Early years in USA, I used to write too many emails to cousins, friends and
families. Soon sentences got shorter, family and relatives got bitter because
they thought I was giving them some attitude.
But my amusement days were gone; things lost the
natural factors of surprise and enthusiasm. Today I had a major wrap up
cleaning ceremony through my old stuffs. While cleaning up, I saw few emails
and letters that I wrote to one of my cousin....Excerpts goes like this:
A bottle of Pepsi cost $1.5 here, people say
‘hi’, ‘hello’, and ‘thank you’ without reasons, and they call hand holding
'gay'....
It was June 2005, Waverly, Iowa. It was after
rain and I was outside the dorm watching birds and squirrel settle back
afterwards, in their homes. I had left home few weeks back too, trying to
settle in US. It was a new beginning. To philosophize, I would say, every
second is a beginning of a new thing. Everything, old or new is a beginning of
some kind. Present is past's future. That summarizes everything. Everything is
afresh. Everything is new and energy. We get lost in the sense of time. Our
senses play tricks. These tricks are pretty powerful and almost impossible to
be conscious about at most times.
May 2005, my cousin Sudarsan Dai and I were
sitting by the balcony and enjoying our super.
"Now you really won't be here at the end of
this summer huh?' he said.
"It looks like it" I said.
He was partly happy, partly disappointed. He was
worried about his 2nd and 3rd year, English and Nepali Paper.
'I wish you well, success and good health and
write to me, write like we talk every day here and every night. Keep writing.
Keep reading. And send me when you write something, we will publish your
books" he said.
I was scared, nervous and extremely excited to
have finally got my Visa after the Embassy people gave me hard time. I can
still feel the heartbeat of those days. A sense of begging, and of struggle and
of dreams. I remember the day that I walk from the Embassy to my home,
barefoot, mid-summer; there was traffic strike that day. We walked and talked
until home. We were tired and pitied our cursed destiny to be born in a poor
country which ran by the grace of Americans and Indians. When home, I remember
the high pitch yelling of two little neighbor kids, a brother and a sister. The
brother was little but mischievous, and the sister would beat him to weeping.
And their mother would scold them both. But when those kids saw us in our
balcony, from their balcony, they would be embarrassed and hide quickly.
Our tenant Pradip and Shambu, both from
Chaudhari caste, would be intimidated when we call them fisherman or jackal
killer or Chaudhari's sons. It was just stereotypical jokes we made for fun,
nothing racial. My cousin always told Shambu that one day, when he becomes the
prime minister, he would appoint Shambhu his driver, a high paid one. And
Shambhu mostly shrugged off but he could not totally negate the possibility of
Sudarshan dai being Prime Minister one day, so Shambhu would be careful talking
to him.
Shambhu and Padip, I heard are in Arab
somewhere. I do not know how those quarreling kids grew up, probably in
college, still fighting. Same night, my cousin and I were talking at night,
listening to some FM. Some literature program...
Natikaji had died same day. The DJ of the FM
said “I tried to contact Fatteman to comment on Natikaji's death but he already
slept." In Nepali his exact words were ‘Natikajiko barema sodhna maile
Fatteman lai phone gareko thiye, uha sutisaknu bhayechha...” The DJ had bad
presentation style and choice of words... amateur, unprofessional, kind of
funny.
My Cousin said- 'Oh Pity! Fatteman thought his
best friend died so he drank some wine and slept in melancholy.'
I kept laughing for a while. I remember the
exact words although we were almost asleep ourselves. Many years have passed
but the memory is fresh. The summer memory in Nepal... I have lost significant
years, but I am new and fresh and something inside me has never become old,
never got tired, and never became sad. Yeah 7-8 years is a long time, I reckon.
I missed a lot of things; lost time, lost appetite to be righteous, and no
surprise-- lost hair growing interest, thanks to balding head. I quit some
dreams, I made some unnecessary friends and I broke relationship with some best
of friends. I have lost most of my identity but my essence is same, fresh,
anew, innocent, eager, awaiting, moving, accepting, flowing in the time's
direction, yet just living in the present worldly, mostly depressingly, in
unnecessary struggles, unfavorable and unpleasant exchanges, in deep
contradiction to my own beliefs and against my own soul’s true voice, in
silence, and sometimes in indifference towards the ‘Dream Prospects’ I had of
USA and of my life itself.
A poem I send him in 2005, when UNICODE didn’t
exist and I had to type it all English font. I could not publish a book but
heard from same cousin today that my father got his book publish
and released. Well, I think he got motivation from me, though he will
probably deny it. He used to ready my diaries poems and stories, that I mostly
hide under my bed at home and he enjoyed it. I was shy.
An old poem here now in fresh reckoning…. I
wrote it, my cousin printed his email and translated in Nepali. I saw it today
and thought- Oh okay, I knew that feeling. It will always be the same. I will
never forget.
8/25/2012
Irving Texas
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