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My Cousin Vinney
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"Thyaas thoos thyas" was what Vinay, or Vinney as he called himself, sounded like to Hari. Vinney was seven,two years my junior, recently back from England and spoke no Nepali. Hari was fifteen, originally from Sindhupalchok and worked in Vinney's family as a domestic helper and he spoke no English

"What is he saying?" Hari asked me. I shrugged unable to decipher any of what my cousin said. I could speak, write and understand English, or so I thought till I heard the gobbledygook coming out of my cousin's mouth. I guessed it was English because I could catch every fifteenth word. What a strange brand of English it was! I used to come first in class, including English class, and it bruised my infantile ego that I could not make any sense of the sounds my oh-so-sophisticated cousin uttered. What was as bewildering was how all the elders heaped so much praise and attention on him. Surely there must be something right about him, something that balanced those incomprehensible words flying out of his mouth that made him so special to the elders? He looked just like the rest of us, in fact he was darker than the rest of us, yet he spoke a tongue we did not understand , behaved in a way we could not relate to and did peculiar things like complain about some sort of paper missing from the toilet. Paper in the toilet? What did he think the toilet was - a library?

"I can't understand a word of what he says. He speaks just like Bob but looks like Rajnikant" Hari complained referring to the Caucasian villain in Bollywood movies who spoke painfully broken Hindi and the dark-skinned stunt master from Madras whose numerous stunts included throwing a cigarette up towards the heavens and lighting it with a bullet from his pistol. To this day I have never understand how the velocity of that bullet did not alter the trajectory of the cigarette or if it did, how perfectly it reversed the trajectory and set it on a direct path towards his mouth. But then I've always been a bit of a geek.

"Hello mister, how do you do, nak bhari singan chak bhari goo!" I blurted out poking fun at my cousin's perfect English. Hari burst into a hysterical bout of laughter. I am still taken aback by how mean I could be as a child.

"Try saying that" I taunted him

"What, what, what?" Vinney looked confused. That made me happy. For once I knew something he didn't.

That night I asked my parent what language Vinney spoke

"But why is it different from the English they speak in my school?" I inquired. I can only imagine what question Vinney must have asked his deeply embarrassed parents.

"One day you can go to England and speak just like that" my mom told me. She didn't answer my question, but the idea of a trip to England was distraction enough for me to forget about my cousins peculiar tongue

"What do they have in England that we don't have here?"

"Double decker buses, soldiers in big hats, electric toys, police cars"

Yes, in that case I definitely wanted to go to England. I had seen that battery-operated remote-controlled police car that Vinney kept under his bed and didn't let anyone touch. It had blue flashing lights and could make the howling sound of a police car, ambulance or fire engine depending on which switch you hit. It even had a megaphone you could speak into. Vinney would say something in his accented English into the megaphone that sounded like a muffled version of "pullover". I didn't get it. The only pullover I knew was what we otherwise called a "high-neck sweater" in Nepal. Maybe fugitives in England wore pullovers.

"But if I go to England, nobody will understand what I say, like nobody understands Vinney here" confusion reigned supreme in my mind. What if they tell me their version of naak-bhari-singan and I didn't understand a word of it and had to ask my parents the same embarrassing question Vinney asked his. I shuddered at the very thought of being humiliated in a foreign land.

"If you stay in England for six months you'll speak just like Vinney!" my dad was the perennial optimist in the family and he was never short of words of inspiration.

"I want to become an English soldier" I said looking at the picture of a Grenadier guard taken outside of Buckingham Palace with my parents standing on either side of him. I liked the idea of being a soldier in a foreign land. No I don't have Gurkha blood in me, although my Baishaki boju in Gantok thinks we might be remotely related to the Gurkha soldier whose statue stands outside the Ministry of Defence in London; but then she also thinks we are distant cousins of Danny Denzongpa, Baichung Bhutia and Prashant Tamang; and given how Darjeeling is making world headlines, that list will only grow I am sure. What better way to go off to a strange land than as soldier with a gun. Nobody messes with a soldier.

"Eentu meentu london ma, unko baba paltan ma, tini nini nini jhyappa!" I heard my sister play outside with her friends.

***

The pukka-Englishman
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England soon turned into an obsession. That March I went back to boarding school, my home away from home, and I ran into things English everywhere. I started to notice things around me that had always been there but never caught my attention. Like the picture hanging in the school library of Princess Margaret wearing a bizzare hat at Ascott; it was taken by a former principal on his trip to England who could go on and on about the event whenever he was asked . I started paying attention to the names of the food served in the school dining hall, words that I had earlier mispronounced because I didnt care what they meant like "short bread", "scones","hot grams". Hot grams? How can it be called that when my mum, that epitome of a modern woman, calls it bhujia? Why did the caterer keep referring to dal as "dawl"? What's more, I came to learn that I was seated in the "Hindu" section of the dining hall because I did not eat beef and my snotty friend, the one whose father was a planter in a tea-estate in Assam and whose mother baked "queens" cakes, was seated in the "English" section.



That was too much for me to take in. I had to move to the English section. Hindu section sounded so, err, so, mmm, so strange: I didn't know what exactly it meant to be seated in the Hindu or Engish sections but something was just not right with the sound of "Hindu". As far as I knew Hindus were those people who shaved their heads, wore tupis and put tika on their foreheads in the shape of a paper clip broken in half. No, that wasn't me. I didn't know what exactly the English looked like, but I certainly was not one of those Hindus. If I could move over to the English section, I wouldn't eat the beef; I couldn't because it sounded so yucky; but I would pretend to eat it and throw it under the table when no one was looking.


So that night I went up to the matron in charge of the dormitory and told her I needed to be seated in the "English" section.


"The English left forty years ago, but they forget to take this one with them" she snorted, dismissed me with a wave of her hand and re-seated me the next morning in the beef-eating section.


***


My sister had given me a book from Enid Blyton's "The Five Find-outers" series the previous year as a birthday present. Like I did with anything that was not a police car, plane or firetruck, I had tossed it into the shoe section of my cupboard alongside my smelly sports shoes and my pet stag beetle. It was during the Easter Holidays; the boys from nearby towns had gone home to spend time with their families, the Christians to celebrate Easter and eat easter eggs and mince pie and all the other delicious goodies their mothers supposedly baked, the rest who could go went just to spend time with their parents. Those from faraway places like me stayed back with other boys from even more far-away places. I accidentally pulled out the book while searching for my beetle. I wiped off the mould that was beginning to form around the edges, probably the result of the thick-gravy I had spilled on it as I clumsily fed my beetle. With all my close friends away and nothing else to do I started reading the book. The book captivated me and I did not move, except for bathroom breaks and meals, and finished it in a day. I discovered other boys too read the same series and by the time the summer holidays had come around in May, I must have read two or three books in the series. I wanted to be like Fredrick Trotteville, the lead protagonist and the smartest of the lot. I wanted to own a Scottish Terrier called Buster, drink lemonade, have a high-tea of scones and ginger-bread and ride my bicycle down the narrow cobble-stone roads of a quaint village, past the vicarage, to the police station to meet a policeman named PC Pippins and outsmart him in front of his superiors. I wanted to take the train to London and buy peppermint and do a whole bunch of things that did not sound one bit crazy (or embarrassing) at the time.

The summer holidays turned out to be a disaster. When my mom fried up pakoras, I wanted meringue cakes. When she made chiura-ko-pulau, I wanted cold lamb pie with a jug of freshly squeezed lemonade.

"What's gotten into this boy, huh, Baba" my bewildered mom would ask my dad

"He is trying to become an Angrej. A kala-angrej" my dad dismissively laughed off my forays into Englishness much to my annoyance. I wasn't trying to be like anyone. I was no different from an Angrej as far as I was concerned. Angrej, I could accept that noun, but only grudgingly so, but the present-continuous verb "trying" and the despicable adjective "kala" raised my hackles.

I was not just a head-strong kid, but physically strong as well, thanks in large part to the Horlicks and Boost I drank in the hopes of miraculously turning into a pilot. The burst of sugar from these drinks would temporarily transform me into the neighborhood bully who often found himself coming home with a torn shirt or a bloodied nose. The closest Horlicks got me to flying was me leaping over the compound wall after Rishab's sister set the dog on me for knocking her brother cold and then jumping on top of him like Hulk Hogan delivering his coup de grace. I rushed headlong towards my dad like a charging bull out to flatten the matador. I was no match for him. My mother's Horlicks was powerless in front of my grandmothers dudh and makai. To add insult to injury, my dad used his height advantage to grab me by the waist and held me up in the air for a whole minute as I kicked and screamed. Then he threw me up and grabbed me on my way down; he did this a couple of times all the while laughing heartily at my peculiar experiment with Anglophilia.

There is a set of English crockery in my house that my parents brought back with them when they returned from the UK. My dad completed a Masters in Civil Engineering and Urban Planning on a British government scholarship and returned to Nepal with dreams of turning Kathmandu into a well organized and bustling megapolis. He probably didn't have the money then to buy the crockery set at Harrods or an upscale location. I suspect it must have been Marks and Spencers or whatever discount store existed at that time. Discounted it might have been in London, but it was prized possession in my household in Kathmandu. That dinner set only came out when we had very special guests.

Still high on my English trip, I refused to eat in the Hulas stainless steel plates that my mother laid out on the dining table. "I want the sisa-ko plate".

As the youngest kid, I was the prince of my middle-class home, my little fiefdom. "No" was the initial answer I got. Dark clouds soon formed over my head and the haloed look of a martyr showed up on my face. Out came the English plate.

"I need a fork and knife" I probably deserved a slap. Instead I got a pair of shiny silverware also from that same store in England.


***

The White Nepali
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I wanted to be all sorts of things as a kid. I wanted to join the army and wage war on the enemy. My uncle bought me combat boots and a uniform of the Royal Thai Army from Bangkok. I neatly blacked out the work "Thai" and replaced it with "Nepal". I wanted to build a powerful army and invade India and capture the state of West Bengal, where I was studying, so that Nepal could have access to the sea. I would then add Assam and the other Northeast states to Nepal's territory and we could use the petroleum found in India's North-east to become self-sufficient in oil production and not have to rely on India for anything. This was against the back-drop of the Indian blockade on Nepal. That dream lasted for about three months. It was the police right after that. I saw the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) battle it out in the tea gardens of Darjeeling and I was fascinated with the idea of joining the police. I would fight the bad guys back in Nepal, those people whom I heard my parents talk about as smugglers,I would capture the dacoits along Nepal's border with Bihar and be granted a medal by the King. I would be the good cop catching the scourge of society like DB Lama and Bharat Gurung. Rumor had it that Charles Sobraj had escaped from an Indian prison and crossed the border into Nepal. I would arrest him and take him to court. I would protect the world, especially my beloved Nepal, from the evil doers.


That dream too lived and died it's natural death. I had moved on to becoming a pilot, doctor, astronaut, politician, UN secretary general, scientist, tennis player, basketball player, footballer, boxer, guitarist, movie star, teacher, preacher, you name it. I am none of those now, yet I sometimes wonder if I am a little of all of those in spirit. Being English soon turned out to be very boring compared to the alternatives. Shooting at dacoits in the tribal areas of Bihar was much more exciting than riding a bicycle in a sleepy English village. I forgot about the Meringue cakes and instead I settled for pastries from Glennary's or Annapurna Coffee Shop. Someday I would go to England and explore all the places that I had read about and heard my teachers and other visitors to England talk about. Someday in the future. I had more important matters to attend to in the present.


I was back in Kathmandu that winter. Vinney now called himself Vinay and was going to school in Kathmandu. Although it was supposed to be an English-medium scool, none of the students spoke to one another in English, and in a couple of months he had pretty much forgotten the language.


"How are you?" I asked him


"Thik chha" he replied with a perfect Nepali enunciation. He had perfected Nepali to the extent where he said "garni" instead of garne, "khani" instead of khane and even "hagni" instead of hagne which totally bewildered me.


We played chor-police, rode our bicycles in the neighborhood gallis and bought marbles at the local store. Gone was the incomprehensible English accent. In fact, he did not speak a single word of English. "Aiyaa", and not ouch, was what he said when he fell off his bike. He now used words I did not understand like zhinchalimobia, hareeb, raddi. He knew all the kids in the neighborhood and everyone wanted to be on his team when we played chor-police. Then there was me, in my Indian-accented English, trying hard to fit in, mispronouncing every third word of Nepali, speaking malformed sentences and completely bastardizing the language. He looks like one of us but speaks like a retard they must have thought. He is faking it, putting up an act, trying to sound like a foreigner, thinking he is a cut above us; that was what the boys were surely thinking. Our roles had reversed; the hunter had become the hunted. I was the weirdo, not Vinney. I was the one who spoke an odd language and talked about peculiar things no one understood.


"Hyaaa, kya ho testo myari go roun bhanya" one of the kids mocked me as I spoke about how hard I could push on a merry-go-round.


"Ha ha ha ha" instead of one person, Hari, laughing at Vinney, it was six people, Dhiraj, Alok, Basant, Prashant, Sushil, Niraj, laughing at me. "Vinay came from England and he can speak proper Nepali, and you came from jabo India and you can't?"


Three months later, when it was time to go back to school, I couldn't speak a word of English either.


***


I live in Holland Park, London, these days. It's cold and rainy here today. A pot of Darjeeling tea sits on my desk. I took Vinney, his wife Junu and my girlfriend Dipti out for high tea at the Claridges today. We talked about old times and laughed our hearts out.

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 10:20 PM ] | Viewed: 1558 times [ Feedback]

Part 5 Sachita: When all was said and done
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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.

- T.S Elliot


At the door of death
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Good looks is no excuse for bad behavior. Wealth is no excuse for extravagance, nor power for arrogance, nor pedigree for contempt. His parents sat at the bedside of my creator agonizing over what had happened. Why did this have to happen? Why their innocent son? Weren't there enough bad people in Kathmandu? Why not that gangster Chakre Milan? Or that butcher Prachande? Was this punishment for their past sins? Chance, by definition, happens for no rhyme nor reason. The universe was the cataclysmic result of an equilibrium disturbed by happenstance. Life formed when a stroke of lightning chanced upon a nitrous compound minding its own business. As they watched their only child breathing through a ventilator, they felt the air sucked out of their lungs, their mortally wounded souls gasped for breath, their numb minds struggled to overcome the horrific calamity that had befallen them.

My creator's dad was always aware of the power of his good looks. As a child he knew what kind of face to make and when. Faced with an angry mother or aunt, he would put up a crest-fallen look, sometimes with a sheepish smile that would solicit a round of cheek-pinching and cries of "Cho-chweet" from his elders. Or he would clench his jaw and have a far -away and determined look in his eyes when reprimanded by an older male relative like his father, who showed up, usually at night, once every couple of months, or his maternal uncles who visited his mom every now and then. Concerned about the emotional damage they had inflicted on him, and unable to put up with that martyred look on his face, his father or uncles would offer to play ball or badminton with him, as a way of making up for the scolding. His ability to manipulate his elders with his looks and their apparent susceptibility to it instilled in him a lopsided understanding of rewards and punishments; of right and wrong; of responsibility and recklessness.

As he grew older, he was able to factor in gender, age, culture and relationship contexts and slowly mastered the art of making faces. He knew the affect his crooked smile had on a first date, it usually scared the hell out of his date; yet that same angular smile, when flashed a few dates later, could drive any woman mad with lust. The look of sincerity and the boyish smile opened office doors and closed business deals during the day. It also opened bedroom doors (and lingerie) at night. His looks hide his true self, his wife said of him.

"He has the face of an angel and the soul of the devil" she would say.

Yet, we all use our assets to our advantage when we can. The runner seduces by winning races, the body builder by flexing his muscles. The actor draws attention to himself by his acting, the writer by his stories, the poet by his poetry, the singer by his songs, the musician by his music, the politician by his speeches, the joker by his jokes, the 'nice-guy' by his nice words. What then is wrong with a handsome man showing off his looks to the world and using them to fulfill his desires? Humans by nature are philanderers; it's morality that has caged, controlled and regulated our sexual desires. If it wasn't immoral to sleep with anyone you desired, if it didn't hurt anyone you loved, if it was logistically and financially possible to sleep with as many people as you might want, who in their right minds would suppress that urge between their legs?

Stop. Ceteris non paribus, but all other things don't remain equal, our lives don't operate in a vacuum. Immoral it might be. Hurtful it surely will be to those who love you the most. Logistical problems, yes, probably. Financial problems, possibly. Guilt, most certainly. Divorce, most likely. Dishonor, yes, this was Nepal after all.

How different was he from a pig who woke up only to eat, f*c*k and go back to sleep? Realization was a long time coming, but when it entered the cabin in Bir Hospital, it hit him hard in the head and the chest. His son was his 'aha, gotcha' answer to death. You can take my life away from me, he had told death, but my progeny will live on. You might leave me with unfulfilled dreams but my children will live my dreams. Now death was trying to out-manipulate the great manipulator, as his wife thought of him, by taking his son way first. He wasn't going to give in so easily. We was willing to beg, borrow, steal, do anything to let his son live. He promised he would never cheat on his wife again or come home drunk. He knew how much those things hurt his son. Never again, he promised the powers that be, will I indulge in my vices; I will give everything up, if only you will let my son live. I will put a plug on all my desires, never do anything to hurt anyone, love my wife, go to Pashupati daily, give all my property to charity, just let my son live.

***

My creator's mom married his dad soon after he returned to Nepal after completing a pilot training course in the United States. He joined the Royal Nepal Army air wing, the 11th Battalion, where his assignments included flying members of the Royal family. He left the Army to join Royal Nepal Airlines where he eventually became a Captain and after a couple of years left to found and fly the planes of Air Makalu.

He had cheated on his then fiance when he was in the US. I will stop after marriage he told himself. Stop he did for a few years. When he joined RNAC, he was only twenty-four and stunningly handsome. It first happened on a night-stop in Lukla. Rita Aunty was the air-hostess on the Twin-Otter flight from Kathmandu and Gaurav Uncle the co-pilot. Gaurav Uncle retired to bed early that evening after drinks and dinner. Rita Aunty and his dad stayed on and talked in the porch of Khumbu Hotel. They talked amongst other things about ghosts and shamans. Rita aunty then told him she felt afraid to sleep alone in her room and asked him if he could give her company. Not even I, the outspoken chip, can, or wish to, get into further details.

He was logging a lot of flying hours those days. Whether it was Baglung or Bangkok, Singapore or Surket, Lukla or London, he was constantly away from home. What started with Rita Aunty continued with countless other Gita, Sita, Mita, Nita aunties over the years.

His unsuspecting wife found out when one of the air-hostess, heart-broken and out to seek revenge, called to spill the beans. He had apparently left this air-hostess for another younger and prettier one.

His wife angry as she was, had no desire to cheat on him. She could not see herself with another man in her heart of hearts. She made friends with other men, with a deep sense of pain, only to seek his attention. She never slept with anyone. Yet, he called her a slut for merely speaking to and being friendly with people of the opposite sex. She took to drinking and gambling as a way of easing the pain. She was the only woman amongst the circle of cross-legged men playing Paplu at an old dilapidated durbar in Narayanchaur. She became the best Paplu player in Kathmandu and soon what started as a game, a past-time, a break from the pain of a cheating husband became an addiction. She could not live without booze, cards and Pan Parag, a habit she had acquired from her fellow gamblers.

He hated her. A fish thinks the world is wet. His was convinced she was sleeping around with her gambling partners. Sexual desire comes naturally to all -- young and old, men and women. She too had desires, but she never acted on them, perhaps secretly hoping that her husband would someday return to her and things would be like they were in the good old days. She did not deny his charges of cheating because she wanted him to feel the pain she had felt when she learned of all the women he had been around with. "See how it hurts" she would tell him only to be slapped by his drunken hands.

"Your mother is a whore" he yelled into the closed door of my creator's room once. A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth. My creator, angry at her for her gambling and boozing habits not to mention her large circle of male friends eventually and reluctantly believed his father.

***

When Suvit visited my creator in the ICU, he had been going back and forth between different states of consciousness where he sometimes saw his parents and the white walls of the hospital and at other times saw a dreamy and colorful world. One world was cold and painful. It smelled anti-septic and germicidal. The other one was warm and smelled of berries and fruits. The sun was always shining on lush green pastures in this world. Tall trees and beautiful flowers grew on vast meadows with meandering rivers. His parents loved each other and the three of them held hands and went on a picnic alongside one such river. His mother was young and beautiful, without dark circles around her eyes and Pan Parag stains on her teeth. His dad was as radiant and warm as the sun and his breath did not smell of alcohol. He and his dad played badminton and Frisbee while his mother laid out fresh chicken sandwiches and lemonade.

Suvit was deeply saddened by the sight of his best friend at the door of death. He was never really angry with him for more than a few days after the incident with his sister but when you storm out like that, it's hard to undo what you did and go back. His throat was not big enough to swallow his pride. He knew his sister well enough to know she had been the initiator. He never wanted his sister with anyone. He was protective of her because as a young man he didn't know what else to be when it came to her. Perhaps that's why she chose to fall in love with his best friend. Perhaps she saw her own dada in his best friend. He knew how deeply she admired him. If there was any man worthy of his sister, it was his best friend lying in the hospital bed.

Suvit's heart was otherwise as cold as the polar icecaps. Confronted with the sight of his childhood friend drifting between various states of consciousness, he felt a burning sensation in his chest. The flames in his chest brought the ice age in his heart to an end. He hugged his best-friends mother and the flood gates opened. They both wept for ten long minutes.

***

Near-death studies have shown that people often hear a voice telling them to come back. Sometimes it is their own voice or sometimes it is the voice of a loved one. My creator not only heard the voices of his loved ones but also read their thoughts while chatting with Jogi Parmanand in the Valley of Flowers. If there could be a world where he had loving parents who did not fight, if there could be a world where his dad did not cheat on his mom and she did not gamble and drink, where he could chat and spend time with his good friend and let bygones be bygones, where he could have a guilt-free relationship with the love of his life, then all the flowers in the Valley, all the happiness in the lake, all the warmth in the meadows, all the wisdom in Jogi Parmaned could not hold him back from that world. He was coming back to live the life he deserved.

Three months after the accident, my creator was discharged from hospital. He is resting at home. I will be de-programmed and re-formatted first thing tomorrow morning. The world is not ready for an invention like me yet. Other people's minds are best left unread my creator and Suvit have concluded. Light would not be light without darkness. Good cannot be good without evil. Dark and evil thoughts we must all have, for they are borne out of our frustrations and come naturally to us. Such dark and deep thoughts eventually prove futile and result in good and pure thoughts. Purity of thought comes not from an unblemished source, a fountain of purity, but from a rational rejection of the impure thoughts that run through our minds.

My creator and his friend will have ample opportunities to tell the world of their experiment. They will become the high priests of biophysics in due time. I wish them the very best. My time is up and I must now go. There is no Valley of Flowers or Lake of Happiness that awaits me. I go back into the vast expanse of nothingness that I was born of. I have seen the inside of the human mind and learned of it's infinite potential. Someday I or someone like me will be born again out of that very potential.

My creator let out a gentle snore. He plans to get married next month. I hope somebody gives him Snorex as a wedding present.

Rest well, my liege, rest well.

***

The End.

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 10:18 PM ] | Viewed: 1485 times [ Feedback]

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
-----------------------------------

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
------------------

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.

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 03:31 PM ] | Viewed: 1834 times [ Feedback]

WARNING: STRONG READER DISCRETION ADVISED. This piece depicts explicit content that some readers may find discomforting. My intent is merely to depict reality within the confines of fiction and not to cause offense.



Part 3: Sachita Whatever-Happened-To-Her
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The silicon chip was to be planted under the skin of the forehead because the forehead had no hair and therefore had more exposure to the outside environment than other parts of the brain. The chip was self-learning, meaning it could store, analyze and use information it had come across. It was also self-healing whereby it could correct any errors encountered in the process of its operations. Lastly, it was self-destructible meaning under a certain set of defined conditions, such as an external command, it could cease to function.

My creator, on painkillers for the last two hours, cleaned the center of his forehead with Dettol, used a blade to make a small cut in his skin and inserted the chip, applied anti-bacterial ointment, and used a Handyplast to cover up the puncture in his skin. My body is petite in size. Smaller than the clipped nail of your pinky finger.

Within seconds the monitoring device hooked onto his laptop picked up first the signal from his brain. It started with blip on the screen and soon turned into a deluge of electrical activity. He smiled at the sight. The joy generated a distinct type of current. As did his anxiety, pain, frustration, affection, anger, jealousy, greed, sexual desires, hunger, thirst as I slowly learned. I noted the chemical composition of his synaptic fluids at the time as well as his heart rate, breathing rate, adrenalin and hormone levels during each of these events. I was programmed to measure sub atomic activity and duly memorized my findings.

It was on the second day of my existence that I noticed interference in the electrical field. It was early in the morning and his maid had come to serve him tea. She was a women with gray hair, wrinkled skin and large eyes. I detected a new kind of electrical current. The intensity of the current varied with how close she was to my creator. I was picking up her electric fields.

"I know how much you love me, Ishwari didi" my creator blurted in his sleep

"You must have read my mind, raja, I was just thinking of that" exclaimed Ishwari didi, his mother's helper, and the one source of consistent love for him in his family. "I don't know how I will handle your wife when you get married. She better treat you better than I do"

"Didi, don't fight with her" my creator said

"You read my mind again, I was just thinking I will kick her out of the house if she didn't treat you right".

The electrical activity was overwhelming. The system could experience an overload if multiple current fields were detected faster than they could be processed.

"This may not be my own house, but I have raised you since you were little, and if she so much as asks you to fetch her a glass of water, I am going to drag her out by her hair"

"Just like your mother-in-law once did to you when you came home late ?" my creator smiled and asked..

"How do you know all this stuff, raja. I dont ever recall telling you" an astonished Ishwari di replied

"I have a headache" my creator said.

The chip crashed. Upon automatic reboot, the self-healing adapter kicked in and picked up unprocessed activities. Total downtime of missed activity was 180 seconds. What transpired in those seconds I dont know. The next recorded signal started with Ishwari didi wiping a tear from the corner of her eye as she rubbed my creators head and asked "How did you fall to cut your forehead like that?"

***

When I first saw my creator's mother, she was coming home and he was leaving and they crossed each other at the main door of the house. I detected a strong but short-lived signal in him denoting affection. This was immediately followed by a longer signal denoting anger. As she got closer to him, I picked up activity from her brain that I had come to associate with affection. It was the strongest such activity I had recorded till then. Much more intense and lasting than that detected in Ishwari di.

"Mamu, don't worry I'll be back soon. I'll eat dinner at Ranjan's place" my creator told her

"I was just going to ask you that. Ok, that's fine. Don't drive too fast" she said as he tied his laces and went out the door

"Are you okay? " she asked after him

"Yeah, and I wont drink at his place"

"He is such a drunkard, I was just thinking about that. That whole family is full of drunkards. They will all have liver cirrhosis pretty soon if they go on this way"

***

The initial signals I detected when I first saw his dad were of anger and apathy on my creator's part. There was jealousy and frustration on his dad's part. It was late at night when the doorbell rang, the servants were fast asleep, and my creator had gone down to open the door knowing full well who would be ringing the door bell at that hour.

He shut the door after his dad and was getting ready to bolt it, a common practice in robbery-prone Kathmandu, when he blurted out "Yes, I have made love".

"What!? I will give you two tight slaps. What are you talking about? Who asked you that?" his dad's eyes were as big as an angry tiger's

"I dont know, I thought you did" he replied

"Are you drunk? Are you taking drugs?" his dad said but surprisingly retreated upstairs without pushing the matter further "Somat nabhako keta"

" I could have sworn I heard him ask if I had ever made love" he muttered to himself

He went upstairs to his room and remembered Sachita, my namesake, also Suvit's sister. He loved her. He desired her. He recalled every moment of their time together. An increase in the levels of vnorepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, nitric oxide (NO) and prolactin was observed. He fell asleep soon after.

"My dad thinks I am a handsome kid. Ha, ha, what a joke. I'll never sell my looks to the devil like he did" his electrical activity decreased significantly after that point.

***

I had been programmed to find and re-position myself to that point in the brain that was most conducive to detecting electrical activity. I had to move away from under the skin on his forehead to a much deeper position within his head. By then I had become cognizant of the different types of emotions he experienced and the physical events that triggered them. I could tell what made him happy and what made him sad. I could tell why he would get angry and what he would do when he was angry. I learnt what food he liked and how he liked them cooked and served. I knew whom he liked and hated. I knew who liked him and who did not. I learnt of those slim bodied girls with long silky hair on TV he desired and what exactly those desires involved. I knew of the books he read and movies he watched growing up that bred those types of desires.

***

He went to the passport office to renew his passport in preparation for his trip to America. He was going to visit Srijan, his childhood friend and cousin. At the issuing counter, I detected resentment signals from the issuing officer. There was greed too. He thought my creator must have money and began to think of a way of telling him his passport could not be issued till next week unless he paid a small sum under the table. My creator, acting on my findings, and without being asked, said he was a college student and smiled. He got his new passport the next day.

He went to Yeti Travels to pick up his tickets. The girl behind the counter served him with great reverence because of his family's connections to her boss. Midway through their conversation, he smiled. I detected a short blip of sexual tension in her that quickly faded. I passed this information to my creator. At the end of the twenty-minute conversation, they had exchanged email addresses. This was not the first time his smile had resulted in blips of sexual tension in the opposite sex, or one occasion, as a placard-carrying Blue Diamond Society rally marched by , on people of his own sex.

He visited the Annanpurna Coffee Shop right after getting his tickets. He sipped cappuchino and ate a pineapple pastry. The waitress was expecting a fifteen-rupee tip. He thought he'd give her thirty and share his happiness.

***

The runaway bubble bee
------------------------------------

He became aware of the unintended consequences and power of my existence one day at a wedding reception. As buttoned-up waiters of the Everest Hotel in Baneshwor served cocktails and appetizers to the five hundred-plus guests, his mom glanced at Pradip uncle. He detected love and lust in her. He hated her. The thought of her with any man, even his father, was disgusting enough. The whole idea of her with that fatso Pradip made him sick.

His father meanwhile, slightly inebriated from the three pegs of Chivas Regal he had consumed, looked at Kaushalya aunty and right there, before his very eyes, he vividly saw them naked in bed.

Shocked, he closed his eyes and covered them with his hands. This had never happened before. I have now learnt to decipher those electric signals from people's memory centers and project them as real images to vision processing parts of the brain.

Soon he saw the lives of every one around flash in front of him. How Rana uncle hated Bahuns. How Sharma uncle could not stand Ranas, Shahs and Thakuris. How Amatya uncle though Bahuns and Chettris should be driven out of the Kathmandu Valley,confined to a concentration camp in India and starved to death wearing only their janais. How Pandey uncle thought Newars should be exterminated along with all the water buffaloes in Nepal. How they all loathed Madesis or "Marshyas" as Shrestha uncle thought of them.

He did not want to know these things. Rana uncle, Shrestha uncle and Sharma uncle were some of the finest people he knew. They were the creme de la creme of Nepali society. Educated at the finest institutions in the world, they were the best Nepal had to offer. It was painful and unbearable for him to find out that those he had thought of as heroes harbored such dark prejudices and hate inside them. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, politicians, teachers, bankers, businessmen, industrialists, chartered accountants, business analysts, IT specialists, farmers, landlords, shopkeepers, spiritual leaders were all no different from barbarians and savages in the deepest corners of their minds. Their smiles, their handshakes, their degrees, name, fame and wealth were just pretty edifices hiding the rotten and stinking garbage decaying inside of them.

He could not bear it anymore and ran out of the hotel. He drove as fast as he could towards Maharajgunj. There were times when he was blinded with too many images in front of him. His mind was seeing things his eyes were not. As he passed fifty-feet from a cop in Durbar Marg, he cursing and swearing about arrogant mother-fu***rs driving like mad men. The cop wanted the Maoists to overrun the valley and imprison all those rich and corrupt people who drove expensive cars that were smuggled into the country. He yearned for a day when the rich would plough the fields and patrol the traffic and he would live in one of their mansions.

Amidst all this, my creator heard a deafening bang. His blood pressure immediately dropped and his heart rate fell. He felt sharp pain in his head and chest. Overall electrical activity in his brain dipped to a very low level. He was not speaking or moving. His head was on the steering wheel. There were footsteps running towards the car.


To be continued

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 12:04 AM ] | Viewed: 1447 times [ Feedback] (1 Comment)

Part 2 : Sachita What's-Her-Face
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Some of mankind's greatest discoveries and inventions have been accidents. Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin by accident. He had returned from a long holiday and noticed mould growing on one of the Petri dishes he had left out for cleaning. Upon closer examination, he further noticed it had killed off the bacteria originally cultured on the dish. The first antibiotic was thus discovered adding years to human life expectancy. I was invented by mistake too. I am a piece of software installed on a tiny a chip implanted in the fore brain of my creator. The chip uses patented technology to detect, capture and process electrical signals in the brains of others and pass them on to the brain of my creator. That's how he read minds. It took Suvit and him, and later just him, about two and a half years to come up with this invention that was never meant to be.

What's more, my creator's birth, like mine, was an accident. He liked to joke that he was the result of poor quality control at Nepal Contraceptive Retail Services Company, Lainchaur. His birth was the result of someone's else mistake. His life too was the result of other people's mistakes. He had a tomcat of a father and a slut of a mother. Which came first - his dad's visits to the whorehouse or his mom's flings with Kathmandu's high society - was like asking the chicken and egg question. Regardless of the order of precedence, each behavior fed the other. His grandparents whisked him away to boarding school in Nainital to shelter him from the heavy artillery in the battlefield his once peaceful home had become. Chairs, tables, cups, mugs, glasses, telephones were hurled inside the house like Scud missiles pounding Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War. His tears were the closest thing he had to the Patriot interceptor missiles that were supposed to destroy the Scuds in mid-air. Like the Patriot missiles, his interceptor's hit-miss ratio was fifty-fifty. He parents would sometimes cease their fire but other times completely ignore the tsunami of tears he shed and carry on their endless, senseless war.

I was meant to be part of a process to detect the electric field in a human body and compress electrons into packets of data that could be transmitted around the world. I was to be the software that would operate the underlying hardware which consisted of electro-magnetic sensors, gauges and processing centers. I was the glue to hold together the different components of their earth-shattering invention

One day things changed. My creator and Suvit parted ways. Suvit's sister fell in love with my creator. He initially resisted her advances because she was his best friend's sister. His relationship with Suvit was more important to him than her love for him. Then one cold wintry afternoon, and she curses herself to this day for it, she kissed him. He kissed her back. Before they knew it, they were in my creator's bedroom giving vent to to the fires that burnt within. His defences crumbled to the ground like a house of cards. A man often thinks with his penis. When he does not, he can only put up so much resistance to persistence from the other side. As Murphy's law would have it, during their third sexual encounter, Suvit caught them red-handed, stormed out of the room, trashed the laboratory they had built in a rented place in Baneshwor, and never spoke to my creator again. My creator stopped speaking to Suvit's sister soon after.

With an enemy for a best friend and a family more ravaged than war-torn Bosnia, my creator sought solace in the hills of Kumaon and Garwhal. Nepal epitomized everything that was wrong about life. The war, the strikes, the pollution, the traffic he loathed them all. When the Maoists weren't fighting the Army, his mother was ambushing his father over one thing or another and his father, a staunch believer in the Powell doctrine, was retaliating with overwhelming fire power reducing his mom to a vessel of tears. When there wasn't a Nepal banda outside, there was a strike in his mother's kitchen. "Don't those whores feed you? You shameless bastard, you dog, you fu*k every bitch you can sniff and then come home and expecting hot food? My foot! "

Have you ever heard your mother swear? I haven't since I never had one and don't know how it feels to have a mother let alone one who swears. My creator never swears. He doesn't drink or smoke either. He speaks with a soft voice and has a smile that can light up a cave

My creator met Jogi Parmanand by accident. Disillusioned with the world, he decided to take time off from his life and travel. It was his childhood dream to explore the Valley of Flowers, tucked away in the high altitudes of the Garhwal Himalayas. Legend has it that there is a lake close to the Valley and late in the summer, the wind blows the beautiful yellow, red, purple, pink and orange petals from the valley and covers the lake to form a magnificent natural cornucopia. Those who have seen it have said it is unlike anything anywhere else in the world. According to the same legend, those who take a dip in the petal-covered icy waters of the lake have their sorrows washed away and attain perpetual bliss.

He had stopped in Haridwar on the way to the Valley of Flowers. A flower seller outside the Mansa Devi temple, upon finding out where he was from, motioned him to a cottage where a "Nepali baba" lived. He said the baba was a nice man and was interested in meeting people from Nepal. He was supposed to posses curative powers to rid people of diseases like cancer and diabetes. None of which my creator believed but driven by sheer curiosity he decided to pay a visit to see what a Nepali sadhu would be like.


The hop of the bumble bee
--------------------------------------

When Suvit walked out, the lab resembled the scene in my creators house after a big fight. It was six months before my creator returned to the lab again. Fresh from his trip to India and rejuvenated by Jogi Parmanand's example of the bumble bee, he set out to revive and complete the abandoned project. He had lost his best friend to lust and he was going to finish his friend's work as a tribute to their friendship. When optical travel became a reality, he would share the credit with Suvit. They would be the new Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their company would overtake Google as the most sought after technology company in the world. Suvit would surely forgive him when he saw how earnestly my creator sought his forgiveness. He would also hire the best marriage counsellors and psychotherapists to fix his parent's dysfunctional marriage. He would not hesitate to pay off the Colombian drug cartels to knock off anyone who so much as dared lay a glimpse on his beautiful mom and his dashing dad. He would take his grandparents on a helicopter pilgrimage to Mt Kailash . As for the expulsion from MIT, when you are that famous, they would probably be willing to brush that incident under the carpet as an act of youthful indiscretion.

My creator finally managed to put together a prototype of the first component of the optical travel system : the electron compressor. It could, in theory, dismantle elements into their sub-atomic components, pack the electrons into data packets, transmit them using TCI/IP, the standard protocol used on the internet and re-assemble packets on the other end. While testing the prototype, he faced an uphill challenge in detecting electrical activity in the human body. The intensity of the electromagnetic field varied by body part and he realized he needed different compression mechanisms for each part of the body. Since the brain seemed to have the most readily detectable electric field, he decided to focus his efforts on the brain.

The microwave was an accidental discovery when Percy LeBaron Spencer noticed the radar waves he was experimenting with melted the chocolate bar in his pocket. In contrast, Dr Frankenstein's monster, albeit fictional, was not so accidental.

"Luck favors the prepared mind" my inventor was not going to let anything go wrong.

To be continued

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 12:03 AM ] | Viewed: 1399 times [ Feedback]

NOTE: Needless to say, all characters and events in this story are fictional in their entirety. Some readers may find parts of the story uncomfortable. Strong language has been used on occasion to emphasize the gravity of a situation and is not in any way an indication of my own views or feelings of the subject in hand.


Hello! My name is Sachita.
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Sachita Chettri-Sharma-Shrestha. Those of you familiar with caste dynamics in Nepal might have noticed my last name, besides being ridiculously long, spans three castes. Depending on how well versed you are with Nepali last names, you might even have noticed that each of my last names, given to me by my creator, is a very generic one. Peel off those generic layers, and I could be Sachita Thapa-Dixit-Rajbhandari. Or Sachita Budathoki-Pudasaini-Gurbacharya. History has tossed some amazing ingredients into Nepal's melting pot and in the process my last name has become a witches brew of what surely must have been the mad quest of my overzealous forefathers to conquer the frontiers of genetics in their bedroom. What a twisted sense of humor my forefathers and creator must have possessed - the former to leave behind a legacy of lengthy and bizarre-sounding last names and the latter to use them with great glee and fervour when he could easily have called me something else.

My creator made me a woman because he was studying women, trying to demystify them. Like in the movie, "Being John Malkovich", he was working on a project to enter the mind of a human to figure out how it really works. He chose a woman because he was fed up of the battle for the remote control, the most symbolic of the gender wars that have plagued our planet since the roaring success of Womens Lib. He spent hours reading about female psychology and secretly tried his theories of man-woman dynamics on the countless unsuspecting women he ran into everyday. They were harmless theories that caused no damage to the physical, psychological or emotional well being of the women in question. Like his theory on who appreciates pleasantries more - men or women - and why. As harmless as that. Before you conjure up images of a Hannibal Lecter or Baazigar's Shahrukh Khan let loose on Sajha, put your fears, if any, to rest. He was as harmless as the Pope. In fact, he had even tried to enter the mind of the Pope a couple of times only to be chased away by the Pope's stubborn refusal to accept his intrusion as a noble experiment in science and instead treat it with the same suspicion the Catholic church has treated , say, evolution or condoms with.

The desire to read minds or enter the mind of another person is perhaps as old as human thought. Religion is about making you believe there is someone who knows your every thought, your deepest and darkest secrets. God is to be feared because he knows everything you are thinking. Like that one incident of sexual abuse you faced as a child, that does not bother you anymore, but whose memories come rushing back to you whenever someone lavishes praise on your then young and foolish uncle. Google tells you it was definitely abuse, yet your heart tells you it was just a stupid mistake he made. No one knows about it because they cant read your mind and you wont speak your mind. Or the thoughts of that one lesbian encounter in your all-girls high school that comes back to you in your dreams typically on those lonely nights when your husband is out of town on business and your sons are fast asleep in their rooms.

Back in the old days, trying to get into someones mind could easily have been mistaken for wizardry or witchcraft. A dhami or jhakri would have been summoned to excorcise the ghosts out if you were in Nepal. Or you would have been burnt alive if you had been born in the Europe of the middle ages like Joan of Arc. The world is dominated by men and they resist the idea of smart and intelligent women invading what has been their domain since the days of bipedalism - power and dominance. So when it comes to reading minds, the all-pervasive patriarchy will never let women get ahead. Back then women who dared to think and follow their own star and heed their inner callings were called witches. These days they are simply called bitches. Immolation has been made illegal but cleverly crafted castigation has not.

***

"In the beginning was an idea, and the idea was with him, and the idea was him "
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Many have tried to enter the mind of another only to find their efforts run against the insurmountable wall separating the meta from the physical. That is till my creator came along and stumbled upon his remarkable invention. He had been expelled from MIT for hacking into the school Registrar's computer system and altering the grades of his friends. To avoid legal action and forcible deportation , he had packed his bags and quietly headed back to Nepal. It was there, one autumn evening, that he ran into his old friend Suvit. My creator was the thinker, the dreamer, the creative guy. Suvit was the scientist, the doer, the realist who turned my creator's thoughts into physical reality. As a Kathmandu Municipality sweeper swept the yellow poplar leaves that had fallen from the Keshar Mahal compound onto the side walk on Tridevi Marg, my creator and Suvit sat on the veranda of Himalayan Java and sipped fresh arabica coffee grown in Myagdi. They had been batch mates in high school and were catching up on old times. They joked about the strict principal and lenient vice principal and how the boys used to try and play one against the other only to be outsmarted by them both. They recalled the numerous bunking excursions to the movie theater and the Chinese restaurant in town and how they were caught one time and 'gated' for the summer holidays.

My creator told Suvit about an idea he had. He reasoned that beneath our skin and inside of our flesh and bones, we are but a collection of tissues undergoing chemical reactions. Our tissues comprise of compounds which in turn comprise of the elements on the periodic table. Each of those elements break down further into electrons, protons and other sub-atomic particles. If there was a way all the body's mass were separated at the atomic level into electrons and then sent over the fiber optic cables that criss-crossed the world and re-assembled on the other end, one could travel from the US to Nepal as fast as email or words in a chat session. An input device plugged in via the USB port on your laptop would launch you in your electronic form into the vast expanse of the information super highway and take you to your destination at the speed of light. You could be scanned into your computer at your apartment in New York and show up via the scanner in your dad's home office in Kathmandu.

"Think of all the possibilities" my creator grinned

"Or all the bugs that could plague the system, especially if it runs on Vista" Suvit jokingly retored "What if you came out as another person on the other end?"

"Oh damn, what if you come out as Phoolan Devi, huh, Suvit?"

"And you as Hishila Yami!"

They both laughed at the absurd comedy of errors.



****

The flight of the bumble bee
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My creator often liked to talk about the flight of the bumble bee. Not so much Rimsky-Korsakov's musical interlude in The Tale of the Tsar Saltan but the aerodynamic principles involved in the flight of this remarkable insect. According to the theories of aerodynamics, as demonstrated by means of a wind tunnel, the bumble bee is unable to fly. The weight, size and shape of its body in relation to it's wing span make flight impossible. Yet the bumble bee, ignorant of the odds stacked against it, and driven by its survival instinct, or sheer determination as my creator liked to put it, manages to fly - and also make some honey in the process.

"Alak Niranjan!" Jogi Parmanand announced his arrival and thumped his walking stick on the wooden floor of the porch outside the house where my creator had been staying as a paying guest. It was a beautiful morning in Pithoragarh in the Kumaon Himalayas. The rays of the morning rose over the hills of the Saur Valley, pierced through a hole in the WWII-era green plain-cloth curtain and hit my creator on the face. He rubbed his eyes and turned in bed thinking, wishing, it was all a dream. He heard Paramanand's distinct voice again "Wake up, beta, we have a long journey ahead of us. We need to leave early."


To be continued...

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 12:07 AM ] | Viewed: 1458 times [ Feedback] (1 Comment)

Part 2 can be accessed here : http://www.sajha.com/guild/read.cfm?guildid=418

Part 3: The Twist

Tinker Village, Darchula District, Far Western Nepal
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After four days of trekking through some of the most beautiful and rugged landscapes Deepak had ever seen, the group of six incognito intelligence offices, seven porters and four mules finally reached the outskirts of Tinker village just past sunset. Across the mountain ridge from Tinker was the mighty Tibetan plateau joined to Nepal via the Tinker pass. To those who inquired, they were government employees from Kathmandu working for Khadya Sansthan, the Food Corporation, and on a project to set up strategic food depots that would house and supply grain to the local population during the harsh winters.

The journey had been long and tiring. They would set up camp each day at dusk. The porters would then prepare dinner in large aluminium cooking pots set over the roaring blue flames of a kerosene stove. When the kerosene supply ran low, as it did on the third day, the porters gathered scraps of wood and brush from the surrounding forests to light the fire. Meals were served in white aluminium bowls. Water or butter tea came in colorful aluminium tea mugs with black rims. Dinner typically comprised of a stew-like combination of rice, millet, potatoes and pulses. On the first day, there was even a slice of dried-mutton sukuti to go with it. After dinner they would gaze at the magnificent night sky and stare in awe at the stars above them and the worlds that lay beyond those twinkling lights. Bhimsen thought the the stars were gods peering down grandiosely from the heavens on mankind. Sarla suggested they must be dead souls who had done good deeds in their lives and received a place in the sky as a reward.

Their conversations were the only source of entertainment between dinner time and bedtime and would cover everything under the stars. The team had bonded quite well during the four day trek. The initial thrill of the scenic landscape had worn out after a day or two and with little else to talk about, the soldiers slowly opened up about their personal lives. Deepak got an insight into a whole new world as the group shared stories about the places, people and experiences in their lives.

He learnt many things about the lives of others than he would never have known under the normal circumstances of his job. Between gazing into the starry nights and walking the rocky trails during the day, Deepak listened with rapt attention as his subordinates recounted some of the happy and not so happy moments in their lives. He learnt about their families and loved ones, the blissful moments of their childhood and adolescence and even the story of Bhimsen's failed first love which was told with great trepidation so as not to cast Bhimsen in the wrong light. Officers often got married as per the wishes of their parents to a girl their parents chose and it could be considered quite cheeky ,if not outright damaging, for lower ranking soldiers to talk about love and romance in front of the higher ranks.

Deepak also learnt about their hardships and financial difficulties. Things he took for granted in the comforts of Kathmandu like a nice bath, satiating meals, filtered water and electricity were not always available to many of the people he met. He had heard about such hardships from others and read about them in the papers and books in Kathmandu and had always felt sympathetically towards the people who faced them. However, coming from his own men and women and seeing it for himself first-hand in the hamlets along the route to Tinker was an unexpected and moving experience.

Emotions rarely overwhelmed Deepak. He was an intelligence officer trained to think dispassionately. In his business there was little room for feelings. Emotions blurred your mind, clouded your judgments and muddied your thoughts. A successful intelligence operative was one who could build a Chinese wall between his thoughts and feelings. If he felt so much as a tinge of emotion, he would nip it right in the bud; usually by changing the topic or passing a light hearted comment about the subject at hand. That's exactly what he did when he saw 10-year girls in tattered clothes lifting heavy pots of water that a grown and fit man like him might have struggled to get off the ground. Why weren't they playing with pots-and-pans toys with their tiny hands like the children he knew of their age back in Kathmandu? Much to his amusement they even managed to laugh at one another and smile at the visitors. Those sights stirred something deep within Deepak but he didn't want to dwell on it. Poverty was the problem of planners and politicians not that of a military intelligence office he told himself as he scraped and threw out the stillborn emotions forming inside him.

Yet the sights and sounds of the journey kept nagging him for days. On the second night, they could not setup up camp because of strong winds gusting down the mountain side. Instead they had sought lodging with a local family who owned a large two-room hut furnished with only bare necessities like sleeping mats and sheets in the rooms and a bare minimum of utensils in the kitchen. On the outside was a roofed area where the intelligence operatives setup their bedding. That was after Deepak declined the family's offer to sleep inside. The porters slept in tents erected in the front yard which stood besides a vegetable garden that boasted of a few potato and chilli plants and an animal shed at the edge of the garden.

Deepak marvelled at the how much hospitality came out of so much scarcity. When they paid for their stay, Deepak added a few extra hundred rupees to the total. He felt if he were to put a price tag on his stay, all the cash in his wallet would not cover the costs. For a person trained to suppress emotions, Deepak was confronted with a host of confusing feelings when he said goodbye to the family of five seven -- three boys, two girls and their parents. He felt immense gratitude towards his hosts for being so kind. He felt great pride in being a citizen of a country where people took so kindly to strangers. Where else in the world would people shower such genuine hospitality on guests? He also felt a sense of injustice that such nice people could be so poor. Or that poor people could be so nice.

The hell with it, he immediately dismissed his thoughts and shut the emotional trap door that had seen the light of day for the first time in a very long time. Service to King and country came first and he would not let anything get in the way. Least of all the misery of others. He was incapable of solving poverty in Nepal and he would only be wasting his time trying to. Besides, he had more pressing issues at hand to deal with.

However, there was one emotion an intelligence office was sometimes allowed to show and an army officer sometimes expected to show. That was anger. He found himself snapping at Sarla, Gopal, Tanka, Hem and Bhimsen along the journey after they had bid good bye to their hosts. Why did his subordinates have to be different from him? They reminded him of those hosts in many ways. They had the same carefree attitude, the ability to laugh at small things, and a general apathy towards the problems of the world. While he would think, and sometimes worry, about burning issues like Nepal's relations with its neighbors, the consequences of the communists coming to power in the next elections, the balance of power in South Asia after Pakistan's nuclear explosion, India's designs on Nepal etc, his team seemed unaffected by it all.

The frustration was starting to show in his speech and mannerism. He was short and almost nasty with the team for much of that day. Why was there such disparity and differences between good people? His conscience kept gnawing at him. If there was an answer to that question, he didn't know it. He was boiling with rage at those around him simply because they were who they were. He was secretly angry that those brought up in such humble circumstances could still smile and laugh and enjoy life, yet he, in spite of his semi-aristocratic lineage and immense family wealth, could not be as happy as they were. Ignorance is bliss and knowledge misery he reasoned. They don't know therefore they are happy. Ignoramuses.

Yet, somewhere deep within, he envied their happiness.

He had to do something about these new found emotions before they consumed him. Deliberately being mean to others was the easiest way to divert his attention from those unfathomable feelings. In fact, it was the only way he knew how to do so. Meanness scoops out very bit of kindness hidden in the nooks and crannies of one's heart. Its the best and most lasting cure for kindness.

He yelled at Bhimsen for being five minutes late in transmitting their daily coordinates and status to the command center. "The Army does not run on your clock, you lazy bum" he bellowed out at a visibly startled Bhimsen. He felt better. He did not care how Bhimsen felt.

Likewise Sarla was got the fat end of the stick for the static in the communication device which was really the fault of the device makers. Subedar Major was rebuked for not keeping his men walking in a straight line on a curvy trail that tore across a ravenous mountainside.

"They have lost all sense of discipline" he warned the Subedar Major."The Army cannot function when officers don't have a sense of strict discipline in them"


***

Command Post 193A, overlooking Tinker Pass
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A week after setting up camp near Tinker and establishing a sentry post on the Nepalese side of the border pass, the men were getting bored. His men were expecting some action in the form of enemy activity but besides a herd of mountain goats and a caravan of local women returning from a pilgrimage to Lake Mansarovar in Tibet, the men hadn't observed any activity in the pass -- friendly, suspicious or hostile. It was then that they heard the story, from the pilgrims, about Wangdu Gyatosang, the legendary Khamba, and the gold he was supposed to have hidden in the forests before he died. One of the pilgrims had told the story to Sarla during the brief questioning that the pilgrim party had been subjected to and she relayed a spiced-up version of it to the men that night over dinner. Deepak was aware it was of those urban legends that re-emerged every couple of years with a new twist, but he let his men believe it.

He could see how excited they got when they talked about it. At nearly 18,000 feet in terrain that was harsh and unwelcoming, they needed something to keep their spirits high. When you interact with same people day in and day out and everyone has shared every story about their lives that they can share publicly, even a myth like that can serve a catalyst for ideas and motivation.

Deepak decided to humor his men. He allowed them to use the metal detector they had bought for possible surveillance of buried arms and ammunition. He taught Bhimsen, who by now had become guilt-ridden Deepak's confidant, how to use the device. Bhimsen secretly believed the metal detector would be his ticket out of the penury of military service and onto wealth, fame and glory. He never missed an opportunity to take the metal detector on any surveillance mission he was assigned. Deepak was happy to see Bhimsen in high spirits and visibly happy even though the source of that happiness was an elusive myth.

***


It was a bright and sunny afternoon. The sky above was an unbroken clear blue. Deepak sat outside his post in his synthetic outdoor chair going trough some papers and working on the report that Colonel would be expecting upon their return. He was beginning to count the remaining days of the mission. He could hear the sounds of what he thought must be a local lark circling a nest full of chicks on a nearby tree. There was a beehive a few hundred meters from the outpost and the occasional bee would buzz past the camp usually indifferent to what was going on in there. Those bees are harmless unless they think you are trying to harm them he had told Subedar Tanka. Tanka greatly feared and detested those bees after one of them stung him in the forehead. Tanka wouldn't admit it but Subedar Major Gopal told Deepak that Tanka initially thought it was a fly and had tried to swat it with his vest.

"He's lucky it didn't sting him on his nipples" Deepak told a giggling Subedar Major Gopal.

Subedar Major Gopal was out that morning leading the other three men on a reconnaissance mission to the two villages down the mountainside. They were to inquire about the pilgrims they had encountered the other day. Second Lieutenant Sarla was dusting off and re-positioning the radio transmitters and receivers.

Deepak had never looked at Sarla lustfully. He was not attracted to women like her. His idea of appealing women were those who came well dressed, wore sweet smelling perfume, spoke in graceful manner and carried themselves about elegantly. The average man thinks of sex sixty times a day and for a brief second he thought about it too. He quickly dismissed such impure thoughts and decided to stroll around the camp area. A brisk walk is a better and safer way to channel one's libido.

A loud crackle on the radio interrupted his walk.

"Alpha six six nine, alpha six six nine" it was Bhismsen's voice on the other end. There was a clear tone of panic in that voice. Alpha six six nine was the distress signal, the equivalent of a "Mayday" in standard military voice procedure.

Deepak rushed towards the communications post as Sarla worked the equipment and sent a message back to the team.

"Alpha one to Bravo three, come in " she kept repeating into the handset but got no response from the other side.

The receiver was completely silent barring the occasional static that emanated from Sarla holding the handset too close to the antennae. For the next thirty minutes, Sarla kept sending out messages that came back only with silence or static.

"Are you sure your equipment is working properly?" he asked her for the third time

Deepak was worried. His men had been told to observe radio silence except in case of an emergency. What might have happened? They were not armed. He was the only officer on the team carrying and authorized to use a firearm on the mission.

Last radio contact with his men had been at 1139 hours NST he noted anxiously into this mission log.

***

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 11:35 PM ] | Viewed: 2015 times [ Feedback]

PART 1: Once upon a time, in the land of Chai Latte and Laptop
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I've dated Miss Sajha. You might think that's an absurd claim to make as no such pageant exists to confer that title. Or that I have elephantitis of the ego, or worse, suffer from delusions of grandeur about dating the most beautiful woman on Sajha. The truth is Miss Sajha was the name I gave a girl I once met on Sajha. I'll explain in a moment why and how it all happened. Before I do that, allow me to cover a sensitive part of my anatomy and dole out the standard legalese about all characters being fictional and any resemblances to anyone being divinely coincidental and my writing venture being covered by the limited liability act of 1836.

In the hopes that that will make me unworthy of a law suit, here's how it started : with a Chai Latte and a laptop. We were both posters on Sajha those days, she much more regular and active than me. I had recently graduated, had a job lined up thanks to the placement services of my university, and was waiting, unemployed and bored, at home for my work permit. I would drink several cups of what I called Chai Latte (Nepali Chiya with cardamon and ginger served in a Starbucks Chai Latte mug that I got as a graduation gift) and surf Sajha on my newly acquired Dell laptop which I figured I'd need at my new job. I'd typically start around nine or ten in the morning and hang out on Kurakani, Trivia and the general chat room till past mid night. It still amazes me how much I could chat those days. I admit I did not have much of a life outside of Sajha at that time. My roommates had moved out, I wasn't too close to many of my classmates, and the few people I knew well at that time had also moved on to new places and new lives.

She had written a provocative article on Kurakani. For purposes of protecting her identity and my bank account from trial lawyers, we'll say she wrote a piece titled "Where have all the Nepali Bachelors gone?". The topic immediately caught my attention and I clicked on the link to the article. I was the 347th person to view it and would be the 10th to reply. What happened next is what inspired me to write this story.

Beautifully written and intricately presented in her article was this idea that Nepalese women had overtaken men in education and achievement and had to look to other communities for boyfriends and husbands. Interesting I thought. I had been doing the same when it came to girls. Well, not really, but that's what I wanted to think at that moment. This girl must be one of those who just hates men I thought. I should stay away from such people I told myself. But being me, my curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to know more about her. So I posted a comment on her thread and waited see if she would bet back with an answer other than "thanks for posting" or the likes.

Reply she did. And then I did. And then she did. And then I did again. It went on like that for a while. The thread repeatedly showed up at the top of Kurakani for an entire day and a half. By the end of the first day, there were a thousand views. Which must have been a record because I've had a hard time getting even five hundred views on many of my stories and of those five hundred , a full hundred is usually me repeatedly hitting the refresh button. The funny thing is we weren't fighting or even arguing in all those posts. In fact, at the end of the conversation, we realized we hadn't talked at all about the topic at hand ,and as happens on so many other Sajha threads, we had had a scintillating conversation that was totally off-topic.

Our blossoming acquaintance was abruptly cut short by the 20 post limit that existed back then. I was bummed. I had every reason to be. It was my turn to reply to a brilliant rhetorical question she had posed and not replying right away might have looked like as though I had been stumped by her last comment. Which was far from the case and I didn't want anybody, especially her, to think that.

So I decided to email her. I clicked on the Email link next to her user name and a few minutes later I had sent my first email via Sajha. Half an hour later, I received my first inbound Sajha email. That wasn't the first email she sent via Sajha by the way. She had been on the site far longer than I had and being an intelligent and friendly girl, her mail box was full of "Sent via Sabai Nepaliko Sajha.com" emails. Back in those days, that's how Sajha mail was labeled when it was delivered to your inbox.

Like so many other Internet romance stories you must have heard, ours too started with a simple "Hi, how are you?" email and progressed pretty rapidly as the days went by. When email could not keep pace with our incessant back and forth, and when Microsoft threatened to suspend my account because it thought I was spamming people by sending out so many emails in a single day, we found ourselves on each other's MSN friends lists.

***

PART 2: The first chat
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"Hi Miss Sajha" I typed into the dialogue box on MSN messenger when I saw her online for the first time. I don't know why I said that. It might sound cheesy now but at that time, that was the first and only thing that came to mind. I have never been good with pick up lines. If I could be granted a wish, it would be that guys didn't have to use pick up lines to start a conversation with girls. Somehow the conversation would just start magically and effortlessly.

"What????????????????" came the reply with an icon suggesting my humor was not up to the mark. I'm peeved when people use a bunch of question marks to do what a simple and visually more pleasing exclamation mark can do. Annoyed, I let it pass as one of those "woman things" that I might not fully understand.

"Hi" I typed and clicked on one of the more affable smileys. I knew I had blown it. What a dumb thing to say I immediately thought. Suddenly I didn't feel like talking to her. She is going to make toast out of me I feared. She is one of those who likes to make fun of men and will make me feel foolish I thought. I was going to make some small talk and say bye at the first opportunity.

Or maybe not. She replied with a smiley that seemed to suggest she was now grinning. I grinned too. I put that grin into a smiley and sent it to her.

I hopped onto Google to search for "cool pickup lines". After going through some of the results Google showed me, which were totally cheesy and tacky to say the least, I didn't feel as bad at what I had written. If I were a girl and going on a date meant having to hear the absurd things Answers.com suggested, I 'd prefer to die an old maid and never date than be picked up by lines like that.

But I am glad I Googled. Because one of the search results was an article about how pickup lines are overrated and there are so many things, persistence included, that really work on a girl. Just be a nice guy with a decent sense of humor the article suggested.

That article was right. Persistence paid off. A few minutes and sentences later I had her laughing at my comments and the jokes I had lifted off Sardarjee.com.

She asked "Are you always like this?" perhaps signaling tacit approval of every thing I had said up until then. I was elated but didn't know how to react. So I did what I normally do when in doubt: reply with a simple smile. That emoticon surely must rank as one of mankind's cleverest inventions as it allows you to say something without really saying anything.

At the end of the first conversation, we said "Bye", "take care", "keep in touch", "see you around", "talk to you soon" , "nice talking to you" and a few other pleasantries implying that we were interested in chatting again. It was the longest goodbye I had ever bid anyone in my life.

***

Part 3: Coffee in Los Angeles
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After you chat with a person for a while, which in this case was about three months, there develops this urge to have coffee with them. Even if you are not a coffee drinker. In our case, there was a slight logistical problem though: we separated by 3000 miles of the contiguous United States. But nothing commercial aviation and my hard earned dollars waiting tables and busing dishes in an Indian restaurant could not solve. I hopped on a Southwest flight from La Guardia to Burbank. It was a long way to go for coffee. Not to mention that it would probably be the most expensive cup of coffee I would ever have had but what have I to loose I reasoned to myself. Best case, I meet a nice girl; worst case, I'll take a picture in the Hollywood Hills with the "Hollywood" sign in the background and send it back to my friends in Nepal.

You can't get around without a car in Los Angeles. Which worked just fine for me because I didn't own a car in New York those days and was thrilled at the opportunity to drive a nice rental. The dare-devil in me wanted to go for the Hummer. That would be a turn off I quickly figured. The gallons-per-mile the Hummer would give would not be something that Miss Clean-Green-Eco-Friendly-Prius-driving-Sierra-Club-PETA-contributing environmental activist (that's the impression I got) would approve of. I might as well have showed up on her doorstep in an M-1 Abram tank as far as she would be concerned. Besides the Hummer was an ugly vehicle that did not fit my budget. I settled for a Mustang convertible. By merely considering the Hummer for 5 seconds, I secured my bragging rights about how I almost rented a Hummer in LA once. Just like my friend Rishab back in New York who used to brag he had been to Switzerland because of the 6 hours in transit he spent in Zurich.

***

Part 4 : Message sent: Landed in LA, checking into La Quinta Inn
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I am not the nervous type of person. You know the type that feels weak in the knees or tongue tied when meeting a special person for the first time. I had to keep reminding myself of that. But for some reason, my palms were sweating. It had nothing to do with nervousness and everything to do with the muggy LA weather and the air conditioning not working properly in my hotel room. The thermostat showed 64 degrees Fahrenheit but I figured in LA, you could sweat at 64 degrees. After all, in no two spots in the world do people sweat at the same temperature. Isn't that what the "six degrees of separation" theory was about? That the same person sweats at least six degrees apart in two different places?

Ok, I was clutching straws and needed to come out of my denial. So yes I was a bit anxious. But nervous, no way! . So what? Nothing a nice shower could not fix. I trimmed my nasal hair, clipped my nails again and took a nice long shower. I was dressed in Calvin Klein jeans and an Express T-shirt with a lion on its hind legs stamped on the left side.

I gain a lot of confidence when I look at myself in the mirror. I wont hold it against you if you think I am a narcissist. Back then I was very self centered and everything was all about me. As the only child in the family, I had never really learnt to share or care much and the whole world revolved around me. No wonder I had been such a failure at having lasting relationships. As you will find out during the course of this story, I have come a long way since and the relationships I got into, including this one, had a lot to do with it.

That slick designer-clad person staring at me in the mirror boosted my self confidence enough for me to pick up the phone. I had her on speed dial and I called her as planned before I left the hotel. We had been talking on the phone for two weeks then.

***

Part 5: Miss Sajha
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I reached Yamashiro, an Asian-American fusion restaurant in Hollywood 10 minutes before 7. The restaurant had been recommended by one of my cousins who used to live in LA. He was a man of expensive tastes and I made sure I carried an extra credit card to be on the safe side. The reservations were under my name and we had agreed whoever would reach earlier would be seated at the table. I was hoping to get there before she did.

I found her seated at the table in the corner. We had exchanged pictures but she looked somewhat different in person. I smiled, we shook hands and we both put on our best manners asking after each other, the flight, the weather and made all the polite small talk genteel people make. It is funny how when you talk to a person online, you make all these assumptions about their persona. She was an articulate and smart girl and for some reason I associated more aggressive mannerism to go with that. I was pleasantly surprised to see that was not the case. She spoke in a soft voice, much softer than what I was used to hearing on the phone.

She also looked much more calmer and relaxed in person than in her MSN picture. For a brief second, I could have been talking to a stranger. I guess my mind was still trying to reconcile the image that I had built of her online to the reality of what she was really like in every day life.

For a few moments thereafter, I wasn't sure if I really liked her now that I saw what she was like. She wasn't bad looking but she wasn't Angelina Jolie either. For some reason, I felt a girl who could talk and write so well would come with the face of a Hollywood star. Or Bollywood, which had quite a few hot stars too . Yes, that's it, I was, for some odd reason, expecting to meet Preity Zinta.

I got the same impression from her. Perhaps she was expecting to meet a Brad Pitt or a John Abraham. I am not a bad looking person but I don't have a face either that can give the male stars of Holly and Bolly wood a run for their money. If I did, I'd probably be acting out, instead of writing, this story.

Reality was setting in. With every word said, every movement of the body, every glance of the eye we were taking in this new reality that we found ourselves in.

She ordered a Sangria and I a glass of Cabernet-Shiraz.

Sajha dominated the conversation that evening. Back then the leading lights of Sajha were people we don't see much of these days. No one talked about Sajha without mentioning them. Two very talented guys happened to be her favorite posters. I was immediately jealous. I was tempted to say something to pull them down. Except that I couldn't think of anything as I actually liked them up until that point. My better senses prevailed and I let her go on about how witty one was and how sharp the other was. When it was my turn, I talked about two girls who wrote great stories . I looked for the faintest sign of jealousy in her eyes. I couldn't find any. I felt foolish for having let that tinge of jealousy come over me.

Sajha was the topic over the drinks, appetizers and entree. Talking about Sajha helped us reconnect. We started talking about some of the same things we used to talk on MSN like our favorite threads, some of our favorite posters. I guess that was our way of bridging the virtual world with the real one and served to remind us that the person sitting opposite us was the same one we had been chatting with for the last three or four months.

During dessert time, the conversation shifted to travel. Any conversation on a first-date about travel does not go without talk of Paris, Venice, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and a few other quaint European cities. So we talked about the left bank and the right bank of the Seine and the Gondolas and all the pot they smoked so freely in the land of the Gouda and clogs.

"Have you ever smoked pot?" she asked the first difficult question of the night

"Once" I lied. OK, may be 5 times in all my life. That too in college where everyone smoked. What's a slight exaggeration on a first date I reasoned and asked her the same question

"No, never" she was speaking the truth as I found out later.

She had not been to Copenhagen and Berlin, which were two cities I recommended and I had not been to Spain and Greece which she in turn recommended. Neither of us had been to Budapest. I don't know what got into me but I told her I might be visiting Budapest that summer and she was more than welcome to come along if she wanted. She laughed it off but did not dismiss the idea. Perhaps I was getting too bold for my first date. I changed the topic to movies.

As the evening wore off, we had covered threads and posters on Sajha, travel, movies, books and authors, a little bit of sports, our families, friends, our school and colleges amongst other things.

She was different from my expectations. The lively, talkative and somewhat aggressive girl I thought I had come to know seemed very calm and almost subdued that evening. Emboldened by the Cabernet, I asked her if everything was okay and told her I thought she was much more conversant on the phone than in person. She replied she was just fine and she was herself.

It was a great conversation over good dinner and I walked away feeling good. I later learned so did she.

We drove our separate ways that evening after dinner.

***

Part 6: Centrifugal motion, perpetual bliss, pivotal moment
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Much has happened since that first date a year ago. We both live in San Francisco now. Separately of course. She works with the Diera Club and I with Fun Macro Systems. We get together almost every weekend. This summer we drove up to Napa and Sonoma and down to Carmel, Hearst Castle. We are taking things one day at a time. We don't know yet if there is a future for us together and we are taking our time to figure that out. Neither of us visits Sajha as often these days. She is tied down with a new project and I have been coding a chip that I am told could break new grounds in home computing. We both have huge student loans to pay and expect we need to work extra hard the next couple of years to be stable financially. Her parents recently suggested she get married and she told them she needs three more years to pay off her loans. That's the same thing I told mine.

My phone is ringing. That's her calling. Got to go. It's our "anniversary" today. She probably thinks I forgot. She doesn't know about the reservations I made for dinner tonight. Shhhh, its a surprise.

Thanks for reading.

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 12:39 AM ] | Viewed: 2714 times [ Feedback] (5 Comments)

Part 1 can be accessed here

PART 2 : The Team

"Classified message for you" she saluted and introduced herself "I am Sarla from Signals and Engineering". Her double-khukuri insignia denoted she was a Second Lieutenant, two ranks junior to Deepak. Deepak remembered her as the liaison in Signals that the Colonel said he was to work with.

She was a petite woman. Her hair was tied in two braides concealed under her military cap. She was around 5 feet but her lean frame and army fatigue made her look slightly taller.

She had been ordered to hand-deliver a classified message from Colonel Prakash received by the signals desk in the barrack.

He dismissed her and opened the envelope she had handed him. The DMI, according to the note, had received intelligence that the ISI was about to make a "drop" in approximately 10 days. Deepak was ordered to move the original plans ahead by 2 weeks to setup an under-cover reconnaissance post and monitor the modus operandi of the infiltrators. He was specifically asked to report on the SALUTE of the target : size, activity, location, unit, time, and equipment. The team was to keep an arms-length from the suspects and be extra-careful not to arouse any suspicion. This was to be strictly a reconnaissance and monitoring mission with no orders for engagement. Permission to directly engage the suspects would need to be obtained explicitly from Deepak's commanding officer, Colonel Prakash.

Deepak was glad the order came sooner. He was beginning to feel out of place amongst some of the other officers in the barracks. Unlike his well disciplined and suave colleagues back at Headquarters, the officers who shared his quarters were too laid back and a bit unruly for his liking. Their conversations time and again veered to subjects like girls and sex. At first, under peer pressure, he would laugh as some of the other captains and majors cracked jokes and recalled their exploits with women in far away places during various stages of their life. Polite amusement slowly turned to disgust as he learnt more and more about the brothel-happy ways of some of his ranking officers. The thought of filthy, smelly women who reeked with BO, as per the accounts of the others, sent shivers of disgust and disdain down his spine.

This was his first assignment in an infantry barrack and he initially struggled to cope with the new environment he was in. It struck him how the gap between Nepal's rich and poor made it self visible even amongst people eating and sleeping under the same roof. The officer corp generally came from well to do families while the non-commissioned soldiers who were almost always from more humbler backgrounds. Caste and ethnic consciousness seemed to run deep amongst all regardless of their ranks or backgrounds. Ever the extrovert, Deepak was quick in reaching out to those around him, especially amongst the officers. Deepak made a few new friends and gathered some admirers. And a few detractors too.

One such person was Major Ravi as once incident proved. He outranked Deepak but seemed to feel insecure in his presence. He would only half-acknowledge Deepak's salute when he greeted him in the hallways, and when the officers went off duty to the local market to dine out, the major seemed to take extra pain to avoid Deepak. One evening, after a couple of beers and a few pegs of Bagpiper whiskey the conversation veered towards the on-going Maoist insurgency. Deepak was sharing his opinion on the weapons used by Maoists when Major Ravi sharply interjected and said in so many words and a harsh tone that Deepak was one of the "dahi-chiure desk types" and did not know the ABCs of weaponry.

Deepak felt the blood rushing into his head. For a brief moment he was blinded and paralyzed with anger. But he could not do anything to a Major, even if it was outside of duty hours. The consequences would be catastrophic for him and his career. He knew he had to control his anger in spite of the raw, subliminal desire in him to crush the Major's face. You never take issue with anyone above your rank. He would make enemies with every other major in the barrack and the divisional headquarters once the word got around. Nowhere was the expression closing ranks more true than in the Army. Your rank was everything. You survived the rigors of military life through your ranks. Breaking rank,was a no no under any circustances. Besides, any violence on Deepak's part would probably lead to disciplinary action and cause disrepute to his family. As it is Colonel Prakash seemed to resent him and he feared this would provide the Colonel just the excuse he needed to send Deepak on an obscure assignment to a place only the Colonel had heard of.

He clenched his teeth and stomped his feet hard into the restaurant floor to release the massive amount of raw energy that had built up.

***

RNA Barrack, Khalanga Bazar, Darchula
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After almost an hour in the air, they were getting ready to land onto the hard clay helipad at the RNA barracks. Subedar-Major Gopal looked at Deepak's face as the Puma helicopter hovered over and then descended vertically onto the helipad.The subedar-major was a lean man with a slightly shrill voice and a thick crop of hair trimmed in a crew style at the edges. Deepak had ordered his men to let their hair grow. A bunch of lean and fit men with crew cuts roaming the high altitudes of the central Himalayas would be tantamount to writing "spies" in bold on their foreheads. Although their hair hadn't grown in three weeks to the length Deepak had hoped for, he did notice that they looked much less like they were fresh off a barrack now than when he first started with them.

Deepak had obtained special use of the helicopter to drop him and his men. Helicopter usage was normally available only to the highest ranking officers. Both Colonel Prakash and General Tej had pulled strings stressing the time criticality of the mission and for a brief moment he felt proud of both his superiors. The helicopter also did wonders to Deepak's credibility amongst his subordinates and was a morale booster for them. A mission that involved the very top brass was something that excited them and what more proof of that than the helicopter Captain Deepak had obtained for their journey.

Subedar Tanka, Subedar Hem and Subedar Bhimsen were seated in adjoining seats. As the helicopter trembled slightly on its descent, Subedar Hem peered out of the window and marvelled at dust storm created by the air from the rotors of the Puma chopper. Hem was born and brought up in Sanfebagar and was the most "native" member of the team. He was trained by one of Deepak's close friends and considered a hard-working and straightforward person.

Second Lieutenant Sarla's, seated next to Deepak, threw nervous glances at him and the Subedar-Major a couple of times when the chopper shook a little unexpectedly as the pilot coped with the dualing forces of aerodynamics and gravity to put the machine on the ground. Sarla had completed her SLC from Urlabari in Morang and completed her plus-two from Biratnagar and then joined the Army. Her parents had wanted her to get married after school and the Army was her ticket out of it as she had not prevailed in the engineering and medical entrance exams she sat for. This was her first field intelligence assignment and she was secretly excited to work with Deepak who was very different from the other officers she had worked with and whom she had taken an instant liking to.

Subedar Tanka was probably the oldest member of the team in his early thirties. He had a wife and 2 children back in his village near Argakhanchi. He was weary to go on a mission to such a remote and desolate place - as if he hadn't been to enough of those places - but the Colonel had selected him precisely because of his previous experience with high altitude and rough terrain in Mustang, Jumla and Rasuwa.

Subedar Bhimsen grew up in Dhading and had childhood dreams of joining the Army. He was brought up by his mother after his father abandoned her and their three children for a woman 10 years younger than him. He was the eldest of the three and helped his mother in the fields before joining the army. He had also become a black belt in judo. He carried a picture of his sweetheart in his wallet. She was from a different caste and he had suffered much stigma and trauma at the hands of both their families because of it. The army was his way to prove to the world that he was a strong man who could stand on his own feet and provide for her. Few in his village would dare look down on a man in the Army especially when they saw him walk into the village during Dasain time with his head held high and his chest swollen in pride. He would be in his combat fatigue and carry a bag over his soldiers laden with "lipistic and lali" and a few bottles of the fine Bagpiper and Royal Salute whiskey they sold in Kathmandu and sweet orange candy that would make every man, woman and child envious of his achievements.

Deepak was struck by the alpine vegetation that he had caught glimpses of during the last part of the flight. Out in the north, he could see vast swaths of green pastures along the mountain side crowned with lush green pine forest on the mountain tops. He spotted what looked like black-tiled roofs atop stone house dotting the pasture land. The mountain side turned slightly more barren as they approached the landing site and and the settlements of Darchula on the Nepalese side and Dharchula (notice the 'h') on the Indian side loomed on the foreground separated by the turquoise waters of the Mahakali.

Sarla looked relieved as the helicopter planted itself on firm ground and she was all too happy to disregard the slight jolt created by the skids of the chopper coming into contact with the hard ground . She peered impatiently at the rotors as they slowed down provided a welcome relief from the din of the last one hour. Jamadar Tanka had a shy smile on his face from the trill of the whole ride and he watched intently as the pilot proceeded to unarm and unmount the door.

They were one step ahead in their mission.

They were to freshen up in their quarters and meet for a briefing at 1800 hours. Tomorrow would be a new day. And it would start early.

***

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 08:06 PM ] | Viewed: 1676 times [ Feedback] (2 Comments)

PART 1 - The Task

Department of Military Intelligence, Jungi Adda, Kathmandu
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Captain Deepak reached work 15 minutes early that morning. An orderly delivered a cup of tea along with his mail and some files. The pile of papers included a copy of The Rising Nepal and the previous day's Times of India and a new edition of Jane's Defence Weekly. The Times of India was published from Delhi and came in each evening via the afternoon Delhi-Kathmandu flight of Royal Nepal Airline and was made available only the next morning. The latest issue of Janes first came to the General's office, who after exercising his first rights, which usually meant marveling at the new fighter planes the Swedes or French had designed, would send it off to the Colonel's office. The Colonel would then extract his worth of the magazine, and when done, send it over to Deepak's office. By the time it got to Deepak's office, and a lot of the times it never did, it would usually have the markings of a tea-stained cup on the cover or a torn out page in the cover story section. Perhaps the work of the General's war-crazy 7-year old grandson or the Colonel's military hardware fanatic 19-year old boy.

Deepak sifted through the papers in his "IN" folder. There was the daily intelligence report that he had to review by eleven and send to the Colonel. The Colonel had called him in the middle of dinner the previous night. He had been instructed to be at the colonel's office at 0900 hours sharp for a classified briefing. It pertained to an assignment of a serious nature with orders from "up above". As an intelligence officer, his mind was trained to be suspicious. In his business there were no coincidences. What was the Colonel upto he wondered? And how high was the high-up where this was coming from? Why was there a new issue of Janes delivered to him? The Colonel would surely expect, want or perhaps even demand something in return.

Deepak arrived at the Colonels office dot on time. He knocked, was told to enter, saluted, and sat when asked to sit. They were joined moments later by General Tej. It was rare for the General to sit in on such briefings. The General's presence signalled the importance of what he was about to hear.

The General was a man in his late fifties with gray hair, an English moustache with two magnificent curls that pointed upwards, and a thickly-framed pair of glasses. He had a slight paunch but was otherwise in good shape for a man his age. He was also a friend of Deepak's family. That was the only comforting fact in that cold office room. It was a typical cold and foggy Kathmandu winter morning and the Colonel was trying to beat it with an electric-rod heater switched on under his desk.

"You went to school in Nainital, right, Deepak?" the General asked. General Tej usually took a while to come to the point unlike the Colonel who never spoke anything besides the point. How the two could get along Deepak wondered. "Have you heard of a place called Tinker?"

"Yes sir, I have" Deepak nodded. Deepak disliked it when his schooling was brought up. It created resentment in the minds of those who did not attent some of the institutions he was fortunate enough to go to. He was an ace student in school at Sherwood College in Nainital, and later at the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun and Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. In addition to his sharp intellect and handsome physical features, his family connections ran deep in the Royal Palace and the upper echelons of the Army and he was considered a rising star in the field of military intelligence in Nepal.

Tinker, he had come to learn from the history archives, was the 17,800-foot pass in the Nepal-Tibet-India tri-juncture area where Wangdu Gyatsosan, the legendary commander of Chushi Gangdruk, the Khamba resistance movement, was tragically killed by Royal Nepalese Army troops as he was on the verge of escaping into India and safety.

"Good. We have received information that the ISI is active in that area and smuggling in infiltrators and drugs to Tibet and then via Tinker into Nepal and onwards to India. We have received orders to beef up security on our side of the border and establish command posts along the southern ridge begining with a command post at location 193A" the general said pointing to coordinates on a map that was open on the Colonel's desk.

"There will be five posts with radio communication links to a command center and the posts will be operated by the Maha Nath Battalion. Our orders are to do the necessary surveillance and reconnoissance work needed to setup the posts" Colonel Prakash said. Deepak was to lead a five-man team for the purpose and work with a Captain from the Maha Nath Battalion to get the outposts operational.

Deepak was to leave in two weeks time and start his work out of the Army's Far Western Division Headquarters in Dipayal. He was informed all the necessary paper work would be ready by next week and he and the colonel would brief the rest of the team members

"The villagers say Wangdu hid a lot of gold up in the forests near Tinker just before he died" the General added with a gleam in his eyes that seemed to unnerve the Colonel.

"And no one has found his gold till now. But, hah, who believes such folklore!" the general exclaimed much to the relief of Colonel Prakash who had by now resigned himself to the General going off on tangents on virtually every topic he spoke about.

Officer's Mess, RNA Division Headquarters, Dipayal
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"There is someone at the gate to see you , sir" one the sentries announced "she says she needs to talk to you about the food depot"

Food depot was the code word for the outpost project.

"Shall I let her in to the waiting room?" the sentry asked. Deepak nodded and told him he would be there in five minutes.

Who could it be? Informants usually would never want to be seen in Army premises. Perhaps someone from Kathmandu?

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 12:17 PM ] | Viewed: 2008 times [ Feedback] (2 Comments)

Note: Reader discretion advised. This piece was written in light vein and not intended to cause any offense. All names and characters used are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead or events past, present or future is purely coincidental and not the result of the scheming, conniving or otherwise diseased mind of a bored blogger.

When I grow up I want to look like Bruce Lee

"When I grow up, I want to look like Bruce Lee" 6-year-old Sarin told his 9-year-old sister Pradita as he looked at himself in the mirror and flattened his nose with the thumb of one hand and used the other hand to pull back the skin around his eyes so it looked as though he had slanting eyes like Bruce Lee.

"Ha ha ha " his sister Pratida laughed at Sarin. "I don't know about Bruce Lee, but right now you look like Rana Uncle". Rana uncle was their next-door neighbor. A handsome man in his late forties, he had an oval face with a Roman nose that was slightly flat towards the tip. He had thick eyebrows, a bushy military moustache and here's the Bruce Lee bit : slanting eyes. He was a very handsome man judging by how all the older cousin girls were always giggling and talking about him in hushed tones.

Encouraged by his sister's remark, Sarin went downstairs to the living room where he had heard his parents talking. He burst into the living room and put on the act again and this time instead of saying Bruce Lee he said "Mummy, baba look at me, I look just like Rana Uncle".

He expected his parents to go hysterical with laughter just like his sister had. Instead their faces were frozen. Seated there in the room in the big green sofa, holding up a cup of tea, was General Megh Sumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, the future commander in chief of the Royal Nepalese Army a.k.a "Rana Uncle" to the children. Next to him was Kaushalya Aunty, his wife and a former headmistress who had gained notoriety amongst the neighborhood kids for the big long "imported" cane she kept in her house. Rumour had it she did not spare the rod on anyone who so much as accidentally set a toe-nail on her orchard while playing hide and seek.

Rana Uncle saved the moment by making light of it all with a witty remark about how Sareen still needed to grow a moustache. Right after the guests left, Sareen was chased down by his mother, smacked on his bottom, and confined to the puja kotha in the attic till dinner for his behaviour.

He never did the Bruce Lee or Rana Uncle act again.

***

Sarin never thought about his physical features again till he went to boarding school. It was in the second or third grade that someone told him he had a nose like a Brahmin.

"What is a Bramhin?" he asked

"Someone who sings Hare Ram Hare Krishna " came the reply.

When he came home for summer vacation, he asked his parents why his nose was pointed unlike the rest of the family and most of the kids at school.

That's when he learnt about plastic surgery. His mother, a gynaecologist by vocation, mentioned plastic surgery in passing to his father. She of course meant it as a joke but the idea got etched in Sarin's infantile mind and would stay there for a long long time.

***
Sarin was a handsome kid. He was the darling of his primary school teachers and the girls in senior classes who would buy him candy after looking at his face and going "How cute". He never quite understood it but it got him free toffee so he figured there must be something else right about his face other than his nose.

Sarin forgot his features till he was in the sixth grade. He was rudely reminded of it again in boxing class when his opponent, Dhiru, two grades his senior and whom he had overwhelmed and pinned to the ground in two previous rounds, took aim at his nose. Seething with pain and anger, he retaliated by hitting back at his opponent's nose. The result: one week of detention, two bloodied noses and a lot of bad blood when his opponent whispered to him in the detention room that his nose had been deliberately targeted because it stood out.

It then dawned on Sarin that he looked different from many of the people around him. Some of his classmates looked like him, while others looked different and it seemed all because of their noses. He started looking at peoples noses more closely. The American principal's nose was different from his Chinese class teacher's. One seemed excessively long and the other unfairly short. Ever the do-gooder, he wondered what would happen if the Principal sliced away a bit of his nose and gave it to his teacher. He giggled at the ingenuity of his thoughts.

"What are you laughing at, Sarin?" Ms Chiu was suddenly at his desk "Are you day dreaming again? Do you want to do another week of detention?"

"No, miss"

"Then pay attention when I am teaching" she went on "at this rate, you are not going to pass this class" she said and moved away from his desk. "First he picks up a fight with senior boys and gets beaten up and now he has stopped listening in class"

"What is the square root of 256?" she then asked the class.

"But miss, I didn't get beaten up. He was the one who almost fainted" he clarified clearly disturbed at her understanding of events and completely ignoring the square root of 256. The class burst into giggles and nervous laughter. In those days it was not too common for students to talk back to their teachers without getting scolded or punished.

"Shut up now or I will add one more week to your detention" Ms Chiu could get really mean. I hope she never gets a slice of the principals nose he said to himself as he said "Yes, miss" . The thought of her being stuck with a stubbed nose for the rest of her life made him feel better.

The nose business soon turned into an obsession. He took out a ruler and measured the size of his nose. He noted it down. He would measure again in a few days to see if it changed.

***

Several years later, when he was in the 9th grade, he noticed an add in the newspaper from a medical college in the US that was looking for volunteers to take part in a plastic surgery recovery study. He cut the ad from the newspaper, saved it inside one of his text books, took it home during the winter holidays and promptly filled in the application and posted it to America.

***

Soon after posting the application, life caught up with him and he pretty much forgot about the shape of his nose again. He had changed schools and unlike in the 6th grade, he was now in a school where more people had noses like his. In fact, he was now a strong and well built boy who had found that in spite of his nose, he seemed popular, both with the guys and girls. He still wanted his nose fixed someday, but was content for the moment.

That state of contentment would give way to despair whenever he fought with other boys, which was rare, but it did occur a few times. Or when he would "break-up" with one of his girl friends and would be down and out with the blues


***

Seven years had passed since he filled out the form and forgotten all about it. Life had changed. He had completed his college in the US and had started working. So Sarin was pleasantly surprised to get an email from John Poppins University asking if he was still interested in the study. It seemed like a very good offer. All his medical expenses would be paid and he would constantly be monitored through video and other technology by a group of researchers 6 months before and after the procedure. And he could chose how he wanted his nose shaped although he would be guided by a team of experts who would explain his choices to him and help him make the best decision.

He had a week to get back. He was really excited. This was what he had wanted and finally he was getting it. He called up his girlfriend and shared the good news with her.

"But what is wrong with your nose?" she asked when she heard the news

"What do you mean? Haven't you noticed how my nose is shaped?" he was getting a bit annoyed that she wasn't being supportive.

"Are you kidding me? You have the cutest nose I have seen" she said. He thought she was saying that only to make him feel good. He called up a few other friends to get their opinions. He got mixed views. Some said do it if you want. Others said, what, are you crazy? But he heard something that surprised him: not one of them said there was anything wrong with his nose. No matter what their final advice was, they all seemed to think he looked great the way he was.

He even called one of his friends from the school with the American principal and the Chinese teacher. He had reconnected with her a few years ago and they had come to be good friends again. He came to find out that she was now married to Dhiru, the guy who had punched him in boxing class, and they had a 2-year-old son with another on the way.

"You are funny!" she roared with laughter when he brought it up. "Why would anyone want to change such a sweet nose?" she continued almost hysterically. "Did I ever tell you I had a crush on you in Ms Chiu's class? As did Sarita and Vicky."

Sarin declined the John Poppins offer.

He currently lives in the suburbs of Washington DC in peace with his nose, his German Sheppard Dhiru, a golf set, 2 tennis rackets and 2 laptops that he uses for blogging and other recreational activities.

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 07:59 PM ] | Viewed: 1812 times [ Feedback] (1 Comment)

Originally published 04 Feb, 2006 under the title "Looking for a Roomate in ..."

- http://www.sajha.com/sajha/html/OpenThread.cfm?forum=2&ThreadID=27511

"Impossible!" I concluded when I asked myself the question: can a guy and a girl be roommates and maintain a totally platonic relationship? No way I thought and decided to put an end to the fantasy right away. I mean life is not an episode of Friends and even in Friends, didn't someone get pregnant in the end?

What brought up that question was a girl telling me she was looking to sublet a spare room in her apartment. The conversation happened under the most extraordinary of circumstances. I had just moved to the city for my new job. I happened to be having dinner by myself at a Sushi bar one evening when the waitress serving me, perhaps having overheard me talking into my mobile phone, asked "Are you Nepalese?"

"Yes" I replied "Why do you ask?"

"Ma pani Nepali ho" she said smiling and continued in Nepali "Where in Nepal are you from?"

"Kathmandu. And you?"

"Me too. Where abouts in Kathmandu?"

She went on to tell me she was a junior in college and went to school 3 days a week and worked at the restaurant when she didn't have class. She asked me where I was putting up in the city .

"Oh, you live in a hotel?" she seemed a little taken aback when I told her. After a brief silence she continued "It must be expensive, no?"

"Well my company reimburses me for it" I quickly replied lest she think I was some rich snob with expensive spending habits. "and its only for the first 30 days of moving to a new place that I get the benefit , after that I have to find my own place"

"Oh, then in that case it makes sense."

"Yeah" I almost sighed in relief. It felt nice to be thought of as a normal person.

"My roommate moved out." she told me on one of her trips to my table "Rent in this city is so expensive especially when you have to pay the whole thing yourself" she said while filling up my tea cup.

"I know." I empathized "I have been looking for something that's a little decent but not too expensive and I haven't found anything yet. If I like the place I don't like the price and if I like the price the place is not good"

"Ha ha" she laughed politely at my lamentation "Yeah, it's difficult finding a place in the beginning" she added and went off to check on another table.

Funny she should be looking for a roommate I said chuckling to myself. Thats when the question hit me: can a guy and a girl really live under the same roof and be just roommates? Stop fantasizing I immediately told myself - you barely know the girl - why are you even thinking of this? But I wondered where she lived and what her apartment was like. Well, she was a student, I reasoned, so she must not be living anywhere too expensive. Did she, by any chance, live close to downtown where I was looking? I wondered whether I should ask.

I dismissed the idea. What if she thinks I am trying to hit on her, or worse, move in with her ? I had heard stories about Nepalese people coming to a new city and begging other Nepalese to let them stay at their places. Maybe she already thinks my intentions are just that. Why did I have to tell her I was looking for a place?

"Oh well" I sighed to relieve the stress that had just built up. I was done with my meal and saw her approaching my table.

"How was the food?" she asked.

"Oh, perfect, thank you"

"Can I get you anything else? Some dessert, perhaps? More tea?"

I surprised myself by asking for the dessert menu as I normally don't indulge in dessert. Ginger ice cream was the dessert of the day and I asked for it. After I had scooped the last of the ice cream I decided it was time for me to leave and asked for the check.

"If you know of any girls looking to share an apartment, please send them my way" she said as she took the check and credit card away.

"OK, sure" I replied. I dared not ask how I could let her know. I figured she was just making polite small talk and didn't really mean it.

"I've given you a 5% discount" she told me when she came back and asked me to sign the credit card slip. I rarely check the details on restaurant bills and had not noticed the discount.

"Thanks" I said embarrassed "there was no need for that". In fact, I was a little ticked off. I don't like being obliged to anyone for anything and it almost seemed condescending on her part to think I should be given a discount.

My discomfort must have been visible and she seemed must have sensed it. She tried to make up for it my asking me for my number in case she came to know of any apartments that might be available.

Still reeling from my bruised ego I found myself hesitating to give her my card. But then, as is often the case with me, my anger passed away quickly. I scribbled my mobile number on the card and after a few departing pleasantries I was out of the restaurant and on my way to the hotel.

I didn't expect her to call and she was out of my mind soon after as I got bogged down with work. An exciting new job can make you forget a lot of things like paying your bills and doing your laundry on time let alone remembering someone you briefly ran into.

One evening, perhaps a week or so after the dinner at the Sushi bar, I was heading out from a restaurant in downtown with a couple of colleagues when I realized there was a missed call on my cell phone.

I flipped the phone open and hit "Yes" in response to "1 Missed Call. View now?"

"Unknown caller" the cellphone proclaimed. Who in the world could have called me without revealing their ID? Must be the damned tele-marketers I fumed. How the hell do they get people's cell phone numbers I wondered as I flipped the phone shut. The government's do-not-call list doesn't work I concluded. I must call and complain.

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 06:49 PM ] | Viewed: 2036 times [ Feedback] (2 Comments)

Originally published 02 Feb 06

http://www.sajha.com/sajha/html/OpenThread.cfm?forum=2&ThreadID=27610

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A POET, A PLAYBOY, A PHYSICIST AND ME

"Bandhu!" Manoj was knocking loudly on my room door "Uthnus na, chhito uthnus ta please"

"What time is it, man?" I yelled wishing he would go back to sleep. I had a headache from the party last night - boy, what a party it was. Manoj was snoring when I came home so he would be clueless as to what I had been up to and how hung over I might be.

"8' o clock" he said "Farmers market jane hoina? " he continued. Manoj was one of my flat-mates in a four bedroom apartment that he and I shared with two other guys. Originally from Lamjung, he had done his high school in Pokhara and had a Bachelors degree from Tri Chandra college. He completed a second bachelors in Computer Science and a Masters degree in Philosophy from a small town in the Bible belt. He was also a poet. He wrote poems for every occasion - birthday parties, funerals, graduation parties and even dance parties. He rarely addressed his roommates by their first names, and much to the discomfort of everyone around him, he always addresed us as "tapai" and often suffixed our names with "Bandhu" and "Mitra".

"La la, ma aye. 15 minutes, ok ?" I bargained for time. There are few things I value as much as precious morning sleep and I dreaded the thought of having to walk with Manoj through hoards of shoppers and rude farmers alongside rows of fruits and vegetables. He always gleefully compared the prices to the local grocery store and enthusiastically proclaimed how much cheaper they were here. He did this every-time he went to the farmers market which, in his case, was anytime he could find a ride to the market square.

"Mickey Bandhu" I heard him knock on the door of the other flat-mate " Tapailai ko keti ko phone achha" he teased. Mickey was a party animal and a self-proclaimed womanizer who worked at a management consulting firm. He was an easy going lad from Kupandole whose top-most priorities were partying and getting laid when not working his rear end off at his job. He and I shared a lot in common but we had one big difference : I , in spite of all my flaws, could only see one woman at a time. As for Mickey, his legendary mojo made it hard for him to stay focused on any one thing, be it jobs or women, for long. If flirting, seducing and philandering were art, he was Picasso, Mozart and Homer all in one. We never quite figured how he got away with it time after time.

"Bihana bihana jaad kha ho kabi-jee?" he teased back. Mickey was always in a good mood. " Go back to sleep" he shouted.

Disappointed, Manoj went to knock on the only other bedroom door left. He was always much more formal with Prashant than with Mickey and me.

"Prashant jee, chiya khane ho?" he tried bribery this time, perhaps realizing moral persuasion no longer worked in the house. Prashant was a graduate student of physics. He was a brilliant student and recipient of several scholarships and awards. He was a man of few words and when those words did come, they were delivered softly and calmly. Originally from Ikhalakhu, Patan he was admitted to a prestigious university in the East coast on a full scholarship.

"Hetta, khanna bhankeo. Yo manchhe le kasto disturb gareko yar " Prashant grumbled and turned in his bed.

Never in our 12 months of living together, had we gone anywhere at 8 on a Saturday morning. Mickey and I didn't even wake up till noon on Saturdays. Prashant hated anything to do with shopping and would avoid grocery shopping whenever he could. Manoj's weird love for grocery shopping, his peculiar knack for poetry, and his not-so-sophisticated etiquette often got on our nerves.

Manoj finally gave up on his roommates and went into the kitchen, set the kettle on the stove for some tea and started whistling a tune from a Nepali movie. Today was his last day in the US. He was catching the 11:30 AM Virgin Atlantic flight to London and onwards to Kathmandu. He was going back to Nepal after six years in the US. The job market was in the doldrums and he had decided to try his luck back home after his optional practical training, and thus his student visa, had expired. He had hoped to take some pictures at the farmers market and downtown - two of his favorite places in the city - to show friends and family back home. With shopping and the packing taking up most of his time, he hadn't been able to take any pictures of the city. Never mind, he thought.

The kettle started whistling and he headed to the fridge to grab some milk when he saw three half-awake faces making their way to the kitchen table.

"Malai pani chiya hai " they said almost in unison.

"Let's go grocery shopping" Prashant broke the silence that followed.

"And I need to go to downtown too" Mickey quickly said.

"I'll take my camera as well" I said.

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 06:43 PM ] | Viewed: 1934 times [ Feedback]

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

(PART 1 can be accessed here )

Jolly Grant Airfield, Dehradun
-------------------------------------

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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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
----------------------------------------------------------

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
---------------------

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
-------------------------------------------------

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
------------------------------

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
--------------------------------

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
-----------------------------------------

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
------------------------------------------------------------------------


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
------------------------------------

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".

***

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 06:25 PM ] | Viewed: 2082 times [ Feedback] (1 Comment)

PART 1 : WHEN REENA MARRIED JASON - Notes on a Marriage

Megha Malhar Ballroom, Hotel Soaltee, Kathmandu
----------------------------------------------------------------------

"Throw the lawa in the fire" Shankar, the priest solemnizing the ceremony quickly grinned at those around him, amused at his own English, as he ordered the groom and bride to perform the age old wedding ritual of worshiping the fire god . They had decided to have a watered down Hindu wedding ceremony to be completed in no more than an hour in Kathmandu and a US-style reception in San Francisco upon their return to the US. Reena and Jason promptly followed the priests orders as family members and guests looked on - the groom's with curiosity and polite smiles, the bride's with visible traces of boredom on their faces.

"I like this idea of a short-cut marriage" opined Arun uncle, husband of Reena's mother's best friend. "It's so quick, no hassles, saves time and money not to mention having to stay up all night if the sahit is at some ungodly hour"

"It is easy to say that when it is someone else's daughter" Kamala aunty rebuked Arun uncle "I would want my daughter to get married with full rites and rituals. Sharmila didi's son did a short-cut too and they got divorced in less than a year. Sharmila di is regretting it to this day" Her tone was hushed perhaps because she did not want anyone to find out how superstitious she really was about weddings.

This was one of numerous side conversations going on as the bride and groom sat cross-legged in the jagya. In some sense this was a typical upper-class, upper caste Nepali wedding. Or at least how such weddings were turning out to be those days amongst the privileged few. The fire in the jagya was fueled by spoon-fulls of ghee thrown in every two minutes or so by the main priest or his assistant as they took turns to chant Vedic hymns. The five pheras were performed at a quick pace with a long silk scarf tied on one end to Reena's lehenga and to Jason's finger on the other. A shortened Kanya dan followed and the ceremony was complete in exactly one hour and five minutes. A reception with a guest list that resembled the country's who-is-who followed.

It was a wedding to remember and bride and groom were happy and madly in love.

***

Lunch room, MacKanZoo and Company, Hong Kong
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jason was introduced to Reena in the lunch room of their Hong Kong office. He was a fellow associate at the LA office of their word-famous management consulting firm. Diversity was greatly valued at the firm: you didn't have to go to Harvard or Stanford to join the company, you could be from Kellog or Wharton too. And in the operations department, they were even taking in UCLA grads. Or so the joke went amongst the company's detractors and those who never got to sneak their foot past the door.

Both Reena and Jason were on the same two-week project in Hong Kong. Jason's good looks struck Reena the moment they were introduced but she did not give it more than a passing thought as her mind was deeply engrossed in the contents of a power point presentation on the impact of global capital markets on government policy.

Hong Kong is a beautiful city but when you are several thousand miles away from home and you have visited every tourist spot that you possibly can on a business trip, evenings and weekends even in a vibrant city like this can get dull. So when Reena ran into Jason at the elevator of their hotel that weekend, she had a sudden urge to ask Jason what he was doing that night. For some reason she did not. Both checked their work emails instead, ordered room service and turned out the bedside lights in their respective rooms.

A week later, they were seated in Cathay Pacific business class enroute to San Francisco. After what had transpired during the remainder of the week, they could only but ask to be re-seated next to each other on the flight. Jason's smile gave her the butterflies and her calm and composed nature fascinated him in more ways than he was willing to admit.

***

The Bickford residence, Russian Hill, San Francisco
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

You don't fall in love in a week. No matter how great a person is. And not when you are 26 and 28 years. It took them longer than that. After about 2 years of seeing each other, visits to probably every restaurant listed on Zagat, fun-filled vacations and countless sleep-overs at Jason's place followed by made up stories and coverups with her family on the phone, Jason finally proposed. Reena had never wanted to say yes so badly to anything in her entire life. She was the happiest Senior Associate of Strategy Consulting anywhere in the world.

She had never been so happy in her life. She felt so complete and content. She had the perfect job and the perfect life and was the envy of her friends and sometimes the subject of their sharp tongues.

***

University of California, San Francisco Medical Center
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tragedy had never struck Reena before in her life for which she was truly thankful. That was soon to come to an end and when it did strike, it struck hard. Eileen Arati Bickford would have been born 18 months after the wedding. They had taken out a huge mortgage to get ready for what was about to come and were thinking of getting her room ready when their worst nightmares came true. She blamed her busy schedule and crazy hours and the resulting stress for a miscarriage so late into the pregnancy.

It was a day of blood and tears. Jason, normally a composed and laid back person, was visibly shaken when he saw the expression of devastation in her face in the hospital room that night. Denial soon gave way to mourning. Mourning would give way to healing. Or so everyone hoped.

***

Dr Talwar's office, Sausalito, CA
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Reena decided to see Dr Ashwini Talwar on the recommendation of Triveni Kaur, a co-worker who had gone through relationship problems in her own inter-racial marriage.

The waiting room in the counselors office was empty except for an old man sitting in the corner. On more than one occasion she wondered what she was doing there and the thought of escaping down the back stairs crossed her mind.

"Tell me how you are feeling?" Dr Talwar's question seemed tougher than any she had faced in a boardroom or seminar. The president of the elocution club in high school felt a slight tremor in her legs just the way she had when she forgot a sentence she had learned by rote in the seventh grade.

Reena was miserable. She felt a deep melancholy piercing her from the inside. Jason suddenly seemed so fake. Nothing he said or did was authentic anymore. He hadn't really changed, yet he was so different. He was running around the country working with big-name clients just like he had always done. At times, he seemed to be making too much of an effort to love her. After Reena got pregnant, he was either home during the weekends when he was working with out-of-town clients or by 6 PM when he was based in the local office. In fact it was he who had picked her up from work a couple of times when Reena was in the office chasing tight deadlines and aggressive project plans. After the miscarriage she felt a void of sorts develop between them yet she chose to hide those feelings from him for reasons she was too afraid to admit. Day in and day out she tried her best to make things seem as normal as possible.

"I am fine, I think" she replied and managed an unconvincing smile.

"Is there anything bothering you?" Dr. Talwar maintained a detached tone in her speech.

"I don't know". But she knew. She was just too scared to put it into words. The consequences of doing so, she feared, would bring her world crashing down. It would expose her for what she was behind that facade of a forward-thinking, open-minded, Ivy-League-educated management consultant with a multi-million dollar home, a handsome husband and a form 1040 that would make many eyes pop. She was an utter failure behind that mask. A coward running away from the demons of her nature. And she did not want anyone to find out.

"I hate this life, I hate America, I hate Americans, I hate everything about this place" she broke down into tears three weeks after the first session and $5000 dollars and some spare change later. Everything around her seemed fake. The smiles on the faces of people who passed her in the hallways who could care less about how she really felt, the neighbors who waved at her as she backed her car out of the driveway, but had never invited her over ever, or whom she never got to build the kind of relationship she could with her neighbors back home - something seemed amiss in this place. The "friends" she had come to make over the years seemed more concerned about being seen at the right places, with the right clothes, sipping the right wines than about laughing and having a good time.

"I want to go back home" she felt a tremendous relief as she let those words out. It was something she could never bring herself to tell Jason. She grew up in a nuclear family in Nepal but missed the joint family environment of some of her cousins. She missed the love and warmth of her grandparents who had passed away when she was away from home and neither of whose funerals she could attend because of that "challenging project" she was working on. There was a part of her that would wake up some mornings and still think they were alive. If anyone else I love passes away, I will attend their funerals from now on, she promised herself. I will always say my final goodbye she would weep to herself at times.

Her grandparents had visited a year before her grandmother died. She had bitter sweet memories of the incident. She loved the moments she got to spend with them but felt a pang of guilt about how they must have felt. She could not take them to the finest restaurants in town because they would feel out of place there. Her grandfather spoke English, but with a slight accent, and her grand mother could manage only the bare minimum words needed to get one past custom and immigrations. She could not showcase her grandparents, the pride of her life, amongst her new circle. She could not bare to see the looks of polite disdain that might appear on the faces of some people when they saw the shy and wrinkled faces of two foreigners. So what if his title once read " His Excellency, the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Kingdom of Nepal to ...." The list would have been quite long of she had to go through it all.

There were things she had come to learn about how San Francisco's famed egalitarian and progressive society viewed others that would make her clench her teeth. Her grandfather, ever the adventurer, wanted to drive her SUV, and even got an international drivers license from nepal when he came to visit. When he brought it up with her, the phrase "DWA - Driving While Asian" was what she immediately thought of. A term used to refer to the driving skills of old Chinese ladies. Fear, and not the lack of skills, was responsible for such driving she wanted to yell whenever she heard that phrase because in some ways it reminded her of her own grandparents. She had brought up the issue with Jason but he gave his characteristic shrug by which he meant "Ya, fine" but by which she understood "I can help you integrate into my society but your whole family is not my problem".

Her grandfather never got to drive in America.

The sessions continued.

"If you could go back and change what you did, what are some of the things you would change" Dr Talwar scribbled something on her notepad as she asked the question.

***

San Francisco Superior Court, San Francisco
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Citing an irretrievable breakdown of marriage and stipulating that the terms of the settlement be carried out within 180 days, the court spent less than 15 minutes granting the divorce. Reena then took her dad to have his favorite cup of capuchino at the local Peet's Coffee while her mom complained about how bitter the "American" coffee was.

Reena felt a burden had been lifted off her shoulders. Only the presence of her parents stopped her from throwing her shoes into the sky and jumping. It had been one hell of a struggle convincing them that she was doing the right thing and even though they agreed to go along, she still sensed an unease in them that disturbed her. In fact it angered her. Why were they not taking part in celebrating her new found freedom, her second chance in life? Why did they have to look at divorce as doom?

But she was too happy to let her parent's thoughts dampen her spirits. She added an extra sachet of brown sugar to her coffee, stirred it and nibbled on her chocolate biscotti and she looked out at the majestic San Francisco Bay and smiled.

"Do you have a minute? " she typed into her phone and hit the "Send" menu playfully.

" Ke chha?" came the reply in a few seconds "For you I have a life time :D"

   [ posted by Sajha Gazer @ 06:21 PM ] | Viewed: 2156 times [ Feedback] (1 Comment)