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(Nepalese mother smoking a katuwa (crude cigarette)Art by satisshroff (c) 2009
A NEPAL TALK (Satis Shroff)
A German school teacher invites me
To talk about Nepal
And to introduce a traditional dish to her German class.
The teacher, a lady in her forties,
Likes it multicultural.
She asks her pupils with foreign parents
To greet the class in outlandish tongues.
The bicultural children comply,
And the class learns to say:
‘Good morning, Bon Soir, Namaste,
In English, French and Nepali.
A class full of curious children await me.
We make momos and little hands help in turn.
In the audio-visual room the slide projector has no bulb.
An Italian Hausmeister turns up with a new one
And voila! Our adventure can begin.
I show them colour transparencies
Of Nepal, my homeland.
Temples, streets and school-children and ethnic Nepalis
From Kathmandu Valley and the hills.
Living Goddesses, potters, farmers, sadhus and priests,
Overdressed and underdressed Nepalis.
Rhinos, tigers and elephants in the subtropical flatlands.
King Birendra, Queen Aishwarya and the Royal Gurkha Guards.
After the slides we return
To the classroom to try out the momos.
The German kids relish the Nepali Maultaschen.
I tell them a story about the yeti.
Meanwhile, Frau Wolf gathers money for the ski afternoon.
Our Nepal theme is over,
What remains are the queries,
Of the innocent, well-fed and well-off children of Freiburg:
Why did you come to Germany?
Have you climbed the Everest?
What does the Yeti look like?
Is the King of Nepal rich?
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MY NIGHTMARE (Satis Shroff)
When the night is not too cold
And when my bed isn’t cold
I dream of a land far away.
A land where a king rules his realm,
A land where there are still peasants without rights,
Who plough the fields that don’t belong to them.
A land where the children have to work,
And have no time for daydreams,
Where girls cut grass and sling heavy baskets on their backs.
Tiny feet treading up the steep path.
A land where the father cuts wood from sunrise till sunset,
And brings home a few rupees.
A land where the innocent children stretch their right hands,
And are rewarded with dollars.
A land where a woman gathers white, red, yellow and crimson
tablets and pills,
From the altruistic world tourists who come her way.
Most aren’t doctors or nurses,
But they distribute the pills,
With no second thoughts about the side-effects.
The Nepali woman possesses an arsenal,
Of potent pharmaceuticals.
She can’t read the finely printed instructions,
For they are in German, French, English, Czech,
Japanese, Chinese, Italian and Spanish.
What does she care, the hieroglyphs are always there.
Black alphabets appear like an Asiatic buffalo to her.
‘Kala akshar, bhaisi barabar,’
Says the Nepali woman,
For she can neither read nor write.
The very thought of her giving the bright pills and tablets
To another ill Nepali child or mother,
Torments my soul.
How ghastly this thoughtless world
Of educated trekkers, who give medical alms and play
The macabre role of physicians,
In the amphitheatre of the Himalayas.
Glossary:
kala: Schwarz
akshar: Buchstaben, Schrift
bhaisi: asiatische Büffel
barabar: gleich, vergleichbar it
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WHEN MOTHER CLOSES HER EYES (Satis Shroff)
When mother closes her eyes,
She sees everything in its place
In the kingdom of Nepal.
She sees the highest building in Kathmandu,
The King’s Narayanhiti palace.
It looms higher than the dharara,
Swayambhu, Taleju and Pashupati,
For therein lives Vishnu,
Whom the Hindus call the unconquerable preserver.
The preserver of Nepal?
No, that was his ancestor Prithvi Narayan Shah,
A king of Gorkha.
Vishnu is the preserver of the world,
With qualities of mercy and goodness.
Vishnu is all-pervading and self existent,
Visits the Nepal’s remote districts
In a helicopter with his consort and militia.
He inaugurates building
Factories and events.
Vishnu dissolves the parliament too,
For the sake of his kingdom.
His subjects and worshippers is, of late, divided.
Have Ravana and his demons besieged his land?
When mother opens her eyes,
She sees Vishnu still slumbering on his bed of Sesha,
The serpent in the pools of Budanilkantha and Balaju.
Where is the Creator?
When will he wake up from his eternal sleep?
Only Bhairab’s destruction of the Himalayan world is to be seen.
Much blood has been shed between the decades and the centuries…
The noses and ears of the vanquished at Kirtipur,
The shot and mutilated at the Kot massacre,
The revolution in front of the Narayanhiti Palace,
When Nepalis screamed and died for democracy.
And now the corpses of the Maobadis, civilians and Nepali security men.
Hush! Sleeping Gods should not be awakened.
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BOMBAY BROTHEL (Satis Shroff)
‘You’re not going to get away this time.
And you’ll never ever bring a Nepalese child
To a Bombay brothel,’ I said to myself.
I’d killed a man who’d betrayed me
And sold me to an old, cunning Indian woman,
Who ran a brothel in Bombay’s Upper Grant Road.
I still see the face of Lalita-bai,
Her greedy eyes gleaming at the sight of rich Indian customers.
I hear the eternal video-music of Bollywood.
The man I’d slain
Had promised to give me a job,
As a starlet in Bollywood.
I was young, naïve and full of dreams.
He took me to a shabby, cage-like room
And told me to wait.
Three thugs did the rest.
They robbed my virginity,
Which I’d wanted to save
For the man I’d marry one day.
They thrashed me, put me on drugs.
I had no control over my limbs,
My torso, my mind.
It was Hell on earth.
I was starring in a bad Bollywood film,
A lamb that had been sacrificed,
Not to the Hindu Gods,
But to Indian customers and pimps
From all walks of life.
What followed were five years of captivity,
Rape and molestation.
I pleaded with tears in my eyes
To the customers to help me out of my misery.
They just shook their heads and beat me,
Ravished me and threw dirty rupees at my face.
I never felt so ashamed, demeaned,
Maltreated in my young life.
One day a local doctor with a lab-report
Told Lalita-bai that I had aids.
From that day on I became an outcast.
I was beaten and bruised,
For a disease I hadn’t asked for.
I felt broken and wretched.
I returned to Nepal, my homeland.
I lived like a recluse,
Didn’t talk to anyone.
I worked in the fields,
Cut grass and gathered firewood.
I lost my weight.
I was slipping.
Till the day the man who’d ruined
My life came in search of new flesh
For Bombay’s brothels.
I asked the man to spend the night in my house.
He agreed readily.
I cooked for him, gave him a lot of raksi,
Till he sang and slept.
It was late at night.
I knew he’d go out to the toilet
After all that drinking.
I got up, took my naked khukri
And followed him stealthily.
The air was fresh outside.
A mountain breeze made the leaves
Emit a soft whispering sound.
I crouched behind a bush and waited.
He murmured drunkenly ‘Resam piri-ri.’
As he made his way back,
I was behind him.
I took a big step forwards with my right foot,
Swung the khukri blade
And hit him behind his neck.
I winced as I heard a crack,
Flesh and bone giving in.
A spurt of blood in the moonlight.
He fell with a thud in two parts.
His distorted head rolled to one side,
And his body to the other.
My heart was racing.
I couldn’t almost breathe.
I sat hunched like all women do,
Waited to catch my breath.
The minutes seemed like hours.
I got up, went to the dhara to wash my khukri.
I never felt so relieved in my life.
I buried him that night.
But I had nightmares for the rest of my life.
Glossary:
khukri: curved multipurpose knife often used in Nepali households and by Gurkha regiments as a deadly weapon.
Dhara: water-sprout in the hills.
Resam piri-ri: a popular Nepali folksong heard often along the trekking-trails of Annapurna, Langtang and Everest.
Bollywood: India’s Hollywood.
KATHMANDU IS NEPAL (Satis Shroff)
There were two young men, brothers
Who left their homes
In the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas.
The older one, for his father had barked at him,
“Go to Nepal and never come home again.”
The younger, for he couldn’t bear the beatings
At the hands of his old man
.
The older brother sobbed and stifled his sorrow and anger
For Nepal was in fact Kathmandu,
With its colleges, universities, Education Ministry,
Temples, Rana-palaces and golden pagodas
And also its share of hippies, hashish, tourists,
Rising prices and expensive rooms to rent.
The younger brother went to Dharan,
And enlisted in the British Army depot
To become a Gurkha, a soldier in King Edwards Own Gurkha Rifles.
He came home the day became a recruit,
With a bald head, as though his father had died.
He looked forward to the parades and hardships
That went under the guise of physical exercises.
He 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 the young man, riding on the back of a lorry,
Sacks full of rice and salt,
Stared at the Siwaliks and Mahabharat mountains
Dwindling behind him.
As the sun set in the Himalayas,
The shadows grew longer in the vales.
The young man saw the golden moon,
Shining from a cloudy sky.
The same moon he’d seen on a poster in his uncle’s kitchen
As he ate cross-legged his dal-bhat-shikar after the hand-washing ritual.
Was the moon a metaphor?
Was it his fate to travel to Kathmandu,
Leaving behind his 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.
About the Author:
Satis Shroff is a prolific writer and teaches Creative Writing at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. He is a lecturer, poet and writer and the published author of three books on www.Lulu.com: Im Schatten des Himalaya (book of poems in German), Through Nepalese Eyes (travelogue), Katmandu, Katmandu (poetry and prose anthology by Nepalese authors, edited by Satis Shroff). His lyrical works have been published in literary poetry sites: Slow Trains, International Zeitschrift, World Poetry Society (WPS), New Writing North, Muses Review, The Megaphone, Pen Himalaya, Interpoetry. He is a member of “Writers of Peace”, poets, essayists, novelists (PEN), World Poetry Society (WPS) and The Asian Writer. He is based in Freiburg (poems, fiction, non-fiction) and also writes on ecological, ethno-medical, culture-ethnological themes and lectures at the University of Freiburg. He has studied Zoology and Botany in Nepal, Medicine and Social Sciences in Germany and Creative Writing in Freiburg and the United Kingdom. He describes himself as a mediator between western and eastern cultures and sees his future as a writer and poet. Since literature is one of the most important means of cross-cultural learning, he is dedicated to promoting and creating awareness for Creative Writing and transcultural togetherness in his writings, and in preserving an attitude of Miteinander in this world. He lectures in Basle (Switzerland) and in Germany at the Akademie für medizinische Berufe (University Klinikum Freiburg) and the Zentrum für Schlüsselqualifikationen (University of Freiburg where he is a Lehrbeauftragter for Creative Writing). Satis Shroff was awarded the German Academic Exchange Prize.
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