Sachita: Rest well, my love, rest well
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My forefathers, who art in Hindu heaven, hallowed be thy names
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My creator's father was sinfully handsome. When a man is that good looking, he gets arrogant or generous depending on how you look at it. He thinks his looks are too good to be relished by only one woman. He therefore wants to share it with as many women as possible. Vanity is often the reason behind philandering men (and women for that matter). Bill Clinton screwed his intern because he could. My creators father screwed countless maids, co-workers, other-people's wives, mothers, aunts and daughters because he too could.

My creator came from a family of Royal priests, public servants and businessmen on his father's side. His great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandfathers were priests to the Kings of their times. His grand-father was educated in the West where he earned a degree in Public Administration, and was made, was amongst other things, a key advisor to Mohan Sumsher, the last Rana Prime Minister of Nepal. He was also a Bada-Hakim, an Ambassador and an Honorary General at different points in his career. Besides all these, he was a flirt, the first one to breakaway from the pious lifestyle and monogamous bedroom habits of his forefathers.

In case you are confused, the family tree, by generation and occupation would look something like this

- My creator's great-great-great-grandfather: Royal Priest (and a pious man)
- My creator's great-great-grandfather: Royal High Priest, bada gurujyu, (and a pious man)
- My creator's great-grandfather : Farmer, Bichari ("thinker" or judge in the old Rana justice system) (and a generally pious man)
- My creator's grandfather : Public Servant, Bada Hakim (governor of one of the eastern provinces), Ambassador, Honorary General (and a bedroom revolutionary)
- My creator's father : Businessman, landlord, philanthropist (and heart-breaker and philanderer)
- My creator: Scientist, MIT dropout, and later IIT graduate. Non-smoker, non-drinker, has never slept with any woman besides his true love.
- Me (just for laughs): A silicon chip in my creator's brain, with a happy and adventurous life thus far, with one purpose of existence: learning


People with good and happy lives are boring. I won't bore you with the details of their lives. I'll tell you, instead, about the mischief-makers, the heart-breakers and the mistress-takers.

There are women from a particular community in Nepal who don't have pubic hair. Or so the story goes. During the Rana era, when there were no hair-removing lotions or Gillette razors, these women were bought, forced, coerced, cajoled into the ranks of susares, or concubines, to please their Rana and Shah masters. Like all things Rana and Shah, this practice spread over time to other Kathmandu-based families. Young spoilt brats today go to dance restaurants in Nepal in search of sex. Back in those days, you headed out of Kathmandu, beyond the all-watching eyes of Swayabhu's Buddha, away from the sight of Pashupatinath's golden roof to seek extra-marital carnal pleasure. My creator's great grandfather headed out on one such journey on a pleasant March morning on the pretext of visiting one of his maternal uncles. This was his first such adventure, and in a fit of March madness, having experienced his first act of manhood, and gotten carried away by the enormity of the moment, he asked the beautiful, but lower caste woman who had transformed him into a man, to marry him.

This was the Kathmandu of the early twentieth century. Chandra Shumsher was the Prime Minister. The Praja Parishad was still a few years in the making. Dasrath Chand, Dharma Bhakta Mathema, Shukra Raj Shastri and Ganga Lal Shrestha had barley begun to build up resentment against the Ranas. Those disgruntled and heretic Brahmins Tanka Prasad Acharya in Kathmandu and Krishna Prasad Koirala in the Terai had not yet raised their cries of revolution that would sweep the country in the decades that followed. How then could the grandson of a Royal priest marry a girl of lower caste? It was unheard of. It was unthinkable.

So when he showed up in the family home in Chettrapati with a highland girl, all hell broke loose. Kathmandu's conformist, God fearing and King-obeying Brahmin society had never before been rocked by a scadal of such magnitude and would not witness anyhting on the same scale till decades later when that disgruntled looser Tanke and that Madise of a Brahmin Koirala set in motion the forces that would permanently take power away from the Ranas, their relatives and the trusted circle of Brahmins and Chettris who surrounded them.

A friend of his and a courtier in the court of Chandra Shumsher intervened. Since my creator's great-grandfather was no longer a practicing priest, in spite of having been born a Brahmin (what was the world coming to, the Bahuns were taking over Nepal by getting all these fancy degrees from hot-shot universities), he could take her in as a mistress and marry the girl whom his mother had lined up instead. In exchange, the girl was to be kept in a house near the jungles of Gokarna.

In the large bedroom of a cottage in Gokarna, genes mingled, bloods mixed, races crosses and out popped my creator's father fine one day just like that as his dad liked to say. The love child of the then Bada-Hakim, or Chief Administrator, of an Eastern district, and his bhotini (a broad stroke used by Kathmandu's Thagadari (thread wearing) castes, often in the pejorative, to describe many Matwalis ) mistress was the darling of the neighborhood ladies. He inherited the small eyes of his mother as well as her fair skin.The large forehead and square chin came from his father. As for his nose, as Borat might say, he had the sixth most perfect nose in Kathmandu. That made him the fifth most desired man in Kathmandu only after all the four unmarried scions of the extended Rana and Shah families.

My creator's grand-father sent his sons to school in Darjeeling. He did not discriminate between his legitimate and not-so-legitimate children. They were to get the best education he could provide and be the future masters of Nepal. Like Jung Bahadur, he harbored dreams of ruling the country and passing on the mantle to his children and their children. He envisioned an autocracy of enlightened and able Brahmins, mind you not just any Brahmins, who would be free from the feuding baggage that accompanied Jung Bahadur's clans, free from the cold war of the Thapas and Pades, free from the bloody and brutal history of power grabs and Kot Parbas and free of the influences of inept and henpecked Shah kings.

Damn those two bastards Tanke and Krishne - they went too far and destroyed his dreams. Empower the masses? My goodness what blasphemy! Those uneducated Tamangs and Magars - what would they do with power? Those greedy Bahuns who could read but knew nothing about the meaning of the words they read and were only after dakshina money? They wouldn't know how to rule. Those stinking Bhotes up north and those buffalo-eating, tatta-ra-matta-tongued Newars? They would destroy the fabric of society with their disgusting eating habits. Those hale Chettris unfit to be anything but hawaldars and perform chakari in Royal court? They would turn the country into a blood soaked battlefield and provide a free ticket to the beef-eating British to take over the country.

How he hated Tanke and Krishne. Scums!

***

The Sati Savitris - the maternal side
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Jung Bahdur did not exactly abolish the practice of Sati but declared one needed the permission of the Prime Minister to commit this heinous act. The women on my creator's mother's side were such devoted wives, that would have done anything, short of jumping into the fire, for their husbands. That's because their educated, experienced and enlightened fathers and husbands had drilled into their heads both the virtues and vices of Hinduism. For brevity's sake, I'll skip the family tree, and talk only about a few prominent men and women on this side of the family.

My creators maternal grandfather was a close aide to King Mahendra. He came from a family of Army officers and civil servants. Outside of Ranas, Shahs, Thapas and Pades, their's was the most influential Chettri family in Kathmandu. He was a bedroom revolutionary in the same mould as one of the other paternal forefathers but with one difference : he lived in more accepting times and married the daughter of a Lhasa-sau. That's not to say there weren't cultural issues in their inter-caste marriage. There certainly were; but in the post-Rana Nepal, with the winds of change sweeping the world from Budapest to Bali, the Hippies smoking themselves high on Freak street, innocent villagers lining up to smile at foreign tourists, his family was swept away in a breeze of short-lived Utopian idealism that swept Kathmandu at that time. My creator owes it to his great-grandfather, a retired Army General who read the daily papers and listened to Radio Nepal and BBC, for allowing the marriage to take place. At least she is not one of those subversive eastern Thapas he reasoned to his shell-shocked and deeply heart-broken wife who was later taken to Ranchi, Bihar for psychotherapy.

My creator's Brahmino-Matwali dad met his Chettrio-Newari mom at a "social" in Darjeeling. A dance party is probably the term we would use these days to describe the event. The girls were told to strictly observe the one-foot rule: you had to be dancing at least one feet away from the boys. The nuns threatened to enter the dance floor with rulers to measure the distance. If anyone was found dancing too close, they would be made to bend down and their bottoms would be spanked with the same wooden ruler.

The nuns did not have to worry. These were students from all-boys and all-girls who had no idea how to talk to anyone of the opposite sex, let alone dance with them. Most of that evening passed with the LP discs spinning the Doors, Beatles, Carpenters and other numbers. Finally, about half an hour before the end of the dance session, a group of four girls moved shyly onto the dance floor. My creator's mother was one of the four. My creator's dad knew about her through family connections. Emboldened by the sight of a pretty acquaintance on the dance floor and drawn by the the pied-piper-like power of "Obladi-Oblada la ra la ..." he stepped on the dance floor. All eyes in the room were on him as his friends buried their heads in embarrassment at the impending disaster that was about to unravel in front of them.

"May I dance with you miss?" He said it just like Sean Connery in the James Bond movie that their Principal had treated them to for winning cricket's prestigious Edinburgh Shield.

"No, no, no, no, please, please" she blushed and pleaded against the idea. She "almost fainted" at that moment as she would tell her friends later.

There have been few women who have said no to my creator's dad. His face turned crimson like the maple leaves the Candadian missionary and Biology teacher kept preserved in the lab. As he turned to leave he heard something that sounded like "laahh, laahh, what-have-I-done" behind him. By this time his friends had buried their heads deep into their blazers and some, unable to bear the head-on rush of embarrassment had even run out of the social hall. Just as suddenly as she had said "No, no", she appeared in front of him and said "I really don't know how to dance"

"I don't know either. Lets just do it like this" he shook his hips and moved his hands close to his abdomen just like in that 'twist' scene from the same James Bond movie.

My creator's mother was an attractive woman too but not on the same order of magnitude as her future husband. She grew up in a very sheltered environment and had very romantic ideas about what marriage would be like. Her idea of a husband was straight out of a Mills and Boons novel. My dad's creator met that expectation on one count: looks. Just one count as she would find out later but when you are sixteen that's the only count that matters.

Paging Dr Devkota
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My creator was in a coma for a full day before he came out of it, much to the relief of his family and the doctors attending to him. He jerked his knee when then doctor hit him with a medical hammer and he responded to the EverReady-powered torch light that the nuero-surgeon almost stuck into his eyes.

"This looks good, we won't have to perform invasive surgery. The concussions might heal with medication" the doctor went on."Usually when you are in such a big car accident and there is so much concussion, the patient can go into a prolonged coma"

He saw his parents and wanted to slip away into unconsciousness again. It had been warm and peaceful where he was. He knew it would be a matter of minutes before they started fighting again.

I passed on the signals I had picked up from their brains.

He was surprised by what they were thinking.