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AFSAN CHOUDHURY
The
assassin and his lover
On the fork where the Patan roads meet
Before
walking to the bridge which lies over a comatose Bagmati,
where the roads sleep broken and muddy,
crawling with
indifferent slime, where the roads twist and turn like a
woman in shimmering pain, whispering desperate groans that
don’t make it to Kathmandu Post or Nepali Times,
he stood
like a sage weeping tears of deaths and dimes screaming in
pain at his own desperate prophecy.
Near the feet of an unknown martyr, standing in a rumpled
garden,
scattered by dust and fumes of reluctant dinosaurs
pretending to be buses from Patan Dhoka,
the shops stand
lined up like well-mannered deaf and dumb kids waiting for
their school bus in the pale winter sun.
The shops sleep or lazily wink on holidays,
the seedy
shadowy street tea shop where mobikes and men come to rest
and drink beer and lime, chatting with girls lazing or
resting on the brawny arms of souped up two stroke machines,
next to the shop which sell sad pizzas in the dark, for
customers haunted by fast food come-ons.
And there in serene gloom sits a bookshop for unknown
Pilgrims waiting for unwary men with time to slaughter and
kill,
hoarding books on the dead and the dying as white
tourist fingers lay obscene hands on coffee book Kamasutra,
and people in grimy shorts who search, with the vacant
sockets of their tired vacation-fed eyes, looking for
mystics and rishis on the pavements and walls of
Patan.
They have come to search for the East in paperback book
covers of ancient travelogues and ritual sex,
books
wrapped in careful but dusty plastic covers,lying close to
incense and candles in earth mother jars.
And there, I found
as I was told I would, I found my brother I had come to
kill, as he stood in a naked corner of the roads
rolling down to the Bagmati,
he stood rolling a
cigarette with his cold, bare hands waiting for the smoke to
fill the hills and the alley of his own mind.
The cracked
road bends and forks in the limpid darkness as men chisel
arcane songs in a voice choking with sleep and wine.
Frozen
into a hump in the middle of a haphazard signboard,
frozen while humping a paid lover, making dead love in
midnight sloughs,making mud and babies in dark mountain
nights,
cleaning the dirt from charity-calmed shoes as
half-fed peasants in saris of red and gold drift off in no
general direction at all, hearing and seeing nothing at all.
No one heard
anything. No.
Not even the lovely girls who walk home
without fear wearing winter jeans and sweaters,
chattering
like swift birds in a mid-air swing,
defying the Himalayan
stare resting on their young shoulders covered in young hair
and shine, as they walk home near the roofs and walls of
peeling faculty pillars of confused concrete.
Girls who dream of far away lands, lands which don’t
swallow dreams like of those who stay home to watch their
decrepit families die wrapped in splendid, serene, helpless
stares.
Go away, far
away.
Where the blue and white marshmallow hills
Don’t
make a constant din of the dead and the dying.
And yet I saw
all this before the assassin came, his face wreathed in hope
and prayers, long before the night was ripped open with the
sharp cleaver of dawn, spilling the red rose guts all over,
just before it dripped into a red day in the red streets, as
early Newar prayers chanted their song in solitary temples
wishing the chill a gentle beloved welcome.
And so you
too have come Bangali babu come as you promised?
We
don’t really need you,you know.
Ah yes, ah yes. That
part I heard first.
Oh, yes, I
am the truthful fat Bangali liar, always weasel-like, always
looking for a friendly face or a hand-out, always so glad to
be Huree, C.I.E and a full member of the Royal Asiatic
Society, friend of the Maestro and close to the Dalai
Lama’s camp, trusted by a man who shoots cocaine and
writes his name in bullets and violin on any empty wall...
Sala
bainchot Bangali. Bat nai sunta. Khali rusgoola khata
and kehta, Tagore, Kehta Amartya Sen, kehta Satyajit Ray,
Subhash Bose, Khali kehta, kehta, kehta…Bol, bol, aur kiya
kiya kehta? Kam dhundta? Sala naukri ko shadi kiya?
Sabka piche parta? Kiya? Bol?
It’s all
right sir. We are Bangalis. We can’t mind being disliked.
We just want to go home and fart pleasantly with our wives.
And he stood
there near the monument to the dead,
his hands full of
liquid dust, tears like fire dripping from his shaded eyes,
as his wrist rested from the familiar joy of a knife pushed
deep into a belly as it becomes death inside the wind-swept
tents of desire, where fools hide, sleep and dream of past
incarnations in wretched but rain washed hills.
He had come
to Patan to kill,
He had come to look for his lover.
Sure
man, why not? It’s so cold, so sublime, all this death and
blood.
Out here
there’s no hunger and no brine soaked lips to caress the
neck of the dead lover, the mouth open, hostess to rude
flies, Mixing memories of salt, venom and corpses. Of making
love to death. As footsteps stalked the fog-clad night.
Yeah?
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