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My Cousin Vinney
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"Thyaas thoos thyas" was what Vinay, or Vinney as he called himself, sounded like to Hari. Vinney was seven,two years my junior, recently back from England and spoke no Nepali. Hari was fifteen, originally from Sindhupalchok and worked in Vinney's family as a domestic helper and he spoke no English
"What is he saying?" Hari asked me. I shrugged unable to decipher any of what my cousin said. I could speak, write and understand English, or so I thought till I heard the gobbledygook coming out of my cousin's mouth. I guessed it was English because I could catch every fifteenth word. What a strange brand of English it was! I used to come first in class, including English class, and it bruised my infantile ego that I could not make any sense of the sounds my oh-so-sophisticated cousin uttered. What was as bewildering was how all the elders heaped so much praise and attention on him. Surely there must be something right about him, something that balanced those incomprehensible words flying out of his mouth that made him so special to the elders? He looked just like the rest of us, in fact he was darker than the rest of us, yet he spoke a tongue we did not understand , behaved in a way we could not relate to and did peculiar things like complain about some sort of paper missing from the toilet. Paper in the toilet? What did he think the toilet was - a library?
"I can't understand a word of what he says. He speaks just like Bob but looks like Rajnikant" Hari complained referring to the Caucasian villain in Bollywood movies who spoke painfully broken Hindi and the dark-skinned stunt master from Madras whose numerous stunts included throwing a cigarette up towards the heavens and lighting it with a bullet from his pistol. To this day I have never understand how the velocity of that bullet did not alter the trajectory of the cigarette or if it did, how perfectly it reversed the trajectory and set it on a direct path towards his mouth. But then I've always been a bit of a geek.
"Hello mister, how do you do, nak bhari singan chak bhari goo!" I blurted out poking fun at my cousin's perfect English. Hari burst into a hysterical bout of laughter. I am still taken aback by how mean I could be as a child.
"Try saying that" I taunted him
"What, what, what?" Vinney looked confused. That made me happy. For once I knew something he didn't.
That night I asked my parent what language Vinney spoke
"But why is it different from the English they speak in my school?" I inquired. I can only imagine what question Vinney must have asked his deeply embarrassed parents.
"One day you can go to England and speak just like that" my mom told me. She didn't answer my question, but the idea of a trip to England was distraction enough for me to forget about my cousins peculiar tongue
"What do they have in England that we don't have here?"
"Double decker buses, soldiers in big hats, electric toys, police cars"
Yes, in that case I definitely wanted to go to England. I had seen that battery-operated remote-controlled police car that Vinney kept under his bed and didn't let anyone touch. It had blue flashing lights and could make the howling sound of a police car, ambulance or fire engine depending on which switch you hit. It even had a megaphone you could speak into. Vinney would say something in his accented English into the megaphone that sounded like a muffled version of "pullover". I didn't get it. The only pullover I knew was what we otherwise called a "high-neck sweater" in Nepal. Maybe fugitives in England wore pullovers.
"But if I go to England, nobody will understand what I say, like nobody understands Vinney here" confusion reigned supreme in my mind. What if they tell me their version of naak-bhari-singan and I didn't understand a word of it and had to ask my parents the same embarrassing question Vinney asked his. I shuddered at the very thought of being humiliated in a foreign land.
"If you stay in England for six months you'll speak just like Vinney!" my dad was the perennial optimist in the family and he was never short of words of inspiration.
"I want to become an English soldier" I said looking at the picture of a Grenadier guard taken outside of Buckingham Palace with my parents standing on either side of him. I liked the idea of being a soldier in a foreign land. No I don't have Gurkha blood in me, although my Baishaki boju in Gantok thinks we might be remotely related to the Gurkha soldier whose statue stands outside the Ministry of Defence in London; but then she also thinks we are distant cousins of Danny Denzongpa, Baichung Bhutia and Prashant Tamang; and given how Darjeeling is making world headlines, that list will only grow I am sure. What better way to go off to a strange land than as soldier with a gun. Nobody messes with a soldier.
"Eentu meentu london ma, unko baba paltan ma, tini nini nini jhyappa!" I heard my sister play outside with her friends.
***
The pukka-Englishman
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England soon turned into an obsession. That March I went back to boarding school, my home away from home, and I ran into things English everywhere. I started to notice things around me that had always been there but never caught my attention. Like the picture hanging in the school library of Princess Margaret wearing a bizzare hat at Ascott; it was taken by a former principal on his trip to England who could go on and on about the event whenever he was asked . I started paying attention to the names of the food served in the school dining hall, words that I had earlier mispronounced because I didnt care what they meant like "short bread", "scones","hot grams". Hot grams? How can it be called that when my mum, that epitome of a modern woman, calls it bhujia? Why did the caterer keep referring to dal as "dawl"? What's more, I came to learn that I was seated in the "Hindu" section of the dining hall because I did not eat beef and my snotty friend, the one whose father was a planter in a tea-estate in Assam and whose mother baked "queens" cakes, was seated in the "English" section.
The summer holidays turned out to be a disaster. When my mom fried up pakoras, I wanted meringue cakes. When she made chiura-ko-pulau, I wanted cold lamb pie with a jug of freshly squeezed lemonade.
"What's gotten into this boy, huh, Baba" my bewildered mom would ask my dad
"He is trying to become an Angrej. A kala-angrej" my dad dismissively laughed off my forays into Englishness much to my annoyance. I wasn't trying to be like anyone. I was no different from an Angrej as far as I was concerned. Angrej, I could accept that noun, but only grudgingly so, but the present-continuous verb "trying" and the despicable adjective "kala" raised my hackles.
I was not just a head-strong kid, but physically strong as well, thanks in large part to the Horlicks and Boost I drank in the hopes of miraculously turning into a pilot. The burst of sugar from these drinks would temporarily transform me into the neighborhood bully who often found himself coming home with a torn shirt or a bloodied nose. The closest Horlicks got me to flying was me leaping over the compound wall after Rishab's sister set the dog on me for knocking her brother cold and then jumping on top of him like Hulk Hogan delivering his coup de grace. I rushed headlong towards my dad like a charging bull out to flatten the matador. I was no match for him. My mother's Horlicks was powerless in front of my grandmothers dudh and makai. To add insult to injury, my dad used his height advantage to grab me by the waist and held me up in the air for a whole minute as I kicked and screamed. Then he threw me up and grabbed me on my way down; he did this a couple of times all the while laughing heartily at my peculiar experiment with Anglophilia.
There is a set of English crockery in my house that my parents brought back with them when they returned from the UK. My dad completed a Masters in Civil Engineering and Urban Planning on a British government scholarship and returned to Nepal with dreams of turning Kathmandu into a well organized and bustling megapolis. He probably didn't have the money then to buy the crockery set at Harrods or an upscale location. I suspect it must have been Marks and Spencers or whatever discount store existed at that time. Discounted it might have been in London, but it was prized possession in my household in Kathmandu. That dinner set only came out when we had very special guests.
Still high on my English trip, I refused to eat in the Hulas stainless steel plates that my mother laid out on the dining table. "I want the sisa-ko plate".
As the youngest kid, I was the prince of my middle-class home, my little fiefdom. "No" was the initial answer I got. Dark clouds soon formed over my head and the haloed look of a martyr showed up on my face. Out came the English plate.
"I need a fork and knife" I probably deserved a slap. Instead I got a pair of shiny silverware also from that same store in England.
***
The White Nepali
I wanted to be all sorts of things as a kid. I wanted to join the army and wage war on the enemy. My uncle bought me combat boots and a uniform of the Royal Thai Army from Bangkok. I neatly blacked out the work "Thai" and replaced it with "Nepal". I wanted to build a powerful army and invade India and capture the state of West Bengal, where I was studying, so that Nepal could have access to the sea. I would then add Assam and the other Northeast states to Nepal's territory and we could use the petroleum found in India's North-east to become self-sufficient in oil production and not have to rely on India for anything. This was against the back-drop of the Indian blockade on Nepal. That dream lasted for about three months. It was the police right after that. I saw the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) battle it out in the tea gardens of Darjeeling and I was fascinated with the idea of joining the police. I would fight the bad guys back in Nepal, those people whom I heard my parents talk about as smugglers,I would capture the dacoits along Nepal's border with Bihar and be granted a medal by the King. I would be the good cop catching the scourge of society like DB Lama and Bharat Gurung. Rumor had it that Charles Sobraj had escaped from an Indian prison and crossed the border into Nepal. I would arrest him and take him to court. I would protect the world, especially my beloved Nepal, from the evil doers.