Nepal Talk,Nightmare,Katmandu is Nepal,Bombay Brothel (Satis Shroff)

(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?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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
___________________________________________________________________

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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

The Charms of Spoken English

The Charms of Spoken English (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

Whether you hear Radio Nepal, the BBC, CNN or the Voice of America, there’s no such thing as ‘correct spoken English.’ There is no standard as such, even though the Queen’s English is regarded as a measuring yard. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘No two British subjects speak exactly alike.’ Whether you have a Cambridge, Oxford, Cockney, provincial or colonial dialect is immaterial. You don’t have to be shamed of it. A Rato Bangala1 or St. Xavier’s slant is just as good as a Texan drawl.

Being understood is the point. You try to express, not impress. You speak presentably. There are naturally circles wherein your choice of words should stamp you as a ‘cultivated person as distinguished from an ignorant one’. That is where either one puts one’s best foot forward and throws in all the rules of rhetoric and the performing arts and makes a show of it, or perhaps makes a fool out of oneself. But that’s another matter.

It all depends upon whether you’re from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the British Commonwealth or some other Anglo-American area. Or even Kathmandu or Timbuktu.

Take two German friends of mine, Monica and Yogi Rudolph, who visited Nepal sometime ago. Monica’s an English teacher who now works in a bookstore, whereas Yogi is a trained-geologist. When they came in contact with Nepalese people in the countryside during their Jomsom trek or even in Kathmandu, Moni put on her best English accent, with the result that the people didn’t understand her at all. Yogi, however, with no English background, spoke Ginglish (German-English) with the verb always at the end of the sentence, in a slow soft-spoken manner and always managed to get his message across.

And that’s the point. You have to adapt yourself every time to the person you’re speaking with, not only in your choice of words and expressions, but also pronunciations. With an academician you could afford to adopt an elaborate style, letting your fantasy run, dashing out warmed-up idiomatic and current expressions and bombastic words with a bit of Latin and French thrown in. But when you’re talking to a simple, honest-to-God farmer or Sherpa along the trail, you have to switch into a simple, restricted language, without jargon. Yet there are people who go through life without having understood this simple rule.

A foreign student from India at our local Freiburger Goethe Institute once asked an American girl: ‘Vat is the medium auf instrukshun in yer kuntry?’ The baffled American student’s eyebrows shot up like a pair of boomerangs and her mouth opened. She hadn’t understood a word. One must admit that it does take quite sometime before you can train your ears to a new accent or a new dialect. The Indian student had asked: ‘What-is-the-medium-of-instruction-in-your-country?’ It must have sounded like a sack of potatoes being unloaded on a wooden floor. What he meant was, ‘In which language do you teach in the USA?’ Some features of English as spoken in the Indian subcontinent are: ‘Arre baba, he-be-God or Vat-are-you-doing? Most travellers to the subcontinent are confronted with the question: ‘Where-you-come-from? Or ‘Which kuntry you are from?’

India has over 50 million jobless people, in comparison to Germany which has 4.5 million, and the frustration in applying for government jobs goes thus: ‘Indian gormenta, no gooda gormenta. Apply, apply , no reply. British gormenta, gooda gormenta. Morning apply, evening reply’.

When I listened to Elvis Presley singing ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,’ which is a case of double negation, my aunt, Mrs. Dong, who was a teacher with King Edward’s Own Gurkha Rifles stationed in Hong Kong, would say, “Eh pagla! Don’t listen to such American songs. You’ll spoil your English.’’

In Germany for instance, the people in Baden have a totally different accent and dialect than those coming from Bavaria or even from Schwabenland. As a foreigner you tend to understand the conversation only in snatches. The Badener pronounces the word ‘sympathy’ as though it were ‘symbady’. Which incidentally reminds me of some of my Newari college friends in Kathmandu who have problems with the word ‘that’, which is pronounced ‘dat’, (der = there, hot =what, iz = is). Newari is a language with monosyllables and is spoken in the Kathmandu valley.

It makes the language colourful though. Patience and goodwill helps. Or as the Germans say: one has to speak with one’s hands and feet. And gesticulate a lot.

Just as English is taught in Nepalese schools by teachers, who have no real contact with England or America or the Anglo-American way of life, there are also teachers in Germany who teach their pupils German-English, with the result that a lot of students have inhibitions about speaking a foreign language, scared that one might make slips. As though to err wasn’t human at all. One must admit that the chances that a German teacher may go to England or the USA, to widen his or her English-horizon, is bigger than that of a teacher in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal. As a result, one learns only idioms and expressions that are passed along the grapevine. Expressions that are obsolete in a culture that has remained conserved and isolated. That’s also why Microsoft has different standards of English depending on the country: Australian, Belizean, British, Indian, Irish, Jamaican, Canadian, Caribbean, New Zealand, Philippine, South African, Trinidadian and US American English.

The Banaten Swabians or the Aussiedler, as Russians of German origin are called, also speak a conserved form of quaint German when they come to Germany. The German language has also moved the times, especially after the fall of the Third Reich. The younger ones adapt themselves fast as they visit the kindergardens and schools. The older generations have a tough time integrating themselves in modern western Germany. The German languages is studded with English, Italian and French expressions. With a hand-held translator you can get funny sentences, for instance: if you try to translate ‘Give me a ring,’ your palm-top might translate in to ‘Geben Sie mir einen ring,’ which certainly doesn’t mean ‘Give me a call.’ During my student days at the Freiburger university I read a message on the university wall which made me chuckle with delight after I’d understood what it meant: how up du high-knee. It means something close to: ‘Get lost!’ Most Germans who don’t know much English want to become strange things. It’s not the post-war complex.

It’s just that many English words sound familiar to them and they use them in the German sense of the word. There’s a famous case of a blonde German Fräulein who goes to a butcher’s shop and says, ‘Can I become a steak?’ The word ‘become’ means ‘to get.’ When a German says, ‘My daughter Gabi goes to the Gymnasium’, it doesn’t mean that she does gymnastics in a hall. I must admit that I’m a great admirer of P. G. Wodehouse and Richard Gordon and in my schools days I’d laughed a lot when I read their books. Then I chanced to get copies of their works in German. The books were well translated but I couldn’t laugh at all. The jokes and the pointe were all lost in translation.

It is remarkable to note that many English words have come to stay in the Nepalese conversation, if not Nepalese literature. Words like: habituated, hobby, compulsory, cinema, TV, entrance-exam, syllabus, boring, restricted, Hollywood, Bollywood etc. The list increases with the passage of time. And time and again people protest in a lot of countries regarding the infiltration of English words in their respective languages. The French have protested now and again and so have the German and demanded the weeding out of foreign words from their lovely languages. But globalisation makes it impossible to isolate languages, for we all communicate with foreign words, and feel proud of it, nicht wahr? It is just as charming for a German to order a cup of Ilam tea in a restaurant in Namche Bazaar in the local lingo, as for a Nepalese to order a cup of Cappucino in Italian. Es lebe die Vielsprachigkeit.

At one time I was with some people from London and Liverpool at a cocktail party and I said I was originally from Nepal. It was amusing to hear, “Oh, Nepaul?’’ The blonde woman had been raised on Kipling, I presumed, with all those nautch-girls, snake-charmers, sepoys and wallahs.
Names are always distorted by foreigners. And so are most words. During my visit to Ilam in eastern Nepal in 1995, a bus driver used English words with a nonchalance that was really disarming. Words like ‘birik’(brakes), ‘esteering’ (steering-wheel), ‘turuck’ (truck), and his companion who cleaned the car was a ‘kilinder’. On the other hand my German grandma, who watches spy-thrillers in TV, is fond of James Bond whom she calls ‘Rogger Mooray’, because the last letter is always pronounced in the German language, and not silent.

Have you heard a Frenchman speak English? I used to know a young man named Pascal originally from Paris but I’d met him in Neufchateau, and he had the habit of beginning his sentences with: ‘I preferrr...’ in that funny, elaborated French way. When I heard that, I thought the Nepalese school-kids who do the School Leaving Certificate exams were much better off with their knowledge of English as a second language. It’s just that the Nepalese pronounce the words with a Nepalese flair.

Spoken English does have its charming side. You can made it a game to find out the origin of the speaker, for despite the much cultivated attempt to speak a foreign language, you can at most times discern the rough geographical origin of the person talking. And that makes it all the more amusing. Vive la difference!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the Author: Satis Shroff writes regularly for http://www.americanchronicle.com/ and its affiliated 21 newspapers in the USA, besides writing on http://www.blogspot.com/. He has written over a period of three decades, what the Germans would call a “Landesumschau,” for his readers with impressions from Freiburg, Venice, Rottweil, Prague, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Basel and Grindelwald.

Satis Shroff has worked with The Rising Nepal (Gorkhapatra Sansthan), where he wrote a weekly Science Spot and editorials and commentaries on Nepal’s development, health, wildlife, politics and culture. He also wrote weekly commentaries for Radio Nepal. He has studied Zoology & Geology in Kathmandu, Medicine & Social Science in Freiburg, and Creative Writing under Prof. Bruce Dobler (Pittsburgh University) and Writers Bureau (Manchester). He sees his future as a writer and poet. He was awarded the German Academic Prize.

Satis Shroff’s bicultural perspective makes his prose and poems rich, full of awe, and at the same time heartbreakingly sad. In writing ‘home,’ he not only returns to his country of origin time and again, he also carries the fate of his people to readers in the West, and his task of writing is a very important one in political terms. His true gift is to invent Nepalese metaphors and make them accessible to the West through his prose and poetry. Satis Shroff writes in German & English.
Please read his poems & prose on http://www.google/ & http://www.yahoo.com/ search under: satis shroff.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Rato Bangala and St. Xaviers: Two English schools in Patan and Jawlakhel (Kathmandu Valley)