~Paramendra Bhagat~
The latecomers went straight for the kill, those whose appetites had been whetted by a few rounds of servings competed; in the semi-dark it was a strain to reckon faces. Newcomers and veterans mingled. The apartment complex had the lull of a Friday evening. Cigarette smoke wafted in the air at a lazy pace trying to keep pace with the rapid-fire conversation. Beer was being passed around, one opener-swish after another. There was a steady flow of gaunt faces and pot bellies and slim shadies from the kitchen to the living room and back, and an occasional trip to the John after a customary word of politeness by a few when a random walk would have delivered in the squeezed apartment: “Where’s your guys’ bathroom at?”
Inadvertently the conversation moved on to the home front. Dinesh Parajuli put down the gauntlet with his cutting criticism of the Prime Minister. The topic sustained its momenutm, party after party, year after year, no matter who the Prime Minister “back home.” He made vain attempts to relate his high falutin’ graduate level courses in Economics to the political platitudes gleaned in the online newspapers from the country. Just before Parajuli made an attempt to muffle the idle talk of monotonous greetings among well-wishers, the new arrival from Birgunj who had showed up at the party with his high school friends from Kathmandu looked around with extra attention to the topic, less out of political acuity than in an attempt at social inclusion.
Namita KC prepared for the unavoidable, for political talk bored her and she made no attempt to hide her mood, not now, not never. She started looking at the CD case on the table while saying “No, thanks” to the plate of dumplings being passed around while those standing behind her reached for them. Karishma at the other end of the couch threw a knowing smile at Namita in the room full of loud men bubbling with their weekend ethnic pride, partly the need to connect, but mostly nostalgia.
People had been arriving for hours, though it was too early for anyone to have left. Word was still being passed around in other parts of town, invitations extended by those who had been in the know. A few more cars would arrive in due course of time. The crowd was larger than usual, spilling over on to the terrace outside.
Having failed to get the attention he was used to, especially during the years when the hung parliament swung one way and the other, and every parliamentary session in Nepal looked like a playing field for the number crunchers who changed Prime Ministers at will, or so it seemed, Parajuli made a diplomatic request across the room.
“Please pass me another,” he said to noone in particular, and a beer went his way.
It took him a full half hour to realize where the center of gravity lay that evening. The muffled voices in the corner eased into a general conversation on relationships across cultural lines. Word was out that the socialite Kundan Karki’s girlfriend of four years had left him. He had not seen it coming. One morning she packed up and left.
“I tried,” she said. “And I have loved you. But when you are not hobnobbing with your loud friends, you withdraw. I am not even sure anymore I know you, or you care.”
Kundan did not have the awkwardness of a newcomer groping his social ways, club to club, party to party, from one circle of friends to another. He had had a few casual relationships before he settled for steadiness. And Linda, a social butterfly herself, had made it her second job to get to know his friends. She learned names fast and sat through intense conversations in rapid Nepali on Nepali politics more than once, feigning complaint with a good humor. She early impressed the uncoverted with her disarming talk about her “racist uncle” that won over the crowd. But then once the outlines had been taken care of, people known, routines followed, the nuances started creeping in. What were genuine incomprehensions for Linda Kundan tried to see as lovers’ quarrels, all the sweeter for their frequency. He would respond with surprises and gifts, as when he threw yet another surprise birthday party for her, and invited a few of her friends over as well. There was an occasional steely silence, sometimes lasting days, but they always got back together, or so it seemed to Kundan.
“Relationships are a lot of work. They are not all sweet and easy like in Hollywood movies, or for you also Bollywood movies, he, he he,” the elderly clerk at the gas station round the corner he had befriended during his trips for gas and cigarrettes and an occasional pop and who he had taught a few phrases of his own would tell him stroking his long, blond hair, and he bought into it, or so Kundan thought. He thought he had been through the break-up rituals painlessly several times during the early years, but this was different; back then it felt like a fashion statment, to dump and get dumped, the price you pay to learn the ropes, the motions you go through. He had started to feel settled. The worst part was, as he kept claiming for weeks afterwards, that he did not see it coming.
“At all, at all, at all,” he said in his exaggerated way. After the pain had been internalized, he learned to say the phrase in a comical way, since everyone from the community he knew asked about it; those who did not get to meet in person during the first week called in the evenings. After the first few tellings of the story, the details came out of his mouth as if he were talking about someone else, perhaps a close friend whose pain he felt intimately but that was not him. Questions were asked endlessly and borrowed from person to person. His answers got circulated. The gossip mill was busy as people casually mentioned the happenstance at the end of a long conversation when what they had been intending all along was to talk about what had happened to Kundan, did you hear.
The lady Ramya Shreshtha whose home had been the venue for the community’s Dashain celebrations for the past three years was surprised when Linda showed up one day with a gift for “your youngest daughter’s birthday, since I will be out of town for a week, so I thought I would show up early.” Ramya thought maybe that was Linda’s way of signalling the lovers’ quarrel had ended once again like the fire in the small haystack, as the saying went in Nepali. But Kundan knew better. He started suspecting instead that perhaps she had left him for another man. So he called one day.
“No Kundan. I have not fucked anyone, yet, if that is what you are getting at,” Linda sounded more impatient than on the morning she walked out. “You don’t get it, do you?” she added.
Kundan had come to see over the years the amusement on Linda’s part at the attitudes of many of his friends. Men who got to attend better schools than their sisters growing up, men who “guarded” their sisters lest they go “astray,” men who shared “dirty” jokes and gossip about the up and coming young Nepali women in the county, men who made enough money to buy fancy cars, and yet had the secret desire to hold on to their relative place in the world order that was theirs “back home.” He teased her about her genuine friendships with the middle aged married women who had accompanied their husbands from Nepal and her genuine incomprehension of the culture surrounding arranged marriages.
“What if a married couple finds out they are not sexually compatible?” Linda had asked early on.
“People have bigger things to worry about, I guess,” Kundan had offered a lame excuse and had become defensive. “I mean, I don’t know. I don’t hold you responsible for the choices all white women and men make, do I?”
Linda once told him the story of a friend of hers at college who went out with a Mexican, got pregnant with him, and then surprised him by deciding to break up after all. “But you are pregnant with my kid,” Linda would quote the guy with a naughty smile dancing across her face. Kundan thought he got it, and then he really did.
“The guy did not realize his relationship with his girlfriend was between him and her,” he had offered his platitude to Linda.
Kundan went over to Linda’s new place she had moved into after staying with a friend for a few weeks. They were civil, and they talked like old friends. And Kundan started feeling good, and then he spoilt the moment without realizing.
“Do you think we can give it another try?” he asked.
After regaining her composure – she acted surprised that Kundan had said what he had – Linda explained how she had loved him, and still would like to remain friends, but that the issues were genuine, and the void, if anything, had grown over time, and she did not see anything changing fundamentally, and that she did not foresee their getting back together. Kundan felt betrayed. He forgot to ask, what issues, what void. On his way out, Linda gave him a big hung.
“You take care of yourself, you sweet pumpkin,” she said. “And hey, my mother says she feels for you, and that she hopes you are doing okay. And that you should feel free to drop by her place anytime. Or to call.”
“You mean they know?”
“Of course they know. What do you mean?”
Kundan was getting hints it was over after all. His heart sank. The pain on the first day was of bewilderment, now it arose out of a sad knowledge, and yet he did not really understand.
September 30, 2002
(Source : Parmendra Bhagat’s Blog )
