TRAVEL'D ROADS By Satis Shroff

Travel’d Roads (Satis Shroff)

Dharma Chettri is a lean young boy,with Causacian features like his Dad, but his lower jaw and fine white teeth betray something of a Mongolian melange, genetically inherited from his Ama, his Mom. He wears a smile that you’d describe as honest and winning. After the winter holidays he always returns from his relatives home in Bombay with a new set of shirts and pants and even pocket-money from his grandpa. The shirts are fancy handloom products, and he’s pretty smartly dressed. His Ama knits him also pullovers with decent patterns. And he has good, well-polished black shoes on even when he doesn’t have school. The school demands that the lads should wear English uniforms: a pair of grey trousers, a light and dark blue striped tie, white shirt and a blue blazer. The outfit is good for the winter months in the hilly regions but the kids start sweating under the scorching Asian sun in summer.

He is agile, both in body and mind, and always stands up when the elderly are sitting out of respect, speaks only when he has to, and his mind is occupied with the cosmos,the lives of his heroes in other worlds. He has a casual, friendly attitude towards his family members but a different attitude towards strangers: he’s friendly but watches them from a distance. The line of thinking is: he’s not one of us, he’s a stranger, so you don’t try to get closer to him. This attitude is repeated informally at times of crisis by his Ama. Things that are discussed in the family are family matters, and shouldn’t be carried outside. It’s a family secret. In this way a form of loyalty develops within the family members.

The regular prayers and meditations with his Ama gives Dharma a certain level of inner peace and he tries to be nice to all. He pays attention to the people he talks with and never insults them. With his school friends he talks about the teachers and lets out a ‘bloody swine!’ when he thinks about his Maths teacher. Sometimes he gets very angry without any reason. He thinks it’s his helplessness in a grown up world. He has nightmares and often dreams of the teacher toting a gun in a jungle, dressed like a Marine soldier. He often wakes up from his dream breathing heavily, a racing heartbeat and beads of sweat on his back.

The reality is different. He’s still so small in comparison to the burly Irish Brother, and really scared of that ogre. He has never killed an animal, but likes mutton, and secretly eats swine and even beef momos and gyathuk in Tibetan restaurants. He detests violence and likes Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence but wouldn’t mind defending himself when someone attacked him. He likes reading Ian Fleming’s books and likes Sean Connery in the film ‘From Rusia With Love.’

He tells his chubby school-friend Bhanu Rana about the dream and the other replies, ‘If I were you, I’d finish him off. In the jungle nobody sees you. Look at how the Vietcong shoot the US Marines. The rookies are just sent to the jungles of Vietnam without much training. There are fat Marines smoking cigarettes at night in the jungle. They’re sitting ducks for the Vietcong snipers. They just pick them off and disappear in the undergrowth. That’s how they do it.’

Dharma says, ‘If I was a soldier I’d also shoot him straight or slash him with a khukri. But that’s easily said than done, old chum. The cops will get you in the end. So thanks, I don’t fancy spending the rest of my life behind bars.’

A couple of times Dharma lifted a few currency notes from his Dad’s thick, leather wallet and no one knew about it. Karma had to take the blame as usual, even though he’d done nothing of the sort. He was so crazy about comics that he stole the money from his Dad to buy comics about super heroes. No he didn’t buy candy or cigarettes or anything else. That was the baddest thing Dharma had done. He knows that he’s egoistic and tries to overcome this egoism: he suffers in his inner mind that his brother has been blamed and hasn’t taken his share of the blame. He fights against himself and his conscience:

‘Shall he tell it or not?’

But he prefers not to. He realises that he’s weak to admit his sin or bad deed to his mother. He repeats the Act of Contrition that he has picked up from school to himself in bed and that was it. His mother is the only person he’d confide anything serious–but not his Dad because he’d flare up instantly.

Dharma has dreams of going somewhere for further studies but he doesn’t know what. There was a time when he played with the idea of becoming an artist, learning art at the Jehengir Art School in Bombay. He thought he could live with grandpa and go to art school if he passed the entrance exam.

But his Dad said, ‘What, you want to be an artist? A painter? Have you seen a painter having a decent income?’

His Dad was talking about the poor painters who paint the gaudy posters of the Bollywood films. But that wasn’t art, was it? Real artists were educated in art schools and held exhibitions in famous galleries. Dharma was fascinated by the works of van Gogh, Claude Monet, Turner and other European artists. It was useless trying to convince his Dad.

Not far from Dharma’s home is what you call a line, a row of houses built like barracks when Gurkhas are living with their families. Life is mean in the small town where Dharma’s family lives. Even though it’s a residential area, there are always urchins and beggars roaming about out to do mischief. Policemen keep to themselves in their check-posts and turn up only when someone phones them.

On Sundays Dharma enjoys reading the English newspaper ‘Hindustan Standard’ and the ‘Statesman,’ both Indian publications that his Dad buys. He loves the cultural part because there are always interesting articles about people and countries.

Kathmandu is far away and Nepalese newspapers hard to get in their part of Nepal. The days of Rule Britannia are long over in neighbouring India, but he likes listening to BBC’s Cool Britannia and the Binaca Hit Parade, both of which bring English and American hits. He’s crazy about the Beatles songs ‘Can’t Buy me Love, If I Fell in Love With You, and Cliff Richard’s ‘Outsider,’ and ‘The Young Ones.’ There’s also Radio Colombo which brings the Everly Brothers and Jim Reeves, and now and then Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker with ‘Hey, Let’s Twist Again.’

He has taken dancing lessons from a Nepalese Christian sailor named David, who’s a chain-smoker and coffee-drinker. He smells of coffee and nicotine, is rather thin but he certainly has the grooves.He looks like Elvis with his slick mocassins, tapering blue trousers and a shirt of the same colour. David like to show off his hairy chest and wears a gold necklace with a cross. He says he works on board the Vikrant, an ageing aircraft-carrier sold by the British Navy to India. Dharma and his school-friends go in the evening to David’s dancing classes which is located in a shack on a hill,with enough room to shuffle around with your feet. Dancing is important for Dharma because they have socials now and then during which boys in English school uniforms are obliged to dance with girls from the convent under the argus eyes of the Christians Brothers and the nuns of the girl-school. The boys are always exciting when the Master of Ceremonies announces: ‘Ladies Choice, please.’ That’s the time when your hormones go awry and you want to hide yourself, embarassed at which girl is going to ask you for a dance. He had to admit there were some pretty girls. Oh, with all those perfumes around you. Oh-my-God, what happens when I step on her long sari? Oh, shit it’s a cha-cha. I’d rather prefer a waltz. Quick-step, oh-no!

Dharma has jet black hair and a tanned pale complexion,and his hobbies are reading whatever he can get: newspapers, old magazines, National Geographic magazines with those wonderful pictures and compact articles, classic comics, western books like Zane Gray, Battler Briton, Dandy and Marvel comics with all those super heroes. He likes reading Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories and Agatha Christie. He speaks Nepali with his mother, English with his Dad and uncles. He looks around in his immediate environment and sees people who run shops, other who go to the woods to chop wood and sell them, young boys who spend the day with their catapults, killing birds and sitting around on a meadow, chewing the roasted meat, and spitting the tiny bones around on the grass. Some of the Tamang mothers would be away chopping wood. He knew a Tamang family with a father who was boozed at home, incapable of cooking a meal and unable to give the children a structure in the family.

Dharma goes to the same Irish school as his brother Karma in the foothills of the Himalayas, where discipline, integrity and character were regarded as very important in life. Sometimes, he hates the discipline and the crap that goes with it under the holy name of pedagogy, but othertimes he is thankful that there is a certain structure in his life, otherwise he’d also be like one of the care-free Tamang urchin boys who didn’t listen to their parents, came home and went away, where and when they pleased, and were hurling curse words everywhere in the Nepalese tongue, which is actually a very musical language. He remembers his Muslim school-friend saying: ‘Nepal is a very musical language: I love the doing-words: ‘chapdhung-chapdhung to describe someone splashing and swimming in water.’

There he sits in the living room of a two-storied bungalow. The table is long and made of teak and he sits near the kitchen window, which is half open, so that he can ask his Ama questions in case he doesn’t understand some expressions in Nepali. She can’t help him in English and Maths. Even though it’s an English school run by the Christian Brothers of Ireland, they’ve introduced Nepali literature in the Cambridge syllabus, which he finds good. He likes both English literature and Nepali literature. He has to write an essay and a precis on alternate days.

‘All this writing must have a purpose in life,’ he mutters to himself.

He likes the winter months because he goes with the family to visit his paternal grandpa, uncles and aunts. He has a favourite aunt who looks like a Bollywood actress, and she has a fantastic number of stunning saris with silk brocades, and she’s always kind and nice to him. His uncles work during the day but in the evenings one of them takes him always to Juhu beach to have ice cream or to Chowpatty beach to have bhel-puri or walks along the Marine Drive with the Arabian Sea roaring on the man-made barriers of concrete along the coast to keep the breakers at bay.

Zeitgeistlyrik: A DREAM LED TO ANOTHER (Satis Shroff)

I was around twenty years old,
My head full of dreams.
I left the Himalayan foothills to win a dream:
A dream to go to Europe, visit places I’d read about.
The Bastille from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities,

Where I spent time recalling the French Revolution.
My friend’s Parisienne sister shook her head and said:
‘Monsieur Satish, there are others ways of spending an afternoon in Paris.’
The smell of sea food at a French harbour,
Such as the peasants of Normandy built.
La Rochelle and the German bunkers in the Ile d’ Oleron.
I peered at sea fogs from the mighty Atlantic,
Watched the ‘last oozing, hours by hours,

From a cider-press’ in the Vosges, as John Keats aptly put it.
* * *
In Blenhelm’s little tavern I saw murals of its famous son:

Winston Leonhard Spencer Churchill.
I stood in front of Churchill’s grave;
Above his remains lay his mother.
The words of James Shirley came to my mind:
‘Death lays his icy hands on kings,
Sceptre and crown,
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made.
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.’

I listened to the English ‘Country Sound,’
I’d  read in William Cowper’s verses.
An eighteenth century house, described by George Eliot.
A pub akin to the one in John Burn’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’:
Even though ‘pleasures are like poppies spread.’
Took a swig of English ale in picturesque Burford,
A Cotswold town in Southern England.
Country scenarios depicted by John Milton in ‘The Poet’s Pleasure:’
‘And the milkmaid swingeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe.’

To walk over the Thames Bridge between Waterloo Bridge and Chelsea,
As in Stephen Gwynn’s ‘Decay of Sensibility:’
‘The halflight when the lamps are first lit’ in London.
Where the people are now confronted
With the uncertainties of Brexit,
And promises made by Trump to May.
Peered at the Gurkha and Scottish Guards
Doing their loyal duty near the Buckingham Palace.

One dream led to another;
I found myself in Stratford-upon-Avon,
To be reminded of the Bard’s words:
‘Turning again toward childish treble,
Pipes and whistles in his sound’
From The Seven Ages of Man.
* * *
‘In Denmark’ with Edmund Gosse,
When he wrote about:
‘All the little memories of this last afternoon,
How trifling they are,
How indelible!’

At the German butcher’s in Oberried with my friend,

Who died later of aneurisma of the aorta,
The Metzer’s daughter was what he called an ‘Augenweide.’
Having read Mary Shelly’s ‘Frankenstein,’
I found myself in the apothecary in Heidelberg castle,
And later in the Anatomy Museum in Basle,
Fascinated by the deformed specimens,
Preserved in formalin.
Back in the lovely Schwarzwald town of Freiburg im Breisgau
I dissecting an elderly German’s body,
Under glaring white neon light.
Did he fight the Russians in Stalingrad?
He couldn’t tell me his story.
* * *
The inner German border wall,
Long lines of inhuman barbed wire,
Meant to keep humans in,
Not out.
Hitler said: ‘The great masses of the people
…will more easily fall victim to a great lie
Than to a small one.’
* * *
King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya came
On a state visit to Bonn,
With familiar faces from Nepal’s media.
A reception at La Redoute and Graf Zeppelin,
And a salute from the Bundesgrenzschutz
In Echterdingen.

A few years later the Royal family was massacred,
By the crown prince so the tale goes.
‘Strange things happen in Nepal,’ said my Swabian physician.

* * *

As if in reply to the 20th year of the Berlin Wall.
A metal plate with these words of Konrad Adenauer
Was hung on 13.8.1981 in Bayern-Thüringen:
“The entire German folk
Behind the iron Curtain call us,
Not to forget them!
We will not stand still,
We will not rest,
Till Germany
Is united again
In peace and freedom.”

We’re fortunate to have lived to see the day.
An invitation from President Gauck and Winfried Kretschmann
Flattered to me one day from Stuttgart.
A Spätzle lunch with the Landesvater
And dinner with the President.

* * *
My dreams lived in my head with fluid thoughts.
Went to Venice and imagined the speech
Of Portia to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice:
‘…in the course of justice,
None of us should see salvation.’

A dream within a dream,
Of a young man from the Himalayas,
Now grown old with a shuffling gait.
Goes to Crispano to be bestowed the Neruda Award 2017,
For his verses
And thereby hangs a tale.

* * *