Expression»
Notes on my destiny
NOV 23 - The moment I enter the Valley,nausea thrashes my well-being. A chill seeps into my bones and I close my eyes. Near glacial grandeur of Himal, I had in fact remained quite warm. Instantly I regret my return to this slum of human destiny, this ‘ashtray’ of shattered dreams.
After a while I open my eyes to see a theater of human misery thriving deviously. It appears as if overnight they have overpopulated this once-an-exotic village of huge brass bells. Overnight a flood of vehicles has filled the spacious squares this village with their life-strangling fumes. Overnight a demon has sucked the fragrances of this once an intoxicating valley, leaving it a deserted, wrinkled and crumpled sheet of a Daily. In a fraction of a second, its centuries-old silence has been shattered permanently. Without a regret or guilt.
I open my eyes to enter this labyrinth of nightmares, nonplussed at the fact that the floral fields I celebrated in my dreams never existed.
I open my eyes to discover the first casualty of this expansion was nothing but silence.
Yes, the silence. A cadence of a melody I have carried like a sacred song all these years, a nucleus of my water-wells I have somehow unscrupulously misplaced.
Awestruck, I realize I’ve remained at ease all through the week while I walked alone on those mountainous mule paths. But the moment I entered the ugly city, I lost the syllables of the secret song that I had kept humming all these days. In the cities, I realize, I’ve spent the saddest moments of my life.
Back at New Road I see Poet Mahendra Shahi who has come back from the United States for a brief stay. He has also published a book of Nepali poems here. Showing the dummy copy of the book, he repeats what he said a few years ago. “This is no place for RD. You must immediately leave these parts of the world. Your talent will perish here.”
He talks of what authors of Asian origin have done in the West. “You can make millions of rupees with one book. But here what do you do with your works. This New Road fame is all that tickles your ego. But I ask, is it enough?”
He has been learning Spanish and German in the States and is planning to translate some of the best-known Latin American poets into Nepali. I remember him as an aggressive and angry poet but a decade-long stay in the States seems to have mellowed him.
He’s sad about the fate of Nepal in the years to come. He also foresees wild scenario if the contemporary crisis continues to ravage the already fragile nation. Of literary scene he seems out of touch. He very hesitatingly accepts the younger poets that I introduce him at Peepal Bot-Buddhisagar Chepain, Chanky Shrestha and Pramod Snehi. He seems very fond of Jhumpa Lehari and dismisses American poets as uninteresting when compared to Latin American poets. I discuss the Special Issue of American magazine Atlanta focused on Latin American poetry. He laments how best of world literature reaches here quite late. It takes sometime for it to come into English and from there it takes decades to reach the regional literatures of South Asia.
He sees Nepalese bureaucracy as the root cause of all crises here. He wonders how these huge houses are coming up like mushrooms. “ After a decade- long stay in the States even I can’t afford to build a house in the capital. It’s corrupt bureaucracy that thrives in Nepal,” he believes.
He’s one of those fellow poets who have been asking me to migrate. “But maybe,” this time he says, “ maybe you’re destined to be here, like I was destined to live away from my motherland. Maybe it’s Nepal that has become your destiny.”
(The writer can be reached at yuyutsurd@yahoo.com)Posted on: 2003-11-22 10:47
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