PART 2: WHEN NIRMAL UNCLE PHONED KARSH - NOTES ON A MAN'S JOURNEY WITHIN

(PART 1 can be accessed here )

Jolly Grant Airfield, Dehradun
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Karsh liked to think he resembled Sylvester Stallone. There were times when he actually thought he *was* Sylvester Stallone. He felt it every day -- like in the gymn when he would see swollen muscles on his body that no one else could see. Or when he went to town and all the girls would look at him (and not his cool Sony walkman and head phones)

A happy-go-lucky tenth-grader at Doon School, he was all packed and ready to go home to Nepal for the annual summer vacation.

"Vayadoot announces the arrival of flight 112 from Pant Nagar enroute to New Delhi" the muffled voice on the PA system proclaimed. "Passengers travelling to Delhi are requested to proceed to the departure gate".

A blast of hot Gangetic summer air hit his face as members of the Vayadoot ground crew opened the gate. The crowd of departing passengers, who at this point had begun pushing and shoving each other for space at the front of what was supposed to be a line, burst into the steaming tarmac and rushed towards the plane.

"Dont push, you idiot" a pretty-looking middle-aged lady yelled at a man with a brieface in one hand and a bag of leechees on the other as the crowd was forced to line up again at the gangway attached to the plane

"The plane is not going to take off till everyone who has left the gate is inside. Hasn't he heard of the new security procedures? Does he not read the newspaper?" she asked Karsh as the man with the leechees sneaked past her and mumbled what could either have been an apology or a curse.

Karsh's seat was towards the back of the plane and he was one of the last to board. As he put his carry-ons in the overhead compartment, he noticed someone in the seat in front of him.

"Hi, Reena!" he smiled asking the obvious question "Coming from Nainital?"

"Oh hi!" Reena smiled back, her face overcome with surprise " Ya, I am. Are you going to Delhi?"

"Ya, and then Kathmandu. You?"

"Ya, me too. I will be spending 2 days with my grandfather and then flying to Kathmandu" she said referring to her grandfather who was in the Nepalese foreign service and posted in Delhi for the last one year.

A few pleasantries and some five minutes later, he exchanged seats with the man sitting next to Reena.

"Are you still at All Saints?" he asked her. They knew each other because of their families. Or in spite of their families. They both came from two powerful(although at different times) political families who had been at loggerheads with each other throughout much of the recent past. Because of this and their caste difference,they knew in the back of their minds there could never really be any blossoming romance between them. Both were children born into privilege: one into a family of feudal lords, ambassadors and army generals and the other into a family of doctors, lawyers, diplomats and land owners. Both did not care much about the politics or privilege of their birth.

***

Karsh and Anita's bedroom, Somewhere on the Upper East Side, Manhattan
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It was past 2 AM and Anita was not home This was the third time she had done such a thing in the last three months. Karsh lay wide awake in bed his mind thinking of what she might be up to. How the hell did this happen? How did she turn out to be this way? It had been a year since she had first had the affair. He had believed her when she said that would be the first and last.

What if his parents called and asked where their buhari was? They loved her so much. How could he tell them that their daughter in law had turned into a slut who had slept with other men outside of her marriage? His parents would be devastated. He felt he had failed them by first marrying outside his community and then by making a disaster out of the marriage. How could he tell anyone? Who would understand? The one time he tried telling someone, they hinted it might be a problem with his performance in bed! How he hated those sex illiterate people who seemed clueless about sex and relationships even after years of being in one and were so quick to judge others. He a virile 27 year old man in great shape and unable to satisfy the trashy tramp he had come to call his wife? Baloney!

He was looking for anyone but himself and Anita to blame. He had been the perfect husband. He made good money, owned a slick 2 bedroom condo in a zip code that could solicit quite a few ooohs and aaahs, he took her on holiday to the most exotic destinations on earth, made love to her a couple of time a week. Less frequently so after their first affair but nonetheless at least once a week. As a man, what else could he do for her?

It wasn't she who was to blame he tried to reason. It was her upbringing. Our actions in adult life are often the affects of what we are subjected to as children. He hated her for what she did to him but he still knew her well enough to know she was not a bad person at heart.

"The goddamn Jomas" He fumed referring to the ethnic community Anita was from. "They have no moral values. They even marry their cousins. Barbarians! "

The Jomas were an ethnic group from the northern areas of Nepal. The Jommas were predominantly a hard-working community supported by remittences from far flung corners of the world. One member of that community was also the ten-thousand pound elephant in Anita and Karsh's bedroom.

***

Mrs Spaniel's tuition center, Tachal, Kathmandu
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Anita was dressed in short skirts and a tank-top that day when she came for Maths and Science tuition that morning. She wore long silver earrings and had long loose black hair.

"Excuse me, is this Mr Khatri's math class?" she asked nervously as she entered the class.

The rest was history. It started with awkward glances in class and progressed to long drives and motorbike rides to places like Dhulikhel, Tatopani and Kakani.

At 19, Karsh needed a pretty girl who he could take out , have a good time with and show off to his friends. Anita needed a guy who had the looks that complimented hers and the pedigree and money she so lacked and longed for.

They were the source of much gossip amongst friends , well wishers, and not-so-well wishers : the first kiss on one of their long drives, the hiking trip to Annapurna base camp which was really a week in a Pokhara hotel and countless other escapades that Anita narrated to her eager friends. Karsh could never dream of going out with a girl from his own community like this. His community women might have slender bodies and wear Estee Lauder and Christian Dior and go to the finest schools and eat at the finest restaurants but when it came to that thing, forget it. They all had chastity belts tied around their waists with the key thrown into a deep dungeon guarded by a dragon (the father). It was like a fairy tale where the man who could get past the dragon and retrieve key got to open the belt - only to be subjected to a final condition : marriage. So he had learnt to save himself the embarrassment of even asking.

Forget sex, he really hadn't though much about that, you couldn't even get a kiss from the girls he knew. When Anita kissed him back for the first time, he was convinced she was what he had been looking for all along.


He really grew to like Anita's family and friends who seemed to be very friendly and welcoming. They seemed to know how to enjoy life to the fullest. She was 17, and she could go home late at night after a few cocktails and except for an occasional gentle rebuke if she had one too many, nothing else would happen. In his case, he was 19, a guy, allowed to drink only one mug of beer at home, and if he ever got home drunk, woe betide him! All hell would break loose. The heavens would part, the sky would roar and his mother would descend upon him like an angry Goddess Durga preparing to slay a demon.

Everything about Anita's family seemed uber-cool. Her dad worked in a foreign land and sent money home to Anita, her mom and her two brothers which they put into building a new house in addition to having what they thought was their fair share of fun. While his sisters would never be allowed to go near one, Anita was always willing to give him company, day or night to the the numerous discos in Kathmandu. They would often go out after their tuition for a quick bite in Durbar Marg, visit the Archie's store there, buy each other cards and teddies and head to the discotheque down the road carrying shopping bags that they would deposit with the bouncers for safe keeping.

He loved her life. He wanted her life. It was something he had never known before.

Karsh slowly started feeling detached from his family. They have 16th century values he concluded. And when he read text books about the brutal exploits of the upper castes in India, he could only wonder when the day would come when Nepal's ruling castes would be hounded out of power. He wanted to be part of that revolution. Fight for a just cause. But Anita's family seemed well to do. They didn't need a revolution. Well, maybe it was the people in the villages who were exploited and wanted the revolution. He was convinced someone in Nepal was exploited and as soon as he found out who they were and the extent of their suffering, he would start fighting for them. He felt a moral and intellectual high whenever he thought of this.

He concluded Anita was not of an oppressed minority group and that disappointed him in some ways but made him feel good in others. It made her more normal. And he didn't have to worry about the police knocking on his door in the middle of the night and his mother beating him out of bed with a big fat stick for planning a protest march on behalf of the downtrodden masses.

He was in love with Anita with every fiber of his being. They talked about how their children would look like with the combination of Aryan and Mongoloid features. But for his fair skin and small eyes, he could be mistaken for an Indian. Which he sometimes was. And he hated it. He was glad his children would not have to go through that. He hoped they would inherit their mother eyes and nose and everything else from their father.

"Your son will be a heart-breaker" Anita would tease him "I want him to look like you"

"I want our daughter to look like you" he would say

The grass was greener on the other side : each wanted their children to have the features of the other.

"And I dont want her to be a heart breaker at all. I am going to beat her boyfriend up, if she has any"

"Abui, so protective already" she would tease him "Somebody counting his chickens before they are hatched"

They would roll over on the soft spots of grass in the forests of Nagarjun and laugh their hearts out at the absurdity of it all.

***

Bangalore, India
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Karsh got into a top rated engineering school in southern India. Leaving Anita was the hardest thing he had ever done. It didn't help that she cried non stop the night before leaving. She had wanted to see him off at the airport but because his parents did not know about her, and were not to know for a long time to come, they decided against it.

They would write to each other everyday and talk on the phone at least once a week. Karsh started living off campus so that he could get more money from his parents in the name of rent, food, maid fees, water, electricity, gas etc. He used a 2-day hospitalization due to diarrhea and de-hydration as the excuse not to eat hostel food. He told his parents he needed his own place and maid so that he could stay healthy. He found a room mate, a Nepali senior called Siddarth, whose girlfriend went to one of the colleges in Bangalore. Having a roommate would be a less expensive and more attractive proposition for his parents for one more reason beside the cost: Siddarth was an ace student who topped the engineering entrance exam at the Indian Embassy and won a merit based scholarship to the same university he was in.

He lied about his total expenses to his parents and padded it up by a thousand rupees a month. This was in addition to his pocket money of a few hundred rupees. He spent the extra bucks of his parent's hard earned money buying cards and gifts for Anita. Or making long distance calls. With the advent of the internet, he could even email her although he still liked sending those romantic Archie and Hallmark cards that had a funky picture on the front where the joke would begin and then a punch-line on the third page leaving plenty of space in between for him for him to to wax his eloquence on how much he truly loved and missed her.

As luck would have it, his dad wanted him to transfer to an engineering college in the US and Anita had been talking about going to the US too. He ended up changing his major to business, going to a top-rated business school and landing a job on Wall Street with a fat paycheck

***

Lombardi's Banquet Hall, Philadelphia
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After 2 years of living in sin, Karsh and Anita decided to tie the knot. The wedding and the reception that followed comprised mostly of Karsh's family and their guests with a sprinkling of Anita's friends and 2 of her distant relatives who had flown in from Chicago. His family had warmly embraced Anita realizing she was a decent girl. She had been a hard working student who had graduated magna cum laude in Computer Science the previous year while working 40 hours a week as a lab assistant. You could accuse Karsh's family of many things, but pride or prejudice was not one of them. Growing up in a political family, where every member was out canvassing for support from the age of 5, they seemed to have lost all sense of their ethnic identities.

They honeymooned in Crete and returned to a life of perfect marital bliss in New York. She thanked her lucky stars everyday for a husband like Karsh and he could not stop smiling the moment he opened the apartment door and buried his head in her loving arms.

***

Samakhusi, Kathmandu
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Six months after Anita's wedding, her father returned to Nepal for good with a mistress. Her mother left the house to him and his mistress, who incidentally referred to herself as his 'wife', to live with Anita's maternal uncles in Chitwan, since she had no where else to go to. One of her brothers was working in a hotel in Qatar after finishing a training program in hotel management and was in no position to support her. The other brother had disappeared from a drug rehab clinic a few moths ago and had not been heard of since .

Anita's world lay shattered. She just could not understand it. She had been shielded from her father's philandering while growing up. But she had heard bits and pieces about it from conversations that would turn silent the moment she entered the room. That morning her crying mother mentioned on the phone that he had been at it for years but she had chose to look the other way because she felt responsible for it. She wondered how badly he must have needed her love when he was so far away from the familiar settings of home.

She blamed her poverty and illiteracy for not passing the visa test at the embassy. She had stopped applying after being rejected thrice. She said she understood how difficult it must have been for him to survive in a strange land without anyone to cook for him and wash his clothes. Once one of the persons who brought her letters and money from her husband even dropped hints about his infidelity. She sensed a change in his behavior and tone of voice when he called - which wasn't too frequent those days. Yet, as a mother, she could not bring herself to tell her children the terrible news and see the looks of stoic silence on their faces. What they don't know wont harm them she had said to herself. Her youngest son had gotten wind of his dad's shenanigans and taken to drugs as she later came to find out.

***

Jackson Heights, Queens
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Anita got involved with the local chapter of the Joma Cultural Association. It proved to be a great way for her to relieve her stress. It felt therapeutic to chat with faithful Jomar men, who had left their wives in Nepal, and were working hard at restaurants and gas stations and sending money home to their families without so much as casting an eye on other women. If they could do it, why couldn't her dad? She would often think about the mistress of his who was a Joma too. How could a Joma woman do this to a fellow Joma man with a family?

She was elected President of the New York chapter of the Joma Cultural Association. Executive committee meetings were held once a month and each member took turns to host the meeting. When it was her turn, she chose a day when Karsh was out of town because she knew he would get bored if he was around. He had been supportive of her efforts because it would keep her mind off her parent's problems. He didn't particularly care for Joma culture but was glad to see his wife feel at home amongst people from her community. It didn't bother him that most of them happened to be married men with wives back home. Every so often a Joma woman would show up. It would usually be on of the wives who had made it here on a tourist visa that was bound to lapse without the tourist ever returning home. He also liked the extra attention he got whenever she attended or hosted one of these meetings. Guilt ridden, she would cook him his favorite dishes, iron his clothes and sometimes even give him a massage.

Balram Joma was a clean, handsome Joma boy, about their age, perhaps a year or two younger, who was going to college part-time and working in a gas station to earn his tuition fees and living expenses. He attended all of Joma Cultural Association meetings regularly.

The phone rang loudly at 3 AM shaking them both out of their slumber.

"Jesus freaking Christ, who the hell could it be at this insane hour?" Karsh muttered as he fumbled to switch on the bedside lamp.

Anita's mother had died in a bus accident. She was traveling from Chitwan to Kathmandu in a mini bus when they were hit head-on by a truck with failed breaks. There were no survivors.

***

Pashupati Arya Ghat, Kathmandu
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Anita stood in silence watching the murky waters of the Bagmati. A funeral pyre was burning at the far end of the cremation ground. The wind carried over the wails of women mourning their departed loved one. As per tradition the body had to be cremated before sundown the same day of death which was a full 24 hours before she reached Kathmandu. She did not get to say her final good bye to her mother.

There was so much she wanted to tell her mother. How Karsh was going to write a letter to the US Embassy on the letter head of the number one firm on Wall Street and sign an affidavit of support that would make the US consular staff envious when they saw his income and assets. She would get a visa to come to America and she could live with them as long as she wanted. She would take her mom to all the places Karsh had taken her to. On second thoughts, her mom would probably not enjoy Broadway or the Met as much but she could still take her to Disney and Niagra falls. Once she got a better job herself, she would help her brothers get here. And then they could all live here. Maybe dad would come to his senses and leave the mistress when he saw how happy the rest of the family was and how much money his daughter was earning and what she could provide for them if he stayed with her mom.


After she returned to New York, she realized Karsh was unable to understand her anymore. He would hear her out as she talked about days gone by, her youngest brothers addiction problems, her dad and his mistress, stories of her mothers kind and caring nature but he would drift off pretty soon. She would inevitably catch him trying to fiddle with his Blackberry or jump at the first phone call even when he knew it was just the firefighters association calling for a donation.

"Karsh, do you not feel my pain?" she once asked

"I try to, sweetie" he replied "if only you will explain it in a way I can understand."

He wouldn't understand she knew for sure. What did he know about parents who cheated? His parents were virgins when they married and had probably never strayed outside their marriage. She hated the happy upbringing that made him so insensitive to her pain. He has never felt pain like I have she thought. She wished he knew how sad she was.

She slept with Balram one snowy night. Balram had come for dinner, it was snowing outside, Karsh was in Brussels on business, and she couldn't remember how it started.

Karsh found out when he saw a tattered piece of Trojan under the bed one weekend. He did not use Trojan.

***

Karsh and Anita's living room, Upper East Side, Manhattan
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It was 6 AM and Karsh had not slept a wink. Anita still had not returned. She did not answer his calls or text messages. She would always switch off her phone when she was at Balram's place.

He shaved, showered, made himself a latte, read the Journal and made a call just as the cuckoo clock in the living room crowed 8 AM. The business card he was holding up read :

Andrew J Prinecky IV Esq JD
A. Prinecky & S.Princeky LLP
Attorneys at Law and Proctors in Admirality
Specializing in family and divorce law


He wept thinking of his parents. His parents who loved him unconditionally. Who had supported and accepted everything he did because they wanted his happines, sometimes at the cost of their own happiness. He wished he did not have to drag them through this hell.

***

Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam
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Karsh was getting ready to board the KLM flight to New York, when he noticed he had a voicemail.

"Babu, ma Nirmal Uncle boleko, Reena ko bua." Nirmal uncle was in New York for a meeting of the American Heart Association. He had brought some prasad Karsh's mother had sent from a "rudri" she had done for him back in Nepal.

"Mero hotel ko number 212-..... Room number 915. Please call me back. Thank you".

***