Prologue
I am Onu, here to tell you the tales of my childhood, tales of riding winds and listening to forests, of trees and open fields, of vagrant heroes and gentle beggars, of singing dacoits, of elephants, parrots, and my mother's secret conversations with their kind. Tales of tender friendships and softer sensibilities, of seasons filled with laughter, and others shaped by the gales of loss and learning.
My childhood isn't mine alone. Like everyone else's, mine too belongs to those voices and presences that sheltered, shaped and altered it. One of those voices eventually steps into my story as a companion narrator from whose dialogues you will learn about the same tales but from a different, and perhaps more philosophical, point of view. As of now, we must wait to meet this narrator, Rahmat. Let me first introduce the inhabitants of the house across his thatched hut in Bahadurganj, the village where we all lived.
The summer heat overstayed in Bahadurganj, like an old friend would, prolonging a humble dinner visit, lingering in countless stories, old and new, dissolving into everyone and everything effortlessly, becoming the air itself. It stayed on and on and on for months, scorching the rice paddies, ripening the mangoes, drying the rivers, revealing the veins within the dirt roads, warming the forests and rescuing, as my grandmother often said, the jackals from wretched winter nights.
It also brought strong winds from the west. My mother's cautions often rode on them. 'Don't go outside the house from noon until four, or else duphari will catch you!' Maa would warn us. The word, 'duphari, as I learned years later, simply indicated the 'loo', the unforgiving hot winds of the southern plains. But to our younger, more curious minds, it sounded like a day-demon flying over the fields, on the hunt for foolish children, playing alone in burning afternoons, away from their parents.
My brothers, Tapa and Pikun, and I often thought that our mother's concerns were unfairly reserved only for us, because she herself always seemed to revel in the summer elements. She would exuberantly run out of the house when the storms made landfall, either to adjust the wooden props supporting young shrubs, or to cover the chicken coops with jute sacks so her hens wouldn't be frightened. Sometimes, I speculated if she went outside simply to skip about in the rain. Even in the hottest of afternoons, she would climb to the rooftops time and again to check which stage of fermentation her chillies in glass jars had reached, or shake the bamboo trays of drying spices so they would dehydrate evenly. She gave up many chances for merriment too, although she was a doctor's wife, choosing instead a life of quiet labour through the cold of winter and the blazing summers. To the neighbours she was 'Bahini' (sister), to the patients 'Dacterni-sahib' (doctor's wife). To us, she, like mothers wonderfully are, was the heart of the home.
Baba, my father and the village doctor, had his own adventures in those blazing afternoons. Come rain or shine, he would saddle a horse or mount an elephant, whichever animal was available, and journey across the village to visit the sick, especially those whose feeble bodies couldn't chart the distances themselves.
My maternal grandmother often visited, sometimes staying for months. She had a way of tricking us, or so we thought, into finishing our meals, drinking our milk, doing our homework, and behaving ourselves, all in exchange for stories. She always had something to say about Keats, Romain Rolland or Tagore, about literature and imagination. From her, I learned how vital village life truly was, the raw earth beneath our feet, the humility of its people, and the youthful spirit of nature that kept our boyhood hearts alive and restless.
Our house in Bahadurganj, now that I have gained some perspective after living in the city of Kathmandu for many years and experiencing life in much smaller spaces, had an admirable expanse. It only had two rooms when my parents bought it, but it did boast a vast yard even though it was half barren and half invaded with weeds. I was only a few months old then. Had I been older, I would have witnessed firsthand Maa's relentless efforts to till the soil hard enough to transform the wilderness into a garden. I would have helped her mould the earth, like the little girl in my storybook did, having found a secret garden at the back of her uncle's English manor. Baba told me that Maa did have help in the form of Salik, one of the heroes of my tale, a young man with a permanent limp and a fiercely romantic heart. His right leg was lifeless, but his condition was never an impediment to the ongoings in our garden that had, in spirit, become half his.
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