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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: 1559 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: 1486 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: 1835 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
----------------------------------------------------------------

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: 1448 times [ Feedback] (1 Comment)

Part 2 : Sachita What's-Her-Face
-------------------------------------------------

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: 1400 times [ Feedback]