Sunday, October 18, 2015

My time with Kale

Oct 18, 2015- The mayor of Ratnanagar Municipality was riding down the street in his black sports utility vehicle. He ran over my dog, Kale. 

After the ceremony, I walked back to the city. Of course, I was depressed. I started to think about how I had first met Kale. It was seven years ago, when he was a puppy. He was like a baby. He never complained. My father had a fondness for Kale, too. He was such a captivating dog—my new dog, a fine great one with a black tail, delicate ears, a rich texture, charming eyes and a wilderness of patchy colours that lit up in his body like sunshine. 

He was like a member of the family; we loved him and petted him. No one tried to give him a new name like ‘Tiger’ or ‘Rocky’ or ‘Hunter’. Friends and relatives even started to call me ‘Kale ko ba’ (‘Kale’). I suspect that they were just trying to rile me up and show some type of dominance. I didn’t care so much. My name was not Kale, after all. 

The servants in our house were all kind to me and were fond of Kale. So, as you can see, mine was an easy life with Kale around. My sweet little Kale, my “very dearest puppy”, as some people would call him, made my happiness perfect. 

My time with Kale began on a hot Sunday in summer. I was at a Chitwan cricket ground—perhaps playing in a district-level tournament between Ratnanagar and Narayanghat. 

Father had gone to Kathmandu to see some of his old friends, and when he returned in the evening, he bought a surprise gift for my little brother, Dhorji. We children had never contemplated getting a pet, and our mother had never liked the idea. So when I went home in the evening after winning the game against Narayanghat and celebrating a bit with friends, I saw everyone in the family talking to a Kale. They were uttering words like, ‘Kale aija. Chu chu, Kale’. I asked Dad why he had brought home such a small dog and whom it was meant for. Dad didn’t respond. I had been late in arriving for the doggy party that evening.

The next morning, I saw Dhorji playing with Kale. The previously unknown dog had already been given a name by Dhorji and Father. So I was left with no choice but to call him Kale. I don’t know why Dhorji, who is just five years old, so enjoyed gathering his phucchhe friends and giving Kale stuff to eat and play with. He and his friends even smiled and touched Kale’s body without hesitation. I don’t know why phucchhes are never afraid of anything, but even when they got a bit closer to Kale they would shout aloud, which must have terrified Kale.

Dhorji was allowed to keep Kale in his room most of the time. I wasn’t even allowed to touch Kale—Father always reminded me whom the dog had been bought for. ‘He’s not your toy,’ he said angrily. So it was not my toy, but somehow I felt deep affection for Kale, and he felt the same for me. I still remember when my grandfather died. Kale was around then, and people could not believe that he had stayed in Aryaghat and never, it seemed, intended to leave. It was the talk of the town, and people gossiped about Kale (‘Kukur’), saying that he was very loyal to our family. There were hundreds of mourners at my grandfather’s funeral service, and Kale ambled up to near the funeral pyre and lay down next to it for seven days.


Kale knew that I had affection for him when I freed him from Dhorji’s captivity to meet the love of his life. When he saw Kali during Kukur Tihar, he studied my eyes and, with his tongue hanging out, immediately rushed to her. 

Kali was just like Kale, but a bit shorter, and with less hair on her body than him. She had very nice ears and longish legs, though.  

“Where are you, Kali?” shouted Ms Sabina Dhakal, Kali’s owner. When she saw my Kale panting and making love to Kali, Ms Sabina started shouting at me.  

‘Grow up!’ I said. ‘They have needs, like us! Let my Kale enjoy his freedom and fulfil his doggy needs, with careful attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort. Let him be able to truly care about his own life, making love in myriad, pretty little sexy ways, every day, to your Kali’. 

“That’s Kale getting married in Kartik, and that too to Kali…” laughed a neighbour, seeing Kale and Kali.  

“That dog is shameless. Ram… Ram… Ram. Hare Krishna,” said a passing Hindu priest.  

“Untangle them,” said a young man, pelting my Kale with a stone.  

“You did this purposefully, didn’t you?” said Sabina, staring at me angrily. “I’ll show you and your Kale someday,” she continued.

She was really pissed off by the sight of my Kale mating with her Kali; however, my Kale was not in any mood whatsoever to stop making love to Kali. Sabina vanished from my sight in a flash, murmuring some bizarre words that hardly made any sense then.

It’s astounding how the festival season passes so quickly. Some neighbours were really aggravated that we had Kale in our house. They were a bit afraid, but this was understandable as Kale was very hyperactive and often became ebullient. Once a neighbour’s uncle shouted at Father, saying that Kale might be dangerous to his newborn son.

“Give your dog a preventive injection. He might be of danger to my new-born son; otherwise I’ll kill your Kale dog,” he said.   

It was really unfortunate that this neighbour’s uncle and his baby son had been killed in an airplane crash, but that was not our Kale’s fault. 

After Kale’s death, I saw Dhorji’s friends talking about their memories of Kale:  

“It was only few months ago when Kale was with us, and now he is gone,” said Dhorji.  

“Kale had the biggest personality ever,” said Dhorji’s friend. “I really miss him,” said Dhorji’s best friend.  “Until the very end, we were together,” said Dhorji.

On that fateful day, I put on my coat and hat and started off to the market. I knew that the back door was open, and I could get outdoors without being seen. I got my Kale ready, because I was going to take him too. I checked for my wallet and found that it wasn’t in the back pocket of my denim jeans, so I went upstairs to fetch it from my room. When I got back, I saw Kale lying on the street with blood all over. Father had gone to file a police report about Kale’s death. I saw him near the city’s central police station riding on his Hero Honda bike. He saw me too, but he looked elsewhere. I knew why he was frustrated. Maybe it was I who should be blamed for Kale’s accident. What if I had simply gone to the market without my wallet? Why did I have to go to the market at that time? “I am the one responsible for Kale’s death,” I thought.

He was a good dog. I learned a lot from him, especially through his loyalty and kindness to our family. His friendship was truer than today’s so-called ‘Facebook friends,’ where you collect thousands of them while communicating with only a few. At least my Kale was with me in real settings, in my house, together with me always. I could share my jokes, sorrow, sadness, happiness, and stories with him when there was nobody around to turn to. Now that he was gone, I didn’t know whether my life would be the same.

After hitting Kale, the mayor got out of his car and looked at the scene that he had created with his brand-new SUV. His black boots were shining in the hot summer day, where my poor Kale lay bloody, legs broken, dead.  

“Is he still alive?”

I remained silent. I didn’t know how to respond to such a bizarre question.  

“It was a stupid dog, so it died stupidly, like a dog,” said an inspector who was the mayor’s bodyguard. 

“Darling, isn’t this the one?” he said to someone inside the SUV. 

I saw a girl wearing a pink frock getting out of the vehicle. My eyes looked up from Kale and remained wide open for a while.



Published: The Kathmandu Post
fiction park
Posted on: 18-10-2015 09:10 


Sunday, July 5, 2015

The darkest of aftermaths

JUL 05 - Dear Dr Ghorle,
Anxiety is all around us. I am gradually realising that I cannot blindly trust the security, the integrity, and the confidentiality of our communications. I am sorry for being so ignorant and not responding to your encoded messages promptly. Because of war, and self-doubt, it was difficult for me to decode your brain-computer encoded messages. I am proud that you are writing a piece on Nepal’s Third Great Earthquake in one of the top magazines in Nepal to inform the readers about its consequences and what can be done to overcome the effects of the disaster. I must say, it is an interesting read. I was very young when I first visited Nepal with my father and my memory of the place is a blur. So I might not be of help in improving your piece. Perhaps you could ask my grandmother, who still lives in Chitwan. My grandmother resides in Ratnanager, 2nd Street, Chitwan. That is my home address, too. She will be glad to offer you 
her help. She also remembers the First Great Earthquake of 1934 and the Second Great Quake of 2015. I would have joined you, but I am deprived of the luxury of air travel, after the war.
Regarding  my sister Maya, unfortunately, I am unaware of her whereabouts. She has been out of contact ever since she disappeared right after our father’s death anniversary a year ago; nobody has heard from her since. The worst I fear is that she may be dead by now. Some of her friends reported that they were planning to go on a picnic to Pokhara.
Father, as you have ascertained, spent most of his life working on the antinuclear programmes for some secret research company that we were unaware of. When home, he would spend his time reading piles and piles of research journals, but to tell you the truth, I can’t remember what they were about. When the Third World War started, he was busy working for this private contractor, and he always used to say that his invention would change the course of the entire world. He later built a small laboratory next to our barn. Ms Molly, the only love of my life, used to live there then—I love her so much. Most of the time, Father would lock himself up in his lab, doing his experiments and what not. Smoke fumes would rise from the vent. Sometimes strange sounds—like a sonic boom—would shake our house and the neighbouring buildings. I do not intend to be insensitive, but I have some idea of how it feels to be inside a shaking building. 
Out of my father’s thousands of great experiments, one small one was on how to stop earthquakes from occurring. He never published his findings in any reputed scientific journals of his time, perhaps because he knew that companies or secret government organisations would patent his inventions, and they would make a business out them. I have some of his manuscripts—the ones that I was able to save—that I want to send to you. But before that, I would like to give you an account of what has happened in our lives since.
The day before he died, Father seemed very happy. He said that his research team had been successful in developing antinuclear machinery that could block nuclear missiles, irrespective of where they had been launched from. I remember him telling me that he was very proud, and that he had become ‘life’, a saviour of the world. He left for work early the next day, but he didn’t come back. That was on the eve of Dashain.
From what Maya told me later, I learned that I was playing with Ms Molly that day; the TV was on. Masha and the Baby Bear was interrupted to telecast an emergency news report. Soon, bomb explosions consumed the TV screen and within minutes the power was cut. The phone rang. Mum, a few minutes into the phone conversation, collapsed on the carpet. Then, we didn’t know what had happened, but later we were told that father and his entire team were murdered. 
Maya later explained to me that his team had been asked to join a meeting with the top delegates of all nations. These people, who were admired and respected throughout the world, saw Father’s invention as a threat to their political agendas. They gassed him in his own 
laboratory.
Back to the manuscripts: they were always lying around in Father’s laboratory. Some of his greatest secrets were just there, lying untouched. Later, Maya turned it into her personal property. She never gave it to me or to Mum. She said that his works were nothing but bits and pieces of rotten and boring prose, scrapped drawings, and mathematical jargons. According to her, there was nothing in the papers for us to gain and learn from. I remember, once, she tried to burn them up. But somehow, she has managed to keep them a secret from everybody. Even the people from the National Security agencies could not find the papers.
Some years later, it was in the news that a blue-turban-wearing young man had started some anti-nuclear-missile experiment and that it had saved our part of the planet from the political elites. I think I don’t have to tell you all this as it was reported in both parts of the planet by the leading news media houses. You must have heard that in my part of the world, the citizens had stoned these political elites to death for starting the war. The war led to the plummeting of the population from billions to a few millions. We were lucky to have survived this great catastrophe in our region.
I do understand how you feel right now; in the aftermath of the quake, you want to motivate and inspire some of your people to return home. But that’s not easy to do when the world is so divided. We are so divided that I don’t even know what your part of the earth is called now. 
The place you live, do you still call 
it Nepal as it was called before 
the war?


I want to inform you that I feel a bit hesitant to respond to your proposal to come back to Nepal and start a new life there. I would have tried to find my way to you if it were not for Ms Molly. I love you, but you know how I love her more. I don’t know whether this comes as a surprise to you or not, but I am already married to Ms Molly now. We have been together for the last 27 years.
I still remember the day when Father brought Ms Molly home. I was one. She didn’t have a lot to say as she used combinations of the utterance ‘Meow’; but that was more than enough for us to communicate. You may wonder if she is able to fulfill my desires, but I want to tell you that she has grown big. She is five-feet-six-inches-tall now. She is less a cat and more a human now. She protects me. She is there when I need her the most.
You also write that you want to raise a family with me. It would be one of the nicest things to give birth to your babies. But yesterday, I stayed up all night and thought about it. What is their use? What use are they when people in power will continually start a new world war every few year or so? What use are they when every day a new calamity strikes the earth, killing millions? What have we done to this world?
Enclosed with this letter are 450 manuscript pages written by my father. It is a walkthrough on the process of subduing the effects of an earthquake when it strikes. In our part of the earth, we have implemented this scientific process, and I hope you can use these pages to stop earthquakes from happening in your part of the earth too. 
I cannot wait to read your reply.
x
Krista
PS: Please do send me your brain-computer transmission of words more securely.
Sent from: sessiK dna sguH
Posted on: 2015-07-05 08:42
Published: The Kathmandu Post (under different name in print)

To Err is Human?