NOTE: Needless to say, all characters and events in this story are fictional in their entirety. Some readers may find parts of the story uncomfortable or even disturbing. Strong language has been used on occasion to emphasize the gravity of a situation and is not in any way a reflection of my own views or feelings of the subject at hand.


Hello! My name is Sachita.
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Sachita Chettri-Sharma-Shrestha. Those of you familiar with caste dynamics in Nepal might have noticed my last name, besides being ridiculously long, spans three castes. Depending on how well versed you are with Nepali last names, you might even have noticed that each of my last names, given to me by my creator, is a very generic one. Peel off those generic layers, and I could be Sachita Thapa-Dixit-Rajbhandari. Or Sachita Budathoki-Pudasaini-Gurbacharya. History has tossed some amazing ingredients into Nepal's melting pot and in the process my last name has become a witches brew of what surely must have been the mad quest of my overzealous forefathers to conquer the frontiers of genetics in their bedroom. What a twisted sense of humor my forefathers and creator must have possessed - the former to leave behind a legacy of lengthy and bizarre-sounding last names and the latter to use them with great glee and fervour when he could easily have called me something else.

My creator made me a woman because he was studying women, trying to demystify them. Like in the movie, "Being John Malkovich", he was working on a project to enter the mind of a human to figure out how it really works. He chose a woman because he was fed up of the battle for the remote control, the most symbolic of the gender wars that have plagued our planet since the roaring success of Womens Lib. He spent hours reading about female psychology and secretly tried his theories of man-woman dynamics on the countless unsuspecting women he ran into everyday. They were harmless theories that caused no damage to the physical, psychological or emotional well being of the women in question. Like his theory on who appreciates pleasantries more - men or women - and why. As harmless as that. Before you conjure up images of a Hannibal Lecter or Baazigar's Shahrukh Khan let loose on Sajha, put your fears, if any, to rest. He was as harmless as the Pope. In fact, he had even tried to enter the mind of the Pope a couple of times only to be chased away by the Pope's stubborn refusal to accept his intrusion as a noble experiment in science and instead treat it with the same suspicion the Catholic church has treated , say, evolution or condoms with.

The desire to read minds or enter the mind of another person is perhaps as old as human thought. Religion is about making you believe there is someone who knows your every thought, your deepest and darkest secrets. God is to be feared because he knows everything you are thinking. Like that one incident of sexual abuse you faced as a child, that does not bother you anymore, but whose memories come rushing back to you whenever someone lavishes praise on your then young and foolish uncle. Google tells you it was definitely abuse, yet your heart tells you it was just a stupid mistake he made. No one knows about it because they cant read your mind and you wont speak your mind. Or the thoughts of that one lesbian encounter in your all-girls high school that come back to you in your dreams typically on those lonely nights when your husband is out of town on business and your sons are fast asleep in their rooms.

Back in the old days, trying to get into someones mind could easily have been mistaken for wizardry or witchcraft. A dhami or jhakri would have been summoned to excorcise the ghosts out if you were in Nepal. Or you would have been burnt alive if you had been born in the Europe of the middle ages like Joan of Arc. The world is dominated by men and they resist the idea of smart and intelligent women invading what has been their domain since the days of bipedalism - power and dominance. So when it comes to reading minds, the all-pervasive patriarchy will never let women get ahead. Back then women who dared to think and follow their own star and heed their inner callings were called witches. These days they are simply called bitches. Immolation has been made illegal but cleverly crafted castigation has not.

***

"In the beginning was an idea, and the idea was with him, and the idea was him "
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Many have tried to enter the mind of another only to find their efforts run against the insurmountable wall separating the meta from the physical. That is till my creator came along and stumbled upon his remarkable invention. He had been expelled from MIT for hacking into the school Registrar's computer system and altering the grades of his friends. To avoid legal action and forcible deportation , he had packed his bags and quietly headed back to Nepal. It was there, one autumn evening, that he ran into his old friend Suvit. My creator was the thinker, the dreamer, the creative guy. Suvit was the scientist, the doer, the realist who turned my creator's thoughts into physical reality. As a Kathmandu Municipality sweeper swept the yellow poplar leaves that had fallen from the Keshar Mahal compound onto the side walk on Tridevi Marg, my creator and Suvit sat on the veranda of Himalayan Java and sipped fresh arabica coffee grown in Myagdi. They had been batch mates in high school and were catching up on old times. They joked about the strict principal and lenient vice principal and how the boys used to try and play one against the other only to be outsmarted by them both. They recalled the numerous bunking excursions to the movie theater and the Chinese restaurant in town and how they were caught one time and 'gated' for the summer holidays.

My creator told Suvit about an idea he had. He reasoned that beneath our skin and inside of our flesh and bones, we are but a collection of tissues undergoing chemical reactions. Our tissues comprise of compounds which in turn comprise of the elements on the periodic table. Each of those elements break down further into electrons, protons and other sub-atomic particles. If there was a way all the body's mass were separated at the atomic level into electrons and then sent over the fiber optic cables that criss-crossed the world and re-assembled on the other end, one could travel from the US to Nepal as fast as email or words in a chat session. An input device plugged in via the USB port on your laptop would launch you in your electronic form into the vast expanse of the information super highway and take you to your destination at the speed of light. You could be scanned into your computer at your apartment in New York and show up via the scanner in your dad's home office in Kathmandu.

"Think of all the possibilities" my creator grinned

"Or all the bugs that could plague the system, especially if it runs on Vista" Suvit jokingly retored "What if you came out as another person on the other end?"

"Oh damn, what if you come out as Phoolan Devi, huh, Suvit?"

"And you as Hishila Yami!"

They both laughed at the absurd comedy of errors.



****

The flight of the bumble bee
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My creator often liked to talk about the flight of the bumble bee. Not so much Rimsky-Korsakov's musical interlude in The Tale of the Tsar Saltan but the aerodynamic principles involved in the flight of this remarkable insect. According to the theories of aerodynamics, as demonstrated by means of a wind tunnel, the bumble bee is unable to fly. The weight, size and shape of its body in relation to it's wing span make flight impossible. Yet the bumble bee, ignorant of the odds stacked against it, and driven by its survival instinct, or sheer determination as my creator liked to put it, manages to fly - and also make some honey in the process.

"Alak Niranjan!" Jogi Parmanand announced his arrival and thumped his walking stick on the wooden floor of the porch outside the house where my creator had been staying as a paying guest. It was a beautiful morning in Pithoragarh in the Kumaon Himalayas. The rays of the morning rose over the hills of the Saur Valley, pierced through a hole in the WWII-era green plain-cloth curtain and hit my creator on the face. He rubbed his eyes and turned in bed thinking, wishing, it was all a dream. He heard Paramanand's distinct voice again "Wake up, beta, we have a long journey ahead of us. We need to leave early."


To be continued...

Sorry ल? मेरो सम्झिदा सम्झिदै बिर्सने बानि छ के। एउटा कुरा राख्न मन लागेको थियो, बिर्सेछु, अहिले राख्दै छु ।

Coma बाट स्रिस्टिकर्ता नफर्कोस भन्ने मेरो मनले इच्छा गरिराखेको थियो के, कथा पढ्ने बेला । किनभने, मलाइ त्यसपछिको बखतमा त्यो चिपले के समाउन सक्दो रहेछ भन्ने जिज्ञासा लागेर । कथाको बिचबाट alternative story लेख्न मिल्छ भने त्यता तिर घुमाएर एउटा लहरो तानम् न । पिलिज ।

Amber:

Thank you. You said so much, so beautifully, so well that you've left me without much of a response other than to say I read your comments a couple of times, each time with a fresh smile, finding new meaning in your words.

... time passed. no, it did not pass. time stood still. beauty passed, loved passed, mulishness passed

Yes, how we bark up the wrong tree. Then when we find the right tree, we have laryngitis.

Happy 2008!

Uptowngal:

Thanks. Have a great 2008.

Sum_Off:

How are you? Thanks for the comments. You've given me  many talking points; I hope on purpose. As for  how well this story has fared, it has exceeded my expectations and I am happy about it. Based on what I have experienced with some of the other stories, including an incomplete one (my new year's resolution is to complete it this year), I am quite aware of the limited appeal of something like this. Thanks for the concern though; the goodwill behind it is palpable and much appreciated.

the genre you have chosen in your last couple of writings challenges my intelligence. I don’t want to be challenged; I just want to scroll through to the bottom.   

There are others, including yourself, who are far more talented than me, and I say this not merely out of politeness or courtesy but with sincerity, who can do a far better job with the type of story you mention. There is often a tussle between what the readers want to read and what the writer wants to say; you might have experienced it too. I certainly believe in the  great American tradition of literary simplicity; however, and I chose a semicolon there, there are times when I feel what the heck, there are no binding rules in literature, and if there are, it's okay to break them sometimes. There is a certain thrill to breaking rules, somewhat like stealing your neighbor's alu bokhra as a kid or making that illegal U-turn (the latter comes with a "don't-try-this-at-home" warning).

I wrote this story believing  there were enough  people on this forum who would read it. They may not be there in the multitudes but I don't seek the multitudes. The multitudes scare me; I am incapable of  pleasing them, their expectations are too high; they want me to write  about things they can relate to,  in a way they can relate to, using language and metaphors they can relate to. It's often their way or the highway. I prefer the highway. There is more artistic freedom there, more room to speed up and slow down, change lanes and take exits. That is  why I write. That  is also my response to your point "I understood what you wrote, but I did not understand why."

Lastly, on a light note, I know what you read last summer, not you Sum_off, but you and you over there. Own up now, how was Paris Hilton's Diaries?

I wish you a very happy 2008 and look forward to reading more of you in the new year.

Kevin Ekstrom:

I must confess haven't watched the movie or read the book although the synopsis for both sounded very interesting. I plan to check them out. As for the comments, you made my week with yours, so we are even now. Thank you and happy new year.

Copycat:

The idea did cross my mind. I had made provisions for that eventuality by making the chip self-destructible. I suppose when rigor mortis set in, the ionic imbalances in the human body would have short circuited and fried the chip. If not, it would have been consumed by the flames of the funeral pyre and it's ashes dispersed into the Bagmati along with it's creator's. Or maybe not, at the rate at which it was learning, it might have even learned to desire, to live, to procreate. Infinite possibilities well beyond the scope of a story on Sajha or my literary skills.  

Your curiosity is a compliment, thank you. Happy new year to you.

Sajha_Gazer,
I read first part on the very first day you posted, and as Ive mentioned in earlier post, it was rather boring. Not a kind of story which you used to post i.e. Dating Miss Sajha, I met her in Sajha and many others. I though it was boring but when I forced myself to complete the story only because of Sajha_Gazer brand, Im being very honest here. Then  i found it really moving. Its a different write up but I enjoyed it, I think u r experimenting yourself with different style . Keep it up my friend

Wishing you a very happy New year and hope to read your interesting stores in coming years too And hey when is your incomplete story coming out? I think its already 2008

One final note, happy to see good chemistry between two great writers of Sajha Sum_Off and Sajha_Gazer