Kedar used to be close to this group of friends. But at one point Kedar felt that they weren’t at his level. They seemed so pakhe in comparision to his high fashion life. That was in his teenage years when all of them used to be in school together. He used to avoid most of the people sitting in sofas in the living room with drinks in their hands.
Considering how he used to put them down once upon a time, he was hesitant of how he would be treated hanging out with them again. He felt torn. He knew had no right to deserve anything after he had talked about them to others and had treated them. Kedar was cautious, eyeing everyone carefully. He knew that he could easily be the object of ridicule and hatred. He knew that they didn’t have to be kind to him.
Kedar winced, unnoticeably. A thin smile curled across under his wispy moustache. It was an impish smile. A smile attempting to hide the discomfort, but failing. Kedar smoothed out his hair. He watched across the room at his friends. They toasted each other in silence as spoonfuls of curry and rice was shoveled into politely arched mouths.
Yesterday he had avoided them because his parents had been wealthier than theirs. But today their careers and businesses had done a lot better than his. He knew they felt superior to him. But he, strangely, did not feel inferior. He knew that their pride and a sense of accomplishment came from their professional achievement. But a different passion and pride floated within Kedar’s breast. It was one of purpose and desire to serve the people of his nation, Nepal. He knew that the fire that burned in him was made of a different substance than what fueled his friends.
Their sense of superiority came from their wealth and power in Kathmandu. And though Kedar did not have that, he did not feel any less sitting with them. But still, a doubt bubbled up within himself from the boy who hung out with these boys. For a moment he questioned whether he should be feeling inferior. But he batted the silly thought away with a smile.
Kedar made himself sit up tall. He felt resolute. Despite the beer doing a number on him, he looked around him with a steely eyed determination. He felt focused about where he was supposed to go and what he needed to do. It almost scared him how clearly saw it. It made him, out of humility, to question himself. He felt arrogant being this clear with himself. It seemed unnatural and uncomfortable to be this sure. He didn’t want to be this certain of himself. It was scary. He wanted someone to check him, to correct him. Kedar knew he was thinking too much. He sipped the beer in his hand and popped a handful of bhujiya in his mouth.
Hari tilted his wine glass pouring the purplish-red fluid unto his protruded lips. Kedar looked down at the Sprite in his hands. He’d rather be in his motel in Thamel. Kedar had sat with his friends in previous get togethors when they were teens. It was hard enough sitting here sifting his plate of rice, dahl and spinach, on the other side of the living room. His purpose for living seemed so different than theirs.
But Kedar knew that socializing and hanging out and making small talk was part of the game. He wasn’t doing it for the same reasons like when he did it as a teenager. Hanging out here and trying to have fun and play the social networking game wasn’t necessarily his most favorite activity, but it allowed him to feel out his friends and the space they were in. They were powerful and he needed them.
Laughter erupted in the room. The music of boisterous cackles made Kedar look up. He might as well have been in a different country. There was a darkness of shadow in the part of the room he was sitting in. Did he smell bad? Is that why people avoided looking at him for too long? Is that why people quickly excused themselves away after making polite some small talk?
Kedar smiled to himself. He just wasn’t used to being around this gang. Their ways of money and power didn’t interest him if they weren’t cutting big checks for his non-profit. He wasn’t sure if he was breaking one custom or another. So much had changed from the days they all went to school in Kathmandu. Now he had just returned to Nepal after fifteen years of living there.
Is that why, he wondered, no matter how much he tried to make the conversation it just didn’t seem to have traction? They looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language. He was speaking the same Nepali and the language that he remembered this group of his friends spoke. But, man, it was like they spoke a different language. They talked of wheeling and dealing and finance and stock exchanges. It was a world that Kedar’s eyes had long glazed over. If they weren’t the biggest donor to his charities, Kedar couldn’t care less.
He went through his mental routine. His mental toy box emptied the dominoes of his life that had collapsed one after another that had led him to where he was. He would stack the events of his life over and over. And each time the black dominoes with random white patterns would keep falling in the same sequences. Kedar would experiment with the ‘what-if’ scenarios by re-arranging some dominos. But the bloody dominoes would not miss to hit the sores of his life as they replayed. Finally, he scraped all of them from in front of his eyes and stuffed them back in his toy box. He would play with them later.
For now, he was only in Kathmandu for 2 weeks and he needed to make the most of it so that the non-profit organization to improve Nepal’s health care system that he had started in Arizona, would run smoothly.
He forced himself to focus on the conversation happening around him, repeating words within him so that he would focus. He slowly he found himself drawn in the banter. Hari’s wife, decked in a heavy gold brocade and in a red shiffon sari kept jiggling her head and describing her daughter’s awesome performance in her school. Her face contourted with every gesture, her eye brows mischieviously danced about.
Kedar sighed as he tried to suppress a stench that welled up within him. He abhorred narcissists who were so self-obsessed with the “wonderfulness” of their own life. Many of them could not acknowledge the beauty in others. Kedar looked uncomfortably around the room. If there was a way to separate himself from himself, he would.
Seeing the lady’s crass display of grandiosity made him feel ill in the stomach. He wished he could be in that room while discarding the ugly parts of what he saw. He imagined himself artistically swiping a surgeons knife and surgically the filth which the woman had filled the room with her crassness. Perhaps he was over-reacting. Why did she make him feel so uncomfortable and dirty?
Kedar lowered his eyes and in the quietness of the moment, accidentally glanced at his own soul. He used to be a show-off once upon a time in this same friend’s circle. He had successfully done it in the past. But he felt uncomfortably facing up to who he used to be. He was caught red-handed in seeing the inner drama-queen within him. He looked at Hari’s wife going on and on waving her hand about, completely lost in glorifying how wonderful her daughter was. Kedar used to talk about himself in this way in his friend circle. He rolled his eyes in embarrassment.
A scorned sentence formed within him that asked, “How could it have been.” How was he caught so helplessly in his own need to be wonderful that he could have looked like this lady dancing around in front of him? Did he really look like her? It was obvious that she had not noticed how turned off people in the room were with her being lost in her showing-off.
Today, Kedar was willing to do whatever it took to sacrifice to make the lives of women and children in Nepal better. That he was once a self-possessed narcissist once upon a time who thrived in showing off and putting the people in this same group down, made him blush. He lowered his head.
