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.



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Boring Uncle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manufacturing Experience

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

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

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

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

Weak Finish

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

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

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

Here's next Sunday's:





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What do trees mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waltzing with Bashir

Saw the movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom-Yum-Goong

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

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

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

Stefan Comes to Kathmandu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That shit don't fly.

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 :-)




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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.

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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.

Still Sixteen Hours! [Part II ]

I am lame. I just ranted for next Sunday's TKP. Here is is:

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Still Sixteen Hours!
Dark! There are more things to see behind closed eyes than with eyes wide open: at least the eyes marry with the mind, bring squiggles and bursts and sparks of color behind the eyelids. And with a minute’s flirting, thoughts color their own merry circus, one bright image leads to a train of others, time passes without struggle. But, eyes wide open and searching, there is nothing but a bill of knees knocked in the dark, misplaced notes and emasculation -exasperation to deal with: still sixteen hours without electricity! Mid-noon is blanketed with the same doom that must have smothered the dark ages: the rattles and whirrs of modern conveniences disappear, now information doesn’t come my way, nothing can be made or unmade, reason itself seems to spiral down a dark well. There is nothing to do on the computer or see through it; there isn’t anything to watch on the television. Deferred deadlines lurk at the edge of conscience, scrape at the mind’s peace, and erode it bit by bit. Even the blood-pressure rises in protest.

Yet, tempered with a little statistics, even this isn’t too bad: Pakistanis, at the moment, are worse off than Nepalis, for one, and a large majority of the Nepali population remains without electricity, for another. It is foolish to look for a better human condition when there is no water in the reservoirs and the rivers seem intent upon annual destruction, and when the party in power enjoys forgetting its own role in birthing the malaise. Charity comes swiftest with the knowledge that one is better off, much better off, compared to the most abject: what little we have of Ampere and Volt, we must celebrate like the revolutionary nation that we are. There is electricity, a whooping eight-hour of it, and that must be reason to celebrate.
In any case, electricity is a demon that has the capacity to irreparably alter the surrounding: it announces its arrival with pylons and aluminum towers and hums and chirps and stormy sparks. It undulates and coils, shakes like a silver skein as it climbs over hitherto unobstructed hills to cleave valleys which nothing worse than the hand of man has touched. It arrives as if it is needed: to power radios, for instance, and bring foreign beats and babble to the children, encouraging them to gyrate and twist to strange ideas.

Electricity is bad. I remember when it entered my life, even in that primordial flare showing its full range: Electricity is at its worst when it can bind us entirely, and then, still dazzling with its brightness, push us into the abyss of darkness. Bhim Bahadur kaka who knew light bulbs because he had been in the Indian Army, came over to fix a single bulb into the holder hanging from the sooty rafters of our kitchen. Taking caution against its potential to sting, he stood on a wooden chair and screwed the bulb in. There was a bright flash, too bright, the coil inside burning to a vivid blue, before it whimpered, shuddered at what it saw, and turned into a sunset-copper, lighting only Bhim bahadur kaka’s eyes. And it died.

Yet, that wasn’t the only drama that electricity brought to the lives of people in Abu Khaireni: the village was to be the site for the Marshyandgi Hydro-Electricity Project, the biggest of its kind when it was announced, or so we were told. Thousands of laborers descended into the narrow valley to tunnel through the granite under Chhimkeshwari hills. When a few Japanese engineers died with two dozen Nepali laborers, their funerals was a sight to see, unrivalled in pageant and curio until a circus came through town almost seven years later. Young women disappeared and feces appeared everywhere. The old—men, women, trees, streams and fields, the forests—choked under an envelope of dust, the life slowly squeezed out of them, as they young dismantled the mountain, the river, their heritage.

The children’s games were pushed away from their houses near the highway, now torn up by crane trades, to the river drained dry. Every day brought fresh news of new accident, theft, absconding, elopement, distress and death. The stench of feces increased, finding a new surface in every farmer’s field, under each large tree, even inside the enclosure where the Magar people’s Budhi Barahi lived under a fig tree. On my way to the school one morning, I saw the hook of a two-ton crane unlatch and swing with the inching crane, cleanly scattering away the head of a man while his torso crumpled on the spot where he had stood. All of this for electricity.

So that we may have rice-cookers and refrigerators and vacuum cleaners and pornography and the luxury of emailing articles to our editors. I think my village suffered enough for the electricity it generates. I can’t complain: Khaireni has only a few hours of power cuts each day. That is just, I think, given what surgical horror the valley had to undergo to make its contribution of 69 MW, unlike Kathmandu, which still stumbles ahead through sixteen hours of darkness. Perhaps, this too is just. But this is small comforts for someone whose life is tied to a wily mistress, the punishing ways of Bijuli.

Commie Bastards Hate Freedom of Expression!

The United government in Nepal has passed an ordinance requiring the scripts, and details about the cast and crew, of any movie that is to be shown in the theaters. This has always been the case with Nepali movies, but now the rule has been extended to foreign films as well.

What foreign films? Nepali theaters show perhaps half-dozen Hollywood titles every year. More than half of the box-office revenue in Nepal comes from Hindi movies from Mumbai. This ordinance is aimed at a lazy, unimaginative, derivative-drivel-peddling Nepali film industry. If good taste and common sense were the only censors in the country, the half-dozen or so Maoist movies that have come out in the last two years would be the first to be barred from the theaters.

My questions to the government:

If, at a time when a large part of the Nepali population is claiming Hindi as their first language, how does it make sense to ask Hindi scripts to be translated either into English or Nepali?

What about a Gurung film? A Bhojpuri film? A Newari film? There are dozens of titles in each [perhaps just a dozen in Gurung, but Bhojpuri and Newari are much mroe prolific]. They are indigenous languages. Must their scripts also be translated into English or Nepali before the movies can be shown? Why? Kyeno, Commie Babu, kyeno?

What do they aim to gain by keeping foreign voices out of the theaters? Do I not, as an free citizen of a free country, have the right to decide whom to listen to and whom to ignore?

I know this is just a rant, but dyamn, my government is making my chosen vocation of writing and selling cheap, pornographic, violent stories a very difficult task.

My next project: "The Life and Times of Prachanda, our Supreme and Benevolent Leader, How he is Like Stalin [Just The Good Stuff]"

Zeenat Comes Calling

I am back in Kathmandu, after an eventful border-crossing, which cost me a lot of money, to be honest, although none of it went in bribes. Tangawallahs, customs, buswallahs, hotelwallahs... I wish people sold their service in a more straightforward, more honest manner.

Dal-bhat never tasted as good as the dal-bhat in Palung, where I finally got to eat after almost 24 hours of nothing but a bottle of Sprite.

Back to the grind, now, feeling much poor, but still a little tired, a little lazy.

So, Sophie Butcher, as I said I would, here is yesterday's TKP essay:

Zeenat Comes Calling


[I can't find a link to the "expressions" page in TKP's archives for yesterday, but I did see it in print, this morning, in yesterday's paper]


It is not easy on the nerves, I discover and resist, the waiting for a foretold guest: I have to clean the house, clean the kitchen, prepare a meal. Hell if I will, I think, I say aloud, walk out to throw a robust tantrum, but there is no point in protesting: the guest is special to those who will bring her to their home. I am incidental to the scene, so I must attend to matters peripheral. And, it is a moral trap they set for me: she is old and she is alone, they remind me, as if drafting an initial list of characteristics against offences to which I have taken a vow. But, they implore with a passion that breaks their voices and brings tears to their eyes—It is Zeenat Aman! How can you! Just be nice!

So I clean the house. I even take the trash out to the pile where there is always a soul or two keeping vigil. I swing the bagful of refuse in a circle a few times before letting it fly, aiming for the largest cluster of crows picking apart another clump of rubbish. The birds squawk; some leap and flit, more experienced and athletic ones affect a short, effective hop away from the missile's target, but saunter back to pry and peck at the bag. To them, my intentions mean nothing: to them the material mysteries of the universe are better revealed. They know how a thrown thing, or my maniacal shine of murder for them, pertains to their peculiar existence. A woman emerges from the shadows to wave her stick at the birds, gives me a look which humiliates me deeply in a way I have never before known, before prying apart the plastic bag that flew from my hand. She combs through the rubbish: from it she takes the milk-packet plastic, the big-mall plastic bag, the drinking-water plastic bottle, the twisted-up roll of newspaper with its achar-stained opinion page. There is in the bag, with potato and potol peel, shame wrapped in layers.

Italo Calvino writes in an essay about living in France the idea that what we throw away is truest measure of how we have lived. In it is proof of what we have touched and modified, what we have produced but failed to sell, the detritus of what we piece together to live and pursue security and satisfaction. If I have thrown away, with theatrical flair, constitutes that which somebody else ekes a living out of, there is something very wrong with the picture.

I am incapable of averting my gaze, and she from me, as we labor in this mutual bond: I try the suave luxury of creating a condition, while she rubs against the coarseness of it. I flee, I rush towards the market. Rohu fish is preferred over meat. Cauliflower and peas are always pleasant. I can cook lauka for daal.

I am still cleaning when Elena rings the bell, once, twice, six times before I have washed my hand and walked to the door. She is alone. This is the fourth day she has returned without Zeenat Aman, on each day putting me to work cooking four-course meals. I am about to let spew my usual: “What the hell!”

She asks me instead to run down the stairs to carry Zeenat Aman home. I run downstairs. Zeenat Aman refuses to be carried. She can't really see, but she bravely tries to keep up appearances, like that forger-thief in The Great Escape. She has to surreptitiously throw her hands ahead to read her environment's tactile makeup. From her muttering, I surmise that she imagines she is still in her neighborhood of Topsia, going up a few steps to a shop she knows. The third floor apartment is five flights up.

Sophie holds Zeenat Aman’s hands as their eyes lock in a silent embrace. They are as alien to each other as foreignness can get: Sophie is a twenty year old student from a Sidney suburb; Zeenat Aman has lived in the streets of Kolkata since she was ten years old. Her father came from Bengal to pull a rickshaw and was promptly digested by the metropolis, followed within months by his wife. Zeenat Aman is senile now, has been cared for by the poorest of Kolkata’s poor because she was once able-bodied, genial, and charitable in her own capacity. Now they hold hands, one pair of eyes keen, the other feeble, turned away from a world that has revealed too much of itself.

She keeps searching for her hair. “We don’t cut our hair until we die,” she says, miming a veil of tresses over a dead woman’s breasts. She tries to recognize me, speaks a few words in Bangla, few more in Urdu. “Where is the salt?” Zeenat Aman demands. “Too much rice. Of course, I can eat fish. Who cooked this spinach?” Elena tries to convince her that the spinach is good for the eyes. Zeenat Aman pushes a large scoop of it into her mouth, spits in disgust. She demands that her chappals be brought to her. She stands leaning on her walking stick. “I am going home,” she declares. Then she falls on a mattress in the corner, careful to let her feet hang to a side, and snores softly.

It is impossible to enter the bathroom: the putrid sick-sweet smell of layers of slough and skin cling to the walls and tiles. Elena and Sophie have washed Zeenat Aman twice, cutting her hair, delousing and rubbing an ointment to kill the scabies on her body. After five strong washes, the stained gray sari they brought her in emerges a startling, heart-breaking pink. Elena has dressed her in a sari the color of fresh turmeric roots. Zeenat Aman has left nothing in the corner where she had been living for the past few years because she has brought her walking stick and her chappals with her. In perhaps an hour, she will have to leave, for a new life in a nursing home. Even in her sleep the walking stick is just an inch away from a hand that twitches in a dream. Her feet hover over the dear pair of chappals.

She sits up in a fit and says something in Bangla. There is a knot she has tied into the new sari: it is a pouch of tobacco. She brings it up to her face, is satisfied, falls back to sleep. “She thinks we are going to steal her tobacco,” Elena says. Sophie and I chuckle. We sit motionless, riveted by the sight of an old woman sleeping in the corner where I usually sleep. Zeenat Aman turns in her sleep, and her feet are no longer hovering over the chappals. She must feel at home.

Exit, chased by a bear

Shout Out to Lily Weed!

I visit your blog whenever I need a laugh. Then I go "Weeeeeeed!"

My Kolkata visit is coming to an end. I will be in Kathmandu by next Sunday, so that I can start meeting with people beginning Monday. I feel lazier, fatter, more dull now than a month ago, but I have spent a fabulous month here. The heat is bordering on unbearable now. I don't want to stay back to experience the truly unbearable heat of March and April, before monsoon kicks in.

I have been checking the little cluster-map thingy to the right of the page. It seems more and more people are visiting, although "more" rarely goes over ten, or fifteen at most.

I enjoy having a captive readership. It is feeling nice-nice only.

Rajiv Bartaula, now a doctor in the US, posted [on facebook] a few pictures from our last days/year at Budhanilkantha: I am a lean, already balding boy. I saw a photo Elena had printed of me visiting a school in Dhapa, north of Kolkata, where kids swarmed me. Some called me "Aunty" because they were accustomed to the women volunteers who often visited. A bit perplexing at first, but easily forgotten once they start chatting in Bangla and asking questions, absolutely non of which I understood. In that picture, I am a fat, bald man with broken glasses. Time does change a few things.

Khichari and Blindfold

Another essay that has been sent off to TKP...

I am a little more productive now, although not as much as i would like to be... but the gears are grinding along better...


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Khichari and Blindfolds


I knew the woman would eventually get me into trouble: she is always pausing to sniff the flowers while I want to rush by, to get safely into a familiar territory where I don't have to answer or question, where, for heaven's sake, I am left alone to brood or simply stare out of the window. Everybody knows her, and therefore everybody wants to know what I am doing in their street, plodding along in the mornings to buy milk and eggs, sitting morosely through the afternoons outside the tea-stall at the end of their alley, scrutinizing them with piercing—if feigned—scholarship, as if categorizing them into pages of a thick volume in my head. Nobody here knows my name, except an aged singer spinster, who has surely forgotten my name or my face. I have nothing to say to the children and shorn widows who instinctively pucker their lips and squint when they look at me, not knowing quite what to make of my presence in the alley where they empty their spittoons or throw their cricket balls.

Now the woman has got me into trouble: instead of demurring and closing the door behind her, she has laughed with the thirteen-year old boy who has organized the puja, and disappeared just around the corner for a bowl of khichari. I follow her with bags full of grocery: eggplants, eggs, pumpkin flowers, two hundred grams of Rohu fish, three tomatoes, a bag of muesli. She comes around the corner, a leaf-bowl duno full of spicy khichari in her hands, the idol of Saraswati still smiling two full days after her puja. I have no choice but to venture around the corner.

I have so far avoided this corner, barely ten paces beyond the door into which I daily disappear, or from which I reemerge into the community's realm that is the thin, eternally disturbed, incessantly dug-up, cat-strewn, widow-watched alley. I do not know where the road leads in that direction: there is no tea-stall or ration-store around that corner, I am certain of that. But that doesn't preclude the possibility of there waiting for me a charming lane with overflowing window-boxes of bougainvillea, or a particularly attractive window that lets waft the soft strains of music sweet to the ears and calls out a comely woman or two who will smile at me before closing the window, flicking on the switch to a chamber where cultural confusion flits in a blood-mingling flea-dance of seduction, and where I am rendered incapable of deciding if that was withdrawal or invitation, if she lowered her eyes to close me out or to draw me in with her lashes.

The boy grins as he brings me a bowl of khichari, as a part of the puja celebrations. This is a city run by communists—the longest elected communist government in the world, I am reminded by its citizens whenever the opportunity arises, which is very often, once they come to know I hail from the principality of Prachanda Dahal. Yet, their pujas drag on forever: even Kumar, Shiva's other son largely forgotten in Nepal, has his own puja, and it is sobering to remember that I have seen him only as an enamelled relief on the western gate to Pashupatinath temple, where I take my visiting non-Hindu friends to appreciate the golden shape of Nandi's giant testicles as he squats facing east. Like Nandi's golden frame, the steaming duno of khichari is warm and golden. I am too hungry to protest. I dig into the wallet for the woman's visiting card to eat the khichari, but she is a wild woman with her own ideas about loyalty and integrity: she insists that I imitate her, eat with my fingers coated black in Kolkata-grime, tasting first the smoke and salt of a sick city, then the khichari spices.

I am furious. I am the incarnation of Rudra himself, but only for about ten seconds. The spicy khichari tastes of turmeric and chillies more than anything, but it also a comfort food that caresses the mind in its most infantile corners: it is glorified dal-bhat, it assures across a gulf of unfamiliarity, it melts foreignness into friendliness.

Then they blindfold me and give me a stick. Fifteen paces away is a single brick on the asphalt. I am to find my way to the brick after being spun around a couple of times: to strike a grounded piñata, to toe and stumble towards an unseen goal, and reaching it, to announce my arrival with a savage blow. In the blindness, in the strict binding of my vision, I realize how much I am an outsider, and for that reason alone, how much a spectacle, how much welcome as a comic relief, which must be, I insist in the moment, the first invitation towards acceptance. I am good at throwing darts, I remind myself, as if that means anything at all, except that it recalls another moment long ago in a friend's friends' basement where I had to stand alongside another woman, a friend again, proving that I was no simple foreign freak, but a man of quirks and romance.

There are small, rodent snickers from children and gruff laughs from men and sighs and coughs that serve as the language of women in this city as I walk aslant towards the goal. I walk into the mounds on either side of the alley, correcting the map in my mind, flexing my foot in subtle degrees. I am blind. There is an audience outside of me, whose faces I can't reconstruct because I have not taken the time to know them, watching me, waiting for me to stumble and plant my face into the asphalt. I give up on the goal, but I know it is important to persist until a conclusion is announced. I step forward.

Until I reach and toe the brick, very slightly, as if testing its verity, as if checking the intention of those that watch me. There is nothing more to do but to wait for the trumpet of arrival. I do not want to strike the brick—that registers as mildly vulgar, assuming an absent familiarity, easy boast if I belonged here, but otherwise an unwelcome and hostile gesture. I pause with the first chorus of sharp uptake of breath. There will soon descend a verdict: if I qualify for the prize, if the foreigner has proved himself, if he sullied himself in stains of turmeric enough to earn familiarity. There is a split second of silence before the eruption: it is filled with nothing but the warm blindness that surrounds me. Here I am nobody, unless I announce myself through great feats of magic, like finding a brick on the ground fifteen paces away. If I am nobody, I can't belong, but I am not forced to be a foreigner either. I am renewed into a man freshly arrived at a metropolis that is nonetheless stitched together with the small grime of many lives, and I ask to be included, folded in the midst of their collage of needs and joys.

Spring Comes Stealing

This was published in the TKP on Sunday, Feb 1.

Later today, perhaps another long post about Kolkata.


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Spring comes stealing


The marshlands on which the city of Kolkata is raised experience a sudden withdrawal of winter, as if the fog tires of fighting for an etymological victory over the city's persistent smog, as if gradation is an unsolvable puzzle, as if there is no intermission between shivering and sweltering. There is no graceful exit, like birds take flight away from their winter habitat or deep-buried habits of hibernation thaw to a new tickle of sun: the sellers and mongers, the Babus and their horde of waddling housewives, the intensity and anger in the eyes of bus-drivers and rickshaw-pullers all persist, as permanent as the urine soaked sides of roads, the black-as-Kali's-wrath feet of Kolkata's denizen, the mildly stinging foam of smoke belched by union-backed two-stroke engines, and the destitution of gap-toothed two-rupees tea-sellers. Still, spring comes stealing to Kolkata and brings a burst of color that comforts the mind.

In this renewed garden, the eye becomes a small animal under the watch of an amused archer. It darts from one refuge to another, avoiding exposure to the colour of new hibiscus or old marigold turning crimson in its heart. But the eye is a bucket by nature, forced to scoop, and take account, of all sights new, all minute flicker of light and shade, so it labours under the slow torture of notice. It is, more than any other sensory organ, attuned to the acquisition of new knowledge. To it is given the concave surface where the greatest of all binary finds its playground: light and shade. And this idea shapes itself best on the facets, the lulling curves and pointing juts on the clay body of a Saraswoti being shaped by loving hands.

It takes colour from a new Gujarati Kotha sari a housewife decides to wear for the big day of puja, and it takes the colours of the bougainvillea she waters in the morning to invite vitality to the narrow strip of sun on her balcony. The eye watches as spring takes colour from the fresh-eggs gut of rohu fish in the market. Spring takes colour from the new date syrup for the city's sweets, and from the first peek of sun finally victorious over winter, and awakens in the eyes of the people slowly waddling to a chowk where Kumhars practice their art of building idols for each season's festivities.

The Kumhars, or clay-players, start early for each appointed date, perennially labouring, twisting dampened straw over a crude bamboo frame, rubbing over the shapes a clay and lime paste, using weeks to realize one form, like the incisive, derivative, meditative shape of learning any new idea. Because their shapes are applied with too much precision, they can't be kilned: fire is too harsh a judgement for any delicate idol. Ornaments, earlobes, meaningful curls of the lips and decorative nipples are added by hand as idlers stand to watch, drawing on their slow-smoking beedis, leaning on the handles of their long spades as they dig up the roads to change water mains, or to repair a road that never needed alteration, but the government being communist, unemployment finds a ready solution in the sunny prospect of digging aimlessly, endlessly, over any exposed public land, until the rains come chasing.

Not the Kumhars: their labours have nothing to do with ideology, or any other corruptible chain of human logic, but pertain to the skein that connects seasonal wisdom of sleep to its subsequent burst of awakening. They add one fresh colour each day to finished idols: red alta ring around the feet on Monday, black pupil of eyes on Tuesday, crushed-bougainvillea pink for the mouth on Wednesday, ochre blouse on Thursday, yellow silk for a sari on Friday. On Saturday, her swan gets its black-dotted yellow beaks, and silver strands strum to evoke the shellac-red veena in Saraswoti's hands.

And so spring comes stealing to the land, amplified in the swing and grunt of day labourers grateful for the mild clime. New flowers garland idols of Kali, and everybody smiles in the anticipation of puja that brings freshness to their demeanor. Lovers fight again in the streets, whispering urgently in rapid-fire Bangla, slapping away a hand that reaches for another. Fishmongers abandon their stalls to appreciate new shades in lilies and peonies, children clamber over tea-stalls to collect an unanticipated harvest of what looks like cherry blossoms. Each teeming window-box or balcony rivals every other in the uniqueness of its own bougainvillea.

All of this is witnessed by a Saraswoti who is assembled in parts over a long time and kept in the moist shade of a veil, an ancient woman of grace who learns each season the very lessons she teaches the world: to create, with effort and affection, to keep faith in creativity and new knowledge, to persist in the task. She allows Kumhars to create her every year, to be celebrated for a day, after which she is abandoned under trees or in the waters of Ganga: which of her disciples has escaped the same fate? Create. Persist in the effort. Give to the world a few new ideas to cherish. Then wither and return to the eternal void, just like the spring that comes stealing, then withers into parched soil and flowers that wilt in the mid-morning sun.

Cough! Cough!

Cough! Cough!

A little sick, body, mind. Of the city, of the story, of getting around. Going to market to buy vegetables and fish.

Made fish yesterday, way too creative [!] with the recipe for it to remain palatable.

Old Monk is coming over tonight for a talk.

Will possibly post again later in the day, after finish writing TKP post.