| Biswo |
Posted
on 24-Apr-01 07:19 PM
A short story
--- ---- ----
< Allure >
City for me was a place teeming with people,a place awash in
byzantine network of roads, and a kind of concrete palpable thing
created for fun and only fun. And Tandi was the city I heard of
most, for her proximity to my village and for so many stories
related to her within my circle.Mom never allowed me to visit
Tandi with my friends although Tandi was only one kilometer away
from our village. "You are not supposed to go there, ok. You will
be lost."She would try to inculcate the image of the city as a
location swarmed with people who would abduct children, swarmed
with kleptomaniacs who would take away clothes and whatever we had
in our pockets and filled with callous moneyminded vendors who
would overcharge everything.I always obeyed mom, though it was
often painful to turn down invitation from the close friends who
had to manage their own trip stealthily. Sometimes they angrily
called me coward for that.They used to come back with tantalizing
account of how they went to cinema hall and saw the posters of
coming movie and the current movie, how they bought sweetened
ice from the bearded dark seller from Madhesh and how they shared
the chilly cha-naa-chat-pat bought with the remaining money.The
cinema hall had a rickshaw which the publicity beaurau of the
cinema hall used to man with one announcer and one puller on the
day they changed the movie. Whenever the rickshaw meandered around
the city and nearby villages,it used to be decorated with the
attractive posters of the new movie. The announcer would
continuously tout the movie from the rickshaw, often loudly
reading out the names of actors and actresses (He used to say
hero, heroine and villains for different characters based on their
role) feverishly, and also ,intermittently, play the music from
the currently running movie. So, we always knew whenever the movie
was changed.Often when the movie being changed turned out to be
the same as predicted, the boys who visited the theater in their
furtive trip used to become upbeat and swagger with the air of
vindication, that they were there in Tandi on purpose, and that
those who didn't go there missed a great opportunity to gain knowledge and superiority.
I don't know exactly if I envied those people who made it to
Tandi. I found my home a peaceful and friendly place, and my mom,
who was a teacher in the local primary school, had managed to buy
dolls and caram board for me and my sister. Apart from my
grandfather, we were only three in the house. My mom always tried
to be our best friend , and I never left her for other friends.
It was only when she was not available to play with me and my
sister, and when my grandpa left to play card in the village that
I went to other kids of the villages. Only then, I realized that I
was missing a thrill of going to Tandi. Afterall,Tandi always
appeared to be a genial and exciting place whenever I went there
with mom. After graduating from local primary school, I joined
the highschool in Tandi.On the first day,mom took me to the
school,and showed me the beaten path that could take me to my
school by completely avoiding the rush of the city. She instructed
me to walk in the foot path, and loudly and forcefully told me
never to set my feet in the main road. While we were walking in
the street, she pointed to the speeding vehicles and told me
how much they act like jaggernaut."Drivers can be drunk, and
reckeless",She pointed to her mouth with her thumb when she said
'drunk'," and they absolutely don't care about who is walking in
the street. You got to be careful."I listened to her sermon with
rapt attention and regular reply of "yes,mom" and "oh,yes,mom."She
made me saturated with her instructions in the evening also,and
,as always, I kept on nodding only.
My first trip to Tandi bazaar became possible only after three
weeks from my first school day.It was Poush 25th.A cold day,but
the shining sun of Chitwan was backing up local spirit. The dawn
occurred belatedly, so I could still spot old ladies coming from
nearby temple wearing red sari and cholo on my road to school. The
ladies of Tandi were very pious, may be because they were rich.
Only rich people there could afford to be such pious as to
squander their whole morning with the trips to temple.The ladies
were not so fond of chanting bhajans in the roads, but there were
plenty of old males wrapped in the warm blanket and walking slowly
chanting 'bhajamana naraayan raghubara govindam' incessantly.Most
of the land along the road was freshly tilled, as mustards seeds
were sown only recently.I could see as far as the mountain in the
north, and houses of Jhuwani in the south.Some astray dogs were
found roaming in the roads,and before I took detour of the beaten
path to eschew Tandi on my way to school,I saw one of such astray
dogs,overrun by some vehicles,lying on the road, its intestine
pulled and flattened along the cambar of the road to the shoulder,
its cerebral structure blown and head crushed as if it had no
skull and its two legs severed from the body by overrunning
vehicles.Other dogs were not paying heed to the dead dog,probably
they knew it was the job of local citizens to clear the cadaver
from the road.Preparations seemed to be already ongoing as people
were clearly riled by croaking crows circling in the sky and
gazing at the unfortunate dead creature. It was exactly that day
that I first went to the Tandi bazaar with glee and curiosity that
would dampen shortly, but making me perennially addicted to the
city and her charm, and forcing me to give up the beaten path that
I followed for the whole three weeks.
As I reached the school, I noticed some uncommon events,
incompatible to the pattern that I was inured to.People were just
not organized in the playing ground, teachers were not in front of
the big ground to attend the national anthem, the grass in the
playing ground was still soaked with the morning mist without
being trampled as it used to be everyday.I looked at the digital
watch I was wearing, and it was only five minutes to ten o'clock,
it was already too late to start the PT(drill), to sing the
national song and to unfurl and salute the national flag. I
couldn't determine what I should do,but my first instinct was to
go to my class. As I was going to my class, I saw some uniformed
police outside the highschool. They were wearing shield outside
their uniform, and were carrying a big stick in their hand. Those
sticks were somewhat different from the batons policemen normally
used to carry.The sight of police panicked me, but ,still, I was
determined to find out 'just what the hell was going on'.
I didn't have any close friends,most likely because it had been
only a few weeks since I joined the highschool. All classmates
were just acquaintees, even though they were eager to share
laughter with me and go to the Saraswati temple made in the school
premise. I started looking for my acquaintees, and to my dismay
there were nobody in my classroom.Rather I found a teacher ,who
was known to me because he was from my village.
"Today is hadtaal(strike). No Class." He said.
"Hadtaal? " I asked, little bit baffled by the new word.
"Yes. The teachers are on strike."
"What about you?"
"Me too. We are organizing a sit-in in Tandi bazaar today.
Students are also supporting us. No class today. You also need to
go to Tandi bazaar."
I didn't ask why they were protesting. I didn't think there should
be a reason to organize a strike.I understood what 'opposition'
meant, what 'government' meant, but I didn't understand their
connotation, and the mechanism with which the government was bound
with people and their works.The significance of the protest being
talked was nothing for me,except for the chance it would provide
for me to individually explore the new world: the new path to
Tandi, the new face of Tandi, and the new understanding of Tandi.
I left the school from the main gate, the gate I seldom used
before. A macadamed road going from north to south was there, with
a breadth of around five meters.It had potholes every here and
there, and rickety old tractors and tampos were plying,
inordinately sending out thick,black, and gritty emission.All the
passenger vehicles were sardine crowded, children were seen being
squeezed among old passengers, and some old passengers were also
seen puffing cigarette in the same crowd. To me, it seemed like
they were very poor and coming from the remote villages to Tandi
for shopping or ,to correctly put it, buy some things that people
couldn't live without. Their children were looking at me with some
curiosity and temptation,and I realized how privileged I was for
whatever I had at the time. After the tempo and tractor stopped, I
saw some ladies with children in their lap going to a nearby
temporary clinic,where agile nurses with white robe were flitting
around.I knew that they were administering vaccines to new born
babies there for free. My mom had once told me that she too had to
go far away carrying me in her hands for those vaccines, and it
was exactly because of those vaccines that I had got that scar in
my biceps.
"I carried you in the sultry heat of Chitwan,boy. You were born in
Falgun. I had to take you to those temporary camps in the
following hot summer. All those bee-see-zee, dee-pee-tee stuffs,
and you used to cry so much.." My mom who raised me alone would
give her lovely giggle after that.
The downtown Tandi Bazaar, as it was understood but not officially
called, was a crisscross of the road coming from impoverished
villages of north and going to tribal villages of south, and
another highway coming from prosperous east and reaching to cities
like Narayanghat, Pokhara and Kathmandu in west and far north.I
had never seen the cross section less than crowded,and I had never
seen the small footpath along the road without people, both
pedestrian and those pedalling their bicycle spiritedly. Near the
corner where buses used to stop was a gigantic old tree of peepal,
which was decorated with an altar in the ground, and it was
obvious that people had worshipped that tree too, because there
were so many teekaa of different colors smeared in the trunk of
the tree. There, near that altar, were several porters waiting for
vehicles to arrive so that they could unload or load freights.
Whenever any vehicle arrived, they would ferociously run,and
before any price haggling start unloading while other would load
whatever they saw around there.They were not very wiry,but they
were plucky and their spirit was obviously driven by the penury of
their house rather than intention of working that way.There was a
small vegetable bazaar in front of the peepal tree, and when I saw
the vegetable markets and customers going there, I was somewhat
forced to contrast the same curry of dacon root that I had been
eating in my house since more than ten days and the variety of
vegetables available there!
As I was watching the bustling and kaleidoscopic downtown Tandi, I
slowly started to gather what was going on regarding the teacher's
strike. Teachers were protesting for the reason I couldn't fathom,
and they were organizing a protest march from the highschool to
the downtown, where they planned to organize a sit-in in the
highway,thus blocking the public transport.Some leaders were also
supposed to deliver speeches during the sit-in. While I was
watching the porters unloading the freights from the vehicles, I
saw the mass of people coming from the north-south road, chanting
slogans and occasionally jumping with loud shoutings and with
their fingers pointing towards sky.Probably because it was already
a midday, some of those were sweating also, drops of sweat so
obviously trickling down their pachydermic skins of face that I
could see the glistening drops flowing down the face and vanishing
in the surface or in their own apparels.People were looking at the
protesters from their houses,windows and doors, and whenever they
reached a house, the beholders there would clap loudly, which the
teachers and senior students in the front row of protest would
acknowledge gracefully by lowering head, joining hands and again
resuming their loud shouting of protest.It was in deed a rousing
protest,but obviously I couldn't be aroused because I didn't
understand the cause,the protagonists and the antagonists.The sky
kept on reverberating with those chantings:
"------------_ Murdaabaad!"
"------------_ Jindabaad!"
And others.
When everybody sat down, the vehicles were stopped in the road,
and the porters started running to those vehicles. They were
neither unhappy, nor happy, but to me it was obvious that the
porters in other cities were probably unhappy,because they were
not getting any more goods to unload.The stampede of porters
created the dusts of the road to rise above people, and they
temporarily blocked my views of east. Then again, those dusts
settled down, and I could clearly see the protesters sitting
attentively and listening to somebody who was speaking loudly, and
reading out a list of demands from his paper. For each of his
sentences, a long clapping would follow. The female teachers were
in blue sari, which was their mandatory uniform while teaching in
school.Their male counterparts were not required to wear any
uniform. I could also see that there was not even one lady
speaker, probably the ladies were there only to clap and support.
Then two green old vans arrived from the west.A few trucks were
following them, and a lot of tall standing policemen in their
fatigue and stone-proof cap were looking at people from those
trucks. The sight of such massive police force panicked the
onlookers, old ladies started to rush their children to their
home, and the shopkeepers started closing their doors. Some people
started surrounding those green vehicles, and some of the rest
started fleeing. I was all alone, talking to my own soul and
looking at the bazaar in its most bizarre state and certainly in a
different state than in any other of my visits.I couldn't decide
what I should be doing.The only guiding principle for me
was my mom's words:" Biswo, never fight with anybody. Never go
near to crowd, never move with crowd, and never trust any
stranger. You should understand that you are my only support left
now."
"CDO, CDO" I heard people slowly whispering.An obese man with
dhakaatopi in his head was smiling and getting off from the first
green van,and then going straightly to the protesters. He was
accompanied by a sinewy moustachio police chief whose belt had a
holster for his small pistol.I guess I just guessed him to be
police chief, but I was pretty much sure he was the police chief.
Sometimes our conscience says something, and we are forced to
believe that.At first, the CDO exchanged namaskaar with some of
the teachers protesting there and I gathered they were probably
known to each other. First they were just laughing, and talking to
each other, while the police accompanying the CDO attentively cast
his steely look to everybody around.Slowly, talks got louder.
There surely was some kind of hot discussion between the
protesters and the CDO. Even then the CDO seemed very much a
congenial person, and was smiling all the times even when it was
obvious that he was not speaking or listening very nice words from
the protestors.
"They will charge everybody with batons today. I am sure."
Somebody was shouting behind me, and a lot of people started
leaving the bazaar. In the east, I could see a long procession of
bicycles, and I also noticed that the public transport vehicles
parked there also started going to the direction from where they
came.Police suddenly started cordoning off the area of the sit-in
and protest speech,roughly pushing people. Until then, Police
didn't have any particular image in my mind. I knew they were
supposed to come to apprehend criminals, as my mom used to
threaten me to call police if I commit something wrong, and that
was all I knew. But policemen suddenly started to frighten me, I
suddenly had a whole lot of changes in my perception regarding
them eventhough they were doing nothing to me personally. I
thought I couldn't be matter of fact anymore,I couldn't be just
another witness anymore, and I too decided that it was not a
pert moment for me to be there. I headed eastward following the
fleeing rabble.
My house was about one kilometer from the downtown. Tandi bazaar
was more than a hundred meters in the east from the downtown, and
then there was a sprawling tract of land, owned by a local
landlord who refused to sell the land , and whose intransigence
blocked the eastward expansion of the bazaar. There was a small
canal between the bazaar and the land. That canal was considered
to be the eastern border of the bazaar.When I reached the canal, I
heard a whistle blowing loudly. Then a few minutes later ,stampede
of people almost overran me.I had never seen so many people
running for their life, never seen fear forcing people to run like
leopard, and never seen so many people becoming so narcissist as
to disregard even the small children and the old or pregnant
ladies and thinking about only themselves and their personal
wellbeing. I was also running, but I was imitating other runners
more than anything. Probably fear, more than anything else, goaded
my feet and that my whole reaction was just a kind of reflex
action.Probably I was driven by mass reaction. Probably I was
conforming to the mass sorrounding me. But I was trying to be a
good runner. It was there I knew that personal strength mattered
more than everything else,that nobody would help other when
everybody's in danger,that we were no better than the animals
whenever our situation became similar to the chaotic situation of
animal world. It was the first awakening for me that I was alone,
I had to survive alone, that I was the only factor that could
ensure my survival, and I too ran with the crowd becoming careful
not to let myself stumble under any circumstance. The doors of the
houses that came after the land were also closed, and it was the
first time I had seen all those houses being closed, and it was
also the first time that I had wanted those houses to be open and
welcome me.I just ran with all energy that I had, believing
the exhortions of the crowd running with me that the policemen
were following all of us,and that they were making mass arrest and
beating people very cruelly. Most of the vehicles queued there in
the blockade had already moved, and those which just moved were
crowded with burly and energetic people,not children and women.
People coming from sideways to the highway turned back to the way
they came from whenever they saw the unusual stampede in the
highway.I wasn't thinking about anything, I was too busy to think
even about the iniquity of mass sorrounding me, even about the
smiling leader of those striking teachers who so warmheartedly
welcomed the CDO and who had delivered the speech , and I was just
fixating at those moving and fixed objects around me. Sometimes I
laughed with a few people who had been exhausted and running with
me slowly,and even then we were laughing for no reason, or perhaps
for the stupidity of our speedy exit,or perhaps we were just
ridiculing those who were running faster.Sometimes some
motorcycles would come from behind, and we all perforce looked at
the driver of the motorcycle in the vain hope that he would be one
of our acquaintee or sympathizer, and that he would stop revvying
up his motorcycle and offer a ride.Few among those fleeing would
offer an inkling of what was happening, or what had happened in
the bazaar:police making mass arrests, throwing canisters of tear
gas, and beating protesters who defied the order to clear the
protest area.I heard of all these reports one by one, and scraped
all these information to make an image of the whole happening in
my mind. Probably the informants were exaggerating, but I believed
all those stories and kept running as fast as I could,thinking
what happened in the bazaar could as well happen in the very road
I was running on.
< The End>
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