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An unfulfilled wish
MAR 26 -
We all knew he was on the brink of “bidding adieu”.
On the night of March 19, when I went home from work, I requested the office van to stop outside Sujata Koirala’s Mandikhatar residence. I got off the van, said my silent goodbye to Girija Prasad Koirala, and requested the driver to take me home.
There was nothing overtly sentimental about my goodbye. As someone who’s apolitical, I have never held special sympathies for any political party. With people like Ganesh Man Singh, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai and GP, however, I’ve felt a different kind of affinity. I’ve always thought of them more as friends of my late grandfather, who was himself a Congress man, than as politicians. Not that I knew any of these figures closely; the equation being the same as my association with Raghuji Panta or Gopal Shakya as my father’s friends. Though there’s no personal association with any of them, these names strike a distant childhood chord in me.
This was the time of the Panchayat era, when “underground” politicians gathered in private homes to discuss political agendas. My grandfather was a Central Committee member of Nepali Congress then, and his house was considered safe to visit. Our white veranda with its pretty shell bits would disappear under uncountable pairs of shoes on those days. My grandfather’s baithak would be filled with people—some sitting on the neat white chakatis on the carpet, others on the long maroon sofa.
Entering the baithak was a treat for the children in the house. We had to either wait for Saturday cleaning sessions, or just peep through the key hole and wait for visitors.
Days ahead of the day of Congress meetings, the house would be filled with preparations. Nimkins, dozens and dozens of eggs on their paper crates, sweet khajuris deep fried in ghee, litres and litres of milk for tea and Newari culinary delights, with all the women in the house busy! Everyone said the “Kangres” was close to changing something in the country. But for four- or five-year-olds in the house like me, the only excitement was the opportunity to walk into the living room and try the sofa.
So, when the day arrived, the “Kangres” men would all make their entry through the back door, crossing a dirt-filled alley, instead of the main door facing the street. I didn’t quite understand why the men came so early in the morning and left only at dusk or stayed back sometimes, talking late into the night over aila. But there was a sort of excitement about the way they came into the house through the backdoor. The alley, now a black-topped road, was in those days a dingy galli, filled with human excreta, garbage and what not!
The meetings went on for ages. And the children stole turns to venture close to the living room and flee before they got arrested in the stares of the elders. My impertinence guided me to walk right into the room one such afternoon. The “Kangres” men were not the object of my interest. The great big maroon sofa was!
Sitting on the sofa were Ganesh Man Singh, Girija Babu and Damannath Dhungana, who I didn’t recognise at the time. Ganesh Man was sitting in the centre and that’s where I directly headed. He made me sit on his lap and asked for my name; I asked him his. Upon being told, I told him that my father’s distant cousin had run away with a boy called Ganesh! The room broke into laughter. Later, my ears would be tweaked for brandishing a family secret and I would be denied another entry into the room when the Congress was meeting. But for then, I sang a series of nursery rhymes amid adulations.
Baa, baa, black sheep was followed by tales of Cinderella and Snow White. My grandfather would later tell my mother that Girija had told him his grand daughter was a great singer. He no more held my audacity for the “intrusion” into their ‘secret’ party meeting against me.
I don’t really have a memory of particularly what Girija Babu was like at that time. But I do have a vague picture of a lanky man with an aquiline nose, who came to those meetings and always sat on the longest sofa in the room.
A total contrast to my grandfather’s baithak was my father’s room in our ancestral home, where Communist Students’ meetings took place. The room had moodhas with chakatis on them, and was frequented by Manjul, Raghuji Panta, Ryan and Ramesh Shrestha, Pramesh and Pramod Hamal, Lochan Bhattarai, Sambhu Rai and Shyam Tamot. A stark contrast to the clean-shaven men in grandfather’s meetings, these men liked singing and reading out to each other. I understood their meetings as song and book sessions that lulled me to sleep.
My father, a commerce student, had been issued an arrest warrant for singing “Koi ta bhane jahaj ma harara” in a folk song competition, and was deeply involved in the “students’ revolutionary movement”. Their medium for social change was music. My grandfather once asked my father to drive Girija Babu, Kishunji, Shailaja Acharya, Sudhir Upadhyaya, Marshal Julum Shakya, and Ganesh Man Singh home after one meeting. Girija later complimented my grandfather on my father’s intelligence and said he respected his communist point of view.
After becoming a television journalist, I must have spoken Girija Prasad Koirala’s name the most. I have quoted him over and over in the past seven years; that, being my only relationship with him. But, I had always wanted to meet him at some point of time, and tell him I was the little girl who had sung him nursery rhymes in Kul Bahadur Shakya’s living room.
Posted on: 2010-03-27 08:22
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