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Writer/Director has
learned hard lessons in order to please you. Some lessons were
etched onto the lining of my stomach by gastric juices boiling with
impatience [I was hungry and for long, too, my kind brothers and
sisters who would have certainly fed me on your unending generosity;
and when has hunger been reluctant with its lessons? And such
lessons are etched deep on the unforgiving concrete of urban
sidewalks]. Some lessons were jabbed into my ribs with angry lathis
of Mumbai Municipality Police, strained with colorful Marathi swear
words. Some lessons I embraced wearily, and some willingly—but how
much will can be lighted by the dim dank streetlamps of this
gaudily, blindingly bright city on the Arabian Sea?
That apostle, on his way to kill Christ, was blinded by faith, and
so many around seem to have inherited just that—blind faith, and
blindly and faithfully they stumble around even as I sit aside to
watch them go from one source to another, one respite to another,
stumbling ever more with their multiplying thirst, unaware that
their springs of comfort spew only coarse, dry sand. Some say
monarchy, some say a republic—but all forget that Gyanendra or
Girija, it is their entire generation that has failed us, and only
by effacing our blundering fathers can any hope be brought to our
ailments. As long as that generation walks, they will avert their
eyes from our urgent pleas, and in their own glorified gore they
will paint themselves in Jungi colors, and imagine that will
suffice. Flag-makers and Shroud-sellers will never go out of
business as long as that generation—of Gyanendra and Girija alike,
of Makune and Prachande alike, of Baburam and pupp[et]y Tiger-Bahadur
alike—become both the blockade and the bolstering of our humble
efforts. Can you cringe with me, my sympathetic brothers and
sisters, can you cringe with me now—your mouths are filled with just
that coarse sand of despair, and where is the Undespair that the
good-looking Algerian talked about? Even while I curl to hide from
persistent hunger and Mumbai Municipal Police, I am afraid a brick
will come hurtling to me from the angry gallis of Kathmandu, or that
the next lathi descending upon me will be that of a duty bound
police-people [for you see, my sisters, Suresh Dhital, this aspirant
fool of a trade with no takers, has also learned what they call
“political correctness”—although it escapes him how politics could
ever be correct, and how, if politics could once be correct, it
would be required any further to dance atop our heads], fighting
those who fight regression. You, O my Faithful and Fickle Readers,
should protest my many digressions, and tie me back to my labored
words.
And, so much has changed, my brothers and sisters! One man named
after a large meat-eating cat has been set up as the hopes of our
ailing nation, and he extends uncertain hands to measure the pulse
of our troubled Mother, but how does one trust that he will not bite
off our Mother’s wrist? This mumbling fool has bitten off her hand
in that pretext once before, hasn’t he? He has changed stripes
too—this weak tiger, this papier-mâché effigy, this many stringed
puppet—and he has changed his stripes once too often. And that
tobacco hawker king of ours—is he humbled that this Son-in-Law of
his devoted aristocracy has somersaulted back into power? Or, does
the cigar-puffing, weak breasted Machiavellian maker of conceits sit
playing with the stuffed tigers in his isolated palace? That verily
striped cat consulted his astrologer before assuming the premiership
of our country—even before he could accept himself as our chosen
leader, that weakling had to listen to a fat Brahmin squealing
scriptural mumbo-jumbo. And I say—what better could that mumbo-jumbo
have been, even compared to mine? My constitutional representative,
sitting in for me and my 23 million brothers and sisters and those
ten thousand slaughtered at the whim of a few maniacs—before he
could even fart on a chair thrown to him as alms and as a bone of
contention among other equal geriatric clowns—he had to consult his
Jyotish! How much resolve can that man possibly have? How much
strength in his bladders?
Mark my words, my brothers and sisters and equal sufferers from
distant lands and dense shadows of bat-laden lanes of Jamal, this
meat-eating cat will run to and fro, incapable of holding his
bladders and gnashing his plastic fangs, whining before one door and
running to another, his loyalty as divided as a plate of momo among
thirteen children, and one hyena will laugh to drown the din of the
traffic on Durbarmarg, and that hyena will be puffing on a cigar not
of his factory’s make, but imported from Cuba where a much more
admirable dictator combs his beard.
And so much has changed. Titli has left me for good; there are no
other butterflies in sight. Worrying about Nepal doesn’t help me
much—one afternoon, as I wondered how the blood of innocent children
must have run downhill to paint the terraces with Prachanda’s
self-adulating ambitions, I inadvertently spilled scalding coffee on
an A list actress who had waxed her leg just the evening before.
Retribution was swift—not the dilly-dallying of our Netas in
Kathmandu who can’t agree even over disagreeing, but a sweeping
damnation tinted by a woman’s scorn, and hell was humbled in its
fury, let me tell you, my brothers and sisters. And now I am like
one out of a Rohinton Mistry novel [you see—I have also taken to
educating myself on my immediate vicinity, just as unsure as you are
about whether or not there is a return to Mother fated in my
charts], living from this mouthful to the next, nodding into dreams
under streetlamps that try to pry into the landscapes of sleep’s
conjuring. Only our affection remains at this turbulent time, my
readers! And let’s not abandon each other now!
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