Carrying Kathmandu

These past three days - ugh. 

Ms Upreti the neighbor and I took a short walk on Tuesday, before the arsons began. Until then, the fires had been small – mostly orange traffic cones piled up. I joked about how inexpensive the smoke plumes that day had been. So nice of Gen Z – even the fires are little. I told Ms Upreti about the day during the Hrithik Roshan Kanda when I and my friends followed a mob as it went around burning Madhesi-owner businesses, using the fire to light incense dedicated to Shiva Shambho. I was nearly giddy at the – how is an older man to put this – the near demureness of the protests. Yes, there were groups going around confronting the police, but a few tires here and there, some traffic cones, some barricades. 

The real burning began later, when – now it is a lot more clear – the Army made it possible. It may have been that they were trying to avoid further casualties, but the Army did allow the bloodletting to happen. 

The damages are estimated at around a billion USD. Every symbol of democracy was burned. Rashtra Bank was left intact. Now it is becoming more and more clear that the arsonists were far too well-informed and clear of intention than a typical mob. Almost as if someone has been studying Roman history recently and directing the mob.

I have as little faith in Gen Z as I did in Oli and Deuba's gang. They are a mix of inexperience and self-righteousness. This is to put it nicely. 

However, this is not why I have this post going. It is for the short story below, which I was reminded of as I took the walk with Ms Upreti the neighbor. It is about another time long ago, another time of terror.

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Carrying Kathmandu

(Jan 3, 2013)

 

‘There is no turning back,’ Bidur looked Manav in the eyes.

Manav agreed – there was no turning back once they got on the road. It would take caution and cunning to walk the cargo from Anamnagar to Sanepa. There was a bridge to cross, the city was burning, the dogs were everywhere, sniffing for an opportunity to rush at the defenseless. They could wait for another day for the job, but they didn’t want to. Bidur didn’t want to wait, and Manav didn’t want to argue, for they had spent the Saturday past arguing about the interminable wait. The city had already been in turmoil for over a week.

Bidur ran back from the mouth of the alley. ‘Coast is clear,’ he said, sotto voce. ‘Roger, then,’ Manav said. They carefully picked the large, flat board wrapped in butcher paper and securely Scotch-taped, a board unwieldy enough for just one person to carry, but no easier for two to manage either.

Manav stopped at the pavement. No vehicle, no pedestrian, not even a dog marking its territory – the road was eerily empty. Not a sound, not a whisper, not a song but the buzz of his own heart irrationally scared of the emptiness of the road before him. Manav nodded at Bidur. They matched strides to march towards the Hanuman temple, where they would have to stop to take stock of their progress, chart their options.

To the west rose a plume of black smoke. From the hill to the east came the slow rumble of inevitability inching closer. ‘The river,’ Manav said. Bidur ran to check if the coast was clear, and roger, it was. Manav ran with the board over his head. He must have flapped like a flightless bird to anybody spying from the thousand shuttered windows around him.

‘Slow down! Slow down!’ Bidur said urgently. Manav could hear the wooden frame creak as he rushed the board, lopsided and flailing, to the shade under the house where Bidur waited. He knew the frame was of sapwood pine, light and weak, fragile.

‘Why are we being so afraid?’ Manav asked Bidur, who shrugged. The eastern rumble wasn’t getting any louder – that was both fortunate and unfortunate. If they’d wait there long enough, another plume of smoke was sure to rise from the east, where the slow rumbling serpent had just made its stop.

They walked along Dhobikhola. A dusty road littered with garbage, following the course of a river fed with sewers. A lone pig rooted in the filth outside an abattoir. Like fruits of a miracle, bright purple brinjals and spiky dhatura hung from plants dotting the dusty banks. A reservoir of plastic bottles pooled many an untold fathom deep. Snips and strips of cutoffs and refuse from a garment factory hid the shame of the river under motley.

‘We have to be afraid sometimes,’ Bidur said. They shuffled along silently over the dusty track. A dog ran out with its tail held high, whimpering, turning to bark at the furniture workshop yard from which it had been chased out. Half a brick bounced along the ground, narrowly missed the dog, went over the edge of the road, scared the pig enough that it galloped away, squealing as if it had been stuck.

‘Slowly, but, now!’ Manav said. Bidur turned around and lead the retreat. Behind them, the dog snarled at its enemies. ‘Don’t run,’ Manav said as he felt the tug on the board as Bidur quickened his pace. The dog gave a loud scream behind them as another missile found its mark. It hightailed past Manav and Bidur, disappeared under the bridge. It would be hell to hide there, amid excreta and shadows, but much safer than being in the open. If the slow-rumbling mob from the east descended the hill, it would perhaps pass right overhead, oblivious that Manav and Bidur guarded the cargo right under the bridge, under their very trampling feet.

Bidur tensed up when a man cackled behind them, his laugh a rasping trumpet of derision. Manav pushed the frame, prodding Bidur to keep walking forward. ‘Oi!’ the man called. Manav pushed the frame. Bidur hurried forward. ‘Oi! Stop!’ The hyena called from the gate of the furniture workshop.

Bidur shook his head at Manav – the board trembled as Manav tried to control his trembling hands. Manav clenched his jaws, breathed deep and turned around.

The man – the hyena who laughed and ordered them to stop – was wiry but short. He still grinned, a blackened row of teeth under spotted gums. If Manav put a hand on the man’s forehead and kept him at arm’s length, the man would flail as he tried to reach Manav. He also wore flip-flops which would make chasing difficult, unless the man took them off and wore them on his forepaws. He wore a filthy shirt with a pocket torn in a corner. Manav would never be intimidated by this villain. The hyena sauntered over to them, a fist-sized brick in his throwing hand. He jerked a thumb in the direction of his workshop. ‘I didn’t see you come from the other direction,’ he said. He picked a stick from the ground and slapped his naked shins.

‘I’m afraid of dogs,’ Bidur said. ‘You hit that dog and it came after us. I don’t like dogs.’  The man looked at Bidur and Manav, started in a wide circle around the board, dragging the stick in the dirt. Manav picked his side of the board and turned. The man put his hand on Manav’s shoulder.

‘Brother,’ he said, ‘Wait a minute, won’t you?’ Manav waited for Bidur to pick his side of the board, but Bidur was looking past Manav, past the skinny hyena.

‘What happened?’ A band of men with red and blue scarves wrapped around their heads emerged from the workshop gate. The leader carried two mobile phones and smoked a cigarette. His shirt was spotlessly clean, his jeans an expensive brand. He could be a bank executive or a web-designer with his own business. He could be a restaurateur in Thamel. The leader – Naikay, instigator – put his arm around his scabby guard-dog, the laughing hyena.

‘What do you have under there, brother?’ Naikay asked. Bidur didn’t respond. Manav took stock of the situation – the hyena, Naikay, four more young men, all Manav’s age. Each seemed reasonably amicable by his appearance, except for the hyena, but, each also wore a red and blue scarf around his head. Naikay’s phone rang, but he ignored it after checking who was calling. ‘Let’s take a look, brother, at what you have under the wrapping,’ Naikay said. But, he made little curlicues in the air, a gesture directed at his four companions to unwrap the butcher paper.

‘No!’ Manav barked. The lackey who had stepped forward to tear at the butcher paper froze, looked at Naikay for permission to initiate the search. ‘It took us a lot of careful work to wrap it. We don’t have any paper here. We can’t carry it unwrapped.’

‘Tell us then – what is under the paper?’ Naikay asked.

‘It is a canvas,’ Bidur said. ‘We have to take it to Sanepa.’

‘Why?’

‘Our job,’ Manav said. ‘That is what we do.’ He picked his end of the board, waited for Bidur to pick his end and walk.

‘Wait,’ the hyena said. ‘But, why did you run?’

‘Did they run?’ Naikey asked the hyena, who nodded, laughed. ‘Brother,’ Naikey said to Manav, ‘Please understand. We have to see what is under the paper. Please don’t force my hand. You know how it is. ‘

‘How is it?’ Manav bristled. Bidur nudged him gently with the frame, but Naikay was already squaring up to Manav. Bidur raised a hand in a placating gesture, but the man closest to him flinched as if Bidur had tried to touch his face. Or, hit him. The air crackled with intense energy.

‘They were sneaking that way, towards Babar Mahal. I came out and saw them. Then they tried to turn around and run,’ the hyena reported to nobody in particular. Naikay’s phone rang. He let it ring until the person at the other end hung up. Hyena stabbed at the butcher paper with the stick he had been dragging in the dirt.

‘Stop that!’ Manav hissed and snatched the stick from the hyena, broke it, threw it into the sluggish river. The hyena shrank behind Naikay. Bidur rolled his eyes, stepped between the men and the frame. Manav held the frame behind him, at an arm’s length. Bidur called the hyena to him, put a friendly hand on his shoulder.

‘This is a canvas. It means it is a painting. It took months to make, but it only takes one mistake to destroy it forever.’ The hyena vacantly looked at Bidur, unimpressed. ‘It is a work of art,’ Bidur said.

‘Let’s look at it, then,’ Naikay said. Bidur spread his arm, wordlessly pointing at the filth around, the pig that had trotted back to regard the posse with curiosity, the loose, light dirt underfoot. ‘Come on!’ Bidur looked Naikay in the eye. ‘This is no place for that!’

 

‘Is this good enough?’ Naikay asked. He and his posse had brought Manav and Bidur back to the road by the Hanuman temple, under the awning of a shop that was shut for the day. Nothing was open in the city – not even the windows that faced the streets. Without waiting for permission or protest, the hyena tore at the butcher paper. Manav let go of the frame with a huff and crossed his arms.

Naikay’s phone rang again. He didn’t answer it, but furiously punched a message. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and leaned against the shutters of the shop. ‘Huh,’ Naikay said. The hyena looked at Naikay, at the painting, at Manav. Bidur’s face had hardened into a mask of stone.

‘I’ve seen this before,’ one of the younger men spoke with his chin on his friend’s shoulder. His friend, who was fiddling with his phone, looked up, pushed his glasses up with his knuckles. 

‘This is a work of art?’ the hyena laughed. His laugh disappeared after he looked at Naikay, who shook his head slowly, grunting under his breath. Naikay looked at Manav and said, ‘Sorry, brother – but you know how it is. We had to ask you what was under the paper.’

‘Satisfied now?’ Manav said. ‘Now we have to take this all the way across town, in this sun and dust? You couldn’t have taken our word?’

‘There are people,’ the hyena said, ‘there are people who are carrying pictures we don’t agree with. These are unsafe times.’ Manav glared at him. But the hyena didn’t back down. Instead, he pinched a piece of butcher paper that still clung to the frame and ripped it, slowly, with exaggerate attention. A six years old boy hummed, imitating a motor-cycle, and slapped a bicycle tire with a cane. The hyena grinned at the boy. 

‘It is just a painting,’ Manav hissed through his teeth. The boy’s lone tire wobbled until it was righted with a well-timed slap of the cane.

‘Which is fine. This picture is fine. We have no problem with it. You can go now, brother,’ Naikay said.

‘Oi! Fuchey! Kid – today is a chakka-jam! No wheels on the road!’ The hyena laughed and chased after the boy.

‘Are you giving us permission to walk freely on the road?’ Manav squared up to Naikay.

‘This attitude won’t get you very far from here, brother,’ Naikay said.

‘Both of you!’ Bidur picked up his end of the frame and raised his voice a notch. Naikay swiveled towards Bidur, but Bidur had taken a step forward, crowding him against the shutter. The other men fanned behind Bidur. ‘You have forgotten my face, haven’t you?’ Bidur said to Naikay. A flicker of doubt sped across Naikay’s eyes. ‘I think you have forgotten my face. My name is Bidur. And you,’ he yelled at the hyena, ‘walk away from that boy.’

The hyena backed away, uneasy and deflated. The boy grabbed his bicycle tire and disappeared behind a house. The four men behind Bidur shifted their weights and searched the roads behind them. A crow circled above the Hanuman temple. The man fiddling with his phone took a video of the crow.

‘We have a long way to walk,’ Bidur said. The men cleared away.

‘Who is this guy?’ Manav asked as they picked up the painting.

‘Nobody,’ Bidur looked at Naikay. ‘Just a kid trying to please his father’s friends.’ The four men watched slack-jawed as Naikay’s face contorted in humiliation.

 

Manav walked in anger, outpacing Bidur so that the painting swiveled, came between them like a fence of crowded faces, a bouquet of blood-spatter or petals strewn over a hillside. Bidur tried to keep up.

‘You knew that motherfucker and you still let me go through that humiliation!’ Manav stopped in the middle of the road at Maitighar. Bidur listened attentively at the sound of a thousand feet dragging in their direction. ‘You knew him! He would have let us pass, wouldn’t have ripped the wrapping apart to let crows shit on the cargo!’

‘I wasn’t sure. I thought he was still abroad, working.’

‘You should have waited a little longer, until they tore up the canvas itself.’ 

‘Like I said – I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure why they let us go,’ Bidur said. Manav walked ahead. ‘You can carry the damn thing on your own.’

But Manav stopped after a few paces. Bidur caught up, the large painting flapping on its frail pine frame held aloft.  

In the silent tableau ahead of him, there rested a few three-wheelers, a car, a smoking bundle of clothes abandoned in the middle of the road. Riot-police in formation. A thousand men and women standing across the street with bricks in their hands. A police truck with gun barrels poking out of the nest above the driver’s cabin. The asphalt red with brick-dust, speckled with abandoned footwear, fuming with nearly-spent tear-gas shells. The whites of a thousand pairs of eyes. Raging veins on a thousand pairs of fists. 

A thousand heads wearing red and blue scarves.

‘Keep walking,’ Bidur said. Manav waited at the edge of the crowd. A policeman cradling a shotgun raised his hand to stop Bidur, but he held the painting before him, like a talisman, and walked into the fray.  

And, for the half-minute it took Bidur to walk past the mob with their flags and the police with their bamboo batons, to step gingerly over and around broken bottles, hot shells, bricks, sticks, pamphlets, puddles, bullhorns and slogans, everybody looked at the painting. The cargo that Manav and Bidur were charged with carrying across town, across the bridge and to a home, parted the thick violence in their path.  

Manav looked at the shotgun until the policeman pointed it to the ground. Manav stared at the bullhorn in the hands of a bearded guru until he pointed it to the ground. Thousands of pairs of eyes followed Bidur first – he obscured behind a broad, crowded, painted face – then swung around to quiz Manav. He looked at them broadly, with disdain, skimming over their passion-flushed faces. He peered around the painting until a fat man carrying an insignia painted on a flag stepped out of Bidur’s way. He measured his stride to remain behind Bidur, behind the talisman that transported them from that world to another until they walked past the upturned car burning at the mouth of the bridge, leaving behind the silenced crowd, the silenced shotgun and bullhorn.

 

Bidur was waiting on the other side of the river, at the mouth of the alley that went down to the Gurudwara. ‘Let me carry it,’ Manav asked when he caught up.

Manav looked at the city from the shadow under the painting which he balanced over his head, careful not to touch the canvas with his hair. He and Bidur had accepted the task of carrying it – this bauble – across town, through a riot. Bidur walked behind him, whistling now. The streets were still empty, but the city was stirring. The halal butcher behind the Gurudwara hadn’t opened his shop, but he was sharpening his curved knife on the whetstone outside his home. A goat strained against its tether, trying perhaps to put distance between its neck and the pervading smell of blood inside the shuttered meat-shop. A temple was wide open – it even had lit lamps and thick clumps of incense fragrant by the freshly washed idol. A woman walked with an open basket of marigolds. A plastic ball rolled from a doorway and bounced down the front steps, rattling to a rest by Manav’s feet. Bidur picked the ball, and as Manav walked ahead, Bidur threw the ball into the door from where it had spilled. Further down the street, three boys balanced atop a wall and watched Manav approach, until their friend hidden in the guava tree shook the branch on which he sat astride, raining ripe guavas all around. The paan shop wasn’t open, but the paanwallah leaned on his kiosk, lazily slapping at a handful of chewing tobacco. A girl, barely ten years old, carried a small yellow bucket of water, resting every ten steps. Somebody must have called her from somewhere, because she yelled back in a piercingly high voice, muttering, cursing innocently, spilling more water in her wake as she tried to hurry. The sound of a motorcycle racing away roared and echoed through the street. Manav and the four guava-thieves froze on their spots and listened. Nothing. The boys resumed their fight about who was to get which part of the spoils. Manav walked around the corner.

‘Wait,’ Bidur called. Manav turned. Bidur had spotted a large vat of water steaming over a large kerosene stove at the end of the alley. ‘Let’s wait it out, understand?’ Bidur said. ‘Let’s wait for sunset. They all go home after sunset, anyway, these punctual reactionaries.’   

‘The cargo,’ Manav said.

‘Bring it in,’ Bidur smiled.

 

Manav leaned the painting against the wall in the shop. A tall man with a long nose and a twinkle in the eyes smiled and pointed at the painting. ‘Brother – did you make that?’ he said. 

‘No, we didn’t,’ Manav smiled at the tall man and his friend.

‘Sister!’ The tall man stood and hollered. A middle-aged woman appeared from behind the florid curtain at the back of the room. ‘Sister – two warm glasses for our friends here,’ the tall man said before settling into his chair with a thud. ‘They have delivered high art to your humble abode, sister, and we must celebrate that.’

Manav and Bidur quickly drank the first glass of the weak millet brew and asked for refills. ‘I insist,’ the tall man said, ‘I insist upon paying for this round. For our artist friends.’ Manav and Bidur didn’t correct him. The tall man left his companion behind and hopped to Manav’s table. ‘Cheers, brothers!’ he said.

‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he said after finishing his drink and tapping the table to signal the shopkeeper for more. ‘I was in the Gulf for a long time. A long time. The air was like the breath of a child who is about to die of fever. All women covered themselves from head to toe. To see a Nepali sister on Fridays, coming out to eat momos with her friends, smiling to us and even asking how things were back home – that was like heaven. Women bring coolness to troubled heart, don’t they? You tell me, brothers – don’t they?

‘Now, it had been six years since I had left Nepal. I fell from a scaffolding, nearly four stories I fell, because I had been running a fever, but my supervisor – not a Pilipino, no, no, not a Bangladeshi, no, but a Nepali – my supervisor wouldn’t let me have the day off. So I lost my grip, and I fell. Didn’t even faint, just retched my guts out into the hot sand. Then I was given time to recuperate.

‘I’d be left alone all day long, tossing and turning with fever, cooking from inside out. I’d drink all the water in the bottle by noon. But I’d be too weak to walk to the tap, you see, too weak to refill the bottle. More than that, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to walk to the toilet if I had to go, you know, if I drank too much water, I worried I’d wet the bed, be humiliated before the others. I’d be parched, desperate. I’d lick my lips like this, for some salt to gather spit to wet my throat.

‘On the second day, I noticed the painting of a mountain that one of my roommates had put on the wall. Snow-flurries and cracked glaciers. Whenever I’d get very thirsty or hot, I’d concentrate on that painting. Then I’d fall asleep and dream of swimming in the stream in my village, or waiting in the thick shade of a tree on a mountain crest as the breeze dried the sweat on my back.

‘So, brothers, I looked at that painting for six days, while the fever ravished me, made mincemeat of my brain. The painting and I made friends, you see, became mits  – sometimes I’d wake shivering with cold. Cold. Brr! After six days and six nights, I woke up fresh, fresh as cow’s milk. Never got sick even once in the next four years in the Gulf. That is why I admire people like you, brothers, who bring coolness and relief into lives like mine.’

‘We didn’t make this painting,’ Bidur smiled at the tall man, who shook his head vigorously and wagged his finger. ‘No, no, no,’ he said, ‘please let me thank you nonetheless, for doing what you do, for bringing some relief into lives like mine.’

Manav and Bidur paid up and picked the painting. ‘Brothers,’ the tall man said, ‘please, will you let me say one last word to you?’

‘Yes?’ Manav said.

‘That painting of the mountain on my wall – the one I made my mit,’ the tall man waved his hand in the air, sighed. ‘It never existed. There never had been anything on the wall. My fever had made me see it. So, when I say that I want to thank people like you, my brothers, please believe that I mean it from the heart. I miss that friend of mine who saved my life so many years ago, you see? And I salute you. I salute you!’ The tall man staggered to his feet and saluted Manav and Bidur as they carried the painting out of the teashop.

After walking for a few minutes, Manav said, ‘Back there by the bridge – I thought they were going to burn the cargo.’

‘I thought they’d pepper it with buckshot,’ Bidur said. ‘I couldn’t decide who would pounce on the cargo first – the police or the mob.’

‘But, they saw the painting, didn’t they?’ Manav said, almost with a catch in his voice. They climbed up the stairs to Lain Singh Bangdel street in Sanepa Heights. The sun was setting over Thankot. ‘I want to look at it for the last time,’ Manav said.

 

Just as they arrived at Sanepa Chowk, the shops opened their metal shutters with boisterous, grating screeches. There was light. It spilled out from doors, from window displays of shampoo and electric cables and ladies’ hosiery. The barber trimmed his own beard; the fractal of his snipping scissors repeated in the mirrors on the three walls of his shop. The grocer winnowed a basket of tomatoes, letting the lackluster sink out of sight, calling the lustrous to the light. A toddler, shirt gathered around its waist, veered towards the road as it tried to waddle away from its mother, who snatched at it with alarm, but not without laughter, not without gratitude, a gesture made with one part terror and one part love. Two schoolgirls chewed sour, spicy candy and watched Manav and Bidur carry the cargo into a dusty lane to the east.

A dog followed Manav, sniffing at his feet, trotting ahead to read Bidur, trotting yet ahead to clear the road for them. It ran to gates and utility poles and marked their progress with personal notes to his comrades. Manav worried about not being able to clearly see the path beneath his feet. The large canvas wobbled and buckled whenever the two friends went out of tandem, but that quickly got them adjusting their paces until the painting glided smoothly over the dog-shit and puddles that peppered the road. The dog ran ahead and ran back, looked at Bidur with expectation, then disappeared. A little girl ran out to her balcony and screamed, ‘Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday!’ A chorus of children poured out onto her balcony and sang. A boy playing alone, knocking a football against a wall, also shouted to the balcony, ‘Happy Birthday!’

Manav knew they were almost at their destination. Bidur would call a number and somebody would come to a gate few houses down the road, take the cargo from them. Bidur would put his arm on Manav’s shoulder and ask – Are you tired? Manav would say – No.   

 

End.