Updates?

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

Hey there, Courtney Cross!

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

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

Boring Uncle

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

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



----------

Boring Uncle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manufacturing Experience

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

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

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

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

Weak Finish

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

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

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

Here's next Sunday's:





---------------

What do trees mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waltzing with Bashir

Saw the movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom-Yum-Goong

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

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

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

Stefan Comes to Kathmandu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That shit don't fly.

Star and Dust

I couldn't resist watching Stardust on HBO during the four hours of power, leaving me with about 80 minutes to write this article for next Sunday's paper. I thought I had an interesting idea, but it turned out to be quite trite. I was so lazy that I even lifted--borrowed--the title from the movie. I am so bad at giving titles to the essays: it is usually in the "this-and-vaguely related that" format.

At least it has Nikhil Uprety in it! It seems he isn't on IMDB, although he has done tons of Nepali movies, and a few Bhojpuri ones. On the other hand, I am on IMDB :-)




----
Star and Dust

He can't be more than fourteen years of age, but he carries about a weathered air, sits peering into the dust and pale sun as if beckoned at by a once forgotten sight. He sits on his heels, knees folded to support cheekbones, arms ringed around the shins, the tail of school blazer brushing pine needles as he sways to a private rhythm. Often the lips curl and crumble around the edges to make small flickers of a smile or a frown as I watch for shadows of thoughts fade and flash on his face. My curiosity pushes me forward: I saunter over to where he sits and ask what school he has run away from.

“North Point,” he says in the faintest voice, too faint to catch the first time around. His arm points to the west. “Near here, North Point, Samakhusi.” I ask him why he isn't in school—Suraj laughs behind me. He thinks I am scaring the boy. “Holiday,” the boy mutters, makes no eye-contact, shifts edgewise away. He is still squatting, so he doesn't get too far with that exercise, but he indicates enough to reseal his envelope of privacy, there on the dusty ground of Ranibari.

Suraj, Yagya and Camen have a laugh at the boy's expense. It is the morning after a friend's wedding reception: each man is parched and wary of the sun. This morning in Ranibari is the perfectly mellow start to a new day our bodies need, lulled by the sun broken by the scant roof of leaves above, fanned by a blaze of dry bamboo groves that stubbornly wear their golden leaves, and spiced by the mild acid of unaccountable cynicism as we mutter in approval, but mostly laugh, at Nikhil Uprety giving an action sequence. We watch the team of technicians go about their work, but we also watch the handful who have congregated to watch the action sequence being shot.

Nikhil has to come running up a slope and veer off just before hitting the camera. The boy gets up, touches his tie as if stroking a talisman, shifts to a new perch with a better view of the actor, who does come gunning down the ground, veers off, and even before he has come to a stop, flicks the phone out of a hip-pocket and leans against a tree, grinning needlessly into the phone, flicking his long hair in squealing delight. Behind him, extras and stunts-men pile small heaps of leaves to fall hard into, practice complicated five-step choreography that needs perfect timing and grace of form to execute. The boy nods his approval, but he is shooed away from the line of sight of the camera. He is reluctant to stand and loathe to relocate, unlike middle-aged women with bright tika on their foreheads, spillover from a nearby wedding, hiding cautiously behind tree-trunks, taking in the bright magic of cinema being made Nepali-style, on the strength of grunts and guts, and nothing besides.

Caymen starts clowning, wondering aloud when the filmmakers would come to their senses, see the kuire with blond curls, cast him for the villain's sidekick. “Just give me some ratty brown wigs and like three heavy gold chains and put me in a pit and I'll jump out of the leaves.” We all laugh. But we know that this dusty troupe is stitching together a snare of magic, yelling in pain and bravado with each punch and kick that will be in service of a damsel in distress or a kid nabbed by a pot-bellied goon when all is done, when a blanket of hush falls over a darkened theater to erupt in applause as Nikhil comes running up an incline, knees a man in the face, leaps over two more, kicks one so hard that he does a complete back-flip and falls into a pile of leaves.

The truant boy has moved into the shade of picnic stall, still hunched, still peering at every object, every person, every movement. Our attention is waning, wavering, but his seems to accrete with every nod at every accurate punch, every new angle the camera squats to capture. I belong here, to this world of make-believe and leaves thrown in the air, men flying through the air, calling for damage and baby and action. The boy in his blazer, chewed-up tie and the jaundiced gauntness of frame is an eavesdropper at this orchestra of sounds and sights. But I am fidgety, irritable, tense, cynical, too easily goaded to derisive laughter by Caymen or Yagya's wisecracks, whereas the boy is like a heap of cow-dung marked into veneration with vermilion and turmeric and red ribbons, his mute, rooted mass deified, transcended into Ganesh.

Where is the illusion, I ask myself—in the obviously faked throws and kicks and falls, or in the expectations I have of the movie business? I see too easily through the effort. I project my disbelief instead of suspending it, but the boy, seems to me, has mastered the rare art of sustained awe, which must be the lifeblood of the theatrical arts, or our persistent desire to laugh with ourselves, at ourselves. I stand and shake my head as if to shake off the thought. The boy looks at me, but he doesn't nod. Suraj laughs once more at Nikhil, who is once more on the phone. As if on a cue, we all stand, ready to walk away from the morning's entertainment, Nepali-style.

Bookworm?

I have an interview in tomorrow's TKP [Monday], "Bookworm-Babbles," apparently. The City Post, to be exact.

I was the last-minute stand in, so it was hard to refuse...

I interviewed in a cheap little fly-fested cafe. I didn't know there was going to be photography involved, so I went in shorts and chappal, prepared to talk and nothing more.



more tomorrow...

Mosquitoes are here...

I killed one. I had forgotten how satisfying it is to kill an insect that has drawn your blood.

I am at the verge of completion with a project; the cold feet have returned. All I want is to bury my head. What I have written is drivel. Drivel.

--

I had the weirdest dream this morning: somewhere in Sudder Street in Kolkata was a bench before a shrine of Kali. On the bench were two blind gay-lovers beggars, who talked to each other with their tongues in each other's mouth. On the same bench were the family of a girl who was the statue of Kali.

As the duo of blind beggars talked, a story surfaced:

The girl who was now Kali had once been very beautiful and fair, and with her carefree ways given her family a lot of pain. People flocked after her and wanted to murder the family because they came in between. One day, while she slept, they poured kerosene over her body and put her on fire. She jumped out of bed , into a tandoor that charred her and cooled her at the same time, so that she healed, but her skin darkened and stiffened. The family repeated this twenty times, after which, the girl's face froze in a look of rage and terror. The family put up a shrine and put her in it, silent, charred, alive, immobile.

But the blind gay-lovers beggars knew the story. So they told it with their tongues in each other's mouth.

That was one.

Another dream I had towards midnight yesterday had to do with the idea of my present self as chrysalis, is that makes any sense. It was a slew of images, rapid fire, of which I remember the pod and the peas most distinctly. But it was tied emotionally to an urgent need to break free, to open and leave, to leap without net. It was so fierce in its gut-wrench that I woke up sobbing.

I think I understand why my mind is doing this: I think it is because today is the anniversary of my return to Nepal.

One whole year. Still not one *completed* movie project to my credit, although a short film was shot. It is being shot to pieces in the editing room.

One collection of short stories translated: no word from publisher or author any more. I think they won't be publishing it.

Translated more than a dozen poems for Save the Children's rehab for violence-affected kids: not one published...

No new short stories written. One published in a book that probably didn't sell a thousand copies.

Still lonely. Still looking, waiting. Still living with family.

Spent about two months away from home, including a month in Kolkata.

Still not regular enough, or good enough, writer for TKP.

Lost not a single kilo of weight...

All in all--roundly a failure.

Alice Springs?

What? Really? Alice Springs? That's kinda random.

In other news: the picture of an adorable infant:

Aarush Adhikari-Mahat [or just Aarush Mahat... his name in the city registry / birth certificate was "Infant Adhikari" because his parents couldn't decide upon a name at that time...]

Mah nephew, he is.

Still sick

I am. Still sick. This thing, this gut and bag I carry around and lay with, this being in my skin is behaving as if it is something else, without, aloof. I wish I could clean my guts out like they clean out a freshly butchered goat, hold

Sick to my guts!

Literally.

I met Paruj Acharya, [refined] dickhead-extraordinaire, well known to some of you, on Friday night. Needless to say, I needed to rehydrate the next day. I am a terrible judge of re-hydration establishments. I don't say it is that I can't judge, but there seems to live a perversion in my mind that forbids me from walking away from a business establishment if I have so much as made eye-contact with the vendor. I guess, to my moral self, that is when the first and binding contract is drawn between myself and the vendor.

What this highfalutin gibberish actually translates into is a series of unfortunate purchases, with equally lamentable consequences.

My choice beverage for oral re-hydration the juice of the sweet-lime, better known as Mausami in Kathmandu, something I had grown to like in the recent months.

I have no clue as to what was, for the establishment, its choice of detergent or cleansing-agent for the mugs that changed hands often. My gut feeling is that I got a bug from the juice stall outside the Kantipur Publications office in Tinkune.

Or, it could have been from the momo I had to eat the next evening because I felt so hungry and weak and there was no banana [my alternative to momos these days] in sight. Although, my Kathmandu-machismo forbids me from insinuating a constitution so weak as to fall short on its primary function of digesting street momos.

So, I have been feverishly waiting for the next, you know, run. So much so that I had a dream where I was just as sick, and I was given a whole bagful of dried Amala, Indian gooseberry. Some of you know that Amala would be an excellent herbal remedy for my condition. The mind plays lovely tricks.

But, the real tragedy of the situation is not that the illness seems in some ways induced by a procrastinating psyche, or that it keeps me uncomfortable, gassy and damp in the wrong place, but that I seem to have gained weight.

You see--I was 71 kilos when I returned from Kolkata. Over the next three or four days, I jumped right back to 74 [I blame it on two consecutive nights of Nanglo's momos followed by rice just before bed]. Tonight, after run number 5 [a precise jet mucking the water under-butt], I stepped on the scale, convinced that the day-long punishment would change at least something.

75 kilos. Yup. Now I know a stomach-related ailment is an inefficient way to lose weight. On the other hand, I also did some 25 push-ups, probably for the first time after leaving Santa Rosa.