| Biswo |
Posted
on 19-May-03 03:36 PM
Mr Dahal was a tall, sturdy person: often with stubbles of a few days, wearing yellow-white Kurta Suruwal, and a part of his sacred thread visible near the right shoulder. Almost everytime I went to Pokhara, he would run into my bus, recite his poem with irrepressible gusto, and sell his books of poems. His real name escapes me, but he was a famous bard of his kind. While most of the time I saw him around Abu Khairani, and Dumre, I believe he was peripatetic, going as far as Dhading and Kathmandu.
I believe it was his profession. His poems were about real life incidents: about those paramours who killed the lovers, those fatal bus accidents, and those boat accidents in Narayani that used to claims hundreds of lives before the construction of Narayani River bridge. I believe some of those stories were highly exaggerated, and perhaps totally apocryphal. But there were always a group of old, weary-eyed passengers who seemed to be enraptured with the way he recited the poems. I was very young those days, and I used to watch him in awe whenever he used to ride the bus I was travelling. Sometimes I bought his books, sometimes I didn't. They were not great poems, but they used to rhyme, and they were written with simple words.
From Mechi to Mahakali, in Nepal we used to have several characters, trying to win hearts and minds of tired passengers of old rickety buses[Don't know if they still exist]. Some people used to sing in those buses, some used to cite poems. Unlike singing, writing poems however needed more than naturally given skills.To write good poem, one needs to do more than juxtapose the words that rhyme. So,no wonder Mr Dahal's poems about love were crass, and his poems about murder were lousy. But just like from among those travelling singers came Ram Krishna Dhakal, from among those travelling bards came Gokul Joshi, a young poet who died in poverty long ago and who is fondly remembered by a lot of prominent poets of 'progressive schools' in Nepal.
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But ,of course, no one surprised me more, with their shrill voice,agility and even to some extent customer-recogntion power, than the hawkers of Ratna Park who pestered me with their newspapers when I was just getting to know KTM as a young college student. They were a big surprise to me when I first went there,because there used to be no hawkers in Chitwan's local buses[called ,somewhat affectionately, minibuses], and I thought I was under some kind of obligation to buy those newspapers. I bought newspapers with obscure names that I would otherwise never buy even though I was kind of news junky when I was first accosted by those hawkers. The hawkers recited weirdest of titles, something like how the regime was gonna be collapsed soon, or how a boy killed his mother or how a father raped his step-daughter kind of stories that I found both fascinating and shocking at once. The hawkers of Ratna Park were master orators, master salesmen, and master acrobats. They knew when to ride bus, and when to drop. They knew which title to emphasize and which not to. Their voice was at once both shrieking, and lilting. They were both charming and repugnant. They were puzzle, but they could sell the newspapers.
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And here is my punchline: our writers in Nepal say books don't sell. May be it is the way they sell the books has problem. Even lousiest of poems, and newspapers do brisk sale if they are subjected to crafty salesmanship. An obscure writer , Srikrishna Shrestha(?), proved this last time when he sold thousands of copies of his novel [Janga Bdr], published by equally business savvy Kamana Publications.
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