~Prawin Adhikari~
Mother died and left me alone, wearing white, my head shorn, worrying about nothing, and with only two cowries to my name. Nothing tethered me to the village of my birth, so I sold what little I had and packed my bags. I found a place in Balaju, two minutes from the bus stop, fifteen minutes’ walk from the vegetable market, the woody hills of Nagarjun five minutes away, three small cinemas in the neighborhood, and plenty of immigrant parents who needed young college students to tutor their children. The landlords were a kind and clean Brahmin family from Lamjung who recognized in my features the age-old call for charity and kindness: the bachelor Brahmin orphan. The mother saw my head and white clothes and, taking pity on me, said, “Mishra, for only a hundred rupees more, you can eat with us. What will a poor child like you cook? We are four in the family. One more plate of dal and greens for a child like you won’t hurt my arms.”
Then, the Revolution of 1990 happened. The Congressi boys and the Communist boys made fierce speeches in the college. Four-stars and the hammer-sickle painted the walls. Some said that the armed revolution against the king’s forces should be strengthened. Fools! What did they know what an armed struggle is like? They flaunted the words only because they knew none else; but now, two decades since, they are reaping the harvest of throwing words around too freely. And what good has this armed revolution done for anyone? So many red flags, so much shouting and chanting, so much accusing each other of betraying the nation, of raping the celestial mother herself—and we were all young boys, recently turned into men, easily broiled, easier pushed. I thought of Nepal as a woman with the ripest breasts, and the thirst in the hoarse throats of the sloganeers would be quenched only with that motherly nourishment of freedom from the oppressive aristocracy. I thought, There is Mother again, and I get to be a son, not just an orphaned child, but a son to all mothers.
But I have to say I was more afraid than most of my friends. I wanted to amount to something, albeit without shouting at anyone’s face, without setting fire to stray dogs that dragged through the streets, without carrying banners blazing with obscene slogans. I kept to the rear. I thought, The policemen are just as much Nepal’s sons as I am, why hurl stones at them? I did not agree or disagree with anyone, but kept mostly to myself. I knew nothing of Mao or of Koirala. I certainly did not know of the Iron Curtain or the Cold War; I cared little that the wall had fallen in Berlin.
But it all came in thundering waves of information and a sense of injustice—listening to the bbc broadcast about demonstrations in Kathmandu, seeing doctors and teachers and lawyers take beatings for the cause of democracy, reading of the Jews in World War II Germany, then reading of Mandela’s freedom. There was a sense of euphoria back then—we thought our mother was in shackles, we’d free her and she’d walk free. We talked about the soil and pride and blood and the sunshine of progress and democracy. I mostly listened, never really said anything, because everything still seemed somewhat dramatic, somewhat play acted.
Then one day, I saw Hari Bansha Acharya and Madan Krishna Shrestha with black gags over their mouths, kneeling in the middle of a cordoned crossroad. My friends brought cassette tapes of their performances, explaining how this was a satire on the royalist rulers, how that was a satire on the aristocratic smugglers of antiques and narcotics, how the third song was a parody about the state of untouchables and women in Nepal. I thought, Those men are of the people, giving us the most evanescent comfort of laughs, touching every ethnicity, every age, with their skits and parodies, the most any man did for this country. I felt they had emasculated me by beating me to the streets. But I was still afraid, and my landlords were afraid of what was to come. The police had started killing in the streets. Rumors of disappearances made us angry, but fear was still stronger.
It finally happened on glossy foreign paper, my move away from fear and into the arms of the writhing revolution. I was in college when boys sitting on the roof started kicking down low walls and pelting the police below with bricks. I had heard of the police hurling college students from the roofs of Amrit Science College. I had also heard of stranded policemen being beaten to death by farmer women in a village to the south of the city—Kirtipur, I think, but I don’t remember. Suddenly the prospect of violence and bloodshed seemed real; destruction so proximate that the fear became an eerie elation. As if the prospect of death tempted us even more. Mother was in chains but we were free, and what was one life compared to the fate of the nation?
The police charged in, finally. We ran into classrooms, locking the police out. Some ran through the maze of hallways and stairs, dodging one blow of a thick bamboo stick here, another heavy boot there, pelting a policeman and fleeing to safety. I was punched in my ribs once, but someone pulled me into a classroom. We stayed locked in and laughed and chanted slogans, calling names at the king and the queen. After a while, the police left the college with two truckloads of arrestees. We came out and bragged about the injuries we’d received and made plans for the next day. There were many injured, but in that rush I paid no attention to the smaller gossip of what had transpired.
And so things went for a few days. I thought, There is one revolution in every lifetime, and this is mine. They killed people all over the country, numerous dissidents disappeared. Those who had been hiding in India returned heroes. People talked about all the Congressis and the Communists in jail. I took to pelting the policemen from a safe distance. A week later, someone brought a foreign magazine with a report on our revolution.
Four-stars and hammer-sickles galore! Flags, so many and so expansive you’d imagine that the entire Jyoti Textile Mills had become revolutionary, so tall that they seemed to reach the sky itself. It was a brilliant photo essay. Flags and raised fists, policemen charging with their cane shields and bamboo sticks, the king’s palace in the gray background while the entire promenade before it was littered with the abandoned shoes of fleeing revolutionaries. Then there was a picture from my college—a sudden, brutal image on glossy paper printed on the other side of the world: a stumbling, tumbling figure. It shocked me. I could see the face of the falling man etched with the horror of certainty and behind him the faces of the men who had pushed him off the roof, angry but equally horrified. I used to know the man who fell. Perfectly good fellow, but there he was, suspended midair in a foreigner’s picture, ogled at by people in don’t-know-what corners of the world, a frozen relic of a historic moment, already distant and idealized.
I went home and worried, although I couldn’t quite place where the worry stemmed from. It was a ghostly collage—that of him falling, bracketed by numerous other pictures where four-star and hammer-sickle flags waved brave over a deluge of arms and screams and scrambling feet.
I realized that his unmoving position in the charts of history was a bugle chiding me to rise and march, rise and march. I finally saw my impotency, my irrelevance. The world was changing around me, without my part in the big game.
Sometime in that long night, my tired mind welcomed sleep. I dreamed of an abyss; I was pasted against the bluest mountain face. A deep dark lip of nothingness with a sliver of a stream ran through the depth of the fall below me. A sky melted into the sheer trees above me, stretching endless across this dream and others. For some reason, I would not fall. Then I saw him hovering before me, the air barely moving his hair, a four-star badge pinned to his collar, thin trickle of blood spraying into the air in a crown of crimson beads arranged around his head. I tried to turn away to face solid earth—anything but the void, anything but the vertigo. Have you ever been trapped in such a dream? No matter how hard I tried to turn, the world turned with me, as if the firmaments were transfixed through my private horrors.
I could see the entire world without opening my eyes; his falling body now with the sheen of the glossy magazine where he was assembled in a million tiny, flashing specks of color, and a crisp shower of stars—falling in fours, falling with hammer-sickle zeal. The abyss only grew in its emptiness, because, instead of filling the space, the shower of stars only illuminated the vastness of the fall. My hair was dripping with sweat, and I shivered with cold when I finally woke up.
I wish I’d thought of the nightmare as just another nightmare. After all, the nights were hot and terror abounded—it was no surprise that fear had seeped into my dreams. And who wasn’t affected by that picture? If you looked at that falling martyr, something inside you would have said, It should have been you. Upon each of us was the taint that we hadn’t taken the fall to arise celestially; waterworks and school gates, obscure crossroads and schools to be named after us martyrs. We—dirty-necked students with muddy toes and sacred cow dung in the kitchen, with millet liquor on the breath of our fathers, with countless generations of untouchables among our mothers—we were awake, and we itched to mark Kathmandu as a part of our destiny. Not just for the xenophobic Newars and the cloistered, inbred aristocratic horde, but for every Nepali of every creed. We had real reasons to think we were strong, united by a cause. Those who are made to fall and wallow in submission, don’t they eventually always rise to triumph? Isn’t there at least one salvation due to each of us? No one should suspect the truth in that, or what is there worth living for? Such was my awakening. I thought, How clearly I understand now! How clearly I see! This clarity is no illusion, and the call is as real as my time in this world. As real as the warmth of my bed, the sweat in my mouth, the smell of kerosene in the landlady’s kitchen. As real as my dead mother’s heartache.
That afternoon, I became one among the thousand tongues of a writhing serpent, the very Sheshnaag of the myths, eager to dictate the story of what would come next, for all of us, for the entire race. We were too many facing too many; blood boiled easily in that frenzy. It was a day filled with the usual sweaty jousting; sticks and stones and bricks, abandoned shoes and bottles filled with kerosene sweeping the road, the police with their usual surging bravado, few of them exaggeratedly vicious and others landing their batons lightly. Sweat and grime entered eyes and mouth, sand settled on tongue and teeth, feet blistered and hands ached. The sun got into the head and everything buzzed, an afternoon moment stretched like eternity, and anything seemed achievable.
There was a Mainali from Dhankuta—a thorough revolutionary, very lively, very loud when he talked about the imminent change, straightforward and impossible to disagree with. He was wiry, short, and Lenin-goateed, very hoarse after three days of screaming at the police, but cheerful nevertheless, his face shifting from a we’ll-still-get-these-bastards grin to his comrades to a dark and furious come-and-get-this-you-monarchist-swine! in a single twitch. Then there was Rajesh, a Newar from Libang. What has become of his village now! Didn’t he become a martyr in the latest Red Revolution? Was there anybody left in his family to accept the government purse for his slaughter at the hands of the army? I wonder if anyone ever got around to naming anything after Rajesh. Such were the boys, barely across the threshold of manhood, who thought it noble to die, who thought they’d be mourned.
You know the story of that afternoon. I remember looking back at where I had been, seeing smoking barrels in the distant crowd, drops of my blood trampled over by my rescuers as they jolted me from helpful hands to helpful hands and raced me to Bir Hospital.
Then I saw him—thin as a twig, all teeth and white of the eye when he grinned, staring at me. I was receiving his blood. When I lost consciousness again, I dreamed he was infested with tapeworms. He was scrawny, undernourished, and pale after draining his blood to parasites. He was gone when I woke up, but in that brief, jaundiced window of consciousness, I became nauseated by the conviction that I had been filled with tapeworm eggs. That terrible fragility of his frame—his glistening collarbone arching out from a deep hollow, a pair of floating, spectral eyes, that constant drone of placating words—apart from feeling a deep sense of remorse at having survived, my waking deliriums and nightmares were filled with the tapeworm man, and there were sudden, restless bouts of sweaty, hard-breathing sleep.
The revolution was brief, just as its fruits were. Three weeks of agitation, a year of celebration, and prompt descent into corruption: this is the template that has been repeated again and again. There was talk of compensations for the dead and the injured, of felicitations and dedication of streets and crossroads. I couldn’t bear the thought of being named in the same breath as those who had died, those who were being cynically dubbed “living martyrs” for the crippling injuries that still keep them abed, unable even to voice their anger. When I saw my landlady weep for me after I returned to Balaju, I knew I had wronged her. I knew I had wronged my dead mother.
I fled Kathmandu, decided I would become a teacher in Gairigaun for a year or so, no matter what the revolution brought. I was resigned to my fate, so to speak. But, in those years, I also thought friendliness with fate brought a twisted freedom. Fate doesn’t have to entertain a notion of fairness. What fool will expect any different? If on the sixth day the hand of fate has written on our foreheads the course of everything that is to come, there will be no blame to give, no thanks to offer.
I sat on a bus in Thankot, in a dusk of night buses roaring downhill and juggernauts trudging uphill, with a picture of him in my shirt pocket. I had been recuperating from my grazing wound to the hip bone, eating the fruits and herbal tonics my fellow revolutionaries brought, when he surprised me. The tapeworm man was right there, between the fruits and the tonics. His eyes were languid even through the same big smile that I had seen. He had faded quickly—the paper was only five days old. His condolence photo had appeared late in the papers because there had been a scuffle over which political party had the right to claim him as their own. An all-party round table had reached a consensus: they’d call him a people’s martyr, raising him above inter party politics. They had called it “untimely.” He had given blood to me and returned to the crowded streets. He was shot twice in the chest. They didn’t search for a blood donor for him because he was dead even before they grabbed him in the air. He was thin enough that the policeman’s shotgun tossed him like a fistful of water. And the reporter had the audacity to describe the fall of my savior, to use such a dainty metaphor for so violent a death! I looked at the picture again, but it was dusk outside and you know how newspaper photos are dotted. When I couldn’t see his picture, the lines on his face became even more crisp, his eyes wider, that smile larger and terrifying. His radiance pressed into me, hovering this close to my face. He invaded my dreams.
Bhuvan Tripathi was his name, with the nom de guerre “Biplav” within quotes, even in the obituary. His mother wrote to me through the village secretary when I sent a letter to her, thanking her for Bhuvan. I strained to find among the baroque phrases and salutations of the secretary the earthy, motherly words of Bhuvan’s mother. “Your blood runs in my veins too, Mother,” I had written. “Your son gave this orphan his life back.” Bhuvan’s mother wrote back, talking at length about her dead husband, why Bhuvan was dark skinned, how she lost him.
Bhuvan’s father had migrated into the hills to sell bundles of Calcutta cotton cloth, married a poor Brahmin’s daughter and settled in his father-in-law’s village in Okhaldhunga after promising to never take his bride to his desh, to the heat and disease of his village somewhere south of the city of Ranchi. Bhuvan had grown up the dark and awkward child among his sturdier friends, teased for his father’s bundles and his grandfather’s penury. Bhuvan’s mother had suffered for her husband’s foreignness, too, her name forgotten, answering to Kali Sahuni after the color of her husband’s skin. I was afraid that she would accuse me in some way for the lifetime of hardship she’d had to endure—had her son not weakened himself by giving me his blood? Was I not the final punctuation to her story of injustice? That sun and the shouting of a broiling revolution, that need to scurry out of the oppressor’s reach, the agility required not to get shot through the chest, the presence of mind demanded by mists of tear gas that set one hacking and crying—how could that scrawny bag of bones not fall after such bloodletting? Bhuvan may have given me my life back, but I certainly aided with his death. Did his mother not see my hand forcing her son’s fate?
His mother continued to write to me. She wrote every Shree Panchami, because that was when her son was born. She wrote of obscure events in Bhuvan’s childhood. “Did you see the mark on my son’s forehead?” she would write. “I dropped a steel glass on his head when he was three. The poor child wouldn’t stop crying for hours, crying because he had never seen blood. His father told him he had come unsealed and the morning’s rice would spill from his head.” She wrote about how he fell ill when he was seven months old and wouldn’t drink her milk anymore, until her breasts hung heavy with the rejected milk of motherhood and developed an infection, and how she had to pierce herself with cactus thorns to relieve the burden “until my little Krishnaji cried for his mother’s milk again.” She wrote about the time her husband went northward to sell his merchandise and never returned. “Perhaps tumbled down a ravine with his load. Stubborn as he was, he never learned how to carry a doko and insisted upon balancing the bundle on his head, going up slippery stone steps to Rai villages. I always warned him it was too heavy but would he ever listen?” He wanted only the best for Bhuvan. And how could it escape Bhuvan’s father that the villagers secretly despised his industry and whispered, “What kind of a living does one make by selling printed cotton to unwitting Rais and Sherpas?” They were sad effigies of a life she would have wanted to live, with her husband, with her son. But that wasn’t to be, can’t you see? Who has an unfair share of the world’s misery but the Nepali woman? Her husband came from a land she hadn’t heard of, and her son died for a cause not addressed to her.
Then her letters became infrequent. I thought the old woman must have run out of things to say. And how much longer and how much more love could she have for her son’s killer? She still had to make a living somehow; exhuming figurines from her past and reliving her memories of them was insufficient sustenance. The village secretary wrote finally—I had gotten so used to his immaculate hand that I read well into the letter, confused at such a sudden turn in the mother’s tone, until I realized that these were no longer her words transcribed by a sympathetic man, but the man himself.
He had a flair for burying pertinent information in a heap of jargonized evasion. “The immortal martyr, alas, has lost his mother,” he wrote, “it being my unfortunate duty to relay these darkest tidings to her ’other son,’ as our mother was wont to call you.” She died walking between the school and the village gate named after her son, two edifices over which she had no claim except her attachment to her son’s name. Bhuvan—the entire world!
It became unbearable to me, this news of her demise, as if the last remaining ties of blood that I knew had been severed cruelly, needlessly. While she was still alive in Okhaldhunga I could claim a strange solace; Bhuvan’s face stayed well away from me. When I would be telling the story of my shattered hip bone to eager listeners—here at Pasalwalni’s tea shop, in the bazaar below, when a minister visiting our village asked to see the local revolutionary hero—I tried hard to recall Bhuvan’s face, but the task became increasingly difficult as his mother’s letters piled up. His faces became many, like the faces of children around me, like the faces of adolescent boys in books, but never again the dotted, pitted face in black and white that I had found staring at me between fruits and fortified drinks.
I had lost Bhuvan’s face during those few years. When Bhuvan’s mother died, like all martyrs’ mothers do, Bhuvan came floating back, right here, again—this close to my face, dotted and pitted and the same scrawny smile, his face clearly and hastily cut out of a group photo—a hand visibly resting on the right shoulder, reminding there were more, that he was much more, that he still was, beyond the village secretary’s letters and the scar on my waist.
A Christian missionary passed through Gairigaun not long after Bhuvan’s mother’s death, and he spoke of the messiah. I asked him what a messiah is. The more he explained the more of Bhuvan I found in his answers. I can’t believe, though, that one man can die for every man’s sins; I can’t agree that a man who lived two thousand years ago will today be capable of absolving every soul’s crimes. But Bhuvan had been my messiah and there was no doubt about it. Was he not stretched out on the cot beside me, his hands falling to the sides, his blood draining into me? When I woke up, was he not vanished? And did he not resurrect among fruits? And who killed him but our common enemy arising from the depths of ourselves; a ubiquitous enemy feeding on our anger, despairs, hopes? And when he was shattered, did he not consecrate the ground he fell on? I know who the true messiah is, I said to the missionary. I have seen him, and I have seen his blood spill to give life to me—and also this guilt, this calling to redress my sin unto him. The missionary looked puzzled, he said I was blaspheming the name of Ishu, but Kaviraj—you know how anything foreign agitates him after his miserable stint in Oman, how he says he is better off carrying a plow in Gairigaun than wearing a tie to work in an office—he told the missionary to take his messiah foolery elsewhere, “Because we have enough gods already and they do not come with promises of medicine and money. And what if he could walk on water? Our god sleeps on beds of serpents, floating atop an endless sea, caressing Bhringu’s footprint emblazoned on his chest.”
I wrote to the village secretary again, asking him if he knew of other men like me who corresponded with the mother. He said, No, but why don’t you try the district party office. I wrote to the Okhaldhunga party office and waited for the answer. It takes ages for letters to reach anywhere, and even longer for the replies to arrive. Then there is the matter of the party officials who think they’ve done their duty toward all dead soldiers of the revolution and find queries like mine a nuisance.
If a man can sacrifice his life for another man, I thought, he must have had great dreams, greater aspirations; and who else but myself to bring them to fruition, with the same blood that he would have sweated. Letters came from everywhere: his friends who had now been given jobs in development projects, schools, and civil service; some teachers, some customs agents in Birgunj, some keeping accounts for members of Parliament in Kathmandu, others still struggling as political fledglings within the party. I had hoped to re-create this giant—for he was a giant to me, his sacrifice, his deadness and martyrdom in a single towering heavenly swirl, not chopped and castrated like mine. I had hoped that through the letters I could reconstruct Bhuvan into a venerable martyr. But he had been ordinary, even more so than me.
When someone much weaker than you confronts a brute much stronger than you and fights to the death in defense of an ideal, something gives inside: you become a bit of a coward. Out of love toward humanity, if nothing else, an absurd bravado surfaces, propels you to take lashes on your back. And in that act is the promise of forgiveness toward yourself. But what if somebody cheats you out of that act of charity toward your own soul?
I was furious that Bhuvan had tricked me. He was no giant, but an insignificant village boy. Even worse, he was weaker than I was. At least, even in the tumult of the revolution, I had had the guts to decide on my own—the letters spoke of how Bhuvan was less than that. He was painted a lackey of the lowest order; a hanger-on, a side show, a lampoon without an ideological stance of his own, a mind emptied of courage, a coolie for borrowed conviction. He brought tea and carried papers and looked after the leaders’ shoes as they crowded into a room to discuss the revolution. He laughed when better informed party cadres teased him; he was a party cadet but did not understand anything of the party literature.
He was an oaf, most letters told me—the ghost that had been raised in me and the village secretary was inflated and unreal. He was eager to please everyone—his march at the fore of the sloganeering crowd was merely an aspect of that need in him. Not a fervently patriotic son of the soil, Bhuvan was trying to impress me when he gave me his blood. I thought, The poor man must have had a tough time in Okhaldhunga, with his father’s nose and skin, with his father’s burden of printed Calcutta cotton and jeering crowd of local peers. Of course he would try to impress me; he would try to impress everyone right up to his sad end. And what did he get? Martyrdom for himself, misery for his mother, and this burdensome guilt for me.
Now he comes, occasionally, in hours like this when I repeat his story, where I must relive the humiliation all over again. If I seem to lack the enthusiasm to discuss your party literature, my new comrades, or if you see disgust on my face when you wave that flag in my face, can you really blame me?
How can I help but be angry at him? How can I help but be angry at you?
(Source : Apublicspace.Org )
