Story

 “A Shallow Dish”

Suman Bhattarai

My final exam was nearing. This semester was surprisingly short. Teachers were supposed to take 32 classes each but they were able to take hardly 25. That is why, they were unable to complete the course assigned to them. Consequently, we students had been burdened to work harder than other times.


In the mean time, my dad got sickened by diarrhea. He was working in the rice field and mom used to serve lunch at the site he was working. It was perhaps the food that was contaminated by the bacteria available around the field. In the evening, he arrived home having his face weak and bleak. Suddenly mom started sobbing when dad told, “I have got diarrhea since the afternoon.” Due to poverty and persistent labor, he was already a thin man with low stamina in his body.


Mom came to me running restlessly, “Hari, please visit the health post and call the doctor to come.”


I rushed to the health post. It was 45 minutes walk away from our home. When I reached, I found it locked. A neighbor, Samser Dai, informed me, “The doctor hasn’t come to the health post since so long,” and he added “as I heard the doctor wasn’t willing to stay in our village because of its remoteness. So, he left.”


I asked about the CMA madam. He hesitatingly said, “She has gone to participate in a marriage ceremony of her cousin sister.”


“When will she come back? Do you have any information?”


He answered, “I heard the marriage ceremony was today. So we can speculate and expect her arrival not within more than two days.”


I was puzzled for a moment about my doing. ‘What can I do?’ I returned home and informed everything to mom what I had been informed by Samser Dai.


The condition of my dad was worsening. We kept on giving him the water time to time. But he wasn’t getting any better. Now he had become too weak even to go to the toilet himself.


Despite our disability to serve him with doctor and medicine, mom brought ‘a shallow dish’ near bed where dad was lying down. We ended up sleeping near the bed of dad that night. In such fettle, another day also spent. We couldn’t find any doctor or the helper at the hospital the whole day. And I happened to bear the bereavement as I lost my father.

Since that day on, my mother became the widow but the villagers started to assume her as a witch that she ate her husband to death, they would say rigidly, and also they blamed her she haunted people. Whoever died around the village after then was thought to be dead because of her wandering evilness.


It’s less hurting to forget the pain my mom and I tolerated in the aftermath of my father’s death.

.....

Now I have become the doctor and willingly been working in the same locality where my villagers live. My mother has been the ‘Doctorni Aamoi!’ And we often wait for our dad to come home lighting candle every night although we know he won’t come back from where he has gone. We hope he won’t call us as early as he went there untimely.

Beginning of My Writing Career

Suman Bhattarai

14 September 2018, Nepal

           I was born in the year of Maoist initiation to revolt against the system of government (1995). After 7/8 years, still there was the movement going on and I had been growing my intellectual senses. As the rebels would come and go they would leave some books and while their stay, sing some revolutionary communist songs. I wasn’t influenced much but, I don’t hesitate to say, it obviously had certain impact on me. The books they left used to be found under the pillow or bed or on the ceiling beams of our wooden house. I didn’t dare to read those books at the very moment but I would love to compile them in the bookshelf. Later on, no doubt, I read some of them which grabbed my interest. One of the finest books they left and I read was Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

           Whatever I remember now is I started living my literary environment since my childhood. The ‘Morning Loris’ sung by my mother while rotating the ‘Jaanto’ are the most memorable ones. I think I was 4 years old, since then my father began narrating me the folktales that were, off course, childish and were for the children’s mental development and would give moral lessons. In between the transition of going to bed and falling asleep, my dad used to narrate me the stories often; and sometimes he would recite poems as well as songs he would sing in a low but sweet voice that would evaporate the positive vibes on my mind. Happily I would fall asleep after then. This was in a sense duty of my dad I had given because I was such a persistent guy that wouldn’t sleep until he would be opportune to listen to those stories.

           I was more intimate to my mom than my dad but still she could not be able to tell me stories because she, most of the times, would be busy doing household activities and chores. In the evening before sleep, she would prepare dinner for us all. We were seven children altogether and it was really a big family. She had the burden to feed the cattle too. So, since she woke up till bed, she would respire the breath of busy times.

            I suppose the very first story my dad narrated for me was the mischievous activities of Lord Krishna when he was a child, but not the pervert acts of him he did later when he was turning to frisky youth that I read when I was grown up. “Story of Shishir Bashanta” was the most painful story I heard on my bed. I could never imagine my life without mother since then. Further, Muna Madan in a narrative form he presented that also touched my soul with pain, grief and compelling guilt which I myself read later maybe more than five times.

“Story of Madhu Malati”, many other fairytales, stories like “Tortoise and Rabbit”, comic and also diplomatic stories of Akbar and Birbal, “Rope of Ashes”, “How Much Land a Man Needs” and such stories I heard when I was too young and those stories were all narrated by my dad after we would go to bed.

Ramayana, Maha Bharata, Bhagabata Geeta and several times I heard and read Swosthani. Those religious texts were so very nicely knitted and the acts within the lines were such a mesmerising that I used to be dazzled and puzzled. Our culture is even such a rich culture where we get to hear ‘slokes’, slogans, songs and religious stories that tell the story of Gods and Goddesses and that inspires us to live our life as such or accordingly.

Before I completed my school, I had read around fifty novels and some anthologies of poems. I had been addicted to listen to radio. Many poems, stories, and songs I heard were from radio. One of many radio programs was “Shruti-Sambeg” that I stayed tuning when I was in plus-two level. Achyut Ghimire’s voice and the novels and stories he presented were more that heart touching. The school and college courses were also designed in such way that would encourage one to read literary texts. As a student of literature, I suppose I have read around half a thousand books or more now. And the most significant thing is that writing career comes adjoining to reading one. When we read other’s text, we are inspired to write.

And the most  funny and interesting thing I suppose you are going to hear is I started writing love-poems when I fell in love that was one-sided, no doubt, in class 9 and I think most of you also wrote such poems at least once in your life. Some of you may have kept on writing and some stopped that is the different matter.

As I would read, a mysterious voice would evaporate inside me. That suffocation, that fear and that enthusiasm to rehearse those characters in read texts might be the ones that pushed me to write. At the beginning, I wrote essays as it used to be compulsory for us to write and submit them to our teachers in school-level. Gradually, the trend of writing poems I adapted as my brother and also my dad were habitual in it. As influenced by the stories and novels I read and the sequence of events in them, I started imagining similar kinds of stories that are existed in society and I wrote them. The poems, short stories, lyrical poems (Ghajals), and the life-narrative I often create. Some of the ghajals and also some short stories of mine have been recited and read from the radio programs respectively. And still I am writing which I don’t think I will stop but I will be reading and writing more and more often in coming days.

14 September 2018, Nepal            I was born in the year of Maoist initiation to revolt against the system of government (1995). After 7/8 years, still there was the movement going on and I had been growing my intellectual senses. As the rebels would come and go they would leave some books and while their …Continue readingBeginning of My Writing Career

Mercy Development!

Suman Bhattarai

21 April, 2018

           To imitate something, there must be something. A parrot caged inside the cage also can create her own world but who dares to feel she is born for living such life? A man can stand even if there is nothing accessible around him but the walls walled all around where he learns to stand still imitating the erecting walls. But to stand still is not a true evaporation of life. Today’s human is similar to those standing walls that are totally artificial, voiceless, tasteless, and neither does that give any fragrance. And it has been indeed the choice of so called modern human who chooses to breathe through oxygen cylinder rather than the tranquil breeze hovering around the poplar field. First we give a touch to a pigeon, pluck its wings, and blame it later for its inability to fly. While defining development and musing modernisation, merciful misery has been manipulated which lead human beings might repent in coming era which I don’t think is so far away.

            Some days ago, while wandering through the street, I saw a girl walking with pride wearing a T-shirt printed ‘This Bitch Laying!’ in front. What should I understand and how should I react seeing such literature printed in T-shirt, I don’t know. But, yes, obviously I can speculate that the notion of shame of 20^th century women has been their glory these days. To be modern is to accept offensive manner normally; this is what I can establish in my mind finding such change around the city I dwell currently.

            I was born and grown up to 18 years in a remote village. I still have some reminiscence about my childhood of imitating dove which helps me being nostalgic too. We all the cousins used to gather in a particular place at dusk where the trees would dance with pleasing wind. The purpose behind get-together would be to play, ‘pretence of dove.’ The older brothers and sisters would climb the trees easily and construct the artistic nest of dove with their enthusiastic skills but we the small ones would remain at the ground because of incapability to climb the tree, we would dig the small holes in the ground and knit previously collected straw in the shape of dove’s nest. We all the cousins together would sing, “Kurle Dhukur Kur Kur Kur…!!!” Nowadays, children don’t play such games connected to nature. It is not surprising because to imitate dove, first one must see a dove and observe its living but there we see no dove around villages these days.

            Doves aren’t seen in the corn field. Sparrows don’t fly around the roof of our home these days. The grains scattered in the front yard get rotten but it is not swallowed by any swallow. Those cuckoos that would sing ‘cuckoo-cuckoo’ unseen under the trees aren’t heard and those hiding trees are also excavated. Only we hear is the sound of partridge. We are opportune to hear the partridge because we haven’t stopped planting the corn yet and they feel safe enough to chat in the corn field. The isolated and wild animals and birds are burned with the burning fire that is put by the human in the hope of getting new grazing field after destroying the eco-system of Jungle. The human-centered worldly benefit is hampering the animals, plants and also the humans day by day that seems to be unknown to human but in fact it isn’t.

            The place of Dandi-Biyo has been snatched by cricket, those collaborative marriage-games where the soil used to be dish of marriage-party have been overtaken by wrestling, and the video-games are in existence in place of making-house-of-sand game. Cow is imagined by a child watching documentary about cow, but she is never encouraged to visit the cow-ranch. Following occidental concept of modernization is creating the existential crisis in Eastern culture, I feel.

            Such a change in ten years duration wasn’t imagined even in 100 years by my brain. But it happened. This happens, I am sure, because we see fall of Icarus but we don’t see those intrinsic meanings that particular painting is flowering. Only the trees that are assumed and worshipped as representative of God are protected/untouched, remaining most of the trees even of the isolated places are cut down. The areas covered by dense forest are used for cultivation. First, the trees are chopped, then the land is plowed and the saplings of corn, banana or potatoes are grown there. Simultaneously, in some places, the lands which are owned by the landlords are left barren. The people of villages prefer buying rice from the market rather than growing it in the field. The organic food isn’t found and the organic vegetable is grown only in front of their house but not in their agricultural field which is not even partly sufficient for the family, the vegetable survived by the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers is sold in market that is purchased in high price as it looks very attractive, fresh and without any touch of diseased insect.

            Last month with the purpose of writing this essay, I visited my original district Udayapur, where I had spent my childhood. Udayapur is popular for Sal-tree. Those iron-like strong Sal-trees are very few now because of its trafficking to India; I came to know after my visit. The road (Madhyapahadi Rajmarg) I go through to reach my village is constructed by Japanese government pulling nature into consideration of not destroying it. But the neighboring districts, such as Ramechhap, Dolakha, Okhaldhunga are connecting this road to their headquarters without any contemplation of preserving trees if possible. Only the goal of them is to dig a road which needs to be as short and straight as possible. Those districts are already desert-like due to less rain and only the leafless shrubs are seen mostly in almost all seasons. And now those shrubs are also excavated. I am confused where this development leads us up to!

            Calmly speaking, I don’t see any compassion between a mother and child even in my village. Each and every individual is busy indulging with internet and technology. A son goes closer to his father only when he needs money; in the same way a daughter goes closer of her mother only when the dinner is ready. While having meal also, everybody is busy liking the photos posted by their friends or relatives on Facebook or in Instagram. The medium of conversation and meeting is performed through Messenger, Skype, Viber or Whatsapp. I have a nephew of age 10 who normally doesn’t talk only for a single minute in a whole day with his dad or mom because he is mostly busy studying science fiction and watching those movies related to science fiction.

“Mercy to so-called Development!” I wish to yell that shrivels under my throat. Even if I do that I know I will be excluded from this modern world as I will be taken as a clown who can’t be fit in the developed world of today’s modernization.

21 April, 2018            To imitate something, there must be something. A parrot caged inside the cage also can create her own world but who dares to feel she is born for living such life? A man can stand even if there is nothing accessible around him but the walls walled all around where he …Continue readingMercy Development!