This is the first time that Peace Corps has suspended its program in Nepal, which had run continuously for 42 years. That’s thousands of PCVs having served in Nepal and returned home to tell others of their experiences.

But, more importantly, what does this mean for our well loved staff of Peace Corps/Nepal? Much uncertainty, I’m sure. Very sad news indeed.

Peace Corps Suspends Program in Nepal

Washington, DC, September 13, 2004 — Peace Corps Director Gaddi H. Vasquez today announced the suspension of the Peace Corps program in Nepal effective immediately.

The Peace Corps has had a successful 42-year program in Nepal, making great strides in the areas of small business development, education, environment, youth development and working on health and HIV/AIDS education and awareness. The safety and security of the volunteer is the number one priority of the Peace Corps and in light of the current conditions in Nepal, suspension of the program is a necessary action, said Peace Corps Director Vasquez.

Currently, Peace Corps volunteers are being consolidated.

The Peace Corps program in Nepal began in 1962. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have served as Peace Corps volunteers in the East Asian country.

My group, Nepal 194, will become the last PCVs to COS in country. I hope that not too much times passes before another group of PCVs is able to have the Peace Corps experience in Nepal.

Looking back on my service, I realize how damn lucky I was. Everything finished according to plan. Fast forward to five months later, and PCVs are waiting around a five-star hotel in Kathmandu for boarding passes for flights to Thailand, where they will spend a week or so on their COS and debriefing, i.e., ending their service.

Well, maybe I wasn’t totally lucky. That is one adventure I never experienced.

As I sip, I look through my window to the wreckage of the abandoned dry port of Nepal. I can hear someone singing in a temple through a loudspeaker. The sites and the sounds make this place beautiful.

This is my last day in Birganj.

Moments later, I’m at Himanchal Cabin, looking over the Kathmandu Post and Himalayan Times with yet another cup of coffee and eggs and toast on the way.

With the kids working here, I joke and answer questions about the photos in the papers. They know me and sit at my table when they have downtime. I have known many of them for more than a year, a few for more than two.

After breakfast, I walk across Maisthan past the newspaper man who waves to me from his shop. I wave back.

Further down the block, there is a man who sits on his patio with a radio held to his ear. I have seen him nearly everyday since I coming to Birganj. His hair is now shoulder length.

I have never met him or spoke to him, but every time we see one another we mouth, Namaste.

I turn west for one block, and then south one more block to the Internet cafe. As soon as I walk in, the young computer nerd turns on a computer and I wait for it to boot.

After a moment, I log on and read my emails. The keyboard totters and bangs loudly on the uneven desk as I type. I send a few emails and then sign-off. I’m there for just 15, 20 minutes.

Outside, I jump on a rickshaw and head back north past Maisthan, the clock tower, and my neighborhood, Ranighat, towards the water tank area, Murli Gardens, my previous neighborhood.

I get off in front of my first flat and immediately notice that nothing looks different, except that someone else’s laundry hangs from my balcony. This is me. I am coming, I am going.

Rajesh and his family make lunch, Nepali daal bhat, and we sit together, eating lunch and drinking whiskey, perhaps a bit early. This is a goodbye I knew would be hard. I have a little whiskey and realize all those misunderstandings were my misunderstanding.

A flood of memories pours over me, and I feel shame thinking of their patience and friendliness towards me. All I do, though, is compliment the food and ask for another drink, smiling.

Two hours are gone and, as I walk back towards the main road, I stop at Mira’s for tea and a scolding. It has been nearly a week since my last visit, a period of absence that they find entirely unacceptable, and I smile as they hassle me. Still smiling, I ask for a biscuit with my tea. They tell me not to leave. They say I will forget them.

Mira, who gave me bhai tikka, I won’t forget you.

I know that in small ways, I will remember them, but I will probably never see them again.

They opened their home to me. I feel that my friendship and occasional gifts were completely inadequate, so I almost wish they would hassle me more. They don’t. They just give me more tea.

After I finish prolonged goodbyes, I walk to Ashish’s. He lives where a British VSO once lived. She was a friend and showed me much of Birganj.

Now Ashish lives in her flat. I think about my flat and the Australian who lived there before me. I wonder if this cyclical nature of volunteers coming, working, and leaving is good. We fly in, from far away places, try our best to improve things, and then leave just as suddenly as we came. Again and again.

There are already several volunteers from out of town at Ashish’s for the big farewell party. Oh, and St. Patrick’s Day.

There’s green Carlsberg beer ready and water buffalo meat cooking. Just after dark, the music gets louder and the dancing begins. This has happened so many times that I can’t help but be sad to know that this, again, is a last.

Before it’s too late, I walk alone back to my flat. The streets are empty and the houses are dark. I notice (as I always have) how the fluorescent lights hanging as along the way eerily illuminate the crumbling streets and gloomy homes.

It’s beautiful. I walk across the abandoned dry port, past a building that was bombed by Maoists, arrive in Ranighat and finally home.

As soon as I walk in, I notice my packed bag sitting in the kitchen, waiting for tomorrow’s departure. I can’t sleep, so I go to the roof to look over sleeping Ranighat.

I can’t look in any direction without remembering encounters with people, street food I ate, places I went and others I didn’t, the houses of kids I knew. They will not see me again, and soon I won’t remember many of them.

The next morning, I get in a jeep headed to the airport. After a few moments, we are outside of Birganj and passing through places like Parwanipur, Jitpur, and finally Simra.

This may or may not have happened.

I may not see the clock tower and think, This is a last. I may not notice the Bollywood movie posters that used to catch my eye.

This part of my life is over (or rather ending very soon), and I will never live again in this city full of contradictions—and that makes me sad. Very.

But a new chapter in my life is opening, and I’m turning the page, anxious for a new beginning.

Perhaps it’s just a coincident that my predictions (or rather, intelligence collected) about the security situation in the Rautahaut, Bara, and Parsa districts have come true, much to the frustration of the Peace Corps Kathmandu office. Not that it matters.

The fact is that we PCVs are ourselves responsible for our safety. How can someone expect someone else to take care of them?

So let me explain the situation.

Since December 19, 2003, when I wrote an post for this blog titled Bombs Over Birganj, there have been around 18 bombs detonated in the Birganj and Kalaiya areas, all by Maoists or Maoist affiliates.

There was also a large attack by ‘several hundred’ Maoists on the airport in Simra (the local airport for Birganj, about 12 km north).

The office where I work, the District Education Office, was bombed on February 18, 2004.

Fortunately, I was not at the office that day. I was in Kathmandu finishing my close-of-service medical checkup.

There had been two bandhas while I was in Kathmandu, so everything took a bit longer than it should have; however, this is the way of Nepal nowadays, and so one must just get used to the on-off tendencies of the country.

One day things are on, the next they’re off.

When I arrived at the Kathmandu airport on February 21, 2003, I checked in at the counter and went into the waiting area past security to wait for my flight.

As soon as I was inside, a friend who works for another airline told me that because of a ‘security problem,’ a previous flight had been unable to land in Simra. He didn’t provide, perhaps because he didn’t know, many details but assured me that my flight would be canceled. I waited.

Ten minutes after my flight was supposed to leave, an announcement over the loudspeaker said that all persons flying to Simra should return to the check-in desks. We were told that the flights to Simra were canceled, as said before, because of a now mysterious security problem.

I had just heard, while in Kathmandu that the DEO had been bombed, so I was a bit nervous. I called the Peace Corps duty officer and asked them to do a little research on the security problem in Simra and get back to me before I rescheduled my flight.

When the duty officer called me back, he told me that there had been a total of eight bombs planted along the runway in Simra. He didn’t know what type of bombs they were, just that the army was in the process of safely defusing/detonating them.

He then suggested that I wait until a few other planes had landed safely in Simra before taking a flight back. I agreed.

So one day later (and after two other planes landed safely), I boarded a plane bound for Simra. The flight was rough and I was wondering if it was the weather or the pilot’s preoccupation with possible land mines on the runway.

Once at the Simra airport, I was present when the Minister of Information (then Kamal Thapa) was arriving. The first person to exit the plane was a fatigued soldier carrying an M-16. And so was the second and then third person, until Kamal Thapa himself emerged.

Even I thought this was strange.

Back in Birganj, I stopped by an airline’s office to talk with a friend working there to see if I could get some answers about what had happened the day before at the Simra airport. They told me that five minutes after their plane had left Kathmandu for Simra, the bombs had been discovered.

The flight time between Kathmandu and Simra is about 15 minutes.

Early on the day I was flying to Simra, I ate some sekuwa near the airport, and then walked my way up to the terminals, which takes about than 10 minutes.

As I was walked to the airport, the army folks were off to the side of the road where usually stand RNA guards. Next to them were three kids, about 13 or 14 years old, standing on their heads with their shoes off. One of the army guys was beating the kids’ bare feet with a rod of some sort.

They waved me by without asking for my ticket or ID, which is the standard procedure. I stopped for a moment and asked what was happening. The army man in charge of beating feet told me that the kids were naughty. I asked why.

Because they don’t have jobs, he informed me, his frustration with the children palpable.

I thought about the kids, Maoists, and bombs at my airport.

About a week ago in Kalaiya, the army murdered two civilians in their homes, and then took their bodies to the jungle where they were buried.

Family and other folks found out about this and went into the jungle, found the buried bodies, dug them up, and marched in the main bazaar in Kalaiya, putting the bodies on display and rallying in front of the army barracks.

The people called a bandha and there was some confrontation with the police and the army, ending with the army lining up and firing blanks at the crowd, injuring 15 people.

This is how you when the people’s support, right?

Since December 2003, there have been two bombs at the army barracks and another at a police station in Kalaiya.

The number of reported cases by Nepali media of the police or army killing civilians in Nepal has been increasing every day. Stories of rape, murder, and extortion are beginning to appear with disappointing regularity in the newspapers.

Three kids were killed in Narayanghat on Maha Shivaratri. A while ago in Hetauda, a bus conductor was shot through the chest and killed by an army man who apologized on the spot, saying he had accidentally aimed the gun and pulled the trigger.

After seeing those army men beating those three kids, I think that the army cannot exist like it does without the Maoists, just as the Maoists couldn’t exist without the army being the way it is.

Somehow I forgot to mention this. Forgetting to mention something like this suggests something about how we all feel here in Nepal: safe.

Yet it is a safety borne out of complacency and a feeling of invincibility that most PCVs here feel. I think that the the thing we overlook is that the people who we are working with here just can’t leave the country if things get too bad.

Anyhow, when I got back from the training in Dharan, I was walking to my flat when I noticed a building about 200 meters from where I live looking quite a bit different.

I though, Oh, this must be getting demolished.

Later I asked a local what was happening with the building and he told me that it had been bombed a few nights ago.

Even tonight I walked by that building. Bricks are strewn about the road in front and the one side of the building is mostly exposed.

It was an empty, government building just sitting in a field—across from the the army barracks in Birganj. Why would the Maoists blow-up an old, abandoned government building that’s across the street from the army barracks?

I guess because they can.

I was going to stay for a night, maybe two, before heading back to Birganj.

Anyhow, we were having dinner, and Andrew was talking about the school visits he would be making the next day: a short in-and-out trip to invite two English teachers to an upcoming training.

So wouldn’t it be funny, we thought, if I came along pretending to be one of those know-nothing jocks from Washington, DC, pretending:

1. to know something about the work that we’d just invented
2. be aware in the slightest of the surrounding people and their culture

We could mock the worst aspect of Peace Corps to the people whose opinions actually mattered—the Nepalis, who were often victims of seemingly random, surprise visits from people with unclear agendas and even stranger messages to deliver to people with whom they have no direct contact before. Weird.

I had seen it happen just a couple of months before when two Peace Corps suits (essentially ‘from corporate’) rolled up in a white SUV at an agricultural co-op where a PCV was working.

Their backgrounds were not in agriculture. They had no visible interest in the economics of the micro-finance scheme of the NGO. In fact, they were ex-military intelligence.

Strange ambassadors to send to a dirt farm needing development assistance, especially considering their collective credentials from Vietnam and Somalia.

After they asked preliminary questions on how the office was built (my favorite question, With what type of steel reinforcement?) and the location of the toilet (there was no toilet, just a pit latrine), they mostly talked amongst themselves about the chiye they had been served.

Oddly, they both compared it with teas they had had in Vietnam and Somalia, respectively. Which was enlightening.

Anyhow, the locals had sat nearby, uncomfortable with their non-comprehension of the foreigners’ curiosity with the tea.

The Nepalis there been told that they two men in starched white shirts, khakis, and high-gloss burgundy loafers had come to Nepal a few days ago from far away to visit their NGO. And so far they had been asked about concrete, and then mumbled to themselves for 20 minutes about, apparently, the tea.

Then they walked to the white SUV and drove off into the sunset, leaving the volunteer behind to explain what had just happened.

Sadly, terrible behavior by the office types in Peace Corps isn’t limited to dumb Americans, although they usually do it with such skill it is humorous for everyone involved.

If only these bumblings were just cultural misunderstandings, they could be excused. But it is usually logistical and financial intimidation. If they don’t put on a good show, they won’t get a PCV.

If they don’t get a PCV, they won’t have access to the piles of money available through grants and proposals.

Now, we are way up in the Himalayas, far from the hot, oppressive Terai. A friend from my group was posted in small village in Lang Tang National Park in the heart of Rasuwa district, north of Kathmandu and bordering the Chinese province of Tibet.

It is a wonderful place of mellow, accepting people: some indigenous to Nepal, some decedents from Tibetans. All are Buddhists in my friend’s village, and there’s only a single government school, which is where she teaches.

So a couple of the senior staff from Peace Corps (who happen to be Nepali) show up in her village to assess the situation. She has but a few months left in her village before her time as a PCV comes to an end.

The staffers are her program officer, a woman, and a training officer, a man. Upon arriving, the two check into the one hotel in the village, which they find awful. They begin complaining to the sole proprietor of the sole hotel in the little village about the hotel’s lack of rooms with joined bathrooms.

Actually, the village is little more than a overnight stop for trekkers heading up, up, up to see some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Probably a rare occasion to hear the phrase ‘attached bathroom’ spoken in Nepali.

But they’re not done. Much to the PCV‘s horror, during dinner, the duo ask the proprietor for meat with their meal. The guy says that meat isn’t available and heads back into the kitchen.

The PCV is crawling in her skin and explains that most all Buddhists in her village don’t eat meat. She’s lived there for 24 months without meat.

Nonsense, the woman says, I saw chickens out front. Then the PCV has to explain that chickens also lay eggs.

When the proprietor comes back from the kitchen, they ask him again for meat, mentioning the chickens.

They’re for the trekkers. Although I’m a Buddhist, I’ll prepare eggs. The woman is spurred by this and starts negotiating how much it will cost her to pay him to kill a chicken.

Of course, they didn’t get any meat. All they had done was attempt to bribe a person into abandoning religious beliefs for money. And meat. The volunteer was so mortified that she spent the next day apologizing for her office’s thulo manches.

Touching lives, making a difference.

Our plan was for me to wear Andrew’s pin-stripped suit, a Nepali >topi, and act like a total ass.

A few rules: I couldn’t speak Nepali and would have to pretend like I was from Mars and be totally baffled by everything. Yet I would have to press them for certain pointless information and ask them to complete specific pointless tasks in my absence.

We showed up at the school in a white car that we had rented for effect. We had the driver pass through the gate and right up to the office’s front door.

The driver, convinced by a test dialogue Andrew and I had run through during the drive, got out and opened my door for me. I then walked directly into the office and began loudly introducing myself to the faculty who were waiting together before the school day began and exams were handed out.

Hello, I am from Aaaaahmeriii-cah, I said in my best moron-from-Washington voice and then, commanding Andrew, shouted, Translate! The faculty then gave their introductions.

I listened and then began asking them random statistical information, like how many 14 year olds were currently attending the school. It’s the age when children learn the best, I told them, Get ‘em when they’re 14, and it’s all over—translate!

Andrew was trying to translate, but the sight of me looking so out of place and acting like such a fool was too much for him and he started laughing, quietly to himself.

His counterpart came over to ask him a question while I was discussing dental health with the headsir, putting his hands around Andrew in an unexceptional display of affection.

I turned to him, We don’t do this in America, I said, looking as dumb as I sounded, And I find it . . . disturbing.

I realized that I was losing steam and asked the headsir if I could address the entire student body, but he told me that because of exams, only a few classes were present.

That’ll be sufficient, I said, because I need to share some things about dental health.

I then asked the faculty what they thought was more important, learning English or dental health.

They talked amongst themselves and then told me in unison, Both are important.

Fine. I then walked out of the office and wandered around the school, pointing at students and shouting, Is this a student, Andrew?

Once the students were assembled, I produced a whistle I had taken from Andrew’s and blew it as loud as I could. I had them.

Out of another pocket, I took out some floss that I had grabbed it as we left Andrew’s, thinking a prop or two might come in handy. I asked the students, What is this?

No one knew so I told them it was floss, yelled at Andrew to translate, and began giving a demonstration of how to use it in front of the 8^th and 9^th graders, who were assembled outside.

A girl raised her hand and asked (in Nepali), Is this available here?

I said something and Andrew translated, Probably not.

I then asked the students if they enjoyed learning English and of course they said yes.

And how can you speak English, I was really being ridiculous, without a nice smile?

I then asked the kids how to take care of their teeth.

Brushing, they responded in unison.

I then asked some other ways. A hush fell upon them and no one said anything for about half a minute, until a small boy in the back of a line said, Exercise?

Exactly! I told them, glad that the kid had given me something else to ramble on about, Mouth exercises!

I then went through the three mouth exercises I invented on the spot, the big O, the sidewinder, and the cat’s meow. I’ll let you imagine what these were.

I had the kids going through the exercises when the headsir came up to me, It is time to begin the exams.

I concluded by telling those present that I would come back in five years. If they hadn’t taken care of their teeth, I would remove them—forcibly, Translate!

A girl raised her hand and mentioned that they wouldn’t be at this school in five years. Good point. So I took their names and told them that I would track them down. This seemed to make them happy.

The faculty hadn’t bought my act, though, and I think that’s a good thing.

Next time when a white Peace Corps SUV rolls up in the school grounds, drives right up to the office, and some hack with absolutely nothing important or significant to share with the faculty marches into the office, maybe they will have a broader context to understand the significance of such things.

One last note.

As Andrew and I were leaving, we noticed two teachers. One was Andrew’s counterpart, mouth wide open, and the other was the headsir.

The headsir hand a length of floss in his hand and was carefully flossing the other teacher’s teeth.

Touching lives, making a difference.

But the best that I could do, after two months of Peace Corps’ astounding language training, was to tell them, Ma yad garchhu, I remember.

And what do I remember now? Have I changed after two years in this wonderful and flawed organization? Am I better? Did I climb Mount Everest? Did I build a bridge with cave-dwelling, sun-fearing villagers? Wasn’t I supposed to be sick constantly? And what about the United States?

Aren’t I supposed to realize that, at heart, I am a cave-dwelling, sun-fearing villager who could never live like I had before?

I thought I was a PCV. I thought I was the alpha male, able to adapt to anything, pick up a language on the way, and figure out how to be successful in seemingly ‘difficult’ circumstances.

To me, the adjustment after Peace Corps seems a lot like being a PCV a second time. Once in Nepal and then again in the US. Hopefully it’ll be as much fun the second time around.

I’m trying to figure out exactly how right the Peace Corps shrinks will be at forecasting hard times. They told me I’d be sick, which I really wasn’t. I mean, not any more than I would have been if I’d stayed in the US.

Yes, I did have diarrhea, but I’d had that in the US, too. I didn’t need Nepal to get indigestion. Plus, I never got ill enough to really complain about it. Except that one time during the monsoon when it was well over 110° F and the power went out for over a day.

Which was awful.

While I can’t really start to look back at my Peace Corps experience and the very strange and interesting culture that surrounds it quite yet, I can say that for me, my experience as a PCV was completely unlike what I had preconceived.

In a country of mud huts with thatch roofs, I never lived in one.

In a country of sprawling rice fields, I never commuted through one.

In a country of extreme poverty, I never really experienced it.

Sure I saw it. I passed pale corpses dead from the previous night’s freeze. I watched one morning as a set of tractors demolished shanties I used to see from my kitchen window. I fingered bullet holes in the waiting room of the airport. I heard bombs. I saw the muzzle flashes from weapons in the distance before going to bed. I taught shoeless children and paid half-naked rickshaw drivers. I was mugged and robbed.

But I never really experienced the things that gave Birganj its edge. I was always safe, far removed from the real things that change people.

Even when I rode in the backseat of an army captain’s car while he had a Browning 9mm shoved down the front of his pants, explaining how not a month ago the Maoists had attack him at this very spot and killed several of his men, I was safe.

And I can’t think why.

I’m in Dharan, and I’m finishing the training that the ANNISU-R said I couldn’t finish a month earlier because they were trying to keep eastern Nepal closed for some reason, to prove some point to someone somewhere.

I’m here, and I’m thinking about where I’m going to be, what I’m going to be doing, at some point in the future. Sometimes I think about April, when I finish as a PCV. Other times, I think about two years ahead. Future hazy, check back later, as the Magic 8 Ball used to say.

The one thing that I want to do, though, is have one last breath of what I loved about Nepal, outside of what I can get in Birganj. I want to see Birtamod and remember all the crazy people who flock to Andrew, the PCV who lives there.

I want to walk the quiet, dying streets of Rajbiraj and remember dogs, Christmases, and paan. I want to pass along the quieter parts of the East-West Highway, remembering that not all the trees have been cut down yet.

I want to jump off the bus as it pulls into the Birganj bus park with rickshaws swarming about, remembering that in such a place, I can be happy.

I remember Moser’s songs about unrequited love. I remember Andrew’s long hair, which looked awful. I remember Liz being shy, even though we were close, and I guarded one of her secrets—and a hilarious secret at that.

I remember being on Laurel and Kara’s patio, drinking coffee and eating André’s dry biscuits. I remember waking up in Yvette’s living room even before the sun has risen and then making that dusty, cold walk to catch a bus going somewhere.

I remember the apples in Mustang, drinking hot chocolate with Beth in a place she (for some strange reason) thought was nice.

I remember drinking jar at 8 a.m. with my host family in Gaidankot, then telling my language teacher, in Nepali, that I was drunk, which they always thought was a joke since it was 8 a.m. and I was speaking Nepali.

And I remember sinking that damn boat in Fewa Lake, laughing all the while.

I remember the first walk through the Birganj bazaar, not sure if I was in an Indiana Jones or a Mad Max movie, but knowing I was going to be OK.

I remember my first night in Birganj, staying in such a bad hotel that I even surprised myself. I remember being woken numerous times in a shady hotel in Thailand by roaches crawling over my body. And that had become a vacation.

I need to go to Jhapa and see the green, lowland tea fields one more time. I need to stay a night in Rajbiraj one last time, because I didn’t know that my last visit there was going to be my last visit there.

I need one more cold Coke from a wet glass bottle on a hot, sticky day in the Itahari bus park.

I want more foggy mornings spent over coffee and newspapers at Himanchal Cabin in Birganj.

I have to see more smiling faces of eager students—and teachers.

I have to experience everything again, so I can remember.

And yet there’s no time.

If I said that my Thanksgiving plans for this year were made by my friends while they trekking around Sikkim with the US Consulate to India, I might sound a little over the top, as if I was trying to impress whoever might stumble across these scribblings.

A bicyclist pauses for a photo in Kolkata.

Actually, that’s about the simplest I can put it. My friends took some vacation, went to Darjeeling and then Sikkim, and happened to share the trail with the US Consulate. His name is Geroge.

George and his wife were nice enough to extend invitations to them and their friends (I would fall in to the latter group) to join them and some other foreign service staff for Thanksgiving in Kolkata.

There were promises of a 23-lb turkey, sweet potatoes, and a swimming pool. But getting to Kolkata wasn’t as simple as it should have been.

The problem wasn’t in logistics, since Kolkata is an overnight 12–13 hour train (or bus) ride from Eastern Nepal.

We had four days to get to Kolkata and back to Nepal to be within the good graces of Peace Corps/Nepal. It wasn’t simple. Because we’re morons.

After congregating in Birtamod, we left en masse for Kakarbhitta and then to Siliguri, where we could catch an overnight train to Kolkata.

Andrew was supposed to have bought train tickets, but because of the present security situation in Nepal, none of us were sure that we would be able to go; that is, until the day before we had planned to leave the country. So Andrew hadn’t bought tickets.

Andrew e-mailed me from Kathmandu:

Dear Fool,

I am in Kathmandu. You are at post. I am watching the BBC. You are listening to it on a scratchy radio. I am taking hot showers. You are sitting under a cold tap. You are listening to the same old music, while I listen to new exciting albums you have never even heard of.

I am staying out late at the discos. You are going to bed at 8 p.m. You know nothing about the trip to Kolkata. I have all the control. I have the tickets. I am negotiating with the office. You do nothing. You sit, and you wait for me, dog.

Sit.

Justin Timberlake

I was mostly confused because of how Andrew had signed his e-mail. Strange man, he is.

Anyhow, when we finally saw him in Birtamod, he informed us that, in fact, he hadn’t bought any train tickets. So we were left to ‘figure it out’ in Siliguri. And off we went.

Day 1, Wednesday

It was the day before Thanksgiving when we finally were allowed to leave Nepal and enter India. By the time we reached the Siliguri train station, NJP, we had been throwing around a football and talking about white vs. dark meat, pumpkin vs. apple pie, swim vs. nap.

A tree grows in Calcutta.

It didn’t take long at the booking office to know that we weren’t going to get on a Kolkata-bound train. We would require another means of transportation.

Those means were limited to a bus. Kara sounded suddenly excited and talked about a bus she had taken from Goa to Mumbai back in April: seats that reclined into beds, air conditioning, comfort, et cetera.

We bought our bus tickets and waited for our luxury bus to arrive. We sat around the travel agency playing hearts and spades until 7 p.m. Our bus ride would last something like 12 hours, which would put us in Kolkata well before anyone carved anything.

Seeing the bus wasn’t nearly as disappointing as actually boarding it. While it wasn’t any worse than the average bus in Nepal, it was not any better.

As soon as Laurel sat in her chair, it squeaked loudly, collapsed backwards into a total recline, and rested on the legs of the man sitting behind her. It was broken. As I sat down next to her, I thought of her misfortune in not being able to sit upright for next 12 hours.

Logically, my seat next to Laurel’s was incapable of reclining at all. My chair was to remain at a precise 90°ree; angle. I sat perfectly upright for the entire duration of the bus ride, which was, in retrospect, longer than 12 hours.

Sitting in the erect position, as soon as I would nod off, I would slowly begin to lean forward and descend until the bottom of my chin was touching the top of my stomach and then the top of my head would collide with the back of the seat in front of me.

And sometimes just the light from on-coming traffic burning into my eyes was enough to jostle me awake. But I was not alone, as no one slept.

And then at odd moments in the night, when I was neither asleep or awake, the bus would stop and we would be herded off for food. I have a cloudy memory of stopping somewhere in the black of the early morning. It must have been 3 a.m.

I staggered off the bus and faced three identical rice shops, all glowing violently with an incandescent flicker, all with a single bundled man in front screaming—sort of a shouting chanting—to attract people to the respective rice shop.

I was cold. I was half awake, half dreaming, and there were three men, wearing sweater vests, somewhere in anonymous India, shouting at the zombie-like bus passengers milling around a dirt lot.

At some point, jostled by the chanting, I remembered how a few hours earlier I had awoken to find an Indian Army guy walking up the isle in the bus with a digital video camera, sweeping the passengers’ faces while a bright on-camera light shined into our faces.

I remember waking up for a moment to think I was being kidnapped. And then falling back to my near-asleep state.

After that, the next thing I remembered was this most bizarre sight: three rice shops with similarly dressed touts in front shouting the nearly identical things about actually identical food. I found this odd.

The touts chanted, HEY! WEGOTLOTSOFRICE! LOTSOFHOTRICE! OHRICE! OHROTI! YOUWANTROTIWEGOTROTI! HOTROTI! COLDROTI! LOTSOFFOOD! ROTI! RICE!

During the 20-odd minutes we spent at this rest stop, the three touts never stopped chanting nor, as far as I could tell, breathing.

I ate, but it didn’t help me sleep. The touts haunted my dreams.

Day 2, Thursday (Thanksgiving)

It was still early when we reached the US Consulate in Kolkata. The taxi driver had taken us without any difficulty to Ho Chi Minh Sarayani, the humerous address of the US Consulate.

The Ambassador car in Kolkata.

Apparently West Bengal’s long-standing (and long-ruling) Communist Party thought it quite clever to rename the street in the early 1970s to tease the US foreign service. Kind of like the British with India’s city names.

Anyhow, this was the day of relaxation. We had some breakfast and saw the Buddha that Laloo Prasad Yadav, the then defacto minister of Bihar, had given George.

He told us a story about a man who had met Laloo once to discuss the subject of Laloo’s poor record on education in Bihar. Why was education in Bihar lacking behind other states in India?

Laloo looked at the man. You’re educated, he said. Would you vote for me?

Bihar is an interesting place. Even though I’ve been within spitting distance of it (the border town of Raxual, Bihar, is just on the other side of Birganj), I’ve never actually been there. For better or worse.

After coffee, we played a game of touch football with the pigskin that we had brought from Nepal (and tested at the Siliguri bus depot). We ha been tossing it to and fro to entertain ourselves during the lulls of travel. Most people had assumed it was a rugby ball.

When we told them that it was US-rules football, people just stared at the ball with even greater confusions, I assume trying to figure out how one would kick the oddly shaped ball.

Most people who handled the ball, however, were amused and informed us that the ball was made in China.

The Thanksgiving feast was wonderful. We had cleaned up and tried to look as presentable as possible. I sat near the head of the table, next to our hosts, George and Lee.

There were the seven of us PCVs, two other foreign service folks working at the consulate, and both George’s and Lee’s mothers.

The table was set with beautiful china upon a brilliantly white table cloth, with a few candelabrum here and there.

Things got complicated when Andrew and I were both served the gigantic legs of the turkey. My first impulse was to use my silverware, but Lee quickly scolded me, We’re like your family. You can eat Henry VIII style.

There was a reason that the PCVs had been given these obtuse pieces of meat to eat: shamelessness. We had been eating with our hands since coming to Nepal. The same goes for India.

So who cares if Andrew and I, in the US Consulate on for a major US holidays, looked like we were on a poster for the Society of Creative Anachronism at a medieval festival.

Moser spilled his red wine all over the table cloth. He covered it up with his plate. Liz broke a glass in her bedroom. She stuffed the pieces in newspaper into the bottom of a garbage can. Several of us trampled decorative Deepawali lights while running into the bushes playing football.

We were a mess. They should have kicked us out.

But they were kind people.

Day 3, Friday

We had set aside the day after Thanksgiving to do a few tourist activities before our departure on Saturday. We asked George’s mother to come along with us, and she was game.

First, we walked over to the India Museum. It was a strange place, the museum itself being as interesting as its holdings. There was a display of a family of gorillas that had been donated nearly a 100 years ago.

Late, we approach our platform to find our train back to NJP.

Stitches down the middle of each gorilla dated the quality of the taxidermy. But even stranger were the clear marks of bullet wounds in the chests of each animal: Papa, mama, and their two baby gorillas.

I imagined an old honourable East India Company Britisher with his entourage of Indians wandering jungles and killing every God damn beast that crossed their path.

The gorillas were a gift to the museum by a man who, most likely, had a sufficient supply of stuffed dead things. Just thinking this guy had blown away a family was slightly disturbing, but I guess that was a long while ago.

Hunting ethics are different, I suppose. Recently I had read about foreigners paying to shoot exotic animals caught in wildlife reserves that were tied to the ground.

Afterwards, we wandered to New Market. Mostly we found shop after shop after shop selling saris and a surprising number of wig outlets. I thought of the gorillas in the museums.

There were porters wandering everywhere and most spoke passable English. Or at least enough to convey that they had a special friend that would give us a special price on some special fabric. It was the same gimmick used across the subcontinent: convince the person that they are being ripped off, and then rip them off.

Which is quite effective, actually.

I did find a shop with a reasonable prices and salesmen unlike starving jackals. Even there, though, buying a CD wasn’t as easy as I would have liked. I found a CD I wanted to buy, and the staff, seeing that I was actually buying something, began producing other things they thought I might be interested in: porno movies.

I thought back to Mumbai when a man in an open-air bazaar had asked me, You want sex?

I quickly told the man that I really wasn’t much of a spender, put down the CD, and wandered back to find my friends. I saw one of my pals at a similar shop, flipping through a pile of adult films.

I felt foolish for having not realized what the other guy was trying to sell me.

Not like I was going to buy any. I always think that if I were to die somewhere along the way, if our bus crashed or I snapped my spine somewhere, what would my family think when they received my belongings, complete with what people here call ‘blue films.’

We had arranged a time to met as a group to walk back to the Consulate together.

Andrew had been playing a strange game where when approached by beggars, he would direct them to another person in our party saying, See that guy? He has our money.

The first time Andrew employed this technique, about a dozen young beggar girls surrounded me in less than a minute.

It was a rather passive activity, since about that many had congregated around me at different times while walking through the market.

When I saw Andrew standing aside, I told the girls, He has lots of money, in my occasionally passable Hindi.

On the train from Kolkata to NJP, somewhere in West Bengal.

In a matter of seconds the girls swarmed Andrew. Before he could get out of the market, he had given the girls about 200 Indian rupees and a packet or two of food he had bought along the street.

After meeting, we jumped in to taxis with kids chasing after us, enjoying our game (really, it was fun) as well as their snacks.

George’s mother freely expressed her contempt for our childishness. You just ruined it for the rest of the tourists! she told us, holding back her smile.

Our taxi driver didn’t quite know the way back to the Consulate. We had filled two taxis, and our driver finally pulled over to ask the other if he knew the way. The two drivers shouted various directions at one another in Hindi, and I basically understood what they were saying.

So I tried to give as best directions as I could to the two drivers, as if to jar their memories.

George’s, sitting in front with the driver, turned around to ask Andrew in the back as I spoke, How does he know Bengali?

Andrew looked out the window, shook his hand to indicate contempt, and said with a straight face, It’s gibberish!

She seemed convinced that I was just parroting the two men and remained quite for rest of the trip.

Really, I thought, my Hindi isn’t that bad.

Later, at the Consulate, we decided to go to the Park Hotel’s club, Tantra—supposedly the swankiest club in town. We sat around in George and Lee’s living room questioning whether or not we would even be able to get in to such a place.

I mean, Kolkata’s quite a bit more sophisticated than Kathmandu. And we were barely getting by there, frankly. Each of us had stories about how we would ended up places, parties, and functions looking quite scruffy.

Lee overhead our talk and asked if we really wanted to go.

Of course, we told her.

She picked up the phone, called a friend, and suddenly we were on The List.

I don’t think I’d ever been on a list before, let alone The List. We were excited.

While the club was far classier than any place we had been in a while, it wasn’t quite what I had expected. Perhaps I had been brainwashed by Bollywood.

I’m smart enough to know that when I see a club or some hip place portrayed in a US movie, I can say, Yes, this does not exist, but I hadn’t quite been able to do that and had some pretty crazy preconceptions of what this club would be like.

I mean, just watch a Bollywood movie. To prepare myself for the hordes of beautiful women who I would have to fight off at the club, I sat in the living room, drank Corona, and watched Fashion TV for two straight hours while everyone else napped and washed clothes.

Day 4, Saturday

The day before we left went quickly. I slept until 11 a.m. for the first time in a long, long while. Granted, I hadn’t gotten to bed until 4 a.m. the previous day (that morning?), but the fact that I hadn’t been woken by people milling about, calling for milk, banging on my door, was wonderful.

A small shop, open late, near the Howrah train station.

After a hot shower and a strong cup of coffee, I walked over to Flury’s for a late breakfast. A few folks had gone to the Botanical Gardens to check out the world’s largest banyan tree. Others just enjoyed the Consulate’s garden or did some reading.

Soon the day was gone, and we found ourselves waiting for our train by wandering around Howrah Station. We had bought return tickets in Kolkata, although we had been put on a waiting list, which didn’t worry us much. We had been in the same situation back in April when we visited Goa.

I checked in at the station and got our seat assignments, illegibly written on our tickets. Six people were together in one car (I couldn’t make out the seat assignments but knew they’d be posted outside the train once it arrived) and one person was alone in a separate car.

So I elected to be the guy alone in the separate car. As we boarded our train, I waved goodbye to my pals thinking that if I got bored enough during the train ride, I could wander through the cars and sit with the them for a while. But a couple hours into the ride, I discovered that passage between cars was blocked in one car by an iron door.

I went back to my seat and settled in for the night. I didn’t sleep well since I was under the window and froze all night long. Plus I hadn’t brought a sheet let alone a pillow, so I woke early the next morning with quite a stiff neck.

All in a day’s travel, I thought.

Day 5, Sunday

When we pulled into the NJP station, back near Siliguri, I met the others at the entrance to the train station. They looked awful. Apparently, their tickets had been made so that two people were assigned to each bed (on the train, beds are much smaller than a single).

No one had slept, all were grumpy, all were ready to get to Birtamod, Nepal, and take a shower at Andrew’s flat. We arranged for a jeep to take us to the India-Nepal border and put Liz in the middle of two people—out of reach of the doors.

The Howrah station was almost itself alive with activity at all hours.

Let us return to the beginning of our trip for a moment. We only gotten as far as passing through Indian immigration after exiting Nepal, when Liz opened her door without looking for oncoming traffic. Of all things, a fast-moving rickshaw had slammed in to the door, damaging its hinge.

We received an estimate, which was the driver estimating how much he wanted to charge us for the accident, and pooled our money and paid him off—and quickly got another driver before word spread.

At both the Indian and Nepali customs offices, the staff remembered us and asked us how our Thanksgiving had been. Well, they didn’t remember ‘Thanksgiving’ but just knew that we had left for a national holiday.

I was mostly interested in finding out if any security-related problems had occurred in Nepal in the, oh, 108 hours that had passed since we left.

Peaceful. Quiet. Nothing to mention. What a relief. And for that, I was thankful.

On many levels.

I paused, then composed a haiku.

   I gave this country
     education for the poor,
       and they stole my bike.

So there it is. Nothing else. Moving along, moving ahead.

I’d now like to write about some of the odd Birganj-wallahs that have crossed my path since coming to this town. These folks are recurring points of conversation with my other Birganj friends.

Here are some of my favorites.

Burning Man

He was the first blatantly mentally troubled person I crossed paths with in Birganj. He’s hard to miss. He always wears shorts, the ones with the fake dollar bill sewn onto a pocket, and has a stripped polo shirt that is, oddly, moderately clean.

Sometimes, fires must be lit.

He’s the guy who digs in the garbage and takes out the things that other people throw away. Like pieces of cardboard or posterboard.

What he does then is take some charcoal from a nearby garbage fire that’s cooled and draws some sort of symmetrical design on it. I’ve seen one and it looked like arrangements of the crop circles people in the US are familiar with.

Come to your own conclusions. He draws and scribbles and draws and erases and finally produces something of an odd design. He then produces and cigarette, which he smokes with much satisfaction, as he burns his drawing the street. And the moves on.

One time I asked a local from Birganj, a friend, what the guy’s story was.

Oh, him? He is crazy, he told me while twirling his finger around his ear to further drive the point.

No one seems to know anything about him. I’ve never seen him going into the local shops asking for money. Instead I see him sitting quite quietly outside of the Ganesh temple doing a whole lot of nothing.

And then he’s off . . . to burn something.

Burning Man is really the quintessential lunatic. He’s non-violent and does things that are interesting but that don’t in any way disturb others. Contrary to what you may think, setting fires street-side downtown is not odd.

I’ve never seen Burning Man yell or scream or make any sudden movements. I’ve occasionally caught him sitting outside of the shops that sell TVs watching whatever happens to be broadcasting, but no one seems to mind. Or notice. Or care.

What I’ve learned from Burning Man is that Birganj is like the Phoenix. It is rising from the ashes of the fire consuming it. During the monsoon it does feel like the place is on fire.

And with so much sun baking my brain, Burning Man’s antics seem a lot more . . . significant. He constantly smokes cigarettes, too, just to burn something, I imagine.

Screaming Man

The anti-Burning Man character of Birganj is Screaming Man. Screaming Man is violent and very, very threatening. But not in a dangerous way, if that makes sense.

His presence is unnerving, yet inviting because he is so completely unaware of a world outside of him. He’s gotten his name because, well, he screams a lot. He also collects sticks that he carries with him.

Birganj main street alive with people.

Once there was a small program including a debate-off being held downtown on sanitation and a community’s responsibilities. The boring speeches had finished and the debates had begun.

The debaters were all students from local schools, both private and public. A girl won from one of my feeder schools. I was pleased. Anyhow, while the students were debating I did a little walking around to take some photographs.

At the other end of the platform where the students were speaking, Screaming Man was there. He was also wearing the new Birganj youth club T-shirt. God knows how he got that.

Anyhow, he was standing there, facing the debaters and screaming and screaming and screaming and having a bundle of sticks and screaming.

There was the girl, berating the audience about their duty not to throw trash in the street, and there was Screaming Man, wearing the damn YCC T-shirt, yelling about the color green.

The first time I met Screaming Man was quite, well, personal. I had just walked outside of Himanchal Cabin when I came face-to-face with Screaming Man. He was screaming. He was also wearing one of those short lungees, which he lifted up to expose himself.

He then began wagging his penis around with his hands on his hips as if he was doing something resembling the jitterbug. He’d placed his bundle of sticks on the ground next to him.

Birganj, all of it.

And then one time I saw him standing in the middle of Ghantaghar. He was screaming. He had a bundle of sticks. He was standing with a bundle of sticks and screaming in the busiest intersection in town.

A rickshaw was trying to ply the traffic when he bumped Screaming Man, who, if he not already been screaming, would have started.

Actually what he did was stop screaming and grab on of his sticks out of his bundle. He took three steps back and then suddenly lunged forward throwing the stick javelin-style at the rickshaw wallah.

His aim was true and the stick struck the rickshaw driver in the middle of his back, which seemed quite painful, because the rickshaw wallah then fell of his rickshaw and writhed around on the ground for a bit.

Screaming Man began screaming.

The Master

The Master is extraordinary. A dumb thing to say, but still, there are too few superlatives that I can use with a man with as much skill, poise, and incomprehensibility as The Master. Besides just calling him ‘The Master.’

The clocktower lit up one night in Birganj.

The Master is a barber. No. That’s not right. That’s not enough. The Master is an artist. Wait. Not enough. The Master is a genius. Not right. It’s an insult to the man, to the man who takes an hour and a half to give a normal shave and trim to a guy like me.

Most barbers can sit you down, give you a shave, trim your eyebrows, and pummel your head and shoulders (usually referred to as a ‘massage’) within 20 minutes. The Master takes just under two hours.

Knowledge of The Master was given to me by Luke Shors, who is dead.

(He’s not really dead but when he left Birganj in April 2002, we began using past tenses when speaking of him that suggested he had died. Luke would have liked that, I told Ashish one time, seeing a star chart he’d found at the Peace Corps library. Yeah, I know, but he’s in a better place now, Ashish said, comforting me.)

Anyhow, dead Luke Shors once told me of The Master. I went. I saw. The Master’s hands touched my face and afterwards, somehow, I was a better person.

His razor graced my face with the precision of a stealth bomber’s sub-atomic warhead gracefully wafting through the window of a family’s mud hut in Afghanistan. It was so astounding that it was frightening.

Suddenly, Birganj didn’t seem so bad.

This hell of a city had given me something wonderful. The beauty of it made me compose haiku and even reconsider ugly, like the pigs near my house feasting on the semi-decomposed carcass of a street dog. Its wonderment made me write a haiku after seeing the family of pigs feasting on that semi-decomposed street dog carcass:

   This little piggy
     finally had a hot breakfast—
       of some dead street dog

   Snap crackle and pop,
     its pungent carcass eyeless
       yet looking at me.

If The Master started a cult I would join—just for the shaves. If you’ve never had an elderly Nepali man shave you, at that a shave that takes one and a half hours, then you have no idea what I’m talking about.

For the sake of science, I will explain, in order, exactly what happens when you go for an appointment with The Master:

1. You approach the door and The Master looks at you, silently
2. The Master tells you where to sit (You cannot sit before this since there are six chairs and you just don’t know which one)
3. The Master remains seated, watching 1960s Hindi movies on a black and white TV that you helped pay for (You pay 50% more than others)
4. The Master takes a sheet, which he begins wildly whipping (You didn’t expect such virility and strength in The Master since he looks over 60, but he is wearing a muscle T-shirt)
5. The Master puts the sheet over you, tucks in your collar, which takes 10 minutes to perfect He pauses, watching the commercials
6. The Master then collects a variety of odd, steel instruments (You do not question)
7. As if he is also a ninja master, suddenly he grabs your head from behind and slams it against the headrest of the chair, nearly decapitating you (Yet you are still relaxed, maybe from the incense, maybe from the half-naked pin-up of Hindi star that you are now gazing at)
8. The Master looks you in the eyes and further into your soul, but only through the mirror you face, of course
9. He asks you, Everything good? (You have been there 20 minutes thusfar)
10. You answer, Everything’s good
11. He then takes a handful of water into his palm and slaps you across the face, which turns into something of a massage
12. He takes the brush and lotion and begins lathering your face
13. He stops and walks outside, spitting up what sounds to be the largest throatal phlegm known to man
14. He finishes lathering—Again, he looks into your soul and ask, What do you want?
15. And as if he was a lumberjack, he chops at your face with the razor, gauging perfect pressure and angle (You know he is The Master; you do not worry that he may be drunk)
16. Tea arrives and everything pauses
17. He finishes shaving you, including trimming around the backsides of your ears and around the back of your neck
18. More water, more beating about the face (You must tolerate this, it is purifying you)
19. The then produces a polished rock, somewhat coarse, that he rubs aggressively into your face, which hurts
20. He stops, goes outsides and spits again
21. The Master returns reinvigorated and maliciously rubs many balms, creams, and lotions with high amounts of alcohol that scortches your skin inside out
22. Your face is burning as if it has been dunked in sulfuric acid, yet you are still being Zen
23. The Master beings the head massage, which, let’s face it, consists of being punching in the back of the head
24. You remind yourself for the hundredth time to say, Shave, no massage
25. The Master takes his scissors and comb and begins trimming your facial hair, which is a meticulous process
26. You watch in the mirror as he singles out hairs, considers each, then trims accordingly
27. He finishes trimming and takes the sheet off you and outside, which he whips wildly
28. More water, another slap, something like a massage
29. He reexamines your face, uses the razor to touch up
30. More balms, lotions, tonics, and some baby powder
31. The Master then takes a towel and wraps it completely around your head and begins drying you off (You consider this is what it would feel like if your head was chopped off and put into a dryer)
32. The Master combs your hair and asks you again, Everything good?

Honestly, I haven’t been back to The Master in months. While his shaves are extraordinary—unlike any other shave I’ve gotten in Nepal—the other places are, well, gentler.

And these days in Nepal we could all use a little gentleness.

Pardon me while I wax nostalgic, but a year ago I was living in a different house in Birganj and I had another flat in Kathmandu. Now I’m squatting with an Australian working with a Birganj NGO and Peace Corps kicked us out of our places in Kathmandu.

I’ve since become a fixture at the Hotel Ambassador and Kate’s kitchen.

Tihar candles on my balcony at the flat in Raniganj.

This year I was staying in Birganj. All the other PCVs had left during the holiday, just as I had done a year ago, and I was half looking forward to settling back into a rut in Birganj after not having been here continually for very long.

Since returning from the US I’d only manage to spend around 10 days, maybe two weeks, continually in town before leaving. Since getting back from the States I’d been to Kathmandu (of course), Pokhara, Hile, Ilam, Karkarbhitta, and Rajbiraj. And then back to Kathmandu.

I had been feeling somewhat lost of late. Like not sure where I was going with work or whether or not I was actually welcome in Nepal. Just before Tihar the Maoists had sent a notice to the newspapers and government that it was making steps to change its policies.

No longer would they be targeting infrastructure or low-level personnel of the army and police. Instead, they’d be targeting US imperialists. Or those associated and funded by US imperialists. Or who knows what this means.

Even during training when we could hear the crackle of gunfire in the distance as we ate daal bhaat we knew that we were safe. Really.

And even when the police (or was it the Maoists?) came and kidnapped a trainee’s host-brother, tied him to the back of motorcycle and drove off into the Chitwan jungle, we felt safe.

Even when the Maoists (apparently, it might have as easily of been the police) came and burned down a trainee’s neighbor’s house by cover of darkness, we felt safe. But this is different. This could be personal.

Mira knits at her tea stand in Murli Gardens, Birganj.

Sadly, the only way to gauge to what extent of danger there is we must wait and see. It’s a gamble. It’s (pardon the metaphor) like playing Russian roulette. In Birganj I’ll be fine. I’ve got bigger considerations, like my new landlord.

He’s a weaselly man that I don’t trust farther than I can throw him. One morning the family came knocking on my door to ask if I’d left my phone off the hook. While I don’t usually use it at all, the miserly bastard decided to disconnect my phone and then lie to me to my face about it.

He said he had three phone lines in his house and mine was ‘disturbed.’ It was such an out-and-out lie that I couldn’t even call him on it. It wouldn’t have mattered.

And the same morning I’d received a phone call on the disturbed phone line (in his house), did I get a visit from my old landlord, an equally niggardly man.

He’d been sitting in my living room telling my friend how I owed him money for a phone bill I’d forgotten to pay before I left.

While true enough, it was a minor amount of money and our understanding that such outstanding bills would be considered paid in full as I’d given him my old bed and another previous PCV‘s bed, both worth far more than the phone bill.

I’d also agreed to leave him my gas cylinder as well as a fan, a bookshelf, a couple chairs, et cetera. And here he was, sitting in my living room, moaning about money and complaining about my tea.

For some reason, I wasn’t feeling terribly welcome in Birganj—or even Nepal.

When Tihar began, though, things took a turn for the better. My bastard of a landlord’s younger brother asked me over to his place for dinner. My first landlord, perhaps the only honest man in this town, also asked me over. And so did Mira, my local tea stand operator.

I decided to go to Mira’s and then finish off the evening at my neighbor’s (the nice one, the younger brother) in a hope create some ties with the better half of the family. In the manner of Tihar we’d lit some candles and decorated the front door with a malla.

At Mira’s we ate and talked, but we couldn’t stay long because we had to run back to my place. We had some puri sabji and ate some sweets, looked at photos, and were the first people that Mira’s younger sister, Asha, and friends played their dialo for.

Soon, though, we left in a hurry to get back to my place. As we were ascending the stairway the Indian family living below me quickly came out to ask if I’d take some photos for them of their children.

I complied and soon I was burning nearly an entire roll of film of kids touching this idol, that idol, in this room, in that room. The film wasn’t a problem, but I was late.

The family asked if I’d go to the roof with them and set off some firecrackers, also a Tihar tradition. I was beaten and said, Sure.

On the roof the father began lighting off some sparklers and what not.

Fireworks on the roof of the apartment with the downstairs neighbors.

Soon, though, he had a sparkler in each hand and was lighting roman candles that he’d propped up on the side of the house. I felt like I was in Baghdad. I ducked under a fountain sprayer sparks across the roof and bid my farewell, promising prints in the future.

When I finally got to my neighbor’s house the food was on the table and they were waiting for me. I was more than daunted when I saw the family was expecting me to eat an small mountain of daal bhaat. They were smiling and asking me to sit, eat.

So I did. I guess I should say I tried since there was no way I could eat all of the food without vomiting and even thought I might do that halfway through the plate.

Finally I apologized and said I couldn’t eat any more. We chatted for a while, but soon it was the family’s bedtime and I thanked them again and left.

As I walked around the balcony back to my place I noticed that the candles I’d put out had gone out. Even though it was still a bit windy I went ahead and lit the candles again. The bad man’s daughter came by and said I should position my candles closer together.

I told her I had about thirty left in my room and would do so the next night, the second night of Tihar. In my room I sat on my bed and listened to my stomach complain about the food to me. After a moment I decided to turn off the light and sleep off my stomach cramps.

A moment later I heard the stingy man’s wife and daughter talking outside of my window.

The candles have all gone out, the mother said.

The American inside, the girl replied, He says he has many more.

I hope I do. I hope I can make these days last longer.

Here are three individuals I met while in Jhapa back in March 2003. All live in Birtamod, where my friend Drew is posted, and all are strange. While Birganj has enough lunatics to fill several entries, these are some special people.

Sunjay the Islamic extremist

Take the appearence of the scuzziest rickshaw driver from across Nepal, give him a thick English accent as spoken by someone who learned English in India, circa 1950, and add a lazy eye to the mix. I met Sunjay in Birtamod, Jhapa

He’s an odd man, what many Nepalese would call a tragedy manche, because of his rather unpleasant and/or unlucky life story.

One of Drew’s friends in Birtamod runs an optical shop, selling mostly sunglasses but also producing fine facsimiles of eye glasses. On any given day in Birtamod you can find Sunjay at the optical shop, waiting for a most likely mythical ophthalmologist to show up and fix his eye.

I asked Sunjay how long he’d been waiting. About seven years, he answered, without smiling.

The optical shop is run by Nissam et al. Nissam is an Islamic extremist, trapped to a life of infidelity in Nepal, or so he says, Other Muslims do not think I am true Muslim, he grimaced, as if defeated, because I do not live in Muslim country.

A sign at a restaurant pretty much simplifies the question.

He told me this several times during our first meeting and I began to detect it was the source of a great inferiority complex within the world-wide Muslim community.

This inferiority complex, I also believe, is what gave birth to his Islamic extremism. A while ago when Drew stopped by to say hi, Nissam asked Drew to come in and sit down.

We have something to ask you, he asked Drew. He went on to ask Drew to help him go to the US. Drew, remembering past conversations about the US with Nissam (not good) asked, Why do you want to go the US?

Unlike most Nepalis seeking exodus to the US, Nissam had a formulated reason, I want to kill George W. Bush. Yes. OK?

I didn’t understand how strange the dynamic at the Nissam & Co. Optical was until Sunjay asked Drew and I over to his house. On the second floor of a building either being built or crumbling (hard to tell), Sunjay lives in a single room with his mother and two sons.

The wife ran off around ten years ago and Sunjay has been a destitute tragedy manche ever since. Sunjay kicked open the door and Drew and I got a full glimpse of his mother sitting on the bed, mostly naked.

Sunjay immediately launched into a diatribe about Muslims, or rather, Those fukcing Mohammedans, man (it’s the 1950′s Indian English), after telling us about his Christian faith and showing us a dusty photograph of not quite completely decomposed saint from Goa, India.

His mother was getting dressed in the corner or the room during all of this.

You can’t trust Mohammedans, man, Sunjay told us, Once they move in, the place goes to hell, man with a special emphasis on the last word as if he knew what he was talking about, but mostly amused at what he was telling us.

Drew and I looked at one another. Sunjay, Drew said, You spend all your day with Nissam and, um, he’s a Mohammedan.

Good God man, Sunjay yelled, That’s what I’m talking about, man. Mohammedans!

A bit later, Drew said that Nissam and Sunjay had gotten into a fight. Out of the kindness of his heart, Nissam had been asking Sunjay over to eat with his wife and son.

Sunjay always accepted and was usually intoxicated, most likely as a coping mechanism to deal with the harsh reality that the mystical ophthalmologist was never, ever going to come and fix his eye.

(No one is really sure where Sunjay got this notion that his eye could be fixed or that some specialist was coming to Birtamod, Jhapa, to do the operation in a small bazaar pasal for free.)

So Nissam had taken Sunjay aside, shoeless and smelling of third-rate cheap liquor, and asked him if he was going to come to his house, eat his food, and sit with his wife and child, he’d sure appreciate it if he could try and do it sober.

God damn Mohammedans! Sunjay screamed, I’m going to Cally, man, (‘Cally’ meaning Calcutta) and he left.

And off Sunjay went. Drew was sad when he told me about Sunjay’s departure, but a month later when I talked to Drew he told me that Sunjay had returned, had his operation in Cally, and his eye was still grotesquely gazing in the wrong direction.

Oddly Drew found Sunjay sitting in Nissam’s optical shop and, as far as Sunjay was concerned, having no need for the fantastical ophthalmologist. Sunjay is notorious around Birtamod—not popular.

I have no doubt that Sunjay is still sitting at Nissam & Co. Optical with his best (and only) friend. A Mohammedan.

A child named Time Pass

Another interesting resident of Birtamod, Jhapa, is Time Pass, a most unusual 10-year-old boy. I first met Time Pass while walking through Birtamod with Drew on our way to his place.

As we passed a shack, a motorcycle repair shop, a couple young grease monkeys from inside yelled out at us, Hey! Time pass! Time pass!

I politely responded that I didn’t have time for ‘time pass’ and had to be on my way. Drew’s ears perked up and he said, No, Time Pass is a kid you have to meet, and we headed inside.

Posing in Birtamod, Time Pass. What else to say?

When the young men, apparently the guardians of Time Pass, went inside to look for him they reappeared empty handed. No Time Pass today, I guess, and we left. Just a few hundred meters from the shop this small, rather chubby kid comes running around a corner at full speed.

His pants were pulled up to his armpits and a candy bar was hanging out of his mouth, chocolate slathered around his face. Hey, hey. How ya’ doin’ there? he asked me, invoking the voice of a 50-year-old used car salesman.

Drew had told me what made this kid exceptional was that there was merely the body of a child, but a soul of washed up small-time crook. Besides his name, Time Pass had the strangest body language and behavior I’ve ever seen exhibited by a child. I grabbed my wallet.

Before I could actually say anything to Time Pass, though, and old, also chubby woman in a sari came stumbling around the corner from where Time Pass had come rushing from. She was clearly in a hurry, clearly mad, clearly trying to kill Time Pass.

Above her head in one hand she held a jagged rock, about the size of a softball, and her eyes were burning to see Time Pass’ blood spilt.

Time Pass noticed this as well, Hey ya. Well, don’t you know. Gotta be goin’, and off he went about the time the old woman sent the rock sailing through the air narrowly missing Time Pass, executing a move reminiscent of OJ Simpson’s football footwork.

We stayed until we could no longer see the old woman chasing Time Pass into the jumbled streets of Birtamod. I never met Time Pass again, but Drew gave me an update a while back. While Drew was out of town, Time Pass had come by looking for Drew, looking for money.

Between two volunteers, Time Pass.

The only person at home was Drew’s Aamaa, the old woman of the house, a moderately insane woman as well, who often tells people calling for Drew that he’s dead, and spends most of her time watching Animal Planet dubbed in Hindi while smoking marijuana.

She’s a kind, old Limbu woman who’s just become slightly eccentric in her retirement. She wouldn’t harm a fly.

Time Pass, apparently, does not qualify as a fly. All that Drew could discern from his Aamaa‘s rambling, drug-influenced recollection of the incident was that Time Pass had squatted in the house refusing to leave until Drew returned or his was given a bribe to leave.

The Aamaa finally had it with Time Pass, who was undoubtedly being a buzz-kill during her zany animal bloopers program, and chased him out of the house with a khukuri (those scary banana-shaped Nepali knifes) drawn and waving about.

Time Pass lived to tell the tale, but I must say, Time Pass walks a fine line.

After meeting Time Pass, I asked Sunjay about him.

You can’t trust that boy, man, he said rather somberly, Good God, man. He’s notorious! I think he’ll be the damn mayor one day, man.

And if Sunjay doesn’t trust someone . . .