wailing away the loneliness of the whole village.
Somewhere a king is moaning in his nightmares
still chasing after the ancient family crown he lost forever.
In these closely knit, potholed streets of Kathmandu
stray dogs can feel the monarch’s loneliness
and an army general can enter a dog’s desolate soul.
So closely built are the unpainted houses,
so similar the unfinished desert houses
the citizens can fall asleep all at the same time
and dream the same dreams, the same nightmares.[break]
They can see what their next door neighbors are dreaming
they can even hear them thinking in their dreams
so close do the citizens of the city live together.
Watching the same TV serials, reading the same news, listening to the same speeches,
so similar have their minds become
they can hear in their half reveries who their neighbors are cursing.
The citizens and the denizens of the night bark, wail, moan in their own and their neighbors’ sleep throughout the dark night without streets lights.
They hear in their dreams their leaders making speeches like in a never-ending nightmare they want to wake from but can’t.
“We possess one tenth of the world’s total hydro-capacity – shouts loudly the Minister of Water Resources in his long inebriated night made still longer in the 18 hours lightless days and nights of “load-shedding.”
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
In these tyre-burning streets
their fight for Loktantra democracy has proved so successful that disparate parties come together to sing of new Nepal in ten different “national” languages
until they are so completely tone deaf they can’t hear one another when they wake up.
Their Nepali Sheer (head) is so proud and erect that it has grown higher than their own tallest Sagarmatha whose head touches the sky.
In their living nightmare so full of self-congratulations they write national anthems full of the blood of their dead heroes, this vast nation ever moving forward, victory, victory to Nepal.
Republican politicians of the new democracy brag about sea changes they have brought to their landlocked country without a sea.
They talk of their historical responsibility to write a new Constitution and have gone on and on about it jibberishly everyday for nearly three years as if in a long sequence recurring, sleepless dreams.
The elected Constituent Assemblymen making and not making the Constitution,
the whole country talking and rumor mongering,
some speechifying, other holding conferences and workshops,
going through this never ending Kafkaesque nightmare of peace building, constitution writing and more blah blah blah.
Are we in our sleep or is it our natural waking state of mind, I know not,
but we make Naya Nepal and go on making New Nepal everyday and night ad nauseum.
We go on talking in a drunken stupor of national unity, new revolution
and other la la la:
Let this country live forever, says our First President with tears welling in his eyes, repeating what one of our loathed kings decades ago had said, quickly adding “even after I die.”
Oh, so many platitudes, such audacity for meaningless words and convictions we have heard and seen as if we have never awoken from decades of sleep and nightmare:
Develop this Holy Land
Let’s make Nepal
Save Nepal
New Nepal
New Thinking
Prosperous Nepal
The armies of the night are clashing the whole doggone night.
The mountains and the plains are resounding with the cries of thousands of young teenage boys and girls killed, disappeared.
The night is dark, deep, and soulless.
Throughout the night the dogs are crying away the terrible pain of the generals and commanders in their nightmares
being chased by the thousands disappeared and their living parents and relatives still looking for them.
Somewhere a king is dreaming of having entered the body of a rhino and ritually bathing in blood like his ancestors and consummating himself in the nightmarish long night of his lost diamond and feathered crown.
Somewhere someone wakes up uneasy in the middle of the night to find
that he has lost his country
that he has lost his language
that he’s lost his identity
that he has lost the ability to dream, to dream his neighbors’ dreams
that he has gone deaf and dead
and can’t even hear the dogs of the nights wailing in the loneliness of my Motherland.
Kathmandu, August 2010
Shrestha, originally from Bhojpur, has been a fellow traveler with Abhi Subedi, Nirmal Man Tuladhar, SB Thakur, HB Khoju Shrestha, Peter J. Karthak and many others from their Master’s years at Tribhuvan University at Kirtipur since 1969. A member of such literary protest movements as the Boot Paalis Abhiyaan and Aswikrit Jamaat in the 1970s in Kathmandu, the poet has spent nearly four decades in Bangkok. A former Fulbright Scholar, Lecturer at TU, and Visiting Professor at Thammasat University in Bangkok, he is reviving his old Muse in semiretirement in Dhulikhel where he is building his house.
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