Fiction: Monolog für Iowa (Satis Shroff)

MONOLOGUE.

I and my brother were young men. We left our homes in the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas. I was the older one and my father had barked at me:
“Go to Nepal and never come home again.” Nepal, in the Nepalese sense of the world, meant Kathmandu. We were living in Nepal but didn’t feel that we were living in the country because Kathmandu was Nepal. That’s where the King nd Queen lived in their Narayanhiti Palace. That’s where the ministries were, that’s where the colleges and universities were, temples, Rana-palaces and pagodas with golden roofs.
And also its share of hippies, hashish, tourists,rising prices and expensive rooms to rent.
My younger brother couldn’t bear the beatings at the hands of his old man.
.
I sobbed and stifled my sorrow and anger.
 

My younger brother went to Dharan in Eastern Nepal and enlisted in the British Army depot to become a Gurkha, a soldier in King Edwards Own Gurkha Rifles.
He came home the day he became a recruit, with a bald head, as though his father had died. Normally Nepalese shave their heads only when a parent dies when Vedic rites are performed.
He looked forward to the parades and hardships that went under the name of physical exercises. And thought of stern, merciless sergeants and corporals, of soccer games and regimental drills.
A young man’s thrill of war-films and Scotch and Gurkha-rum evenings. He’d heard it all from the Gurkhas who’s returned in the Dasain festivals.
There was Kunjo Lama his maternal cousin, who boasted of his judo-prowess and showed photos of his British gal, a pale blonde from Chichester in an English living-room.

It was a glorious sunset, the clouds blazing in scarlet and orange hues, as I rode on the back of a lorry, sacks full of rice and salt. I stared at the Siwaliks and Mahabharat mountains dwindling behind me.
As the sun set in the Himalayas, the shadows grew longer in the vales.
I saw the golden moon, shining from a cloudy sky.

The same moon I’d seen on a poster in my uncle’s kitchen as I ate cross-legged my dal-bhat-shikar after the hand-washing ritual.

Was the moon a metaphor? Was it my fate to travel to Kathmandu, leaving behind my childhood friends and relatives in the hills, who were struggling for their very existence in the foothills of the Kanchenjunga, where the peaks were not summits to be scaled, with or without oxygen, but the abodes of the Gods and Goddesses.
A realm where bhuts and prets, boksas and boksis, demons and dakinis prevailed.

Glossary:
Ranas: a ruling class that usurped the throne and ruled for 104 years in Nepal
Gurkhas: Nepali soldiers serving in Nepalese, Indian and British armies
Dal-bhat: Linsen und Reis
Shikar: Fleischgericht
Bhuts: demons
Boksas & boksis: male & female witches