Lu Xun, the writer from the Chinese revolutionary era, was quite the fighter. He fought on behalf of a new ideology and the people’s culture with all his strength. And he demolished the claims of many of those on the path of tradition and superstition. When his opponents could not refute him on grounds of justice or morality or when they were defeated by his fierce logic and rhetoric, they attacked his private life. Lu Xun’s teeth were yellow. The losers labelled him “the one with the yellow teeth”. Even though quite advanced in years, Lu Xun did not yet have any children. The ill-intentioned ones called him “the cursed childless old man.” Lu Xun finally became a father and was amused when he remembered his tormentors. He replied to their aspersions – I, too, now have a son.

Most people don’t have Lu Xun’s difficulties in becoming a father. One doesn’t need talent or application to become one, one doesn’t have to wait for an auspicious occasion, nor does one require training or skill. The two-legged male need only have intercourse with the female; nature takes care of the rest and the child forms in the female’s womb. The difficult part is to become a good father. When I look back on the role I played as a father, I think – I was a reasonable father to my daughter, a middling one to my son.

Worried about our reputation in the eyes of the world, we hide our private lives under a cloak of conceit. But I will here tell a highly private story. This is a story that the son has perhaps forgotten but the father is impatient to tell.

Our daughter was born five years before our son. I had a lot of free time then. So I became both witness and support to the subtle and exciting stages of her physical and mental development. My wife’s father and mother were somewhat unhappy with their daughter’s self-chosen inter-caste marriage. Our daughter became the bridge over which her grandfather and grandmother crossed over to us. I played with her, carrying her in my arms like a flower, lifting her upon my shoulders. Her first wondrous crawl, her first victorious smile as she lifted her tiny hand and stood up with her feeble legs trembling, the first step she took, the bewitching sound she made when she said “Bā ” for the first time – I was witness to all this. I told my daughter stories to try and make her young imagination soar. Later, I feel that I also became a good aide and friend in her journey towards socialization and the gaining of knowledge, beginning from the time she learnt the alphabet.

It was the after the storm of the 1980 referendum. When our son was born in Chitwan, there were platoons of trouble surrounding me. I was then an architect of the teacher’s movement, a teacher who gave private lessons at a decent market rate, a leftist activist lightly involved in politics. To tell the truth, I didn’t have much to do with the practicalities of politics. Even so, the royal sycophants and tattletales had managed to form a terrifying image of me among their masters. They made it seem as though I was a raging volcano who, in every step that I took, spewed boiling lava upon the royal hegemony. The state’s yes-men and informers followed me like my own shadow. How could I, so tormented, gather peace of mind and spend time with my son?

When I, after waking at dawn, used to go out to the tuition centre, or for a purposeful meeting of friends, or on my activist mission, my son was still sleeping next to his mother. He was likewise fast asleep when I returned late in the evening. As a toddler, my son was clumsy and heavy. Was this kid, pressed down by his own weight and unable to get up, to come to his end lying on his bed? Such anxieties troubled me, the father, who held the reins of my son’s short-term destiny. The steady steps of my daughter’s development were fresh in my memory. I tried to measure my son’s development against the standard that she had set.

But all the stages of my son’s development were delayed. He sat late. His circumference was wide, like a grinding wheel. I was worried that this flabby body wouldn’t even crawl. But eventually the clumsy toddler did crawl, even though it was later than expected, and my worries disappeared. Then I was worried that it took so long for him to stand and walk. I looked at him, he didn’t seem to have any sense of hurry or urgency. As though he had nowhere to get to in life. Then another worry: when would this slow traveller speak? The age at which children are meant to speak had passed, yet the relaxed kid showed no signs of speaking. Was he going to be a fountain of sorrow for himself and for others for the rest of his days? Such unhappy questions came to my mind when I was otherwise unoccupied. My son did eventually speak. But this did not bring any happiness to his mother and father. Initially, his speech was like Mr. Sher Bahadur Deuba’s – the sounds would register on the mind, but it was almost impossible to understand their meaning. But gradually, his speech became more articulate and pleasant to hear than that of Mr. Deuba the leader. My worries were defeated and my son gained victory in the art of speech.

Now began the difficult course of his left-handedness. My son started going to school, holding his sister’s hand. One day, returning home after teaching foreigners the Nepali language, I saw his anxious mother holding her son’s right hand and trying to force him to write. There was a glum and helpless expression on his face. The poor fellow glanced at me and tears streamed down his face.

“What are you doing?”

“This idiot uses his left hand,” his mother revealed the mystery, “I’m teaching him to write with the right hand while there is still time.”

“Why? What’s wrong with writing with the left hand?”

“You should know! It will bring bad luck.” The mother revealed her adherence to the superstitious strands of sanātani belief. “People will treat him with contempt.”

I spoke of the workings of nature. Mother dear, just because his left hand is the more active one doesn’t mean that he is cursed. He is simply following the signals from the command control tower of his mind. It is stupid to try to shove nature onto a bus. But the mother, drowned in worry about her son, did not listen. She continued to pursue her peculiar logic and added, “This left-handed one won’t even be able to find a girl.”

“He will,” I responded in a lighthearted way, “If he doesn’t get a right-handed girl he will surely woo an exceptional left-handed girl.”

The mother went to work in the kitchen.

“Ok son, show me what you can write,” I said, with the intention of examining the fruits of his mother’s efforts. My son quickly wrote an outstanding “Ka” with his left hand. I was delighted. Eternal nature had won the battle; manmade culture was defeated.

A week later, returning home through Handigaun’s hellish bazaar in the midst of monsoon, dodging the piles of shit and mud on the road, I walked downhill towards Bhatkeko Pul. I was exhausted teaching Nepali to foreigners. My son suddenly appeared at the entrance of the tin-covered kindergarten school at my left and came running towards me. Heartrending screams emerged from his throat. I watched stunned: there were tearstains on the child’s cheeks, a string of snot hung from his nose and his eyes were red.

“What happened, bābu?” I asked, caressing his cheeks.

He fell upon my legs in answer, and cried in an even louder voice. I guided him to our home nearby, holding him by the hand. He continued to cry. I gave him a glass of milk to console him. Then I asked, “What happened, son?”

“Bā, they called me a left-handed moron.”

“Who? The wicked boys?”

“Everyone.” My son expressed his suffering in an injured voice. “Even the teacher. Everyone looked at me and laughed hard.”

“Wait,” I said. “I will take care of that moronic teacher tomorrow.”

The next day, I coaxed my son to come with me to his school. And I gave a disquisition to that moronic teacher and others as well about the workings of the command control tower of the mind. At the end, I said in a mildly threatening tone, “What kind of teachers are you who don’t even know this much?” The school’s Principal was understanding. She said she was ashamed and promised that such an incident would not be repeated. And it wasn’t. My guiltless son was liberated from the slur “left-handed moron”.

The vigour of our son’s left hand brought about another problem. My daughter complained one morning, “Bā, our idiot washed his bottom with the hand meant for eating.” Now, didn’t this cause trouble! I gave my son a discourse in a loving tone on the specific uses of the two hands. I said – “Look son, the left hand is to be used to eat and write. The right one is to be used to wash your bottom. If one gets confused with the other, then everything is finished.” To observe the outcome of my lesson, I was compelled to stand guard outside the toilet when my son sat to evacuate his bowels. Good job! My son proved himself in the toilet. And this nuisance also came to an end.

I tasted both the burdens and the happiness of being a father as the days passed. My son grew fast but the progress in his studies was slow. He was in third grade at Panipokhari’s Bhanubhakta School at the time. One day as I sat in my room, my fingers moving on the typewriter like popcorn being popped, I heard my daughter giggle outside. My son’s mischievous laugh joined his sister’s. “Father,” my daughter cried, “they took this guy’s shorts off at school.”

“What happened?” I asked, emerging from the room.

My daughter told me the story of her brother’s shorts. I listened to it in all its detail. There was apparently an idiot of a teacher at the school. He punished boys who hadn’t done their homework by making them take off their shorts. Made to take off his shorts in front of both male and female classmates, my son was at first hesitant. He said “No” and cried. But to save himself from a beating, he eventually took his shorts off. Then apparently, taking his shorts off stopped bothering him. He started taking his shorts off for entertainment. It was as though the alternative to doing one’s homework was to take off one’s shorts. What had this world come to? The next day, I reached Panipokhari in anger to complain to the Principal. The Principal was busy with administrative work. I wrote a short letter, in which I provided a description of the event and at the end wrote: “Principal-ji! I wish to meet the teacher who forces students to take their shorts off.” That was all.

I don’t know if my letter reached the person it was meant for. I didn’t go to ask about it either. Instead, I adopted the tactic of self-reliance. I set aside whatever time I could to help my son with his homework. The school was stamped with the attractive label “English boarding”. The level of the textbooks was a foot higher than that achievable by the poor children. But nothing had been taught to them well. The weight of homework upon the children’s laps was such that there was a danger that they would become terrorized and their minds would weaken. My son wrote like the junior George Bush, with his elbow at a 90-degree angle and his hand bent towards his chest, in a way that appeared very awkward to the right-handed me. He wrote the letters first and then drew the line above them. The large letters he formed were elegant and indicated talent. But he wrote at an extremely slow speed, at which it would take him at least a week to complete a day’s worth of work. Now, there was no solution but to cheat. The homework that the son could not do, the father and daughter finished, imitating his handwriting with great effort. When this collective homework campaign approached mathematics, the son raised havoc. “That’s not the correct way,” he interrupted us, almost crying. “How, then, boy?” I asked him. “I don’t know,” he said and tears streamed down his face. At my wits’ end, I wrote a sarcastic letter to his mathematics teacher – “O wise and generous Guru-ji! Either teach my son mathematics in a way that he understands, or else please cease terrorizing him with homework.”

Another cycle began around this time, when my son started his “search for novelty” and “invention”. One day, I arrived home as the sun was setting. I found him sitting on the porch alone, puffed up in annoyance. In front of him there were the two broken parts of a lock. There was a screwdriver on the table. I asked, “What is this mischief?” He remained there, infuriated. The index finger and thumb tip of his right hand were blue. There was a bruise on the back of his left hand that looked like it was about to bleed.

“So you broke the lock, mister!” I said in a joking tone.

“It broke by itself,” he replied.

I laughed inwardly. The son’s destructive activity in search of the new continued. We had a cheap Indian radio set. To make it play, it was necessary to periodically smack it on the back. My invention-oriented son broke that old radio as well.

“So you’ve accomplished something else?”

My son didn’t speak. His face looked like the broken radio.

“Why did you break this?”

“To see the people who speak from inside it.”

Perhaps because he sensed the rising anger in my voice, my son ran outside in his campaign for self-preservation.

My daughter was always studying. My son on the other hand didn’t care for his studies at all. It was difficult to even find him at home. When he was small, his unwavering interest was in marbles and rubber balls. When he grew up a bit, his interest graduated to that game called cricket. Bernard Shaw used to say of the game, derisively – Some idiots play it and a thousand others watch, intoxicated by the stupidity. I was after all Bernard Shaw’s student and follower. I sometimes used to watch the game that so absorbed my son; I was unable to perceive any refinement in the players’ movements or any art in the game. It looked to me like a gross display of the thigh muscles and hands. A tired-looking old man stood as a referee and periodically raised two fingers. A man with a bat, an iron cap on his head and his face within a cage, tapped the bat periodically on the ground and looked towards the ball with a terrorized expression on his face. Another creature rubbed the ball on his hips, ran rapidly and threw the ball as though to blow the batter’s nose off his face. Other muscled youngsters spread across the field as though willing to give up their lives to catch the ball. The game went on for hours, but that was all that happened. In a country where almost everyone lived a hand-to-mouth existence, this flavourless game wasn’t going to fill my son’s tummy. But in his colourful world, there was nothing as valuable as the bat.

I used to pressure my son to study. He didn’t care. And assuming the posture of a wise father, I tried to give him advice – Look, lazybones! There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who work, earn and hold their heads high and those who beg. You will become a beggar who is ashamed even to show himself.

He either got annoyed or smiled when he heard this. He never spoke back.

But my taciturn and disobedient son astonished me. When his exam results came, it turned out that he had passed with flying colours. He beamed as he showed me the transcripts. It was as though his proud face was teaching me – Father, don’t look down on me. Recognize me. Understand me for who I am. People differ in the ways they think and act. If you don’t believe this look at me, stupid old man.

This is a story from the time when my son was still wearing shorts and studying at that school in Panipokhari. His mother had been lovingly spying on him.

“Your son is a degenerate,” she complained one day in a voice filled with distress and anger.

“How so?” I expressed curiosity.

“Our son took money from the box and frittered it away.”

“Really?”

“All you need are books and pens,” the mother said, discontented. “You have time to chat for hours at the teashop, but have no interest in taking care of the children. If things continue this way, that idiot may well turn out to be a drunkard. This house is going to turn into hell.”

I quietly listened to her with lowered head. Then I counted the money in the box. As I was after all an irresponsible fakir, I was unable to figure out how much money those tender hands had stolen. I took my son to a corner to find out.

“So you broke into the box, young man.”

Realizing that his secret had been revealed, my son turned black and blue. Hurriedly donning the armour of self-defence, he began to shed tears.

“Son, now tell me, why did you steal the money?”

Bawling his eyes out, he revealed the woes in his tormented heart, “Everyone looks down on me.”

In my view, my son was guilty of an act of misconduct. In his view, he had engaged in a child’s revolt against me, the ruler of the house. Now, how was I to extinguish the fire of his revolt? I vowed to do my utmost to transform my son’s attitude. I adopted two tactics. The first tactic was to coax and cajole. The second tactic was to intimidate. I started taking him to places around town after he returned from school. In this period of my crisis, his power to negotiate with me reached tremendous heights, and I was compelled to fulfill all his demands.

“Bā, I want to eat jeri.”

“Ok, sir.”

“Bā, peanuts for me.”

“Whatever you desire, my little lord.”

“Bā, I want a ball.”

“Ok master, here you go.”

Recognizing an opportunity, he asked me to buy whatever he saw. In my helpless state, I bought whatever he asked me to. To help him break away from his addiction, peers and environment, I sometimes took him to Dhumbarahi’s Panchayat Park. Sometimes I took him to climb the huge Boudha stupa and showed him the beautiful view below. It seemed to me that he was over the moon, being able to roam around like that. But all this was my psychological attempt to transform his bad habits to good ones. After he was convinced that his father wouldn’t beat him, my son revealed the mystery of the stolen money. It turned out that the idiot had taken four 1000-rupee notes on a total of four different occasions.

“So what did you do with that money, nincompoop?”

“I bought and ate Cadbury chocolates, and jeri, and oranges, and apples, and grapes, and momo, and peanuts…and…and.”

“You wolfed all that down yourself?”

“There were others…”

Given my limited income at the time, 4000 was a lot of money. Now, hadn’t my son caused a lot of trouble?

After some days of unflagging effort, I asked my daughter to secretly keep an eye on her brother’s activities – to find out where he went, whom he met, what he did. The report she brought back wasn’t bad. Having gotten whatever he asked for, my son must have thought – my father has improved. But when the “improved” father used the weapon of intimidation, the son was astonished.

“Listen son, I was born before you and will probably die before you do. This house is yours,” I lectured to him one day as he stood before the moneybox. “It is yours, even if you destroy it. It is yours, even if you preserve it.”

Wondering what was now going to happen, the son gazed at the father dumbfounded.

“There is money in the box, the key is hanging on the nail over there,” I said in a voice that was subtly threatening. “Even if you save it, even if you blow it all away, this money is yours. Do whatever you feel like with it.”

My son became astounded, speechless and tearful. His lips trembled. His eyelashes quivered. And tear drops fell from his eyes onto his cheeks. When I went to find him an hour later, he was still standing there with eyes full of tears. The next day I discovered a note on the wall just below the nail where the key was hung. In it, he accepted his guilt and made a pledge: “Bā, I won’t steal from now on.” That was that, my two-pronged tactics had worked. And my son had for this time at least turned from bad to good.

From a very early age, there were striking differences between the interests and desires of my son and daughter. I cannot say whether those were natural differences between male and female, or artificial differences created by the long tradition and culture of patriarchy. My daughter’s demands for fun and games were always small and economical. Toy pots and pans, a skipping rope, kites, little sparklers during Tihar. But my son demanded much bigger and more expensive things. Leather balls, sports shoes, bats, balls to strike with the bats, firecrackers that raised a hell of a racket during Tihar, bicycles. My daughter would delight in playing imaginative, pretend games like marrying her dolls. My son’s preferences were more rough-and-tumble. Small bruises and injuries were like nothing for him.

When I sat to write, my daughter used to rest her chin on my shoulder and steadfastly look at what I wrote. If something moved her, she caressed my hair and giggled. My son, on the other hand, had no interest in my writing at all. He must have thought – My father is lazy. He only wanders around, and sits doggedly with his pen and paper. One day, my daughter coaxed her brother to read a section from my reminiscences from childhood published in Navayuva: “Mitrus, read what father has written, it’s really great.”

“Whatever, I’m not interested.”

“Come on, read it, you idiot.”

The idiot read. The story was about a fake ghost that had terrified me. The idiot was delighted after reading it. And, striking his sister on her shoulder with his hand, he commented, “Daij, our father writes
alright.” His grave comment became a joke in conversations between sister and brother for many days – Daij, our father writes alright. Mitrus, our father writes alright.

My first computer, which moved at the speed of a bullock cart on a dirt road, arrived. There was great rejoicing at home. My son was the happiest of all. At the time, he was in the eighth grade at Banasthali School, where he learned how to use computers. I wonder if he, among the hordes of students, got as much as to touch the few computers at school. But he must have certainly been able to look at them from a distance and sniff them to his heart’s content. When the computer arrived, the roles of father and son were reversed. He then reigned as the knowledgeable guru; I became his disciple. He astonished me with his skill. I was a moron when it came to learning technical skills; he on the other hand was sharp as a knife. This was the first time I had touched a computer. Something like fear preyed on my doubtful mind. What if I accidentally pressed a key I wasn’t meant to and all that I had written with such great effort was erased? How was I to find the right way to open a file, to save, to delete, select, cut and paste, copy, make the size of fonts smaller and bigger? There were so many hassles! Although it was just a machine made of matter, it was as though a magical brain had been installed in it. Everything about it seemed to me a mysterious miracle. I only had to ask him to teach me something, my son would come swift like the wind, rapidly move his adept fingers and quickly explain things to me. I had no clue what would happen if I pressed this key or if I pressed that. He must have thought, it’s not enough to brag and claim that you’re an educated father. You need brains; you need acuity. Over time he made me so dependent upon him, he swelled with pride, whereas I felt inferior and small. I had been in a position to give until yesterday; he was in a place where he had to beg from me. Now, he had climbed to a position from which to give, I had dropped to a place where I had to beg. His pride increased, my pride decreased. In the end, I became sick and tired and irritably pleaded, “Guru-ji, please write down instructions on a piece of paper.” The guru-ji wrote the instructions and pasted them on the wall. From below his Adam’s apple he made a sound like “aha” and went outside. And, with great smugness he said to his sister, “Daij, our father is stupid.” I considered myself objectively and thought, when it came to computers my son was right. I was stupid!

My son’s SLC exams approached. And another worry cropped up in my suspicious mind. I never saw him work hard. He wasted most of his time playing with bats and balls. His remaining time was extinguished clashing fighter planes on the computer. Was the boy going to flunk his exams? To fail a small exam is small news and the mental shock it causes is also small. To fail to leap over the iron gate that is the SLC: this would be big news and the mental shock it would cause would also be great. But look, my son was carefree. After returning home from his exams, he sat on the porch with a grave expression on his face. He placed the questions in front of him and calculated how many marks he would get. He became delighted and announced – Father, I will pass this exam as well. I had my doubts: was he overestimating himself? But when the results came, it turned out that my son had done really well. His self-confidence had won; my worries had come to nothing. I thought happily, this mysterious person must be formed of a quite separate substance.

My son did manage to leap across the iron gate, but what was he to study now and where? Was he to study the social or the hard sciences? He was carefree, as though he had no preference at all. There were discussions at home – let him try to get into St. Xavier’s. If he can’t get in, there is always his alma mater Banasthali. Refuting all my doubts, he passed the written exams with flying colours. My daughter then took her brother to introduce him to her old Father at St. Xavier’s. Sister and brother returned home with happy expressions and the story of their conversation. My daughter had apparently obsequiously pleaded, “Father, this is my brother. He says that he won’t study anywhere but here.”

Measuring him with his eyes, the Father was curious, “Daij, how can this boy who is a foot taller than you be your younger brother?”

My daughter racked her brains and said, “Father, please look at our noses.”

Looking at the shape of the noses, the Father smiled. And so began the short conversation between the Father and my son.

“Why do you want to study here, son?”

“Father, this was my sister’s college, that’s why…”

The Father asked in jest, “How much trouble do you make son?” My son also replied in a joking tone, “A little bit, Father.”

And with great affection, the Father patted my son’s back.

“Bā,” my daughter happily said to me, “Our Mitre spoke to Father in English.”

“Broken or fluent English?”

“Fluent. He spoke quickly too.”

The brother, who was listening, looked as though he’d accomplished some great feat. I thought, hopefully, that the boy might do something after all.

As hoped, my son completed his ISc with good marks. Then another problem presented itself.

“Son, what are you going to study now?”

His reply was on the tip of his tongue, “Computers.”

I requested him to find a place of study that our home could afford. But his pride was such as to be not so easily satisfied. He said, “There is no such place. I have already learned whatever they can teach.”

I thought that my son’s education had perhaps come to an end. And he shoved my support aside and started walking ahead on his own. He somehow got a job as a technician at Infocom Internet. With the aid of his job, he became a donor who sometimes gave me money. He hadn’t learned very much, he couldn’t have been very skilled, but his application was tremendous. Work, work, work. Sometimes he was at his office until midnight or 1 am. The quality of his clothes improved and his confidence rose. He became able to look me in the eye while speaking to me.

My son somehow gained admission into St. Cloud’s University in Minnesota, North America. He planned to study graphic design, a field that was dear to him. The clever idiot did gain admission, but where was he to get the huge amount of money to fly there and help him survive?

His mother had gone to Switzerland some months previously. There she met an old friend who had facilitated the path to our wedding: Regula Fa. Back then, she was head nurse at Bandipur Hospital and a very close friend of my to-be wife. I came from a different caste, and on top of that I was a bit shorter than her. My to-be wife found it very difficult to commit to marry me. And so she asked, “Regula, should one marry a man who is shorter than oneself?”

“Why not?” Regula helped to untie the knot of her inhibitions, “Short spouses are the best.”

That was that, we got married. Yes, it was that same matchmaker who promised economic support for my son. He, snapping all links of economic and psychological dependency on me, followed in the footsteps of Columbus and went to America. I quietly watched as he, feeling both liberated and sad, left home.

An alien place, an alien culture, an alien environment. On top of that, my son lacked money.  He spent his first year in Minnesota in dire straits. For some months, the adept matchmaker Regula Fa bore his costs. After that, she told him to manage for himself and threw him into life’s watery depths. But my son never complained to me about his privations, hardships, and humiliations. He struggled, he survived, learned a skill and moved ahead on his own two feet. About a year later, on his summer holidays, he went to Ocean City in search of employment. In the afternoons he drove a play train for children; in the mornings and evenings he delivered pizza. He worked for 18 hours a day. He was completely drained by the heat, bad food, unhygienic living conditions and the burden of work. And one day, while at work, he became so weak that blood streamed out of his nose and he fell unconscious. Later, he wrote to tell the story of his bitter experience, “Bā, America is heaven for those with money; it is hell for those without.”

To understand reality is to know oneself. And one derives strength from knowing oneself.

Excerpted from Afnai Ankhako Layama by Khagendra Sangroula, translated by Aditya Adhikari