God knows why, but I once wanted to become a doctor. So that fated day, like every day of the previous two months, I was preparing for my MBBS entrance exams, locked up in my room with the KSMT’s much-thumbed health primer. Must have been eight-ish in the evening. After hearing repeated oohing and aahing of my parents from the adjacent room, I decided I had had enough and ventured out to investigate. When I entered their room, both of them were planted in front of the TV, watching what appeared to be big planes crashing into tall skyscrapers.
I still remember my first reaction. Surely, these are movie stills. Then my parents fill me in: what I was watching was no fiction, but the most brazen terrorist attacks in its history of the United States. Even as we watched the Twin Towers smolder, the excitable CNN news anchor kept yammering: yet another passenger jet had crashed into the Pentagon, and then a fourth one into an open field in Pennsylvania; who knew, she speculated, how many of them had been hijacked!
It’s been more than thirteen years and 9/11 feels like yesterday. The same with the royal massacre the same year. I had been staying over at my Sanima’s for the night. The next morning, with our morning cuppa, she delivered the surreal sequence of events in the royal palace the previous night. But it didn’t feel right. The news only sank in when I later went out into the warm, morning Sun and everywhere I looked people were huddled together in small circles, murmuring, like they were privy to some secret.
Fast forward to 2015. So where were you at 11:56, on the 25th of April? Now, is your mind juddered awake, your whole being transported back to that crispy afternoon? Can you almost see yourself in that room again, as everything in your sight started to rattle, slowly first, and then violently, back and forth, like an out of control steam-train bogey, and you find yourself caught in two minds: should you wait it out? Or should you run for the exits?
I, for one, was in our kitchen. I had just warmed my curries and dal and dumped the hot case-framed clump of rice on my plate. Then, I poured the steaming dal into a big bowl, picked it up, walked the couple of steps to my dining table and was about to place it next to the plate of rice when the bastard arrived, in full combat regalia, all guns blazing.
Hot dal is all over my hands. I barely notice. I plonk myself down on the nearest chair and decide to let it, you know, do what it could. But strangely, instead of running out of ammunition, as it usually did on its previous raids, it kept firing and firing and firing, and not still content, it then started lobbing dirty bombs. The aluminum filter by my side smashed into the floor, spilling its watery gut. Then it was the turn of the drinking glasses to take the hit. I could hear something crash in the living room, followed by a mighty thud from my parents’ room. With nearly everything in sight now destroyed, I waited for the inevitable: the collapse of the building and with it, the end of my sorry earthly existence.
But for those 30 or 40 or 50 seconds there was no fear. That would come later. For the entire duration of the first blitz, the biggest, we are told, in the last 82 years, I was trying to think, hard, trying to focus, to reason: should I stay in my chair? Or should I duck under the dining table? Or fumble through the debris and down the stairs? Are my parents safe? Never before in my life have I been so aware of the here and now, so present in the moment, so alive.
So what did I learn from that brush with nature’s fury, you ask.
It’s said that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Nonsense. It rather turns you into a little wuss. Now the slightest shake makes your heart race, sets those stress hormones coursing through your veins, overwhelming your senses, and your ability to reason. If that feels bad, spare a thought for the thousands who have not only lost their homes but also their most loved ones.
The relentless march of time may be their only solace. There is an old Eastern fable of a monarch commissioning the wise men in his kingdom to collect all the wisdom in the world and bring it to him. After years of hard word, the wise men come to the king with ten, big books. But the king has no time to read them all and asks the wise men to further distill the knowledge therein. Another couple of years and they manage to whittle it down to a single, yet still bulky, volume. The monarch’s still not satisfied. In the end, after another couple of years of editing, they present the king with a single scrap of paper, the world’s knowledge captured in a single, short sentence: “This too shall pass.”
Just like that stupid yearning of mine to don white coat, just like the as stupid ambitions of our pampered monarchs, or my no less stupid assumption that Dharahara would forever serve as my guide-post during my aimless ramblings through Kathmandu, this period of grief and mourning, too, shall pass. What remains will be history, spanning over many more bulky books—the knowledge for the posterity.
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