The confounded and slack-jawed men in the class stared at Katuwal, whose head, bending ever to the ground, found his knees for support.
“That is why, brother Katuwal,” the storyteller added in a soft voice, “I say that the creation story you told me is a forgery no different from the forged promissory notes written by your moneylenders. That deceitful document puts us on par with turds, piles of dung. If we really want to rise from the status of dung to the ranks of men we must seek out the true story of creation. What are your thoughts on this, Katuwal?”
Katuwal hid his face between his knees and said in a dull voice, “Let it be, sir! I have nothing to say to this.”
“If that is so, sir,” Mangaley’s curiosity tumbled forth, “let us hear the true account of creation!”
“It might astonish you to hear it,” the storyteller walked through the class in a slow and deliberate pace, “but man is descended from the monkey.”
Man came from the monkey! Oh, my lord! Man was created from the monkey? The listeners turned to each other in amazement. Suddenly, they felt a surge of discomfort; chill shivers ran down their backs. The hair stood on ends all over their bodies. On the surface of their minds they saw monkeys approach them, scratching their armpits, picking and eating lice.
“Of course!” said the storyteller, pacing about the room. “It is a tale from millions of years ago. A tribe of monkeys encountered insuperable distress in an impenetrable forest. They were surrounded on all sides by devilish beasts and other predators with sharp claws and fangs, poisonous tongues and enormous horns. The lives of the monkeys were in grave peril. They had two options before them: get killed, or adapt to a new idea and save their lives. After all, who doesn’t love life?”
“Everybody does, sir! A lot!” Katuwal agreed excitedly.
“Therefore, to save their skins, the tribe of monkeys invented a new course of action.”
“What new idea did the worthless monkey invent?”
“Brother Somey, the monkeys picked stones with their fore-paws and pelted them at the enemy. Found sticks to hurl. When it pelted stones and hurled sticks, it was forced to stand on its hind-legs and raise its head high. As they practiced picking and pelting stones and hur-ling sticks, their fingers became more flexible, more energetic. As they stood on their hind-legs frequently, the spine became straighter. As they confronted and fought off their enemies, and as they foraged for food, they were forced to learn to use their various limbs and appendages in new manners. Gradually their bodies morphed and took new forms. Eventually, over thousands of years, that tribe of monkeys stood upright on hind-legs and walked, head raised and the spine erect. It was no longer sufficient to employ the fore-paws as hands when confronting enemies. And so, as they encountered new needs, the minds of the monkeys also sharpened, became keener. Thus, the hands helped make the mind keener, and the mind that had become sharpened taught truer aim to the hand. Over time, the monkey became the wild-man ape of the jungles. An ape is half human and half monkey. Over thousands of years the same apes transformed and improved into full humans.”
A stunned quiet hung over the men in the shed. It was so quiet that their breathing sounded like bellows being worked.
“Calamities!” Katuwal opened wide his mouth in amazement. “The boys tried very hard, didn’t they?”
“Yes, Katuwal, they tried very hard.”
“What happened after that, sir?”
“After that, Somey, in the process of changing, the monkey-man learned to fashion weapons out of bones, and learned to tame wild animals like dogs and horses and put them to work. Gradually, the ape-man who lived in caves learned to build and live in huts and till the land. The ape-man found fire, which must have come either from an exploding volcano or from dry trees rubbing together in a storm. Fire became a reliable and favoured friend to man. Food tastes superior when cooked over a fire. Good to taste, and easy to digest. And – whenever the enemy saw fire it ran away cowering. Of course, it gives warmth in the cold. Man learned to wear the barks of trees, the pelts of beasts. And gradually he shed the fur on his body. After thousands of years man discovered metals like copper and bronze. He had fire – now he could smelt ores and forge metals in different shapes to make weapons and tools. With the beasts he had tamed and the tools he had forged, man began a new method of tilling and sowing the land. When there wasn’t much work to accomplish utterances and gestures had been enough to tell and listen. But, as the business of work increased utterances and gestures became insufficient. And so man took another epoch of thousands of years to learn the language of words. Thus, through the relation forged between the hand and the mind the monkey of the wilderness became the man of the household. That is why I said – Man is created from the monkey.”
“How do you find this story?” The storyteller asked with a faint smile playing on his face. The mature students flitted their dull, dumb eyes to other pairs of dumbfounded eyes. They were still feeling discomfort and disgust. Goosebumps that had grown on their bodies stood unabated. Some even felt nauseous. Are we – Men – created from monkeys? We are descendents of the monkeys? Oh God!
“Sir – you bring brimstones here today!” Mangaley hesitatingly opened his mouth. “I am stumped by this tale you have raised today, and which nobody has ever heard before.”
“Sir,” Katuwal raised his bowed head and asked with the intention of locking horns, “You spoke as if you saw it with your own eyes. Who told you that this is exactly how it happened all those years ago?”
The storyteller realized that Katuwal had found the crux of the matter. He began thoughtfully unfurling the issue, “Brother Katuwal – hundreds of learned people have spent hundreds of years to search and study these matters to come to this conclusion.”
“And that too I don’t grasp, sir. A man who lives the longest perhaps lives for eighty or a hundred years. As you told us – this story is hundreds of thousands of years old. How do men from our time see events from so long ago?”
“You ask the right question, Katuwal.” The storyteller tried to politely explain what he knew. “Of course, people from so long ago couldn’t have lived to our time. And, of course, people from our age can’t see into the past. But, the thing is, Katuwal, in the new scriptures there are schemes for determining matters of this nature.”
“What is that scheme?” Kaudey, who has been sitting still as an owl in a corner, asked.
“When animals walking the world die their bones and skeletons remain on earth. Sometimes there are earthquakes, and sometimes there are landslides. Sometimes glowing flames of lava erupt from inside the earth and are called volcanoes. When that happens, there are innumerable disturbances on earth. Skeletons and bones on the surface get buried. Some of them become like rocks, remain exactly the same and at exactly the same place. Learned people search for them, dig them out, and minutely examine them. Then they make guesses – they talk among each other and ask if something really happened one way or another, and then they determine what must have really happened. Katuwal, this is not the sort of silly talk that goes with “Brahma did this, Brahma did that.” This requires searching for evidence, examining the evidence, showing it to others, convincing them of the truth and then finally settling the matter. This, Katuwal, is the irrefutable.”
“All of this seems like a dream to me, sir,” Somey, who had remained quiet so long, showed his perplexity. “If this tale were true, why don’t the monkeys of today turn into men? I am stuck on that point, sir.”
“Like I said, Somey – the kind of monkey that turned into man was different from the kind of monkey we see today. This is a long time ago. That one tribe of monkey found itself in grave peril. It had to either confront the perils and overcome them or die and disappear. It acted out of a love for life. I told you what it did, Somey. This is the second thing. The third thing is that the monkeys of today are not in the peril of dying and being destroyed. And so these worthless idiots haven’t had to utilize their hands or employ their minds.
They raid people’s crops in gangs, eat what they can and raze what they won’t eat – they have enough to get by. Why would they change then, these miscreants?”
“This is something I can agree with,” Katuwal scratched his ears in agreement.
“When I listen and ponder it,” Somey started with hesitation, “I feel as if this will drive us to madness. What I have listened to and believed in all of my life is one thing. But I am now hearing this in my dying hours.”
“Age is no barrier to hearing and learning about new things, Somey.”
“This is beyond my abilities,” Somey sighed and let his limbs go slack. “Let the younger boys put their strength to it. It is beyond me. If I had only heard these stories when I still had time...”
“I agree with Younger Uncle,” Katuwal, who felt the millstone of uncertainty burden his head, buckled under and fell to his knees.
“You are a coward!” The arrogant Somey growled at Katuwal, who thought Somey was a pilferer. “As long as you have days, you have to put your strength to these matters.”
“I have already said I can’t do it, Younger Uncle.”
The bearded Kapil looked at his watch. It was already eleven o’clock. After signaling something to the storyteller he turned to the men in the classroom, “Brothers! Should we end our talks for today?”
When everybody stood to get on their way, Katuwal raised his voice to ask, “Sir, the other creation story had come from the four-faced god Brahma. What is the name of the Brahma behind this creation story?”
“The name of the man who found the roots of the true creation story of humankind is Charles Darwin. He was a learned man from England, which is a nation of white people.”
“Everybody! Listen carefully!” Katuwal ordered his peers in the manner of the village crier that he was. Then he slapped his own head and asked again, “What was the name again, sir?”
“Charles Darwin.”
“Yes. Charles Darlin.” Katuwal repeated the name a few times, trying to commit it to memory, “Charles Darlin, Charles Darlin, Charles Darlin, Charles...”
And so ended the first day of classes in the shed in Simring. When the mature students of Simring walked home they felt as if they carried on their shoulders the foul forms of monkeys. In their disturbed ears echoed the words of the storyteller: We are created from monkeys. When they dwelled upon the significance of those words it disgusted them, as if a large lemur perched on their shoulders, with its belly splayed over their heads, and with one hand scratching under its armpits while the other shaped itself into a spoon of dead, dry digits trying to dig out the eyes. And the echo of the beanpole’s voice ringing – It’s from the monkey that man is descended!
Damn it! Damn it all!
THE TUTOR OF HISTORY
Manjushree Thapa
Manjushree Thapa is a Nepali author, translator and editor. She grew up in Nepal, Canada and the United States and began writing after completing a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. She later graduated with a Masters in English from the University of Washington. Manjushree’s essays and editorials have appeared in the New York Times, London Review of Books, Newsweek and other publications in the US, UK, Canada, India and Nepal. She has written several non-fiction titles including Forget Kathmandu, which was a finalist in the Lettre Ulysses award in 2006, The Lives We Have Lost and A Boy from Siklis. Her novels include The Tutor of History, Seasons of Flight and All of Us in Our Own Lives. She lives in Toronto.
Kathmandu. One day after another in a lifetime of rambling. One day after another, as though they had some order. Rishi followed a set routine, but it was a routine that lacked purpose. Every day he walked the city’s tortuous alleys to the house of a student. There he reviewed the student’s homework, made corrections and assigned the boy textbook pages to study more carefully. The student’s mother brought him tea. Sometimes she also brought two slices of bread. Most days she didn’t. Biding his hunger, Rishi watched the boy struggle to understand simple facts. In the background he could hear family members in the inner rooms, which he had never been let into. A scrape. Creaks. Footsteps sliding on the linoleum floor. The easy rhythmic sounds of bodies at home.
From there Rishi headed to the house of another student, who was richer, and to another. At both houses he was fed snacks. He stopped at evening time to read papers at a pavement stall, and then at the end of the day he made his way through the halogen-lit city to Hotel Tanahun. That was his day. That was his drift.
Hotel Tanahun was a street-side diner owned by a couple who had migrated from Rishi’s home district. Many of their clients were also from the district, but Rishi didn’t know them. He sat apart in a corner, watching everyone through the steam that rose from his tea: men holding out plates for second helpings of sour rice and vegetables oversalted to hide their staleness. He eavesdropped on the exchanges that took place around him.
“I Work as a peon at a factory.” “I’m a driver at a hotel.” Entire lives compressed into short sentences. “I arrange visas for boys to go to Korea.” “I have a farm in the district.” Some sentences were longer: “I didn’t weigh enough to qualify for the army, but I’ll try again next year.” All these people who thought they knew who they were.
He was, himself, unwilling to respond to queries about what he was doing in the city. He no longer felt he needed to know. When anyone asked he said he was a tutor of history. “A teacher?” No, a private tutor. “Eh.” People assumed he was in between jobs on the way to a more stable position. The truth made them uneasy: he was cut off from his family and he had no friends in the city. He had no connections and couldn’t find a job. Since he left the UML party’s student wing, he had no political patrons to look out for him. He’d been working five years as a tutor, and this life wasn’t leading him anywhere.
Sometimes Rishi would lie. “I teach at a local school,” he would say. When people asked why he was still unmarried, he would say, “I’m already engaged.” And he had been, once. But now he couldn’t imagine starting a family with the pittance he earned. When he was pushed for more detail, he extended the lie. “My family adopted a Bahun name, but we’re actually from the lower castes,” he would say, deriving a sharp pleasure when people shrank from him. Casually, he steered himself into the bare jutting walls and cold corners of his pariah’s place. “Actually, my father died in a landslide,” he would say. “My mother took up with another man whose name is Parajuli.” Why not? In the city he could shrug off identities or wear them like a shawl to cloak himself. This was the mobility he’d sought when he had decided, years ago, to leave home.
Heading back at night to his boarding house on New Road, Rishi was all eyes. A man with ropes strapped to his back: a porter waiting for work. A child washing dishes in a restaurant. Three men talking in Gurung tongue. He stopped and watched an auto-rickshaw driver arguing with a customer. He watched a man come out of a house reading an air-mail letter. He mimicked the hand gestures of a teenage girl and adopted the rolling gait of a foreigner. This was what it meant to live unnoticed in the gaps of Nepal’s history: to grow unrecognizable, unknowable to others and to himself.
*
Yet every now and then Rishi felt overwhelmed by the hardness of his life, its objection and lack of charity. On such days he felt tugged by untenable desires. Unlike his college friends he didn’t want to go to Osaka to wash dishes, or to Kuwait to tend gardens. He didn’t want to earn vast sums of money. What he wanted was a modest life which would let him live with his mind in flight. At times he thought he might return to Khaireni Tar and work as a teacher there. But for what? Home. The accusation of his father and reproach of his mother. The tenacious orthodoxy of village society –. He couldn’t return. He could neither move backward nor could he spring forward. All he could do was lose himself.
To commit himself to his straying, Rishi had hewn a map onto the city of Kathmandu, with one constant path leading from his boarding house to Hotel Tanahun. The shifting community of the diner’s customer
s – villagers coming to Kathmandu on errands – was his only link to home. Sometimes he even recognized people there – family acquaintances, friends from childhood, shopkeepers he had bought grains from, long ago, in Khaireni Tar bazaar. He kept his distance from them. One evening he spied his old schoolmaster from Khaireni Tar, and he turned away to avoid him. The next night the schoolmaster was in the diner again, surrounded by other men. The following evening, Rishi stayed away from the diner. When he came back the day after, he found the schoolmaster there, sitting with someone. It was as though the man had never left.
Rishi took his place in the corner of the diner, facing his old high school teacher. The schoolmaster was probably in his sixties now, and he looked hard, whittled with age. His silver hair was unkempt and his eyes were narrowed onto the man he was talking to. He exuded the same aura of heedlessness that had impressed Rishi as a boy, with his steeled look of someone who’d survived disaster intact. It was he who had recruited Rishi into the UML party. The schoolmaster glanced up, scanned the room, seemed not to recognize Rishi, and looked back at the man he was with.
Rishi lowered his head and listened to the clatter of steel plates and spoons, and the distant moaning of radio songs. A mosquito whined near a light bulb. The man with the schoolmaster was talking about the elections. The UML must win a majority this time. The woman who ran the diner put a plate of rice and daal in front of Rishi. Some men sitting by the door guffawed. The schoolmaster mentioned Tanahun district’s third electorate. Rishi leaned in to hear what he was saying. “The People’s Party will make it a three-way race.”
House of Snow Page 24