep doing forever, and the value of which is really nothing at all.

I was reading the details, surrounded by the people that were hosting me, when I was woken up, to go fetch Abhi from his school.

I just wish I had been able to dream just a minute more, perhaps five minutes more, get something on paper, a phrase, an idea. I have often felt that reality is the shadow of dreams, and not the other way around, and that is exists only for us to have to regret it, endlessly, for the things that we could have had and done and seen in our dreams... I would have written the story out, if only I could have put something on paper... a sound, a face, a fear...


Bonus: while I stood by the school gate waiting for Abhi, Hanshu, my niece, sneaked up on me. She is in grade 1. She offered me water from the tank the school has installed by the gate. I love her. She brings a smile to my face every time I think of her. Because she loves me, too.

smooth and tender and sway

I am struggling with love stories. Not that I have never written one: Face of Carolyn Flint is one, I think. There were a few more that I wrote for Suskera.com But I have never been satisfied with my products.

Here, in The New Yorker, is a beautiful, unexpected love story by a certain Stephen O'Connor: Ziggurat

It is beautiful. Here's a favorite moment:

"The Minotaur was a novice of arc and swell and dip, a new-minted connoisseur of smooth and tender and sway. That little snippet of bird-peep that entered the new girl’s voice whenever she got excited, or when she thought something she had done was stupid—he wanted to put that in a box, tie it up with a leather thong, and keep it around his neck."

This is the kind of stuff that makes me wish it had come out of my writing...

Name?

I heard from Rakesh and Yagya that Alok Nembang's next movie has a name. In today's Saptahik or something?

Anyone has a copy of it? Could you just tell me the name?

MC talk today

I didn't want to be there, and it was apparent. I had no clue what to talk about, and that was apparent. I talked, like a madman chained to a fantasy. I am inarticulate, I become angry and defensive really quickly, and I was in a difficult position: I had to blame Ajit and Sushma for the flaws in the book, which there are aplenty.

But-- Myblogride, thanks for being there.

Tehmporary Chitrakar, dude, it was fun, I hope you seriously pursue your dreams [make them into your vocations, if not your professions], and here's what:

simplyscripts.com
johnaugust.com
celtx.com

pretty much self-explanatory once you go to the URLs.

I think a certain person named Anu was there too. I wasn't wearing my glasses [broken; owner broke], or I would have roped you into a conversation.

But, it is over now, the obligation. Good, good.

and really really fuck pretentious semantics about how a kuire cat meows or myaauuu's.

Correct Info About Martin Chautari Event

It seems I have been giving false info so far, saying the event is scheduled for 1 PM.

It is scheduled for 3 PM, June 21, 2009 [Sunday].

See you there perhaps?

To a flake of your life

The OCP movie work is getting interesting, finally, now that it is time to fit the puzzle together. I have lost interest by now, but two more creative minds are working on it. I have become more the spec-writer, producing pages and necessary screen-play patches, rather than commanding an over-all view of the script.



The brilliant engineers at NTC un-fixed the entire neighborhood's telephone connections three days ago. They assigned wrong phone numbers to our landline, so that the ADSL service no longer worked. But, it is alright now. I am on the internet from my computer, which feels much better than trying to write emails from the nearest cyber, where the kid has figured out that I might want to rent his DVDs.



Here's what might appear in the paper on Sunday:

---

To a flake of your life

Besieged is the word for how it felt. Trapped. Weighted. Buried, mauled, left to rot. Change was desperately the new sauce for vitality. Let it tang on the tip of the tongue, let a new tinkle be ear's new laugh, let it come, what may come, and let it bring what dares come. Such was the flare of a need for friction, a need for flight. But, there was little distance to be covered on a fire built of no fuel. The leash of professional slavishness was short. How far can a man run to escape work and detail, dialogue and scene, reversal and climax, sustained illusions of stillness that look into the soul?



Monsoon hasn't come yet; the heat is unbearable. There is not enough haze in the air to cut out the sun. Roof and walls thicken during the day, fatten with the poison of afternoon heat, make the nights infernal. Sleep becomes thin, unravels every minutes, leaves holes in its shimmering shroud through which come real and imagined worries. The threat of a night before a chemistry exam almost ten years before erases the trunk of experiences since then. Gone, the many years spent happy since, the few years of work and romance, of reading poems under a tree and writing poems on roofs, cliff-tops, peeking at a bird's nest after friends and merlot. Gone the welcome memories and maps of faces and bodies that otherwise spiced sleep. Panic sets in. Sweat becomes the cold prison from which the mind looks outward, at the already too-bright sky, the loud remonstrations of neighbors laboring at hand-pumps, and the knowledge that once more the reprieve has passed, once more, the cool black of night that should have been wrapped over eyelids has evaporated.



Desperate for something to hold, slapping the sweat that has matted his thin rat-tail hair, a man gazes west and sees what? A road to nowhere. Mhepi, its pine-forested pubic mound, and arranged in a ring below it a skirt of heat darting up from blacktop roads. Microbus drivers thrown just slightly off their already mad axis; their erratic swerving and cornering over long stretches of an empty road. Immobile like swatted flies, shopkeepers paste their cheekbones to small squares of concrete on their floors, shifting every few minutes on their straw mats to cover another inch of untouched coolness. In a tea-shop that doesn't sell tea, there is a girl, who can't be more than twelve years old, who has been wilted by heat and wrinkled and pruned by sweat into an unhappy hag. From the coldest part of the house, where she washes dirty dishes, an swarm of flies rises on cue, to hover inches away from new skin, testing the alien for signs of life, salt, nutrition dripping from nose-tip.



Thirty minutes pass. No fridge. No eatable that hasn't been left out in the heat. One half of the shop is dark, the shutters pulled down, a fan roaring from a corner. A phone rings and a body stirs awakes from one corner, crawls on all fours. It is a bitter, bitter man calling, angry at being duped: he paid good money to go somewhere. His money has disappeared, but the visa hasn't arrived. He trusted her, a sister from his village, he trusted her to take care of him, and now he is a destitute, without enough money to pay the lodge for the night, and there is the bill at the bar to worry about. She calms him. She calms me, her voice beseeching, scolding with mild seduction. She leads him through an interrogation with yes-no questions only. She strokes her hair as she forces him to agree. There is a bold stripe of blonde highlight in her hair.



Tell me your story. She stares back, stroking her hair, tapping the table with a thin, chipped nail. I write stories, but today I couldn't think of anything to write, so I have come hunting for stories. Tell me your story, and I will write it exactly as you want me to. She taps the table, asks me if I want anything else to drink. Where did that man want to go? You know, some Arabian fantasy, sun and sand and towers eclipsing man's ability to see clearly. What happened to his money? Why didn't his visa arrive? She stops tapping the table. What sort of stories would we tell? Interesting ones. Don't hesitate. Tell me, anything, about you, about the business, about the neighborhood. She gets up, clears the table of egg-shells and empty glasses.



So much for something to hold. So much for tell me your story. A stray dog corners itself into a tight box of shadows between house and wall and utility pole. Back off, mongrel, it says with its panting and squirting over the new kingdom. After almost a minute of staring back and forth, the dog no longer feels threatened, it lowers its hindquarters with princely leisure, lets its testicles hover over the ground, seeking the coolest spot. The spectacle is concluded. Although it is later in the afternoon, the heat is just as unrelenting. Instead of the scorching sun overhead, it is the waft from the ground that stifles. A thirsty tongue can't decide upon its essence: it switches between a coarse-barked log and a brittle wafer.



A boy brings a bicycle out-matched to him to the bridge over the Samakhusi sludge-run. There are three men sitting on the bridge, having surrendered in the fight against pre-monsoon heat. There is a stack of plastic envelopes, baggies, of all sizes, on the bike's carrier. But the boy isn't authorized to sell them: he stands guard by the bicycle and waits. Tell me your story, kid. I write stories, but I have nothing to write about today. He stares back, grabs the rails on the twelve-foot concrete bridge over Samakhusi and leans over. It is a ridiculous gesture. The water is barely four feet below, black and curdled, bubbling instead of foaming, moving only imperceptibly under the crust. Tell me your story, kid. Treat me to a flake of your life. He looks to the other men sitting on the bridge. He can't trust a man who sits on a bridge over Samakhusi, under Mhepi, asking for stories. He spits over the rails and watches the white blob float down, over an endless chasm, to echo and splash on the torrent a mile below.