Part 1 - Kalimpong

Atisha Road

At five in the morning, Sudhin pulled Murakami's Kafka on the Shore from his shelf. He'd bought it months ago from Upasak's but hadn't bothered to read it. Now, sleepless in the early darkness, he figured he'd give it a try. He'd liked Murakami's short stories before—the quirky humor, the odd situations. Tashi had once told him something about Norwegian Wood: "You know midori means green in Japanese? The novel came as a two-book pack. The first one was green. Doesn't that open up new possibilities for understanding the work?"

A loud, agonizing squeal broke the morning silence. A pig being slaughtered. He'd ordered two kilos himself. Sudhin closed the book and lay listening to the pig sounds. He imagined the man with his spear making repeated stabs into the porcine flesh, desperately seeking that decisive strike to puncture the creature's heart. Sticking pigs was messy work even for an expert, but today it seemed someone was torturing the poor animal. The squeals continued, then slowly died with the pig.

Feeling uneasy with the morning's violence, Sudhin reached for the water jug and drank thirstily. He threw off the blanket and leapt out of bed—his daily dramatic gesture, underlining the sense of purpose with which he wanted to begin each day. He put the CD on. Velvet Underground swelled to fill the morning with their chaotic "Heroin," striking an effective counterpoint to the honey-sweet Anup Jalota bhajan that wafted in from the neighborhood along with the aroma of freshly lit incense.

The house was a British-era bungalow with a red roof and a lawn in front. Since Sudhin lived alone, he'd sealed up most of the rooms and used only the bedroom, dining hall, and kitchen. At the back were outhouses meant for servants. These too were empty.

Sudhin's father had been in the British army. Now he lived with the rest of the family—except Sudhin—in London. The British government had granted citizenship to most Gurkha ex-servicemen and their families. Sudhin's family had taken up that offer and left about five years ago.

Moving to London hadn't always been in the cards. They'd known Kalimpong all their lives. All the boys had been born here. Leaving was out of the question. But then Kalimpong stopped being an idyllic haunt for retired British soldiers spending quiet time on pensions paid in pounds and shillings. It was the agitation that had shaken Sudhin's father. The last straw was the masked raid on their house to demand his two-bore hunting rifle. Not used to being treated so roughly by lads younger than his sons, he'd become withdrawn, meditative, melancholic. That's when he resolved to leave Kalimpong and start life anew in the UK.

Only Sudhin had decided to stay behind. He'd put his foot down and refused to fill the forms. As the cutoff date approached, his family tried every trick to convince him to leave. They tried to make practical sense, enlisted neighbors and relatives to reason with him, but to no avail. Finally, his father—secretly admiring his son's resolve—worked out an arrangement: a portion of his pension would be sent through Western Union, and Sudhin would try to make a life for himself in Kalimpong.

Just then, a knock at the door. The milkman. He poured out a kilo of milk from his can and without saying anything walked off, leaving behind a whiff of what Sudhin called the "stable smell." He was about to close the door when Ramey came in with his two kilos of pork. The meat was stitched onto a thin bamboo strip. He inspected it to see if his neighbor had kept his word about giving him "only the red stuff." The promise, as usual, was broken. Sudhin's portion comprised mainly of a thick hairy layer of fat with a morsel of red meat sticking stingily to it.

Ramey was excited that morning. Slaughtered pigs brightened up the whole community, and Ramey—who Sudhin suddenly realized was the individual behind the pig squeals—was the real star of the morning. Sudhin had to acknowledge that this was rare: the person responsible for slaughtering the pig had himself run an errand to bring a portion to a customer. This was Ramey's way of showing gratitude to Sudhin for all those times he'd filled out the Central Bank withdrawal or deposit forms for him.

Ramey lingered, expecting Sudhin to say something in appreciation. His breath smelled of raksi, and his wet beady eyes danced in the merriment of that busy, fruitful morning. Sudhin opened his fridge. There was a half-empty bottle of Hit beer with newspaper stuffed at the mouth. He handed it to Ramey, who emptied it with great relish.

"I have to be going," he said. Sudhin smiled as he handed over the money for the meat. Ramey thanked him, and the beer having gone slightly to his raksi-muddled head, he bowed low in an exaggerated show of respect and staggered out the door.

Sudhin took the pork and put it in the refrigerator. His eyes fell on the yellow Post-it note stuck on the fridge door as he closed it. "Appointment with the Lizard," it said. He found it strange that something he'd been eagerly looking forward to all week had almost escaped his notice at the crucial moment.

Lizard was a seemingly unoriginal name assumed by a local rock star whose biography Sudhin had been planning to write as his first venture into the literary field. Writing and rock were his twin passions, and he found it hard to believe these would come together in this biography project.

He remembered Tashi's thesis: "All this talk about the hills being in the forefront of Western music as a result of some special gift is bullshit. It's just the hippies and the cheap copies of rock classics knocked out in Thailand that we have to be thankful for."

It wasn't something Sudhin agreed with entirely. His love for music wasn't limited to rock. There were those hours he spent with friends discussing the vocal intensity of Narayan Gopal or the lyrical and musical genius of Gopal Yonzon. He'd often told Tashi, "The only thing we Nepalis can be genuinely proud of is our music."

"What about the khukuris?" Tashi would butt in provocatively. "Aren't you proud you're a Gurkha?"

That would get him meditative. He remembered the live telecast aired by a local TV channel during Diwali. It showed how soldiers of the Gurkha regiment stationed at Algara celebrated Dashain. The same harmlessly jovial, cherubic Gurkha soldiers "breaking their hips" to the tune of the madal and the dohori were later seen on stage applauding gleefully as many of their compatriots beheaded goats for sacrifice. The decapitations had been turned into a spectacle, and the soldiers seemed up to their necks in their enjoyment of that gory display. And here was Sudhin, true-blooded Gurkha, not even able to slaughter a chicken. At least the pork doesn't make me faint, he thought. But yes, what binds us is our music—he reflected as he remembered how he was swayed by the gay abandon with which those young soldiers went about making their mountain melodies.

There was no simple explanation for the hold that rock music had on the youths of the hills. Unlike Tashi, he hadn't yet succumbed to the urge to theorize. Rather, he felt that meeting with the Lizard and spending time with him would open up a few windows of insight into his generation's attraction to this genre.

The Lizard was a typical specimen. His English was bad, and when he sang Iron Maiden, only the speed of the singing masked his atrocious accent. Of course, he was a rock star in every measure. Short and squat, he wore his straight Mongoloid hair to his shoulders. He fancied only leather and torn jeans—which thanks to the cheap Thailand stuff that flooded the market, he was never short of.

He'd met him only a couple of times and was surprised to learn he'd never heard of Jim Morrison. But what shocked Sudhin most was the Lizard's utter disdain for anything Black. He hated the blues and utterly loathed rap. "Habshi music" was the pejorative he applied to any music that had to do with Black artists. The only exception, as you may have guessed, was Jimi Hendrix, who was looked upon as this otherworldly being who could do magical things with the electric guitar.

The Lizard knew of at least one musician who'd tried to commit suicide on hearing the news of Jimi's death by jumping into one of the lakes of Nepal. He also talked of Mongol Busty grandmas who loved listening to Jimi-type licks played on guitar by the legendary Albert Subba, whose virtuosity on the instrument was said to be heard to be believed.

The Lizard could never handle the newfangled gadgets that youngsters fancied. This was learned the hard way by a couple of Kalimpong boys studying in Delhi. The Lizard had been made to pass off as the lead guitarist of their college band in one of the many beat contests organized at DU. He was to be their Hendrix-type god who was supposed to give the Satriani-soaked Delhiites a taste of what the guitar could really sound like. Unfortunately, the Lizard was so lost in the tangle of wires and the mountain of gizmos that he could barely scratch his axe. This resulted in him being booed off the stage.

This was one of the lowest ebbs of his career as a musician—worse than playing "Sultans of Swing" to an inebriated crowd at a tea garden immediately after they'd been enthralled by a sentimental Suresh Kumar number. But not quite as embarrassing as the near-death experience he'd encountered when he accidentally swallowed a mouthful of tobacco as he tried to play the guitar with his teeth à la Hendrix.

The second time Sudhin met the Lizard, he'd asked him about his influences. The Lizard rattled off a litany of band names: Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Kiss, Iron Maiden, AC/DC—all the usual suspects. To the Lizard, these were the authentic syllabus of rock, a hallowed canon that could never be veered from.

But what about more intelligent bands—Yes, Pere Ubu? Sudhin was greeted with an ignorant silence and an all-knowing sneer. The Lizard almost pitied Sudhin as he proselytized him on the virtues of unadulterated rock. The Lizard, it seemed, was caught in a time warp from which he moved neither forward nor backward. His education in rock had been entirely musical. His classroom was the cassette. He wasn't schooled in the polemics, the politics, the protests, or the other scholarly platforms from which the topic was broached at times by journalists and academics.

It wasn't even snobbery. The Lizard had never been comfortable enough with the English language to even understand the meanings of the words in many of the songs he sang. But nothing could detract him from worshipping his limited pantheon of rock stars. And that was the way he'd always been.

What about cutting an album of his own? The Lizard had no clear-cut answer to this one.

Suddenly the doorbell rang. It was the man himself.