Saturday, August 7, 2010

An Encounter with a Dog

Padma Devkota

      I have always been proud of my father’s achievements. My admiration for him has only increased with every bit of additional knowledge regarding his life and work. It has also increased with every other story I hear from people who love to improve upon the already existing legends about Mahakavi Devkota. I love to hear these stories about my father because they come from a fandom of imperishable love and admiration, and I listen attentively to any legend about him, especially those that come from his contemporaries.
     I relish his works too. Recently, I had just finished discussing one of his autobiographical pieces with students, but retained some doubts about certain names and dates that appeared in the essay. I was familiar, for instance, with the name of “the great Raja of Salyan in Nepal,” and could even recall my mother pointing at a formidable roadside gate near Pipalko Bot in Dillibazaar to identify his residence. There were times when I had seen a horse-drawn carriage enter or leave that immense gate. However, I did not know that the grandson of the great Raja of Salyan was my father’s classmate until I read “Pleasure in Humiliation.” 
     In this essay, my father recalls the last minute preparations for the I. Sc. examination and tells how he and his friend Phanindra Prasad Lohani went through the English textbooks in just two days. When the results were out, two of his aristocratic classmates, in whose house he used to teach children three hours daily, visited him and told him that their grandpa, the great Raja of Salyan, wanted to see him. Their grandpa, suspecting foul play in the marking of the examination copies, had my father’s English answer book re-examined by the Bengali tutor of the two babu sahebs. He simply could not believe that such well-fed and well brought up lads under the tutelage of the best Bengali teacher of English could fail while my father, despite his lower socio-economic rank, could outdo them. Although the re-examination of the answer book established the competence of the student, it failed to clear the suspicion upon the other Bengali tutor whom the Raja of Salyan had declined to offer the job of tutoring his grandsons. Before taking leave of such a great majesty as the Raja of Salyan, my humiliated father had his last say: “These two bedside products of yours are the greatest germs of genius born under the luckiest star. They must have been born on the day of the Light Festival”—the day when my father himself was born. And, when questioned by his classmates as to how many hours a day he studied, father had sarcastically replied that he was in the habit of keeping his books under his pillow and of reading the lines of print in his dream.
     I was naturally curious to learn more about the Raja of Salyan whose name was Shumsher Bahadur Shah. His son, Gehendra Bahadur Shah, had wedded Juddha Shumsher’s daughter. The rich aristocratic tonality of feudal connections was itself historically significant enough to encourage my feeble attempts at research into this family’s history, but the real goading came from the satire in the essay, the deep satisfaction my father felt through humiliation. Who were these chums of his who, despite the best opportunities available to them, had frivolously wasted their time in privileged pleasures instead of seeking academic excellence? Did they sense an economic security for a long line of male descendants powerfully enough to undermine the real merits of education? Or, was it a simple case of inadvertent juvenility relishing life the best it can? Whatever it was, I wanted to listen to the recollections of a member of the family of the great Raja of Salyan of the days when my father used to tutor in their house and to find out more about his affinity with his aristocratic classmates. I therefore obtained an appointment with the octogenarian Birendra Bahadur Shah, one of the five grandsons of the Raja of Salyan, at his residence at 11:00 a.m. on the 9th of January 2008, and presented myself at his gate on the dot. He was a person who had served long as Zonal Commissioner in the Terai region during the Panchyat Era.
     Anticipating my arrival, Mr. Shah had approached the gate as he had promised to do so. From the gate to his house at the far end of the field was an unpaved driveway, shaped like the right half of a square bracket, with patches of winter sunlight interspersed with shadows of large trees. He did not invite me into his house as I had expected, but chose to stand on a sunny spot near the gate end of the driveway. A well-fed person, still looking ruddy and robust, his health had nevertheless been recently undermined by the onslaught of age and whatever else accompanies obesity. He spoke to me about his recent hospitalization and I felt sorry for him. I was undecided about how to begin the interview because I had anticipated the comfort of a chair to sit down and jot notes in my copybook as he spoke. Understanding the futility of such an expectation, I pulled out my notebook and started scribbling the faded recollections of a patrician habituated to stand-up meetings with visitors near the main gate, pretty much like the Rana prime ministers of yore used to do.
     He was happy to recall my father who had tutored him and others in his ancestral home at Pipalko Bot from 1939-41 as he recalled. This recollection probably missed the mark by a whole decade because my father joined Patna College and passed his I.Sc. in 1928. I, therefore, began doubting the authenticity of an unutilised memory. Nevertheless, I learned from him that Gehendra B. Shah had five sons: Jitendra, Narendra, Surendra, Birendra, and Devendra. Of these, Jitendra and a cousin of theirs, Padam Bahadur, were my father’s classmates—the two “germs of genius”—while Narendra and Bhavadeva were one grade above them. I also know from a different source that another intimate friend of my father, Shankar Dev Panta, taught Surendra all the seven papers of MA English programme offered by Patna University.
     Unfortunately, the interview took a different turn at this point. I saw in the distance a sleek, black beauty gallop towards us, not in aggressive haste, not in howling hostility, but in almost leisurely stride as if towards a playground. By the time I could blurt out to Mr. Shah, “Dog! Dog is coming!” it was already half-way through the driveway. Mr. Shah looked at the dog with an octogenarian equanimity and even continued saying something he was saying though I do not remember what it was he said. The sleek, black creature sort of trotted towards the old man, and then it came to sniff at my crotches. I didn’t know how to greet it. By nature, it was better able than I was to respond to a new situation. It held my scrotum in its fangs and looked almost too gently at my face as if to ask if it hurt. Unable to reply to this interview, I crouched more with fear than with pain, for my winter garments were a timely blessing, and wondered why Mr. Shah would not chase my interviewer away. Half amused by my undignified posture and more repulsed by the plebeian chemicals that hurt its sensitive nostrils, the Doberman, or whatever it was, released me and stepped back.
     “It’s bitten me!” I said.
     “Go away!” said Mr. Shah, shooing with a feeble, leisurely wave of the hand the devil of a dog, which delighted in attacking me from behind. I felt its fangs tear my calf and cried out in pain.
     “Don’t worry,” said Mr. Shah. “It has been given the anti-rabies injection. Nothing will happen. Nothing will happen.”
     This time, my ballpoint and notebook had fallen to the ground, my leg hurt and I was terribly frightened.
     “Chase it away,” I cried. Before anyone could do anything else, the nimble animal had frisked behind me to test the tensile strength of my right thigh immediately below the buttocks—a test with sharp and piercing canine points that made me jump and cry out in agony. I saw it come around to the front and look at me as if to ask, “How do you like this play? I haven’t been really aggressive, have I?”
No! The savage could have torn me to shreds, but it hadn’t. It only seemed to study the fear in my eyes and to say, “You respond well to my message.”
     I did. I placed the synthetic leather bag in front of me to protect my crotches as it looked mischievously at my thighs and at my eyes turn by turn. It did not snarl. I did not run away. It bared no teeth. I trusted it none and hoped to parry well in self-defence in case of another frontal attack. Half-crouched in self-defence, I waited for someone to come to my rescue. Mr. Shah finally called for help: “Someone! Come and chase it away with a stick.” For the dog would obey no man, only a stick! From the humble servants’ quarter, a man came walking with a leisurely stride as if nothing uncommon had happened and took an eternity to cover some thirty feet of the drive. “Don’t worry, Sir,” he said. “This dog bites everyone. It has bitten me so many times! It has been injected. Nothing will happen. You don’t have to fear.”
     When being bitten is normal, bites don’t count.
     But even this devil of a dog did not like to be beaten. No, not with a stick. It was the stick that chased it away, not Mr. Shah, nor his keeper of the gate. It was not obeying these people because it was obeying its own nature. It was unassumingly its own self and nothing else. Nature reigned supreme and pure in this supple, muscular, canine frame. Its only fault, if it was considered a fault by its master, was the habit of biting every stranger that visited the house. I wondered why, knowing the dog so well, Mr. Shah did not leash it properly or lock it up in the kennel before receiving me into his compound. As it galloped away, the dog turned back to look at me a couple of times as if to say that it had enjoyed the pleasure of my company. I almost thanked it for not mangling me up to shreds.
     Neither the patrician nor the plebeian asked me if I was bleeding, and I did not want to expose my wounds to them. Mr. Shah could have asked me whether I needed medical attention. He could at least have offered to call a cab for me to go home. However, he simply stood there watching me as if he was used to giving special appointments to visitors who were then unfailingly bitten by his normal and healthy dog. I will not say that this was the equivalent in Nepal of the Roman arena that let loose hungry lions upon culprits against the state for aristocratic entertainment. Yet, I felt like one who had presented himself at a formidable gate to entertain a Lord inside. Humiliated, hurt, but not defeated by such atrocious culture that defied all genuine taste of the civilized world, I picked up my notebook, put it in my bag, limped towards the main gate without a farewell, and stood hailing a taxi to go home.
I had finally learnt a lesson the hard way. What more could I have expected from a dog than a bite? However, I had expected much more from Mr. Shah: genuine hospitality, respect for me as an individual, some human sense and sensibility, and perhaps many more things. I should have known that human beings always disappoint us by their pretensions at superiority. Because I could not trust what was not genuine, I opted for the five required shots of anti-rabies at Himal Nursing Home and delighted in rereading “Pleasure in Humiliation” several more times as I recuperated from this experience.

24 April 2008

7 comments:

  1. Padma, I very much enjoyed this story. But Enjoyment is not enjoyment in your humiliation and fear or his who cares attitude. I was outraged in every sentence, btw, is Birendra Bahadur Shah, the famous Lava Raja a forester too who died in his 90s?

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  2. It is an amazing story! I enjoyed it teaching too!! You are great sir!

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  3. What lesson do we get from this???

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