- Anirudra Thapa
On the beautiful evening of April 17, my wife, my eight-year old son, and I went to attend the "Himalayan Cultural Night" organized by the Nepalese Students Association of Texas University at Arlington.
Having a disappointing experience of a hugely publicized similar program by the "reputed Nepali kalakaars" a month earlier, we thought we knew what to expect in a program that boasted of nothing sort of.
But the program lived beyond our expectation, a very untypical Nepali
program: no empty beer cans, no half burn cigarette buts, no frustration of having to wait hours for the program to begin and then the luxury of dozing off through some community leader's lengthy sermon on the piety of remembering one's nation.
After years of living abroad, nothing seems so delightful than to see so many sakkali dhaka topi and daura suruwals greeting you on the corridors. In the Rosebud theatre of Texas Univeristy, when Prem Raja Mahat flaunted his dazzling red shirt sparkling beneath a Nepalesque waist coat and played Sarangi with a Nepali flag donned on top it, the audience erupted with a joy. Why does country mean here? I look at the program flyer the ticketing lady handed me. It begins auspiciously, solemnly: "Nepal, a small landlocked country between India and China, has the distinction of being the birthplace of Lord Buddha, the land of brave Gorkha soldiers . The Mount Everest." I stop right there.
I see my son avidly reading the flyer. He turns to me and tells me how his teacher once told him that Buddha was an Indian prince; that Mount Everest is in New Zealand! I try to reason.
Maybe what his teacher meant was Edmund Hilary was born in New Zealand. My eight-year old son who thinks his English is more American than mine casts a look of disbelief.
Thank God he slept through the rest of the program. I survey the hall to hide my predicament. I saw rows and rows full of Nepali, all chasing a slice of American dream pie; they get into frenzy when Prem Raja Mahat sang "aayo Nepali." I don't know why but I sensed a re-scripting of "aayo Gorkhali" in his benign song.
Nothing is so intriguing than to understand how a diasporic imaginary construct the nation of origin. I try to piece together the distinctive markers of Nepali nation inscribed in the flyer. It all appeared a riddle-Buddha, Gorkha soldier, and Mount Everest. In a game of odd-man out, one has to take each apart; together they do not make sense. When one thinks of Nepal as "the birthplace of Buddha," the headline news of the day that Maoists killed 10 villagers in Nawalparasi brings such a note of discord that the predicate sounds hollow and jaded. Then the "Gorkha soldiers!" Our official history says we never bowed down to imperial powers. How come then we ended up being the soldiers of the empire? Shed our blood and thousands of others' in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America? We fought for what? Money? Fact is we fought not knowing why we fought, not knowing who was a friend and a foe. We acted like mercenary; only we refuse believe that we did.
We, the innocents of history, were made sacrificial goats without knowing who did the offering to please which God. Bhupi Sherchan knew it decades ago; "we never learned to be brave without being dumb-heads," he declared. Many a time I am embarrassed with my identity that links me with "Gorpha soldiers." In my postcolonial literature class, we were discussing Bapsi Sidwa's Cracking India.
In one place she mentions how the "diminutive Gorkhas"
watched a whole village of Pir Pindo in Panjab massacred by a Sikh mob during the partition of India. One of my American friends from Iowa asked me what Sidhwa meant by "Gorkhas." I had to repeat the history of Nalapani, the recruitment drive, the shady dealing between the Nepal Palace and the East India Company, and Nepali's bahaduri during the Great Mutiny of 1857! To those who have a sense reading history beyond clich?d officialese, our "bravery" hangs like a national color and pricks like a thorn. One Begali family friend in Texas was surprised to find us so unlike typical Nepalese. I asked what does a typical Nepalese look like? Without any intention of offending us, he said, "The bahadurs in Bollywood movies look like Chinese but you look like an Indian, you look bhalo manush." The same day I read about a Nepalese minister who had gone visiting Korea to talk about exporting Nepali youths, the new edition of old bahadurs, whose history follows from Nalapani to Korean factory. Yet we go crazy to hear "aayo Gorkhali," die to listen a meaningless rhetoric repeat zillionth time so that the historical amnesia feels like a patriotic note.
Nothing is more embarrassing than when we gloat on our ratrabath predicted on a false sense of history. Then how are we to describe our desh in pardesh? I met a group of my American friends in the faculty reception party at Texas Christian University in August of 2002, among whom hardly a few have ever heard about Nepal. Those, who have, recalled the recent Royal massacre and repeated all gory details; I felt like throwing up right there in the party. I could see the disappointment in their faces when I dodged their questions. They felt like missing a lifetime opportunity of knowing the "behind the scenes"
episode of a R-rated Hollywood blockbuster. The same month my colleague from Kentucky related an incident when a nineteenth-century U.S. literature professor while explaining about the urban poverty and squalor in New York, looked at him and told he has never seen such poverty and squalor as in Nepal. This year when I told my professor that I am going home for summer, she just looked at me with disbelief and asked, "Are you sure you will be fine, I mean, be able to come back?" She has read somewhere about how intellectuals and professors are treated in Nepal. What if I ask the same question to her when she goes to Nebraska during summer? I am sure my sanity would be in question.
When the question of whether one would be safe at home has become perfectly normal, where is my desh, my home? When people in a foreign land recognize us through Maoist insurgency, human right violations, poverty, and squalor, the Nepalese Students Association of Texas University indeed did a commanding job in promoting the image of Nepal as the birthplace of Buddha and the land of brave Gorkha soldiers. But the diaspora has the luxury of hanging on a myth that has ceased to exist long ago.
Baffled I proceed towards the parking lot. An elderly gentleman clad in daura suruwal stops me near Kalpana Chawala Hall of University of Texas. We exchange introductions. After hearing my intention of returning back to Nepal next year, he gave such a chuckle I look at him dumbfounded like a child about be transgress a moral code. "You crazy? All are dying to come here and you talk like a perfect fool to go there in a country!" he found words to express his disbelief. I saluted his wisdom, and as we drove off, I caught the last glimpse of receding daura and dhaka topi slowing immerse in the glitter of surrounding vicinity.
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