Borderline Erotomania: Lust and Lechery in Nepal

I often wonder – well, not often, but often enough – how it must feel for an actor-director to see his name glitter and flash on screen every few seconds during the credits. Cases in point: Braveheart (Mel competing with Mel), and more recently, Tropic Thunder, which Ben Stiller, in addition to the above, also co-wrote and co-exec produced, and maybe even made love to, on occasion. An embarrassment of riches, to be sure. Don’t these guys feel the least bit embarrassed to watch the scales of fortune tip so overwhelmingly in their favour in comparison with every clapper boy who ever lived? The haves screwing the have-nots again, a million to none.

Nonetheless, I digress (how the hell can I digress when I’ve just started writing this?). Or maybe not. It’s all connected, somewhere. So if you do have time off from your daily dose of Sudoku, just join these goddamn dots, will you? 

It was a cool, sunny day in Kathmandu. I was uncharacteristically sociable this morning, and so I decided to read the newspaper. I swear I wasn’t expecting much, not a cocktail party for sure, and certainly not what I got – my name flashing and glittering (to my 9 a.m. mind) in 12-point Helvetica on the front page of The Himalayan Times.

“Yesterday was the first day of Kartik Nach,” beamed the snippet on the left margin of the page.

My first thought, as you’ve probably guessed, was: was I dancing again in my sleep, and what’s the scientific term for it, and do I wish to be cured? And then I saw light, as revealed by the masthead:

Wed Nov 5, 2008, and below that, Kartik 20, 2065, and finally, Nepal Sambat 1169.

Yes, I am the October Man, my name (which, quite inadvertently, happens to be Kartik, whatever the fuck that means) representing this auspicious month, and the Nepalis are ahead of their time, and ours, if you didn’t know already (this might explain their foreshortened life expectancy). Theirs is a solar calendar based on ancient Hindu tradition; the Bikram Sambat calendar is 56.7 years ahead of the solar Gregorian calendar.

Now I’m not religious, save for the occasional alcohol binge, but this day of our lord, whoever He might be, seemed to dawn like a beacon and lead me to the conviction that I was the chosen one, chosen for the explicitly spiritual purpose of welding myself with the first Nepali lass who’d have me (it wasn’t exactly a mission but I’m not averse to commission).

How did I arrive at this conclusion? Duh. Kartik + Nepal + 69 = Sexy Time, yo. And one more thing I believe in firmly: when in Rome, do the Romans…

Flashback: it’s a rave type of party, a trance festival on the outskirts of Kathmandu, and I’m raving with a Swiss miss. We’ve reached the stage, thirty-sex hours into our acquaintance, when we’re all too comfortable, almost over-familiar with one another’s quirks and needs and idiotsyncrasies, and so we decide to go trawling for a chick to complete the third angle of this rather dubious triangle.

Now you’d think that this should be a cinch at a party where everyone’s letting their hair - and a few other things – down, but no. When I’m not wondering about actor-directors’ ego kicks, I’m perplexed by this apparent paradox in which everyone’s going stark raving mad in every way except sexually, shedding inhibitions but not clothes, making out with the music but not with a fellow human, the dance floor so thick with energy, sensuous and otherwise, that you can feel it pulsing at you, at your loins, from a mile off like a quasar or a supernova.

I mean, whatthefuck? Aren’t we all children of the sperm to start with? And why pretend at freelove and techno-hippy revolutions when you can’t walk the walk, homey. I mean, if I wanted sterile I’d re-read 1984 or move to China. (Wait a minute, I think I did both recently.)

Anyway, so this is what the lady and I have to contend with: another sexually repressed drug orgy. Nobody wants to get jiggy with it. To complicate things further, my new friend – we shall call her Ludmila, because it’s cute – has developed a slight speech impediment owing to certain substances ingested several hours earlier. She has regressed to her amniotic roots, meaning she can mumble in German, maybe even do the baby goose-step, but the Queen’s English, tough titties to begin with, is now another ballgame altogether. You could say this is a particularly British strain of aphasia, and virulent as hell. Ludmila sounds like a stuttering wind-up toy winding down.

            Ludmila: “Ya. Hee. So…we…make…love…no?”

            Victim: “What?”

            Me: “Let me handle this, m’Lud. (To victim) What she’s trying to say is, would you be interested in a threesome?”

The victim’s expression is to die for, several times worth the price of the ticket. She recovers composure soon enough, but it turns out that she, a pert, dishy blonde from Belgium, is not into women. Don’t worry, I coax, you don’t need to interact with Lud, I’ll take care of the both of you. While I’m saying this, I think, did I actually say this, and how the fuck will I ever live up to it? Not now, she squirms, maybe some other time, eh? Strike out. Unsurprisingly Lud has no luck on her own either. So we make do with one another. What to do in Kathmandu, or Kathmandon’t?

Our scouting expedition ended there, but we continued to drool at and comment on beddable objects. I even suggested we hit a few Kathmandu bars together and see what came up in terms of group therapy. When this didn’t bear fruit I suggested we attend a Shower Girl show (Nepal-style striptease), which, at the very least, might infuse some spark or humour into our dreary small-town lives. But by now we were too mired in ourselves, in our burgeoning bourgeois bubble, to really care.

Then Ludmila decided to take a vacation from our vacation and go Vipassana-ing down the slippery slope to self-improvement. Or perhaps she was trying to tell me something. I was beginning to sense a pattern emerging from my failed relationships. On the rebound from me, women seemed to invariably a) embrace spirituality’s sexless solace b) meet that special scum-one c) turn lesbian.

In short, I’d made them ineffably happier by leaving them than they’d ever been within my blessed world. I was being transformed willy-nilly into the Father Teresa of Sex, a serial donor of life and love and freedom, my charity beginning at home even as I chased my dependents into someone else’s.

In Lud’s absence I became the Chosen One (encouraged by newspaper headlines blaring my name) and gradually began to nurture the roving eye once more. My eyes roved, in fact, straight into the daily droves of Nepali schoolgirls oozing sex along the roads like slug slime. Tarted up - stockinged, mascara’d, micro-mini-skirted – and Avril-fied to the nines, they stalked the sidewalks like goth kittens out to capture victims for underground S&M parties.

That darned roving eye again

These demure designer vixens reinstilled my faith in teenage sexuality, lust as the colour black, and Nepali neighbourliness, not in any specific order. They also casually made Britney (in her first video) look like Julie Andrews flaunting nun chic high on the frigid Austrian Alps.

A young Brit, friend and fellow traveller, summed it up gallantly, “It’s the high socks, mate. Not to mention the glint in their collective eye when they walk past you. You’re like, ‘Naughty naughty, you know things you shouldn’t.’”

And so there were fantasies, instead of fantasies about fantasising. I’d heard stories from at least a couple of local boys/men concerning the Nepali girl’s notorious coquettishness, and how this translated into a fatal cocktease of the highest calibre.

“If you so much as kiss them once,” bemoaned a university student I’d struck up a conversation with, “they expect you to marry them and father ten babies.”

Since I wasn’t about to go down that road, I began to mine my reveries all the more; this rich inner space thence became redolent with a sense of personal exploration, a meditative maturity, a million daydreams jostling for prominence and not all involving Manisha Koirala as a Scottish high-school dominatrix in Bravetart.    

The days flew and I found myself crippled by a combination of excessive lust and a fear of unleashing it. Maybe, I thought, if I gave myself a deadline I’d hit upon something or someone faster, and so I decided to buy a ticket out of the country.

A few days later my daydreams shrank to a pinpoint, a single lodestar whose orbit I was dragged into.

Her name had probably been plucked out of The Handbook of the Dullest Female Names in History, something to the tune of Kavita or Bhavna or Shilpa, but who cared? She was a trainee in a travel agent’s office, a prototypical svelte, dark-eyed Nepali lass with JAILBAIT written all over, and even while the fucktarded manager simpered and lisped at me, she sat next to me and worked me over with her eyes. I felt like she was conducting a full body cavity search. The air was so choked with sex I wanted to rip her clothes off and take her roughly, unchivalrously, right there on the floor, but all that this notion succeeded in doing was giving me a rather unbecoming stiffy. Something was travelling north in my pants, I thought, trying to ignore her as she deliberately brushed her hand against mine, or leaned over me to pick up a pen on the other side of the desk.

Two others sat in the room - the male manager and his Delhi cousin who wasn’t too unattractive herself but had just been rendered invisible by a mere trainee. Were they seeing this, I wondered, and how could they not; they just had to be the two greatest actors in the world to keep this charade going. So this was how a poor hormonal Nepali boy got embrangled in a Black Widow’s web for life. I hastily booked my passage to India and slithered out of the room. When I went to pick up my ticket the next day she wasn’t there. I despaired and exulted simultaneously.

While a part of my brain (probably lodged in the scrotal area) still contrived ways to reach out to her (she had access to my number and email, I reasoned, she’d connect like a Nokia-enhanced wet dream), and other libidinal tentacles rippled out at random Israelis and Europeans, I decided to do what any self-respecting psychology graduate-cum-writer would do in my position. Sublimate, mate, sublimate. I began work on my third debut novel, a panegyric to the young female form as seen through an old man’s eyes.

Working title: Ludmila.   

           

Verboten

Word of the day: Perfuse. verb. Suffuse. Diffuse. Cause to spread or flush or flood through, over, or across. For some reason this word's been perfusing through my brain in the last few days/nights. Has a nice ring to it, like perplex or persnickety or perdition, damn it.

Pretentious word of the day: Mofussil. noun and adjective. Described by the Hobson Jobson dictionary (which happens to be an extensive glossary of Anglo-Indian terms) as, ""The provinces," - the country stations and districts, as contra-distinguished from 'the Presidency'; or, relatively, the rural localities of a district as contra-distinguished from the sudder or chief station, which is the residence of the district authorities. Thus if, in Calcutta, one talks of the Mofussil, he means anywhere in Bengal out of Calcutta..."

Most likely to be used by: film school types, painters, neo-surrealists - or anyone who uses the term art deco thrice in a sentence without drawing breath - and, of course, Bengalis. Or all of the above at once. 'Eminent' writer Amit Chaudhari uses the word, not once, but thrice in an article published in The Hindu in which he reviews a Bengali writer's stories titled, In the Company of Ghosts. Maybe he wants to be three times cleverer than the average Bong (slang for Bengali, not a smoking implement). Maybe if he uses the word one more time I'm going to send him into the company of ghosts.

But don't be fooled, the South Indians don't like to be left behind when it comes to pretentiousness. Thus, the Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus (CMBT) is the largest bus station in all of South Asia. And how do they justify such linguistic genius? Because how else, you see, can they get people to travel through and beyond Chennai, the Gateway to South India. And beyond. Let's all take the Moffie Magic Bus, maaan. How cool and unfettered we be, in a moffie sort of way. How typically posh, we of the Meandering Let’s-use-the-word-Mofussil-now Movement.

Deadheads

Sometimes I think (it’s rare, but I do - think, I mean) some diseases were invented just to make hypochondriacs of us all. I mean, thumb through a medical dictionary and tell me your heart doesn’t go a-flutter and your tummy collywobbly at the mere prospect of how many sicknesses you can contract just by being alive today. Just by breathing, or taking a walk, or petting (light or heavy) a dog, or wolfing down that paani puri or holding a stranger’s hand in the darkness of a movie theatre.

Technological advances in medicine have stretched our lifespans to the point where we can do wheelies on our state-of-the-art electronic chairs just before manoeuvring soundlessly into our graves. But why is there no record of the number of people whose lives are snipped short by the same science? What about these unfortunate critters who die stress-related deaths every day, stress wholly engendered by health anxiety, anxiety generated by Too Much Information? And what about them those who worry constantly about dying of worry and in the process, die? Self-fulfilling prophecies aren’t always fun and games, unless you’re a shrink and you get to diagnose them in everyone but yourself.

A modern kindergarten class might decide to teach a reinvented version of the alphabet: A is for Aneurysm, B is for Brain Tumour, C is for Colon Cancer...

Then there's SUDS, sudden unexpected death syndrome, which mysteriously strikes adolescents and adults in their sleep. How the hell do you plan for that?

I read about people all the time who've never smoked and have religiously, almost fanatically, devoted their lives to various ancient and new-age therapies; the yoga-and-wheatgrass warriors. Yet, in some sad, twisted dance of irony, Death visits them first but not before they've been ripped open by some horrific, excruciating disease with an unpronounceable name.

Tomorrow's headlines (guaranteed): More People Dead.

It almost seems as if you're one of the lucky ones if you're already a corpse. Throw some rabid, old-school superstition and paranoia and fear-mongering into the mix, and you know you have one hell of a life to look forward to. Still want to spit out as many kids as possible before you die?

Terminal Trepidation. Coming soon to a bedpan near you.

I used to shop in China and that ain't no bull

There are watering holes, and then there are Beijing bars.

Case in point: a popular joint in the expat district has been christened Pure Girl Bar. Although whether it was popular first or was thus named to magnetise the dive, is moot. Chicken or egg. Then there's one in my area which I've passed a few times during the day and it somehow seems as if it would retain its Zen-like quality of emptiness through the night as well. Unfortunately for some reason it hasn't had the same mob-sucking effect as the other place, even though I'd like to tell my grandkids some day that I was a frequenter of Hump in my time. And why and how did Beijing get abbreviated to BJ and why hasn't anyone in the government vetoed it yet? Usage: BJ girl seeks handsome man to spend nights with. (actual classifieds ad on thatsbj.com). 

There’s hashing the obvious - Lush. And the Bubble Café in Chaoyang. Not gifted with a particularly outlandish name, but remarkable nonetheless for its Saturday night live jazz band, The Fuckleberries. Now that would be a great name for a dive. On second thought, that would be a great name for just about anything. Your dog. Your plants. Your annoying boss. Your ex-wife. Your retarded sister in the nuthouse. You could even change your family name to Fuckleberry. You could claim that Fuckleberry Finn is a biography of you. You could read it to your child every night and watch hero worship bloom in his eyes. You could discover a new fruit and name it after your family. Generations of Fuckleberries (your family) would live off the fortune you made from naming and selling Fuckleberries (the fruit) and you’d be their ongoing God-like ancestor unto infinity. What better way to court immortality than with a Fuckleberry.

Houhai Zoo, the pub, should’ve had a tagline to go with the name: “Do not feed the animals. They’re on a liquid diet.”

Finally, there’s the bar with no name, again in the Houhai area. No, that’s not its name. It just doesn’t have a name - or any kind of denomination, rank, hierarchy, convict number that the public can discern with the naked eye. Subject of much ontological ping-pong? You bet.

Typical conversation with a colleague:

Him: (cheery) So, you want to go to No Name Bar tonight?

Me: Where’s that, then?

Him: Oh you know, that place we went to the other night. And every night before that for three months.

Me: Oh, you mean the bar without a name.

Him: That’s what I said.

Me: No. No, you didn’t. You said No Name Bar. Which is quite the opposite.

Him: I thought we were speaking the same language here. Could you repeat that in English?

Me: (sighing) Ok, here goes nothing again. By calling it No Name Bar you’ve killed its primal purpose - that of not possessing a name. By calling it No Name you’ve christened and baptized it, and thus reduced it to the ranks of just another bar with a name, even if that name is No Name. By the way, things didn’t have names until we humans came along and labelled everything, thereby corrupting the integrity and wholeness of the cosmos.

Him: (flaring up) Look, can we just %#$@* go there? I really need that ***#$@* drink now.

Then things get really ugly when I bring up the same subject at the bar with no name later that evening, and the rest of the group nods wisely, sagely, sombrely in total, synchronized agreement. My esteemed colleague doesn’t speak to me for the rest of the month, until pay day in fact, when I bribe him with an all-you-can-drink-for-free offer at - where else - the smugly existential bar with no name to speak of.