The street exhaled a cloud of dust and smoke as the procession of tires crushed the ground and carried away a strong smell of tobacco towards the north. Across the street, attuned with the rhythm of drumbeats, the woman’s khukuri continued slicing the chunk or red meat into equal pieces, and the spatula supported by her left hand was dancing on the frying pan.
This side was the tea stall. It was virtually connected with the radio tower looming over its roof. Nityanand was a regular reporter, and I a part time anchor at the radio station situated just behind the stall.
Nityanand was a pensive man. So, our conversation involved more silence than sound. Sometimes he forgot that he was sitting with his friend and having tea. Sometimes he suddenly woke up and spat, “You know…”
It was at these times that I knew that he’d begun hatching the eggs he’d laid in his mind.
“These FM radios are generating a new generation in Janakpur,” he spat.
“Yes I know,” I said. “It’s become easier to catch a hotty naughty and copulate thereafter.”
Sometimes he sounded more a preacher than a friend, “Actually girls now catch mikes,” he uttered, trying to adopt a convincing tone.
“It’s cool that they do,” I responded. But my resignation couldn’t stop him from pouring out the seemingly unending stream of his profound truths. “Girls have overcome the fear of being crowded,” he said. “They can venture into crowds, and ask questions to political leaders; ask them sternly enough to puzzle the men.”
Nityanand was not a man of impulse. But suddenly, a subtle straw of stress entangled his face. “Her voice is a bit tense today,” he uttered.
It was really surprising for me how he could catch the tension in the tenor of her voice from the news on the radio. Her memory, however, had already sent a flush of blood through my temple.
During the last episode of my live regular program, her toe had quietly kissed mine; it had been a quiet toe kiss. Inside my mind, I had already begun to settle a sort of affair with her. Nityanand was my close friend. So, I wanted to confirm, “Is she your girlfriend?”
“Suppose she is.”
“What do you mean ‘suppose’?”
“Suppose that she is my girlfriend”
“It’s good if she is. After all, your face is quite symmetrical; you rather suit her,” I swallowed the saliva that I wanted to spit.
“Absolute symmetry is repulsive, my dear. I am not engaged with her though. Don’t worry.”
I felt challenged. “Hey, I never worry about girls. It’s all about making the best out of everything.”
I wanted to draw his attention away from the news towards my new idea, “So it won’t hurt you if I propose to her.”
“Me? No. But it will certainly hurt you. She is already engaged my dear.” “What if she is already engaged?” I expressed automatically.
“Even the station manager wanted a dive with her in his libidinal desire,” he announced. “Make sure dear. Her eyes are larger than her breasts and oscillate more frequently than her hips.” I was well aware of his habit of expressing things in symbolic terms. “She is seriously engaged my dear.”
“You mean marriage.”
“Yes very soon.”
My dreams of the flesh disappeared, leaving my mind vacant. My friend was trying to disentangle the thread of emotions in her voice.
“I think it’s her turn now,” Nitya prophesised after sometime.
I couldn’t catch his prophesy, “You will also get your turn. Don’t …”
“They demand her signature on a document,” he overrode me.
I failed to correlate things.
“The Armed Forces want her land,” This time, he put things straightforward.
“But they can capture her land without signature as they do throughout the nation.”
“One of her relatives is in the party. An important, commanding position I hear; maybe an area in-charge or something. He covets it.”
“How interests sometimes override—personal over party and party over nation,” I tried to generalise things.
“Her father and brother had already been kidnapped, their hands mutilated, legs smashed and heads sliced. Their bodies were left on the river bed,” Nitya read the news.
The news really shocked me; a four-year-old news. News is no longer a mere bit of information when you know the person it concerns. You experience it. I know her personally
“So she is a refugee here.” Nitya didn’t say anything that might be obvious to me.
“Is she safe?” the only question that struck my mind.
“Are you safe?” This time Nityanand was philosophically real. For the first time in my life I felt my vulnerability and impotence. My programme was due to begin soon. And when I came out of the stall, I realised that I was thinking.
It was already nine o’clock when I left the radio station. The moon had just left the sky. Almost all the shops were closed, except that of the woman who was still serving fried meat to a few customers. In the empty street, I paddled my cycle. Under the street lamp, a drunkard was shouting at ministers.
As I was about to approach my room, I listened to the sound of ecstasy somewhere from nearby, a copulating couple producing the vaporised rhythms of the drum and harmonium. But my vitality soon transformed into a bundle of sorrows.
She had been attacked and her heart pumped blood out of her body, now lying unconscious in the hospital, waking up at regular intervals to ask a simple question “What’s my fault.” This was not ten o’clock news, but an announcement from the radio urging its listeners for a blood donation; the rare group of O negative. For the first time, Janakpur’s radio had become sentimental.
The next day, she was sleeping over her sharp death; her lips open so that she could swallow the frozen blackberry juice over her face, the camera didn’t need flashes to take her clips.