Sharad Duwal’s Kumari Galli is now a Cul-de-sac won first prize in sixth Writing Nepal: A Short Story Contest. About the winning story, Samrat Upadhyay, author of Buddha’s Orphan and judge of the contest shared, ‘This wonderful story is told from the point of view of a young boy who is discovering that the vibrant community where he lives contains some pretty tantalizing secrets. The story’s sense of community is strong, and there were moments when I was thrown back to my own childhood neighborhood in Lainchour, where everybody was in everybody’s business. The narrator of this story was an utterly charming and observant boy who made me chuckle throughout the narrative. The humor here is top notch, the prose is impeccable. There is an arc and a coherence in this narrative, and a beautiful musicality that made it enjoyable even during repeated readings.’
The first strains of the harmonium would permeate the morning quiet while we still lay in bed. First some diatonic trips along an octave, then Rajamati followed by Fulko aakhaa maa – the squeeze-and-release of the instrument producing soulful nasal keening halfway between a lowing and a whine. It sounded diffuse and faraway from our homes: only the lower end coming through, insistent and enveloping. Every morning without fail – until the day it stopped.
If we hadn’t debedded already, the harmonium was cue that we should. We’d get up, ablute, and take ourselves to a by-day-chiya-pa:sa:-by-night-bhatti in Inacho to get some mimkis to go with the morning tea our mothers would be putting on to boil. Before we even put the communal pond behind us on our way there, we’d hear Æ Panter or O Jhyablé from behind us and the others would join us on the perambulation to secure the mimkis. Not everyone, however, rousted themselves for mimkis – some of these barely-twelve kids were out for their morning fix of nicotine.
We’d follow the brick pavements, the first light of day glorious. We used to think roads the world over – except highways – were paved with bricks. Later, of course, the world revealed itself to us the way it always does, but then it was different. There was some ineffable quality to the nip in the somnolent morning air. Mothers with puja thalis would be on their way home after audiences with the gods of the day. Men would step out to find themselves headed to corners that sold milk tea to get their morning cup and their own fix of nicotine – or chin music.
It would take us all of ten minutes to get to a crowded Inacho.
Mimkis were a wonder. You made one by first dipping a conical tongue of raw papad into a viscous batter the secrets of which are now perhaps all but lost. Then you dropped the lolling papad into a karaai with heating oil or ghee, let it sit for two minutes before flipping it over, let it sit two more minutes and took it out. It’s a bit soft on the outside and incredibly crisp on the inside and goes swimmingly with a cup of morning milk tea strong on sugar and kept warm in one of those thermoses with flowers slapped onto a turquoise curvature.
This was how mornings started. The walk, ten mimkis for ten rupees, the tea, and getting ready for the day at Progress Secondary. And always the harmonium to colour the morning golden – its undulations industrious and laid-back at once.
The harmonium would take on the ether again in the evening. When a wrong note sounded, we’d imagine the hand forgetting to decompress the bellows, or the fingers of the other hand pressing down a wrong key. A shake of the head, a hasty remedial key press, which turned out to be also wrong, another key press, and finally a fresh go of the entire phrase. We knew who those hands belonged to but didn’t know her closely. Her name was Pratibha and we called her Harmonium. She was a few years senior to us at school.
There were no formal introductions as there never were. We just saw her around the tole. But all parents in the tole knew each other, so all kids knew all other kids. One day at school I was standing outside my classroom with my buddy Sajan – aka Cassette, Kyaset, Keset – when Harmonium didi went past us with a friend of hers. She stopped in front of us and asked me why we were there. Me and Keset had been asked by Krishna sir to leave the classroom for what he’d called a delinquency. He’d found us out passing notes to each other. It had started out casual: You are monkey, Keset first wrote on a note to me. You are bastard, I wrote back. But soon the stakes were raised. We had been learning about the human body in our health classes and Keset next passed me a note that said in a crabbed hand, You kiss S—–’s excretory system. I added below it: And you kiss urinary system. As I was passing the note back, it was interrupted by Krishna sir. He was not happy with it and so we were deposited outside the class. In answering Harmonium didi’s question Keset chalked it up to forgotten homework. She smiled and went on to her class with her friend and when they were out of earshot Keset told me that the friend, Kavita, was seen with a boy the other day behind the Dattatreya temple.
Keset had stories to tell about everyone. His mother was quite the roving Rita of the neighbourhood and no one was off-bounds to her chinwagging. She was up in everyone’s business. In his trademark halting speech, which was just the thing to have for someone so resourceful and with so much to say, Keset told us why someone had not been seen for three days running, or divulged the proceedings of the case of a neighbourhood rashila who ran out on her family to live with a Napit boyfriend of hers only to be brought back home two days later pale and ghastly. There were heart attacks to be had during joint family altercations which divided witnesses of the first order through the third into neat categories: some called theatrical bluff, some became the myocardial infarcter’s latest convert, others went their silent way. Keset, like the ideal detached observer, was all three and none at the same time.
On our evening gallivants across the tole, me and Keset would sometimes find Harmonium didi in the local stationery store talking to the owner’s wife, who’d occasionally woman the shop. A few of us patronized the store to appear the kind of intellectuals we certainly weren’t. Select dailies were collated at one of the tables for perusal or hung up outside with paper clips. We’d casually flip our way through these newspapers, taking our time with the pictures and headlines. One such evening I was explaining to the boys present what burning data into a CD entailed. Harmonium didi and the stationery didi were talking about someone’s marriage and Harmonium didi suddenly looked towards us and said, “He explains things just like his dad – very comprehensively.” My dad was a math teacher at the school. I stopped and reddened a bit by way of acknowledging the comment and continued with my babble about CDs. I darted a glance at her. She smiled.
Other times we’d see her when she was out to get something from the convenience store. Her outings over a week could be counted on the fingers of the hands.
We were hardly ever home. We’d either be up to a game of guchchaa around the uneven crater-studded brick pavement between the falchaas or playing a certain version of hide-and-seek in the Ganesh mandir–Saraswoti mandir–Maruchhen pukhu environs. I’d be hiding myself along the brick perimeter wall of the pond or in the house that had been under construction for thirteen years and of a sudden I’d catch a snatch of a phrase on the harmonium – and know it was her.
On other evenings, we’d be spectators to heated wrestling card games. Once the piles were formidable enough, every card reveal was like a magic trick. Waited on with bated breath. Eventually someone won and cleaned up the loser’s pile and added it to his own. We never partook in these games because in the penultimate moments they often devolved into mean matches of insults where entire families were debased, with mothers receiving special unflattering mention. Some even disintegrated into frenzied fisticuffs as a result of which the players avoided each other for a week before finding themselves in the same team in a game and making up.
Some days I stayed back at school even after classes were over. A few friends would be around; they used the school bus service and it didn’t leave until all grades were done for the day. I’d stay on because there wasn’t much at home waiting for me anyway. We’d horse around picking stupid fights.
One after-school evening I lost a watch whose straps had broken off long ago from wear. It was my father’s, but it had a calculator programmed into it, so I had made it mine. The last I remember of it was taking it out of my pocket to look at the time under the gazebo at the far corner of the school’s playground, where I was hiding for a game.
Later that evening on the way home, hair still wet, I kept rooting through my pockets and turning up empty-handed. It was not even my own property, I kept repeating to myself. I didn’t even have to take it to school. I could have fixed the straps. I could have kept it in my bag. It was expensive. It was not even mine. I felt even then that this loss would never go away and here I am still talking about it. One thing could’ve been different and all of it would’ve been different.
It was monsoon and the sky was overcast. When the school bus left, it began to patter. I picked up my school bag and was on my way to the admin block to leave the premises when it started pouring. I had to run all across the playground, past the swings and slides, down the steps past the computer lab and up to the forlorn building. Some classes were still running, supplemental classes for students who weren’t doing well. I climbed the steep porch steps – how did I never see anyone fall off it? – up the back of the building. Inside, the fluorescent lights were already buzzing.
I came in from the rain not entirely dry. It was coming down like it wouldn’t stop for a week. I felt thirsty. I walked up to the drinking water facility and, because I didn’t have a bottle with me and because no one was around, drank directly from the dispenser. As I ran my hand through my hair and took gasps of air between mouthfuls of water, I looked up to find Harmonium didi in front of the mirror hanging outside the janitor room. I’m convinced the table on which the water purifier sat was moved around by the boys looking at girls looking at themselves in the mirror because from where I now stood I could see the upper half of her face. As I was thinking this and gazing at eyes that one could compare to glassy pools of anthracite, the pools gazed back. I looked away. She turned around and walked up to the water facility and in the glare of the harsh clinical fluorescent tube-lights – two to each side – she asked with a lilt in her voice, What mischief is this little boy up to? I froze. I was catching my breath when she added, You were drinking directly from the tap, weren’t you? Vice principal sir lai bhandinchu pakha. What few words I had managed to think up went hiding. I felt my cheeks flush, which apparently amused her. She said, Or I can punish you myself, then giggled. I looked at her smiling eyes once and then looked at my shoes. I knew I didn’t have to stand there and take any of it, but I did. I was eleven and she was older so I was about to ask her what punishment, when she stabbed the air with a water bottle with Hello Kitties painted all across it. She said, Fill this bottle up for me. I felt relieved. The water in the jar was running its final legs but it should fill this bottle up and I’d be out of here, I thought. She walked back to the mirror hanging from the wall. I looked at her out the corner of my eye and she was pushing a strand of hair away from her forehead, tucking it behind her ear. The bottle was almost filled up when I looked again and she turned her head as soon as I did. Our eyes met. I felt the back of my neck go cold. I looked down at the bottle, tried turning the tap closed but the water spilled out anyway. I was thankful for the rain because this would’ve been unbearable in silence. She walked up to the water filter. She held out her hand. I raised the bottle towards it. I thought she’d graze my hand. She didn’t. She took the bottle and said, Now you’re a good boy. I was ready to run into the rain to get home, but she had other things in mind. She looked out the door by which I had entered the building and turned back to me, looked into my eyes and said, Ma rāmro lāgcha? Don’t worry, she said, I’ll not complain about you to the vice principal, you’ve been a very good boy. I heard a repeated thudding that could have been footfalls coming down the stairs or rain lashing down. She probably heard it too. She leaned forward and whispered: Do you like me? the whisper barely audible. She put the bottle on the table and took both my hands, which were wet from water or sweat. I felt my body go into a state. The rain kept pouring, the roar impossible to snap out of. I felt my knees go weak. She straightened back up, letting go of my hands. She picked up her bottle. Then she tousled my hair and walked to the staircase. Some students were coming down. She disappeared up the stairs like an apparition.
On the way home I patted myself senseless for the watch. I racked my brain for a single image of the watch falling out of my pocket. Maybe while I was rolling in the grass nearby, maybe when I was returning the watch to my pocket under the gazebo. I focused hard on the thought as though knowing where and when would make the loss any easier to accept. I knew it was around the gazebo because even today I remember the tall, skeletal enamel-black structure with overgrown stalks of grass around it.
At night, after tiring myself out, I was flipping through the pages of the caterpillar book. I wanted my mom to ask me if I’d done my homework (I hadn’t) like mothers did on TV. I tapped the pockets of my pants once more, and the watch was still not there.
Before the next week was over, I enrolled myself into music lessons at Progress and chose the harmonium over the flute and the guitar. The teacher was called Sandesh sir, who was fairly young, in his mid-twenties. In the first lesson, there were a couple of us absolute beginners whom Sandesh sir walked through the chromatic scale, the white and black keys, the stop knobs. I was following his hands as they made palpating rounds over the harmonium in front of him, but the lonesome coos from the pigeon holes in the nearby houses caused Rambo dai’s pigeons to occupy my thoughts. Also distracting was the fetor of smelly socks. But I willed myself to stick it out.
In another corner was the crop of senior students. With the teacher busy with us, they were speaking among themselves. There was Harmonium didi too, and I was able to dart my eyes around a few times. But then she saw me and looked right back and I didn’t scan the group again.
I had only ever seen harmoniums in movies and in the flesh from a distance. The instrument had always struck me as strange. Unlike other instruments whose mechanisms seemed straightforward and whose sounds had some correspondence to the effort put in, the harmonium seemed gangly, malformed and awkward. You blow into a flute and a sound blows out. You strum the guitar and there’s this direct and convincing translation of exertion into sound that feels unequivocally linear. But the concept of the harmonium was not exactly cooperative. There were just so many things to keep in mind. You forget the bellows one second and the keys do not work the next. A veritable overload on the brain.
Thus I approached the instrument with awe. I placed my left hand on the decompressed flap, positioned the fingers of my right hand at the beginning of the first octave. I took a deep breath. With as many pairs of eyes as there were on me I was hesitant. I pulled the flap into a squeeze and pressed the C note and the instrument emanated a wheeze that sounded bovine. I went for the second key and forgot to release the bellows. I tried again and pressed the key after bringing the bellows down. Still bovine-sounding, but this one as if it were dying. I was embarrassed at the sounds it was making, so I looked up at Sandesh sir and stood up to let the next student on.
I asked permission to go to the toilet. On my way back I was hoping to see Harmonium didi at the drinking tap, but when I climbed the steps into the building, I didn’t see her. But she was at the mirror and she turned as soon as I got to the water dispenser. She flashed a smile and waved me over. I walked meekly up to her.
Did you start today? she asked.
Yes, I nodded.
Did you want to play the harmonium?
I nodded.
Do you want to drink some water?
No, I said.
Did you want to see me? she asked and looked into my face. I looked down at my shoes.
When I didn’t answer, she continued: Do you want me to teach you the harmonium?
I looked up and said yes.
She took my hand and led me towards the janitor quarters. I didn’t pull back, but she stopped at the door and then headed towards the stairs. Outside the music room she let go of my hand and inside she talked to Sandesh sir. He then told us that we’d be taught today by the senior students and Harmonium didi chose me and two others to tutor. She went over some of the things Sandesh sir had covered – it was clearer this time – then asked us to try it out on the instrument. When it was my turn, she saw me struggle under her gaze. She sidled up to me and brought her hands over mine. Her warm hand obliterated my hand at the bellows with a firm hold, and the fingers of her right hand closing over mine felt absolute and final.
It sounded like an entire herd with all the instruments going at the same time.
It was Keset who brought us the news. Harmonium nang yāng akhnu bāmlāka nala ka, Keset managed. Harmonium took some damage the other day. While the rest of the class was let go at the end of the music lesson, Harmonium didi was apparently made to stay. The music teacher then supposedly beat her until a janitor preparing to lock up the building heard her screams and, with the help of the other janitors, broke into the room. They then called the principal. The boys had invasive questions and Keset held their attention with details that I believe were mostly fabricated. But fabricated or not, the inevitable wasn’t averted – the harmonium stopped.
The music teacher had been leading the girl on ever since she’d joined. He’d been abusing her and making promises to keep her quiet. It had been happening for some time. After class she’d be asked to dawdle around the school premises while the other students left, then to join him again. Of course the other students saw and knew something was up, but no one wanted to kick up a fuss. And no one knew what precipitated the assault.
The tole exploded silently with the news. Women speaking audibly in front of kiranas pulled one another to curbs and brought their voices down to a reserved low as soon as the unavoidable gossip came bubbling up to the conversational surface. Men preferred not to speak of it, only making nodding acknowledgement when it was brought up.
While her outings were sporadic before, they now stopped completely. Through the spool-vine, we heard of a potential legal case being made, a khukuri wedding being worked out, self-attempts at life. It wasn’t easy to ascertain what part of it was true and what part not. Some nights, when I stayed up past my bedtime, I heard what could have been muted confrontations that attempted to break the night silence the way you burst a soap bubble.
But, of course, these could have issued from any home, any family.
We, falchaa-side, were too young to get more out of the whole thing than its scandalous contours. I felt angry, but that didn’t count for much. For the others it was news just like any other and they gave it the attention they must have thought it deserved. Then we went back to swinging marbles indreni-style and climbing up the joists of the falchaas to hide from the it.
Some days I would wake up out of dreams that reverberated of exertions at the harmonium expecting, upon waking, to hear Harmonium didi at it, but would be met by a disinterested silence. It was as though the soundtrack to our mornings and evenings had been yanked out ever so casually.
Soon autumn arrived and the rains receded. We went to Paaka’s to fly kites. We took the latai by turns. While I was on, there was an all-red kite (hyangu-sārā in bhutima-flying parlance) trying to swagger into our airspace, so I banked our own bapatya towards it and let the strings catch. I let the latai unspool but soon our bapatya was spinning wildly and I started preparing myself for the long spooling I’d have to power through if they managed to cut our string – which couldn’t be ruled out now. But the bapatya went steady again. In a while the hyangu-sārā went limp and started on its way down. We shouted out the battle cry of the newa: kite-skies!
I was reeling the kite in when the string got caught on the TV antenna protuberance on the Harmonium terrace. It wouldn’t disengage. The smallest pull on the string caused the kite to distend against the antenna. Soon, the latai went around: everyone trying exertions befitting an amateur contortionist. Eventually I took the latai back and pulled on the string until the spine of the kite broke. I told them I’d get the money from my parents for a new one. I dragged in the flapping carcass.
***
Harmonium didi entered our conversation again when there was a music programme slated to happen in the tole on the third day of Dashain. Keset wangled intel that she had a performance. The locals settled on the dabu a few paces from the communal pond as the venue. The raised platform was purportedly built out of exactly a hundred and eight tablets of stone.
At nine am on a Tuesday, the stage arrangements began. It was a day off from school. We were in the Ganesh mandir falchaa watching a match of baghchal between two oldies when the first batch of musical instruments were brought in. We abandoned the game and watched things being set up. Tents to check unexpected rain, the sukuls, the dhimays, the harbens, the sitar and other instruments.
The programme started at ten with an ensemble rendition of the Malashree dhun. After some performances we went home. We returned after our afternoon chow. According to Keset, she would come on after a dhimay performance. We sat on the steps of the nearest temple now. I thought everyone was there just to see her.
After the third dhimay performance of the day, it was two, and cloudy, in the afternoon. The sky looked encumbered. I saw a glimpse of someone backstage. It was only the eyes and the bridge of the nose through a slit in the tent, but the eyes looked back for just a moment. By the time I pointed it out to the boys, the shadow had moved on. Onstage three flutists barely older than us were belting out a version of Wane tela jila thau. Next came yet another dhimay ensemble.
She could be up after this, Keset said.
The day was getting to be cloyingly warm and I wasn’t really enjoying the sounds anymore. I felt that I could’ve been doing anything else. There were always pigeons being tossed from terraces and falchaa games being played without an audience. Maybe a forest fire somewhere in the Suryabinayak jungle to spot from a terrace. Or kites to fly. I looked on with something like pain on my face while, for once, more remarkable things seemed to happen elsewhere.
Three months later, our families received invitation cards to Harmonium didi’s wedding. Her parents were packing her off to somewhere in Banepa. This time the news beat even Keset.
I pretended to have a bad stomach, but my parents took me along even when I threw a tantrum. Most of us kids were present at the wedding reception. Harmonium didi was sitting on a red queen chair on the dais where the bride received wedding guests and dispensed betel nuts. The music blaring out of the speakers was too much for me to take, the lights too flashy. The boys were sitting together at a corner near the bar. My parents allowed me to join them on the condition I didn’t wander too far.
Someone handed me a glass of alcoholic punch. Having never before tried it, I put away a couple. I remember finding myself back with my parents later and them speaking to me in reprimands which I wasn’t really hearing. But before all that I remember the boys talking about the marriage itself.
My mom says it’s a good match, Keset said, as if his mother’s was the last word on the subject. Harmonium’s lucky, he added with authority.
Now someone from here has to marry someone from Banepa, Prajwol the bed-wetter said.
Why is that?
To balance the population, Prajwol said.
They are sending her so far away because of what happened, I said.
It’s not that far, Keset said.
It is far, someone else said.
***
I was home for Biska Jatra two months ago, the first time I’d returned in seven years. On a jog one morning – I was reacquainting myself with landmarks that used to be – I was passing through the succession of alleys and courtyards that short-circuit Bekhal and Kwathandau – two otherwise distant places, but connected by passages that seem to telescope space and time – when I was reminded of Harmonium didi. I’d forgotten much of everything, even her name. At the mouth of the low alley I lowered my head and was greeted by the narrow tunnel with its wall of crumbling bricks, too full of shadows for the bright morning. No one else was in transit. A few steps in I felt my heart quicken. I made longer strides and was sprinting by the time the curving alley opened up to the bright stone-paved courtyard with chaitya plinths at its centre. I was recovering my breath, looking at the windows of the houses around the courtyard when memories stole on me of darkened staircases, cramped spaces, interminable corridors, and insistent hands – hands that grabbed mine and placed them on a waist and below arms and other places, hands busting open buttons and forcing themselves inside, throaty whispers, and everything else. I had forgotten all of it.
When I met up with a few of the guys who had not yet left the country or were in the process, I asked if anyone remembered Harmonium didi. They laughed. Even after all these years, huh, loverboy? Prajwol said. They didn’t say much else about her, but started talking about school days and soon began sending up the teachers. Prajwol asked me if I was releasing new material anytime soon. I told him I had been toying with a few ideas.
On the fourth day of the Biska Jatra I found myself leafing through some photo albums – those marvels of the long-gone days – with my family. We’d returned from a trip downtown to see the jatra in motion. On the way home we’d met more family and had secured take-outs and wine for an impromptu gathering back home. After the third Pinot noir we found ourselves going through the photo albums and I found a photo from the wedding of one Pratibha Shilpakar. It was a rather crowded photo. They were all on the reception dais. At the centre was the bride herself: impossibly young, all decked out in bridal trappings. She was smiling. She looked happy. Flanking her were her parents – the father on the right, the mother on the left. Beside the father were my own parents. Beside her mother, there were Dumaru uncle from the hardware shop and his wife. There were other people some of whom were already dead.
Chha nang wau khané, my mother said pointing at the picture. Look, you also made it in.
Go ganā? I asked.
She pointed out a miniature ghost obscured by two men in the process of climbing up the steps to the dais. You could see my tiny physique and half my face, which was turned towards the people posing for the photo. In my hands was my mother’s purse. I had an impulse then – blame the wine – to cart the photo along with me when I flew back, but thankfully I later decided against it.
