In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude…
William Wordsworth,
Daffodils (1804) [break]
In these lines, Wordsworth evokes his sense of wonder at the sight of the endless chain of daffodils stringing the waterworks of the famous Lake District in Northern England. For some reason, whenever I go through these lines, I am reminded of a favorite muse of my own, the Fewa Tal.
Why Fewa? Why not the no less majestic Begnas or Rupa close by? I can’t quite put a finger on it, but Nietzsche perhaps comes the closest to articulating the way I feel about Fewa. “There is always some madness in love,” he says. “But there is also always some reason in madness.”
When I was in Pokhara a year ago, all by myself, I spent most of my time reading on the porch of my lake-facing hotel room.
Reclined in my wicker chair with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, swigging on my ginger tea by the day, chugging local beer by the night, even as I struggled to adjust my poor eyes to the dim halogen light flooding the porch from inside the room.
The book chronicles the cycle of violence surrounding the short-lived independence movement of the Nigerian region of Biafra, a little too close for comfort, I thought at the time, for a citizen of a country still struggling to come to terms with a violent struggle of its own.
All through my stay, it rained like hell. Not that I needed any excuse to read by the Fewa right through the wet days. And wrestle for sleep through the forlorn nights.
Angel has this disarmingly sweet habit of answering every question with a smile. “School janchhau?” (The cute little thing instantly breaks into a disarming grin.)
“How long have you been here?” (The grin widens. Her dainty front row teeth shimmer in the morning sun.)
Angel is five, one of the 17 girls sheltered at the childcare center being operated by the 3 Sisters Adventure Trekking.
This scrawny girl with her short, cropped hair parted to the right, whose eyes tend to dance to the movements of the camera lens in front, was rescued by the 3 Sisters from her grandparents who were unable to look after Angel. A year earlier, her mother had run away.
Her father, a notorious drunkard, had remarried; out of favor with her own father, the stepmother was quick to chuck the four-year-old Angel out of the house.
Another 14-year-old girl from Syangja, also sheltered at the center, narrated a horrendous tale of her own. She too had to be rescued after being sold by one of her relatives. Her going price? Rs1,000!
Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that Angel now lives with these three incredible women who have given up their own lives to take care of hundreds of disadvantaged children and neglected and oppressed girls from right across the country.
The Empowering Women Network shelter where the children are housed also provides training for women porters, most of whom come from broken homes.
The intensive training offered at the center equips them with skills to serve as porters for women trekkers from the West who wish to trek in Nepal but are reluctant to hire male porters. The income is decent; and their new lives a far-far cry from their hellish existence before they came to the center.
As I talk to the three Chhetri sisters (Lucky, Dicky, and Nicky) in their cozy orange-painted office tucked at the back of the center, I can see the brilliant morning sun playing on the now clam Fewa. Perhaps it was the same soothing vibe that inspired the sisters to set up their noble venture by the Lakeside.
The same evening (March 28, 2012), slumped over my hotel bed, I am overlooking the evening sun set high above the algae-green Fewa, right next to the Peace Pagoda up on the tree-lined hills, a sheer rise from the lake.
At a distance, I can make out a boat that looks stranded, bang in the middle of the stretch of water, visible from my room. The outline of the oarsman is hazier still, but he definitely isn’t rowing. Who would blame a little indulgence on his part finding himself as he does in the middle of the pastel of colors that is a cloudy but rainless Fewa evening in late March.
It was then that I have one of those flashbacks, when a cascade of memories flood my head, triggered, this time, by something as innocuous as fuzzy outlines of a man on a nondescript boat barely within my sight. I am transported back to Pokhara of a year ago.
I wanted to venture out on the lake alone. “Ma aafai garchhu!” I kept insisting with my innkeeper. “Hundai hundaina!” he was as vehement in his opposition.
I would not be allowed, I was told, to go out on my own, not on his boat. Apparently, far too many lonely tourists had insisted on going out on the calm waters, never to return. Only after an elaborate exchange and after I had set down in writing my home and office address was I hesitantly let go.
As I pushed the boat into the tepid water, the sky was already filled with nimbus clouds ready, it seemed, to batter down on the lush green valley below, anytime.
I must have been an hour into the ride. Soaked in sweat from constant oaring, I decided to take a breather in the middle of nowhere, the Barahi at the center of the lake still some distance.
Caught unawares, my mind had conjured up a query, at once frightening and somber, as my eyes flitted over the vast green expanse that had engulfed me. Why had so many people over the years willfully chosen to make the final descent to the darkest depths of Fewa?
In Shakespeare’s epic tragedy, Hamlet faces a similar existential dilemma, which forces him to soliloquize one of the most enduring phrases in all of English literature: “To be, nor not to be, that is the question.”
The Prince of Denmark is contemplating suicide. But he is held back, for some of the same reasons, I reckon, most of us decide to push ahead our desolate lifeboats even amidst maddening uncertainties all around. We do so because, in Hamlet’s words, “… conscience does make cowards of us all.”
Still supine in my bed, I can see through the window a navy-green van parked on the little grassy stretch that occupies the space between the observer, now chastened after a crash course in mortality, and the observed, my evergreen friend, my muse, my Fewa.
By the van is a family out on a picnic: a middle-aged man, his blond wife and their two tousled-haired children, a girl in white frock and a boy in his purple shirt and khaki.
By their side, a group of youngsters are playing football with the languid air that is impossible to replicate in the hurly burly of modern-day Kathmandu.
On the far side is the placid Fewa, a silent witness to their effortless play and peregrinations of my restless mind.
The writer is the op-ed editor at Republica
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