Pragya: What can I say! To the incidence or to your reaction!.... No, (I rather keep quiet) because my comment would be adverse to your reaction rather than to the incident. Learn to ignore Dila

Me: Why my reaction?

Pragya: In my personal opinion, you grossly over- reacted

Me: An indian friend of mine says she was walking in new york last week and someone called her "slumdog!:

Pragya: Yeah because those bloddy Yuppies hsve only seen this one movie tht is called "Slum Dog Milionoire

Me: Haha! Now see your reaction!

Pragya: She should have replied by saying Thank you so much, U son of a Bush!
At least I'm not talking about gracing their filthy minds and bodies with my touch


UPDATE: 22nd September 2014 

I want to delete this post, for I'm ashamed of my reaction. I wish I could meet this woman and apologize to her for having such evil thoughts. I'm terribly sorry to all Nepalis for what I wrote. I made many friends there, and you may be surprised to learn that this woman was my friend. I was actually going to her home when the incident above happened. I did not include the details of my relationship with her at that time for I did not want to offend her and her family. Now, I cannot say more on what I was going to do at her home for the same reason. After this incidence, I stopped going to her home.

Actually, that same day, I refused to enter her home. Even as the baby was screaming, she came to me smiling, laughing, and welcoming me into her home, but I couldn't enter. 'What's wrong?' she said. 'Why won't you come in? Are you angry with me?' I walked away without another word.

Now, when I look back, I see my reaction was uncalled for. I did right in walking away, but I should not have thought about rape. Maybe I should not have been rash to write it down for the whole world to see. But at that time, no one was reading my blog apart from a handful of friends like Pragya, and I did not think strangers would read it and send me hate mail.

It makes me want to take it down. But I won't, and not because I'm proud of what I said, but because I am only human. We all have a dark side, and we can easily slip off to the evil side at the slightest provocation. At the time I wrote this, I had not read Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, nor did I know of what influenced it, of the atrocities in Darfur where light-skinned men of Arab origin used rape as a weapon of war against dark-skinned women of Sub-Saharan origin. They raped the women with the purpose of impregnating them with light-skinned babies. You can read the horrors of that ethnic cleansing. We Want to Make a Light Baby

I only got to read Nnedi's book this year, and as I read it, it felt like looking into a dark mirror and seeing my evil self grinning at me. It scares me. I'm no different from those Arab militia-men. If I had power, if I had guns, would I have raped this Nepali woman with ethnic cleansing in my mind? This question has given me countless nightmares.

I thought I was a nice guy. I thought I was a great guy, one of the good guys. I thought I was an ordinary African man whose only ambition was to tell stories. Then I went to Nepal, to tell the story of inter-caste marriages, and for the first time in my life I became the color of my skin. I stopped being Dilman, the boy from Tororo, and became Kalo Manche (black man). I became Habsi (Negro, or Nigger). I was called Raati (Night), Kukur (Dog), Bhoot (ghost). I was denied entry to a restaurant once, in the Eastern Nepali city of Biratnagar, and teenage girls screamed in terror on seeing me, as though they had seen a monster. Other girls laughed at my face. I once heard one sigh in horror, saying 'oh babababa kasto kalo!' which would translate to 'Oh my God. How black!' I hated myself for learning the language, for then I knew what they are saying, and I knew why they are laughing, and I knew why that girl screamed in terror as though she had seen a ghost.

Almost every day, I asked myself why I put up with it, why I didn't just pack up my bags and return to Africa, to a world where I was not treated like shit because of my skin color. I wanted to give up many times, but I stayed on, even as evil thoughts like rape whirled in my head. I can't excuse myself, for thinking like that, and I hope Nepali people who read this will not think evil of me. The thing is that I did not quit Nepal simply because some people were treating me as though I was a monster. I stayed on until July of 2011. I made some good friends that last until today, and I met really incredible people who made me see that a few people should not spoil my opinion of Nepal. I met a girl who I fell in love with and for the first time in my life I thought about settling down to a wife and having children. I even surprised myself by writing a romance Novella,Cranes Crest at Sunset, based on my two years in Nepal.

Being the writer that I am, I tried to make light of the terrible experiences I endured. I wrote blog posts that some people read and think I had a great time in Nepal. I even confronted some of the girls. 'Kina haseko (why do you laugh?) I remember asking one of them, at a shop near Raatophul in Dhangadi town, where I was staying. 'Have you seen a ghost?' The young woman fled. A man followed her, saying, 'Come back here! He is asking you a question. Why did you laugh?' But she only continued laughing. The man then came back to me and said, 'Don't mind her. She is just a little girl.' Though she was nearly twenty. I did take comfort in such words. I did try to wish it all away, to convince myself that they treated me like this not because they were racists, but simply because I was living in a rural area and they had not been exposed to black foreigners.

The trauma of those two years runs deep. I sometimes fail to speak in public. I sometimes find myself being very nervous when talking to people. There is an actor friend who I cannot to talk to without feeling jittery, and it's all because I lived in a fish bowl for two years. A terrible fish bowl where I was not treated like the favorite pet, but rather like a monster.

Yesterday, I launched my first collection of short stories, A Killing in the Sun, at the Storymoja Festival in Nairobi, Kenya. I had not realized how much my experiences in Nepal had influenced my writing until I noticed that two of the stories in the collection are based in a futuristic Africa where racism is at its worst. If you ever get a copy, read A Wife and a Slave, and Lights on Water. Both are in a world I don't want to think about, for its humanity at its worst, but I have to tell these stories, to remind myself, and those who happen to read this page, that we are all just a step away from evil.

My book contains stories that were influenced by my stay in Nepal