The Crow’s Nest The entrance to my maternal grandfather’s house, my mamaghar, is marked by  a splendid arch of thick, swirling  Bougainvillea vines that flower in brilliant shades of magenta, pink and purple. The rapidly expanding marketplace has engulfed what was once a quiet tree-lined road where the town’s landlords, businessmen and  government officials lived.  Shops selling  grocery, clothes, hardware, liquor and cheap phone cards to faraway places now line up both sides of the road. I climbed down from  the rickshaw and handed the puller a twenty-rupee note. “Rickshaws in Biratnagar have really become expensive” my aunt, Anita kaki, had warned me earlier that morning. “Don’t pay more than fifteen rupees for the ride to your mamaghar. Rickshaw drivers take advantage of outsiders. If you are from Kathmandu, they will demand at least twice the normal fare and if they find out you are from America, you will all but get robbed. And you don’t even speak Maithali” My Maithali at best constitutes of adding a “chhe or chhi” to the end of a Nepali word. I was brought up in Kathmandu where speaking proper Nepali diction was expected and slipping in words from Hindi or the Terai languages into your speech always got you a good ribbing. My parents were born and brought up in Biratnagar and moved to Kathmandu in the 1960s seeking better career prospects. My dad used to haggle with fruit sellers and grocers in Kalimati in Maithali, a habit he had picked up in his younger days driving  hard bargains in the hatiya bazaars of the eastern Terai. I once asked him why he did not speak in Nepali with the Madesi grocers. “I get a better discount” he  had told me. He  was not intimidated by the looks of discomfort on the faces of other Nepali-speaking people who felt uneasy hearing a fellow citizen speak the language of the Indian cultural imperialists across the border.  He displayed the calm and confidence of someone at his  ease with his identity. If I don’t turn into an Englishman when I speak English or an American when I say “skejyul” instead of schedule to my American friends,  how does using the occasional Maithali or Hindi word with the vegetable-seller make me any less Nepali he would argue. “Kanchanbadi jaichhe?”  I asked the rickshaw parked around the corner of the street. The  back of the rickshaw had a jaunty mural of a dreamy-eyed Lord Shiva gazing down from the Himalayas, a fountain spouting from his head and flowing into a river, the goddess Parvathi sitting admiringly besides him and the Lord Ganesh burying his hands on a  pile of laddoos large enough to trigger an early onset of juvenile diabetes. “Janchhu hajur” the puller replied in pitch-perfect Nepali. He had dark complexion, a thin build and his skin glistened in the hot and sweaty Terai sun. He  wore a faded purple singlet and a green gamcha loin-cloth and carried with him a small towel that he used to wipe-off the beads of sweat on his forehead. He pedalled through the crowded bazar  tinkling his bell and artfully dodging other rickshaws and pedestrians who veered too close to him.  Biratnagar had expanded exponentially into a bustling city, a far cry from the frontier outpost it was when my forefathers settled here in search of farmland and a better life. As children we were told stories of how they valiantly braved malaria, heat, humidity, dacoits, snakes and scorpions and a host of other problems to start a new life away from the power centres and influence of the Kathmandu establishment. He took the 20-rupee note I had handed him,  placed it between his lips and pulled out a handful of coins from his purse. He started counting the change  in one-rupee increments and I waived a thank-you and  walked away. I wanted to give him another ten rupees but remembered my aunt’s complaint about the  generous tipping habits of visitors from America putting in peril local riders. I looked up at the old house where my late grandparents had spent most of their lives. I had last been there  fifteen years ago. The wooden columns that held the house together looked just as sturdy and dusty as they did the last time I saw them. Paint had started peeling off portions of the bright blue corrugated-zinc roof. A wrap-around verandah decked the  second floor of the two-storey  house. The windows had once been painted blue to match the roof but layers of dust from the street now gave them a brown tinge. Bluish-black mould grew out of a section of the  side-wall as it did every year after the rains. “Bhim Dai” I yelled as I walked into the courtyard that led into the house.   Bhim Dai was the caretaker of the house and lived there with his wife and children. Bhim Dai’s father, Ram Dai, was from Palpa and migrated to the eastern Terai during the Rana regime to escape the debt and brutality of the local landlord. Lured by dreams of owning his own land, Ram Dai had journeyed through tiresome hills, treacherous mountain passes and frightfully dense forests to reach  the Koshi river where the land was fertile and rumor had it new settlers received a bigha of land from the government. Sadly for him such rumors did not prove to be true. Undaunted by his failure in Nepal and drawn by the growing British timber industry in Assam, he left Biratnagar after a few months and headed further east expecting never to return to Nepal. The British had started clearing large swaths of forests in Assam and Burma to feed the ever-growing appetite in England for hardwood furniture. In return for the low wages, the British Government granted the plantation workers plots of  land to build their houses, grow crops and raise livestock. Bhim dai and his sisters were born on the plantation and spent their early childhood in the lumbar yards amongst the felled logs of teak and sissau trees. Then one day clashes broke out between Nepalese settlers and locals uneasy at the influx of low-wage and hard-working immigrant labor. Worried for the safety of his family, Ram dai, returned to Nepal where my great grandfather, who was a dittha and received a government salary, offered him a place to stay and a job looking after his farm. The walls of the courtyard  looked a familiar and warm yellow but had lost their lustre and cried out for a fresh coat of paint. When my grandfather was alive, the house was painted every other Dasain. My uncles had jointly inherited the property and  under pressure from their sisters had promised to not demolish the wooden house and build a shopping complex in it’s place as one of their friends had suggested . A small child, who looked about five came out of what was once the family’s godown, examined my appearance and darted back inside. I heard muffled noises behind the godown wall and  saw smoke coming out of one of the windows.  A mouth-watering whiff of warm Basmati rice came from the same direction telling  me the new occupants had converted the old grainery into a kitchen. A small-built middle-aged women came out, folded her hands into a namaste and informed me Bhim dai had gone to his sisters place in Lauki. I introduced myself. “We didn’t know you were coming here otherwise he would have stayed behind” the woman who turned out to be  Bhim Dai’s wife told me. “We heard you were in Biratnagar from your mama but did not expect you would visit this old house” My maternal uncles live not too far off from my grandfather's old house. They don’t know how sentimentally attachment I am to my mamaghar.  I don’t blame them because I have never bothered to explain my feelings to them. After all what can a dilapidated house on the verge of crumbling into a pile of rubble offer a young man seeking his fortunes in the glitz and glamour of America? They had grown up in the large bungalow down the road with marble floors and high ceilings and if they had any sentimental attachments to a house, it was to that one. My grandfather had inherited this house from his father but only moved in  after his daughters had been married off and his sons were of university age. When they looked at the house, my uncles likley saw a rickety place with old beams and creaky floors susceptible to collapse. They saw termites, ants, mice and nesting gauthali birds  that had to be taken care of.  A leaky corrugated zinc-roof that a strong gust of wind could blow away and thick vines and crowded bushes sheltering menacing snakes and scorpions. They saw the potential of this place to generate income for them and their children once their sisters had lost their emotional attachment to the house. I saw my childhood. This house was my escape to a simple past. My mamaghar was that cherished place where I built a special bond with my grandparents. My paternal grandparents had died when my dad was young and my mother’s parents where the only set of grandparents who got to dote on me. During the hot and humid summers of the eastern Madesh, I would devour bushels of leechi and mango from my grandfather’s garden till I bellied up and passed out. I was rushed to the doctor’s on more than one occasion because of indigestion or diarrhoea. There was no other place in the world, not my home, not my school, nowhere else where I could do whatever I wanted and no one would bother me. I don’t have a single recollection of either of my grandparents rebuking me for anything. When I was a child, I was fond of spending time at my mamaghar rather than my far more spacious and modern house.  The size or amenities of the house did not matter, it was my role in the household that did. At my mamaghar, I  was the visiting son of a married daughter who was expected to slowly cut-off her ties to her own family as she found happiness in her husband's family. I was only a transient visitor  who yearned for a more involved and permanent relationship with the house. A futile longing for something that never was or never could be mine. Years later, when I learned my mother and her sisters were largely bypassed at the time of inheritance, in keeping with the patrilineal inheritance norms of Nepali culture, I was forced to come to terms with who I really was -- and  was not. My great-grandfather used the savings from his government job to invest in farm and timber land. My grand-father and his brothers inherited the farms and build on top of  their father’s work and the family holdings grew over the years. Timber prices boomed in the global market as neigboring India rebuilt from the effects of colonization and West from the second world war. The house was built in increments over many years with  income from the trade.  My maternal uncles shot doves and pheasants for a hobby. They went on hunting camps, roasted game meat  and sang alcohol-fueled songs around campfires till the early hours of the morning. My father’s family had  brains, education and personal drive. My paternal uncles went to university, joined the anti-establishment student unions, published long articles in newspapers, gave endless speeches, joined the political underground and eventually overthrew the government of the day much to the consternation of my mother’s side of the family. “Can I go inside the house ?” I asked Bhim Dai’s wife She led me past the foyer and unbolted the doors to the main bedroom. The room had been cleared of most of my grandparent’s belongings except for the brown teak almirah that still stood besides the door. The contents of the alimrah had been replaced by Bhim Dai’s wife’s belongings. The top section had a glass case where a picture of my mother’s family, taken in the 1940s at the wedding of my grand-uncle,  still remained.  The men and boys wore Bhanubhakta-style caps on their daura-surwals, the older women wore dhotis and the younger ones frocks. I looked around to where the beds used to be. My grandparents slept in seperate beds. My grandfather’s bed was a large four-post bed from which a mosquito net hung and was tucked underneath the mattress each night and folded up in the morning. My grandmothers bed was lined up across the other wall and stood perpendicular to his. In it’s place now was a low-bed that Bhim dai and his wife slept in. The room smelled just like it did all those years ago. A peculiar sulphurous  mix of tobacco and beetle-nuts that my grandfather kept on his bedside table still seemed to fill the air as did the sweet incense from the adjoining prayer room where my grandmother offered prayers to the innumerable deities of the Hindu pantheon. I picked up a faint whiff of dilkhush and ghewar  in the air, sweets my grandmother made and packed for me for school.    Memories of summers past rushed in. I was a five-year old again.The world was simple. I felt the same surge of excitement and joy I used to experience years ago when I returned from boarding school for the holidays. I would be sitting on the wooden chauki , the women of the house putting mountains of food in front of me, fussing over my height, weight and looks and showering me with love and kindness. My grandfather beaming with pride as I told him of my athletic, academic and extra-curricular feats at school. I stepped out to the back-porch where my grandfather spent much of his day. There was that wooden chauki where he sat barking orders at other household members and servants. It had not moved an inch in all those years although  age was catching up with it.  Fine cracks appeared on the wood which had turned a rotting shade of gray. I listened for the familiar sounds that I had come to associate with the back-porch - the bubbling, gurgling  noises of the hukka and the sound of my grandfather clearing his throat to let everyone else in the house know he was awake and in-charge. I went up the wooden stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor that generations of family members had slept in. I paused to listen to the stairs creak. They made the same creaking sound that had woken up my grandfather and given away my uncles and aunts as they tried to sneak past him during the afternoon siesta to catch the latest Bollywood matinee. I suspected my grandfather never bothered to fix the wood as it served him well to keep tabs on his children. He could tell which one of his children was going in and out of the house by  the distinct noise each one of their feet made when  pressed against the wood. The verandah on the second floor over-looked the main courtyard. Leaves from the Neem tree in the garden covered it’s floor like a carpet rolled out to welcome a special visitor. Shoots of Peepal grew out of the concrete parapet. My grandmother said sacred Peepal trees  and their offshoots should never be up-rooted or cut-down.  My cousin and I used to lounge around the verandah on sweltering summer afternoons, unable to sleep during the siesta hours,  as we trained my grandfathers binoculars on the trees beyond the walls of the compound expecting to detect lurching enemies hiding in their midst that we then took down with our imaginary rifles. I strolled along the verandah and Bhim dai’s wife, who along with her son were following me, told me the upper section of the house was now used to store old furniture and no one lived there. She did not have the keys to the bedrooms and so I walked around the deck looking down at different parts of the house, every angle bringing back a lost memory. That's when I saw it, high on the sissau tree was an abandoned crow’s nest. On the same spot and the same tree that  it had been on all those years ago. With its tall tree-tops, abundant vegetation and plentiful water supply, a variety of birds came here to roost and nest. Generations of crows, cranes, woodpeckers, warbles, robbins, sparrows had all called my grandfather's compound home at some point in their lives only to eventually spread their wings and fly away to other places. A crow perched on a nearby branch looked down, cocked it’s head and cawed at me as if to ask what I was doing there. It’s been a year since I took that trip and made my short-lived escape to a simple past. A Himalayan Bank calendar hangs on my wall, it’s black and white pictures include one of a government official riding a horse through New Road in the early part of the last century. The images transport me to an old Kathmandu with spacious roads, uncluttered houses and beautiful palaces. Years from today I will probably look at the present and marvel at it’s simplicity too. Last edited: 18-Sep-11 10:15 PM