The Chinese highway passes through here. The winter sun bursts amid the cold morning gust. Tall pine trees sway. The Himalayan range stands by the nose. A steep road branches from the highway and heads toward the old town. A handless statue of a king barred and barbed, surviving few handmade bombs, stands in the city center encircled by the road. After ages, I am back in this town and today is the Democracy day.

A procession passes by me. People chanting slogans ? Long Live Democracy. At the end of the line I met him. He looked very less enthused to be the part of it. He was exited to see me. I walked along him.

The procession followed to a football field by the picnic spot where people came from the valley on the weekends. Trenches were dug. Holes were made all over the foot field to thwart the possible Maoist attack from the hill behind.

This place is long dead. He tells. There were hardly any one on the picnic spot. The shops thrieves on the local tourist were semi dead dreaming the long gone prosporous days.

He is the master orator on democracy and I am the best ear he ever had. I listened to his unmatched rhetoric, and his logics. I swallowed him like water in hot summer days. It was my salad days and he was a seasoned player of politics.

Should we go to our old Bhatti? I cannot resist my enthusiasm to see the old Bhatti.

As evening invaded, we walked to the old Bhatti to recall our long lost memory back. Bhatti stood there untouched by time. Its perpetual thrust has pushed the time back so no change had ever reached its doors. Same Sahu, same Sahuni, Same hut. Only person missing from the Bhatti was their daughter, Nani. Nani, their only daughter with dark black eyes. Who had long eloped with a so-called democrat and they have heard little about her. Sahuji has gotten little fatter and it made Sahuni look twice taller than him.

How did they marry? That was always mystery to me

The kerosene stove buzzed from the front room. He opened the bottle of local ale. I rubbed the Zippo on my jeans. He lights the Marlboro lights with me. A faint smell of paddy straw and the buffalo meat wafted from the front room.

He puffed the smoke in a little circles and I hurled as the silencer of an old car. The cigarette smoke hit the wooden ceiling and dispersed. He watched the smoke as it rise. Followed it with his eyes and with a pensive look he uttered.

He caresses the marks that passed through his fore head we long called a democracy line. He had it since I knew.

You know, you missed the beauty of democracy. He sounded same all over again.

I lived in the most democratic country so I have no complain.

The hue of democracy here was different. It is like having an old fat lady versus the virgin one. We could have molded it the way we want to. God-dam party leaders, they could not rise to the test of time. Kept bickering in their own petty fockery. And came the god-dam Maoist. I do not blame them solely. Inequality was so prevalent for so long, it has to come. It was long awaited. If not Maoist, it would come in different form. In addition, the king, sonovabitch, always waiting to fcuk us all over again.

He bitched them all and sipped a sip of local liquor.

It has been twelve years since I left here. The Bhatti was the center for democracy in this little town out of the valley. Authorities let the Bhatti loose saying it was the drunkard?s gatherings. This let them despise the democrats as Bhatti goers. The Sahu has provided occasional Choyala-kachila-Baji to the authorities. One in a while there was an arranged raids in the Bhatti ? mostly in the kings birthdays. Next day there would be big news from national radio, The Radio Nepal, gallons of illegal liquors were confiscated. And the weekly tabloids published ? raid on democratic center.

There was a thin line passed through the middle of the Bhatti that separated leftists and socialists. I was left from the center and right from the left so I wobbled around the tables. They threw contemptuous look to each other. Occasionally satires passed through the middle table. And the confrontation was avoided because of the middle table, which seated the habitual drinkers, and they care less what they had to say.

Semi feudal reactionary capitalists.

Ultra leftists.

The regular curse words. Once they have used it ample they waited for the central leaders to invent new. Until then there was melancholy in the Bhatti.

From the center flew some Gazals and hubba hubba. Thunderous claps followed by shrill elation. Out of all, I liked the Nani's dark black eyes. They became lively with the Gazals.

As we depart from here now, God, we may never meet.
A meeting it was, as children?s drawings in the dusty street.

That was the first and the last Gazal I recited. I looked at Nani?s dark black eyes, and she was gazing toward me. I felt as my heart was falling a day before I was leaving the town for do not know how many years. Slowly time faded the engraves of Nani?s eye from my heart and unsaddled it to a perpetual oblivion for years.



After the advent of democracy, the business in the Bhatti has been very slow. The rich never came to the Bhatti, the poor never could afford. The old democrats had gained status in society so they felt ashamed to be regular in Bhatti. Since then they never had to discuss on democracy so they did not have to come to Bhatti.

To be contd.....