Then, he starts to write. Wow, a leftie, I note. He has jotted down all of a single Nepali alphabet in his ledger when he looks up. Someone else has just entered the room.
My man tries to refocus. Another alphabet, nay, the second half-alphabet of my name in Nepali, and he pauses again. He looks me up, and back down on the page he is working on.
I'm starting to get annoyed. On cue, the landline phone rings somewhere. Once, twice—and before he has finished writing my first name, my man languidly hoists himself up, encircles my chair, and waddles across to the other side of the room.
He lifts the receiver and starts talking, so loudly he easily drowns out the din created by around a dozen service seekers packed into this tiny room— all of them adding to the incessant honking of vehicles on the road outside.
The hakim, a middle-aged lady in dark black pants and matching chiffon shirt, is sitting right next to the telephone. But picking up the common phone is clearly for the lowly orderlies. In any case, she is busy talking politics with a clutch of sycophants. "Laaaaa! Sushil Koirala has just cancelled his New York trip!"
"Eh ho?" My man seems riveted by the stale news. "So why is he not going?"
"Khai!" the boss in black perks up. "Maybe he wants to hold talks with andolankari."
After another couple of minutes shooting the breeze with his boss, my man returns to his desk and resumes the herculean task of finishing my first name. It takes him another ten minutes to note down my sir name and address. I have had enough.
"Hernus dai, I am getting late for work. Could you hurry up a bit?" I regret my outburst immediately. I realize I have been shouting.
Or so I think. My man in colorful topi continues with his chore, at his own leisurely pace, my words in anger clearly wasted. I know by this point that if I have to get anything done here I will have to play by his rules. Resigned, I decide to wait him out.
While I am waiting, I take a look around. One, two, three, four....there are seven workers in the room: my man (still hard at work), a thin-lipped lady with specs on an adjacent table (flipping some files), a visibly old man behind another outsized desk
(reading newspaper), and then, at
the far corner, the big boss,
discussing politics with three other hangers-on.
They all have one thing in common: the unmistakable I-have-all-the-time-in-the-world look. I am starting to enjoy this now. The country has been a witness to whirlwind changes over the last one decade. But some things in Nepal, we brave sons and daughters of Bir Gorkhali can take comfort, will always be the same.
"Done!" I am jolted out of my mini-reverie. "Take these papers to that desk now."
I do as told, dutifully passing the bundle of papers to the thin-lipped lady in specs, the only one who seems to be actually doing some work.
"Where is your lalpurja?" she blurts out even before she has finished rifling through my papers.
"But I have brought all the papers you asked for yesterday," I protest.
"No, no, a copy of lalpurja is a mandatory requirement. Come back with it tomorrow."
I want to raise another objection but I know it will be useless in this house of horrors, in more ways than one. I notice there are big cracks everywhere in the room. The four-storey ramshackle building must have barely survived the earthquake.
Not that the seasoned fly-swatters in the room care. In a functioning market economy, most of them would have been deemed redundant and summarily fired. But why be so cruel to our own brethren, right?
Another query pops up in my head. How much do they actually make, forced as they are to work in this booby-trap of a building every single day?
I am particularly curious about the monthly returns of my man, now poring over another file, looking rather glum. It didn't compute. Why would he be all smiles one moment and look like he's just been spooked the next? Family problems, perhaps.
Then, in a moment of sudden inspiration, I get it: his cloying smile, his pregnant pauses, his constant fiddling with his pen...My god, he had been asking for a bribe.
I don't know how to make sense of the new reality. I have to be back tomorrow and deal with the same topi-wallah.
If there is an art to bribe-taking, surely, there must also be an art to bribe-giving. Now, if only I could find the right teacher.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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