Reinventing Jhiltung

- Padma Devkota

    Gopinath Nepal, known to the inhabitants of Jhiltung as Baburam, must have been a very handsome lad once upon a time. His genial and robust face stared at me with incredulity when Ramesh Prasad Nepal, my companion to Jhiltung, told him that our children were wedded to each other. He was delighted and scrutinized my face in the dwindling light of the evening. I was new to him, but he recognized and greeted my companion immediately. We had just arrived on motorbikes with our young escorts to a point from where we now had to descend down a raised, narrow path that zigzagged through the paddy field to the house below.

    Midway upon a southern, sequestered slope of the mountain, Baburam’s house offered us the most unanticipated warmth, comfort and hospitality. Like a living history, Baburam himself walked slowly around his clean front yard with a grey, metal walking stick with a curved handle because he had probably torn a tendon of his knee by falling from the raised path in the terraced fields. In the shed below the front yard, goats, cows and buffaloes chewed on their fodder. A fresh, white lamb frolicked and gamboled near our feet with two others. A calf had newly arrived and the beestings were shared. Rich milk, skimmed milk and home-made ghee were the major attractions of a vegetarian dinner in the large ground-floor kitchen. At the farthest end of the room, flames leapt above the two holes of a mud-stove upon which soot-blackened utensils sat cozily. From the opposite end, a dark, wooden staircase led to the upper story where we would retire for the night. A man sat on a wooden bedstead on one side of the room as we sat cross-legged on wooden boards on the mud floor to devour with gusto the sumptuous dinner while the women kept goading us to try just some more food “even though it may not be that good!” Baburam was the only person who sat with one leg stretched out before him because he could not fold it.

     After the meal was over he told us that we had come to Jhiltung some two or three years too late. “Gore is gone and nobody in this region knew the poet like he did. I was very young at that time and somebody told me later on that he had been asked to follow the poet wherever he went and to make sure that no harm befell him. O, he used to walk all over the place and Gore used to follow him at a distance, trying not to intrude upon his privacy. They had asked Gore to take care of him because they thought he wasn’t mentally stable, perhaps even suicidal. I think they even called the shamans and witch-doctors to treat him. But, O, he was so cheerful all the time. Gore used to say that he had never seen a face that was so radiant, so full of smile, so bright whenever you looked at it. Once, the poet had walked towards the northern slope of the mountain and over a very narrow path from which, if one fell down, one would fall directly into the torrential Trishuli below. Gore told him to be careful and asked him why he wanted to take that risk. He wanted to see the snow-capped mountains along the northern horizon, he had said. And when he was looking at the mountains, was he looking at the mountains? What was he looking at? As he was returning by the same path, at one point Gore instinctively held the poet by the arm for fear that he would fall down. The poet, instead of being angry with Gore, smiled sweetly at him and freed himself.”

    “Where was he staying then?” I ventured. My mother had told me that one of her elder uncles had treated father with some mantra and sacred ash, and also tied an amulet around his arm to protect him against evil. His health had improved perhaps also because of the fresh air of the hills, the good vegetarian diet and the exercise one gets walking up and down the slopes. Back at home in Kathmandu, his brothers had ridiculed such superstition and torn the amulet out of his arm.

     I was told that Baburam had moved to this new abode from his ancestral home higher up the hill. Again, the reason being he could not walk like he used to and living up there was more difficult. That was several years ago. The deserted house stood with silent dignity amidst the dilapidations of time, showing off its deftly carved wooden door frames and windows to the sugarcane fields below. The boys who had so generously taken us there on their motorbikes over the rough and dangerous mountain road told us they were planning to rent the place for the office of a literary society of Jhiltung, which had been functioning informally for the last two years but was yet to be registered. They had decided upon this place because Mahakavi Devkota had once lived in this house. They too were bent on recapturing the glorious past of a mountain abode sanctified by the brief sojourn there of a beloved national poet. Baburam’s grandson, Achyut, was especially enthusiastic about this project. This was only the second time, I think, that they were commemorating the birth anniversary of Laxmi Prasad Devkota, this time the 105^th, and we were the invited guests. The event took place in the sunny yard of Shree Kamarudevi Higher Secondary School, which showed off its modern architecture in the middle of humbler traditional abodes. And, indeed, this was modern Jhiltung living its influence, trying to establish its worth and planning to project a culturally rich Nepal into the times to come. Probably the literary society of Jhiltung would be called “Kunjini Literary Society.” After all that was a right thing to do because Devkota wrote Kunjani (1945) a long narrative poem about the love affair between Gore and Kunjini who faced a tragic end because the traditional society of the hills was antagonistic to such individual freedom, especially of a woman. In these hills, a girl was still the property of the father legally and ritualistically transferred to the husband without giving her a right to choose. Such practice in these hills did not mean that the same society did not have a long and rich social and traditional culture guided by rich Hindu ethics. Nevertheless, Gore, the poet’s guardian in the Jhiltung hills, and Gore, the principal male character of the long narrative poem, had now merged in an image of love and sacrifice. This was probably the poet’s way of expressing his gratitude to one who followed him everywhere to make sure that no harm befell him. The poet may have appeared mentally unstable to some who did not understand the poetic fire that burned inside him. But he was not. He had studied both the nature and society of Jhiltung sufficiently to write significantly about it during his sojourn with the family of his wife’s maternal uncle.

     Baburam is my maternal grandmother’s nephew. Even though he was one generation higher up, we had met for the first time after I too had developed sufficient wrinkles that spoke of our long and separate past. For him, the poet was a legend. For me, he was a father too. For Baburam, the Jhiltung he was born in had a new name: Dui Pipal, also called Pipalay. For me, the whole region including the low, green paddy fields, the thicker habitation of the Dui Pipal heights and even all the distant blue mountains I could see with my naked eyes was just Jhiltung. Had the clouds on the horizon been transparent, the white peaks beyond, too, would have been Jhiltung. Wherever my father had walked in this region, whatever he had seen near and far, was all Jhiltung for me. I guess I really wanted to see it through his eyes, which was actually quite impossible! His presence there almost seventy-three years ago in 1940 gave the place an aura that continued beckoning to me to look and to look for a Jhiltung from which I have now returned with the satisfaction that I, too, have visited that sacred region of earth. The only thing left for me to do now was to re-read Kunjini again to appreciate how the landscape of the place I had visited had been imaginatively reinvented in the poet’s mind.

 January 7, 2014